The question, if the choices are either nationalism or empire, is,
What’s just about the weakest form of nationalism you can get away with, plus a modest safety margin?
Honest answer: 1990s American suburban “white” nationalism.
Not like KKK stuff, but sorta the stuff @kontextmaschine alludes to when he talks about his childhood. AKA 10 years downstream of this.
“We might not be perfect, but at least we’re not those inner-city freaks” and unity around not being those freaks coupled with “And then some of the inner-city freaks manage to avoid being freaks and we should help them ‘get out’ and become one of us by shedding the inner-city freak bits”.
And that was definitely horribly racial in a post-Civil Rights, but also “Wow, a giant very definitely black rape mob came and raped my sister before burning down our house in 1967” sort of way, so I say white, but also those quotes actually have meaning.
Especially because by the 1990s, even the *black* middle class was giving up on black-ruled cities by voting or movement outwards and the last big voter fraud case in this country was Chicago saying “At least we’re not Detroit, we will have white leadership”. And really good chunks of my highschool experience were dealing with the fact that the ~2002-on migrants were doing crimes in my lovely leafy suburb and also starting fights in the hallways.
Seriously I got into programming because I couldn’t eat lunch in the cafeteria anymore, but my physics teacher let me do my homework in Java on the school computers in his classroom instead.
I mean a lot of it was that the suppression happened in the previous decade and the 90s golden age were cruising off that harvest, no longer even having to try hard to uphold it (that getting parsed as a rejection)
That 90s suburban dreamtime, alternative rock, irony, multiplex Will Smith, that was pretty much based on a constriction of the imagined polity to a white mass middle class, overseen by ascended Boomers who had grown up imagining that as the society they were angling to oversee anyway
When I was a kid one of the local unaffiliated TV stations played reruns of What’s Happening, this sitcom about black 70s inner city… but basically okay life.
Working class “worries about money” but not like, destitution, and “urban crime” kind of an extension of “juvenile delinquents”, Sharks and Jets, Wet Bandits-ass stuff. It was a black neighborhood in the city but not like, what “inner city” meant by my day.
Grandmaster Flash’s “The Message”, like, streets is tough, that was about something novel in 1982
