Nationalism and Libertarianism

Cartoon by BALOO

I'm a libertarian nationalist.  What that means to me is that I'm in favor of the maximum amount of liberty for human beings, and that the way to accomplish that is through nationalism.  Paradox?  Only apparently. The basic human unit is the family — I say that because the usual starting point is the individual, which, if you think about it, is illogical.  Our kind of animal is produced by families.  Maybe a creature that just hatches from abandoned eggs can be considered basically an individual, and there are indeed species like that, but not ours.  We have to be born from a mother and nurtured by a mother and father till we're independent.  So the human individual is the creation of a human family.  Families get bigger and stick together till they're big enough to be called a tribe.  Then tribes grow, and technology permitting, turn into nations, or merge with related tribes to do so.  Very primitive people who need a lot of square miles to survive never get to that point till they learn how to get more food out of the landscape so they can concentrate their numbers in an area and grow without splitting up.  So, as I was saying, the basic unit is the family, and then the tribe, and then the nation.  Anything bigger than that is an empire, which has its own problems.  Anyhow, for most of humanity, the nation is the thing.  For one thing, one's nation protects its members from getting conquered by other nations, so a nation is necessary for survival.  Now that we've established that, how does a nation organize itself?  Usually through government of one kind or another.  Government seems to be a basic human trait, despite the assertions of my anarchist friends.  Actually, many of them say that anarchism isn't anti-government, just opposed to political government, which is a subject for another post.  Well, for the most part, nations have governments. Some are authoritarian, some are totalitarian, and some are rather loose. Some are monarchies, some are republics, some are democracies, and most are blends of one or more of these.  Me, I like a loose republic. So it's lucky that I'm an American, because that's how this country was designed, never mind its deviation from that over the last couple centuries.

But a loose republic has to survive, or there goes the loose republicanism.  It has to have some kind of defense — I'm in favor of the Swiss model, for what it's worth — and it has to have borders.  A nation is like a club, in a way.  The Anti-Smoking Club has to have a rule that only anti-smoking people can join, or sooner or later the guys in control of the club treasury will be using it to buy cigarettes. So that rule is the border of the Anti-Smoking club.  A nation's borders have to work the same way, if the nation is to survive.  And remember, a nation is a supertribe, so its basis is blood ties.  Most nations pretty much admit new members by declaring the offspring of its current members to be new members.  Sometimes nations admit immigrants.  We used to have a rule that immigrants had to be relatives, so to speak, because our immigration quotas were based on the national origins of the population we already had — so many per year from the UK, so many from Norway, so many from France, etc.  That worked fine, until Lyndon Johnson blew it out of the water and caused the immigration mess we have today.

Now, the reason you want to restrict things to "relatives" is that you don't want your nation to turn into something else, you want to to keep its character and way of life.  Research has shown that a "diverse" population doesn't work worth a damn.  Trust disappears, and the smooth workings of society break down.  There are plenty of conflicts available in an non-diverse nation.  Why import more?

The constant chant from the immigration lobby is that people want to come here to be free, to be good Americans.  If that were the case, there'd be no problem.  But such people are just a small portion of our current immigrants.  Oh, most people want to be free themselves, but they mostly don't want a free society.  Most leftists want plenty of immigrants from the Third World because they think they can be counted on to vote for more and more freebies for themselves and lots of government regulation, because they like freebies and because they come from places with lots of regs and they're used to them.  On a smaller scale, it's a phenomenon here in Colorado that people come here from New York and California to get away from those particular hells, and then vote for all the stuff — high taxes, gun control, and all the usual politically correct garbage — that made New York and California into places they wanted to get away from.  Immigrants from other countries do the same thing.

So, despite propaganda to the contrary, the libertarianism of the United States has its origin in Europe, most particularly Great Britain, and it reached its highest development here.  The best way to keep it going is American nationalism.  So I'm a Libertarian Nationalist.