I’ve digressed, but the point is that nationalism used to have strongly racial connotations, and this is what disturbs people about it today. Nearly all Americans who now embrace the term, however, reject this older association. (Only fringe figures like Richard Spencer are the exceptions, and they call themselves something else, anyway—“identitarians,” or “white nationalists.”) It’d be hard to do otherwise. From its earliest days, the United States has been associated with the mixing of peoples, and, while a play called The Melting Pot first appeared in 1908, the metaphor pre-dated it. Americans today are divided primarily into those on the right who wish to demand more assimilation, and those on the left who wish to demand less. Bloodlines are not the focus.

Even if U.S. nationalism is quite different from that of blood-and-soil obsessives, though, it would surely be nice to have a substitute for a troublesome word. Some writers have tried to swap in “patriotism,” drawing on a 1945 essay by George Orwell that described patriotism—in contrast to nationalism—as “devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life” that is “of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally.” But many today would call that nationalism. In addition, “patriotism,” as it’s commonly understood today, carries no implications of exclusivity, in contrast to nationalism, which has a distinct and intentional us-versus-not-us sensibility. Others have proposed alternative terms—“civic nationalism,” “citizenism,” “communitarian patriotism,” among others—but these may take a while to catch on, if they ever do.

You could say that all of this is really a semantic—and pedantic—debate, and you’d be partly right. But clarity lowers toxicity, as does adherence to distinctions. It does no one any favors to insist on calling a self-identified nationalist an ethno-nationalist, especially if the person rejects the label. The same goes for calling someone a globalist if they reject the description. And it helps even less to declare the term “globalism” anti-Semitic, yet another useless trend in our discourse. All it does is rob us of the few tools of communication we still have.

Here, then, is an attempt to map out the terrain. At the globalist extreme are those who wish to eliminate all borders and who view themselves as citizens of the world. At the civic nationalist (to try one of the new terms) extreme are those who would have us become as indifferent to the rest of the globe and closed off as Tokugawa Japan. Most people are somewhere in between, trying to draw the right line. Where to wind up on this spectrum? People will debate this forever.

If there’s a case to be made for leaning in the nationalist direction, it’s that the most enviable and exclusive societies are rarely aggressive. Instead, they’re insular and smug, which is probably about as good as humanity gets in large groups. In a hyper-diverse society, civic nationalism can be precisely what bonds people across numerous differences. To be sure, it involves a sense of us-versus-outsiders—at which many of us instinctively recoil—but some form of exclusion is integral to all cohesion. Consider marriage: few of us choose the non-exclusive variety. Or recall, if you’re of a certain age, the cohesion that prevailed in New York after 9/11, when a common cause and shared fear seemed to lower racial tensions. Nine months later, The New York Times noted the effect, reporting that “many people say the color lines remain blurred and less intimidating.”

But that’s just one view of the matter. There’s no right answer to the question of how self-absorbed or generous or open or closed a society should be. Wherever we stand, though, our disputes will become less bitter if we figure out what, here in the United States, we’re really disagreeing about. At heart, it’s about the merits and demerits of in-group loyalty, where the group is Americans. How do we balance what we owe our fellow citizens with what we owe the world? And, if “nationalism” isn’t the way to go, what is?