Really Existing Nationalism: Ghostownification as a Far Right Future

As a social scientist, I remain a perpetually curious person, but like many others who study something intensely, I tend to get easily bored by the common. As a result, I am inclined to investigate the more obscure or outrageous aspects of social life.

Some of the most bizarre, man-made spaces on Earth are the towns found throughout the Japanese countryside. At first glance, they appear as if they were quaint movie sets reflecting life in rural Japan. Sugi trees grow just outside historical town centers, as nearly empty streets pierce through the serene villages. One could be forgiven for thinking that they had stumbled upon an artificial recreation due to the scene’s docility and empty buildings. Upon closer inspection, you may come to realize that these villages exist on a sliding scale between retirement community and ghost town.

Japan suffers from a self-inflicted demographic wound promoted as much by cultural choice as it has been by state policy. Japan has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world (1.15 children per woman in 2024 ¹), while simultaneously implementing a restrictive immigration policy.

In Nagoro, a nearly deserted town of fewer than 30 residents (down from around 300+), decline has been turned into art. Dolls have been installed to represent the residents who once lived there. The surreal nature of Nagoro blends the dystopian and prescient; between the peaks of decline and a glimpse into the future of many Western societies.

Japan’s population has declined by as many as 900,000 people ² a year, with the population declining for 16 consecutive years. She is not alone, however. Japan joins 23 additional countries that could see their populations cut by more than half by 2100 due to seemingly irreversible low birthrates. ³ Japan illustrates the limits of attempting to manage demographic decline without embracing immigration as a comprehensive demographic strategy: foreign workers are increasingly necessary to sustain the economy and population, even as immigration remains tightly controlled, sector-specific, and politically carefully limited.

On the face of it, such countries do not face much of an obstacle: they are in need of workers, students, and investors, a typical combination that historically has led to massive movements of people across the globe to areas promising a chance at wealth and guarantees of freedom. Today, the Global South contains millions of individuals of all skill levels and a multitude of backgrounds eager for entry to the West. Supply, meet demand. What’s the problem?

The People Market

Despite the many exaltations of market capitalism, when questions of supply and demand shift from iPhones to labor, many of the most ardent defenders of the system become fearsome advocates of government regulation. Japan’s recent turn to stricter immigration and residency controls under arch-conservative Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi is just the latest example of this policy choice.⁴ Her brand of hard-right nationalism typifies the paradoxical nature of being an immigration-skeptical leader of a rapidly declining population.

Takaichi is hardly alone in advocating a mixture of policies meant to increase the dwindling “native population” of her country while restricting immigration. In the game to increase or merely stabilize population, the right-wing operationalizes only one side of the equation: birthrates.

Beyond Japanese villages, the rest of the West is confronted with the same issue of falling fertility rates. Despite political and cultural conditions that differ from Japan, the problem remains: when fertility remains below replacement and immigration is insufficient to compensate, population decline becomes extremely difficult to reverse. 

Historically, in countries like the United States, this would have been a moment of mass migration. Yet only Spain and a small handful of other nations have taken such an approach, while others advocate the absurdly counterproductive policy of “remigration” of the current immigrant population, including people who are legally present. Sometimes this policy smacks of the totalitarian rhetoric of ethnic cleansing, especially in countries like Germany, where undesirable cultural and racial groups who have indeed become citizens are labeled “passport Germans” and threatened with citizenship revocation and expulsion by the far right AfD party.⁵ The conspiratorial and historically antisemitic “Great Replacement” story (a narrative claiming that the white population in Western countries is being deliberately replaced by immigrants) has become orthodox thinking among far-right parties.⁶ The solution the right-wing has offered is pronatalism: policies designed to increase the birth rate among the “native” population. The problem is that such policies have repeatedly failed to produce a sustained return to replacement-level fertility.

Ignoring the tremendous amount of untapped labor in the face of declining populations has led to a package of policies that unwittingly contribute to what I have conceptualized as Ghostownification: a process in which restrictive immigration policies, persistently low birth rates, and ineffective pronatalist efforts combine to produce long-term demographic contraction, economic stagnation, and the gradual hollowing out of towns, cultures, and regions into functional shells of their former selves.

Ghostownification is Destiny

The nationalist desire to ethnically and culturally engineer society is certainly nothing new. Eugenics movements since the time of Arthur Gobineau (a French aristocrat who was one of the founders of “scientific” racism) have advanced their ideal social composition based on the centrality of “blood.” In the twenty-first century, rapidly diversifying nations with ethnic backgrounds different from those of the majority have seen renewed efforts of this kind. While claiming to be accepting of “legal” immigration, a litany of statements by leaders and sentiments among right-wing voters clearly indicate that not all cultures or ethnicities are equally welcome. This is where the problem begins.

Across the white-majority societies of Europe, North America, and Oceania, fertility is now below the roughly 2.1 children per woman required for generational replacement without immigration. For Asian nationalist movements whose demographic concerns go beyond color or continent: there are no other Japanese or Koreans to emigrate in sufficient numbers to arrest the decline. With variables such as these, only a baby “boom” would suffice to allay the cultural grievances of nationalists. Such a boom becomes challenging when most people without children are so because they do not care to have them.⁷

That social reality has not stopped some nations from investing enormous portions of their annual budgets in initiatives designed to increase the birth rate. The result has been policies that are not only ineffective and fiscally unsustainable, but “are dangerous to the health and well-being of women and other populations.”⁸ In Viktor Orbán’s Hungary, generous state benefits once reached 5% of GDP, considerably more than America spends on its legendarily well-funded military. ⁹ Despite the spending, Hungary’s birthrate mildly increased before subsequently declining, reaching a recent low in 2024, only about a tenth of a point from matching its all-time low. The problem is that pronatalist policies have repeatedly produced modest or temporary increases in fertility, but no contemporary low-fertility Western society has demonstrated that such policies can sustainably restore birthrates to replacement level. Orbán’s policies join a myriad of failed pronatalist experiments, all in an attempt to keep nations like Hungary free of “race mixing,” in his words.¹⁰

This confluence of bad policies, creeping authoritarianism, and cultural nationalism has put a new spin on the old adage that "demographics are destiny." As cultural concerns remain at the center of an increasingly popular political right-wing, citizens should be well aware of the policy consequences. To avoid the fallacy of ethnic “replacement,” one may instead be leading a country toward extinction, not by foreign conquest, but through a painfully slow aging to death of entire societies.The fundamental question is whether preserving a particular ethnic or cultural composition is worth accepting demographic contraction as its price, even before considering the ethical implications of racially or culturally engineering a society. If the objective is instead to preserve functioning communities, economies, and institutions across generations, the consequences of that trade-off become much harder to ignore.

A Far-Right Future

The repackaging of social engineering as “remigration” is one of the more sordid examples of rhetoric that has migrated from the fringes into mainstream politics. Its demographic consequences are not difficult to imagine. The choice increasingly presented by demographic reality is not between the old nation and a diverse nation, but between a diverse nation and a shrinking, elderly one. Instead of accepting Africans , Asians or Hispanics as part of your country, you may eventually discover that there is hardly a country left to preserve. This is the end result of really existing nationalism.

By really existing nationalism, I mean nationalism as it works in practice rather than as it presents itself in political rhetoric. Nationalist movements often promise renewed sovereignty, cultural revival, economic security, and a return to some imagined period of national greatness. Really existing nationalism asks us to look past these inflated promises and examine what actually happens when nationalist ideas are put into practice: who benefits, what costs emerge, and whether the country really becomes more prosperous, cohesive, secure, or independent as a result.

For most of the citizens who remain in 2100 (and surely for many countries well, well before then) a future of depressed economies, empty towns, loneliness, and the myriad of other related social ills may typify life under right-wing control. Artificial intelligence may be able to pick up some of the slack caused by an aging workforce, but your former self may be replaced by a doll as a testament to policies of failure and to the community that once was, or might have been.

Iowa and Arkansas in the United States offer another example of the contradiction at the heart of really existing nationalism. Both conservative states face labor shortages while simultaneously supporting a national political movement committed to restricting immigration, one of the most obvious potential sources of additional adult labor. At the same time, both states have loosened restrictions on child labor. In Iowa, children as young as 14 can fill roles once worked by adults, while slightly older teens may work until 9 p.m. on school nights and for as many as 28 hours a week. Rather than opening the labor market more broadly to adult immigrant workers, the political response has included making more of the existing youth population available for work. So much for addressing America’s youth’s falling academic performance.¹¹

The social structures that remain in elderly-majority cities in places like Italy keep some of the old traditions alive, but ghost-town policies have put an expiration date on such customs. Even far right leaders appear to be reversing course in some regard. After running on a largely anti-immigrant platform, Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni offered 500,000 visas to non-EU citizens to address the labor shortage.¹²

As far-right parties continue to make gains, the material product of their policies must be scrutinized to an even greater degree than those working within the confines of ailing democratic systems. The builders of new systems in their totality always have more to prove. The right-wing critique of the ills of Western society is often woefully accurate: elitist, unequal institutions disproportionately serve the economically powerful while leaving street-level citizens to struggle. The right’s solutions, however, sit at the nexus of the delusional and the most nauseating excesses of twentieth-century ethnonationalism.

This brings me back to the paradox of Nagoro. Nationalism promises to preserve the nation, but a politics obsessed with preserving who belongs to it may help produce places in which hardly anyone belongs because hardly anyone remains. We the people would be radically remiss not to contemplate the outcomes of really existing nationalism.

Refrences

1. Japan Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare. “Ministerial Press Conference,” July 2025. Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare

2. CNN. “Japan Records Biggest Population Decline as Birth Rate Crisis Deepens,” August 7, 2025. CNN

3. Vollset, Stein Emil, et al. “Fertility, Mortality, Migration, and Population Scenarios for 195 Countries and Territories from 2017 to 2100.” The Lancet 396 (2020): 1285–1306. The Lancet / ScienceDirect

4. Nippon.com. “Japan’s ‘Foreigner Policy’ Skirts Key Issues: No Orderly Coexistence Without Plan for Immigration,” February 27, 2026. Nippon.com 

5. CORRECTIV. “Geheimplan gegen Deutschland,” January 10, 2024. CORRECTIV

6. Boatwright, Stephon J. “Myth, Mayhem, and Pseudo-Democracy: The Role of Political Myths in Mobilizing Nationalist Populist Movements and Political Extremists.” PhD diss., CUNY Graduate Center, 2025. CUNY Academic Works

7. Pew Research Center. “The Experiences of U.S. Adults Who Don’t Have Children,” July 25, 2024. Pew Research Center

8. Forati, Rasadokht, and Deborah Bartz. “The Rise and Fall and Rise of Pronatalism: A Disingenuous Policy that Harms the Health of People and Society.” Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics 53, no. 3 (2025): 435–443. Cambridge University Press

9. The Economist. “Viktor Orbán’s Pro-Natalist Policies Are Not Working,” March 19, 2026. The Economist

10. Associated Press. “Hungary’s Orban Faces Backlash over ‘Race Mixing’ Comments,” July 26, 2022. Associated Press

11. The New York Times. “U.S. Reading Test Scores Continue Their Slide,” September 8, 2026. The New York Times

12. France 24. “Meloni’s Government to Issue 500,000 Visas for Non-EU Workers,” July 2, 2025. France 24

*Images in this article were generated using artificial intelligence for illustrative purposes; partly to avoid the increasingly adventurous world of image licensing and predatory copyright litigation.