In Europe, populist anti-immigrant parties, alarmed at a loss of national identities, are striding toward respectability and power. The Vlaams Belang, seeking independence for Flanders, is the biggest party in the Belgian parliament. The Peoples Party and Freedom Party are now Austria's second and third most popular. The Swiss People's Party of Christoph Blocher is the largest in Bern. In France, the National Front humiliated the government this week, winning over half the vote in a suburb of Marseilles.

All are unabashedly ethnonationalist. Writes British diplomat Sir Christopher Meyer, "It is useless to say that nationalism and ethnic tribalism have no place in the international relations of the 21st century."

Meanwhile, global institutions, the United Nations, IMF and European Union, have lost their luster. Czechs -- whose president, Vaclav Klaus, regards the EU as a prison house of nations -- hold the EU presidency. When the financial crisis hit, Irish, Brits and Germans rushed to bail out their own banks, as did Americans, who rescued Ford, Chrysler and GM, leaving Toyota, Hyundai and Honda twisting in the wind.

This is economic nationalism.

Inside Ehud Olmert's cabinet, a rising star is Avigdor Lieberman. What Lieberman's "merry men" advocate, writes the American Prospect, is "ethnic cleansing: As the creepy name (which translates into 'Our Home Is Israel') suggests, Yisrael Beiteinu believes the million-plus Arab citizens of Israel must be expelled."

Barack won the African-American vote 97 percent to 3 percent over John McCain, and 90 percent to 10 percent over Hillary Clinton in the later primaries. McCain ran stronger than George W. Bush only in Appalachia, the laager of the Scots-Irish.

In Jerry Z. Muller's "Us and Them: The Enduring Power of Ethnic Nationalism," in Foreign Affairs, his thesis is summarized:

"Americans generally belittle the role of ethnic nationalism in politics. But ... it corresponds to some enduring propensities of the human spirit. It is galvanized by modernization, and ... it will drive global politics for generations to come. Once ethnic nationalism has captured the imagination of groups in a multiethnic society, ethnic disaggregation or partition is often the least bad answer."

Disaggregation or partition, the man said.

Are we really in a post-racial America, or is our multicultural multiethnic America, too, destined for Balkanization and break-up?