Two years ago in this space I wrote that “I Want a President Who Loves America.” I started out by telling how I fell in love with America 51 years ago on my first trip to the U.S. over Christmas 1965.

I went on to assert the obvious: nation-state good, multiculturalism bad, therefore we should elect a president that loves America, the nation-state.

And so here we are two years later, about to inaugurate a President Trump to Make America Great Again.

Is this a great country, or what?

And the delicious thing is that our liberal friends don’t have a clue about what went wrong. They are even telling us that the Russians did it.

Err, wasn’t that why liberals got really mad about the decency of Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-WI), when he kept banging on about the Russians?

Shall we tell our liberals what happened? Yeah, why not.

The American people are sick unto death of liberals. They are sick of a lousy economy; they are sick of Hillary Clinton’s grating voice. They are sick of worrying whether a careless word will get them hauled up before the lame feminists in HR. They are sick of being called racists sexists homophobes. And they are sick of their adult kids living in the basement.

But never mind about all that. The real reason for the crisis of 2016 is that liberalism and globalism have been tried and found wanting. The truth is that the nation state is still the best -- although flawed -- way of conjuring up that abstract notion we call human community, and ordinary people feel it in their bones.

But liberals and globalists had another idea. Here is Mr. Conventional Wisdom, Joseph Stiglitz, in The Euro:

[After the 20th century wars] Europe’s leaders recognized that a more peaceful future would necessitate a complete reorganization of the politics, economics, and even national identities of the continent.

No, Dr. Stiglitz. What happened is that you chaps decided that it was the peoples’ fault that Hitler and Mussolini had come to power, and that you would make sure it would never happen again.

Only it is happening again, because you guys have screwed up. People are looking for a strong leader again and they want their nation-states back.

Anyone with half a brain loves the nation-state. Not because she is the dazzling girl of our dreams, as justice is for liberals at the end of its historical arc, but because the nation-state is the middle-aged woman we are married to, and we better love her and cherish her if we know what is good for us.

What we have lacked, these many years, is a president to encourage us in our love of nation. We have needed someone like the good Republican New York grocer, Mr. Hobbs, of Little Lord Fauntleroy, who is awarded the responsibility by author Frances Hodgson Burnett of teaching a young fatherless American lad to love the red-white-and-blue and the Fourth of July and fireworks and parades and everything Republican. And well he might.

Why should we love America? Because we humans have always loved our nearest and dearest, our family, our tribe, our little patch of home. Now that we live in a continental patch of North America, we have had to take those social instincts and reprogram them. The most successful efforts to do this just happen to be the nation state and the neighborhood church and the voluntary association and the employment-at-will workplace. The least successful efforts were the Soviet Union and Maoist China.

Some of these social innovations are more equal than others. But we know is that the alternative offered by our liberal friends is rubbish. They insist on “mentally divid[ing] the world into victims and oppressors,” and they do it for a reason. If you believe in the saving grace of political power, if your question is “how far to get the government involved in empowering people,” then you need, you must have a world divided into victims and oppressors, for which force is the only remedy. And you must divide your nation state into us and them, and diminish it with your intellectual terrorism.

That’s why liberals must always teach their clients that “America Was Never Great,” that patriotism is nationalism without the H-word, that more government is needed, because oppression.

But I believe in something higher, something fuller. I believe that the best thing in the world right now is to love America the land, America the people, America the nation, and it turns out that the American people agree with me.

Because the American people are sending Donald Trump in a couple of weeks to Washington to Make America Great Again. They have decided that all American lives matter, not just the little darlings of the liberals.

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.