The issue of globalization was the great central issue of the last election. The MAGA coalition stands forcefully against the runaway movement towards a globalism. They saw no end to the damaging policies of open borders, unfair trade, and suppression of speech protesting these things. They saw the globalists did not care how much American citizens were harmed by their project.

The MAGA coalition understands correctly that the globalists are working for their global unistate to supersede nationalism, a dirty word for the globalists. MAGA understands correctly that globalism’s advocates, when empowered, insulate themselves from the baneful effects they know their program has on so many American citizens. They do not even applaud those citizens for making sacrifices, merely scold them for not doing so enthusiastically and not doing more, for not being good Stakhanovites.

What does MAGA propose instead? America First, certainly. But that is a phrase with a history in America, and originally stood for a hard-core isolationism that was inexcusably enamored of Hitler. Trump actions show he is not of such a persuasion. He has used extremely effective force against the neo-Nazi international hooliganism of Iran, its proxies, and its Sunni fraternal twin, ISIS.

As well, he effectively kept the international peace. Trump’s actions also debunked the specious and knowingly false claims that he was in bed with Putin as Lindbergh had been with the Nazis.  From the moment during George W. Bush’s presidency that Putin launched his Reconquista of the lost Soviet empire, Putin has invaded new territory in every presidency except one — Trump’s. This is not my grandfather’s America First.

Perhaps what Trump is working towards is American primacy conceived in a far deeper way — America as the paradigm of how to order the world. This means organizing a government that is capable of effective action on a large level while preserving the liberties of lower levels of organization, all the way down to the individual citizen. That is the great miracle of America’s Constitution and its system of subsidiary, nested power structures, with the Constitution’s sovereign, the individual citizen, at foundational bottom.

Any global organization that does not respect the sovereignty of its constituents, from distinct nations all the way down to individual human beings, is a threat to our liberty.

The America that rallied to Trump gets that the globalists envision no such structure of nested power for the world state they are imagining and trying to develop. Rather than being the sovereigns of that system, those who support Trump believe they are being maneuvered and coerced into surrendering to a system that has no intention of ever being accountable to them at all.

At our American beginning, we decided to replace the Articles of Confederation with the Constitution largely because the weakness of the Confederation’s national government. Power was diffused among the states and not enough remained, citizens feared, to be able to respond quickly and effectively to threats, especially from hostile powers.

All too often in human affairs, we paralyze ourselves by imagining that our choices are confined to one of only two opposite possibilities. In this case, anti-federalists made the argument that the only alternative to a weak, ineffective national government was a tyrannical national government, that would be effective to the degree that citizens lost their liberties.

The genius of the Framers of the Constitution and of the American people in their ratifying conventions was that they rejected that false duality. They committed instead to a federal arrangement that preserved both cohesive national effectiveness and the liberty of both the states and the individual citizens. They accomplished this by grasping that there was a third choice that was neither tyranny nor anarchy.

The third way embodied in this constitutional government is an ongoing process rather than a static abstraction. The active interests that lead to either chaos or tyranny could instead check each other’s excesses, whether in the three branches of the national government or in the interplay between the interests of the individual states with each other and with the national government. A free state capable of growing powerful without enslaving its citizens began to emerge.

Vice-President Vance gave voice to the Constitution’s paradigm when he spoke truth to the (waning) power of Europe’s globalists, who have run most European states for some time. He pointed to their admitting aliens who have no cultural commitment to Western constitutional life and then running interference for those immigrants against the rights and the physical safety of their original citizens.

Rape gangs ran wild in Britain and their members were rarely prosecuted — but citizens who raised their voices in protest were censored and prosecuted for the “hate crime” of their complaints and protests. France, Belgium, Sweden have their no-go zones where the laws that govern everyone else de facto do not apply. Freedom of speech, said Vance, is disappearing in your lands because you globalists will not tolerate any protest of globalist policies that you fear might limit your power to rule.

Vance is a voice for the American Paradigm. It rejects both the censorious tyranny of the globalists and the isolationist anarchy that wouldn’t even concede we should combine all forces to defeat Hitler and the Japanese imperialists.

The American Paradigm can imagine a united world. But it must be built, as is our constitutional Republic, on the sovereignty of the simple citizen, whose relations with the Sovereign of the Universe is beyond the reach of governments and whose power to speak and think is likewise sacrosanct.

The United Nations defeated Hitler. The organization in New York that took on its name has long been unworthy of those who fought and died to extinguish the Nazi rule — it has in fact joined hands with Hitler’s heirs in Gaza and elsewhere.

Hitler wanted a world united. So did Stalin. The globalists throughout the West have not held fast to the freedoms that the West fought for in former days. They have not thought the distinction between freedom and tyranny as important as that between having control and losing control.

We want a united world as well. And we have a much better model of how to go about it. It is built on freedom, not on the favor of self-credentialed elites who rarely condescend to assume responsibility for the welfare and the happiness of the people under their sway. We embrace our Constitutional process, its trust of the people, and the relentless and successful striving of the citizens it joins together to improve the common weal.

We build on firm foundations of principle, the shared principle of what the Dutch and English pioneers of modern political freedom called the Hebrew Republic. The law of nations was nested within the principled authority of God, whose power is always exactly matched by beneficence.

A revered figure of the actual Hebrew Commonwealth set out the principle which we may clearly see at work in our current effort to order our world best. His name was Hillel. He lived at the time of the Sanhedrin in Israel which he led, just at the time that Rome was changing into an empire.

Hillel came from deep poverty but was fired by a deep love. His grasp of the law and ability to persuade great legal scholars brought him to the leadership. However, he was perhaps even more renowned for his ability to state the underlying principles and great ideas that made the multitude of laws coherent and inspiring.

One of his most famous sayings dealt with the core issue that is at work in each person’s life as well as in our lives together as citizens of God’s world. He said:

If I am not for myself, who am I?

If I am for myself alone, what am I?

And if not now, when?

The first line expresses the idea that our self-interest cannot be sidestepped without losing our identity. It is God-given. No one else knows better who we are and what we must do in response to that gift than ourselves. This is why we understand that political rights are God-given.

The second line expresses the idea that the worth of our lives is dependent on how well we use the power we have been given to help others survive and thrive. God brings us into being when He could just as easily decided to do without the trouble of such fractious and foolish people that we have so often been. So, too, we are called upon to invest ourselves in others — playmates, friends, colleagues, spouses, children, and grandchildren, members of our community, citizens of our country, humans everywhere, and the magnificent and beautiful world whose value we must preserve and develop.

And the third line tells us that this is real, immediate, existentially pressing, not just the bemused abstractions of dilettantes. The time to put these two things together is right now, to find the dynamic balance every remaining second of our lives. We are charged with realizing both individual freedom and a global community. We turn away from the woke nightmare that we are forced into a no-win, either/or, and devote all the energy and passion of our lives, to bring both ideas together in exemplary lives and communities.

Right now and without end. This is the wholeness conveyed by the Bible’s word for peace, shalom. Peace now and without end — in the way we know that works.

READ MORE from Shmuel Klatzkin:

The Abraham Accords Are the Way Toward Peace

Identifying and Correcting Our Mistakes Is a Moral Obligation