Nationalism Review

THE average intelligent American who wants to learn something about history does not get much help from the political class. The Left projects identity politics backward, in a pageant of saintly martyrs. We of the Right offer little more: here, some remnants of the Army of Northern Virginia; there, the West Coast Straussians, riding between the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address like passengers on the shuttle between Grand Central Station and Times Square. Hamilton’s Republic, edited by Michael Lind—an anthology of short excerpts from the writing of various Federalists, Whigs, and turn-of-the- last -century Republicans, with an idiosyncratic twentieth-century coda— has the virtue of offering something fresh. If Mr. Lind had his way, Mount Rushmore would get some new faces, and pundits and speechwriters would find a new source for bumperstickers.

Hamilton’s Republic: Readings in the American Democratic Nationalist Tradition, edited by Michael Lind (Free Press, 345 pp., $25)

About the Author

Richard Brookhiser

Historian Richard Brookhiser is a senior editor of National Review and a senior fellow at the National Review Institute.

THE average intelligent American who wants to learn something about history does not get much help from the political class. The Left projects identity politics backward, in a pageant of saintly martyrs. We of the Right offer little more: here, some remnants of the Army of Northern Virginia; there, the West Coast Straussians, riding between the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address like passengers on the shuttle between Grand Central Station and Times Square. Hamilton’s Republic, edited by Michael Lind—an anthology of short excerpts from the writing of various Federalists, Whigs, and turn-of-the- last -century Republicans, with an idiosyncratic twentieth-century coda— has the virtue of offering something fresh. If Mr. Lind had his way, Mount Rushmore would get some new faces, and pundits and speechwriters would find a new source for bumperstickers.

Hamilton’s Republic: Readings in the American Democratic Nationalist Tradition, edited by Michael Lind (Free Press, 345 pp., $25)