Nationalism Is Not Going Away

A Response to Benjamin Studebaker

Where We Agree and Where We Don’t

Benjamin Studebaker has responded to my essay on Nationalist Internationalism with a short piece titled Nationalism Is Washed, published less than twenty-four hours after mine went out. Brief as it is, the objection it raises is a serious one and worth taking up. We agree on a great deal, and I want to begin there, because the agreement is wide and it frames what is actually in dispute. We agree that internationalism is necessary, and that the largest problems now facing us, capital mobility, ecological breakdown, migration, the concentration of wealth, the arrival of artificial intelligence, exceed what any single nation-state can resolve on its own. We agree that there is no supranational demos and no prospect of one forming. And we agree that the nation-state labours under real and severe constraints in the present order, constraints I spent a considerable portion of the essay describing rather than denying. I have always acknowledged Studebaker’s points about the disciplining power of global capital, the economic repercussions faced by any nation-state that provokes capital flight, which is one of the most important obstacles to the empowerment of organized labor and the capacity to tackle wealth inequality. I take it to be true because it is one of the premises of my own argument, not a refutation of it.

I will admit I found it strange that his reply did not register this agreement. Studebaker wrote as though I needed persuading that the nation-state is inadequate to our largest problems, when its inadequacy, standing alone, is the very reason I argue for moving through it toward something larger.

Studebaker holds that nationalism is washed, an exhausted abstraction; I hold that it remains unavoidable. Where we disagree is not on whether we need a new international order but on how one could ever be reached. This is the whole content of what I called nationalist internationalism, and it is a dialectic rather than a slogan. National problems have become international in scale, and international cooperation has therefore become a national necessity; yet the movements and governments capable of building such cooperation can only arise within particular nations, addressed to particular peoples, and adapted to particular conditions. My opposition, as I was at pains to say in the essay, is not to internationalism as a political goal. It is to internationalism as a political ideology, and to the methodology of internationalist politics, which in my view has never been thought through with any seriousness, and which consistently passes over the socio-cultural contradictions involved in having to do politics inside the actual nation-states where people live and vote.

I do not raise this as an outsider to Studebaker’s work. His six-part case for a SupraNational Federation, the Why Federalism series, is, to my mind, the most thoughtful proposal for an international system of doing politics that I have encountered, which is precisely why I engaged it directly in the essay and why I devoted an episode of my podcast, 1Dime Radio, to discussing it with him. I would encourage anyone reading this who has not yet heard that conversation to do so, because much of what follows is an extension of the question I pressed him on there. The proposal describes, with real care, an international order worth wanting. What it does not describe, and what his response here still does not describe, is any means of getting there.

I should say, because exchanges like this are so easily misread, that none of what follows is personal in the slightest. Studebaker and I are friends, we respect each other as peers, and he is a great intellectual sparring partner, and my favourite one for thinking through questions this large. I am aware that some who follow our back and forth will be hoping for blood, especially those who reflexively amplify anything aimed at my work without troubling to read it. What the headline hides from them is that his critique here cuts against their own worldview at least as sharply as it challenges mine, a point I will come to below.

What Studebaker Is Actually Arguing

Let me state his argument as fairly as I can, because it is a serious one and in places a persuasive one. He grants, at the outset, what I also take to be true: that modern democracy has only ever operated at the level of the nation-state, that there is no supranational demos, and that none can form, since the shared understanding a demos requires cannot survive across languages and cultures at that scale. But he then argues that the national demos has itself dissolved. On his account, the modern nation was held together by a common moral sensibility generated through shared participation in labour and exchange, and since 1945 that ground has eroded to the point where even the most minimal version of a national demos is no longer sustainable. He gives six reasons for this, ranging from the decline of labour-force participation and the spread of a university-socialized class with weak national attachment to the loss of the fascist and Soviet threats that once made a common national culture necessary and the punishment global markets inflict on any state that asserts itself. From this he concludes that we inhabit a hypermodernity that cannot be reversed, that modern democracy will not return, that states remain the preponderant actors but are defined chiefly by what they can no longer do, and that we should expect mostly inaction, with occasional war at the margins, until some new alternative to modern democracy is invented.

It is a bleak and carefully constructed picture, and I do not dismiss it. But notice where his fire is concentrated. Almost the whole of his response is trained on a single category, the demos, and on the decayed condition of modern democracy. That only focuses on the terrain of the first half of my essay, the historical half I wrote for the less experienced reader who assumes that nationalism is inherently reactionary and incompatible with democracy, or doubts that nations matter at all. The arguments regarding the road to internationalism in the second half of the essay, the half that is more relevant to thinkers like Studebaker, go largely unanswered.

Missing The More Practical Point

Much of his reply argues against a claim I never made. Studebaker treats my nationalism as a project of constructing a homogeneous nation, of manufacturing a thick national culture and making people more nationalistic than they are. I proposed nothing of the sort. The essay said this outright in a section near the end, so let me repeat it here. I am not a nationalist in the ideological sense, and I do not think nationalism is a coherent ideology at all, because what constitutes a nation has always been vague and the concept is too empty to build a politics on by itself. The nationalism I am arguing for is methodological rather than doctrinal. It is the recognition that anyone who wants to change anything has to work through the national conditions they actually inhabit, and that any road to a supranational order runs through national governments, because no other body has the standing to build one. What I am calling for is simpler and more practical than the strawman he has answered. It is a strategy, and only a strategy: that the left should stop surrendering patriotic and national feeling to the right, that it should be willing to speak to those sentiments in order to win elections and mobilize people, and that it should adapt itself to the particular national context in which it operates rather than wearing the reflexive cosmopolitanism and anti-patriotism that have rendered so much of it unelectable. And this is a claim about method, not about any nation’s nationalism in particular. It applies with equal force to socialists, social democrats, and pro-worker, pro-family movements in every country, each of whom must speak to their own people, in their own idiom and out of their own history, if they are ever to accumulate the power a transformative programme demands. That practical claim is the center of my argument. It stands whatever we conclude about the theoretical question of the demos, and he has spent most of his response contesting the theory while leaving the strategy itself untouched.

He also writes as though I were calling for a revival of the mass nationalism of the twentieth century, the totalizing mobilization that could march millions into the trenches behind a single myth. I said the opposite in the essay. Nationalism today no longer commands the force it held in the 1930s, and the hunger for belonging now scatters into club fandoms, ideological tribes, diaspora attachments, and consumer identities. His six reasons for the exhaustion of national feeling are, for the most part, a restatement of a fragmentation I had already granted.

This still does not change the fact that a viable political project has to secure a certain level of legitimacy, either procedurally through electoral victory or simply through a large degree of public support, even if it is not on the agenda of political parties. Deep pluralism changes the horizon of what politics can achieve, but it does not abolish the need for legitimacy. And this is where I believe Studebaker has mistaken my argument, because when I speak of a demos I am not describing a body of citizens who actually rule. I could hardly believe that, having written an entire book on managed democracy, on the many ways in which the capacities of citizens are hollowed out and the people are held at a distance from the power exercised in their name. The citizens I am describing do not resemble a sovereign demos, because in the fullest sense there is no longer any such thing. What the demos remains, even in its debilitated condition, is the indispensable source of political legitimacy. Through elections, citizens grant or withhold their consent, and by that consent the legitimacy of the state is secured or lost. That much is undeniable, and no amount of atomization has dissolved it.

Even in a managed democracy, it is still the citizens who decide the outcome of elections by voting. To win an election, and to hold power long enough to do anything with it, any political project must appeal to enough of them to secure a working measure of legitimacy. This is the point at which his critique comes apart. He has shown, at length, that the demos no longer rules and no longer coheres around a single national myth. He has not shown that securing legitimacy through the national citizenry has become unnecessary, because it has not. It remains the one thing every political project, his own included, must accomplish, and it remains stubbornly national in the doing.

There is a further confusion here that runs deeper than the question of legitimacy. Studebaker organizes his entire response around the demos, when my argument was never confined to it. That democratic life has been hollowed out, locally and nationally alike, is not in dispute between us; it is the subject of the book I have just finished. My argument is about politics in the broader sense, the actual work of building movements, winning arguments, and accumulating power in the places where people live. What I claimed is not merely that there is no international demos. It is that there is no international politics, and there never has been.Politics is conducted in particular places, and any movement that intends to exist has to adapt itself to the socio-cultural particularities of those places, nation by nation, or it does not get built. No internationalist agenda has ever resonated with any public in a serious way beyond the narrow stratum of educated cosmopolitans who find it congenial. To answer this by observing that the national demoi have themselves declined is not a gotcha. It evades the question. There is still no international politics, and the national politics we actually have remains the only terrain on which anything can be built.

The question Studebaker presses so hard, whether a true demos still exists, is finally beside the point I am making. Whether or not the people rule, their consent remains the currency in which every serious political project, national or supranational, must be purchased, and that consent is still gathered nation by nation and adapted region by region.

To the Lefty Internationalists Who Think Studebaker’s Critique Validates Their Views (It Does Not)

A deeper implication of Studebaker’s position is worth drawing out, because I suspect it will be lost on many who read this exchange as a simple contest between nationalism and internationalism. If deep pluralism has made a mass democratic movement impossible, as he argues here and has argued on my podcast, then he has ruled out far more than my kind of national politics. He has ruled out the socialist movement, the labour movement, and the proletarian internationalism of the Marxists along with it, since every one of these depends on mobilizing precisely the mass constituency he says can no longer be assembled. He is more or less open that he thinks the way is shut. I stress this because I expect a certain kind of internationalist Marxist to seize on his reply as a rebuke to my nationalist internationalism without noticing that his project is more at odds with theirs than it is with mine.

Which raises a question he has not answered: if the new international order is not to be built by a mass movement, then who is the political subject capable of building this new international system, and what classes of people have the interests in bringing it about, if not the working class? Some enlightened stratum of administrators? A technocratic elite? An aristoi wise enough to construct on the people’s behalf what the people themselves can no longer be roused to want? I do not believe Studebaker intends the answer to be an unaccountable aristocracy of experts, which is exactly why I would encourage him to state, more forthrightly than he has so far, who the subject of his federation actually is and the class struggles required for ensuring that it would serve the purposes of containing the power of global capital.

Let me be careful about my own position here, so that it is not mistaken for something more romantic than it is. I do not claim that the working majority, the ordinary people I have elsewhere called the common majority, should themselves govern the new order or build it with their own hands. My claim is narrower and, I think, harder to deny: that their consent and their conferred legitimacy are necessary for any such order to come into being at all. And a second, stronger point follows from it. If the new international system is meant to act in the interests of ordinary people rather than against them, then pressure from below becomes not merely a source of legitimacy but a condition of the system’s very purpose.

Recall what people actually resent about the European Union: that it is governed by experts, administrators, and the representatives of capital, accountable to no public. An international order genuinely capable of containing the things Studebaker and I both worry about, capital flight foremost among them, could not be one more structure of this kind, subordinated to the will of capitalists and technocrats. To build an order that disciplines capital rather than serving it would require a real struggle against the class that profits from capital’s mobility, and that struggle cannot be waged by administrators alone. It requires the weight of the working class majority, small business owners, parts of the professional class, and any social class that has the objective interest in seeing this change come about. Without the backing of a popular coalition of people with the objective class interests in wanting to rein in the power of global capital, Studebaker’s new proposed international system would have neither the legitimacy to be put on the agenda in the first place nor the interest to contain the very problems it was meant to solve.

And this returns us, with sharper stakes, to what his proposal cannot supply. How is political change of the kind that could produce a genuinely better international order, one accountable to ordinary people and capable of reining in capital, supposed to emerge, if not through movements that first win legitimacy among the publics of particular nations and regions? An order imposed over their heads will be what the EU already is, or worse: a hollow cosmopolitanism with no roots in any people, felt as a foreign imposition and resented accordingly. Refusing the terrain of national feeling does not advance internationalism as a goal; it retreats from it.

Nationalism is Not Washed, Even if the Nation-State Is

Part of why I chose the subtitle of my Nationalist Internationalism Essay to be Nationalism Beyond the Nation-State is because nationalism remains a highly relevant political force, even though the nation-state by itself is no longer adequate for combating problems that are inherently international in scope. This is why I argue that a new international system (something better than merely the old Bretton Woods system) is necessary for dealing with many of the concerns that drive nationalism (inequality, job loss, deindustrialization, mass migration, etc). A great deal of Studebaker’s case rests on deep pluralism having drained nationalism of its viability. Yet look at who keeps winning. Across the democratic world, it is the political right, the parties that mobilize patriotic and national sentiment without embarrassment, that continue to win elections, while the cosmopolitan left slides further into irrelevance. If nationalism were truly as washed as he suggests, it could not continue to function as a highly effective political device for winning and mobilizing political support and winning elections. A tool that is obsolete would not keep delivering victories. The persistence of the nationalist right is not evidence that national feeling has evaporated. It is evidence that national feeling remains the most potent force in mass politics, and that one side of the political divide has understood this while the other has refused to.

That a stratum of university-educated people feels national attachment less keenly than it once did is not a reason for the left to surrender nationalism altogether and stop speaking to patriotic sentiment. There was already talk of the decline of patriotism after Vietnam, and again as the expansion of higher education under Lyndon Johnson’s reforms in the late 1960s produced the professional-managerial class that carried the new disaffection. It did not stop Richard Nixon from winning the silent majority, and it did not stop Ronald Reagan from assembling an electoral supermajority by speaking directly to national feeling. Victories on that scale are certainly harder to assemble now, for the reasons Studebaker gathers under deep pluralism. But the conclusion that one should therefore not appeal to nationalism at all does not follow from it.What can actually be observed is closer to the reverse. The anti-patriotic and cosmopolitan dogmas of the left have been the obstacle, and they have handed the populist right a language it wields far more effectively, even where the national tradition in question is arguably closer to left-wing ideas than to right-wing ones. The founding fathers are the clearest case, which is why I devoted a recent piece, The American Revolution: A Revolution Unfinished, to the legacy of 1776.

His first reason is also worth a second look, since the evidence cuts against it. Studebaker holds that the population drifting out of the labor force is the one losing its national attachment, yet the pattern of who remains patriotic points the other way. In the United States, where the data is clearest, national pride is consistently strongest among those without a college degree and weakest among the college-educated professional class; Gallup places graduates below the national average and non-graduates above it. Studebaker notices the same split and reads it as further confirmation that nationalism has lost its purchase. I read it as something narrower and more damning. Patriotic feeling has not drained out of the population. It has drained out of one particular part of it. The people who have detached from the nation are not the marginal or the unemployable, but the credentialed professionals most fully integrated into the modern economy, and the people who remain most attached to it are, with some irony, precisely the working-class constituency the left says it exists to fight for. That is the reverse of what his model predicts. National feeling has not evaporated. It remains thickest where the working majority is, and thinnest among the educated few.

Patriotism is Alive and Well

The wider evidence points the same way, and it is worth highlighting some of it, because it indicates that Studebaker severely overestimates how much nationalist sentiment has declined, which is a core presumption he relies on to dismiss it. The available longitudinal evidence of patriotic sentiments at a global level does not support the claim that globalization has produced a uniform decline in patriotism. Rather, national attachment has remained broadly resilient and relatively stable worldwide, while intense, exceptionalist patriotism has weakened in some affluent Western democracies while increasing in numerous post-communist, state-building and externally threatened societies.

Combining the World Values Survey and the European Values Study, the share of people worldwide describing themselves as quite or very proud of their nationality stood at roughly 87 percent in 1981 to 1984 and 88 percent in 2017 to 2020; in Europe it rose from 83 to 87 percent, and in Central and Eastern Europe from 81 percent in 1989 to 1993 to 87 percent in 2017 to 2020.^[1] The declines are real, but they are concentrated in a handful of affluent Western democracies, chiefly the United States and Britain.^[2] Where the trend runs the other way it runs hard, and it runs hardest where a country’s continued existence is in question. Ukrainian pride in citizenship climbed from 62 percent in 2010 to 91 percent in 2024, and pride has held steady across the Americas.^[3] Even the declines reverse. Canadian pride rebounded sharply in 2025, in the middle of an American president musing publicly about annexation, which is as clean a natural experiment in the relationship between external threat and national feeling as one could ask for.^[4]

National attachment has not declined. It has become uneven. What has changed is its intensity, its content, and its political expression, which now vary sharply from one country to the next and respond to war, sovereignty disputes, state formation, institutional performance, and perceived external threat. This is what I meant in the essay when I cited How Soccer Explains the World: globalization has produced the illusion that national sentiment is dissolving, when what the record shows is a resilient attachment diverging nation by nation. I published that essay in the days after the World Cup final, and the timing was deliberate. For a month an enormous share of the world’s population had organized its attention around national teams, and the commentary treating national feeling as a spent force resumed the following week as though the tournament had not occurred. The content of that feeling is thin and thoroughly contestable, which is exactly my argument about nationalism as a technology rather than a doctrine. Its existence is not in question. Older forms of triumphalism and belief in national superiority have weakened in places. National identity itself has not. Nothing here establishes that nationalism is obsolete or irrelevant. What the electoral record does establish is narrower and harder for the left to hear: the parties incapable of speaking to popular national sentiment are the ones that end up irrelevant. Studebaker does not argue that we ought to leave the nation behind. He argues that we already have, and he presents this as a description of the world rather than as a position within it. That is the move worth resisting, because what is offered as the world as it is turns out to be the condition of one stratum in a few wealthy countries, generalized into a historical verdict.

The irony is that if pluralism about the meaning of the nation were genuinely as deep as he describes, we should expect the left to contest that meaning rather than surrender it, and we should expect far more open disagreement about what the nation is and whom it is for. I would welcome exactly that. I do not believe nationalism should carry only one meaning; the whole point of treating it as a political technology rather than a fixed doctrine is that its content is open to struggle. The very disputability he reads as a sign of nationalism’s exhaustion is in fact the source of its flexibility, since a nation whose meaning is contested is one the left can shape rather than merely inherit. But the ground is not being contested. It is being ceded, wholesale, to the right, by a left that has convinced itself that touching national feeling is beneath it. And if fragmentation is the condition of our politics, it falls harder on the internationalist than on me, because the cosmopolitan program was already the least popular thing on offer, resonant only with the narrow stratum socialized to find it natural. Deep pluralism does not clear a road to internationalism. It thins the already thin constituency that internationalism ever had.

In a sense, the nationalist right is being driven by its own failures toward the very question Studebaker and I are debating. Each time a right-wing government is elected on the promise of solving problems that turn out to be international in scope, it collides with the same wall: the nation-state alone cannot contain them. Some on the right have begun, haltingly, to notice this. When Giorgia Meloni concedes that migration cannot be managed without coordinated action across the Mediterranean, she is admitting, against her own instincts, that the national frame is insufficient. What the right has not yet grasped, and what needs arguing for, is that these impasses point past improvised cooperation toward the need for a new international system as such. But that argument begins in national politics and works outward, which is exactly the road I have been describing and exactly the road his position cannot provide.

The Breakdown of The Nation State Wont Bring Us Closer to Internationalism

This brings me to what I find most curious in Studebaker’s position, and here it helps to recall what his federalism essays actually argue. He is not a thinker who dismisses the particular in favour of the universal. On the contrary, he takes local and regional particularity seriously, and he argues that a properly constructed supranational federation would serve regional and local needs better than a world of jealous nation-states ever could. He wants, in his own words, a supranational structure that supports the return of local politics. I do not doubt the sincerity or the sophistication of that commitment.

But this is exactly what makes his refusal of the nation so strange. He will not trust the nation-state as an actor that might build a new international order, yet despite accepting despair, he expects the nation-state’s decline to intensify local and regional attachment, and he places more optimism in the potentials of local politics than he does in the nation state. If a nation-state cannot be trusted to act in the direction of internationalism, a province or a region can be trusted even less. The logic runs the wrong way. The more local and particular politics becomes, the narrower its horizon and the more fiercely its interests compete, and the harder, not the easier, it becomes to sustain anything resembling international solidarity. Whatever suspicion attaches to the nation as a vehicle for transcending itself must attach with greater force to the smaller unit, which is more parochial, more divided, and less able to look beyond its own boundaries. This is the argument I made about the only real alternative to nationalism being localism and the older tribalisms beneath it, the argument his response does not take up. He has embraced the particular at the one scale where it is least able to reach the universal, and refused it at the one scale, the national, that has actually managed, however imperfectly, to bind smaller loyalties into something wider.

One further disagreement is buried in this, and it is the sharpest between us. Studebaker treats the intensification of local and regional attachment as a natural consequence of the nation-state’s decline, something to be observed and lived with rather than resisted. I resist it. The return of localism and the older tribalisms is not a step toward internationalism but a step away from it, because the nation is the historical precursor to every wider solidarity, the form through which people first learned to bind millions of strangers who would never meet into a single body capable of acting together. The tribe and the region have never had that reach. Nor does the breakdown of the nation-state deliver a renaissance of great city-states. It delivers ethnic tribalism, regional separatism of the kind now stirring in Canada, and the hardening of communal enclaves. This is why the abandonment of nationalism by the left does not open a path to internationalism but forecloses one: it surrenders the national terrain to the right, and into the vacuum it leaves it draws back precisely the parochial loyalties that put internationalism further out of reach. None of this is inevitable, which is the whole reason I argue against it. To place one’s optimism in local and regional politics while reserving one’s pessimism for the national scale is a serious political miscalculation, because it mistakes the very form that has carried people toward one another for the thing standing in their way.

I do regard the nation-state as a phase rather than a destination, a stage that has to be worked through on the way to anything larger. But nothing in that view commits me to the idea that history moves forward on its own. Progress is not cumulative and it is not guaranteed. Societies regress, and a politics that treats the dissolution of the nation as automatic advancement has mistaken a risk for a promise. The road to internationalism runs through the nation-state, not around it, and what is offered as an escape from the national scale is far more likely to end below it.

Studebaker’s own account, moreover, keeps circling back to the ground it pronounces dead. He tells us that states remain the preponderant political actors, that most of what drives change in the world is still state activity, and that when states cannot act, the tendency he expects is decentralization, the devolution of power downward to regions and localities. He tells us, too, that further supranationalization is almost impossible to legitimate, because there is no supranational demos and people suspect, understandably on his own account, that such projects will be authoritarian. Every one of these observations lands on my side of the argument rather than his. They place the real political activity of our moment at the national and sub-national scale, and they locate the chief obstacle to his own federation in precisely the absence of supranational legitimacy I have been pressing.

The Problem Anti-Nationalists Keep Dodging

Studebaker has given a searching diagnosis of why the present order is exhausted and a thoughtful account of the order we ought to want. What he has not given, and by his own admission cannot yet give, is the bridge between them. He concedes that he has no theory of how the transition comes about and is, in his words, studying cases of inaction. I respect the candour, because most who share his goal will not admit the gap is there at all. But the candour is the concession.

The hollowing out of democracy, which is the burden of most of his reply, is beside this point. If socialist and social democratic movements cannot appeal to the people of their own countries, they will never accumulate the power or the legitimacy to build an international project capable of disciplining capital. An internationalist agenda that proposes to skip over national politics is putting the cart before the horse. The obstacle cannot be reasoned away, because it is not an intellectual obstacle. It is the condition of doing politics anywhere, and the left is unusually bad at meeting it, in large part because of the phobia of nationalism carried by its credentialed cosmopolitan wing.

Nor does the fact that people are more divided than ever make nationalism irrelevant. If anything it is a reason to reach for every instrument available. A movement that refuses to use the most widely shared political language in the country it operates in has chosen to remain a subculture. Disputing the coherence of nationalism as a concept does nothing to touch this, and the nitpicking obscures a far more basic question about why the left is so helplessly out of touch with the people of its own nation. Whatever fragmentation has done to the intensity of national feeling, it has not changed the fact that the parties that use nationalism, or perform it, or are at minimum methodologically national in how they campaign, are the ones more likely to win.

One can catalogue the pathologies of contemporary nationalism and the limits of the nation-state at length, and much of that catalogue is accurate. None of it answers the objections I raised to the internationalist mode of politics. Poking holes in a thesis about how to reach internationalism does not supply another way of reaching it, and in practice it does something worse: it helps reinforce the people who were never going to try in their conviction that they were right not to. What they are refusing is the work of adapting to the socio-cultural realities of their own countries, from which they feel deeply estranged, and that estrangement is then projected onto the public as the reason not to engage with it. This may not be his intention, since Studebaker himself admits that he does not have much hope for the internationalist movements either and says openly that we should embrace despair. But dismissals of this kind, aimed at nuanced proposals that the left take nationalism seriously, give fuel to the dogmas of less sophisticated cosmopolitan leftist readers who are looking for another anti-nationalist excuse not to come to terms with their own cosmopolitan intellectual blindness.

Against Ideological Gerrymandering

To surrender nationalism to the political right is ultimately to succumb to ideological gerrymandering, in which the one-dimensional binaries of the broader political duopoly have relegated the left to an impotent, self-contained opposition. It hands the most widely shared language in mass politics to one side of the divide and then reads the resulting defeats as proof that the language was never worth having. It also rests on an assumption I reject, which is that internationalism will be built by the left alone. It will not. It will be built by a coalition, and a coalition broad enough to include people who will never call themselves “leftists.”

What I propose instead is that the left make its case for internationalism in the terms nationalists already hold. Mass migration, the mobility of capital, the return of jobs, the survival of small business, deindustrialization, a trade policy worth the name, and the hollowing of community by globalization are the concerns of people who think of themselves as nationalists before they think of themselves as anything else. None of these issues can be sufficiently addressed without restructuring the international system, because that system is what permits global capital to discipline any nation-state that moves against its interests. A government that raises wages, taxes capital, protects an industry, or tightens the supply of cheap labour meets capital flight, and the threat of it is usually sufficient. The nationalist who wants the factory back, or the town as it was, is asking for something that cannot be delivered at the scale of the nation alone.

This is the reason conservatives cannot conserve anything. What their voters want conserved- stable communities, domestic industry, local businesses, - is precisely what global capital dissolves, and no conservative government can defend any of it while leaving intact the international order that guarantees capital the right to leave. What conservative parties do conserve is money in wealthier people’s bank accounts.

The left’s insistence on anti-nationalism concedes all of this and settles for cosmopolitanism instead. This ideological gerrymandering allows the left to remain a coalition of urban cosmopolitans, symbolic capitalist aspirants, social outcasts, and lumpenized professionals, the constituencies most inclined to anti-nationalist sentiment in the first place. Meanwhile, the rest of society is pushed away from the left, towards a political right that has absorbed business, small business, and a growing share of workers, or away from voting altogether. Instead of acting as if nationalist sentiments and internationalism are incompatible, my argument has been that the case for internationalism can also be made by appealing to nationalist concerns, to the fact that internationalism is neccesary to adress many of the concerns that nationalists care about. That is a large part of what nationalist internationalism is about. Wheras the insistence that nationalism must only be right-wing while left-wing politics can only be defined by cosmopolitan internationalism keeps us locked in the same binary trap that has made socialist or social democratic politics incapable of reaching the very working majority that it is supposed to be for.

Anti-Nationalists Have No Alternative

Unlike the Marxist internationalists I spent part of the essay criticizing, Studebaker is not a utopian. His is a position of accepted despair, and he is open about it, which is more than most manage. Being open about it does not make it any less a political choice. Mine differs because I am not satisfied with a politics of resignation, and because for all of its rational kernel his response will enable the anti-patriotic prejudices of leftists who want to give up on national politics and on the people of their own countries altogether. I can already see it happening. Some of those reposting the piece appear to have read the title and stopped there, taking it as confirmation of an anti-nationalism it does not actually endorse, since his argument dissolves the Marxian internationalism they hold to just as surely as it dissolves my nationalism. Where Studebaker counsels us to tarry with the absence of the nation and to expect little from politics but drift and the occasional war, I would rather put a proposal into the air and see whether it can be made to work. The proposal is not complicated. It is that those who want a new international order should stop treating patriotism and national feeling as beneath them, should use them to win legitimacy and elections in the countries where they must actually operate, and should build outward from there. It may fail, and perhaps it will. But it is at least an attempt to answer the question of how the change is brought about, which is more than resignation can offer.

I do not dispute that we need international solutions to problems the nation-state cannot solve alone; that necessity is the entire premise of nationalist internationalism, not a concession wrung from me. We disagree mainly about the road. The road beyond nationalism, if there is one, still runs through it. And any politics that proceeds as though nationalism were already irrelevant will itself become irrelevant, which is the fate the cosmopolitan left has spent a century demonstrating. The way to socialism in one country may be shut, but you cannot escape the nation even if the goal is to move beyond it.

Your support helps keep the 1Dime project alive and independent! Support my work on Patreon to get access to over 100 exclusive episodes of the 1Dime Radio podcast and private Discord access.

Footnotes/Citations

1. Polish pride held consistently above 95 percent, and Estonian pride climbed from 53 percent in 1995 to 1998 to 94 percent in 2017 to 2020. Artur Wysocki, “A Sense of National Pride in Central and Eastern Europe Based on Data from EVS and WVS,” Konteksty Społeczne/Social Contexts 10, no. 1 (2022): 14–18.

2. American pride fell from 87 percent in 2001 to 53 percent in 2026, splitting ever more sharply along partisan and generational lines, and British pride in the country’s history fell from 86 percent in 2013 to 64 percent in 2023. Megan Brenan, “American Pride Falls to 25-Year Record Low,” Gallup, June 29, 2026; John Curtice and Alex Scholes, “National Identity,” in British Social Attitudes: The 41st Report, ed. Elizabeth Clery, John Curtice, and Cameron Jessop (London: National Centre for Social Research, 2024).

3. In Ukraine, pride in citizenship rose from 62 percent in 2000 and 2010 to 68 percent in 2015 and 91 percent in 2024, patriotism intensified by state-building and external threat. The AmericasBarometer found the regional share expressing the maximum degree of national pride essentially flat, 76 percent in 2006 and 76.8 percent a decade later, even as Panama rose from 64 to 91 percent. Razumkov Centre, “The Identity of Ukraine’s Citizens: Trends of Change,” July 25, 2024; Emily Euiyoung Noh, Across Most of the Americas, National Pride Is High and Stable, While It Has Plummeted in the U.S., Insights Series no. 134 (Nashville: Latin American Public Opinion Project, Vanderbilt University, 2018), 1–4.

4. Those describing themselves as very proud rose from 53 to 62 percent, and strong belonging to Canada rose from 72 percent in 2022 to 83 percent in 2025. Environics Institute for Survey Research, Pride in Being Canadian, June 12, 2025; Statistics Canada, “Proud to Be Canadian: Pride and Sense of Belonging in 2025,” The Daily, September 10, 2025.