The Dual Failure Modes of Ethno-Nationalism The attempts by some so-called nationalists to smuggle the entire British diaspora into the British demos during debate are becoming frankly absurd. This is the great danger of the term "ethno-nationalism." It is far too easily stripped of its nationalism, consciously or unconsciously, leaving behind little more than ethnicism. This often leads to one of two related errors. The first is blood idolatry, in which ancestry is turned into an idol. The living people of the nation are then subordinated to ever more absurd purity tests, or to some future idealised racial version of themselves dictated by apparatchiks of a nationalist state. Ancestry is important, perhaps more so than any other qualifier, but it must never be made an idol. The second error is a supranational "kith and kin" concern that overrides the primary duty owed to the concrete, living people of the actual nation. It is entirely natural to feel a deeper kinship with your ethnic cousins abroad and to foster warm, close relations with them. No one serious disputes this. But that kinship must never be allowed to subordinate or dilute the actual nationalism of the nation-state. The true and strongest definition of belonging is a nationalism rooted in both jus sanguinis and jus soli (blood and soil) together. Either principle alone can create a legitimate claim to membership, but that claim is weaker and incomplete without the other. This balance must be applied to the British people as they exist within the British Isles and their sovereign territory, where ancestry carries weight but not exclusive primacy. When loyalty to the diaspora overrides this, you are no longer practicing nationalism; you are practicing a narrow, ancestral globalism that treats the nation-state as secondary to a borderless ethnic network. This is why it is better to insist on the plain, unmodified term: nationalism. When the word is kept whole and unhyphenated, nothing essential can be quietly removed from it. Or why some would prefer the term nativism. It is much harder to make propositional, ideological, or statist.