It seems to me that Richard isn’t trying to bring back ethnonationalism, or even trying to “add just that touch of ethnic pride back into the meme pool”, but just trying to diagnose “how the western world got so dysfunctional”. If ethnonationalism and the taboo against ethnonationalism are both bad (as an ethnic minority I’m personally pretty scared of the former), then maybe we should get rid of the taboo and defend against ethnonationalism by other means, similar how there is little to no taboo against communism[1] but it hasn’t come close to taking power or reapproaching its historical high water mark in the west.
If you doubt this, there’s an advisor to my local school district who is a self-avowed Marxist and professor of education at the state university, and writes book reviews like this one: «For decades the educational Left and critical pedagogues have run away from Marxism, socialism, and communism, all too often based on faulty understandings and falling prey to the deep-seated anti-communism in the academy. In History and Education Curry Stephenson Malott pushes back against this trend by offering us deeply Marxist thinking about the circulation of capital, socialist states, the connectivity of Marxist anti-capitalism, and a politics of race and education. In the process Malott points toward the role of education in challenging us all to become abolitionists of global capitalism.» (Wayne Au, Associate Professor in the School of Educational Studies at the University of Washington Bothell; Editor of the social justice teaching magazine Rethinking Schools; Co-editor of Mapping Corporate Education Reform: Power and Policies Networks in the Neoliberal State)
For the sake of transparency, while in this post I’m mostly trying to identify a diagnosis, in the longer term I expect to try to do political advocacy as well. And it’s reasonable to expect that people like me who are willing to break the taboo for the purposes of diagnosis will be more sympathetic to ethnonationalism in their advocacy than people who aren’t. For example, I’ve previously argued on twitter that South Africa should have split into two roughly-ethnonationalist states in the 90s, instead of doing what they actually did.
However, I expect that the best ways of fixing western countries won’t involve very much ethnonationalism by historical standards, because it’s a very blunt tool. Also, I suspect that breaking the taboo now will actually lead to less ethnonationalism in the long term. For example, even a little bit more ethnonationalism would plausibly have made European immigration policies much less insane over the last few decades, which would then have prevented a lot of the political polarization we’re seeing today.
in the longer term I expect to try to do political advocacy as well
I find this idea particularly fraught. I already find it somewhat difficult to engage on this site due to the contentious theories some members hold, and I echo testingthewater’s warning against the trap of reopening these old controversies. You’re trying to thread a really fine needle between “meaningfully advocate change” and “open all possible debates” that I don’t think is feasible.
The site is currently watching a major push from Yudkowsky and Soares’ book launch towards a broad coalition for an AI pause. It really only takes a couple major incidents of connecting the idea to ethnonationalism, scientific racism and/or dictatorship for the targets of your advocacy to turn away.
I’m not going to suggest you stay on-message (lw is way too “truth-seeking” for that to reach anyone), but you should carefully consider the ways in which your future goals conflict.
If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.
Jean-Paul Sartre
I sincerely believe that people will get hurt if these ideas return to society at large, Richard. Please don’t do this.
It seems to me that Richard isn’t trying to bring back ethnonationalism, or even trying to “add just that touch of ethnic pride back into the meme pool”, but just trying to diagnose “how the western world got so dysfunctional”. If ethnonationalism and the taboo against ethnonationalism are both bad (as an ethnic minority I’m personally pretty scared of the former), then maybe we should get rid of the taboo and defend against ethnonationalism by other means, similar how there is little to no taboo against communism[1] but it hasn’t come close to taking power or reapproaching its historical high water mark in the west.
If you doubt this, there’s an advisor to my local school district who is a self-avowed Marxist and professor of education at the state university, and writes book reviews like this one:
«For decades the educational Left and critical pedagogues have run away from Marxism, socialism, and communism, all too often based on faulty understandings and falling prey to the deep-seated anti-communism in the academy. In History and Education Curry Stephenson Malott pushes back against this trend by offering us deeply Marxist thinking about the circulation of capital, socialist states, the connectivity of Marxist anti-capitalism, and a politics of race and education. In the process Malott points toward the role of education in challenging us all to become abolitionists of global capitalism.» (Wayne Au, Associate Professor in the School of Educational Studies at the University of Washington Bothell; Editor of the social justice teaching magazine Rethinking Schools; Co-editor of Mapping Corporate Education Reform: Power and Policies Networks in the Neoliberal State)
I like this comment.
For the sake of transparency, while in this post I’m mostly trying to identify a diagnosis, in the longer term I expect to try to do political advocacy as well. And it’s reasonable to expect that people like me who are willing to break the taboo for the purposes of diagnosis will be more sympathetic to ethnonationalism in their advocacy than people who aren’t. For example, I’ve previously argued on twitter that South Africa should have split into two roughly-ethnonationalist states in the 90s, instead of doing what they actually did.
However, I expect that the best ways of fixing western countries won’t involve very much ethnonationalism by historical standards, because it’s a very blunt tool. Also, I suspect that breaking the taboo now will actually lead to less ethnonationalism in the long term. For example, even a little bit more ethnonationalism would plausibly have made European immigration policies much less insane over the last few decades, which would then have prevented a lot of the political polarization we’re seeing today.
I find this idea particularly fraught. I already find it somewhat difficult to engage on this site due to the contentious theories some members hold, and I echo testingthewater’s warning against the trap of reopening these old controversies. You’re trying to thread a really fine needle between “meaningfully advocate change” and “open all possible debates” that I don’t think is feasible.
The site is currently watching a major push from Yudkowsky and Soares’ book launch towards a broad coalition for an AI pause. It really only takes a couple major incidents of connecting the idea to ethnonationalism, scientific racism and/or dictatorship for the targets of your advocacy to turn away.
I’m not going to suggest you stay on-message (lw is way too “truth-seeking” for that to reach anyone), but you should carefully consider the ways in which your future goals conflict.