I suspect that the publishers of Bill Kauffman's America First! Its History, Culture, and Politics brought out a new edition of this 1996 book in part due to the newsworthiness of the title: after all, there's a well-known person whose presidential campaign has taken this very phrase as its theme. And we'll get to that in a moment, but in the meantime one has to recall what the author was trying to get at.

When it first came out, Kauffman's book was hailed by those of us on the "isolationist"/Buchananite right as a masterpiece of historical, literary, and political analysis. We loved not only the subject matter—the resurrection of nearly forgotten writers, political figures, and other colorful characters whose eccentricities are not only charming but downright seditious—but also the Kauffman style: witty without being smug and crammed full of learned allusions without being exhibitionistic. Robinson Jeffers, the poet of the Old Right who paid for his bitter opposition to World War II and all things Rooseveltian by being banished forever from "respectable" literary society, is herein described as having "prescience, which we often confuse with pessimism."