Nationalism as the Politics of 'Ressentiment'

by Dr. William Tullius

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From the rise of the MAGA movement’s “America First” agenda with the election of Donald Trump to his second term as president, to the forces behind the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the UK Independence Party and Brexit, and the electoral successes of the neo-fascist Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) in the most recent German elections, it is no great secret that nationalism has become an increasingly global political phenomenon over the past few years. While the impulse towards nationalism is often reflective of real intuitions into everyday challenges faced by people around the world under the pressures of globalization and in the loss of the thick communities and traditional institutions that have customarily served as the points of departure and points of reference for communal and political life within national communities, there is also no question that nationalist politics represent a real and existential danger at every level of human society. It is consequently a political and moral necessity that we should take some time to understand this phenomenon, to take stock of the particular patterns of experience and of thought that it reflects. This is necessary not only in order to categorize nationalism as a political phenomenon of a particular type, but also to be able to understand both its results and what shape resistance to nationalism must necessarily take. I would like to argue here that nationalism reflects a certain form of value-experience that the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche termed ressentiment (loosely translated as “resentment”) and that it is especially for that reason that the forms of political action which it takes always leads inevitably towards various forms of dehumanization. 

Before advancing this thesis, however, I want to begin by acknowledging the ideological difficulties that are in play here. There are obvious differences, for example, between the behavior of nationalists in American politics and, say, the nationalism of National Socialism in the 1930s and 1940s. While National Socialism was always antisemitic and authoritarian in its outlook and in its political program, MAGA, especially in Trump’s first term, was much more ready to employ the mechanisms of a liberal democratic set of governmental institutions and, while comparisons of Trump to Hitler abounded, they were never well-founded. A comparison of MAGA during the period from 2015–2019 as a form of American nationalism and National Socialism as a form of German nationalism during the period from 1933–1944, at least, would not evince more than surface-level similarities, unconvincing to anyone not already predisposed to recognizing the dangers which nationalism poses simply as such. Perhaps now, in the wake of the first few months of Trump’s second term — with mass deportations under way, ICE abducting and arguably disappearing foreign scholars and others legally studying and working in the United States, increasing threats to political dissent in higher education, threats and concerted efforts to undermine judicial power and the system of checks and balances, etc. — those intimations of inevitable danger posed by a nationalist frame of mind may be much more evidente. Still, the average Trump voter would, for genuinely serious reasons, more than likely take issue with the comparison of MAGA with the Nazi party and would therefore likely be unconvinced by the claim that MAGA politics are inevitably and by definition reflective of a certain pattern of dehumanization. 

It is not my intention here to defend the “MAGA = Nazism” claim, however, which is still overly-simplistic and misleading; rather, what I hope to do is to defend the claim that nationalism, irrespective of its form, leads ineluctably to dehumanization and that this will be true even if there is no even superficial comparison at all to be made between MAGA and fascism, authoritarianism, etc. In seeking, then, to understand the ambiguity in the experience of MAGA enthusiasts that leads them to suppose that their politics are perfectly in keeping with human values, albeit stripped and cleansed of their excesses and perversions (Consider the debate over the Christian concept of the ‘ordo amoris’ sparked by J.D. Vance or the Christian nationalist objection to so-called ‘toxic empathy’ recently expressed by Elon Musk), it is helpful to begin by making an important distinction. Many followers of Trump and the MAGA movement would not see themselves as “nationalists” but rather as “patriots.” Others will suppose that there is really no difference at all between the two and that a true patriot is, by definition, a nationalist. It is precisely because these two terms are so often confused that political experience in a nationalist orbit becomes so ambiguous. Our first task, then, is to disentangle them.

The German philosopher and political dissident Dietrich von Hildebrand, who was among the first public intellectuals to warn of the dangers of Nazism, distinguished nationalism and patriotism in an essay published in 1934 in the Austrian paper Der christlichen Ständestaat. He defines nationalism as a “terrible error [which] exists in many degrees, starting with the identification of nation and state and reaching all the way to committing idolatry toward a nation, that is, making the nation the highest criterion for the whole of life and making it the ultimate goal and highest good.” The erroneous character of this identification of the nation with the highest criterion of life and the ultimate goal of human action is best understood, for von Hildebrand, through its contrast with genuine patriotism as “well-ordered” love of the nation. The two are, he argues, “as different from each other as the true, divinely ordained love of self is from egoistic self-love.” In fact, this contrast between an authentic self-love and egoism is a good way of thinking about the difference between patriotism and nationalism as von Hildebrand understands them. An authentic love of self is a reflection of a well-ordered self-affirmation that recognizes one’s own value as a person, as an irreplaceable and unrepeatable bearer of the imago dei — the image of God — and of human dignity and which thus recognizes a certain self-responsibility to work for one’s own good. Crucially here, however, an authentic self-love can never imply the denial of or serve as a detriment to the good of others. It affirms oneself without that self-affirmation taking anything away from the affirmation of the absolute dignity and value of others and thus also of one’s responsibility to and before the other. In contrast, egoism is a disordered self-love; it is the absolutization of one’s own value to the extent that recognizing the value of another is experienced at least at some level as an offense against oneself and one’s sense of self. It affirms oneself first and above all others. To affirm one’s own value in egoism is to take away from the value of others, and to affirm the value of another is to deny or slight one’s own. 

Precisely this structure of value-experience that characterizes the contrast between the affirmation of one’s own value and the affirmation of the other, between authentic self-love and egoism, is what also defines the contrast between patriotism and nationalism as von Hildebrand understands it. As he puts it, patriotism is a certain “affirmation of the general value that lies in the nation as such, and takes on a vivid, concrete form for each person with regard to his own nation, [and] includes a special sense of belonging to the nation of which one is a member.” It includes a certain gratitude for all the benefits that one receives from belonging to this nation as well as a special sense of solidarity belonging with and to all its citizens. Such an attitude of patriotism, though, which affirms and responds to the value of one’s own nation “also entails that one acknowledges every foreign nation in its particular character as something justified and valuable.” Affirming the value of the other nation takes nothing away from the value of one’s own, nor does it in any way challenge one’s allegiance to their own nation. Such an act simply recognizes that each nation has its own special genius, entailing that all nations have a right to exist, to develop freely, and to flourish. On the other hand, any attitude which feels that appreciating the unique value of a foreign nation is a threat to the value and dignity of one’s own, and following on that, any attitude which “refuses to grant other nations the right to develop freely, who holds that he can ignore their rights and justified wishes, and who imagines that he may trample them underfoot if it should be advantageous to his own country, thereby contradicts the very foundation that validates his love for his own country.” It is precisely this attitude with its exclusionary structure (affirmation of my nation necessitates the denigration of the other, or the affirmation of the other is a slight to my own) that is of the essence of nationalism, which is nothing other than a form of “collective egoism,” as von Hildebrand puts it. How often do we find such patterns of thought in our nationalist politics of today!

The egoistic structure of this kind of nationalist attitude is fundamentally important not only for understanding the nature of a nationalist politics and its tendencies, but  also for diagnosing the sort of spiritual pathology that it represents. Von Hildebrand’s friend and mentor, Max Scheler, borrowing from the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, called this pathological form of experience ressentiment, which is a certain: 

“self-poisoning of the mind…caused by the systematic repression of certain emotions and affects which, as such, are normal components of human nature. Their repression leads to the constant tendency to indulge in certain kinds of value delusions and corresponding judgments. The emotions and affects primarily concerned are revenge, hatred, malice, envy, the impulse to detract, and spite.” 

Put simply, ressentiment is a psychological phenomenon in which an affected individual subconsciously, or more often in a conscious sort of play-acting-out of a process of self-deception which they eventually come to believe, carries out a sort of transvaluation or reversal of values. This is done explicitly in order to soothe some powerful negative emotion. Scheler cites Aesop’s fable of the “Fox and the Sour Grapes” as the classic expression of this sort of process. In the fable, the fox cannot reach a bunch of particularly enticing grapes and, giving up on trying to reach them, comforts itself with the lie that it is better off without them because they were probably sour anyway. Here, the positive value of the grapes’ actual sweetness is imaginatively replaced with the negativity of their fictional sourness. In reversing the values in this way, the fox can soothe its feelings of disappointment and powerlessness by shifting its critical emotional focus away from itself and its feelings of disappointment and powerlessness and onto something else. Yet, Scheler insists, the negative affect — in this case the subconscious awareness of its disappointment and powerlessness — remains unresolved and threatens to burst onto the scene at the least provocation. Such outbursts, Scheler argues, can be both dramatic and destructive. 

Famously, Nietzsche had argued that the phenomenon of ressentiment and the transvaluation of values that follows from it is behind the transformation from classical pagan morality to Christian morality in the ancient world. Scheler, while refuting Nietzsche’s historical claim in regard to Christianity, accepts his insight that ressentiment is indeed a widespread and pervasively modern phenomenon, with both envy and the desire for revenge being the most potent sources of the ressentiment-experience in the face of a modern life in which there is coupled the dual consciousness of a right to equality under the law with the real condition of inequality in which persons today actually live. Such conditions are ripe for cultivating dispositions of egoism. Indeed, Scheler roots egoism and modern individualism in the phenomenon of a ressentiment that develops in response to the forces and conditions in play in modern life. This is because concern for oneself in this uniquely egoistic way is always a function of weakness. The person who is strong and who has enough, barring the ideology of mass consumption that characterizes our own age and encourages us to believe that we never have enough, exists in a state of unconcern for their own interests and personal good. It need not concern them because they live with a genuine feeling of inner security and a “bold, knightly indifference to external circumstances, drawn from the depth of life itself.” By contrast, Scheler argues, “[e]goism and fear of death are signs of a declining, sick, and broken life.” It is a function of the weakness, fear, and anxiety that root the individual in him or herself in a particular way — not in the manner of self-confidence and self-security, but in the form of self-consciousness and the fear of inadequacy. Thus, “[t]he egoist sees himself only with regard to the others, as a member of society who wishes to possess and acquire more than the others.” Egoism, then, gives way to competition and comparison as the manner by which one may affirm oneself, as possessing a self-value only in comparison with another, and especially only in supremacy vis-à-vis the other. It consequently leads the egoist to seek, in ressentiment, to deny the real value of the other in order to affirm their own value, because they typically lack any ability to affirm themselves apart from the comparison. 

Following the intuitions of von Hildebrand, if we can recognize with Scheler that egoism as a form of ressentiment rooted in an experienced feeling of inadequacy that seeks to resolve itself in the denigration of others and in self-promotion, then it is easy enough to see that nationalism, as a form of collective egoism, is rooted in the same phenomenon. It is reflective of a widespread feeling of ressentiment, whereby the feeling of the value of the nation is only able to be encountered when it is encountered in an act of comparison: it must affirm the nation especially by promoting it to the first place in the community of nations. Moreover, if egoism is born out of feelings of weakness, self-consciousness, and insecurity whereby the egoist seeks to comfort themselves through both imagined “victories” and also real contests between themselves and others, it is easy enough to see how a nationalist politics is born out of the very same psycho-spiritual forces. After all, it is obvious that the renaming of the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America serves no real geopolitical purpose, especially since even as the “Gulf of America,” it is still, for the most part, international waters. Thus, an executive order renaming it has no legal force internationally. Its sole purpose is psychological. By renaming the Gulf of Mexico, we engage in the fictive act of establishing the supremacy of the American nation in comparison to all other nations. By denigrating and replacing “Mexico” as the nation associated with the Gulf, America demonstrates its own superiority. By contrast, a patriot who fully feels the value of America as a nation among other nations recognizes that it takes nothing away from the American genius and the value of the nation if a gulf that has historically been recognized as the Gulf of Mexico retains its traditional name.

This relatively innocuous (and supremely obnoxious) example, of course, is simply illustrative of the psychological pattern which takes on quite obviously more harmful forms wherever the egoism of “America First” seeks to defend American primacy by devaluing and dehumanizing other nations, and more particularly other nationalities. We see obvious examples in language which seeks American aggrandizement by way of rhetoric aimed at the denigration of other national traditions. We see it, for example, in references to the “Governor of Canada,” in place of the “Prime Minister of Canada,” phrasing which is meant as a threat to the national sovereignty of our neighbors to the north and by which we convey the superiority of our own national interests. Or, we see it in Trump’s transformation of the word “Palestinian” into a slur (which displays a more complex version of the ressentiment complex in that its explicit Zionism serves as a vicarious aggrandizement of America through its actual aggrandizement of Israel that functions through the denial of the value or reality of Palestinian nationality and nationhood). Most dramatically, perhaps, we see it in the nationalist, American-supremacist logic by which we enact the fiction that America can be made “great again” only by eliminating all varieties of immigrants — representatives of foreign nations and nationalities — from our midst, especially now that the lie that we are only interested in deporting dangerous criminals and undocumented immigrants has been fully exposed. As Scheler would remind us, a nation that operates from the authentic consciousness of its own strength and greatness will not find itself preoccupied by the presence of such foreign elements, which take nothing away from its own value and strength, but even potentially enrich it when acknowledging the reality that immigrants fully integrated into the cultural fabric of the nation have always only added new values to that nation. 

Nationalism, then, deploys characteristic modes of thought and valuation which, by promoting the value of the nation especially against perceived threats both external and especially internal to the nation, are fundamentally egoistic. Nationalism is consequently also a way of thinking about and devaluing whatever is other than the nation or those ways of life and human identities that do not fit the national pattern. As such, nationalism has the necessary and inevitable implication that, wherever it is found, it leads to a way of doing politics that is always exclusionary and thus always becomes in some way a form of “othering” with respect to whatever does not belong to the nation. To that extent, nationalism leads inevitably towards the marginalization and ultimate dehumanization of those who are viewed as somehow foreign to and therefore also opposed to the nation. 

Understanding this point, while also understanding that there is a fundamental difference between nationalism and a genuine patriotism, is crucial for any movement of spiritual resistance to a nationalist politics. That is, any authentic movement of resistance to nationalism can only be effective if it takes the form of a genuine patriotism, of a full-throated love of country which seeks to unveil the real genius and value of the national tradition — without, of course, shying away from its real disvalues and imperfections — while simultaneously recognizing the real genius, beauty, and value of all other nations as well. It requires, then, the cultivation of a love of country that, while it does not rely on comparisons with others, is likewise unafraid of such comparisons. Consequently, it also requires a love of country that is unafraid of unserious foreign threats, especially the kinds of alleged “demographic threats” represented by the immigration of so-called “foreign elements” whose cultural forms of life do not perfectly align with our own. It requires a politics, in other words, of humanization as opposed to dehumanization, and one that is proudly pursued by drawing upon all of the spiritual resources of our own national tradition.