{"id":722,"date":"2025-07-23T18:14:12","date_gmt":"2025-07-23T22:14:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/foggybottomline.com\/?p=722"},"modified":"2025-07-23T18:14:12","modified_gmt":"2025-07-23T22:14:12","slug":"a-singular-american-ethnos","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/foggybottomline.com\/?p=722","title":{"rendered":"A Singular American “Ethnos?”"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

One of the many projects I\u2019m working on now that I have some time on my hands is a dive into Curtis Yarvin<\/a>, who cosplays as a political theorist and has argued that the American democratic experiment failed and should be replaced by an \u201caccountable monarchy,\u201d whatever that means. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019ll dig into his ideas more soon, but while looking into Yarvin I found a right-wing podcaster named Auron MacIntyre<\/a> who also wrote a book called \u201cThe Total State: How Liberal Democracies Become Tyrannies.<\/a>\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

MacIntyre\u00a0hosted Yarvin on his podcast back in May<\/a>\u00a0(you can find this on other platforms if you don\u2019t 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 \u201cAmerican Ethnos<\/a>,\u201d \u2013 the idea that America once was, or could again be, a singular people bound by blood, belief, and heritage.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u201cpropositional\u201d concept of national identity based on shared norms and understanding around a pluralism based on liberty and popular sovereignty. It\u2019s not enough to center American identity on these values.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Wilson instead centers his version of an American ethnos around religion and ancestry. that framework becomes a blueprint for national identity\u2014especially in a nation built on pluralism, immigration, and compromise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019s Indigenous nations, enslaved Africans, and waves of Catholic and Jewish immigrants. It\u2019s not just historically incomplete; it\u2019s politically loaded. America has always been more complicated than any single ethnicity. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u201cAmerican\u201d is a civic and constitutional identity, not an ethnic one. To confuse the two is to risk shrinking the country\u2019s democratic promise down to tribal boundaries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wilson doesn\u2019t 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\u2019s a metaphor meant to dramatize a concern about scale, but in practice it dehumanizes newcomers and distorts what\u2019s actually at stake: the strength of our institutions, not the purity of our ancestry.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

\u201cI think we ought to say yes to church bells, not minarets. The public space belongs to Jesus.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s not assimilation \u2013 it\u2019s theocracy by another name. It\u2019s also incompatible with a constitutional republic that enshrines religious freedom and equal protection under the law.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wilson\u2019s vision is one of Christian ethnonationalism masquerading as cultural preservation, and he says this in as many words: \u201cWe need to start putting boundaries on what can be done or not done by people who serve an alien God.\u201d It\u2019s a project less interested in civic unity than in cultural dominance \u2013 or perhaps the sort of civic unity enforced <\/em>by cultural dominance \u2013 and it\u2019s a recipe for deepening the very divisions it claims to resolve.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is all a very fascist version of populism based on redefining, very narrowly, who may participate in self-government by creating a uniform \u201cethnos.\u201d 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Of course, America\u2019s strength has never been in uniformity. It\u2019s in the messy, ongoing work of building shared identity from difference\u2014of forging solidarity not through sameness, but through commitment to a democratic project. We don\u2019t need a singular \u201cethnos\u201d 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

E Pluribus Unum<\/em>, as wise men once said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the many projects I\u2019m 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 \u201caccountable monarchy,\u201d whatever that means.  I\u2019ll dig into his ideas more soon, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":27,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[139,268,270,107,94,269],"tags":[266,267,265],"class_list":["post-722","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alt-right","category-american-identity","category-fascist-populism","category-republican-project","category-right-wing-extremists","category-right-wing-podcasters","tag-american-ethnos","tag-american-identity","tag-fascist-populism"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/foggybottomline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/722","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/foggybottomline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/foggybottomline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foggybottomline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/27"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foggybottomline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=722"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/foggybottomline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/722\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":724,"href":"https:\/\/foggybottomline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/722\/revisions\/724"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/foggybottomline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=722"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foggybottomline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=722"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/foggybottomline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=722"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}