When N.S. Lyons Went Too Far (Part One)

When we see our nation as a family that deserves our undying love, too much mischief can be made. Strong gods without strong principles give rise to abusive uncles.

N.S. Lyons

, pseudonymous rockstar of the Substack right, begins his latest with anecdotes about tech billionaires Ramaswamy and Musk who recognize the importance of attracting the world’s top talent to stay competitive.

Calling for “more math tutoring” and “fewer sleepovers” for America’s youth in order to render them employable, [Ramaswamy] declared on X that “‘Normalcy’ doesn’t cut it in a hyper-competitive global market for technical talent.” Jumping into the ensuing debate, Elon Musk offered an alternative analogy, portraying America as a global sports franchise that ought to contract the best players no matter their origin. “Thinking of America as a pro sports team that has been winning for a long time and wants to keep winning is the right mental construct” for Americans to hold, he wrote.

Lyons goes on to write that their points didn’t land with Trump’s “populist-nationalist base,” who see the US as more than just a “glorified economic zone.” While he is right to argue that the US is not analogous to a corporation or SEZ, Lyons veers off into corporate social responsibility (CSR) talk, which was a precursor to the cancerous ESG. Then, when Lyons goes all Lee Greenwood on his readers, he ironically cedes too much ground to the managerial regime.

But first, he writes:

The corporate machine views employees merely as interchangeable human resources, to whom it owes no loyalty. Indeed, if it is to effectively devote itself to profit maximization the company can afford no permanent relational bonds with any of those who work for it, as it must be able to fire or replace them based on cold utilitarian calculus.

Yes and no.

First, Lyons is thwacking at straw, because it’s not clear that even most executives think of corporations as machines and people as cogs. Lyons’s characterization is obviously for effect, and he offers no evidence that any given corporate exec believes she “owes no loyalty” to her employees. Instead, she might argue there are limits to loyalty, which are baked into an organization's nature.

In other words, a free market's profit and loss system is a stern disciplinarian. If we remove Lyons’s hypostatization, we will see that an organization's decision-makers must do their best to ensure that the value of any given colleague’s labor exceeds the paycheck she receives. That is a cold consequentialist calculus, but failing to acknowledge it makes for dead firms employing no one.

“For their part,” writes Lyons, “employees are liable to return the sentiment and retain no lasting loyalty to the company—though perhaps plenty of resentment.”

This sounds eerily like the lamentations of the useless eaters being cut from the Dept. of Education and USAID. So does this, in fact:

What angered people about the two CEOs’ comments was that – like so many of today’s elites – they displayed no sense of loyalty or obligation to Americans as a nation.

Americans as a nation? Sounds similar to “attacks on our democracy,” in its hypostatization. America is not only an agglomeration of distinct individuals, American companies compete in a global market. It’s not enough to assert that the desire to recruit top talent from other places is “disloyal” because a loud group of nativists say so. Never mind that naturalized citizens tend to be patriotic, there is nothing particularly American about anti-meritocracy—or labor cartels masquerading as patriots.

Lyons is setting us up for sentimentality without substance—exactly what the managerial regime served up when DOGE came sniffing around the graft. (It’s no accident that Musk and Ramaswamy were the original DOGE team.) Yet Lyons—famous for a superb diagnosis of the managerial state—fails to see why this type of saccarine shores up that very regime.

A nation is not a corporation. A nation is a particular people, with a distinct culture, permanently bound together by shared relationship with place, past, and each other.

Yes and no.

A nation’s government is a kind of corporation, just a shitty one with compulsion as a revenue model and no profit-and-loss discipline. Its grotesque power infects much of life, and has prompted many to abandon their communities and religious traditions to worship in the Church of Politics. While governments should not be conflated with nations, governments invariably shape nations for good or ill.

To the extent that a nation is “a particular people, with a distinct culture, permanently bound together by shared relationship with place, past, and each other,” Lyons makes a strong case for breaking up the US into smaller jurisdictions. We can’t just handwave away how little in common the majority in California has with people in Chattanooga.

The less we have in common, the less we feel a kindredness.

But here’s where Lyons goes off the reservation.

A house becomes a home through relationship with the family that lives in it, a connection forged out of time and memory between concrete particularity of place and the lives of a specific group of people present, past, and yet unborn. We can say this house is home because it is our home. In much the same way, a country becomes our homeland because it is ours – and the we of that “ours” is the nation, which transcends geography, government, and GDP.

What sonorous vacuity.

No nation transcends geography, government, or GDP. The English word nation derives from the Latin natio, which means birth or origin. Most Americans are born such due to a history of conquest (government) and accidents of birth (geography). Naturalized citizens are expected to buy into our civic religion to receive the benefits of citizenship. Still, such benefits are almost always expressed in terms of GDP as people migrate here for economic opportunity. Otherwise, most people realize they were born here (geography) under this constitution (government), where there are more opportunities (GDP) than in other places.

We can tell ourselves wonderful stories about how this land is ours, as a home might be to a family—but proximity, state, and economy are all vital factors, certainly ones that cannot be transcended. Indeed, the more American voters try to exercise control over these factors, the more they run squarely into the fact that national elections are spectacles that give us the illusion of control.

And that’s why the managerial regime is so difficult to dismantle.

Unlike a corporation, a nation really is much like a family. And, like a family, it is characterized by strong relational bonds that are covenantal, not contractual. It establishes moral obligations of solidarity and subsidiarity that cannot be simply abandoned.

Covenantal? You mean like Americans’ covenant with Gov is like the Israelites’ covenant with God? Or is Lyons attempting to argue that we are born with certain obligations to each other, as an adult child to an elderly parent?

We have argued in these pages that the problem with the US government—including its intractable managerial regime—is that it’s hard to feel connected insofar as the US government mediates so many of our relationships. We have also argued that it would be far better if our relationships with our governing bodies were contractual, making for more competition. Not only am I more likely to be loyal to a system I choose, a system I choose has to be good to me.

Otherwise, Uncle Sam has every incentive to stay drunk and abusive.

Lyons continues down the saccharine path:

Much as we naturally would, and should, put our own children’s lives and wellbeing ahead of others’, a nation is obligated to distinguish its own from others and to put the wellbeing of its own first. If it fails to do so then it can no longer remain a nation any more than a family could remain a family were it to try to extend the fold of its care equally to all humanity.

Again with the hypostatization. We can agree that citizenship, as it’s currently configured, should differentiate the rights and responsibilities of citizens from those of non-citizens. Otherwise, nationality makes no sense at all. We can also agree that patriotism and love of country reinforces social cohesion.

But nations don’t have obligations. People do.

In an important sense, nations are aggregations of individuals compelled to live by specific rules—but often for arbitrary reasons. The rest can be romantic window dressing designed to keep the herds timid and compliant. An American taxpayer can cheer for *America First* policies, especially if she must forfeit a sizeable portion of her earnings to IRS agents and central bankers. But any strong but abstract obligation to others hangs upon far deeper communitarian ties than nationality provides. And none of this love talk justifies overlooking top talent because they’re from Not-America.

Now, credit where due, Lyons steps back from the precipice:

Only once our immediate duties to those closest to us are fulfilled can concern for the good of others be rightly extended further outward.

I agree, which is why nationhood without radical subsidiarity is a dead letter.

But then Lyons returns to the family metaphor:

And though we may choose to adopt a child into our family, we cannot as readily toss them aside. We cannot, say, swap out our child for a different one who is more likely to get better grades in math class or is willing to perform chores for a lesser allowance. A nation-state is no more justly able to replace its own people or neglect its unique obligations to them simply because doing so seems more profitable or convenient.

One struggles to find a principle in this weird disanalogy.

On one hand, let’s assume that if authorities do not allow open borders, we will have to establish criteria for those manageable few selected to come and live here—including reasonable limits on their rights and obligations as visitors. We might reasonably expect to prioritize those who are more likely to *contribute to society* over those who would burden it. If you want to call that “more profitable,” it’s an odd rhetorical formulation. Even so, it speaks to the idea that a newcomer is not likely to become a drain on public resources and infrastructure, you know, like those poor souls the Democratic Party used to shore up their apportionment numbers. And these talented few can be invited to become naturalized Americans less likely to take the blessings of liberty for granted.

On the other hand, American society is not like a family in one crucial sense. Our economic and social life is not a zero- or negative-sum game. Hiring a talented person from Hyderabad or Hamburg usually helps grow the pie, which means the talented gal or guy from Hartford will find work, too. To hire Tarun over Terry in one instance doesn’t mean Terry languishes. It almost always means that Americans get both Tarun and Terry, which creates more value in our socioeconomic ecosystem. And I dare say I love that about America.

On many such matters, we might follow Tina Turner in asking the age-old question: What’s love got to do with it?

Yet a family is hardly built on obligation alone. A healthy family is founded, ordered, governed, and sustained by love. It is love that binds its members together, forges their sense of responsibility, guides their conduct, and directs their proper care for one another. And it is love that directs us to rightly set our concern for these particular people above others, in the proper ordo amoris, or order of loves.

Are we to take from this that America is founded on and sustained by love? One’s experience of familial love at least offers the contrast we need to put love of nation way down the ordo amoris priority list.

And it would seem Lyons agrees.

“Love is not, cannot be, universal,” he writes. “It is born in particulars and defined by distinction.”

Indeed. He continues:

We love those people and those good things which are distinct and special to us, and those that are particularly our own all the more, but this hardly implies that we must then automatically hate all others. We do not hate other families’ children just because we love our own. Still, this twisted logic is today widely ascribed to one important expression of love: love for our own nation. For this is indeed what it means to be a nationalist: to love one’s own nation – in much the same way (if not quite as deeply) as one loves one’s own family.

Nor do we hate our own family if we adopt someone from another family—so the twisted logic is Lyons’s. Still, love is the key to nationalism, he argues.

But this is where he loses me. For in what particulars and distinctions are we to find such deep American kindredness? By his own admission, these are the weakest of bonds, attenuated by the stronger bonds of family, community, and region. Politics—especially the politics of the managerial regime—is full of emotional manipulation precisely because it is not filled with the sort of bottom-up love that binds people together in freedom. Why else does Lyons think partisans evoke “our democracy” when they really mean our piece of the administrative state?

We might struggle if we were to get particular about what we ought to love about *America* in its current form.

As C.S. Lewis observed, patriotic love for one’s nation grows organically from that which is most local, familiar, and meaningful to us – from our love for our family, our land, and our community.

Maybe Lewis was wrong, or only right in the context of tiny England.

What prompts people to stay locked in partisan combat over the fate of 330,000,000 souls and 3,796,742 square miles? Love of a strange sort. Far from support for Lyons’s view, Lewis’s wisdom about “the local, familiar, and meaningful” militates against rudderless American jingoism.

Lyons all but admits it when he writes:

In the case of Lewis’ England, “for beer and tea and open fires, trains with compartments in them and an unarmed police force and all the rest of it.” It is from this particular sense of love that he seeks to conserve his country.

Notice Lewis was making a case neither for Britain nor the British Empire.

As Lewis reminds us (paraphrasing G.K. Chesterton), “a man’s reasons for not wanting his country to be ruled by foreigners are very like his reasons for not wanting his house to be burned down; because he could not even begin to enumerate all the things that would be lost.”

No doubt Lewis and Chesterton would be horrified to see Britain England be colonized the way it is today, as “foreigners” are setting literal and figurative fires to that country and its constitutional order. They’re only a generation or two away from a British Caliphate—and that’s not due to the arrival of a few Sikhs.

Assuming Lyons agrees that those committed to Sharia Law can’t love Britain, he would likely agree that our homegrown social justice fundamentalists can’t love America. Yet paradoxically, I find as many kindred souls abroad who yearn for freedom and free institutions as any in NYC or SF. So we must again ask what specifically about Americans and America requires one’s allegiance?

Lyons writes,

[W]e should not be surprised that men might lay down their lives to defend their own nation as their own, and not for any other reason. They do so for the same reason they would lay down their lives to defend their children, or their friends: because they love them. Common loves are the source of common loyalties, and of common life.

Sometimes. But ask combat veterans why they signed up and almost all will say something like to defend our freedoms and the Constitution. Most came home disillusioned because they soon realized they were being thrown into a meatgrinder designed to enrich the Blob. Love of country creates a sense of Us and Them that gets exacerbated when violence visits our shores. Many vets signed up after 9/11 to defend “common loyalties.” Still, without more than the U.S. is Us, so you’d better love the U.S., mere nationalism is empty.

Lyons doesn’t get what it means—or once meant—to be an American. What made America unique was that its people embraced principles that became like a secular religion. Denizens of thirteen loosely connected colonies full of patriots united against a despot. Pamphleteers shored up their patriotism not with so many empty words about pietas patriae, but with an anti-authoritarian freedom philosophy. The Declaration of Independence became a bold expression of that philosophy.

Patriotism without principles is just manipulation sauce that can be poured over bad institutions, venal rulers, and a decadent (or desperate) people.

Lyons would be correct if he were to argue that principles alone are insufficient to give us what we need to prevail and preserve a free republic. The way he explains matters, Lyons’s love of nation could land in Mao’s China, Mussolini’s Italy, or Newsom’s California.

Now, I don’t deny that love plays a role in creating the bonds of a people. But the critical question becomes: What exactly do we love? Are we to love those features of an order that remain after the events of 1913, 1928-1940, 1941-1945, 1970, 1989, and 2001? After jackals and vultures pick at what’s left of our republic? What is left today but a debt-fueled welfare/warfare empire where partisans fight over election spoils? We have sports bars and natural wonders, but I’m not sure those would persuade C.S. Lewis.

Yet, at least among our ruling classes, this natural reciprocal love between citizen and nation, which sustains our countries and our societies, seems to have long since frayed. This is no great shock, given that in our age the very idea of nationhood is itself decried, or outright denied, the nation-state stripped of the nation, the world reduced to a network of special economic zones. A man cannot love a special economic zone. Nor can its administrators possess any special feeling for its temporary inhabitants.

No one argues that a man can love a special economic zone, though he can certainly love its faithful founders and inhabitants. Instead, a man can love this:

The past few days when I've been at that window upstairs, I've thought a bit of the “shining city upon a hill.” The phrase comes from John Winthrop, who wrote it to describe the America he imagined. What he imagined was important because he was an early Pilgrim, an early freedom man. He journeyed here on what today we'd call a little wooden boat; and like the other Pilgrims, he was looking for a home that would be free.

I've spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don't know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That's how I saw it, and see it still.

By the same token, no one can love a hypostatization. America is an abstracted agglomeration of individuals forced to live under certain rules, flowing within certain cultural currents. One can love specific Americans and not others, but it’s difficult to see why anyone should have abiding fealty to all Americans—many of whom have not only “decried” our nation, but the very principles that once animated it.

And that is the difference.

Patriotism without principle is errant jingoism. Nationality without either is a fracturing, dying society. It’s like asking people to celebrate the Fourth of July because of friends, fireworks, and potato salad. It’s not enough.

Still, Lyons is right about the post-war drift toward globalism:

This grim status quo is no accident, however. It is the result of a deliberate, 80 year conspiracy against love, conducted out of fear. As I’ve argued before, after WWII, with the trauma of war and totalitarianism haunting the world, the American and European leadership class resolved that these evils should never again threaten society. And they concluded that the emotional power of nationalism had been the central cause of the 20th century’s catastrophes, leading them to make anti-nationalism the cornerstone of the liberal establishment consensus that came to dominate culture and politics after the war.

A partial explanation, but insufficient.

American and European leadership had experienced the horrors of illiberal nationalisms. Yet few Americans went gaga over multilateral institutions, compared with Europe. Love-of-country without love-of-freedom is not very American, and therefore dangerous. That insight has made us special.

Lyons is correct that love of country is not inherently evil. We can dust off our knife analogy to see why: It can cut your steak or kill your spouse. Love of nation is too vague, especially for what we might call the American Remnant whose hearts still kindle Jefferson’s revolutionary fire.

Yet we must carefully consider Lyons’s argument:

1. The post-war elite sought to eliminate the “strong gods”—powerful sources of love, devotion, and societal unity—fearing they led to conflict.

2. Because attachments to family, nation, or truth were viewed as dangerous, fostering dogma, oppression, and violence.

3. The ideal of an "open society" was built on weak loves and weak truths, prioritizing rationality and impartiality over deep passions.

Hopefully you can see that my objection is not to strong gods per se, but to strong gods with no adjacent commitments.

American principles can and should be rooted in family, truth, and country. But we cannot think of rationality as weak. Nor can we think of our commitments to peace, freedom, and rule of law as dispensable. All are means of tempering the strong gods’ excesses.

Now you can read Part Two.