Joe Lowndes writes:

A few days before Trump posted the “Chipocalypse Now” meme [targeting Chicago] on Truth Social, the fifth annual National Conservatism Conference (NatCon 5) was underway in Washington. That gathering, which has grown in influence over the last half-decade, mixed members of the Trump administration and elected officials with far-right influencers, white supremacists, Christian nationalists and far-right intellectuals. The main theme of the event was America under assault — meaning not an assault on its freedoms, its democracy or its Constitution, the way the right used to frame it, but an assault on America as a distinctly racial entity.

In a plenary address titled “What is an American?” Sen. Eric Schmitt laid out a vision of peoplehood that eschewed the universal principles standing in the way of the historic birthright bestowed by Euro-American settlers. “For decades the mainstream consensus on the left and the right alike seemed to be that America itself was just an ‘idea,’” the Missouri Senator said. “We were told that the entire meaning of America boiled down to a few lines in a poem on the Statue of Liberty, and five words about equality in the Declaration of Independence.”

Schmitt went on to say that “the pioneers striking out from Missouri for the wild and dangerous frontier, the outnumbered Kentucky settlers repelling wave after wave of Indian warband attacks from beyond the stockade walls” would be “astonished to hear that they were only fighting for a proposition” rather than “a homeland for themselves and their descendants.”

Throughout the long Cold War era, American exceptionalist rhetoric entwined beliefs in national supremacy and empire with the ideals that were meant to justify it. In his 1989 presidential farewell address, for instance, Ronald Reagan invoked Puritan leader John Winthrop, as he often did, to refer to America as a “shining city on a hill,” one that was “teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here.”

But for today’s right, neither Winthrop’s light unto the nations, the promise of equality for all in the Declaration of Independence, the broad rights enshrined in the Constitution, nor the invitation by Emma Lazarus on the Statue of Liberty are universal touchstones of American political culture. They are rather a hindrance in the war to define the American nation by its historical particularity and, more importantly, its bloodlines. [Continue reading…]