Toward a liberal nationalism

Reclaiming the strategic heights from MAGA

Feb 08, 2025

On a humid August day in 1910, Theodore Roosevelt climbed onto a kitchen table serving as a makeshift podium in a muddy Kansas field and put forward a new approach to American politics and governance. He called it “The New Nationalism.”

At first, according to contemporary accounts, the former president had to shout to be heard over the din of vendors hawking hot dogs and lemonade to the crowd of 30,000 who had gathered in a fair-like atmosphere. But as he pressed on, they tuned out the sales pitches and tuned in to him.

And what he said may have a familiar ring, and a surprisingly strong historical resonance, for us today.

I spent nearly three decades in Washington, watching from a journalist’s perch as leaders and crises came and went. I moved away in December, just before Donald Trump and his acolytes arrived. Since then, I’ve watched from a distance as they stormed in like a horde of vandals, bent on tearing apart institutions that millions rely on and violating constitutional norms and principles that virtually every previous president has respected.

To make matters worse, this demolition derby is happening at a moment of acute social and political dysfunction. Wealth inequality in America is approaching historic levels. Corporate giants cast long shadows over every aspect of our national life. Courts have allowed those companies and the individuals enriched by them to flood the political arena with unlimited and mostly undisclosed money, to a degree that would have amazed the robber barons of Teddy Roosevelt’s day.

And we have a president who revels in this ugliness, celebrates it, even flaunts it by installing corporate allies like Elon Musk in positions of power and places of honor at the highest public ceremonies. He keeps these allies in line with a mixture of threats and blandishments. And, in a great gaslighting twist, he casts these utterly self-serving actions as an expression of high national will, a service to the everyday people who elected him, all done under the banner of national renewal: “Make America Great Again.”

Combating [Trump’s] narrative requires a liberal form of nationalism to counter the authoritarian nationalism of Trump and those like him.

The man who mounted that rickety podium 115 years ago probably would have stared at Trump with disbelief, but he would have found our broader national moment quite familiar. In his Kansas speech, Roosevelt argued that the country was at a crisis point, as ever-greater concentrations of individual wealth and corporate power threatened to reduce most Americans to second-class status. Coping with this crisis required strong action, he said. Only the federal government could meet the moment, and it needed to take sides – to stand with the worker, the small farmer and the consumer as they grappled with the titanic companies that had come to dominate the economy. And those companies had to be walled off from politics, prevented from using their great financial resources to sway elections and legislative bodies.

“The citizens of the United States must effectively control the mighty commercial forces which they have themselves called into being,” Roosevelt said.

Roosevelt’s speech, and the book he published that carried the same title, became a defining element of the Progressive movement as it emerged as a powerful political force in the early 20^th century. The New Nationalism became the core of Roosevelt’s platform when he ran to recapture the White House in 1912, first as a Republican and then as the nominee of the Progressive Party. Although Roosevelt lost that election, the victor, Woodrow Wilson, appropriated much of Roosevelt’s program as he contended with the same forces that had alarmed his opponent. And two decades later, another Roosevelt, Franklin, took up his relative’s core ideas and expanded on them as he mobilized the government to combat the Great Depression.

If the great political challenge of those years was to restore America’s democratic potential, the one before us today is how to counter the pernicious, deceptive narrative that Trump has used to prosper politically. He has persuaded many Americans that we have been betrayed as a nation by a global elite, whose interests are at odds with the needs of the country and its citizens. This same narrative has animated the campaigns of illiberal nationalists throughout the world, from France’s Marine Le Pen to Hungary’s Viktor Orban, Germany’s AfD party and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro.

Combating this narrative requires many things, but one essential element is to wrest back the strategic high ground of nationalism. We need a liberal form of nationalism to counter the authoritarian nationalism of Trump and those like him.

This may seem remote and detached from the immediate moment, as Trump and Musk rampage through our institutions. But Trump is president because he convinced millions of people that he was on their side, and that his opponents – as he put it during a Feb. 7 news conference – “don’t love our country.”

Stopping him requires dealing with the root causes of his attraction. This calls for us to embrace once again some old truths: that we are more than a collection of disparate identities and interest groups, that there is such a thing as a collective national interest. It requires recognizing that many of us yearn for a sense of belonging, that this urge is even more pronounced amid today’s profound social dislocation, and that a national polity – a nation-state – can help fill this void.

“This is your home, my friend, do not be driven from it; great men have done great things here, and will again, and we can make America what America must become.” – James Baldwin

Political scientist Yael Tamir has been writing about these ideas for three decades. Her first book, Liberal Nationalism, was published in 1993, amid the high tide of optimism about globalization and its ability to promote liberal democracy. In it, she warned that liberals would make a grave mistake if they surrendered the mantle of nationalism to their ideological adversaries. Her most recent book, Why Nationalism?, was written in a very different moment, with globalism in retreat before populist politicians wielding nationalism as a club to gain power.

She has argued that this only reinforces the need to reclaim nationalism by putting forward “a kinder type of liberalism, a liberalism for the people, that may mellow some of the fears that breed extreme types of nationalism and help rewrite a new deal that nurtures concern for the common good.”

In a 2019 interview with The Economist, Tamir said true nationalism starts from the premise that respect for national identity “is an important aspect of human dignity, and that the role of political institutions is to protect and nurture this identity.” Liberal nationalism, she said, celebrates “authenticity rather than superiority.”

Ruy Teixeira has also been thinking about these issues for many years. In an article last year, Teixeira explored what he called Democrats’ “patriotism gap.” He cited a wealth of polling data that found voters were more likely to associate patriotism with the Republican Party, and that those identifying as Republicans were far more likely than Democrats to describe themselves as feeling pride in being Americans.

Teixeira is now out of favor with many on the left, but the distance he has traveled in his writings illustrates the challenge before us. In 2002, he and co-author John Judis wrote a book optimistically titled The Emerging Democratic Majority. By 2023, Teixeira and Judis were publishing Where Have All the Democrats Gone?, an attempt to analyze why so many working-class and rural voters were abandoning the party. And, of course, that trend only intensified in the 2024 election.

This puts Democrats at a disadvantage not only in broad electoral terms but also in marshalling support for their priorities, Teixeira wrote: “One of the only effective ways … to mobilize Americans behind big projects is to appeal to patriotism, to Americans as part of a nation. But many in the Democratic Party blanch at any hint of this approach because of its association with darker impulses and political trends.”

Calling on us to do big things together as a nation has been a hallmark of effective political leadership throughout our history. It has been a tool employed by leaders who believed in America’s promise despite all its shortcomings – who believed, as one of those leaders, Abraham Lincoln, did, that our country was “the last best hope of earth.”

Even voicing that thought today can sound hopelessly out of tune with reality, as transactional Trumpists sneer at the very idea that we have any obligation to inspire humanity, and disillusioned people on the left reject the possibility that such a flawed country could ever do so.

But we should recall and take heart from what James Baldwin, in his book The Fire Next Time, wrote to his nephew in 1963, on the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation and amid the great national drama of the civil rights revolution:

“This is your home, my friend, do not be driven from it; great men have done great things here, and will again, and we can make America what America must become.”

Ken Fireman is the author of The Unmooring, a historical novel about America in the 1960s. During his work as a journalist, he covered Washington, post-Soviet Russia and other battle zones.

Liticisms

Discussion about this post