I wrote something similar to this as of late.
This morning, I was going through my RSS reader and saw this article here, by the American Conservative:
According to recent reports in the mainstream media, Steve Bannon is a supporter of “ethno-nationalism,” and that is scary. It is also, since everything the left doesn’t like is slapped with this label, “racist.” Sometimes, the word “white” is thrown in the mix of charges to make them extra scary, as in this tweet from the Southern Poverty Law Center. (If Bannon is a “white nationalist,” what work is “ethno” doing in that tweet? Or if he is really an “ethno-nationalist,” why is “white” thrown in except as a propaganda technique?)
To make their point, people are citing quotes from Bannon like this one: “‘When two-thirds or three-quarters of the C.E.O.s in Silicon Valley are from South Asia or from Asia, I think …’ he said, trailing off midsentence before continuing a moment later, ‘a country is more than an economy. We’re a civic society.’”
The website Quartz claims that “the distinction between nationalism and white nationalism may seem like splitting hairs from a liberal perspective”—an odd claim, since a nationalist would claim that our government should put the interest of all Americans (many of whom are not white) first, something we have heard repeatedly from Trump, while a white nationalist would say that only about white Americans. The site then goes on to say that Bannon believes all Americans kind of have their place, “so long as white Protestants remain, as it were, first among equals.” Which would be a pretty weird thing for Bannon to think, given he is Irish-Catholic: it would amount to him advocating that his own people never be other than second place.
I don’t know if Bannon would call himself an ethno-nationalist or not. But if he did, would it be a bad thing? I suggest not: ethno-nationalism is the core idea underlying the existence of nation-states, and has nothing whatsoever to do with racist nationalism.
First of all, “ethno-nationalism” is deeply woven into the very notion of the nation-state. The Greek word ethnos, used frequently in the New Testament, is often translated as “nation”: the idea of “a people” and that of a nation were seen as tightly linked. Millennia later, when progressives sought to redraw the map of Europe after WWI, they did so under the principle that each “ethnos” should have its own nation-state. Wilson’s Fourteen Points stresses the principle that each ethnos should be free to develop “autonomously.”
To darkly hint that “ethno-nationalism” really means “white nationalism,” as some critics of Bannon seem to be doing, is hinting nonsense. A vast majority of African-Americans are, in the ethno-nationalist sense, “more American” than anyone in my family: the ancestors of most African-Americans arrived here in the 1700s, while my ancestors did so only in the late 1800s. Native Americans are also obviously “more American” than anyone of European descent, and many Hispanic families have been in this country for a century and a half or more.
Glad someone finally spoke out and wrote that, because it is absolutely true.