A Perspective on “Nationalism”

[UltraBudgie]

For example, to me, being a Portuguese

That's strange -- the database here has you as being Eastern European. Huh.

thoughts about "bad influences" that could come from everywhere and resulted in, for example, Coca Cola being forbidden

He may have been ahead of the curve on HFCS there.

In all seriousness, though, nationalistic authoritarianism sucks. It's always a fragile political approach, and when it breaks, it breaks big. That may be the most compelling argument against it, one of practicality rather than ideology. When the state seeks to control the culture rather than the culture molding the state, systems of imposed doctrine quickly calcify within channels of bureaucratic implementation. The dynamism of the culture then withers, and dies taking the state along with it, to reform from ashes, or it splits the seams of its outgrown clothing. Never a pretty sight.

This has me wondering about the parallels with the Church. If we consider RC Christianity as akin to a form of 'nationalism', in that it gives rise to a worldly political power being based upon a common cultural identity, perhaps we can get some insight into nationalistic politics being practiced within a nation-state cultural nexus. The Church, with its long and bloody history, staggered from one configuration to another, avoiding collapse many times by means of assimilation -- expansion and redefinition of the basic 'nation' of practice upon which its institutional structures based their form. Perhaps we would have seen the same thing with Nazism, if the kibosh hadn't been put upon it rather quickly. And perhaps we're seeing something similar with America today -- we're just too darn multi-cultural and progressive to be fascistic, dontcha know, but as soon as we run out of grist for that mill, somethings gonna start to stink, and our implicit moral exceptionalism may become difficult to defend.