The Real America is Not About Blood and Soil
Ethnonationalist Garbage vs. Six Flags Great Adventure
1. The Amusement Park
A few days after ICE agents ripped kids out of their beds in Chicago, I went to Six Flags Great Adventure with my daughter.
It was a beautiful day, part of this elongated summer that’s either a random blessing or a sign of impending climate doom. And the crowd was just as you’d expect at a New Jersey amusement park: a broad, diverse group of all kinds of people from all kinds of backgrounds. There were Orthodox Jews in kippot enjoying the same rides as Muslim women in hijabs. People were Latino, white, South Asian, East Asian, Black, and mixes of all of the above.
None of this was remarkable; it’s what New Jersey, and much of America, looks like today. But the news was on my mind, so I noticed it more than I might’ve otherwise.
And mostly I thought, what the fuck is wrong with MAGA people.
I do “get it.” I grew up in Tampa, Florida in the 1980s, which despite having large Cuban and Puerto Rican communities was still a lot less diverse than it is today. Not only that, but open racism was celebrated (if already a little taboo) among us white kids. White people were the norm, and other people were the deviations from it. I didn’t personally fit in, as a Jewish, pre-gay, non-athletic nerd, but I passed, more or less. In any case it was obvious who was at the top of the social ladder. We were Americans.
Now, America looks different. There are more different-looking and different-acting people around, and some of them are in charge of things. But watching my daughter spin around on yet another nausea-inducing ride, I thought, So What? I get that it’s different, but can’t people accept that things change, and can still be good, or even get better?
Of course, I also “get” that, because of my outsider status, I never quite enjoyed the hegemonic position of straight, white, gender-typical Christians. I also thought that mainstream American society was stupid; I was a Catcher in the Rye kid in the Reagan years. I couldn’t wait to get out of Tampa and go to some college in the Northeast, where I thought things would be better. (They were.) So I never had that much to lose, I guess.
“We Can Return” says a new DHS ad. Return to what, exactly?
2. The Lies
It’s tricky to call any of this racism, because so much of it is subconscious or unconscious. Many (most?) people think of racism as a kind of conscious bias: holding ideas about the capacities, intelligence, or humanity of people based on their genetic history, and acting on the basis of those ideas. But most racism, studies have shown, operates unconsciously. A white person sees a group of Black kids gathered on the sidewalk and feels threatened. Is that racist? Consciously, they may think it’s a reasoned judgment about the risk of violence. But that judgment is based on years of consuming racist media and messaging, on biases may be unconscious, and a thousand other factors. It is racist, but it’s not felt to be racist, which one reason why nationalism and fascism function by giving permission to express the animus that is ordinarily forbidden.
True, the racism of MAGA has been more and more apparent, from Young Republican chat rooms and nominees to administration positions to the claims about Haitians eating pets, to the recently announced immigration policies that favor white immigrants over non-white ones. But still, there are protestations that anti-“illegal” sentiments (even though the very term “illegal” is a racist tell) aren’t racist but are about immigrant crime or violence, or the very act of immigrating illegally, or immigrants taking American jobs. It’s rare that nationalists (or as they have rebranded, National Conservatives) tell the truth — though I’ll turn to that in the next section. Mostly, it’s a long series of lies.
Yet it’s increasingly apparent, though I assume unreported by Fox or CBS News, that most migrants being rounded up by ICE have either no criminal record whatsoever or minor infractions like traffic tickets or pot busts. This isn’t new: even “illegal” immigrants commit crimes at a lower rate than native-born citizens. Gangs like Tren de Aragua and MS-13 exist, but their members surely account for less than a tenth of a percent of immigrants. Most migrants are here for obvious reasons: for economic opportunities or to escape violence in their home countries.
As for illegal immigration itself, in fact many migrants, while technically undocumented, have applied for asylum or other forms of legal protection but have to wait years (literally) to even get a hearing in our broken, underfunded, and Trump-rigged immigration system. For God’s sake, ICE is arresting people when they lawfully show up for their immigration hearings; no one can really maintain this is about illegal immigration when it’s the law-abiding migrants getting thrown into detention centers. And of course, all those immigration laws are of relatively recent coinage; when my grandparents came here from Eastern Europe, they didn’t even exist.
Meanwhile, immigrants are largely either (a) doing jobs that native-born citizens don’t want to do at rates that employers want to pay them, or (b) getting H1B visas because our country’s educational system has failed to produce enough skilled employees for the tech and medical industries. Resentful MAGA supporters need to look in the mirror at their lack of qualifications, or at Republicans’ refusal to raise the minimum wage.
The lies all collapse. And what is left?
3. The Truth
Once you strip away the false claims of criminality or violence or the stealing of American jobs, what you’re left with is the truth: that some mostly-white people don’t like the way the country is changing. They don’t like that there’s more Spanish being spoken, more Islam being practiced, more Asian Americans in universities and tech jobs. They don’t like the scene at Great Adventure, with the people in their weird clothes and the Black kids acting uppity. They don’t like that my husband and I could legally marry and raise our daughter. They miss the old America.
And lately they are saying the quiet part out loud.
On July 5, JD Vance gave a speech to the Claremont Institute in which he said the following:
Social bonds form among people who have something in common. They share the same neighborhood. They share the same church. They send their kids to the same school. And what we’re doing is recognizing that if you stop importing millions of foreigners into the country, you allow that social cohesion to form naturally…
If you think about it, identifying America just with agreeing with the principles, let’s say, of the Declaration of Independence, that’s a definition that is way over-inclusive and under-inclusive at the same time. What do I mean by that? Well, first of all, it would include hundreds of millions, maybe billions of foreign citizens who agree with the principles of the Declaration of Independence. Must we admit all of them tomorrow? If you follow that logic of America as a purely creedal nation, America purely as an idea, that is where it would lead you. But at the same time, that answer would also reject a lot of people that the ADL would label as domestic extremists. Even though those very Americans had their ancestors fight in the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. And I happen to think that it’s absurd, and the modern left seems dedicated to doing this, to saying, you don’t belong in America unless you agree with progressive liberalism in 2025. I think the people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War have a hell of a lot more claim over America than the people who say they don’t belong.
This is a fundamental redefinition — and a profoundly un-American one — of what the United States of America is meant to be. For Abraham Lincoln, America was fundamentally defined by the “abstract truth [of the Declaration of Independence] applicable to all men and all times… a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression.” This is how he could insist that slavery could be abolished, over the objections of a lot of people whose ancestors fought in the Revolutionary War: because slavery was Un-American. (Notice the descendants of slaves didn’t fit into Vance’s hierarchy.) As are, yes, the ideologies of today’s domestic terrorists, who renounce all “claim over America” when they take up arms against innocent people on the basis of political, religious, or racial affiliations. Obviously.
As I wrote about a few months ago, it’s as if we live in different countries. To me, the crowd at Great Adventure reflects the best of America: its diversity, its commitments to equality, its multicultural reality. To Vance, they are less American than he is. To him, being American is a national identity, and patriotism is less about upholding values than celebrating our national-cultural heritage. Perhaps they are to be tolerated, but, as Vance said of his own Indian-American wife, they will never be as American as other people are.
At the recent National Conservatism conference, Missouri Senator Eric Schmitt made this case even more strongly, perhaps channeling his namesake Carl Schmitt:
The Continental Army soldiers dying of frostbite at Valley Forge, the Pilgrims struggling to survive in the hard winter soil of Plymouth, the pioneers striking out from Missouri for the wild and dangerous frontier, the outnumbered Kentucky settlers repelling wave after wave of Indian war band attacks from behind their stockade walls—all of them would be astonished to hear that they were only fighting for a “proposition.”
They believed they were forging a nation—a homeland for themselves and their descendants. They fought, they bled, they struggled, they died for us. They built this country for us…
We Americans are the sons and daughters of the Christian pilgrims that poured out from Europe’s shores to baptize a new world in their ancient faith. Our ancestors were driven here by destiny, possessed by urgent and fiery conviction, by burning belief, devoted to their cause and their God…
When they tear down our statues and monuments, mock our history, and insult our traditions, they’re attacking our future as well as our past. By changing the stories we tell about ourselves, they believe they can build a new America—with the new myths of a new people. But America does not belong to them. It belongs to us. It’s our home. It’s a heritage entrusted to us by our ancestors. It is a way of life that is ours, and only ours, and if we disappear, then America, too, will cease to exist.
Read that again: “We Americans are the sons and daughters of the Christian pilgrims that poured out from Europe’s shores to baptize a new world in their ancient faith.” In that reading, I can never be as American as Senator Schmitt is. (His German ancestors came here in the 1840s.) Nor can any non-European.
Now, unlike the false claims of immigrant crime, pet-eating, or job-stealing, Vance and Schmitt are at least saying something that is true: that they are, for lack of a better term, white supremacists who believe that they belong here more than others, and that that belonging is based on ethnicity and heritage. It is clearly true that many people believe that.
What is not true is everything else. That the descendants of slaves are also not real Americans. That America has always welcomed European immigrants — in fact, when Friedrich Drumpf came here in 1885, he was met with anti-German and anti-Catholic prejudice on the part of Anglo-Americans (and changed his name to Frederick Trump) which would later increase during the war years. Italian, Jewish, and Irish immigrants fared even worse.
And most of all, that this American nationalism has nothing to do with America’s core principles or founders. America is not the same as France or Finland, with a particular culture (or set of cultures) that has been here for five hundred years (and of course, those cultures have always evolved and been subject to migration of all sorts). There is nothing in our founding documents that establishes the United States as an ethno-state. Where does that come from? Only from opinions that people like Vance and Schmidt have about it, and the power they have often possessed, including now, to implement an ethno-nationalist vision which conveniently puts themselves at the top of the heap.
The Real America
As between Vance’s and Schmidt’s America and the America I saw at Great Adventure, I know which one I believe in and even sometimes love, for all its faults. I love precisely what Vance appears to hate: a multicultural America that continues to wrestle with itself, that has always been stained by racism, but that has an ‘idea’ of transcending it; the America defined by ideals like the rule of law, democracy, and the inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Honestly, I can’t believe that this even needs to be said, but apparently it does.
My hope is that MAGA represents the last, dying gasp of this old order – certainly, many of its adherents see it that way, as a last, desperate attempt to ‘save America,’ even if doing so requires the rollback of democracy itself. To be sure, they are indeed attempting to do just that: in advance of next year’s elections, they are gerrymandering, sending troops into cities, installing partisan ‘election integrity’ commissions, and doing everything they can to avoid having a fair election. And they may succeed in doing so.
But eventually, I think Great Adventure America will prevail. You only cheat when you know you can’t win a fair fight, and there are more of us — i.e., real Americans, from whatever background, who believe in the core values of this country — than them. Who knows, maybe some of their supporters might even come to understand that their problems are due to hyper-capitalism and economic inequity, not DEI, Antifa, or brown people.
I don’t meant to be too optimistic. Maybe this will never happen. Or maybe the change will come too late; maybe the combination of AI disruptions, global warming, and the weakening of America in the intervening years will leave us with the mere ruins of a country. I don’t know.
But I know the real America is out there. I saw it at Great Adventure. We are different, but we have a lot in common. We get along. We can enjoy a nice fall day at a park with our friends and families. And we’re not hung up on who is the whitest.
Thanks for your support of this work. Some pieces I’ve liked this week:
Thank heavens someone finally wrote this piece: Joel Wertheimer at
about why Section 230 of the CDA needs to be repealed and why tech companies should be held liable for the crap their algorithm promotes. I do not understand why we feel like this business model is an unchangeable fact of nature. It is not. Wertheimer’s analogy between Big Tech and Big Tobacco is insightful as well. Read this.- did a nice, juicy historical dive into why authoritarians always deputize goons and thugs.
- on the Trump educational ‘compact’ (including a nice summary of all the steps the regime has taken against universities).
Not to state the obvious, but Antifa Does Not Exist (from
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Oh, and buy the way, you can still buy a coke and a red truck, though I guess this is an antique truck built in the 1950s before the Civil Rights Act, so.
“There is nothing in our founding documents that establishes the United States as an ethno-state. “ This one statement says it all. Thank you,Jay, for putting into words all that I think but can’t always express.
Thank you, Jay!