Rich Lowry: A “cosmopolitan” elite has corrupted the Democratic Party

Written by Media Matters Staff

Published

From the November 8, 2019, edition of Fox Business' Lou Dobbs Tonight

RICH LOWRY (GUEST): There's just this loose misunderstanding of the word nationalism, that it must mean hatred, it must mean racism, it must mean fascism, all that's false. Nationalism, or at least national feeling, is very old, it's very basic, very natural, very powerful. Empires have tried to wipe it out over centuries, totalitarian ideologies have tried to wipe it out. They always fail. And it's also part of the mainstream of the American tradition. You get no American Revolution without it, you get no Constitution without it, you get no victory in the Civil War without it. And this nation -- our ideals are important, but we're not just an idea, we are a nation with a culture.

GREGG JARRETT (HOST): It doesn't help when people both in our country and outside our country misunderstand it and miscommunicate it. For example -- let's put up Emmanuel Macron, the French leader's quote. And I think we have that, let's put it up on the screen. I'm just going to read part of it, but the part that grabbed me was “nationalism is a betrayal of patriotism." That's just fundamentally wrong.

LOWRY: Yeah, it's a meaningless statement. If you want to get technical, patriotism comes from the root word padre, patriarchy same root, it's father, fatherland, love of our own. Nationalism is just the doctrine that a distinct people set aside by a common culture and common history should govern a distinct territory. And that idea, trust me, has been really important throughout French history going back to Joan of Arc and Charles de Gaulle.

JARRETT: Sure.

LOWRY: And the idea that nationalism and Nazism -- it was the true nationalists, the democratic nationalists, Churchill, de Gaulle, FDR who defeated Nazism, pushed back against that cracked racial, imperial vision and vindicated democratic nation-states.

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LOWRY: Yeah, so what happened basically, the Democratic Party -- nationalism was part of their tradition too, running through FDR and JFK -- totally turned their back on it; went in a cosmopolitan direction. And the Republican Party in recent decades had been more nationalistic than Democrats but also lost touch with it for various reasons. So this very powerful baton was sort of left on the floor and Trump picked it up. And the basic proposition that our borders are important, because we don't have sovereignty without control of our borders, and that we should put our interests first. Those would seem to be unassailable sentiments, and throughout most of our history, they would have been. And it just goes to how our cosmopolitan our elite is and how denationalizing a lot of our government establishment is, that that is considered a small minded or tribal sentiment now.