JD Vance: Yeah. 

 SA: Where are we with the process, and whom do you view as the main obstacle to getting across the finish line? Is it the Russians, the Europeans, or the Ukrainians themselves?

 JDV: Well, look, there are challenges with all three groups. I mean, I actually got an update from our negotiators this morning. So the breakthrough that I do feel that we’ve made is that all of the issues are actually out in the open. There’s [initially] a little bit of a game of obfuscation, of hiding behind fake issues, not actually revealing your hand. And you see that with everybody in tough negotiations. And what we’ve seen from the Ukrainians [and] the Russians over the past couple of weeks is there is this real sense of what’s non-negotiable [and] what’s very negotiable. 

I think the Russians really want territorial control of the Donetsk. The Ukrainians understandably see that as a major security problem, [even as] they privately acknowledge that eventually, they’ll probably lose Donetsk — but, you know, eventually: it could be 12 months from now, it could be longer than that. So that territorial concession is a significant hold-up in the negotiations — that terrible territorial concession, I should say. 

I think that there were other somewhat more minor issues. Who controls the [Zaporizhzhia] nuclear facility? Can it be jointly controlled? Does it need to be controlled by one or more side? What ultimately happens with with ethnic Russians who are still in Ukraine? What happens with the ethnic Ukrainians who are still in Russia? Ukrainians who are currently in [Russian-occupied] territory but want to live in Ukraine? How do you facilitate that? And many of the Russians have asked similar questions. 

And then there’s, of course, a question about reconstruction, which I think, the Ukrainians are understandably very focused on, and the Russians are somewhat less focused on. And we’re just trying to work through all these things. And so I would say that any particular group right now is a barrier. I do think that everybody has participated, at least in the last few months, in the negotiation in good faith. Obviously, some of this stuff gets played out in the press because people are trying to push their PR leverage. I tend to see that as just the nature of the game, I don’t hold that against anybody for selectively leaking or sort of saying, ‘This provision is too pro-Russia’ or ‘This provision is too pro-Ukraine.’ I just sort of see it as inherent in the nature of the negotiation. 

We’re gonna try to get this thing solved. We’re going to keep on trying to negotiate. And I think that we’ve made progress, but sitting here today, I wouldn’t stay with confidence that we’re going to get to a peaceful resolution. I think there’s a good chance we will, I think there’s a good chance we won’t. 

SA: Pope Leo made some remarks, using pretty harsh rhetoric, suggesting that President Trump wants to break the Western Alliance structure or to sideline the Europeans? What would you say to that?

JDV: Look, especially as a practicing Catholic, I always try to be respectful to the Vatican. It is a diplomatic force for good, completely aside from its religious role. But look, I disagreed with what the pope said there. I think that that’s a particularly Euro-centric view of these negotiations. We’re not trying to destroy the European Alliance, we’re not trying to divide Europeans against one another. What we’re actually trying to do vis-à-vis Europe is to encourage them to be a little bit more self-sustaining. 

I think their economic policies have produced very broad-based continental stagnation. Their immigration policies have caused a significant backlash from the native population. I think that Europe doesn’t have a very good sense of itself right now, and you see that reflected in various measures of economic and cultural stagnation. We want Europe to reinvigorate itself. We want it to be much more self-sufficient, much more self-reliant. And look, the reality is, America sprang out of European civilization. We are fundamentally descended from a lot of European ideas. . . . That’s why we want a stronger Europe. We don’t want a weaker Europe. And we think that our views and our policies are, hopefully, trending in that direction, helping the Europeans where we can help them, but a lot of this is something I think the Europeans have to do themselves. 

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SA: But there’s a bit of a paradox there, isn’t there? Because on the one hand, the administration says that America in the past too often lectured the world on moral values and so on. And yet the National Security Strategy document that was recently published made certain claims about what Europe should be like civilizationally. So even to get them to be where we want to be, we still have to lecture them.

JDV: We have much greater cultural, religious, and economic ties with Europe than we do with anywhere else in the world. That is just the nature of things. And so I do think that we’re going to have certain moral conversations with Europe that we might not have, for example, with a Democratic Republic of the Congo, because there is this sense of shared history and shared cultural values. To tie it back to a more specific or direct American interest, France and the United Kingdom have nuclear weapons. If they allow themselves to be overwhelmed with very destructive moral ideas, then you allow nuclear weapons to fall in the hands of people who can actually cause very, very serious harm to the United States. 

SA: What sort of ideas?

JDV: I think there are, for example, Islamists-aligned or Islamist-adjacent people who hold office in European countries right now. Right now, maybe at an extremely low level, right? They’re winning mayoral elections, or they’re winning municipal elections. But it’s not inconceivable to imagine a scenario where a person with Islamist-adjacent views could have very significant influence in a European nuclear power. In the next five years? No. But 15 years from now? Absolutely. And that is very much a very direct threat to the United States of America. So I do think there are ways in which the moral conversation does absolutely bleed into America’s national-security interests. 

I just think that we want Europe to be strong and vibrant. I want Europe to be a place where Americans can go and visit, where there’s cultural sharing; Europeans are coming to American universities; Americans are going to European universities; where our militaries are fighting together, training together. That is impossible without some sense of a cultural foundation. The United States and Europe have that, but there’s a risk of losing it over the long term. 

SA: Turning to domestic politics and this tangle of issues around immigration and American belonging: it’s really sharply dividing the American Right. Just recently, as you know, a pair of dueling visions was presented at TPUSA by Ben Shapiro and Tucker Carlson. . . . 

JDV: I’ve heard, though I haven’t seen their speeches yet. 

SA: . . . And a lot of people want you to weigh in on one side of that, and they want you to denounce directly the Groypers and maybe Tucker Carlson for entertaining the Groypers. Will you?

JDV: First of all, I don’t think Tucker Carlson is a Groyper. 

SA: No. 

JDV: Tucker’s a friend of mine. And do I have disagreements with Tucker Carlson? Sure. I have disagreements with most of my friends, especially those who work in politics. You know this. Most people who know me know this. I’m [also] a very loyal person, and I am not going to get into the business of throwing friends under the bus. I can express substantive disagreements with them, but I find the idea that Tucker Carlson — who has one of the largest podcasts in the world, who has millions of listeners, who supported Donald Trump in the 2024 election, who supported me in the 2024 election — the idea that his views are somehow completely anathema to conservatism, that he has no place in the conservative movement, is frankly absurd. And I don’t think anybody actually believes it. 

I think that there’s a certain amount of gatekeeping where people are trying to settle their own ideological scores, and that’s what’s really going on here. 

On some of the broader issues, anti-Semitism, and all forms of ethnic hatred, have no place in the conservative movement. Whether you’re attacking somebody because they’re white or because they’re black or because they’re Jewish, I think it’s disgusting, and we should call that stuff out. 

SA: So you disavow Fuentes?

JDV: On Fuentes, I’ve criticized him in the past, but let me be clear: anyone who attacks my wife, whether their name is Jen Psaki or Nick Fuentes, can eat shit. That’s my official policy as vice president of the United States. And my attitude towards anybody, again, who is calling for judging people based on their ethnic heritage, whether they’re Jewish or white or anything else, it’s disgusting. We shouldn’t be doing it. [That said,] I think that Nick Fuentes, his influence within Donald Trump’s administration, and within a whole host of institutions on the Right, is vastly overstated — and frankly, it’s overstated by people who want to avoid having a foreign-policy conversation about America’s relationship with Israel. 

Now, I happen to believe that Israel is an important ally, [and] that there are certain things that we’re certainly going to work together on. But we’re also going to have very substantive disagreements with Israel, and that’s OK. And we should be able to say, ‘We agree with Israel on that issue, and we disagree with Israel on this other issue.’ Having that conversation is, I think, much less comfortable for a lot of people, because they want to focus on Nick Fuentes instead of on: why is Nick Fuentes gaining popularity or gaining notoriety? . . . Because 99% of Republicans, and I think probably 97% of Democrats, do not hate Jewish people for being Jewish. What is actually happening is that there is a real backlash to a consensus view in American foreign policy. I think we already had that conversation and not try to shut it down. Most Americans aren’t anti-Semitic. They’re never going to be anti-Semitic, and I think we should focus on the real debate. 

[On Fuentes’s racism,] let’s say you believe, as I do, that racism is bad, that we should judge people according to their deeds and not their ethnicity. Is Nick Fuentes really the problem in this country? He’s a podcaster. He has a dedicated group of young fans, and some of them have been shitty to my friends and family. Does that annoy me? Of course. But let’s keep some perspective. For the last five to 10 years, I’ve watched one-half of our political leadership go all in on the idea that discriminating against whites in college admissions and jobs is not just OK, but affirmatively good. Sometimes South and East Asians get caught up in this, too. If you believe racism is bad, Fuentes should occupy one second of your focus, and the people with actual political power who worked so hard to discriminate against white men should occupy many hours of it.

That same political movement, the Left, has also promoted wide open borders that necessarily leads to the destruction of social cohesion in the country that I love. Ethnic rivalry and balkanization is the inevitable consequence of these things. You don’t have to think it’s a good thing. I certainly don’t, but it’s a predictable consequence of what the Left has pushed for years.

Let’s bring it back to the personal: if you look at my kids — half white, half-South Asian — they were among the most discriminated against in the entire elite-college and jobs hierarchy under Joe Biden. And the Left explicitly promises to bring that hierarchy back if they ever again get power. It pisses me off that Fuentes calls my kids “jeet,” and I appreciate that Ro Khanna would never do that. You know what pisses me off a million times more? That Ro Khanna, AOC, and Chris Murphy would deny them jobs and opportunities because they have the wrong skin color.

SA: How do you define what it means to be an American? Obviously, you and I both reject the economic-zone account of America, and that has not brought us to a great place. But how do you react to a term like ‘Heritage American’?

Well, one, is a Heritage American somebody who’s from the late 17th century [or] the late 18th century? I think that it’s like a lot of these things, there are questions of definition. But, I mean, look, let me say a few things about this. 

Number one, do I think that there is something credal at the heart of the American identity? Absolutely! We take ourselves to be on a very unique national project, a project that is a very unusual compared to what the European nations were doing at the time, to what other nations in the world were doing at the time. We believe in the fundamental dignity and equality of every human being. That’s one of the reasons why I think Americans are just not a racist people. Black people don’t hate white people, white people don’t hate black people — that’s a good thing. 

That said, do I think that somebody who came to the United States 15 minutes ago has the same understanding of American culture and American identity as somebody whose family has been here for ten generations? No. Of course, I don’t believe that, because human beings are complex, and part of knowing a culture isn’t just believing certain things, but actually living in a culture, absorbing it. That happens multi-generationally. It happens over time. And so I guess my own view is a fusion of the two: it’s to recognize that human beings are inherently creatures of their time, of their place, of their family, of their community. And so we should expect that people who have a longer connection to the United States of America are going to understand it differently than somebody who came here on a tourist visa 15 minutes ago. We should also understand that believing certain core things, being able to express certain core democratic values is part of being an American. 

One last thing I’ll say about this is, I think there’s a tendency to try to over-intellectualize this stuff. When I talk about shared cultural traditions, shared practices, living in a country and sharing it with your neighbors and your community members, a lot of that is not stuff that you can teach in a book, right? It’s about: which sports teams do you follow? And what do you eat for dinner? And how do you communicate with your neighbors? It’s the cultural lingo that is dominant among certain generations, but not in other generations. It’s music, it’s art. There’s a whole host of things that make it. And I think the credal nationalists, the mistake that they make is thinking that you could absorb American culture just because you have the right ideas in your head. And I think that the racial nationalists — or anybody else who wants to say that it’s purely genetic or purely having some connection to the late-17th-century Mayflower descendants —  what they ignore is that people can accumulate it over time. [It] doesn’t happen overnight, but the idea that we have to be a static nation of people who came or who are descendant of those who came on the Mayflower, I think that’s also not consistent with American practice, either. 

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SA: But in terms of legal treatment, the person who got their passport yesterday versus the one who does trace ancestry back 10 generations — they don’t get different treatment, right?

JDV: No, no! Whether you got your citizenship an hour ago, or you got your citizenship or your family got citizenship 10 generations ago, we have to treat all Americans equally. I also think that we have to accept that if you overwhelm the country with too many new entrants, even if they believe the right things, even if they’re fundamentally good people, you do change the country in some profound way. And so, so much of the immigration debate, I think we try to create these very firm categories. And the reality is that America does pretty well assimilating people, so long as it’s a small number of people, and they’re given an amount of time to assimilate. The problem with American immigration . . . over the four years of the Biden administration, [was] that we let in too many people, too quickly. And if the numbers were much smaller, and we had tried to select for people who were much better at assimilating into American culture, I don’t think that everybody would be looking around and saying, ‘What the hell is going on?’ 

Somebody said to me recently that Gordon Wood — who’s sort of a famous historian [and] a credal nationalist — he thinks that we should cap the number of foreign people in the United States of America at 15%. Well, if you believe that, you’re acknowledging that there’s something about the American identity and character that has to be formed over time. You can’t just drop tens of millions of people into the country, expect them to believe the right things, and think that America won’t be changed for the worse because of it. 

SA: Can Christianity ease some of today’s identity tensions?

Yeah. Well, I think that, look, this is a much longer conversation, but I do think that when I talk about America having some common culture, I think Christianity is very much at the heart of that. With the exception of Jefferson and a couple of others, most of our Founding Fathers were devout Christians, and particularly, the people who were influential in each of the individual states were incredibly devout Christians. And that’s an important part. And I think there’s a lot about Christianity that is very useful, even if you’re not a Christian. I think Christianity gives us a common moral language. You saw that in the Civil Rights Era, you saw that during the Civil War. It was one of the ways that we were able to actually come together as a nation, post-Civil War: that shared Christian identity. I think that it gives us a way to actually understand our own sins as a nation, but also have forgiveness and grace towards one another. I think it’s very hard to have a concept of forgiveness and grace that is not rooted in some Christian idea. 

And so I think a lot of the woke wars of the early 21st century are because we had a sort of Christian moral language that was completely divorced from actual Christian moral practice. And, you know, the wokesters, they got a lot wrong. But the thing that they got most wrong is they had no account of grace and forgiveness, and that was completely deranging to American culture. 

SA: How do you balance the demands of your faith and your public responsibilities. We talked about how the pope has disagreed with you on Ukraine, and also on immigration. It must be incredibly difficult to navigate these tensions. It can’t be easy.

You know, I guess that I don’t think that it is that difficult, the balancing. When you ask yourself, what should America’s immigration policy be? Well, that’s a fundamentally moral judgment. Because I’m a Christian, Christianity influences that. And you have to ask a bunch of prudential questions, too, about how many people your country can absorb, who should be here, who shouldn’t, what’s in the best interests of the people who are already here in the United States of America? So you just have to balance a number of prudential and moral considerations, but that’s true in almost any vector of any person’s life, right? I mean, I think a person who’s a business leader or a worker at a factory or a mom or a dad, you’re constantly balancing the moral and the prudential and trying to ensure that you’re making smart judgments, but also moral judgments. That’s how I try to live my life, and when there are tensions, like, for example, when the Church criticizes our immigration policy, I try to remember that the Church has one moral perspective. I don’t think it’s right, by the way, to say, ‘Oh, you know, they should stay out of politics.’ I think unless your politics is informed by some moral judgment, it’s going to be very, very broken. 

[But] the pope in the Vatican, in Rome, is not going to be looking at an immigration policy with the same prudential lens that I have on. Yes, we have to treat people with humanity and dignity. Yes, we have to protect our borders. I’m also trying to protect the wages of workers. I’m trying to protect the social cohesion of the United States of America. I’m trying to ensure that we don’t have the rise of balkanization and ethnic hatred, which can happen when you have too much immigration too quickly. And so, yes, I take my Christian faith and moral teachings [seriously], and I also try to apply them in a very messy, real world that I live in. 

Read Sohrab Ahmari’s account of his interview with JD Vance here.

Engel allows Italian-Americans and Greek-Americans and other lesser breeds into the Heritage America tent, notwithstanding that it “was a significant sociopolitical mistake” to admit “the type of people that came here during the Ellis Island generation.” The likes of Andrew Cuomo, it seems, will be tolerated — but only if they “are ethno-culturally tied to the ethos and spirit of the United States prior to its definitional transformation into a Propositional Nation after World War II.” (Maybe there should be a lustration process, in which swarthy Ellis Island Americans ritually denounce Emma Lazarus’s poem “The New Colossus,” inscribed on the Statue of Liberty.)

According to Engel, Heritage America “includes the blacks of the Old South (like Booker T. Washington), though it repudiates any instinct that some of them have to leverage their experience for the purposes of political guilt in our time. It also includes integrated Native Americans with the same stipulation.” Ah, there are stipulations. So black and Native-American membership in Heritage America is conditional on their agreeing with Engel’s ideology — otherwise, no Heritage for them. Meanwhile, “peoples like Indians, or Southeast Asians, or Ecuadorians or immigrated [sic] Africans are the least capable of fitting in and should be sent home immediately.” Under the New Order, then, Vice President JD Vance will have to visit his Indian-American wife and mixed-race children in South Asia.

All of this turns my thoughts turn to an important question: Am I a Heritage American?

My earliest ancestor in the New World, according to family tradition, was a Scottish pirate who practiced his trade in the Chesapeake Bay in the early 17th century, following the founding of Jamestown. In 1648, another ancestor, Thomas Lane, was one of 47 people “transported” from England to labor on the plantation of a gentleman who had been granted 2,350 acres in Virginia that had been carved out of “Indian lands” only three years earlier. His descendant William Lane Sr. became a wealthy slaveowner in Fairfax County and a captain in the Virginia militia during the American Revolution.

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One Tennessean ancestor of mine fought at the Battle of New Orleans under Andrew Jackson and died of a disease contracted in camp. Another had his farm in Georgia burned by Union forces during Sherman’s march in the Civil War. Still another ancestor, a member of the US Cavalry, was shot while fighting Indians on the western plains during the Civil War; he survived and came to central Texas as part of the federal Reconstruction forces. The family heirlooms I own include a small arsenal: a stiletto dagger; two flintlock pistols and a powder horn; a vintage Colt Walker revolver; some Civil War minie balls and a grenade; the sword given by the Army to my great-grandfather, who served in the Spanish-American War.

Last but not least, after the Civil War, my great-great-great grandfather, a Texas cowboy, proposed to his bride by handing her a letter from horseback before he rode off to join a cattle drive. And a distant relative of mine in a collateral line was Wyatt Earp, the legendary lawman of O.K. Corral gunfight fame. Sounds pretty Heritage-y to me.

But those are all maternal ancestors. On my father’s side, I am a third-generation Swedish-American, and according to Pastor Joel Webbon, another white-nationalist firebrand with growing influence these days, “first-generation immigrants can never be true Americans. But neither can [the] second generation, even if born and raised here.”

He has a point. It takes diasporas a while to dissolve, if they are not replenished. My Swedish-born great-grandmother would ask her children, when they brought home friends from the one-room prairie schoolhouse, “Ar de svenskar eller Amerikaner?” (“Are they Swedes or Americans?”)

Then again, the immigrant Swedish-American pioneers and their children were white and Protestant, and they cleared land for small family farms. One of my ancestors on the Swedish side worked as a cowboy on a cattle ranch. Heritage or Hyphenates?

To complicate matters further, I am also one-eighth Jewish (the Union cavalryman shot by the American Indian during the Civil War was an Austrian-Jewish immigrant). Can Jews be Heritage Americans? According to Pastor Webbon, America is “not for Hindus. It’s not for Muslims. And it’s not for Jews. It belongs to Christians.” Non-Christians “can be in the car … but they don’t get to drive.” Now I’m worried that my driver’s license will be revoked in the Heritage American Regime.

My identity crisis deepens. To be fair, I have been confused about my racial identity for most of my life. According to the US Census, I was born a simple “white.” But then, in the 1970s, the federal government resolved that I’m a “non-Hispanic white,” a term made up by the Census in those years as a catch-all encompassing every white ethnic group that doesn’t know how to make good tamales. Under the Biden administration, the Census added a new category, “Middle Eastern and North African,” or MENA, that includes many ethnically Jewish people (in addition to Persians, Gulf Arabs, Levantines and Mesopotamians, and Amazighs, among others). Am I still a non-Hispanic white, or, as a one-eighth Jew, am I a MENA?

Confusing matters further, under halachic law, I am Jewish because my mother’s mother’s mother was Jewish. And yet under the Nazi Nuremberg Laws, I would have been classified as a non-Jewish Mischling of the second degree, rather than a Jew.

Bottom line: I don’t know whether I am a simple white, a non-Hispanic white, a MENA, a Jew, a second-degree Mischling, or a Heritage American.

Let’s turn from biological race to American culture. According to Ben R. Crenshaw, a doctoral student at Hillsdale College and another race-Right theorist: “Liberalism only ‘worked’ in America because these [white British Protestant] identities were commonly known and accepted… Thus, if America hopes to regain her strength, to preserve her historic people and way of life, and not be plundered of her wealth and inheritance by international pirates, then she must recover her own identity politics. She must ask and answer with force and conviction what her identity is. And then, she must have the political will to once again practice a politics of exclusion and preservation if she hopes to remain America much longer.”

Who knew that everything good in this country was done by my old-stock ancestors before all those non-British Europeans at Ellis Island and recent immigrants from elsewhere in the world arrived and screwed everything up? Is there a club I can join, like Sons of Heritage America? A secret handshake? Discounts on Heritage Americana on sale at the local Cracker Barrel?

I have to confess that I like the idea that, if I qualify as a Heritage American, citizens of other ancestries should ritually offer their thanks to my progenitors. It would be nice if, when I am on an airplane, the pilot would announce: “We have a Heritage American on the flight today, please give him a round of applause.” And I would smile benignly as strangers shook my hand, saying, “Thank you for the service of your British Protestant ancestors.”

To be honest, though, I’m not convinced my British ancestors really deserve to be retroactively thanked for taking part in a heroic, visionary effort to found a new society. Most of them just wanted to buy land and maybe slaves and make money. Many of my colonial-era English ancestors in the 1600s seem to have been indentured servants, brought over as contract laborers to work for fixed terms for this or that Southern tobacco farmer with a headright granted by the Crown, before obtaining their freedom.

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As for the Scots-Irish in my family tree, they didn’t cross the Atlantic from Northern Ireland in the 1700s because they had a bold spirit of adventure and wanted to wrassle bears, wear coonskin caps, make moonshine, and invent NASCAR. They were victims of rising rents charged by English landlords who gentrified Ulster, after having used the Scots-Irish as their shock troops in subjugating and ethnically cleansing the Catholic Irish.

As far as I know, neither my English nor my Scots-Irish ancestors before 1776 had any intention of creating a nation-state organized as a democratic republic that would be independent of the British Empire and a beacon of liberty to the world. Only a few zealous Puritans in New England had grand visions of the American future, hoping that the saints of New England would launch the conversion of humanity to Calvinism — not liberal democracy.

To be fair, pan-racial categories like non-Hispanic white and “MENA” and Asian and Pacific Islander are just as absurd as the idea of a pan-white, pan-Christian, or pan-Protestant Heritage American. The political scientist Eric Kaufmann has observed that the US system since the 1970s has been one of “asymmetric multiculturalism” — pan-racial categories get to have their own official “cultures” and “traditions” and “symbols,” but that is not allowed for whites — sorry, non-Hispanic whites.

Forget, for a moment, domineering white Christian nationalism. Why not allow symmetrical multiculturalism, in which the color white is added to the rainbow in a non-aggressive way?  Why not White Pride Week and White Heritage Month and a White History Museum on the national mall, where tourists can learn about the many contributions to our country of white Americans like George Washington and Thomas Edison and Lady Gaga?

The problem is that many stereotypically “white” cultural traditions are not, in fact, white in their origins. For centuries, despite division along the lines of racial castes, American culture has been a mixed-race melting-pot culture. The archetypical corn-fed Midwestern farm boy was fed on maize, developed originally in Mesoamerica by Native Americans. Barbecue? From barbacoa, a loan word in Spanish from the Taino Indians of the Caribbean for a meat smoker.

The American cowboy is a version of the Mexican vaquero, from his lariat (la reata) to his chaps (chaparreras) to his boots. In the 1950s and ’60s, a majority of American suburban houses were ranch-style homes, popularized by Cliff May, whose one-story designs with patios (another Spanish word) were inspired by the homes of his Spanish and Mexican ancestors in California. The banjo? An African instrument, brought to the New World by slaves and popularized among whites by 19th-century minstrel shows.

If you throw out everything in white American culture except colonial-era British Protestant imports, you’re left with — what, exactly? Boston baked beans? Buckled shoes? So maybe we should think twice before inventing Kwanzaa for white people.

Like pan-racial “cultures,” pan-racial political solidarity of any kind is rare in the United States. The slowly eroding bloc voting of black Americans is the exception to the rule. Though tilting toward Democrats, Hispanics and Asian-Americans have long divided their votes between the two parties. So have so-called Heritage Americans.

The Patriot and Loyalist factions in the Anglo-Protestant majority fought each in the Revolutionary War. A few generations later, Northern Anglo-Protestants and Southern Anglo-Protestants fought in the Civil War, which killed more Americans — mostly white Protestant Americans — than all other US conflicts combined.

Plus, white Americans have always been found in rival parties. In the 2024 election, white voters, who made up 71% of the electorate, were pretty evenly split, with 57% voting for Trump and 42% voting for Harris. To the perpetual dismay of white nationalists, the political divisions among white Americans — regional, religious, cultural, class-based — have always defeated any pan-white consciousness, even in the most racist eras in American history. Though a few of its members may infiltrate the Republican Party now and then, the fringe Right will remain on the fringe because there is no chance that normal, sane white Americans will ever be persuaded that they must set aside their other differences and unite in politics against domestic racial and religious minorities and nonwhite and non-Christian immigrants.

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Darryl Cooper, the online autodidact who provoked outrage when Tucker Carlson let him spread his revisionist views about Nazi mass murder, made this obvious point in a podcast with the nativist writer Scott Greer: “Most of the Southern racialists I know are closer to neo-Confederates than white nationalists, and don’t labor under the illusion that they share much of a common destiny, let alone a common identity, with Portland hipsters or Upper East Side Jews, or even liberal Yankee elites, for that matter.”

Given the many divisions among Heritage Americans, the United States isn’t going to become a white Protestant ethno-state any time soon — certainly not under President Trump, with his Jewish in-laws and Jewish-convert daughter. Indeed, the only way in which the GOP can hope to obtain a sustainable political majority is to build upon the gains made by Trump in the 2024 election among working-class Hispanic and black voters.

Contra the Heritage Americans, the racial divide is weakening in US politics and giving way to the “diploma divide” among all races. Nothing could undercut the growth of the Republican coalition more than toleration by mainstream Republicans and conservatives of fringe white nationalists, who have podcasts and fly-by-night churches and rural compounds, but no significant number of voters behind them. To quote Tennessee lawmaker and frontiersman David Crockett, a Heritage American if ever there was one: “That don’t make sense. It don’t even make good nonsense.”