Everyone’s been talking about John Ponte’s recent essay on the global ideological battle in which we are engaged with what he calls “transnational progressivists.” It’s a very interesting thesis, and one that resonates with me, but I do have a nit to pick.

I’m not sure why he chose “trans”national as his descriptor, other than that they describe themselves that way. If so, then we shouldn’t allow them to get away with it, any more than we should have allowed people to call themselves Bolsheviks when they weren’t truly a majority, or to appropriate words like “progressive” or “liberal,” when their views were in fact often exactly the opposite, and a throwback.

The prefix “trans” means (if I recall my eleventh-grade Latin correctly) “across.” So transnational would mean across nations. But the people that he describes are, in fact, extremely antipathetic to the very concept of nation. It seems more appropriate, and accurate, to call them postnationalists (after nationalism), or praetornationalists (beyond nationalism), or even, to be most accurate, antinationalists, assuming he wants to stick to his Latin roots.