Nationalists Already Have the World They Want but Need to Pretend Otherwise

Their views only make sense if you ignore basic facts

Trump’s cutting and freezing of foreign aid has created a discourse around the question of the degree to which the American government should put its own people first.

As JD Vance said in a recent interview, representing the nationalist perspective,

You love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then, after that, you can focus on and prioritize the rest of the world. A lot of the far left has completely inverted that.

Huge if true. We might ask what evidence there is that the left, or the “far left,” whoever that is, prioritizes foreigners over American citizens. The US spends about 1% of its federal budget on foreign aid. States and localities spend practically nothing on non-Americans, except in cases where there is a large number of immigrants, though they also pay taxes. Democrats feel pressure from the far left on trans, climate, and other issues, but raising the amount spent on foreign aid or otherwise expanding our circle of empathy seems to be a very low priority.

Sometimes you’ll hear “America First” types argue for restrictive immigration and trade policies, and maintain that in these areas our leaders have prioritized the interests of foreigners. Yet they ignore the fact that analysts have produced a great deal of research and economic analysis arguing that such policies are good for Americans. Nationalists may disagree, but practically nobody of any influence is saying that the goal of public policy is to make foreigners better off even if it comes at the expense of Americans. When the left criticizes Trump’s views on tariffs, they focus on Americans having to pay higher prices, not the possibility that Chinese workers might lose jobs.

This is what makes modern nationalism so incredibly bizarre. The world looks pretty much exactly as they want, which means they need to completely check out of reality in order to argue for their positions.

The US spent $113 billion on food stamps in 2023, at the same time all foreign aid totaled $72 billion. That means we spent over one and a half times more on making tens of millions of Americans fatter than we did on all the wars, famines, AIDS, poverty, cancer, wife beating, child trafficking, etc., combined afflicting the nearly 8 billion foreigners in the world.

Of course, in addition to food stamps, Americans get globs of money spent on their housing, education, healthcare, and police protection. Maybe you can attribute some part of what goes towards foreign policy to helping foreigners, since the US does protect other countries abroad and sometimes engage in humanitarian interventions. The national defense budget is about $850 billion to $900 billion a year. Let’s pretend that, I don’t know, maybe half of that is to benefit foreigners, and the rest is to protect Americans? This seems way too high, but let’s go with it. Half of spending on national defense plus all of foreign aid comes out to maybe 7% of the budget going to help the nearly 8 billion people in the world.

That’s a little more substantial than the approximately 1% that goes to foreign aid alone. But Trump has always wanted to spend more on the military, and Democrats less, so if your gripe is with how much is budgeted for defense and you’re a MAGA, you picked the wrong side.

The number goes down even further when you count state and local spending, which doesn’t have any foreign aid or national defense component. If you’re considering government at all levels, there is no way you can get a number that’s over 5% going to non-Americans.

So America already looks out for her own people, while giving relative scraps to the rest of the world.

One can set aside spending and just look at how the government treats citizens versus outsiders. Even if an American murders someone, he has constitutional rights, and we won’t imprison him without giving him a fair trial. If you’re a foreigner, however, you can be killed with a bomb just for being in the vicinity of someone who might commit a terrorist attack against the United States. If an American gets kidnapped on the other side of the world, his government will use diplomatic and financial pressure to bring him home, while it looks the other way when a village is massacred in Africa. An illegal immigrant might be sent to Honduras to live a life of poverty for getting pulled over in a traffic stop, while an American can be arrested dozens of times for actual crimes and continue walking the streets menacing his community.

I’m not against a moderate form of nationalism. This seems to be the only way to organize society at this point in history. A government that treated foreigners as just as worthy of consideration as citizens would completely lack legitimacy and probably be unable to function or do good for anyone. What I can’t find any sympathy for, however, is looking at the world as it exists, and saying that the problem with the United States is that it does too much to advance the interests of people abroad.

Nationalists claim to care about their own people, not to hate others. Yet such assertions are difficult to reconcile with their priorities. Whenever you hear someone is “America First,” it’s never that he wants to cure cancer or fix the housing supply issue. Instead, he talks about Ukraine or foreign aid. He’s relatively indifferent to most questions regarding how to make Americans’ lives better, but he’s certain that he doesn’t want to help outsiders.

Imagine a man who pays little attention to balancing his checkbook and doesn’t put much effort towards organizing his finances. At the same time, he lives in a state of absolute paranoia that his wife might occasionally give a dollar to a homeless person. When he finds out, he blows up at her. “Our family first! What kind of person puts others ahead of their own family? A strange inverted morality you have!” Then he goes back to keeping his money in a savings account instead of buying government bonds or mutual funds. It would be rational to conclude that when he complains about the dollar given to the homeless man, he’s driven by malice more than love of his family.

We can be more charitable when understanding nationalists. I don’t think that most of them actually want to see foreigners suffer. Rather, the psychology seems to go something like this.

1. Some people are attracted to tribalism as a moral principle. As with all moral principles, there is a temptation to signal that you adhere to it more than other people.

2. There is a dilemma because the world is already nationalist by any reasonable definition.

3. You can’t be a nationalist and also stick to the facts, since even though most Americans are nationalists, few would think that 1% of the federal budget going abroad is worth worrying about.

4. Therefore, the nationalist needs to ignore facts about the world and instead pretend that we live in a country where the American government to a large extent prioritizes the well-being of foreigners. This leads to bizarre policy takes like the idea that Ukraine is responsible for our debt by people who have no strong opinions regarding what to do about the coming entitlement crisis. Hostility to trade and immigration reflects this need to create an alternative reality. Instead of recognizing these are good things that benefit all parties involved, they need these issues to be zero-sum for their worldview to make any sense.

In this framework, the nationalist isn’t full of hate towards foreigners, nor love towards his own people. He is in love with a narrative that allows him to virtue signal – or perhaps vice signal in this case – in order to raise his own status within his political faction.