Free Republic

I would like to discuss something rather foundational. What do you think about this “new nationalism”? Do you think it's new? What does it mean? Does it mean putting America first? Does it, in fact, put America first? Has this new nationalism been tried before? It very much has. The phrase "new nationalism" was actually coined by Theodore Roosevelt in a speech he gave in Kansas on Sept. 1, 1910. In that speech, Theodore Roosevelt, a Republican, later to become a Progressive Party candidate, in essence denounced the Declaration of Independence, and embraced the new nationalism.

Last weekend, at a dusty race car track in that part of New Jersey where lacrosse fields slowly give way to farmland before the landscape seems to stop altogether, Sarah Palin rallied a couple of thousand partisans on behalf of Steve Lonegan, a longshot, Tea Party-fueled candidate for the U.S. Senate. “I just told Todd,” she said to the crowd a moment after they stopped chanting her name. “‘Ooh,’ I said. ‘I can die and go to heaven now: I just shook Mark Levin’s hand.’” Levin had been out earlier, warming them up. He cuts a figure that is the...