QUESTION: If the world is not headed towards a one world government, why does it appear that nationalism is being viewed increasingly negative?
THE CORRECT ANSWER
Institutional, bureaucratic, economic, political investment in the status quo.
That’s all. Without the USA as world police, we MUST return to national or civilizational policing of contract, finance, transportation and trade. This means that world costs will increase (our consumption will decrease) by 40%. And it’s unavoidable, because we are no longer technologically advanced enough or wealthy enough to manage the other civilization’s central powers (Russia, China, central Islam(Persia), India, and an emergent Africa). And Americans are ‘tired’ of trying to bring wealth to less developed civilizations when those civilizations appear to be limited in doing so to their cultural institutions and those institutions take generations to change.
Why the resistance to the restoration of nationalism? Because there is an obvious distribution of male and female intuition and cognition in world populations, that’s rather evident in all voting in all countries that vote. But it’s also evident in behavior, brain structure, and neural organization: The feminine mind does not want to pay the cost of defense of the commons. The masculine mind is willing to pay the costs of defense of the commons. There are evolutionary reasons for this difference in empathizing vs systematizing. So in simple terms the kind of people who gravitate to government, academy, and media, in periods of prosperity place their peer customers as more valuable than they do the citizens they represent, and they avoid conflicts of preserving the commons at all times by claiming their virtuous rather than just evading costs of administration and defense.
We are going through another transition (we go through regularly) now that the western economic, technological, scientific, strategic, and political advantage has been consumed by the ‘credentialed class’ in and their virtue signaling. (Technically it’s a virtue signal spiral collapse.) We will (as all competent historians predicted) go through the usual warfare, and only reform after the war. The scale of that war is the only question. And whether that war is civil, international, or global is still open to question. But in simple terms, you have to replace the dysfunctional generation of people in elite positions before you can behaviorally adapt the polity to a new condition.
Civilizationism, Nationalism, Regionalism will return and nothing possible is going to stop it. Period. End of story. the few high trust relatively homogenous peoples (Europeans, indians) will continue with trade and federalism, and the many low trust heterogeneous peoples (Russia, China, the Islams (N, Central, S, E), and Africa) will continue to pursue imperial central control because those are necessary requirements of preserving cooperation and trade by homogenous and heterogeneous groups. Wealth may temporarily ameliorate group differences but as economies constrain we all revert to kin selection without exception for simple, rational, cooperative, economic, and political reasons.