Driven in part by the revival of a classic knit sweater emblazoned with an American flag, “Ralph Lauren nationalism” has emerged as a trope among online talking-heads. Well-dressed political scientist Samuel Goldman is also known for his sharp takes on menswear. He joins host James Patterson to discuss his recent article for Compact magazine that tackled the concept. There may be something to the Ralph Lauren aesthetic that captures an essential quality of the American character, Goldman argues, but it’s not exactly what the highly-online chatterers think it is.

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“The Meaning of Ralph Lauren Nationalism” by Samuel Goldman

Transcript

James Patterson (00:06 ):

Welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. I’m your host, James Patterson. Law & Liberty is an online magazine featuring serious commentary on law, policy, books, and culture, and formed by a commitment to a society of free and responsible people living under the rule of law. Law & Liberty and this podcast are published by Liberty Fund. 

Hello and welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast. My name is James Patterson, contributing editor to Law & Liberty. Our guest today is Dr. Samuel Goldman. He is the associate professor of political science at George Washington University, as well as the executive director of the Loeb Institute for Religious Freedom and Democracy and director of the Politics and Values Program. He’s written God’s Country: Christian Zionism in America, and his second book was After Nationalism. He has a third book on higher education, right? Is that right?

Samuel Goldman (01:13 ):

That’s right. Conservative Critics of Higher Education.

James Patterson (01:16 ):

Yes, there he is. So I guess it’s too late for me to say this, but Dr. Goldman, welcome to the Law & Liberty Podcast.

Samuel Goldman (01:22 ):

Thanks, James. It’s always a pleasure to talk to you, but especially on a subject of such pressing national importance.

James Patterson (01:29 ):

Exactly. So it is summertime, or it’s about to be, and so we don’t always need to be very serious, although this is in a way very serious for certain enthusiasts. But we’ll be talking about Sam Goldman’s article, “The Meaning of Ralph Lauren Nationalism,” published on April 25, 2025, for Compact Magazine. And why don’t we start with the big picture here, which is why is it so funny or so interesting that so many people are adopting a Ralph Lauren aesthetic given what Ralph Lauren was doing when he was creating that aesthetic?

Samuel Goldman (02:10 ):

So the piece sort of takes us its point of departure genre of tweets or memes that can be found on Twitter and probably other places as well that are tagged “Ralph Lauren nationalism,” and they have these images of beautiful models wearing tartans and tweeds and riding horses in the desert or in other improbable scenarios. And the implication is that this is something that has been lost. I was going to say, you open up a magazine, but of course we don’t do that anymore. You open up your browser and you get this algorithm that pushes advertising on you, and it depends what you click on, but you don’t see beautiful people in this exotic, yet also vaguely American fantasy world. And this is presented as sort of a conservative or even reactionary statement that what we have now is slop. It’s ugly, it’s stupid, it’s not even cosmopolitan.

(03:24 ):

It’s sort of the lowest common denominator, globalized. We used to have this proud aesthetic vision. And there’s some truth to that. But it’s interesting as I go on to argue in the piece, because what Ralph Lauren was really doing in the second half of the twentieth century, and especially in the ‘80s and ‘90s, was recreating or imagining a whole vision of America that was not reality and was not derived from his own experience of vaguely old money, WASP-y life. It was something that a Jewish kid from the Bronx created from movies and books and watching people on the street. And I draw reader’s attention to this not just as a sort of pedantic corrective about what Ralph Lauren was really doing, but also to suggest that this is the sort of cultural nationalism or cultural patriotism that we need. It is optimistic, it embraces freedom as a core American value. It’s not “pluralist” in the hard multicultural sense, but it is flexible and welcoming and open-ended. That’s a lot of what I and others like and admire about this country. So Ralph Lauren nationalism, yes, but I don’t think it means quite what some of the people who are making these memes believe.

James Patterson (05:01 ):

Yeah, there’s a sort of a “RETVRN to Tradition,” and that return is always spelled with a V. And the tradition of Ralph Lauren is, as you point out, actually a kind of freewheeling repurposing of even older men’s wear traditions that at the time of his doing that were considered pretty subversive. And so it’s odd that something that’s subversive, not really in a political sense, but just sort of upending a lot of norms in menswear would be something that would ever become conservative. So what is it that Ralph Lauren did to menswear that made it a contemporary aesthetic people long for again?

Samuel Goldman (05:43 ):

Well, so Ralph Lauren emerges as a cultural figure in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, and this is the moment of real collapse in traditional standards of dress and behavior. You look at movies or photographs from 1960 and basically every man is wearing a suit and often a hat, women are wearing dresses and gloves. Just ten years later, the world looks very, very different. And there’s a passage in Saul Bellow’s great novel Mr. Sammler’s Planet. I allude to Bellow in the piece, where he describes riding a New York City bus in the late ‘60s, and he says, you can see everything: cowboys, Indians, Siberian hunters, but no longer the traditional Western bourgeois uniform that had been pretty stable for about a century before that. So this is the moment when Ralph Lauren emerges, and what he does is make elements of traditional clothing: tweed coats and suits and ties and shined shoes. But he makes them novel and appealing, and, it’s a cliche, but sexy again by drawing on what he had seen in the movies as a kid growing up in the Bronx in the ‘40s and ‘50s, his interest in Western and Native American culture, this sort of safari fantasia that he derived, I think probably from books of H. Rider Haggard or something like that, all of which were made into films.

(07:44 ):

And he makes this traditional clothing that had become very staid and boring and unappealing, something that people wanted to wear again.

James Patterson (07:57 ):

And it was bound up in a kind of restoration of a memory for who the Anglo-Protestants WASP-y types were and points of leisure and work when the bourgeois uniform, as you put it, had essentially domesticated and worn out a sense of a type of life, right? Everyone in a gray flannel suit with a white pocket square and a TV fold, and the most that you might get is a clip with your favorite college football