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There’s a labor-friendly version of “America First” that isn’t based on xenophobia, and it behooves the left to defend and promote it.
This article appears in the April 2025 issue of The American Prospect magazine. Subscribe here.
Donald Trump is giving nationalism a bad name. It’s time for the left to reclaim it.
Trump’s brand of nationalism is a malignant ideology shared by Viktor Orbán and parties of the European far right. It’s ethnocentric and xenophobic. It’s also autocratic and authoritarian, though those are not necessarily as linked to nationalism as ethnocentrism and xenophobia are.
Trump proclaims a doctrine of “America First,” but his real guiding light is a narcissistic sectarianism: You’re either a Trump follower or the enemy. That makes for a whole lot of Americans, roughly half of the population, whom he casts into the outer darkness, with consequences that already endanger the republic and whose full extent we can’t yet gauge. Nonetheless, under the banner of America First he has sundered alliances, imposed tariffs, and abandoned the soft power and the power of example that has brought generations of immigrants to our shores. It may be his perpetually wounded ego that leads him to trash our relations with Canada—after all, its prime minister has actually said critical things about his policies—but Trump clumps his antagonistic acts under the heading of America First nonetheless.
Given Trump’s appropriation of nationalism, it should come as no surprise that some on the left shudder in horror at the word and the concept. That would be a huge mistake, for two distinct yet overlapping reasons. First, the working class in every nation is inherently nationalistic and rightly so. If Democrats are ever to regain some of the working-class support that they’ve forfeited, they need to be nationalistic, too. Second, nationalism can be as much a progressive doctrine and practice as it can be a xenophobic one, and it would be well if the left affirmed more audibly and in practice that progressive form of nationalism.
EVER SINCE MARX AND ENGELS CONCLUDED The Communist Manifesto with the ringing words “Workers of the world, unite,” the theory, or faith, to which much of the left subscribed posited a global working class, whose allegiance to their respective nations would be eclipsed by their cross-border allegiance to their fellow workers. This faith should have totally collapsed in 1914, when the workers of Europe went to war against each other, and when even many of the left’s own political parties, most prominently the German Social Democrats, voted to go to war against Tsarist Russia. But it should have been clear even in 1848, when Marx and Engels wrote the Manifesto, that nationalism was hardwired into the working class, both industrial and peasant. A half-century earlier, in 1793, revolutionary France built the first mass army to defend the Revolution against the foreign aristocracies that sought to overthrow it, and workers first flocked to the nationalist banner. As the lyrics to the Marseillaise make clear, French workers fought for a cause that was at once democratic, nationalistic, and xenophobic (that line about the “impure blood” of their enemies has long made that anthem a tad less rousing to some of us).
Democratic and xenophobic values are both inherent in the nationalism of democratic republics; the character of individual nations is partly shaped by the question of which is the more dominant. Whichever it is, however, there are very good reasons why working classes are nationalistic. First, if they live in industrial or postindustrial democracies, it’s the nation-state that, however imperfectly, has given them free public education, retirement incomes, and access to health care (maybe not that last one in the U.S.). Second, they benefited, particularly during the three decades following World War II, from closed national labor markets, with no foreign or domestic workers whom their bosses could employ at a lower wage. (Again, the U.S. is the exceptional nation, as the South has always served as a low-wage—or during slavery, no-wage—destination for their employers.)
Capital has always been more mobile than labor, and after cross-ocean containerization and global communication became firmly established in the 1960s and ’70s, that mobility added a billion lower-wage workers to the world’s labor pool, making many of the same products that workers produced in the postwar democracies. With that, the social contracts that had thrived in the postwar democracies were unceremoniously scrapped.
Labor understood what the free-trade agreements of the 1990s would mean for their nation’s workers. When I hear some commentators today arguing that Democrats should move to the right as Bill Clinton did if they want to win working-class votes again, I often don’t hear them say that Democrats should also move to the labor-left, as Bill Clinton decidedly did not when he backed NAFTA and permanent normal trade relations with China. In time, those free-trade policies cost the Democrats as many and probably more working-class votes than Clinton’s “Sister Souljah” speech and abolition of welfare may have gained.
The best of those labor leaders fought for a nationalistic, anti-xenophobic, and even global class politics. The anti-corporate free-trade demonstrations that shut down the 1999 meeting of the World Trade Organization in Seattle are chiefly remembered for the young activists who sat down in the city’s streets, blocking all access to the arena where the meetings were being held. But just as remarkable was an outdoor rally of more than 15,000 union members called by the AFL-CIO. The speakers included union leaders from every continent, and labor leaders from perhaps half of the world’s nations were in attendance. I recall one speaker—a worker in a Ford assembly plant in South Africa—who called on Ford to establish uniform labor standards and minimum wage and benefit levels across all of its globe-spanning factories.
That hasn’t come to pass. As almost all labor movements have weakened in their home countries, appeals for global worker solidarity have grown fainter, and have been almost invariably ignored by global corporations. I can think of only two instances where workers in one country significantly helped workers in another. Earlier in this century, the United Steelworkers—a model union in its global sensibilities—prevailed upon one global steelmaking company to put worker representatives on its plant safety committee in one Nigerian steel mill. In a similar vein, Volkswagen, whose corporate board, by German law, is uniquely controlled by a combination of worker and public representatives, declined to oppose the unionization of its workers at a factory in Chattanooga, Tennessee, which helped the UAW win recognition and a contract at that plant. But these are one-off exceptions to the general rule that unions now barely wield enough clout to help workers in their own country, let alone other lands.
The appeal, then, of an America First policy to workers should come as no surprise, any more than the vote of British workers for Brexit to, in their minds, stop the entry of lower-wage Eastern European workers into British factories and other worksites should surprise. But there’s a labor-friendly version of America First that isn’t based on xenophobia, and it behooves the left to defend and promote it.
That kind of America First-ism was exemplified by President Biden’s industrial policies. Most mainstream commentators scoff at the notion that any form of Bidenomics provides positive lessons for Democrats, but the only survey measuring the effect of new factory construction on American counties’ votes in last year’s presidential election found that they had a positive, if very faint, effect. The fact that Biden proved incapable of making an audible case for those factories, and was swamped by right-wing media’s attacks on his spending policies more generally, still didn’t turn public sentiment against the Democrats in those counties where the factory projects had been announced.
New factory construction more than doubled once Biden’s industrial policy was enacted by Congress and federal funding for such projects commenced. No such results were apparent during Trump’s first term as president, despite his America First rhetoric, and there’s little reason to think any tariffs he imposes during his second term will spur a reindustrialization record comparable to Biden’s.
A crucial difference between these two forms of America First nationalism is that Trump’s tariffs create clear losers—workers and consumers, both in foreign lands and here in the U.S.—while Biden’s do not, or do so only secondarily at most. Trump’s America First-ism, like every Trump policy and whim, requires losers and pain; Biden’s America First-ism did not.
THE POSITIVE SIDE OF NATIONALISM is patriotism, and some on the left feel uneasy even with that form of nationalism. Don’t we lag behind most of Europe when it comes to the universal benefits inherent in citizenship, social rights and provision, workers’ rights to form unions, even the freedom to vote? Hasn’t the American empire sided all too often with tyrants or even overthrown democratic regimes that weren’t all that friendly to American capital? What’s to be patriotic about?
If the result of such queasiness about nationalism is a desire to match (or even go beyond) the best democratic practices of other nations, that can be done without rejecting America’s premises and promises. Indeed, they’re more effective when they’re specifically rooted in America’s best traditions and creeds.
The vast majority of American reformers took those premises and promises more seriously than their more ethnocentric, sexist, and capitalist-autocratic opponents. They took those premises more seriously even than those premises’ authors: Even though Thomas Jefferson didn’t mean “all men are created equal” to apply to all men and women, generations of reformers took him at his word, not his deeds. When they achieved their victories, most of them called these victories fulfillments of the American dream. It’s no accident that Lincoln’s Gettysburg promise of “a new birth of freedom” begins by invoking Jefferson’s words.
While a cosmopolitanism that appreciates other cultures and nations doesn’t preclude a patriotism for one’s own nation, a cosmopolitanism that denigrates all nationalist beliefs will surely alienate that nation’s workers—and it should. Working within America’s democratic premises establishes a strong claim to inform the nation’s policies, just as working outside them does not. The 1619 Project served as a historical corrective, but as Donald Trump seeks to establish a more autocratic nation, it’s the anti-autocratic premises of 1776 and 1787 (for all the Constitution’s limitations and flaws) that provide the basis for Trump’s resistance, that establish the left’s claims toward a more perfect union. If the left spurns the premises of a democratic nationalism for some form of anti-national cosmopolitanism, the right will sweep in with a xenophobic and ethnocentric nationalism; it already has, in fact. If the contest is between those different kinds of nationalism, however, the battle is joined.
Even as most Americans turned against the Vietnam War, millions of them rejected the appeals of anti-war politicos like George McGovern, because they saw him as linked to an anti-American anti-war movement, and thus (completely incorrectly) as anti-American himself. Chanting for North Vietnam at a time when working-class American soldiers were in battle with them was never going to win over Americans who hated the war but were outraged by those chants. During that time, the great American socialist Norman Thomas, then old and sick, would haul himself to anti-war rallies and counsel his comrades not to burn the flag, but cleanse it instead. Sound advice then, and with the return of Donald Trump, even sounder now.
