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Communism shatters economic relations, but ultranationalism breaks diplomatic relations. If the far left’s failure mode is not understanding self-interest, the far right’s failure mode is not understanding other-interest. That is to say: we know the far left doesn’t viscerally get the idea of capitalism, of building products, of sometimes just not having the money to do something. The far left fantasy is of total independence from needing to work at all. They don’t understand economic scarcity. But the far right similarly doesn’t get the idea of diplomacy, of building coalitions, of sometimes just not having the votes to do something. The far right fantasy is of total independence from needing to work with others. They don’t understand political capital. And that is also a failure mode. If you can only cooperate within your small tribe, you can’t even scale up. And then your tribe loses. (The alternative is international capitalism, which is more practical than the socialist left and more scalable than the nationalist right.) When you go *too* far to the nationalist right, you limit your coalition to only those who are both right-of-center and citizens of your country. But only China has the scale to really do everything in one country. Everyone else needs allies. I understand this argument, but the counterargument is simply scale. Empirically, multi-ethnic ideological empires like Rome, the British Empire, Napoleon’s France, the Soviet Union, and the US defeated smaller monoethnic nation states. They defeated them militarily, culturally, economically, and ideologically. And then integrated them. Thereby setting the laws, including the laws of the marketplace. Of course, in each case, rapid imperial expansion may well have laid the seeds of future collapse. But the smaller countries that didn’t expand got acquired first. This is a complex topic, but in brief…how prosperous would America have been without international market access, without a McDonald’s in every country and Hollywood movies on every screen? From inception America expanded, first via Manifest Destiny, then after 1890 via acquisitions like the Philippines and Puerto Rico, and eventually after 1945 and 1991 to the entire world. Essentially the whole world was part of the American Empire’s common market for the last 30 years. And yes, that is now coming apart, but that’s different from saying America never benefited from international capitalism in the first place. That is how we got here, but the American right isn’t one tribe. After the fall of the Soviet Union, there were many different kinds of anti-communists: Polish Catholics, Estonian technologists, Russian nationalists. There were many ways to not be a member of the Communist Party. Similarly, after the defeat of woke hegemony* in 2024, there are many different kinds of non-wokes: Catholic integralists, Internet technologists, and American** nationalists. There are many different ways to not be a member of the Democrat Party. * Wokeness hasn’t been defeated, but woke hegemony over the Anglosphere discourse has been defeated, for now at least. It’s like the fall of communism; the North Korean and Cuban regimes do continue to the present day even though Bolshevism/Stalinism no longer has pull. ** The concept of an “American nationalist” is less coherent than the post-Soviet Russian nationalist. Russians were down to 51% of the USSR by the end, but WASPs are down to <20% of the US. And many of those WASPs are of course on the far left, like Elizabeth Warren. So even the idea of a Mayflower restoration isn’t practical, which is partly why there’s so much thrash over who is a real American. See also: https://t.co/wOTqgQ3hh8