This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Saturday, August 17th, 2019.

I'm Caleb Brown.

Is American nationalism always been with us?

What are its hallmarks?

And is it really as dangerous as episodes of nationalism elsewhere?

Historian Anthony Kamegna argues that American style nationalism has and continues to be

about a sense of mission of achieving a goal of national purpose and his response is

that there is no such thing as a national purpose. We spoke last week. There is this

push and I spoke about it recently on a podcast with Stephanie Slade of reason and Aaron Ross Powell

your former boss here at the Cato Institute

about conservative nationalism or national conservatism and how they feel that

they've lost the culture war and that a lot of the institutions that they view as supremely important are being denigrated

and perhaps to the point of being destroyed and that that calls upon them to invigorate an ideal of what they call

conservative nationalism or national conservatism.

And I guess my thought is, one, I'm not a nationalist.

I don't view the interests of the government of the United States as my own.

I do not, it's not received wisdom as far as I'm concerned.

I do love America.

But in general, what do we know about nationalism in the United States, and where have we seen episodes

of it that we can point to and say, this is a really notable point in time when a lot of people were considered themselves strongly

nationalists and to separate that really from patriotism that is subscribing to the ideals of the United States.

Yeah I suppose from my point of view here I was in high school during the Iraq war and I sort of see an upswing of nationalism for the last, you know, 15 to 20 years or so now, as one sort of coherent arc. I think that's essentially because your

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