One of the many projects I’m working on now that I have some time on my hands is a dive into Curtis Yarvin, who cosplays as a political theorist and has argued that the American democratic experiment failed and should be replaced by an “accountable monarchy,” whatever that means. 

I’ll dig into his ideas more soon, but while looking into Yarvin I found a right-wing podcaster named Auron MacIntyre who also wrote a book called “The Total State: How Liberal Democracies Become Tyrannies.” I have not read this book, but it seems to boil down to a whine about eroding civil liberties in the name of public health.

MacIntyre hosted Yarvin on his podcast back in May (you can find this on other platforms if you don’t like Pandora). After listening to the Yarvin episode I dug into MacIntyre a bit more and found this: a discussion with a pastor named Douglas Wilson about restoring what Wilson calls the “American Ethnos,” – the idea that America once was, or could again be, a singular people bound by blood, belief, and heritage. 

This is a problematic notion, if only because the terminology wants to direct us to an ethnic view of what they mean by singular people. Wilson builds his thesis around a definition borrowed from theologian Stephen Bryan: that an ethnos is a people with a shared name, land, memory, kinship, values, and decision-making structure. Fair enough as a cultural descriptor. The trouble starts when Wilson strays from this by criticizing what he calls a “propositional” concept of national identity based on shared norms and understanding around a pluralism based on liberty and popular sovereignty. It’s not enough to center American identity on these values.

Wilson instead centers his version of an American ethnos around religion and ancestry. that framework becomes a blueprint for national identity—especially in a nation built on pluralism, immigration, and compromise.

Wilson claims there was once a coherent American ethnos: Anglo-Protestant, rooted in the British Isles, stretching from the late 17th century through World War II. This is of course a selective memory, and one that conveniently sets aside the continent’s Indigenous nations, enslaved Africans, and waves of Catholic and Jewish immigrants. It’s not just historically incomplete; it’s politically loaded. America has always been more complicated than any single ethnicity. 

MacIntyre, no stranger to cultural conservatism himself, pointed out a crucial distinction: the difference between ethnicity and citizenship. The Apostle Paul may have been a Roman citizen, he notes, but no one mistook him for ethnically Roman. Similarly, being “American” is a civic and constitutional identity, not an ethnic one. To confuse the two is to risk shrinking the country’s democratic promise down to tribal boundaries.

Wilson doesn’t just blur the line between culture and nation, he redraws it entirely. He imagines immigration as an existential threat to American identity, comparing it to a foster family overwhelmed by 28 new children. It’s a metaphor meant to dramatize a concern about scale, but in practice it dehumanizes newcomers and distorts what’s actually at stake: the strength of our institutions, not the purity of our ancestry.

He would resolve this through a reassertion of Anglo-Saxon Protestant Christianity as the national identity. Wilson advocates for barring Muslims (as well as, presumably, atheists and Jews) from public office and limiting non-Christian religious expression in public life. 

“I think we ought to say yes to church bells, not minarets. The public space belongs to Jesus.”

That’s not assimilation – it’s theocracy by another name. It’s also incompatible with a constitutional republic that enshrines religious freedom and equal protection under the law.

Wilson’s vision is one of Christian ethnonationalism masquerading as cultural preservation, and he says this in as many words: “We need to start putting boundaries on what can be done or not done by people who serve an alien God.” It’s a project less interested in civic unity than in cultural dominance – or perhaps the sort of civic unity enforced by cultural dominance – and it’s a recipe for deepening the very divisions it claims to resolve.

This is all a very fascist version of populism based on redefining, very narrowly, who may participate in self-government by creating a uniform “ethnos.” The natural end state is one where only those people who agree with the fascists, especially on religion and its role in public life, are granted the franchise. 

Of course, America’s strength has never been in uniformity. It’s in the messy, ongoing work of building shared identity from difference—of forging solidarity not through sameness, but through commitment to a democratic project. We don’t need a singular “ethnos” to hold this country together. We need institutions that work, a civic culture that values truth and compromise, and a national story that includes all of us.

E Pluribus Unum, as wise men once said.