In this research assignment I sought to understand the emotional side of Nationalism. Given the current state of the country the feeling of minorties peoples is that of increasing unease, as white hate groups gain momentum from our political leaders it is hard to believe that we are living in a post-Holocaust society. But as history often does we are repeating the overal themes of the extremist nationalist values from Nazi Germany.
Throughout this research I was able to get a basic sense of the overall feelings the group of respondents we surveyed had towards Nationalism. The results were somewhat anticipated except for people responding to the question that most people are proud to be in this country. Most individuals agreed with my hypothesis that Nationalism does in fact have a negativity surrounding it, especially with our current president's campaign slogan “Make America Great Again” Some changes that I would make to this survey is that I would try to reach a bigger range of people outside of the Bay Area, where most here have more liberal views. I would also add a couple of things to the questions themselves. For example, for the first question, I would add on 3 or more generations as some families have been here for longer. I would also add some more demographic questions such as age and possibly education level. Some feedback I received is that for the question on race the respondents would like to choose more than one ethnicity and to change the word race to ethnicity. Overall my theory was proven that although nationalism directly may not be the source of hate groups and feelings of superiority it does have a threatening influence over individuals who want to defend their ways of life.
