THE KHAKI PANTS AND RED HATS?:

Varieties of neo-nationalism range from political movements and parties (think Brexit or the National Front, rebranded the National Rally, in France under Marine Le Pen), to neo-nationalist leaning governments (with wannabe autocrats like Trump or Brazil's Jair Bolsonaro, and the evolving story of Modi's India), to illiberal democracies (Viktor Orbán's Hungary, Andrzej Duda's Poland and Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's Turkey), to authoritarian states (think China, Russia, and North Korea at the extreme end).

Hybrids abound. But most neo-national movements, parties, and governments are characterized by some combination of right-wing anti-immigrant, nativist, anti-science, anti-globalist (sometimes couched as anti-Western), and protectionist sentiments. When in power, they seek to squelch or even eradicate criticism.

And neo-nationalist leaders often have a core constituency that includes conservative religious groups--a marriage one finds in India, Turkey, Hungary, Poland, Russia, and here in the U.S., but not in secular China where the Communist Party is the state religion.

Some of this is familiar. Like right-wing populist movements in the past, neo-nationalist supporters and parties are often reacting to their own sense of waning political power, and perceived declines in social status and economic opportunity. Demagogues, then, step in to feed off a desire to preserve or reclaim a seemingly lost national cultural and political identity.

In Russia, you can find such backward-looking neo-nationalism. Vladimir Putin is infatuated with asserting Russia's power and place in the world in order to revive nationalism and reclaim in some modern form both Russia's tsarist and Soviet empire.

But if you really want to go back to the future, go to China.

Xi Jinping's "China Dream" is a rewind to hero-worship politics. He demands increased loyalty to the party, and has built a personal cult around himself reminiscent of the founding leader of China's Communist Party, Mao Zedong. Xi's goals are to preserve the existing domestic political order, to restore territory seen as lost (namely Taiwan), and to pursue a new global economic dominance and increasingly military presence in Asia, and beyond. Xi's autocratic China is also portrayed as a superior model to established democracies that seem incapable of governing.

One of Xi Jinping's earliest nativist edicts--in 2013, just a year after assuming power--was for the Chinese people to avoid Western values and what he called the "seven unmentionables." These included "Western constitutional democracy," human rights, media independence, promoting "universal values" in an attempt to weaken the theoretical foundations of the Party's leadership, judicial independence, pro-market liberalism, and "nihilist" criticism of the party's past.

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