Our increasingly amoral culture has been changing the meaning of perfectly good words for several decades.
“Gay” used to be “happy”, not a pervert. “Queer” is a word of choice for homosexuals instead of something disgustingly odd.
“Patriot” is a positive word only if you are a fan of New England football. The left now attempts to associate the word with radical militias that organize insurrections against the Capitol Building in spite of the fact that our founding fathers are all described as “patriots” in what’s left of most history books.
This brings us to words like “Nationalism”, “Christian Nationalist”, “White Nationalist”, “Black Nationalist”.
Washington, DC, has a checkered past in naming its sports teams. “Redskins” was controversial enough. And now they persist in keeping the name “Nationals” (a term painfully close to “nationalism”) for their baseball team. Nationalism, once a positive term describing love of country, has come to represent those who range from “putting America first” (how DARE we!) to those who use militias to force whiteness, blackness or Christianity on the rest of the nation.
Take, for example “Christian Nationalism.” Christian Nationalism is used in either a generic or a specific sense.
Generically, Christian nationalism refers to the belief of doctrinally conservative Christians who are also patriotic Americans who believe our nation was founded on the prevailing Christian moral ideals and principles of governance of the 1700's, and those principles must prevail for our nation to succeed and endure. This is also known as “dominionism”
dominionism
(də-mĭn′yə-nĭz′əm)
n.
1. The Biblically-based divine mandate to influence and guide all aspects of society and government toward Godly principles and actions, e.g. be salt and light.
Opposite of private/personal spiritualism wherein the individual refuses to influence or be involved in any form of governance. Jehovah’s Witnesses fit this example.
2. The belief that God gave humans the right to exercise control over the natural world.
But the left even demonizes dominionism, calling it “American jihad” and other such insults. Like any other “ism”, dominionism can be mild, moderate or radical.
I am a Christian nationalist. I not only believe that we must put America first in our domestic and foreign policy – quit believing we must solve every other nation’s problems –, but as a nation we have lost the moral underpinnings that enabled the nation’s historic greatness. A growing percentage of our population believe we are a nation in decline for this very reason. Unfortunately, an increasing proportion of the population – the left and communists - believe that we were never a moral nation; that our founders and founding were corrupt from the very beginning. That’s why they take every opportunity to disparage the term “nationalism.”
This difference in the perception of our history is a key to the great and growing divide we experience in our current politics.
The other sense of the term “Christian Nationalism” (note the capital “N”) is more specific to the ideology practiced by organized groups. There are militias, religious sects, and political action groups that promote various degrees of activism to establish their beliefs. Such beliefs vary widely, from mild to radical. On the mild end of the spectrum are those who believe that our nation is in moral decline that must be reversed to stem the rampant corruption in our government, educational, media, and corporate organizations. The American Family Association and John Birch Society fall into this category. On the more radical end of the spectrum are those who believe that we must Christianize our nation and purify the nationalities and races of our nation via political action and, if necessary, by militant actions. Somewhere between the middle and the radical are groups like the Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and a hundred more secretive militias.
Note that both Proud Boys and Oath Keepers have most recently been accused by the left of actions they are not guilty of. In fact, several internet search engines make it difficult to access the Oath Keepers web site – a joint action of big tech and big government to stifle alternative viewpoints.
Terms “White Nationalist” and “Black Nationalist” have similar extremes in their perceived meaning. Add a color before “nationalist” and the term becomes racist. But in a generic sense, if you are black and happen to like the idea of nationalism, you are, in fact, a black nationalist. I am a white one.
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Here is a bit more academic opinion on why the word “nationalism” has turned negative from an anonymous internet source:
It's a difficult question because 'nationalism' means different things to different people, and in different time periods. I'd say among much of the general public today (maybe this is limited to the left though) who aren't familiar with the history of nationalism, the word means a vague mélange of xenophobia, national chauvinism, excessive patriotism, and sometimes racism. Therefore nationalism in this sense is opposed to many deeply held beliefs among much of the Western political and media classes, such as international cooperation (e.g. the EU, UN, ICC etc.) and ethnic and racial equality. There are of course nationalist movements, like Scottish nationalism, which take great pains to distinguish themselves from that kind of nationalism, but the fact that they feel the need to do this shows what they perceive mainstream opinion on nationalism to be.
I think this mainstream rejection of nationalism comes from two related sources. One is of course Nazi Germany, which did a lot to discredit nationalism throughout the West, and the other is the rise of movements for racial and ethnic equality from the 1960s, so I'd say that it was during this period that nationalism became a 'bad word'.
This shift is reflected in academia, which is of course more precise in defining nationalism. As Hobsbawm says, nationalism wasn't really much theorised about during the age of nationalism from the late 18th to the mid 20th centuries, it was just taken as a given. Hobsbawm writes: "[W]e encounter, in nineteenth-century liberal discourse, a surprising degree of intellectual vagueness. This is due not so much to a failure to think the problem of the nation through, as to the assumption that it did not require to be spelled out, since it was already obvious’" (Hobsbawm 1992: 24). The bulk of the academic work deconstructing and criticising nationalism came from the 1960s onwards, with the work of Gellner, Anderson and Hobsbawm being famous examples.
My reading of this shift is because in the 19th century, nationalism was the 'carrier' of progressive ideas about liberty and equality, opposed to aristocratic domination. Now though, aristocratic domination has been soundly defeated, and international institutions have become the carriers of progressive ideas, and nationalism is seen as 'standing in the way'. These days we are much more sensitive about ethnic and racial equality, and therefore the 'exclusion' inherent in nationalism is seen more problematically today than it would have been during the age of nationalism. E.g. the language of many figures on the left (e.g. Karl Marx talking about savages) would not be acceptable discourse today.
But the reality is this: Nationalism has been fabricated into a negative concept in this nation because globalists and communists are doing all in their power to weaken the fabric of this nation including its history, its moral foundation, its economy, its independence, and its place as a strong nation on the world stage. To do this they must demonize the concept of “nationalism”, among dozens of other words that were formerly considered righteous.
Dumbing down made its earliest splash in education and employment. Blacks and women were, and still are, given extra points for being black or being a woman. If you are both black and a woman you hit the jackpot! The less than “best qualified”, black or woman, for a job beats out the better qualified white or man. If you are both white and male, you are screwed.