In the context of recent nationalist political successes in the Eastern European country, word of banners reading “Europe Will be White” and “Clean Blood” flying over many young Poles struck me as disturbing, but in a now familiar way — anyone who’s been reading left-leaning media at all for the last two years is well aware of the existence of white nationalism.

The aspect of the rally's coverage that nabbed my attention in a new way was the direct comparison it offered of two rival ideologies’ visceral attractiveness.

National Radical Camp gathered thousands with its “We Want God” slogan (a historically important phrase taken from a Polish nationalist song). Meanwhile, The New York Time’s Megan Specia reported, “The crowd at a counterdemonstration, with the slogan ‘For our freedom and yours,’ was greatly outnumbered.”

There’s a picture of some of the counter-demonstrators attached to the NYT article. Several of them fly rainbow flags, and several others are holds a banner that reads “Rainbow is the New Black” and “Queer Solidarnie.”

These sayings, “For our freedom and yours,” and “Rainbow is the New Black” are potently individualistic. They call for the widespread tolerance necessary for individual liberty, that prerequisite for self-actualization, and that is why they often fail to inspire popular action:

Both are slogans about individual fulfillment and its multicolored fruits. They don’t draw on the pools of collective mythos or point to singular meaning in the way that fuels large movements. By contrast, ethnic, religious or otherwise nationalist rallying cries like “We Want God,” or “Make America Great Again,” (as Eliora Katz noted in a recent editorial about modern liberalism’s meaning-deficit) do. Because of that, they are easy to support with your buds.

Looking forward, those of us interested in preserving and advancing freedom should hitch our liberty wagons to better riding lawnmowers than those offered by pure-freedom-hawkers like Rand Paul, or multiculturalists like Clinton or Obama. We need to bind individual liberty and fulfillment to shared American culture, language and identity.

America’s unique history and mythology — from the First Amendment to the Civil Rights Movement — opens the door for benign forms of such nationalism.

We can still tolerate religious, racial and other differences without totally abandoning an authentic nationalism.

We can harness nationalism’s unifying power, without descending into bigoted tyranny.