I.

In his speech at the RNC accepting the vice-presidential nomination last summer, J.D. Vance said: “America is not just an idea. It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation.” This apparently banal observation has been a rallying cry for conservatives throughout the Trump era. In his 2019 book The Case for Nationalism: How It Made Us Powerful, United, and Free, National Review’s editor-in-chief Rich Lowry declares that “America is a nation, whose sovereignty and borders are dear to it, whose history and culture are an indispensable glue, whose interests guide her actions (or should).” The conception of America as an idea, Lowry writes, is “one of our most honored national clichés,” but it is “simply wrong as a factual and historical matter.”

Vance, Lowry, and others on the nationalist Right argue that their political opponents are rootless globalists who care more about some gauzy idea of universal solidarity than they care about their fellow citizens. This belief has led to the creation of movements like National Conservatism, which declares in its statement of principles:

We emphasize the idea of the nation because we see a world of independent nations—each pursuing its own national interests and upholding national traditions that are its own—as the only genuine alternative to universalist ideologies now seeking to impose a homogenizing, locality-destroying imperium over the entire globe.

Vance made his point about American nationhood at a National Conservatism conference a few days before accepting the vice-presidential nomination. His speech was titled: “America Is a Nation.”

For nationalists, the problem with building nationhood on ideas like individual rights, the rule of law, and democracy is that they’re universal, not particular. There are many law-bound and rights-based democracies, so defining a country like the United States in this way is unappealing to those in search of a unique national identity. Which is why nationalists in the United States focus on what they believe is exclusively American—culture; demographics; territory. And it is why they reject the idea that anyone can, in principle, become an American—an idea captured by the country’s founding motto E Pluribus Unum.

The nationalist Right has specific ideas about who belongs in a nation and who does not. In a recent article for the Federalist titled “America Is a Nation, Not an Idea,” John Daniel Davidson advocates importing “pioneers and pilgrims” of the white Afrikaner minority from South Africa over a “Muslim from the Middle East” or a “computer programmer from India.” According to Davidson, when Trump offered “Afrikaner farmers an expedited pathway to U.S. citizenship, the president acknowledged that America isn’t just an idea but a nation.”

Trump’s policy, Davidson contends, is a “repudiation of the popular but fatuous notion that any person from any culture or part of the world can become an American.” He concludes: “It matters where you come from, what you believe, and how you live.” If you’re the white descendant of Dutch settlers who arrived in South Africa in the 17th century, it evidently doesn’t matter if you’ve never been to the United States and have no connections to the country—Davidson believes you will be able to “assimilate to our American way of life,” so you deserve to be fast-tracked as a citizen. Davidson argues that citizenship should be contingent on his subjective judgment about who deserves to be welcomed into the country and who should be turned away.

Davidson cites Vance’s vice presidential nomination speech, in which he referred (as he often does) to a “small mountain cemetery plot in eastern Kentucky” where he plans to be buried next to generations of his family. According to Vance, people in Kentucky coal country who are buried in small family plots “love this country, not only because it’s a good idea, but because in their bones they know that this is their home.” That Afrikaners don’t have family plots on hillsides and in fields across the country doesn’t matter because anyone who becomes a naturalised American citizen is every bit as American as J.D. Vance or John Daniel Davidson. This includes Muslims, atheists, Sikhs, and Hindus like the Second Lady of the United States.

American nationalists like to point out that their emphasis on national identity is “far from being racist or xenophobic,” as Davidson puts it. The National Conservatism website stipulates that the movement seeks to recover the “rich tradition of national conservative thought … in stark opposition to political theories grounded in race.” It’s certainly possible to be a nationalist shorn of racism or xenophobia, but why are Davidson and other supporters of the Trump administration’s policy toward Afrikaners so keen on this group? There are hundreds of millions of Christians in Africa, and the vast majority of them are not white. Vance is a Catholic, and his faith is growing faster in Africa than anywhere else on earth. Catholicism is the dominant faith in Mexico, and many Mexicans have much deeper connections to the United States—such as generations of family members who live in America—than Afrikaners.

Nationalists say that “Judeo-Christian values” are central to American nationhood. “Where a Christian majority exists,” the National Conservatism statement of principles declares, “public life should be rooted in Christianity and its moral vision, which should be honored by the state and other institutions both public and private.” But even if we accept this exchange of the First Amendment for a country organised on religious lines, where does that leave the world’s nonwhite Christians, many of whom face urgent existential threats? Afrikaners are in peril, but so are Copts in Egypt and Christians in Sudan and Syria.

There are millions of oppressed Christians across the Middle East, Asia, sub-Saharan Africa, and even Eastern Europe. Non-Russian Orthodox Christians in Eastern Ukraine are being systematically targeted by Russian forces, but the Trump administration is considering the deportation of Ukrainian refugees. Vance says he doesn’t “really care what happens to Ukraine one way or the other,” which presumably means he doesn’t care what happens to Ukraine’s Christians. So, perhaps the United States’ immigration policies aren’t being driven by American values at all, but rather by political patronage. Elon Musk is one of the most powerful people in Trump’s orbit, and he believes a “genocide” is taking place against white farmers in South Africa—the country where he was born.

Davidson disdains the idea that people can become Americans “simply by going through a neutral administrative process.” The Trump administration wants to deport millions of undocumented immigrants, many of whom have lived in the United States for decades. They have families, jobs, and homes here, and would scarcely recognise their “own” countries if they were forced to return to them. The only thing separating these people from being official Americans is a neutral administrative process that should have been completed long ago. By Vance and Davidson’s standards, what makes an Afrikaner who has never touched American soil more American than these undocumented immigrants?

Any attempt to essentialise Americans according to some preferred religious faith or ideology is absurd. A US-born daughter of undocumented immigrants who lives in Los Angeles is every bit as American as a coal miner whose family is buried in some Appalachian plot. There have always been political opportunists and demagogues who say they can decide who is a true American and who isn’t, but they have no such power or right. Trump may think he can snap his fingers and eliminate the Fourteenth Amendment or wish away the vast diversity that makes up the United States, but Americans should not participate in this ugly delusion.

II.

N.S. Lyons is a prominent national-conservative writer who publishes a Substack called “The Upheaval.” In a recent essay titled “Love of a Nation,” Lyons argues that the nation can be likened to a family and criticises those who view the United States as a “corporation,” which “can afford no permanent relational bonds with any of those who work for it, as it must be able to fire or replace them based on cold utilitarian calculus.” He discusses a recent controversy involving Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy about H-1B visas. In making his case for the immigration of highly skilled workers like software engineers, Musk said he thinks of “America as a pro sports team that has been winning for a long time and wants to keep winning.” Ramaswamy claimed companies hire foreign-born talent because American culture has “venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long.”

Musk and Ramaswamy quickly discovered that the MAGA world they now inhabit doesn’t embrace these views. The MAGA activist Laura Loomer announced that Ramaswamy “knows that the Great Replacement is real”—a conspiracy theory that Democrats are importing foreign voters to win elections, which Musk has endorsed. “If India is such a high skilled society,” she demanded, “why does it look like this?” She attached a picture of a crowded and dirty beach. “You’re still not our President,” she told Musk. “The real President knows H1B visas are bad for America and the real President is from this country.”

Musk and Ramaswamy received similar criticism from other MAGA pundits like Mike Cernovich, as well as a wave of angry pro-Trump accounts on X. An “America First” immigration policy, they said, should always prioritise native-born citizens in the labour market, regardless of their qualifications. In his inaugural address, Trump promised to “forge a society that is colorblind and merit-based” and he reflexively blames DEI when things go wrong (after air disasters, for example). But the idea of forging a merit-based society evidently stops at the border.

The World Trump Is Building

The strong will do what they can and the weak will suffer what they must.

QuilletteMatt Johnson

Lyons accuses Musk and Ramaswamy of displaying “no sense of loyalty or obligation to Americans as a nation.” According to Lyons, a “nation really is much like a family. … We cannot, say, swap out our child for a different one who is more likely to get better grades in math class or is willing to perform chores for a lesser allowance.” But Lyons is beating a straw man—nobody is arguing that the United States should “swap” its citizens for foreigners. People who support increasing the number of H-1B visas, expanding the asylum system, or accelerating immigration in other ways don’t view these policies as a way to displace or injure Americans who are already here. Immigrants aren’t a net drain on society—they add tremendous value in many spheres, from building companies (which often employ American workers) to working vital jobs and serving in the armed forces.

“A healthy family,” according to Lyons, “is founded, ordered, governed, and sustained by love” and this love can’t be universal: “We love those people and those good things which are distinct and special to us, and those that are particularly our own all the more, but this hardly implies that we must then automatically hate all others.” He argues that this “twisted logic is today widely ascribed to one important expression of love: love for our own nation.” Of course, all nationalists don’t hate foreigners—this is another straw man—but in practice, nationalism often leads to essentialism and prejudice. How would Lyons classify Trump’s claim that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of our country”? Doesn’t a statement like that stray beyond love for one’s own nation?

Lyons’s family analogy betrays a naive view of nationhood that downplays the role of laws and institutions and elevates an anachronistic sense of noblesse oblige instead. “It is a modern conceit,” he writes, “that those with power are kept restrained, uncorrupted, and ordered to justice and the common good primarily by lifeless structural guardrails, by the abstract checks and balances of constitutions and laws.” He continues:

The ancients would have maintained that it is far more important that a king be virtuous, and that he love his people. And is this not plausible? Fundamentally, a father doesn’t treat his children well, refraining from abusing or neglecting them and raising them rightly, just because he obediently follows the law or some correct set of rules and standard operating procedures. He does so because he loves his family, and from that love flows automatically a spontaneous ordering of all his intentions toward their good. He would do so even in the absence of externally imposed rules. Love is an invisible hand all its own.

Lyons appears to believe that modern states should be ruled by paternalistic leaders who view citizens as children to be cared for rather than free individuals whose rights and will they must respect. But the whole reason the United States was established as a constitutional, law-bound republic was to reject this kind of patrimonial rule. The Founders didn’t want to be led by a benevolent father or a virtuous king. That’s why they created a system which vests ultimate power in the people, who can depose their leaders through regular free and fair elections. It’s why the United States has a system of checks and balances to ensure that citizens aren’t dependent upon the good will of a single individual. It’s why the rule of law supersedes the rule of the leader. Americans don’t have to put all their faith in the “invisible hand” of Trump’s “love.”

For someone so concerned about the loving bonds of familial nationhood, it’s surprising that Lyons is a Trump supporter. In another recent essay, he argues that “Trump 2.0 seems to be the first administration serious about delivering on democratic demands for real change in American governance since FDR.” He celebrates Trump’s effort to dismantle the “deep state.” “Trump himself is a man of action,” Lyons enthuses, “not rumination.” Trump is “purging the state of the latest ideological evolution of open society orthodoxy (‘Diversity, Equity, Inclusion’).” He’s dismantling pointless “proceduralism” in domestic and foreign policy. He’s using American power to “benefit the nation” instead of “adhering to polite fictions like international law.”

According to Lyons, Trump is restoring what R.R. Reno (a well-known national conservative and the editor-in-chief of First Things magazine) describes as “strong gods”: “strong beliefs and strong truth claims, strong moral codes, strong relational bonds, strong communal identities and connections to place and past.” Strong truth claims? Trump lies incessantly about everything from how much aid the United States has sent Ukraine to how water flows in California. Strong moral codes? Trump tried to overturn an American election and inflamed a mob that was threatening to hang his own vice president. Strong relational bonds? Trump describes Americans who disagree with him as “enemies from within” who pose a greater threat to the country than Russia or China.

Lyons uses the word “love” fifty times in his essay about nationalism. He says “Our leadership classes’ lack of love for their own people is dissolving our societies.” He claims that “Love is the only force capable of genuinely liberating us from selfishness.” And he supports a president who describes Americans as “vermin,” “corrupt,” “sick,” “thugs,” and “fascists.”

III.

“In our age,” Lyons writes, “the very idea of nationhood is itself decried, or outright denied, the nation-state stripped of the nation, the world reduced to a network of special economic zones.” He argues that the destruction of the concept of nationhood is the “result of a deliberate, 80 year conspiracy against love, conducted out of fear.” He continues:

After WWII, with the trauma of war and totalitarianism haunting the world, the American and European leadership class resolved that these evils should never again threaten society. And they concluded that the emotional power of nationalism had been the central cause of the 20th century’s catastrophes, leading them to make anti-nationalism the cornerstone of the liberal establishment consensus that came to dominate culture and politics after the war.

According to Lyons, today’s political elites have been taught not to love their own countries “any more than any other portion of humanity; their self-conceived domain is one without borders, the global empire of the open society.” This has led to a profusion of “managerial regimes” that are “characterized by vast, soulless administrative states of unaccountable bureaucracies.” Because Western governments were afraid of the return of Nazism and the other horrors of the 20th century, Lyons argues, they had to “fully banish all the ‘strong gods’ that fueled conflict.” This meant getting rid of “family, nation, truth, [and] God.”

Where or what is this godless globalist dystopia that Lyons is describing? It certainly isn’t postwar America. In 1948, 91 percent of Americans described themselves as Christians—a proportion that rose to 96 percent by 1956 and remained above 90 percent until the early 1970s. American politicians routinely invoked their Christian faith in the public square throughout the Cold War, which was often characterised as an existential battle against a godless ideology. In 1954, President Dwight D. Eisenhower added the words “under God” to the American Pledge of Allegiance. In July 1956, he signed a bill which designated “In God we trust” as the United States’ official national motto. The decline of religiosity in recent decades is unlikely to have been caused by the “global empire of the open society,” given the decades since that empire’s creation when levels of religious belief remained high. Does Lyons really think Ronald Reagan wanted to banish family, nation, and God?

Postwar American politicians didn’t want a world “without borders.” For many decades, this was a view associated with communism, which claimed to be a universal ideology that transcended national boundaries. Fear of communist infiltration and subversion led to McCarthyism—one of the many periods throughout American history when demagogues claimed to be capable of identifying “real” Americans and exposing the enemy within. In the era before the “80 year conspiracy against love”—a period presumably more closely aligned with Lyons’s nationalist values—the foreign-born percentage of the American population was several times higher than it was during World War II and in the decades after. This proportion kept declining until 1970, when it began to rise again. The immigrant population still hasn’t reached its all-time high of 14.8 percent, which was set in 1890.

Amid an economic boom, the confrontation with the Soviet Union, and national projects like the space race, the postwar years were a period of intense nationalism. The United States and its allies had just won World War II, and this inaugurated a period of American global dominance. It’s true that this was the birth of what is often called the liberal international order: the UN, NATO, the World Bank, the IMF, and GATT were all established within a five-year span after the war. But the United States’ commitment to globalism is almost always overridden by national interests—or at least the perception of those interests.

The 2003 invasion of Iraq, for instance, was arguably waged in contravention of international law and in the face of protests from allies like France (NATO as an institution didn’t have a formal role in the war, unlike in Afghanistan). The American Service-Members’ Protection Act (ASPA), enacted in 2002, gives the US president the authority to use “all means necessary and appropriate” to release Americans who are held by the International Criminal Court (ICC). This is why the ASPA is colloquially referred to as the “Hague Invasion Act.”

There are innumerable other examples of the United States privileging its perceived national interests over international norms, laws, and institutions. It’s impossible to imagine the United States joining a political and economic bloc like the EU, as this would require the country to exchange some degree of sovereignty for greater global cooperation. However, America’s allies and trading partners have long been willing to accept its hypocrisy on international laws and norms because they have so much to gain by doing so. The United States’ inconsistent commitment to the institutions of the postwar international order doesn’t change its pivotal role in constructing that order, nor does it change the fact that certain elements of American internationalism—like the commitment to the transatlantic alliance—have been reliable for the past eighty years. That is, until the second Trump administration took office.

IV.

Trump has always been hostile to free trade, NATO, and other foundational elements of the postwar international order. Until recently, the United States’ closest allies believed that this hostility would chiefly be expressed with the occasional temper tantrum about NATO defence spending and toothless threats to abandon allies and launch trade wars around the globe. Nobody believes that anymore.

The Trump administration is planning to withdraw from Europe and eliminate support for Ukraine. Trump is systematically destroying America’s relationships with its closest friends, imposing massive tariffs on Canada and Mexico, and threatening a sweeping trade war against Europe. The prospect of an American withdrawal from NATO suddenly feels inevitable. The Article V collective-defence provision is already moribund—nobody expects the Trump administration to come to the defence of threatened allies, particularly the small Baltic states, which face an especially high risk of Russian aggression. And nobody expects the United States to come to Taiwan’s defence in the event of a Chinese invasion or blockade, either.

Lyons and other national conservatives may struggle to explain how the Trump administration is putting America first. Its trade wars will have a disproportionately negative effect on middle- and working-class Americans, who will see the costs of goods surge. Trump failed to inaugurate a manufacturing renaissance in the United States during his first term, and it’s unlikely that he will manage to do so in his second. His inflationary policies (tariffs, mass deportations, and so on) are dramatically raising the risk of a recession. The trade blitzkrieg and rampant corruption will create an unstable and uncertain business environment, which will diminish the appeal of the United States for investors and force trading partners to look elsewhere for productive economic relationships.

The main beneficiaries of the Trump administration’s policies will be Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, the nexus of anti-Western authoritarian states around the world, and the wealthiest Americans who will enjoy multi-trillion-dollar tax cuts while the administration digs around for inconsequential savings by circumventing Congress and destroying entire federal agencies. The Americans Lyons claims to love so much will just get inflation, economic instability, the elimination of government support (something that has already incensed many Trump-supporting farmers), shrinking retirement accounts, and a more dangerous world. Americans may have supported Trump’s hard line on immigration, but they won’t be happy when deportations plus tariffs make every trip to the grocery store more expensive.

“Nationalism” in its MAGA iteration doesn’t mean expressing love and support for your compatriots and determining the best way to improve their lives. In today’s United States, it’s an ideology that seeks to undermine global partnerships and institutions regardless of whether those partnerships and institutions advance the country’s national interests. It’s an ideology that will diminish American power and wealth. Instead of considering how America has benefited from the global system of trade, political cooperation, and military alliances that have been painstakingly maintained for the past eighty years, the Trump administration is tearing that system down as quickly as possible with no idea of how to replace it.

Trump’s policies aren’t fuelled by a desire to support forgotten workers or grow the middle class. They’re fuelled by paranoid grievances about allies “screwing” the United States and delusions about how the global economy works. Trump believes America can simply shred its agreements and bully other countries into submission. He fails to understand that aggressive American nationalism creates defensive nationalism elsewhere—instead of immediately surrendering to Trump’s tariffs, Canadians have rallied around their government’s effort to fight back with retaliatory tariffs. Europe is poised to do the same, an effort that will be even more intense now that Trump is abandoning America’s security commitments to the continent.

Trump’s trade warfare isn’t even part of a coherent economic strategy, as he constantly vacillates between imposing and removing tariffs. His supporters stampede in one direction or the other depending on what the latest policy update happens to be—either Trump is a genius for removing tariffs after securing some token concession or he’s a genius for using tariffs to revitalise American manufacturing. Both can’t be true at once.

Meanwhile, the destruction of the American alliance system will empower authoritarian states like Russia and China and drastically increase the likelihood of war. Trump constantly boasts about his ability to achieve “peace through strength,” but the main source of America’s strength for the past eighty years has been its role as the anchor of the Western alliance. Trump’s version of American power is a caricature from the 19th century in which acquiring territory in the Western hemisphere (like Greenland and Panama) is more important than economic, political, and military cooperation with the rest of the democratic world. No wonder the Kremlin now says Trump’s foreign policy “largely aligns” with the Russian vision—a vision that is also based on lawless 19th-century imperialism.

The disastrous economic and geopolitical consequences of America First nationalism would be bad enough on their own, but the most dangerous aspect of this movement is the threat it poses to other Americans. If nationalism were actually based on solidarity with fellow citizens, its loudest spokesperson in the Western world wouldn’t be an authoritarian demagogue who has threatened to imprison Americans for opposing him. He tried to disenfranchise millions of Americans when he lost the election in 2020. He called for the “termination” of the Constitution and recently declared: “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.” If Trump’s apologists want to defend all of this, they are welcome to do so. But they should probably dial down the sentimental lectures about their deep and abiding love for their fellow Americans.