Why Nationalism Trumps Liberalism Every Time | Prof John J. Mearsheimer

Speaker
John J. Mearsheimer is the R. Wendell Harrison Distinguished Service Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago, where he has taught since 1982. He graduated from West Point in 1970 and then served five years as an officer in the U.S. Air Force. He then started graduate school in political science at Cornell University in 1975. He received his Ph.D. in 1980. He spent the 1979-1980 academic year as a research fellow at the Brookings Institution, and was a post-doctoral fellow at Harvard University's Center for International Affairs from 1980 to 1982. During the 1998-1999 academic year, he was the Whitney H. Shepardson Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York.

#liberalism #nationalism

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[PhilosophyInsights]

What do you think about Mearsheimer's view? Where is he right, and where wrong?

[isaacolivecrona]

Liberalism as a international relations theory is fundamentally naive and dangerous. Most people are tribal and not guided by reason and the belief in goodwill and universal morality. Liberal values can only flourish in societies that are relatively homogeneous, i.e. where these values are shared by its members, and social trust is high. In a heterogenous society, where the members’ loyalty is tribal and their morality is non-universal (i.e. the non-liberal belief that morality applies differently to different peoples), liberal values are not only naive but self-defeating. That is why liberal values can only flourish in societies that realize these dangers of multiculturalism and tribal loyalties, and whose first commitment is that of its own survival – which demands that we protect ourselves from those who do not share the West’s enlightenment values of reason, goodwill, and universal morality. Tolerance – an other Western value – does not mean that we mustn’t or shouldn’t protect ourselves from those who seek to replace these values with non-liberal ones. To not be willing to stand up and defend our values and make sure that they live on, is to not value them in the first place. Those who believe that our liberal values, such as individualism, tolerance, privacy, freedom of speech, and the rule of law, is a good thing, must also be willing to fight to protect them.

[GoMatthew]

I've never come across someone contrasting Liberalism with Nationism at the core philosophical level like this. Thank you. I'm a hybrid, leaning more towards Nationalism as I age and witness where unfettered Liberalism has brought us.

[damianbylightning]

Great talk about the basics - which many academics struggle to recognise consistently.
In my experience many academics who specialise in political theory and in ideas have blind spots about nations and nationalism. Both Marxism and liberalism have an inbuilt bias against the nation - the credulity of academics during Brexit showed that quite clearly. After Brexit, US reaction to Trump just repeated the very same errors.
I think the mostly voodoo history about invented communities, which rampaged through universities, has not helped matters. That sometimes literal-minded and convenient view answered all known questions and made it impossible to hold back the still rising and continuing tide of dangerous delusions which has inoculated liberal and Marxist minds from reality. Two centuries of being proved absolutely wrong on every count is clearly not enough. They wouldn't be so stupid if they weren't smart enough to make a good case against established and obvious reality.

[tonymlealv]

At the end of your thing.
You just prove the point.
That you can be a national country and have liberty..
The more liberty somebody has the less power the nation has to control their citizens. This is the only reason why Nations reject liberty.

[Cacacos]

Well, is the "nationalism core assumption" [6:59] wrong? NO. As it happens with the other apes, we too are actually a tribal species. We literally do depend on our parents for at least the first decade of our lives. So, what's wrong with it?

[northcountryfisher]

My problem with nationalism is that when taken to the extreme it ends up invalidating the individual, you are reduced to a mere number ... Almost meaningless! Whereas, the classical liberal tradition based on the social-contract is between the individual and the nationstate, a symbiotic relationship which enables and furthers a well functioning society with neither one dominating the other.

[plethoraplenty]

How are liberalism and nationalism even comparable? One is a political dynamic that explains someone's leanings for policy and the other is an organizational structure for power?

[TaxesreTheft]

Liberalism and nationalism aren't opposite concepts. The distinction between primary individual and social being is arbitrary as well. We are both. Nationalism is a nature-based concept derived from family, peer groups that you seek loyal, trustworthy people around you that know you best and may have the same needs. Call the logic behind a universal/natural principle.
The idea to form a state of homogeneous people to maximize the shared benefits is the reason behind nationalism. The problem is that we are individuals as well. Nation focused states have the problem that the act on this small line between individual rights and common benefit/thinking. So no matter what these states do they harm individual citizens. Because no one can predict the needs of millions and can act in the right way to fulfill all their needs. Nationalism leads therefore into individual suppression.

Liberalism on the other hand doesn't need a state. He derived this conclusion from the mentioned concept that we are primary individuals but we are social beings as well. So he thinks there is the need of a external power like parents for children who watch, care and educate their children. But we all know that the state doesn't want a educated, wise citizen with a critical mind. Our normal life and our daily interactions prove him wrong. We all seek freedom and act with each other mostly friendly. So neutral judges and a security we may have without a state and forced taxes. It's just a question how to organize this. When we visited the moon, have satellites and so on it seems pretty easy for me to organize a society based on maximum individual rights with an universal law to don't harm other. And since we a social beings as well we do that social stuff the state does but now we know our vis-à-vis.
When my body belongs to me then the output of my work belongs to me as well. I should have the right to decide where I invest MY money, because I worked for it no other.
Nowadays the state is the biggest thread to individual rights.

[JurijPopotnig]

I think it's all about the female and masculine aspects of ourselves when it comes to all ideologies. They tend to go to radical if people don't have their personal stuff figured out. Some are more female aspect based and the others are more masculine. That's why people fight over words it's really what people don't get about themselves and in this way they project their issues to the outside. The ideologies themselves should be viewed as ideas or directions for situations to pick. Sometimes the left is right and sometimes the right but people take it personal if they have issues with themselves not the other side, maybe the other aspect of oneself.

[spencera]

Very interesting talk. Liberalism and nationalism (as defined in the lecture) both make important contributions as different means to establishing a good society, but the critical factor is whether they are both oriented toward a good and proper end. We get hung up arguing about means of arranging society as if those means are the ends in themselves, when they are not. Liberalism recognizes the innate value of human life and protects an individual's right to live freely, but nationalism reminds us that when individuals use their freedom poorly by pursuing unworthy ends, those individual lives are devastated, as well as their families and the nation as a whole. We are individuals who thrive in community. Individual life does possess intrinsic value, but freedom is not the ultimate good in itself, and when that freedom is misused, our freedoms quickly disappear. These points are all true, and can only be balanced accordingly when properly oriented in pursuit of the good. What I'm advocating for is a type of synthesis of Straussian natural rights theory and Kirkian pragmatism; Strauss affirms that the basic value of the individual is the whole reason for government existing at all, while Kirk provides the prudence to prevent us becoming a crusader state. But so long as society hides from the fundamental conversation involving the nature of the good, we will be spinning our wheels and talking past one another, by focusing on means when the real question is about ends.

[thegoodpimps]

Nationalism really loses its meaning in the internet age. I have more in common with people on the other side of the planet than my neighbors.

[rudolfbaresic]

The tenets of liberalism are of course individual rights and the maximization of utilities for the individual. It's universalistic, pretentiös, rootless, and risk destroying the collective and unitary forces of a society.

[canac]

I take some issue with the professor's distinction of "nationalism" as a group of people who feel that their common characteristics should allow them to have their own state. While it may be slight, the distinction that people of similar "characteristics" wanting to preserve their own identities, as a people (with all that entails: traditions, culture, etc.), and people of similar characteristics SEEKING to create their own state, which is what it sounds like, using his formulation, are quite a different thing. As for the professor's description of liberalism, I would say that it is far closer to the "classical" liberalism of yesteryear, rather than what has morphed into the leftist liberalism of today. Now, it may well be his intention to contrast the old liberalism vs nationalism, but seeing as how this issue has become a point of current conflict in today's world, I'd say it bears little sense to contrast ideologies that are far less relevant today, at least in so far as they have been described here, than the actual conflict of today's ideologies. Those are a liberal left that has completely warped its nascent ideals into a close-minded, juvenile yearning for a nanny state to absolve them of all responsibility while actively and insidiously imposing their views on all who would disagree. These would, first and foremost, be the nationalist-minded people who understand the fallacy of "diversity is our strength" thinking, and are loath to discard centuries of precious traditions, values, culture and cohesion for the sake of a misguided "enlightened" utopian ideal of diversity where the very diversity they seek prevents any societal cohesion and sharing of values.

[chrisstory]

I agree that national competition trumps a world order predicated on the belief that every individual possesses a sovereign soul, but the precarious primacy of violent nation-states could succumb to a prosocially principled global economic order that makes a large plurality of non-militerized corporations our primary social unit.

[JamesGibbs]

Nationalism based on group theory has now become muddied as previously effective categorisation and successful implementation of liberal ideas is struggling with the expansion of the size of previously smaller sub-groups. When a group within a nation is large enough and has drastically different views and values to the agreed upon past consensus and identity it causes innate internal conflict. One example being the semi isolationist communities of near exclusively Muslim areas in Europe. Group theory here is evidenced by the vast conflict in values and fundamental national assumptions. When cultures within a nation feel so drastically different we see the evidence of tension and impossibility to govern successfully for all in a nation.

[Hannodb]

I've always been proudly and unapologetically a nationalist. I've always found it weird that Nationalism is portrayed as somehow being evil, just because the NAZI's (Who were Imperialists - which is the polar opposite of Nationalism) abused that term. It's like saying Democracy is evil because Communist states called itself "Democratic". I find the critics of Nationalism are usually using intellectually lazy and poor logic, usually by just lumping very different kinds of people together and labeling them all with some kind of "-ism". Simply saying "That's [Insert Label]" is not a valid argument against anything. I want the Afrikaner people of South Africa to have our own state.

[peterjensen]

Thanks, what are the ground principles in marxism?

[MoonBurn]

Both ideas are just that, ideas, notional.

If he’s a nationalist and America is an individualist nation, why’d he invest so much of himself in that nation? Just asking.

But I agree in sort of parallel with one of his ideas: We are indeed in the Age of Rights. I would add that the age of Relationships is over.

[harku]

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