Why Left Nationalism? Part II

"Nationalism is an infantile disease, it is the measles of mankind."  -- Albert Einstein.

What's a nice guy like me writing about something as bloody and disgusting as nationalism for?  After all, nationalism/patriotism is for stupid jingoistic people as Albert Einstein noted (leaving aside the fact that he was a Zionist).  Second, although you call your blog left nationalism, focusing on civic nationalism, how do we know its not a hop, skip, and a jump to ethno-nationalism?  Why don't you write something edifying about peace, love, freedom, and democracy and how we should all get along?

The answer is because this blog constitutes an attempt to address political philosophy from a realist, not an idealist perspective.  I am interested in the good life as it can be found, not utopian fantasies.  To the extent that I address utopia, I look to the use or function of utopian fantasies in real political struggle, and I look to the factors which cause all such fantasies to fail. 

As a philosopher, I seek the first principal, the Arche.  As a descriptive matter, the first principal of politics is sovereignty, which manifests itself in the current day in the form of the nation-state.  So we must start with the nation-state, and its location in a planetary system of power.  What are nations, what do they do, and what motivates their behaviors.  Fundamentally, nations have sovereignty, they seek to protect their sovereignty, they fear other nations, and they generally act in order to expand their power relative to other nations.  In order to do this, they require military strength, and the factors that create military strength.  This need creates a real bound on what forms of political life are possible, and what constitutes idle dreams, as I have tried to demonstrate in my prior post.

Civic nationalism, what I am calling Left Nationalism, concerns a real and existing nation-state, in this case, the United States of America.  Ethno-nationalism, in contrast, generally constitutes a romantic dream about a state founded on ethnic solidarity.  In an open and highly pluralistic nation like the United States, the prospects of any real ethno-nationalist project ever influencing the political behavior of our existing nation-state is unlikely, except as a target for official persecution.  As I said earlier, I am attempting to address political philosophy from a realist, not an idealist perspective.