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Comment by vnorilo | Hacker News Reader

The Economist considers itself center-right, and is classically liberal (free trade, individual liberty). Breitbart caters to nativist sensibility, and while there might be a thoughtful, reasonable standard-bearer for nationalism, I haven't seen one. Perhaps such a publication would act as a pressure valve and reduce the prominence of the nativist garbage rags? Likely I'm too optimistic.

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What's the value of a less extreme nationalist press, except to espouse the same values but make them more palatable to moderates and lead them down the slippery slope to extremism? For better or worse the "ideal" world of nationalists would be a massive, traumatic revision of the current state of affairs, aimed at ethnic minorities and vulnerable people for benefit of white people. It seems like an inherently extreme and racist philosophy.

While I am firmly in the open borders camp, I'm willing to consider nationalist arguments. I can see why people see value in national sovereignity or cultural preservation. I agree there's a very thin line separating it from racist drivel. That is where I draw the line - nationalist: can debate, nativist: not worth my time.

What is the national culture of America? Would nationalists deport all the people of European ancestry and give the land back to it's original inhabitants? What culture is preserved by stopping people moving between Mexico and Texas, which are pretty culturally similar and until recently were the same country? I don't there's a narrow line, I think there's no line and they're just branding to try and save face.

I should clarify that I'm from Finland, which gained independence from Russia in a clearly nationalist context. Not to belittle the troubling consequent alignment with Germany in WW2 which we tend to try to explain with "we didn't know Hitler was so evil" and the existential threat by Stalin. Regardless, national pride can take several forms. You could learn folk song and dance. Or you can wield torches in a skinhead march. I'd very much like to reclaim the concept from the latter.

It feels like you're moving the goal posts - "celebrating national pride" is something you can do without banning people from your country or marginalizing them. Nationalism seems fundamentally opposed to multicultural society - it's not about people electing to do folk song and dance, and multiculturalism doesn't prohibit celebrating culture.

Nationalism does not directly lead into those things. My understanding is that's primarily about national sovereignity. Nativism is about discrimination of people based on origin or ethnicity. Obviously there are overlaps in the supporters of these ideologies. I am neither a nationalist nor a nativist myself.

Well, you must understand the historical context... It wasn't like Finland wanted to roll with Hitler. They were forced to, by the aggressiveness of the Soviet Union and the inaction of the Allied forces.

First, the Soviet Union had just become best buddies with the Nazis (Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and its secret addendum). Second, after demands to cede Finnish territory were rejected, Soviet Union staged a false flag attack and threw eventually overall about a million troops at Finland. The attack was repelled but Finland had to cede roughly 12% of its territory.

Third, the Soviet Union was clearly not done, so what could Finland do? The horrors of 1939 were bound to happen again; Soviets were gearing for war and one could not really expect the weak and submissive Soviet population to make any kind of change for the better within their nation, that much had been taken care of by the death camps, deportations the secret police, tight control of the media, etc. The only actor who could realistically provide substantial help against the inevitable rematch with the Soviet madman was Nazi Germany, a nation run by another madman.

Had USA, UK and the Allies sent troops or at least enough material, or pressured the Soviets to drop their ambitions of annexing a neutral country, Finland would not have needed any help from the Nazis. As it was, Allied help on a meaningful level did not happen. The neighbouring neutral Sweden helped the most, for obvious reasons: if Finland fell, they would be next.

So, yes, it was an existential threat. However, as crude as it may sound, given the circumstances, Hitler being evil or not was surely not even considered.

>which we tend to try to explain with "we didn't know Hitler was so evil"

There is good reason to believe that the Finns aligned with Nazi Germany for purely tactical reasons of survival rather than any shred of ideological agreement. The notorious Hitler-Mannerheim conversation which consists of fifteen minutes of tape-recorded conversation was recorded initially without der Fuhrer's knowledge or consent, an act of subversion, and was preserved rather than destroyed, again against Hitler's express orders. It is essentially a boastful and deluded monologue from Hitler to an audience that continues to humor him rather than engage with him, even as he escalates into evident delusion and falsehood.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitler_and_Mannerheim_recordin...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oET1WaG5sFk

> Would nationalists deport all the people of European ancestry and give the land back to it's original inhabitants?

You are obviously trolling, but I'll answer you anyway. Nationalism (especially in the US where the two overlap much less than in other places) refers to citizenship rather than ethnicity. Nobody is suggesting deporting US-born ethnic Africans.

So why have borders? It's so you can have programs that help the local poor. Any kind of welfare/medicine/UBI type program has to have some kind of filter on it or the poor of six continents would sign up and bankrupt the programs, so that filter is citizenship. The same applies to local wages. Allow local companies to hire foreign workers and wages equalize, which for US workers means they go down. And the culture of the US depends on having a middle class.

> What is the national culture of America?

Are you honestly asserting that it doesn't have one? The culture in Silicon Valley is exactly the same as the one in Beijing? The one in Alabama is identical to Russia?

> The culture in Silicon Valley is exactly the same as the one in Beijing?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGJ5cZnoodY

> The one in Alabama is identical to Russia?

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/russian-than-democrat-shir...

Shenzhen isn't Beijing and Ohio isn't Alabama. Also, the idea that the culture in Shenzhen and Silicon Valley are identical remains ridiculous (try promoting anti-censorship technology in each place), and the shirts are obviously meant to be taken in same way that "better dead than red" doesn't mean you wish you were dead.

There are some clear cultural differences that America has with pretty much any other nation in the world.

The most notable is our very expansive definition of free speech, which has broad popular support and is found almost nowhere else in the world. American culture also exhibits a relatively high support for economic freedom and avoiding government largesse. Additionally, we have a strong liking of suburbs (as typified by the proverbial "white picket fence").

American culture has high support for other people avoiding government largesse. Nobody wants to give up their own subsidies, on the right or the left.

There is certainly some truth to what you say but it's not a universal rule. E.g. plenty of people refuse to sign up for welfare or unemployment benefits that they would qualify for, and we still have a bunch of states boneheadedly refusing to expand medicaid even though the expansion is almost fully paid for by the federal government.

  Mexico and Texas, which are pretty culturally similar and until recently were the same country

Actually, Texas was part of independent Mexico for less than 15 years, and that ended 182 years ago.

It's ridiculous how strongly people object to the idea of preserving national culture or being nativist, when so many of them turn around and focus so heavily on cultural preservation and nativism when talking about gentrification and housing policy on a local level.

That's because the people who argue most fervently for "national culture" are at the same time often strongly opposed to contemporary culture (arts, poetry, classical music, etc.) and don't produce anything of cultural value themselves, whereas the people who actually advance the culture of their country tend to be indifferent or fairly cosmopolitan (as a tendency, of course there are exceptions).

Most people in the political center are able to recognize the cognitive dissonance of these self-proclaimed "nativists" and object to their hypocrisy.

Gentrification, on the other hand, is a real-world problem for anyone who lives in a big city and has nothing to do with local culture or nativism. People can literally no longer pay their rents.

Not easy to produce things of value when you get thrown out for your opinion from essenyial platforms, like venues, banking services, payment providers, college campus, etc

That's totally ridiculous and not even worth discussing. Unless you're a full-blown Nazi, terrorist, or communist and your main goal in life is trolling and spreading hatred, you'll have zero problems with any of the above essential platforms.

Just to give you a sense of how wrong you are, I'm working at a university and one of my colleagues is a fully convinced communist and another colleague is an overtly racist Social Darwinist. They are luckily the exception, but that's just because they defend fringe positions that most people do not and never will endorse. Big surprise. The center portion of the normal distribution is larger.

I was thinking less of the flavor and more the credibility as journalism. Even most people who disagree with the WSJ editorial positions would agree that they don’t just print bald-faced lies.

I’m not sure what that’s look like for nativism since so much of that movement has been based on mistruths but it’s definitely not Breitbart.

The problem seems to be that on many platforms, advocating something like enforcing existing immigration law gets you downvoted and shouted down as though you were advocating gassing the Jews. It seems to be even less tolerated than more extremist comments, because actual-Nazi comments get publicized as "look how terrible The Other Side is" whereas a more reasoned right-wing position might actually convince people.

For example, the top level comment in this thread has been flagged to death even though its gist is that people should look for news from multiple perspectives.

And when you have that kind of populist sentiment attacking anything that questions the party line, reasoned counterargument gets mushed into the same outlets that carry extremist conspiracy theories because they're the only ones not being cowed. Which naturally leads to the kind of polarization we've been seeing lately where both sides move away from the middle.

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