From society’s commanding heights, a ruling class of intellectuals, politicians, publicists, industrialists, and bureaucrats, as well as churchmen, has devalued the attachments to God, family, locality, and nation by which Westerners, and especially Americans, have lived, and has purveyed the sense that we are parts of a global political economy run by experts. Contemporary “internationalism” is part of the larger progressive effort to substitute government by officials, who are supposed to be intellectually and morally superior, for government by, of, and for the people. This essay examines the philosophical and practical bases for the American people’s rejection of the past century’s peculiar internationalism, and suggests that the best way of transcending it—to resume control of ourselves as well as of our relationship with other peoples—is to return to the principles practiced by presidents from Washington to Theodore Roosevelt.

The assumption that human beings are rightly governed only by their betters entered the progressive tradition as an inheritance from France’s ancien régimewhich Napoleon institutionalized throughout Western Europe under the banner of the Revolution. Hegel celebrated state-engineered process as the march of the human spirit. Only in the 1880s did it come to America in the writings of Josiah Strong, Woodrow Wilson, and Herbert Croly. Ordinary people can hardly imagine the domestic objectives at which progressivism aims. Progressivism’s international objectives—perpetual worldwide peace and the equality of peoples—are even further from ordinary people’s grasp or cares. The administrative state internally, and “globalism” internationally, are two sides of