'They have a word, it sort of became old-fashioned...'

The President called himself a nationalist the other day and some people took predictable alarm. To some listeners, to be a nationalist is tantamount to being a national socialist, but we should take that suspicion no more seriously than the canard that national socialists, as socialists, belong to the left. Nationalism got a bad name before Nazism, however, being blamed for the horrors of World War I, if not both world wars. "Nationalism" denoted an inherently competitive if not Darwinian system of international relations that made war a constant danger, if not a fact of life in some places. For Donald Trump, nationalism is most likely a synonym for another old-fashioned term he favors, "America First." Its opposite in his dictionary is globalism. A globalist, he told his Texas audience, is "a person who wants the globe to do well, frankly not caring about our country so much." That may strike some listeners as a misrepresentation. Many self-styled globalists will tell you that as the "globe" does well, so will the U.S. The idea, of course, is that global prosperity creates markets for American goods. This, however, is a utilitarian view that expects the nation in general to do well regardless of however many individual Americans do less well. The globalism Trump decries is in part the libertarian sort that tries not to cry over lost jobs and challenges the unemployed to adapt to the global market as a test of character. It's also the "progressive" sort that assumes that the U.S. owes the rest of the world something that may require individual Americans to pay a just price. Trump himself affects to begrudge every American job lost, treating globalists of all sorts as at least theoretical enemies of the people. At the same time, there's some of the old-fashioned nationalism to his foreign policy, which seems based on a premise of perpetual competition that falls short of the existential antipathy of neocon thinking but still carries a risk of war, especially as he abandons treaties in his pursuit of maximum national advantage. In short, there's a lot more to Trump's nationalism than the mere racism some people seem to infer, but that only means it could be both better and worse than it sounds.