Love of a Nation

Our leadership classes’ lack of love for their own people is dissolving our societies

Biotech billionaire Vivek Ramaswamy stirred up a political firestorm not long ago when, in attempting to defend the importation of foreign workers through the H-1B visa program, he criticized America’s native culture as one of “mediocrity” and “normalcy.” Calling for “more math tutoring” and “fewer sleepovers” for America’s youth in order to render them employable, he declared on X that “‘Normalcy’ doesn’t cut it in a hyper-competitive global market for technical talent.” Jumping into the ensuing debate, Elon Musk offered an alternative analogy, portraying America as a global sports franchise that ought to contract the best players no matter their origin. “Thinking of America as a pro sports team that has been winning for a long time and wants to keep winning is the right mental construct” for Americans to hold, he wrote.

Unsurprisingly, neither proposed mental construct landed very well with President Trump’s populist-nationalist base and Ramaswamy was soon duly shuffled off to a term of exile in Ohio. In the one view, “America” is merely a glorified economic zone, just one part of a “competitive global market” in which labor and capital flow freely. In the other, America is a professional franchise whose sole objective is to maximize winnings. In both cases America is viewed as analogous to a corporation. In such a corporation, management’s only responsibility is to profits; it has no inherent responsibility to employees or their wellbeing, something of interest only insofar as it translates into productivity.

The corporate machine views employees merely as interchangeable human resources, to whom it owes no loyalty. Indeed, if it is to effectively devote itself to profit maximization the company can afford no permanent relational bonds with any of those who work for it, as it must be able to fire or replace them based on cold utilitarian calculus. There are thus few experiences employees find as irritating as that common workplace psyop in which management proclaims the corporate office to be a “family.” Employees know implicitly that it is natural affections and iron-clad mutual loyalties, or at least strong relational bonds, that are precisely what distinguish a family. Their corporate employer, in contrast, won’t hesitate to dump them by the wayside the moment they fall into the wrong column of a spreadsheet. For their part, employees are liable to return the sentiment and retain no lasting loyalty to the company – though perhaps plenty of resentment.

What angered people about the two CEOs’ comments was that – like so many of today’s elites – they displayed no sense of loyalty or obligation to Americans as a nation. A nation is not a corporation. A nation is a particular people, with a distinct culture, permanently bound together by shared relationship with place, past, and each other. A house becomes a home through relationship with the family that lives in it, a connection forged out of time and memory between concrete particularity of place and the lives of a specific group of people present, past, and yet unborn. We can say this house is home because it is our home. In much the same way, a country becomes our homeland because it is ours – and the we of that “ours” is the nation, which transcends geography, government, and GDP.

Unlike a corporation, a nation really is much like a family. And, like a family, it is characterized by strong relational bonds that are covenantal, not contractual. It establishes moral obligations of solidarity and subsidiarity that cannot be simply abandoned. Much as we naturally would, and should, put our own children’s lives and wellbeing ahead of others’, a nation is obligated to distinguish its own from others and to put the wellbeing of its own first. If it fails to do so then it can no longer remain a nation any more than a family could remain a family were it to try to extend the fold of its care equally to all humanity. Only once our immediate duties to those closest to us are fulfilled can concern for the good of others be rightly extended further outward. And though we may choose to adopt a child into our family, we cannot as readily toss them aside. We cannot, say, swap out our child for a different one who is more likely to get better grades in math class or is willing to perform chores for a lesser allowance. A nation-state is no more justly able to replace its own people or neglect its unique obligations to them simply because doing so seems more profitable or convenient.

Yet a family is hardly built on obligation alone. A healthy family is founded, ordered, governed, and sustained by love. It is love that binds its members together, forges their sense of responsibility, guides their conduct, and directs their proper care for one another. And it is love that directs us to rightly set our concern for these particular people above others, in the proper ordo amoris, or order of loves.

Love is not, cannot be, universal. It is born in particulars and defined by distinction. Should we say we love our neighbor, yet we do not love him for himself – with, or despite, all his unique eccentricities – but only insofar as we claim to love all people in the abstract, then we do not really love him. We cannot love our wife because she is a woman; we can only really love a particular woman. Thus believers must have faith that even the infinite God loves each of us in particular, numbering the very hairs on our heads; for his love to extend no further than to the mass of humanity as a species, as to a mass of sparrows, would be cold comfort indeed.

We love those people and those good things which are distinct and special to us, and those that are particularly our own all the more, but this hardly implies that we must then automatically hate all others. We do not hate other families’ children just because we love our own. Still, this twisted logic is today widely ascribed to one important expression of love: love for our own nation. For this is indeed what it means to be a nationalist: to love one’s own nation – in much the same way (if not quite as deeply) as one loves one’s own family.

As C.S. Lewis observed, patriotic love for one’s nation grows organically from that which is most local, familiar, and meaningful to us – from our love for our family, our land, and our community. From “this love for the place there goes a love for the way of life” of our nation, in all its many common particularities, all tied up together. In the case of Lewis’ England, “for beer and tea and open fires, trains with compartments in them and an unarmed police force and all the rest of it.” It is from this particular sense of love that he seeks to conserve his country. As Lewis reminds us (paraphrasing G.K. Chesterton), “a man’s reasons for not wanting his country to be ruled by foreigners are very like his reasons for not wanting his house to be burned down; because he could not even begin to enumerate all the things that would be lost.”

None of this implies that we then desire to impose this particular way of life on the rest of the world. But we should not be surprised that men might lay down their lives to defend their own nation as their own, and not for any other reason. They do so for the same reason they would lay down their lives to defend their children, or their friends: because they love them. Common loves are the source of common loyalties, and of common life.

A scene practically indistinguishable from fascism.

Yet, at least among our ruling classes, this natural reciprocal love between citizen and nation, which sustains our countries and our societies, seems to have long since frayed. This is no great shock, given that in our age the very idea of nationhood is itself decried, or outright denied, the nation-state stripped of the nation, the world reduced to a network of special economic zones. A man cannot love a special economic zone. Nor can its administrators possess any special feeling for its temporary inhabitants.

This grim status quo is no accident, however. It is the result of a deliberate, 80 year conspiracy against love, conducted out of fear. As I’ve argued before, after WWII, with the trauma of war and totalitarianism haunting the world, the American and European leadership class resolved that these evils should never again threaten society. And they concluded that the emotional power of nationalism had been the central cause of the 20th century’s catastrophes, leading them to make anti-nationalism the cornerstone of the liberal establishment consensus that came to dominate culture and politics after the war.

The philosopher Karl Popper, in his sweepingly influential 1945 book The Open Society and Its Enemies, denounced the idea of national community writ large, labeling it disastrous “anti-humanitarian propaganda” and smearing anyone who cherished his particular homeland and history as a “racialist.” Theodor Adorno, who set the direction of American psychology and education policy for decades, classified natural loyalties to family and nation as the hallmarks of the “authoritarian personality” that drove the common man inexorably toward fascism.

But the aversions of the post-war elite ran deeper than a philosophical anti-nationalism. As R.R. Reno writes, the visceral imperative became to fully banish all the “strong gods” that fueled conflict, meaning all those “objects of men’s love and devotion, the sources of the passions and loyalties that unite societies.” Strong bonds and strong loves of any kind – of family, nation, truth, God – came to be seen as dangerous, as sources of dogma, oppression, hatred, and violence. The peaceful and prosperous “open society” the post-war establishment set out to instantiate would, as Reno puts it, “require the reign of weak loves and weak truths,” with all dangerous sentiment subordinate to the rule of cool rationality and tepid impartiality.

In this belief post-war leaders embraced the legacy of Thomas Hobbes, who had viewed the wars which upended his own century as a product of the state of nature – the “war of all against all” – that constantly threatened to emerge from the pride and spiritedness (thumos) of mankind’s base natural personality. He saw the solution to this risk as man’s submission, out of fear, to the absolute power of a political leviathan – but also to an anthropological project, a program of metaphysical reeducation to turn man’s eye away from any summum bonum and downward toward only the fearful summum malum of struggle and death. As Matthew Crawford has succinctly explained, Hobbes believed that “any appeal to a higher good threatens to return us to the horrors of civil strife and must be debunked,” all our spirited passions and “vainglorious self-assertion” drained away so that we can consent to rule by Leviathan, “King of the Proud.”

With Hitler having firmly established himself as the summum malum of the post-war order, the liberal establishment embarked on their own version of Hobbes’ political-anthropological project. Seeking to dissolve the traditional “closed society” they feared was a breeding ground for authoritarianism, this “open society consensus” drew on theorists like Adorno and Popper to advance a program of social reforms intended to open minds, disenchant ideals, and weaken bonds. New approaches to education, psychology, and management sought to relativize truths, elevate “critical thinking” over character development, cast doubt on authorities, vilify collective loyalties, break down boundaries and borders, and free individuals from the “repression” of moral and relational bonds. Soon only economic prosperity and a vague universal humanitarianism became the only higher goods that it was morally acceptable to aim for as a society.

As government joined forces with post-war psychoanalysis, this program of subtle social control solidified into the modern therapeutic state – a regime that, as Christopher Lasch noted, successfully “substituted a medical for a political idiom and relegated a broad range of controversial issues to the clinic – to ‘scientific’ study as opposed to philosophical and political debate.” This removal of the political from politics lay at the heart of the post-war project’s aims. Its central desire was to reduce politics to mere administration, to bureaucratic processes, legal judgements, expert committees, and technocratic regulation – anything but fraught contention over such weighty matters as how we ought to live, organize society, or define who “we” are.

Public contention over genuinely political questions was now judged to be too dangerous to permit, even – indeed especially – in a democracy, where the ever-present specter of the mob and the latent emotional power of the masses haunted post-war leaders. They dreamed of governance via scientific management, of reducing the political sphere to the dispassionate processes of a machine – to “a social technology… whose results can be tested by social engineering,” as Popper put it. The operation of such a machine could be limited to a cadre of carefully educated “institutional technologists,” in Popper’s words, or rather to Hegel’s imagined “universal class” of impartial civil servants, able to objectively derive the best decisions for everyone through the principles of universal Reason alone.

The result was the construction of the managerial regimes that dominate the Western world today. These are characterized by vast, soulless administrative states of unaccountable bureaucracies, a litigious ethos of risk-avoidance and “harm-reduction,” and a technocratic elite class accustomed to social engineering and dissimulation. In such states the top priority is the careful management of public opinion through propaganda and censorship, not only in order to constrain democratic outcomes but so as to smooth over or avoid any serious discussion of contentious yet fundamentally political issues, such as migration policy.

Meanwhile the common people of such regimes are practically encouraged to live as distracted consumers rather than citizens, the invisible hand of the free market and the inducements of commercial and hedonistic pursuits serving not only profits but a political function of pacification. It is preferable that the masses simply not care very much – about anything, but especially about the fate of their nation and the common good. That sort of collective consciousness, transcending self-interest and seeking higher order, was after all identified as a foreboding mark of the closed society.

Here, then, can we see the long historical roots of the open, neoliberal state pointed to as an ideal by Ramaswamy and Musk. Innocently or not, these libertarian-leaning businessmen’s conception of the polity is almost indistinguishable from the “post-national state” that devoutly left-wing leaders like Canada’s Justin Trudeau have set out to devolve their countries into. The “globalism” so often decried by populists is neither left nor right but the logical product of the rationalist universalism embraced by the 20th century’s post-war consensus. It is the inevitable result of treating people, and peoples, as interchangeable units in a mechanical system – that is, of regarding them without any distinguishing sense of love.

But, as is increasingly obvious in our turbulent 21st century, these loveless machine-states are deeply unstable. It turns out that attempting to remove all bonds of affection from politics introduces some fundamental problems of political order. Most importantly, it has left us a leadership class essentially incapable of responsible leadership.

The noble classes of the pre-modern world’s closed societies were still capable of displaying a real sense of noblesse oblige: of having a sacred obligation to and responsibility for the people they ruled. Though modern cynics may dismiss this sentiment as a myth, it was often genuine. It is a striking fact, for instance, that the last real generation of Europe’s aristocratic elite was disproportionately savaged in the trenches of WWI, the flower of its youth voluntarily marching off to die leading from the front in defense of their nations at a significantly higher rate than ordinary soldiers. Eton, the nursery of the British aristocracy, lost more than a thousand of its students during the war – a 20% casualty rate compared to the army’s national average of 12%.

Today our elites no longer betray any similar sense of special obligation to their people. But then we can hardly expect them to, given that all the strong bonds of loyalty that once tied them to their countrymen, transcending divides of wealth, education, and class, have been severed. They conceive of themselves as meritocrats, of no special birth and therefore no special responsibility. More importantly, they have been taught from birth that they ought not even conceive of their nation as particularly their own or to love it any more than any other portion of humanity; their self-conceived domain is one without borders, the global empire of the open society.

Whom does government serve? This is perhaps the most pressing question of politics. In theory the leadership class that rules us is supposed to represent and govern on behalf of the common people and their best interests. This is meant to be precisely what distinguishes our regimes from tyranny, “tyranny” in the classical lexicon meaning rule for private gain rather than for the common good. But no one can truly represent or act rightly for the wellbeing of another if they bear no particular concern for them. It is love, and only love, that can really guarantee that anyone acts in the best interest of another when they could do otherwise. Love is the only force capable of genuinely liberating us from selfishness.

It is a modern conceit that those with power are kept restrained, uncorrupted, and ordered to justice and the common good primarily by lifeless structural guardrails, by the abstract checks and balances of constitutions and laws. The ancients would have maintained that it is far more important that a king be virtuous, and that he love his people. And is this not plausible? Fundamentally, a father doesn’t treat his children well, refraining from abusing or neglecting them and raising them rightly, just because he obediently follows the law or some correct set of rules and standard operating procedures. He does so because he loves his family, and from that love flows automatically a spontaneous ordering of all his intentions toward their good. He would do so even in the absence of externally imposed rules. Love is an invisible hand all its own.

It is this invisible hand, not that of the market, that is so glaringly absent from the heart of our nations. If ours seems a cold and callous age in general, our ruling class characterized by its indifference and our societies by division, dissolution, and despair, surely this lack is the real cause. As Reno writes, “the greatest threat to the political health of the West is not fascism or a resurgent Ku Klux Klan but a decline in solidarity and the breakdown of the trust between leaders and the led. Fearful of strong loves and committed to ever-greater openness, the postwar consensus cannot formulate, much less address, these problems.” With today’s elite “unable to identify our shared loves—unable even to formulate the ‘we’ that is the political subject in public life – we cannot identify the common good, the res in the res publica.”

The enlightened man, the conservative Russell Kirk once observed, “does not believe that the end or aim of life is competition; or success…” Nor does he hold any foolish political “intention of converting this human society of ours into an efficient machine for efficient machine-operators, dominated by master mechanics.” What he recognizes instead is that “the object of life is Love.” And so he knows, what’s more, “that the just and ordered society is that in which Love governs us, so far as Love ever can reign in this world of sorrows; and he knows that the anarchical or the tyrannical society is that in which Love lies corrupt.”

If the countries of the West are still capable of renewal, that renewal will come only when our leadership classes recover an uncorrupted love for the particular people – the nation – over which they govern and commit to placing their wellbeing first. We will be fortunate then if, in the hearts of some at least, this recovery may have at last begun.