If there is a horrific attack on this country like 9/11, the American people will demand we go to war and settle accounts with those who did it. But America's appetite for intervention, for nation building, for democracy crusades, is fully sated.

As polarized as we have been, we Americans are locked in a cultural war for the soul of our country.

If a country forgets where it came from, how will its people know who they are?

Where liberals see as an ever-more-splendid diversity of colors, creeds, ethnicities, ideologies, beliefs and lifestyles, the Right sees the disintegration of a country, a nation, a people, and its replacement with a Tower of Babel. Visions in conflict that democracy cannot reconcile.

I like America, and I think probably the American people like me.

The American tradition of Washington and Hamilton and Madison and Lincoln and TR and Pat Buchanan is of economic nationalism - making America an independent, self-sufficient, sovereign forever country that's able to stand on its own feet.