The Window Seat: Does Nationalism Lead to Harmful Rhetoric?

By just passing through, it’s incredibly easy to perceive the staff of a fast food restaurant as a single, mechanical mass of workers instead of as individuals.

In that anonymity, something strange happens. I’ve noticed customers with confidence say things that, in almost any other context, would be considered a wildly inappropriate breach of social norms. They seem to be using the person at the register to vent whatever frustrations about the world they’re carrying around—someone they hand a receipt back to and never have to see again. But that distance can result in not just controversial thoughts, but allows for sexist, racist, and deeply misconstrued opinions.

Once, I had a man say to me, “I’m happy to see all you teenagers working. That’s what these jobs were meant for, not for the Mexicans and Indians.”

I stared at him in shock, before my disgust clawed down my walls of professionalism. I told him not to be racist. He insisted he wasn’t, and within his rant I remember him calling himself a “nationalist.”

I do not think everyone who identifies as a nationalist is problematic or misguided. I do think that the strange rise of a term that is quite broad and abstract tends to lead to warped opinions.

Historically, nationalism was a lot less about affection for a nation and more about who counted as part of a nation. It was a term that was probably thrown around in a history class or a voice over for a documentary about Europe or world wars, not something mainstream American politicians used.

There was a shift, in the mid-2010s, as “America First” and “nationalism” crept into right-wing media. Most notably, in 2018, President Trump told a rally, “You know what I am? I’m a nationalist.”

Nothing, he insisted, was wrong with that term, and it became a way of sharing great pride in the United States, and an idea that its people would always come first.

I think it is a powerful identifying tool, something many have come to see as a way to summarize their feelings and love of their country into one word. Looking closer at the nationalist movement, it tends to emphasize tighter boundaries around belonging, and even a willingness to bend democratic norms in the name of protecting the nation from its alleged enemies.

To me, it feels dangerously close to other fear-mongering tactics used by politicians to scapegoat groups often referred to as the “others” for all of America’s problems.

And sometimes, the danger of a big, abstract rhetoric about “the nation” doesn’t show up properly in a campaign speech. It shows up in a man at the counter of a fast food place under the guise of anonymity, deciding which workers count as “real” Americans and which ones don’t.

Our words all have deep, complex histories. It isn’t inherently problematic to embrace labels that help us identify ourselves, but if we allow fear to be the sole driving force of those histories, it can lead us to be proud of labels that entitle us to look down on others. Words can manifest in both positive and negative ways, it’s up to us to use them respectively.