Choosing “America First” and Saving the West: Principled Patriotism Versus Totalitarian Socialism

Choosing “America First” and Saving the West: Principled Patriotism Versus Totalitarian Socialism

During the sleepless night of November 5, 2024, I was interviewed near the White House by a Bulgarian TV station, which was reporting live on the election results. I told the interviewers that I had not been so excited and worried about an election since Eastern Europe had voted to overthrow communism in 1990.

I compared the importance of Trump’s victory with the ancient battle of Marathon, when the Greeks defeated the Persians and consequently saved the West, by allowing the values of Classical Athens to flourish in the centuries thereafter and become an integral part of the Western tradition. Similarly, Trump’s victory last November was not about one person, one party, even one country, but about reclaiming common sense and saving Western culture, which had been under severe attack by both external and internal enemies.

For most of recorded history, it was normal and desirable for statesmen to protect their country’s interest. This perception changed, understandably, after the atrocities of World War II. Nationalism today is perceived as an evil and dangerous ideology, and leftist ideologues in the West are quick to demonize politicians who put their countries first.

When we discuss nationalism, we should not throw away the “baby with the bathwater.” There is nothing wrong when a government prioritizes the wellbeing of its citizens and protects national interest, both domestically and internationally, as long as it observes universal human values.

These values, outlined in the Declaration of Independence, rest upon the best traditions of human governance—from Athens and Jerusalem to the Enlightenment philosophers who emphasized our innate rights and liberties, which a limited government ought to protect.

Margaret Thatcher:

Americans and Europeans alike sometimes forget how unique is the United States of America. No other nation has been created so swiftly and successfully…. Whether in flight from persecution or from poverty, the huddled masses have, with few exceptions, welcomed American values, the American way of life and American opportunities. And America herself has bound them to her with powerful bonds of patriotism and pride.

The European nations are not and can never be like this. They are the product of history and not of philosophy.

People naturally care about their families, communities, towns, states, and countries, just as a sports team’s fans live and breathe the successes and failures of that team.

Individuals are not expected to prioritize the interests of strangers and offer their homes to them. Similarly, Western democracies should not be expected to hurt the interests of their citizens and prioritize millions of migrants, especially when their values contradict the host countries’ moral principles. Welcoming individuals who are willing to contribute their hard work and skills and embrace American identity is one thing. Being forced to accommodate large groups of people who have no intention to contribute or assimilate, and whose worldview is hostile to Western values, is another.

For the past couple of centuries, America represented a “melting pot” of cultural identities under one value system—e pluribus unum. In recent decades, however, the left replaced the “melting pot” with “multiculturalism,” in order to undermine American identity and devalue Western tradition.

Yoram Hazony remarks (p. 3):

The nationalism I grew up with is a principled standpoint that regards the world as governed best when nations are able to chart their own independent course, cultivating their own traditions and pursuing their own interests without interference. This is opposed to imperialism, which seeks to bring peace and prosperity to the world by uniting mankind, as much as possible, under a single political regime.

Herein lies the basic difference between national—as well as international—socialism and a principled patriotism that nations founded on good values may espouse. The National Socialists, and for that matter, their communist counterparts—the international socialists—sought to rule the world as a global empire, where individual rights would be subjected to a totalitarian socialist agenda. A major problem with this ideology is that it denies the equality of all human beings as possessing inherent worth and innate rights. Hazony further elaborates (p. 3):

Either you support, in principle, the ideal of an international government or regime that imposes its will on subject nations when its officials regard this as necessary; or you believe that nations should be free to set their own course in the absence of such an international government or regime.

When nationalism is based on totalitarian socialism, this hurts both individual rights and national sovereignty, since the nation is equated with a political party or a social group, and both individual and national interests are subjected to the diktats of that party or group.

It is nearly impossible to fathom the extent to which totalitarian socialism invades every aspect of human life. Many people in communist countries were recruited as informants, who spied on family members, neighbors, or persons perceived as potential dissidents. The informants reported private, often intimate, matters and conversations to the secret police, as eloquently depicted in the 2006 German film The Lives of Others (Das Leben der Anderen).

In eighth grade, I attended a birthday party for a classmate. At one point, someone suggested that we all share jokes that we knew. We had to swear an oath that each of us would participate equally in the joke-telling, so that we would not betray each other and get in serious trouble over this “subversive” activity. This was a justified fear since numerous innocent people were sent to gulag camps for telling jokes.

A popular Bulgarian violinist, named Alexander Nikolov (better known as Sasho the Sweetheart), who delighted the public with his beautiful music and gentle soul, was sent to the camp of Lovetch in Northern Bulgaria for telling jokes. Lovetch was a stone quarry, notorious for its brutal conditions. Its prisoners were regularly abused, tortured, and beaten to death; their bodies were fed to pigs to leave no trace of the regime’s crimes.

A directive to local authorities on how to conceal the atrocities specifies that unmarked, frequently varied vehicles, must be used to dispose of the bodies, in order to deflect suspicion. Sasho the Sweetheart survived for only several days after his arrival at the camp. Similar was the fate also of innumerable other innocents, whose global numbers are estimated at over one hundred million.

Communism and Nazism are examples of totalitarian socialism, which imposes total control over the individual by a social entity—the totalitarian state effectively equated with a ruling party (Nazi or communist). By contrast, Western democracy favors free market economy and innate individual rights. It has the best historical record of respecting human life and improving it by fostering opportunities and innovations.

That is why the nationalism of totalitarian socialists is a pernicious ideology, while protecting the national sovereignty of Western countries today is of the utmost importance in order to save Western civilization and safeguard the liberty and prosperity it has engendered. As Melanie Phillips recently warned (p. xi), “[t]his is the moment when the West will either pull itself together or go over the edge of the cultural cliff. This is the moment when we all hold our breath that Western leaders will make the right call.”

Nora D. Clinton is a Research Scholar at the Legal Insurrection Foundation. She was born and raised in Sofia, Bulgaria. She holds a PhD in Classics and has published extensively on ancient documents on stone. In 2020, she authored the popular memoir Quarantine Reflections Across Two Worlds. Nora is a co-founder of two partner charities dedicated to academic cooperation and American values. She lives in Northern Virginia with her husband and son.

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