In this narrative, which has surged to the fore in response to Trump’s refugee and visa policies, we are a propositional nation bound together by ideas rather than any specific cultural traditions — a nation of immigrants drawn to Ellis Island, a nation of minorities claiming rights too long denied, a universal nation destined to welcome foreigners and defend liberty abroad.
.. saying that’s not who we are is a way of saying that all more particularist understandings of Americanism, all non-universalist forms of patriotic memory, need to be transcended.
.. But the real American past was particularist as well as universalist. Our founders built their a new order atop specifically European intellectual traditions. Our immigrants joined a settler culture, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant, that demanded assimilation to its norms.
.. Our great national drama was a westward expansion that conquered a native population rather than coexisting with it.
.. Then for a variety of reasons — a necessary reckoning with white supremacism, a new and diverse wave of immigration, the pull of a more globalist ethos, the waning of institutional religion — that mid-century story stopped making as much sense.
In its place emerged a left-wing narrative that stands in judgment on the racist-misogynist-robber baron past
.. prefer the melting pot to multiculturalism
.. assume a Judeo-Christian civil religion rather the “spiritual but not religious” version.
.. Trump’s ascent is, in part, an attempt to restore their story to pre-eminence.
.. we haven’t found a way to correct the story while honoring its full sweep — including all the white-male-Protestant-European protagonists to whom, for all their sins, we owe so much of our inheritance.
.. But any leader who wants to bury Trumpism (as opposed to just beating Trump) would need to reach for one — for a story about who we are and were, not just what we’re not, that the people who still believe in yesterday’s American story can recognize as their own.