After Nationalism

The author, Samuel Goldman, a professor at GW, is extremely well-read and his prose is outstanding so you should read this short book. That said, my major complaint is that he omitted the two major reasons that our nation may be unable to obtain any form of nationalism today. These are politics and genetics. In the current era, we are experiencing the greatest resurgence of collectivism (socialism and neo-Marxism) at the expense of individualism (freedom and liberty) that has not been witnessed since the 1960s. Roughly, one-third of all Americans favor getting rid of capitalism and this figure is well over 50% among our nation's elites. This has resulted in the biggest political split that has occurred in decades and will continue until the left-wing professoriate learn that collectivism has never worked anywhere and has in every instance that it has been attempted resulted in totalitarian governments that have imposed only misery and unhappiness. In short, socialism can only work by making everyone equally poor.
Prof. Goldman's second major omission is the recent (during the last 20 years) findings that almost every complex human behavioral trait is almost entirely rooted in one's genes. The nature argument has almost completely overwhelmed the belief in nurture. Scientific findings have demonstrated that "shared environment" plays virtually no role in human socialization and that a "non-shared environment" is both idiosyncratic and random thereby rendering all attempts at amelioration useless as the past 50 years have demonstrated.
Regardless, you should still read Goldman's book!

Goldman opens this book with a helpful distinction between nationalism and patriotism and ultimately develops his position with contextual clarity and historical influences regarding America's origins. In considering the future of America, Goldman looks at the past. In a time of great divisiveness, I'd recommend this book to anyone curious about how an "us vs. them" ideology is built and what may come in the aftermath of unaddressed political chaos.

This is a brisk and readable survey of the "nationalist" push in American politics, and a fair treatment of why the term is often ill-defined (and ill-suited for the contemporary context when it is more precisely defined.) Goldman is a deft guide to some of the drawbacks of common understandings of "nationalist" politics, and is clear that he thinks those (such as National Review's Rich Lowry and Ramesh Ponnuru) who advocate for a "benign nationalism" end up putting a heavy emphasis on the former word and less on the latter; in short, patriotism.

Thank you for a copy of this pub in exchange for honest feedback. I am approaching this feedback as someone who has as PS/IR background, but I don't want to pontificate about my views on the content. Rather, I'd like to say that I think this publication is timely and poignant. I requested to read this publication because I think the divergence in the US (and several other nations currently) is interesting, and ultimately, turning to those who have trained in this area can sometimes spark new discourse. I was a bit surprised to see that this was a really in-depth discussion which boiled down to the roots of the notion of nation/nationalism. This pub was a really well written exploration of difficult and sometimes convoluted concepts that are highly relevant even outside the sphere of academia.