Yglesias Comes Close to the Point

 This piece is a bit of a mess. It starts off talking about Elon Musk calling George Soros Magneto, weaves together strands of Jewish internationalism and nationalism, takes a side trip to Metropolis to check in with Superman then comes close to making an important point.

Here's the point that's REALLY important, the set-up is this:

But the debate is real. Joe Biden likes to say that America is an idea, and National Review editor Rich Lowry likes to disagree with that and go to National Conservatism conferences to explain that actually we’re a nation just like Hungary or anywhere else they have natcons.

So, political scientists define a nation as a group of people bound by a shared political identity. Usually, this correlates to an ethnic identity. You're "German" because you're ethnically German. The question that raises is what to make of the millions of immigrants living in Germany as citizens. Previously, this hasn't been much of an issue, as nations in Europe typically did not admit high numbers of immigrants. The United States consists mostly of ethnic groups that came to America from somewhere else - within the bounds of recorded history.

There's an argument that America is not a nation-state, but a state-nation that consists of multiple ethnic groups who are bound - not by identity but by adherence to the state. That's what Biden means by "America is an idea." 

The Yglesias does that Yglesias thing where he hand waves a bunch of important points away:

Obviously we can, to an extent, use words however we want. America isn’t just an idea, and you can call whatever it is that we are a “nation” if you want to. But I do think it’s important and true that the United States does not primarily conceive of itself as a nation in the sense that 19th-century nationalists intended — there’s no common volk, there’s no special connection to a special plot of land. There is an abstract set of principles you’re supposed to subscribe to, and there’s a kind of alarming-to-some arrogance about American exceptionalism. America is an idea, and it’s an idea that most Americans believe is correct.

There’s a critique from the right holding that really the greatness of America is embodied in a specific subset of its people, with the rest just a bunch of pious myth-making. 

This is actually the whole ballgame. First, Matt, we can't "use words however we want." We define words so that we can be precise in our meaning. People who wish to say that words mean whatever we want them to mean are trying to hide something or elide a truth.

So, we know what a "nation" is and we know that America struggles to meet that definition.

However, we can also say with increasing certainty that the American Right does in fact see America has having a nation, it's just that you filthy Democrats aren't part of it. It has deep roots in the early and mid-20th century: the "new" Klan of the 1920s, the John Birch Society, but Reagan Conservatism largely ignored this as an issue, giving rise to the myth that the GOP wasn't riddled with these people. Pat Buchanan showed how prevalent "blood and soil" nationalism was within the GOP. 

The trauma of 9/11 supercharged American xenophobia, and so you had Sarah Palin's "Real Americans" who did not live in the place where, in fact, most Americans live. "Real Americans" are White people who live close to the land. They are Christian in their identity (if imperfectly in their practice), and they stand opposed to the multicultural, pluralistic idea of America that Biden was referring to.

Trump is the warlord of this blood and soil nationalism. He is their - yes, I'm going full Godwin's Law here - Hitler. The charismatic-for-some-but-not-for-others who enrages his followers with appeals to a lost volkish Golden Age subverted by parasites who leech off Real Germans Americans.

It does not matter one fucking iota that Trump opposes Paul Ryan's plans for entitlement programs. That's not why a plurality of Republicans will follow this man anywhere. He took the idea that there are Real Americans and then the "American Carnage" of our cities, weaponized it and - briefly - won power with it.

That's it.

That's the story of American from 2016 until now.