> Personally, I think this is the effect of governments themselves no longer believing in nations and borders or a responsibility for them, and simply importing polarized populations of both very rich and very poor people
> It's barely right/left at all, it's just nihilistic power as its own end.
These statements are skillfully leaving out "ethno" part of nationalism. Once you add that quite obviously real and active element back, it's very much a left/right difference.
The left's solution to the problems brought about by globalization is to subtly bias the scales of re-industrialization policies toward the domestic labor market - evidenced by things like the battery materials sourcing and assembly location requirements, and income limits of the recently passed EV tax credits.
The right's solution to this has been playing on fears of a purported invasion by non-white citizens from lower income countries. A decade ago that would have been a controversial claim to make about the right, but today's right openly proclaims those ideas.
Portugal's case is interesting because they lived under a nationalist dictatorship that only ended in 1968, so many people alive today remember living under that. In my travel there, I found that many people in the age groups that vote heavily conservatively in the US and UK instead vote democratic left as a result of their lived memories of nationalist dictatorship.
Portugal does need to figure out what else has to offer the world economically in addition to great weather and beautiful cities and countryside, in order to have a better balance of trade, but it's unrealistic to think it can do that while shutting down immigration.
The "ethno-" in nationalism isn't silent or implied though. Canada has been a very heterogeneous nation for over a century, Israel is also very heterogeneous where people are bound by religion and not ethnicity, France and Spain have a huge and integrated north african populations and they are French and Spanish, full stop. Brazil, also a nation with as much global diversity as is available.
This trope that nations as entities are somehow racist is more an artifact of the critical theory that calls everything racist by default, and not of how people actually live together.
Whether or not Jewishness is completely an ethnicity is debatable, but a very large number of Israelis (and Jews across the world in general) aren't religious at all -- they see their Jewishness as being defined by their ancestors who were practicing Jews rather than by their own beliefs.
> ... Stoking grievances over the increased diversity of those countries ...
The underlying grievance is of course not over "increased diversity" per se but rather the long-term decline in civic attitudes. The progressive left expresses the exact same concerns in a different wording, by decrying the increased "marginalization and exclusion" that's seemingly entailed by such diversity. Guess what: they're all looking at pretty much the same thing.
> The underlying grievance is of course not over "increased diversity" per se but rather the long-term decline in civic attitudes.
I fail to see how the previous US president's complaints about people coming from "s*hole countries" and the exhortations from the Charlottesville rioters about how "Jews will not replace us" are grievances about "decline in civic attitudes". Try as one may to dissociate them, but these are the faces, words, and animating motivation of nationalism today.
The sad truth is that Jews have always been used as a convenient scapegoat for grievances of all kinds, and this is just as true on the left as on the nationalist right. For example, Marx famously blamed the rise of bourgeois capitalism on the Jews, and this casual anti-Semitism was picked up by many on the left.
> this is just as true on the left as on the nationalist right. For example, Marx famously blamed the rise of bourgeois capitalism on the Jews
Your argument is intentionally mixing "is" with "was".
Marx died 140 years ago, and there are no ethno-nationalist voices of significance on the left today. In the US context, after the civil rights movement of the 20th century those people left the Democratic party as the parties realigned themselves.
Today it is largely a right wing phenomenon, carrying forward the tradition of right wing ethno-nationalism that persisted from the previous century.
> It's barely right/left at all, it's just nihilistic power as its own end.
These statements are skillfully leaving out "ethno" part of nationalism. Once you add that quite obviously real and active element back, it's very much a left/right difference.
The left's solution to the problems brought about by globalization is to subtly bias the scales of re-industrialization policies toward the domestic labor market - evidenced by things like the battery materials sourcing and assembly location requirements, and income limits of the recently passed EV tax credits.
The right's solution to this has been playing on fears of a purported invasion by non-white citizens from lower income countries. A decade ago that would have been a controversial claim to make about the right, but today's right openly proclaims those ideas.
Portugal's case is interesting because they lived under a nationalist dictatorship that only ended in 1968, so many people alive today remember living under that. In my travel there, I found that many people in the age groups that vote heavily conservatively in the US and UK instead vote democratic left as a result of their lived memories of nationalist dictatorship.
Portugal does need to figure out what else has to offer the world economically in addition to great weather and beautiful cities and countryside, in order to have a better balance of trade, but it's unrealistic to think it can do that while shutting down immigration.