There’s a large faction of the liberal left making the term nationalism a very dirty word.
They are attacking it in every definition. Look at the Mexican border. Look at the White House tariffs. Look at the recent Armistice Day speech by French President Emmanuel Macron defining the term as a negative with the President sitting there.
The liberal media brand President Trump of being guilty of human rights violations for upholding the existing laws of the land. Look at the coverage of the Mexican border crisis. You can say our immigration laws are broken, but that does not mean we should abandon them and allow a horde of Central American natives to stream across as the answer to a broken law.
While the term’s first definition is positive for now, the second meaning and the synonyms all have negative connotations.
na·tion·al·ism
/ˈnaSH(ə)nəˌlizəm/
nounnoun: nationalismpatriotic feeling, principles, or efforts.
synonyms: patriotism, patriotic sentiment, flag-waving, xenophobia, chauvinism, jingoism “their extreme nationalism was frightening”
There is nothing negative about Trump’s stance on nationalism from the building of the wall to leveling the playing field in trade through tariffs. He unlike past presidents is actually upholding his Constitutional duty as Commander-in-Chief to protect the borders and to put Americans first among equals, with no foreign entanglements, as George Washington cited in his farewell speech.
On the recent GM closing plants story, Trump is right to question CEO Mary Barra on the company’s decision on which plants to close. Also to bring up how the government bailed out the company when it teetered on bankruptcy.
But Barra must answer to shareholders and cannot afford to take a nationalistic approach. However, GM should not be looking for a backstop next time it is in trouble using the nationalistic chant of saving American jobs.
The left will take the word nationalism and attach modifiers to it to paint it as dangerous and evil. White nationalism, lunatic nationalism and extreme nationalism.
The word patriot is also used to smear people who do not uphold the left’s view of globalism, which is the antithesis of sovereignty. One only has to look to Europe to see how globalism and open borders have changed forever the lives of hundreds of millions of people.
How politicians in the European Union have bent over backwards to alter laws to accommodate Muslim refugees from north Africa and the Middle East. And it’s very easy to do that when you don’t have the burden of paying much to defend those borders, since they have NATO and the US paying for it.
I believe we are no more than five years away from seeing that globalism’s grand experiment of the European Union come crashing down in flames over its misguided tenet of open borders.
And what will bring down the EU? A backlash of nationalistic pride by a people who are tired and fed up with losing their rights to a growing horde of people who would rather see them dead. And the Liberal left will paint this as a return to Nazism, when in fact the left brought it about through their own ideological failures of socialistic thought.
So I feel the nationalism movement in the US is coming at the right time. There is a very good chance that politically it can heed the will of the citizens without the need for violent overthrow, which we will see in Europe.
The pendulum is moving in that direction.
Gray's Economy 
Respectfully, I dont think it’s the left that attaches modifiers to the word nationalist, to give it a negative connotation. For instance, the term ‘white nationalist’ has been used by all political ideologies for a very long time… white nationalists even use the term to describe themselves.
I think the real question is why did Trump choose to use the word ‘nationalist’, knowing the implications, when ‘patriot’ means essentially the same thing, and is far less divisive. I think he intentionally wanted to bait liberals into becoming outraged… which would then give fodder to his base to criticize them.
Even if someone wanted to make the argument that ‘patriot’ wouldn’t properly convey what he wanted to say there, I still think he should have refrained from using the word ‘nationalist’. It’s too charged, and will push your opposition further away from your goal. Describe your position without the term, or use the term ‘patriot’, and then add clarification.
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Whatever word he chose would have raised the cackles of the left. Besides patriot does not have the business connotation he was looking for.
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