It sometimes seems to me, and perhaps to you if you have read me frequently, that I have been talking and writing about American nationalism ever since I arrived in America as an immigrant in 1979. In fact, my epiphany came somewhat later. It was not until the special issue of National Review devoted to “Demystifying Multiculturalism” in February 1994 that I came out of the closet as a “nationalist for America.” That seems a better description of my standpoint than “American nationalist,” since I was then and have remained since a loyal subject of Queen Elizabeth II. The impulse to engage with such issues as multiculturalism and immigration came not from a personal transfer of patriotic loyalty from Britain to America—much though I love and admire the latter—but rather from the intellectual conviction that the dominant multiculturalist doctrine of American nationality was a simple error that, if persisted in, would have disastrous results.

Nationalism has many definitions, but the one employed here is the concept that people come to share a national identity, mutual loyalty, and sense of fellowship and common destiny as the result of sharing the same language and culture and of living under the same institutions over a long period of time. A nation may have many different historical origins—dynastic, ethnic, revolutionary, etc. What matters is that over time its people come to feel that they are part of the same collective body and feel a loyalty to it and its symbols,