"...[E]conomic nationalists sacrifice material consumption for the national pride that comes with being a creditor nation that owns foreign assets. On this logic, the U.S. trade imbalance cannot be rectified by the marketplace alone....This sticks in the throat of those who prize national self-sufficiency and the moral fiber that comes from saving more than one spends....Traces of economic nationalism survive in America. It is no accident that the most successful U.S. vehicles are trucks, powerful symbols of rural and working-class masculine patriotism. That GM and Chrysler are being bailed out is partly because their products have been immortalized in song and film as national icons."

"...Ultra-Orthodox rabbis control access to marriage, conversion, and burial, effectively determining the status of non-haredi private lives across the varied Jewish community. In addition, ultra-Orthodox activists flex their political muscle by censoring advertising and movies, organizing consumer boycotts, mounting mass demonstrations, and harassing secular Jews who violate the Sabbath. Once peace-process-disinterested members of various coalition governments, ultra-Orthodox politicians now rank among the most hawkish in the Knesset, defending haredi settlements on the West Bank and in East Jerusalem. Although less politically cohesive, Israeli Arab voters favor the flip side of the political spectrum, which makes moderate Israelis wonder how their democracy might function should these two groups grow to dominate the electorate."

According to demographic projections, Jewish, Muslim, and Christian fundamentalists will gain significant ground against their liberal and secular counterparts by 2050, even surpassing them in some cases, Belfer Center Fellow Eric Kaufmann said at last week’s International Security Program (ISP) brownbag presentation.

"Both Wasp and Episcopalian, he spent nearly half a century at Harvard and is descended from several generations of Harvard men. But his nationalism was political, not ethnic, valuing institutions like the military and the constitution rather than a timeless landscape or heroic ancestors. In The Promise of Disharmony (1981), he writes of American identity as an idea. America lacked class conflict, so had no need for the mystical folk nationalism of Europe. Wasps and immigrants alike, he argued, were eager to throw off their past and forge a liberal nation. Not a word did he write romanticising puritans or pioneers."

Initiative on Religion in International Affairs Fellow Eric Kaufmann argues in the Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion that "religious belief becomes deregulated and increasingly varied in modern societies as religiosity takes on a self-conscious, rather than taken-for-granted, character. The demographic advantage that religious populations have suggests that the future of secularization, far from confirming a secular teleology, remains indeterminate."