The late Dan Jenkins, one of America’s greatest sportswriters, passed along a humorous adage once.
“The only thing worse than track is field.”
That actually has very little to do with today’s topic, but I wanted to use the line to set up my premise.
The only thing worse than nationalism is religious nationalism.
The fact is, there’s little that’s more phony these days than the idea of nationalism.
Once World War II was over, the idea that a nation could stand apart from other nations had essentially become obsolete. The days of empire, where one country would take raw materials from colonies, make and sell the products and keep all the money, were a thing of the past.
The major European countries practically invented nationalism, whether it was Germany’s “master race” or England ruling non-whites all over the world. In fact, the English invented the term “wog” to describe the lion’s share of their empire and practically everyone in the world who wasn’t of English ancestry.
Yet as the great countries of Europe have moved past nationalism in creating regional cooperation with entities like the European Union, folks on one side of the political spectrum in the United States are all about “U-S-A, U-S-A.”
And with Donald Trump and Ron DeSantis constantly yammering about `the greatness of MAGA-land, nationalism is getting more and more ridiculous.
In fact, whether it’s coming from Mar-a-Lago, Tallahassee or Moscow (the one in Russia), nationalism is about as bad as it gets for the future of humanity.
It’s time for us to grow up.