The End of the Nation-State, Kirkpatrick Sale

The concept of nation is showing a great deal of wear, and Exhibit A is the United States. From Kirkpatrick Sale at lewrockwell.com:

The nation-state is coming to its end. And thank god for that.

For five hundred years, since the emergence of Spain and England as more than a collection of defeated princedoms and duchies but coherent entities with shared customs, religions, allegiances, and language, the nation-state has been the way most societies have ordered their polities.

Indeed, nowadays there are as many as 195 recognized states in the United Nations, but many of those are known as failed states–Somalia, Haiti, Syria, and Yemen, for example—and one organization that measures such things, a Fund for Peace think tank in America, found in 2023 that two dozen others are so fragile that they cannot provide a full range of basic state functions, plus another 84 that have one or more warning signs of failure. In other words, the arrangement of government by nations that the West has foisted on the world has not been much of a success, in view of the fact that in fully 64 per cent there is no fully cohesive state and in many of the others either internal or external pressures have eroded the essentials of such a state.

But we don’t have to go traipsing around to find the best example: it is here. The America of 2024 could no longer be called a nation, in the sense of a common culture, common loyalties, common beliefs, common religion, common ideology, common vision, common allegiance, or even common language.  It does not have a common agreement on what marriages should be or how many genders there are (ABC news in 2024 counted 53 in use), or what the country’s history has been or even what year it started, or what constitutes a crime; it does not have a working system for public education in any state; it does not even have defended borders, the minimum task that a civil body must fulfill to be a nation.

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