America First—But Why?

Leading with my heart instead of my head keeps me far from Nostradamus territory. (I bet every year on the Bills to win the Super Bowl and I was sure Dwight Twilley would be the pop sensation of the 1980s.) But I was in the ballpark almost three decades ago when in America First! (1995), a cultural and political history of 20th-century American isolationism, I predicted that politics in the new century would cleave along “globalist-Little American” or internationalist/America First lines. 

America First is a protean term if not concept. Woodrow Wilson, who forced U.S. entry into our…