Left Nationalists combine genuine commitment to worker power and economic equality with skepticism of globalization and international capital mobility. They argue that the left made a critical error in embracing free trade and open borders, policies that benefit mobile capital while devastating rooted working-class communities.
This strain draws on older labor movement traditions that were skeptical of immigration as wage competition and opposed trade agreements that exported jobs. Before the 1990s, unions often supported immigration restriction and trade protection—not from xenophobia but from labor economics. Left Nationalists argue this practical worker perspective was abandoned for elite cosmopolitanism.
The core insight is that capital moves freely across borders while workers remain relatively fixed. This asymmetry gives capital leverage: threaten to offshore unless wages fall, import workers to break strikes, play jurisdictions against each other in race to bottom. National sovereignty—controlling borders and trade—is the only counterweight workers have against mobile capital.
Left Nationalists are genuinely left on economics: pro-union, pro-welfare, anti-corporate. But they break from progressive orthodoxy on immigration and trade, arguing that "international solidarity" rhetoric serves capital's interests in practice. Real solidarity means workers in each country building power within their nations, not dissolving national boundaries.
At roughly 1.5% of the population, Left Nationalists are a small, politically homeless strain. Too left for Republicans, too nationalist for Democrats, they exist as a tendency rather than a movement. Some have drifted toward populist right parties that at least address their concerns; others remain in uncomfortable alliance with a left that dismisses their views as reactionary.