The idea for ''A Republic, Not at Empire'' came out of my year-long campaign for the Republican Party nomination in 1996. From March 1995 through the California primary, I sought to persuade my party that the course on which America had embarked was replicating, with alarming exactitude, the course that brought the British Empire to ruin. The free-trade-uber-alles policy of the (Clinton) Administration, and its compulsive interventionism, I argued, violated America's greatest traditions and followed a course that been repudiated and rejected by its greatest men.
...Repeatedly, I found that my arguments were not being refuted, but airily dismissed as "isolationism" or "protectionism." This suggested to me that millions of Americans are oblivious to their own country's history and heritage. The propagandists in the educational establishment have done their work well. For not only was the party of (Abraham) Lincoln, (William) McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, (William) Taft, and (Calvin) Coolidge born and bred in protectionism, it was defiantly and proudly protectionist. Moreover, the economic nationalism that carried Lincoln to the presidency was rooted in the ideas that (George) Washington, (Alexander) Hamilton, and (James) Madison had take to Philadelphia and written into the American Constitution, and that Henry Clay had refined to create "The American System" that was the marvel of mankind.