So goes the nation: you can't build a national party on post-nationalism.

MORE was lost on November 7 than an election. The project of making the GOP a truly national majority party also evaporated. And it did so despite the fact that a Republican president was given an unparalleled opportunity by 9/11 to build such a party on the foundations of a new, inclusive patriotism.

Elections come around regularly. You win some, you lose some. But natural majority parties win more elections than they lose. And they continue to exert an influence on policy even when they are out of office. America was governed by liberal ideas during the long dominance of the FDR coalition, even in the brief periods when the Republicans won power. Clinton governed in a much more conservative fashion than he had intended--like "Eisenhower Republicans," he famously complained--because he governed in the shadow of Reagan and under the constraints of Reaganism.

But when Bush 43 was inaugurated in January 2001, America had no natural majority party. It was a nation split almost down the middle--actually, leaning slightly leftwards if we take Ralph Nader's vote into account--and potentially open to conversion by either major party. Karl Rove's response in 2000 (and, as events turned out, in 2004 as well) was to seek a narrow political victory by focusing on every identity and interest group sympathetic to the GOP and ensuring that they turned out to vote. That incremental approach can win an election, but it cannot build a long-term majority party. What typically creates a new national majority is a massive real-world event--the 1930s Depression, the Vietnam debacle--on which one party reflects strong public sentiment more powerfully than the other.

September 11 was just such an event. Though there was a united bipartisan patriotic response to the attack, the GOP was better placed to gain politically from it than the Democrats. It is the natural party of patriotism and national defense just as the Democrats are the natural party of compassion and the welfare state. Both parties duly tried to exploit 9/11 politically in their own ways: Democrats argued that the bravery of police and firemen had shown the value of government, Republicans that the attack showed the need for a strong defense. This struggle to interpret 9/11 was initially won by the Republicans. The Democrats found themselves endorsing the Afghan and Iraq Wars--which, as their subsequent behavior has shown, they viscerally disliked.

But the reactions of both to 9/11, while important as policy, were culturally superficial. Neither really grasped that 9/11 might have significantly changed our ideas of American nationhood. The upsurge of patriotism on the part of ordinary Americans was uncomplicatedly nationalist. Its slogan was "United We Stand" and it expressed the "melting-pot" theory of American unity rooted in assimilation. This coexisted uneasily alongside a more recent theory of American nationhood: the official multiculturalism of the media, cultural, and political elites who were suspicious of assimilation as nativist. Their virtual slogan was "Why do they hate us?" One theory or the other would eventually prevail. And whether it was patriotism or multiculturalism would determine inter alia the next majority party.

The Democrats were the party of multiculturalism. If the mood of patriotism were allowed to dissipate, the Democrats would benefit by default from the balkanizing effects of a revived multiculturalism. If, however, Bush and the Republicans could shape the inchoate mood of outraged patriotism into a substantial practical politics of American unity, they could well build a permanent new majority around this vision.

At the time several commentators-- including Kate O'Beirne and myself in NR--pointed out that this great opportunity was being ignored. Our analyses were largely general, however, and lacked the kind of practical ideas on implementing a new policy that political parties want. As it happens, just such advice was being given, then and later, to the White House in a series of memos from scholars in a Washington think tank.