Blood and Soil

The Right is committed to an idea of America as a white Christian homeland. They are determined to purge the nation and radically redraw the boundaries of the body politic.

credit: Scott Olson/Getty Images

Please note: I will record an article voiceover asap and plan to add an audio version of the essay by tomorrow morning

Three moments from the Republican National Convention in July.

One: On the final day of the Convention, retired professional wrestler Hulk Hogan came out to praise “my hero, that gladiator” Donald Trump, who he promised would “straighten this country out, for all the real Americans.” That was the key theme in Hogan’s speech – “real America”: “When Donald J. Trump becomes president of the United States, all the real Americans are gonna be nicknamed Trumpites,” Hogan declared. He could no longer stay out of politics, Hogan explained, because he loved America so much, and he loved Trump so much: “I am here tonight because I want the world to know that Donald Trump is a real American hero.”

Two: On the third night of the convention, it was vice presidential nominee J. D. Vance’s turn to introduce himself to the delegates and the country. What, to J.D. Vance, is America? “America is not just an idea,” he declared: “It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation.” America is the “homeland,” as Vance called it repeatedly, for those who are bound to it by ancestry, across many generations, whose blood and bones, quite literally, are tied to the soil. And according to J.D. Vance, they alone have a right to decide who gets to come to this nation, who gets to belong in America.

Three: On the same night J. D. Vance reveled in his love for the homeland, speakers at the Convention were greeted by an audience of delegates that was waving hundreds of “Mass Deportation Now!” signs. Those were official signs, printed and handed out by the RNC – a message enthusiastically embraced by those on the Convention floor.

Those three moments captured variations of the same theme, the same underlying political project. The “homeland” Vance talked about with such affection, that’s “real America.” The “real Americans” who energized Hulk Hogan are those who belong here because of their ties to the land via ancestry and blood. And those who, according to the “real Americans” and their leaders, don’t belong will be rounded up and thrown out: Mass Deportation Now. What we saw at the Republican Convention was a party devoted to an ethno-religious understanding of America as a land defined by white Christian patriarchal dominance – the self-presentation of a political movement committed to blood-and-soil nationalism.

What is “America”?

In many ways, we are experiencing the latest iteration of a very old struggle. Conflicting forms of nationalism have defined the American project since the beginning. One conceived of America as a credal nation. Anyone can be an American, in this understanding, as long as they subscribe to certain ideals and aspirations: Freedom, liberty, and that “all men are created equal.” Another rejected the aspirational creed as the basis of the nation and instead defined America in racial and religious terms, as a land in which wealthy white Christians deserve to rule and have a right to draw the boundaries of who and what gets to be “American.”

Proponents of this ethno-religious nationalism have also claimed to be defending freedom and liberty, but they understood them to be in tension with egalitarian ideals, if not outright incompatible with visions of equality. Their overriding concern was the liberty of certain “deserving” or “virtuous” individuals to be more, have more; their allegiance was to a particular form of “freedom” – the white freedom to take the land and curtail the liberties of others. Every form of domination in American history has been justified in the name of this “freedom.” The loudest and most influential defenders of Native American dispossession, slavery, and racial segregation have always presented themselves as champions of freedom from government tyranny or federal overreach.

The conflict between these different forms of nationalism has invariably shaped the question of how much democracy, and for whom, there should be in America. If America is defined by the egalitarian aspiration that all people are created equal, then a fully realized democracy is the order to best express and accommodate that. But if “real America” ceases to exist once white Christians are no longer in a position to shape the public square in accordance with their interests and sensibilities, then democracy must be restricted. And as the country becomes more pluralistic demographically and culturally, the need to curtail democratic participation becomes more acute. For those clinging to a white Christian ethno-nationalist conception of America, the key question has always been: How much authoritarianism is necessary to prevent too much democracy for too many people?

“America is not just an idea”

In his speech at the Republican convention, J.D. Vance explicitly acknowledged and embraced this ethno-religious nationalism that is incompatible with multiracial, pluralistic, gender-egalitarian democracy as the GOP’s defining project. While Vance agreed that “America was indeed founded on brilliant ideas,” he only counted the rule of law and religious liberty amongst those – while not mentioning equality at all. In fact, he specifically rejected the notion of America as defined by a unifying creed – one again: “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.”

Who is part of this group of people? That is decided by ancestry and blood. Vance traced his own history back many generations to the mid-nineteenth century as proof that he belonged among those who are one with the “homeland” they inherited. “They love this country,” Vance proclaimed, “not only because it’s a good idea, but because in their bones they know that this is their home.” These “real Americans” have become one with the land – a Volk inseparable from their homeland.

Vance’s aggressive misogyny and vision of patriarchal dominance are fully in line with such blood-and-soil ideology. In a white Christian nation, women must accept their lesser place in a hierarchy that manifests the “natural” and/or divinely ordained order – and they have a duty to secure the future by giving the homeland children.

Even when he was pretending to be embracing a form of pluralism, Vance outlined a vision that was irreconcilable with egalitarian ideals. “We welcome newcomers. But when we allow newcomers into our American family, we allow them on our terms.” Not everyone who is here gets to be equal. There is “We” who get to decide and there is “Them” whose status and citizenship is always conditional. “They” must accept “our terms.”

History Wars and national identity

America is “a group of people with a shared history,” J.D. Vance declared – but who gets to tell that story? It is not a coincidence that, as the country has become more pluralistic and the ethno-nationalist vision of America has increasingly come under pressure, history has moved to the center of the political conflict. Public debates over history, the past, the stories we tell about it, the way we teach it, are always struggles over national identity and who gets to define it. The national story can serve to legitimize and help entrench existing hierarchies of race, gender, religion, and wealth – or it can be told in a way that questions the status quo.

In the summer of 2019, the New York Times launched the 1619 Project which aimed at revising and retelling the American story by centering it around the Black struggle to realize the promise of multiracial democracy. The Right reacted with a collective outcry. Conservative pundits and commentators almost universally agreed that this wasn’t just bad history – it was *dangerous* history. The New York Times, Damon Linker lamented, had “surrendered to the sensibility of left-wing political activists.” Andrew Sullivan, still at New York Magazine, saw it as the evil work of a bunch of “neo-Marxists” and “critical race theorists.” Conservatives widely regarded the 1619 Project as evidence that radical leftwing forces had captured the powerful institutions of American life and were now engaged in a full-on, unpatriotic assault on the unifying national story and the very fabric of the nation.

When Donald Trump established his infamous 1776 Commission one year later, in the fall of 2020, he did it with the explicit goal of countering this assault and guaranteeing “patriotic education.” The Commission epitomized the anti-Critical Race Theory panic that was taking off at the time. The call for “patriotic education” was also a key element of the Right’s reaction to the widespread protests against racist police violence in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. When he announced the Commission, Trump described “the left-wing rioting and mayhem” as “the direct result of decades of left-wing indoctrination in our schools.” The attempt to mandate a white nationalist version of history was therefore very much part of a broader reactionary counter-mobilization, as the Black Lives Matter-led protests of 2020 were widely perceived on the Right as indisputable proof that the forces of leftwing subversion had already been allowed to advance too far. The 1776 Commission released its official report on January 18, 2021 – on MLK Day! – and was disbanded by President Biden immediately upon taking office just a few days later.

None of that was new, per se – the history wars have been raging since the beginning of public education in America. The current fight over the national story had its direct precursor in the battle over National History Standards for students from kindergarten through the end of high school in the mid-1990s. The idea to reform the history curriculum had been a bipartisan project originating in the Reagan era; it was headed by Lynne Cheney, Dick Cheney’s wife. But when the commission tasked with remaking the curriculum presented its suggestions in the fall of 1994, conservatives were outraged. Lynne Cheney herself denounced the new standards as “the end of history” driven by “political correctness” and supposedly radical special interest groups of Native and African Americans; according to Cheney, there was too much Harriet Tubman in those plans, but not enough George Washington and Robert E. Lee, whom she both viewed as noble American heroes. The conservative media machine mobilized against the standards – Rush Limbaugh decried the “bastardization of American history.”

The Right was up in arms against what they presented as a subversive assault on the foundations of the national story, intended to threaten national cohesion. The National History Standards, New Gingrich declared in To Renew America, a book he released in the summer of 1995, were undermining that “clear sense of what it meant to be an American” which had supposedly allowed the nation to flourish from 1607 to 1965 when “America had one continuous civilization built around a set of commonly accepted legal and cultural principles.” Note the date: That “continuous civilization” when everyone – everyone? – agreed “what it meant to be an American” ended in 1965, the year of the Voting Rights Act.

Those who were targeted by that critique explicitly refuted the idea that they were trying to undermine unity. According to social historian Gary Nash, chiefly responsible for the National Standards, the mission was to “promote greater unity among Americans” by establishing a more inclusive view of American history that elevated the perspectives of people and groups besides white male heroes: “The KKK and McCarthyism are somber episodes in American history. But will not students be taught valuable lessons and indeed be uplifted by learning how most Americans put the KKK and McCarthyism behind them? This is not dismal history, but dismal history overcome.”

Both sides in this conflict actually shared the idea that history had an important role to play in the creation of national unity. But “unity” and national cohesion on whose conditions? Against the attempt to establish a more inclusive American history, the Right insisted on a national story that centered the white Christian male perspective and thereby perpetuated the idea of America as an ethno-religious state.

“A nation with a shared history,” J.D. Vance said. But whose history? In a rapidly pluralizing country, the prerogative of a white Christian elite to dictate the answer to that question has come under fire as much as their claim to dominant status and power. As a result, the reactionary counter-mobilization against multiracial pluralism has escalated. This has manifested most clearly on the state level, as Republicans have, over the past five years, introduced – and, wherever they are in charge, passed – hundreds of bills designed to (re-)entrench the white nationalist story: Anti-“CRT” laws, legislation banning “divisive” subjects, drastically limiting how teachers and professors can talk about racism and teach African American history – combined with book bans targeting authors of color, banishing thousands of books from schools and public libraries. All of these measures aim to purge from the classrooms, the curricula, the libraries, the minds of young people anything and anyone daring to deviate from a version of the national story that affirms conservative white Christian dominance over the homeland, past and present.

Purging the nation

Crucially, the Right’s desire to purge is not confined to the national story. They also dream of cleansing the nation from anyone they believe does not belong.

The central promise of Trump’s election campaign is to conduct an unprecedented mass deportation. To do this, Trump and white nationalist purge-planner-in-chief Stephen Miller envision the creation of a deportation force larger than the U.S. military, sweeping the country, rounding up anyone they can get their hands on. This isn’t empty campaign rhetoric either: Russell Vought, the guy who is chiefly responsible for Project 2025’s “180-day Playbook,” has proudly admitted that he has been preparing the executive orders to turn those mass deportation fantasies into reality as quickly as possible.

A few months ago, Trump said he wanted to deport 15 million people, then 20 million … the number keeps escalating. The exact number is not important, but the magnitude is: The estimated number of undocumented people in the country is far lower, and the rightwingers know it. What they are planning is a purge of the nation that will not be confined to undocumented people. Miller has been talking about “denaturalization” for a long time. And rightwing thinkers openly fabulate about the need to go much further. In an infamous essay titled “Conservatism is no longer enough,” published in Claremont’s online magazine in the spring of 2021, Glen Ellmers outlined a vision of redrawing the boundaries of citizenship and excluding over half the population: Anyone who is not an “authentic American,” as he put it – literally every single Democratic voter. In his view, people who voted for Joe Biden and his “progressive project of narcotizing the American people and turning us into a nation of slaves” were simply not worthy of inclusion in the body politic.

Such extreme ideas are fully in line with the type of blood-and-soil nationalism that has taken over the Right: The allegiance to the “real American” homeland overrides all else, and those who undermine it must not be tolerated. Legal status is irrelevant, citizenship is always conditional. There is an enemy within – the globalist elites, the “woke” ruling class, the radical Left – that is responsible for the assault on the homeland. This enemy is aiding America’s foes abroad, in cahoots with China, and undermining the strength of the nation by “flood(ing) this country with millions of illegal aliens,” as J.D. Vance claimed in his Convention speech. Propagating Great Replacement, all the way down. For the homeland to be made safe for “real Americans,” the enemy within must be purged too.  

Inciting a pogrom

We are currently getting a terrifying preview of what all this would look like in practice. Trump has never shied away from admitting – from promising – that his mass deportation “will be a bloody story.” And the leaders on the Right are currently doing their best to ensure that there will be blood long before the election.

On September 9, J.D. Vance used his social media to rail against “Haitian illegal immigrants draining social services and generally causing chaos all over Springfield, Ohio.” He added: “Reports now show that people have had their pets abducted and eaten by people who shouldn't be in this country. Where is our border czar?”

Vance was leaning into a long-established racist trope used to vilify immigrant communities since at least the late nineteenth century: They are eating our pets! He wasn’t the only one to focus on immigrants from Haiti in Springfield, Ohio: Neo-Nazi groups have been targeting them for quite some time – it is not surprising, although it remains shocking, that Vance, who is extremely in tune with those circles, thought it was a good idea to join them. And as soon as Vance gave them a target, leading Republicans echoed his baseless claims, and the rightwing activist sphere went all in.

Over the next few days, Vance kept doubling down. On September 10, he claimed a child had been murdered by “a Haitian immigrant who had no right to be here.” The senator from Ohio did not care that the child’s parents begged him to stop using their boy, who was killed in a car accident, to demonize immigrants.

Vance even admitted on television that his claims did not stand up to scrutiny. And yet, he felt completely justified in spreading vile lies. In a CNN interview, he said: “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people then that’s what I’m going to do.” Vance does not feel bound by facts – his allegiance is to a Higher Truth, one defined by the blood-and-soil project: The homeland is under siege, overrun with enemies who “poison the blood.” This tale of decline and peril overrides petty facts and superficial reality.

Donald Trump, never one to be burdened by truth and honesty, has joined Vance in trying to incite a pogrom. In a speech in Tuscon, Arizona on September 13, Trump declared: “We will do large deportations from Springfield, Ohio, large deportations. We’re going to get these people out, we’re bringing them back to Venezuela.” (Yes, Venezuela, for some reason.) According to Trump, “illegal Haitian migrants have descended upon a town of 58,000 people destroying their way of life.” The day before, also in Tuscon, Trump had raged: “I am angry about young American girls being raped and sodomized and murdered by savage alien criminals.”

This vile propaganda has had its desired effect. Already on September 12, City Hall, schools, and the DMV in Springfield had to be evacuated because of bomb threats from people raging against the Haitian immigrants. Acts of vandalism against the Haitian community followed. More threats against elementary and middle schools as well as against public officials on September 13. On September 14 and 15, hospitals had to be evacuated – so did universities, as someone threatened to shoot members of the Haitian community on campus. Ohio State Troopers now sweep every building in every school in Springfield Ohio, every morning before the start of classes, looking for explosives, because the bomb threats keep coming. Meanwhile, neo-Nazis are marching through town – the Proud Boys, and a group called Blood Tribe. Life in Springfield, Ohio upended. All based on a lie.

A preview of Donald Trump’s America

What is happening in Springfield, Ohio is not merely a distraction from the Right’s plutocratic agenda – although they certainly care about that as well; it’s not just a campaign tactic – although they do seem to think that violent chaos will help them win in November. This is the manifestation of the Right’s defining political project. And a preview of what is to come if they get back to power.

A Trump regime is unlikely to be able to deport tens of millions of people in an instant. But they are determined to purge the nation. In Trump’s America, anyone who doesn’t comply, any group, any town is only ever one Truth Social post, one racist lie pushed by the Leader, one Facebook rumor picked up by the rightwing propaganda machine away from becoming a target.

The constant chaos they will be creating will serve an essential function: Rightwingers condone, incite, provoke a racist fury – and then use that frenzy as justification for mobilizing the federal government to “cleanse” the nation. It is a pattern that has led to the worst mass crimes in history: A regime targets certain groups as dangerous “Others” who poison the nation. The propaganda incites a storm of violence. Having created what it now calls an “untenable situation,” the regime declares it must act. To “restore order,” the regime enacts a host of measures against the “Other”: Mass arrests, discriminatory legislation, “orderly” purges in the form of deportations. But the situation will soon be “untenable” again: After more propaganda, more pogroms, leading to more extreme measures. As the regime’s legitimacy and claim to power depend as much on the notion of a persisting threat as on demonstrating the ability to act in response, there can never be a stable equilibrium or compromise. The homeland is endlessly under siege from the enemy and constantly being purged from dangerous “Others” who poison the nation.

A party committed to blood-and-soil nationalism. Its leaders are trying to incite a pogrom. And mere weeks before the election, the presidential race is essentially tied.