Maggie's Farm

Pinkerton has written at TCS today about nationalism vs. universalism. His piece, which is excellent, left out the one bit that is most important to me: in a no-border, one world universalist dream, who runs it?

Isn't "universalism" a giant empire, in effect?

Who runs it, and what do I have to say about how they run it? What is right for me in CT just might not be right for Mohammed in Somalia, or Moishe in Israel, or Swen in Sweden.

Already, in the mini- and already-failed experiment of the EU, distant bureaucrats put out edicts faster than Democrats hand out street money in Newark. The leftist universalist dream is a totalitarian nightmare.

Any one-world dream would be a nightmare of oppression, and then a nightmare of local rebellion - Star Wars. People are tribal and the best governments are the most local, where people have some control over their destiny according to their own ideas, for better or worse. I'm a State's Rights person, too. Give me flawed, messy, non-utopian ideas, any time.

Pinkerton points out that Einstein was famous for deriding nationalism, but, without nationalism, where would he have fled from the Nazis?

From the beginning of Pinkerton's piece:

Here's a question: Why do Roger Cardinal Mahony of Los Angeles, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), and The Wall Street Journal editorial page have such similar views on immigration?

The answer is that all four of the above -- Mahony, CAIR, the ACLU, and the Journal -- have chosen universalism over nationalism.

Yeah, read the whole thing. Good stuff.