“Nationalism is a sin.” “Patriotism is a virtue.” I still think nationalism is a sin, even when Jill Lepore is pushing it and it is tolerant and inclusive. Her “liberal” nationalism is her foil to Trump’s, but it is still excluding “democratic” nationalism. She is more interested in a nationalism that is more “liberal” and tolerant than one that is “democratic” and lets her off the hook from reaching out to people who may not be liberal and tolerant. It is a nationalism made to order for an academic in Cambridge, Massachusetts. If you get to the end of This America—and it doesn’t take long—there is no mention of democracy as being a value at all, and who can blame her? Our side just lost an election to Trump. We can have a tolerant, multicultural nationalism without having equality of exchange. Though Lepore acknowledges the objections to liberal nationalism from thinkers like Tony Judt and Judith Shklar, and prefers to rebrand her own version as “New Americanism,” there isn’t much difference. Somehow, she makes Frederick Douglass the patron of this kind of liberalism, and I hope I admire Frederick Douglass as much as Jill Lepore does, but we need to do more than create an America that has a space for Frederick Douglass, and even Frederick Douglass did not want that—after all, he supported Lincoln in fighting to save the Union, to hold on to the worst and most illiberal part of the nation, a poison in the body politic, if that’s what it took to end slavery.