Nationalism and the political

The modern nation-state claims universality, whatever its particularity. This can facilitate The
Comment published on New York Times online blog, in response to John B. Judis, ”What the left misses about nationalism," October 15, 2018::

The modern nation-state claims universality, whatever its particularity. This can facilitate empire, but need not. The nation-state was less participatory than ancient Greek democracy; the citizen is more a private bearer of rights and responsibilities than a participant in shaping social life. Before being ideological as modern thinking tends to be, patriotism is love of the polity, less loyalty than care. Globalization has increased privatization because its universalism is not participatory; people have rights and responsibilities in relation to impersonal forces; the tendency is to abolish not so much nations as polities and the political as such. The political returns in a culture of victimization, complaint, and gratuitous outrage in the virtual spaces of a lonely crowd. People are interacting with systems. Communitarian cultural nationalisms are appealing but suspected, avoidant more than inventing solutions. Politics is based the importance to what we care about of social spaces of living.  

Modern post-revolutionary republicanism is ideological: founded on principles and not prior social groups or the accident of place. Patriotism demands loyalty to givens with which the nation is thought identified.  

We need the political, as the social world is a work in progress. We need the state, as the political requires governance. States need the nation (or people), as the political is personal and people must be subjects and not just its objects.