You're right, I phrased it wrong. I don't think he's implicit about the presumptions you just listed of course. Rather, I meant that he is only implicitly nationalist compared to explicitly nationalist political movements. One has to draw out the implications of those assumptions.

Even if that's fairly obvious to a political theorist, in my view it's still quite different from how most explicitly nationalist political movements operate on a level of rhetoric and identity-shaping.

Put yet another way, I might say that with his assumptions which you listed so clearly, Rawls accepts a picture of the political world where the nation is a fundamental unit. This is pretty obvious from Law of Peoples.

And one can of course then further argue that this and its implications amounts to a form of nationalism. In fact I agree - I lean towards a more radical form of cosmopolitan than Rawls. But to me this is quite different than "I'm a nationalist" in the way that say FdI in Italy is nationalist.

I mean, I don't know what it was that Matt was arguing that Sharon was objecting to way back at the beginning of the thread. If he was saying "Rawls is politically indistinguishable from Steve Bannon or Victor Orbán," that's obviously wrong. I've just been engaging with her brief description.

I didn't even read it that way, I just read it as an easy way to tease/mock Matt Y for the triangulating nature of his political re-calibration. On a rhetorical rather than theoretical level this seems like a pretty obvious attempt to meet his current environment halfway imo

only rawls thing I could find yglesias posted

If that's it, then... yep, he's very straightforwardly right.

But it sounds to me like you're saying "he's not the *bad* kind of nationalist," which isn't a denial that he's a nationalist.

(1/n) Agreed, I'm not denying that Rawls is a nationalist. Rather, I think I'm making two claims: 1. Rawls is a nationalist in some sense. Call it nationalist_1 2. Matt Y is probably not merely claiming that Rawls is nationalist_1, but is using the fact that Rawls is nationalist_1...

(2/n) ...to lend plausibility or prestige to bad a form of nationalism, call it nationalism_2, that is popular in the circles he's increasingly marinating in. I just saw the followup post of his where he points out that LP is nationalist. As you say he's straightforwardly correct...

(3/n)...at least if we mean nationalism_1. But this isn't what particularly interests me. Certainly as I don't particularly care to defend Rawls one way or the other, not a big fan myself. Rather, while I could be wrong, it seems plausible to me that what's going on here is that...

(4/n)...Matt Y, someone well-known for his punching left, centrist positioning, and continued xitter use in the current political moment, is spitballing about "national liberalism" with memes to try to meet that position, appealing to fans of nationalism_2.

The thing about "nationalism" is that it can mean a lot of different things

I think the case for Rawls's defence (compared to Walzer) is the lack of an ethnocultural basis for the distinct peoples. Though I'm not buying.

yeah, I don't think LP makes any sense at all if "peoples" don't correspond to the ordinary ethnocultural sense of "nations."

I went to the famous NYU legal theory colloquium, and witnessed Samuel Freeman furiously lecturing Joseph Carens that open borders would only lead to global immoderation. He certainly thought Rawls was a nationalist in some key respects.

You would not believe how furious the entire colloquium was at Joseph Carens! It was extraordinary.

!!!

This happened in 2011; some of the philosophers in the room accused him of undermining the basis of human rights by undermining the nation state. And those were putative liberals.

Well, history of shared institutions ≠ ethnocultural homogeneity. I think that’s true, at least. But I think we can have internally pluralistic nations so charge sticks I think

so another thing is in Rawls's time "nationalist" did not have the strictly Nazi meaning it has in the post-2016 era. Pretty normie libs in the 90s thought of themselves as nationalist

(jokingly but seriously.)