From the ashes of both Bryan’s ignoble isolationism and Wilson’s utopian universalism rose the school of Christian realism advocated by Reinhold Niebuhr.

While there is enormous merit to Michael Doran’s binary and overall thesis in his First Things essay, there are some complicating factors that obscure the “wondrous chasm” between Jacksonianism and Progressivism.

Rather than simply securing our borders or pursuing our interests, Americans continue to believe that what happens here is the fate of the earth. The real challenge to this consensus would be a view of America as just another country, neither exceptionally good nor exceptionally evil.

The foreign policies of Teddy Roosevelt and his distant cousin Franklin D. Roosevelt represent an intersection between two different Protestant worldviews.