Two decades after political theorists in the United States and Europe celebrated a “post-national constellation” and “cosmopolitan democracy,” politics is increasingly shaped by explicitly nationalist appeals. The avatar of this new nationalism is Donald Trump, who urged the world in his United Nations speech last month “to reject the ideology of globalism and accept the ideology of patriotism.”
In Mr. Trump's version of nationalism, Muslims and Mexican-Americans are stigmatized, and African-American football players who protest racial injustice by kneeling during the national anthem are denounced. Some of his applications of “America first” — repudiating the Paris climate agreement or abandoning the Iran nuclear deal — may not even prove to be in the national interest.
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