Back in January of 2015 I wrote my first piece in the “I Want a President” series and the title was simply “I Want a President Who Loves America.” I wrote simply about my love for America and how, in the Obama years, I longed for a president that loved America like I did. And now I see that an African American, “Gloria,” agrees with me.

We need somebody that loves America. And he [Trump] also loves all people, all people.

Well, that “all people” may be going a bit far. I am not sure that Donald Trump is all that enamored of Crooked Hillary right now. I am not sure that anyone is all that enamored of Hillary Clinton right now.

Back at the start of 2015 I wrote that the trouble with President Obama and his liberal pals is this.

They do not love America; they sneer at America.

You know who I love? I love Americans that love America. People that sneer at America? Not so much.

As an immigrant from Britain I might easily, as many immigrants do, live embalmed in my old national identity. But I don’t. Oh sure, I am proud of Britain’s contribution to the modern world, and nostalgic for the 1950s England of my childhood. But first of all, I love America.

Of course, the thing I was getting at nearly two years ago was that liberals don’t love America like I do, principally because they think they are too good for racist, sexist, homophobic America. That is why they sneer.

And also, back then, I hadn’t read my Hegel and realized that anything is about the same as its opposite, so racism and anti-racism, sexism and anti-sexism, homophobia and homophilia, are really the same: a puerile liberal obsession with race and sex and gayness.

Also, rereading my first “love America” piece and the second, a year later, I realize that I hadn’t really grasped the basic fact about the liberal disdain for America, that it follows naturally upon a desire for power. If you want political power you must gin up a reason for the world to give you that power. As government is force, you must gin up something, some great injustice, for which the only remedy is force. So you decide that America is fundamentally unjust and needs fundamental transformation, politically. And you sneer at America, the Beautiful.

Well, here we are, a week to go before the presidential election of 2016, and one thing is clear. One of the candidates snuggles up to the American flag when he does his rallies and he tells us that he can Make America Great Again quickly, really quickly.

And the other candidate? Well, let us just say that she is not exactly celebrating the fundamental goodness of America. If I understand the meaning of “Stronger Together” rightly, it means that unless we in the Coalition of the Fringes hang together we will hang separately, what with the national menace of white-male locker-room talk and women all over America getting harassed by billionaires and blacks getting shot by white policemen.

So, all in all, I brilliantly intuited the fundamental issue over which the nation would divide in the presidential election of 2016. Do you love America for what it is and what it could become, or do you think that the whole place stinks and that only the clunking fist of fundamental transformation can beat it into submission?

So much for love and sentiment.

Here is a deep and intellectual policy-analyst reason to love America. It issues from Samuel P. Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations, which I have only just read.

Huntington talks about the world no longer being a Western hegemony, but a world of civilizations -- Western, Islamic, Hindu, Confucian, etc. -- that rub up against each other along the fault lines between them. At the end of World War II there was a Western global hegemony, but not anymore. He writes about Harry Lee, the “best bloody Englishman east of Suez.” Harry transformed himself into Lee Kuan Yew to do politics in Singapore. He became a champion of Chinese civilization and advertised its success as evidence of its clear superiority to the West. All across the world, states are coalescing into civilizational blocs -- Hello Philippines -- and the conflicts are everywhere getting to be fault-line wars between civilizations.

Huntington argues that the U.S. and the West are not going to do too well in these fault-line wars -- Hello Syria -- when we are internally divided between nationalists and globalists and multiculturalists. Writes Huntington:

In the clash of civilizations, Europe and America will hang together or hang separately.

In other words, unless we learn to love our country, love our civilization, love each other, from the president down to a homeless woman of color, we aren’t going to be able to handle the civilizations that do.

Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also see his American Manifesto and get his Road to the Middle Class.