Shorter David Brooks, "Yes, I'm an American Nationalist", New York Times, 26 October 2018:
I'm magically attached to New York but I'm romantically attached to the United States, Rockies, Declaration of Independence, World War II, Silicon Valley, madness, diversity. I'm an American nationalist, and this proves that Donald Trump isn't one, because I'm a nice guy and he isn't.
Quotes from the six-paragraph peroration of Ernest Renan's 1882 Sorbonne lecture, "What is a nation?", with no indication of where he got it from, likely Dr. Google and
www.nationalismproject.org, which runs it without the rest of the text:
The 19th-century French philosopher Ernest Renan argued that “a nation is a soul, a spiritual principle”: “These are the essential conditions of being a people: having common glories in the past and a will to continue them in the present; having made great things together and wishing to make them again. One loves in proportion to the sacrifices that one has committed and the troubles that one has suffered.”
That's not really what Renan (a great rationalist, though also I'm sorry to say an anti-Semite, who is remembered best for his 1863
Vie de Jésus, depicting the life of Jesus with no miracles, as somebody who is not the son of God) "argues". By ignoring the
rest of the piece—he may not even realize it exists—Brooks misses all the argumentation, which is a shame, because some of it is pretty funny, anticipating the great Benedict Anderson:
