Opinion | How to compete with Trump’s fear-mongering

Opinion | How to compete with Trump’s fear-mongering
WorldPost, The WorldPost, Michael Ignatieff, Liberal Party of Canada, nationalism, David Goodhart, elites, anywheres somewheres, anywheres, somewheres, inter-ethnic hatred, ethnic nationalism, Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen, Brexit, Victor Orban, Jarosław Kaczyński, liberal politics, progressive politics, populism, populists, Tony Blair, Cool Britannia, Bill Clinton, ‘a town called hope’, Barack Obama, towards a more perfect union, Emmanuel Macron, Republique En Marche, national identity
/ @dongonews9123
By Michael Ignatieff January 9 at 12:55 PM Michael Ignatieff is the president of the Central European University in Budapest and author of “Blood and Belonging: Journeys into the New Nationalism.” He was the leader of the Liberal Party of Canada from 2008 to 2011. President Trump is proud to call himself an American nationalist. His shutdown of the U.S. government to force funding for a border wall is classic nationalist politics. He’s invented a “national security crisis,” even though there is no evidence of such a thing. In his address Tuesday night, Trump, like all nationalists, invented an enemy. He once again portrayed Latino migrants as rapists and murderers and painted his Democratic opponents as weaklings who won’t protect the American people. “The only thing that is immoral is for the politicians to do nothing and continue to allow more innocent people to be so horribly victimized,” Trump intoned during his speech before rattling off a series of gruesome stories about Americans who have been brutally murdered by illegal immigrants. As Trump’s fear-mongering strategy continues, going forward into 2020, the Democrat-controlled U.S. House of Representatives and presidential candidates like Elizabeth Warren will need to think carefully about how to counter Trump’s politics of fear and the nationalism that allows him his grip on the Republican base. It may look like the easy solution is to craft an inclusive “civic nationalism” to compete with the “ethnic nationalism” that has brought Trump to power and that is doing so well globally. But it is worth thinking about progressive electoral victories of the recent past. They were all firmly rooted in an inclusive nationalist appeal. And yet, they fell short. In 2004, at the Democratic National Convention, Barack Obama deftly turned his own life story into a national fable about “the only country where my story is even possible.” In the 1990s, Bill Clinton, highlighting his humble beginnings on his path to the presidency, recounted how he was raised by a single mother in “a town called Hope.” Around that same time, Tony Blair pushed an image of “Cool Britannia,” playing on deep-seated myths about Britain as the workshop of the world. Through his party, La République En Marche!, French President Emmanuel Macron refurbished Charles De Gaulle’s vision of a Jupiterian state that would modernize the nation. Each of these leaders presented an inclusive vision of a modern nation in control of its destiny. What eventually sank these progressive narratives was not that they lacked nationalist appeal but that their narratives ran smack up against inequalities that nationalism can’t paper over. Blair’s Cool Britannia concept won him voters in London and in the country’s south, but his civic nationalism sounded like metropolitan arrogance for swathes of voters in the decaying industrial heartlands. Obama’s “more perfect union” appealed across racial divides, but many white working-class Americans didn’t