White Nationalism Isn’t the Fringe — It’s the Future Republicans are Building

Senator Schmitt’s words show fascism isn’t lurking at the edges — it’s leading from the center…

Senator Eric Schmitt took the stage at the National Conservatism Conference this past weekend and declared that America is “a nation and a people.” With those five words he threw aside the pluralism that has defined this country since before its founding and embraced an ideology rooted in blood and soil, in exclusion and hierarchy. He put it in context:

“That’s what set Donald Trump apart from the old conservatism and the old liberalism alike: He knows that America is not just an abstract ‘proposition,’ but a nation and a people, with its own distinct history and heritage and interests…

“When they tear down our statues and monuments, mock our history, and insult our traditions, they’re attacking our future as well as our past. By changing the stories we tell about ourselves, they believe they can build a new America—with the new myths of a new people. But America does not belong to them. It belongs to us.”

It’s not new to hear Republicans peddling this kind of racialized “us versus them” rhetoric, but it’s still shocking to see a sitting United States senator parrot phrases that would be more at home in the speeches of European fascists or Confederates in the years leading up to the Civil War than in the halls of Congress.

He offered no acknowledgment of the millions of enslaved Africans whose stolen labor helped build this country, no recognition of the generations of immigrants from Asia, Latin America, and Africa who contributed to our prosperity, no admission of the bloody sacrifices of those who fought for civil rights, equality, and inclusion.

Instead he spoke only of a singular people and a singular nation, implicitly white, implicitly Christian, and implicitly obedient to his party’s authoritarian vision.

This is not some isolated gaffe: it’s part of a pattern. At the same moment Schmitt was narrowing the definition of who counts as American, he’d chosen as his spokesman Nathan Hochman, who was forced out of Ron DeSantis’ presidential campaign after circulating a promotional video featuring Nazi imagery.

That a man with such a stain on his record can walk comfortably into the Republican fold today says everything about the party’s trajectory. It’s no accident, no oversight, no slip. The GOP is nakedly embracing white supremacy and the Confederate neofascist ethos.

They’re not ashamed of it, either, as previous generations would have been, speaking in Nixonesque “law and order” code; today, they flaunt it. They want to redefine America itself, not as a democracy where all people are “created equal,” but as a fortress where some people’s bloodlines, wealth, and religions entitle them to power while others are cast aside or erased from memory.

This assault is not simply rhetorical. The Trump administration has already shown us the template they’re using to deconstruct a democratic America and replace it with a whites-only neofascist ethnostate.

Their racist attacks on the Smithsonian and other national museums weren’t about efficiency or budgets; they’re about rewriting history, about stripping slavery, segregation, and genocide from the story of America, and replacing it with sanitized myths that glorify the Confederate ethos and erase the Confederacy’s victims.

They want future generations to walk through America’s most important cultural institutions and see nothing of Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Sitting Bull, César Chávez, or Bayard Rustin. They want a nation of children raised on the lie that America was always a white, Christian ethnostate, that pluralism and democracy were well-intentioned but impractical mistakes to be corrected.

This is how authoritarian regimes always consolidate power: as George Orwell wrote in his novel 1984, which the GOP has apparently adopted as an instruction manual, control the narrative of the past and you control reality of the future.

But history refuses to be erased. The graves of the people who fought and died to end slavery and grant civil rights to nonwhite people and women are still here.

The gravestones of Black soldiers who charged Confederate lines at Fort Wagner, who bled and died under the Union flag, are still here. The blood of abolitionists lynched by mobs is still in our soil. The memories of those who marched across the Edmund Pettus Bridge and were beaten nearly to death by racist sheriffs are still vivid.

The soldiers of my father’s generation who fell on Omaha Beach didn’t die so that a senator from Missouri could try to turn our country into a singular “nation and a people.” They died for liberty, for equality, for a world where democracy could flourish instead of fascism. To erase their sacrifices by redefining America as a white nation is to spit on their graves.

Where are the Republicans who once called themselves the Party of Lincoln? The ones who agreed with President Reagan when he famously said:

“You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or a Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American. …

“This, I believe, is one of the most important sources of America's greatness. We lead the world because, unique among nations, we draw our people — our strength — from every country and every corner of the world. And by doing so we continuously renew and enrich our nation.

“While other countries cling to the stale past, here in America we breathe life into dreams. We create the future, and the world follows us into tomorrow. Thanks to each wave of new arrivals to this land of opportunity, we're a nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas, and always on the cutting edge, always leading the world to the next frontier.

“This quality is vital to our future as a nation. If we ever closed the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost.”

Lincoln himself declared at Gettysburg that this was a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. He didn’t say “all white men.” He didn’t say “all Christians.” He said all men, a word that at the time encompassed all people. He understood that America’s strength was not in its uniformity but in its aspiration to universality.

Have they all been purged from the GOP? Has the last Republican who believes in a multiracial democracy been driven into silence or retirement?

Watching today’s party leaders it seems so. The few who whisper their discomfort are drowned out by the roar of those who openly embrace bigotry, authoritarianism, and historical revisionism. The Party of Lincoln has become the Party of Jefferson Davis and Robert E. Lee, right down to Trump renaming military bases after traitorous Confederate generals and Klan leaders.

This is not a mere political dispute: it’s a struggle for the soul of America.

Our choice is between the pluralistic democracy that generations of Americans fought and died to protect, or an authoritarian nationalism that dehumanizes millions and threatens to dismantle our most cherished institutions.

When Schmitt stands before a crowd and offers them a vision of America as a singular people, he’s calling for the death of the American experiment itself. When Republicans bring men like Hochman into their fold, they’re saying right out loud that Nazi imagery and Confederate ideology are no longer disqualifying, but are welcome.

When Trump and his administration try to rewrite history in the Smithsonian, they’re declaring war on truth itself. And on the concepts and ideals that made America a great nation.

The outrage is justified because the stakes are existential. A party that embraces white supremacy and fascist ethos cannot coexist with democracy. A nation that allows its museums, its textbooks, its speeches, and its laws to be purged of pluralism cannot endure as a democracy.

America has faced down this poison before. We lost 700,000 people fighting a Civil War to crush it. We passed civil rights laws to dismantle its legal scaffolding. We buried tens of thousands of soldiers in Europe who died fighting against fascism abroad.

To let it rise again here at home, wrapped in the flag of one of our two great political parties, is the ultimate betrayal.

And to put a massive punctuation mark on it, yesterday Brett Kavanaugh wrote a shadow docket opinion for his five corrupt Republican colleagues on the Supreme Court saying that it’s now perfectly legal for ICE and other federal, state, and local police authorities to engage in racial profiling.

Protesting Republicans bringing us fully into a “your papers please“ type of race-based fascism, Justice Sotomayor said that because of the Republicans on the Supreme Court:

“The Government, and now the concurrence, has all but declared that all Latinos, U.S. citizens or not, who work low wage jobs are fair game to be seized at any time, taken away from work, and held until they provide proof of their legal status to the agents’ satisfaction.”

The question now is whether we’ll rise to the moment. Will we allow a senator’s words to pass unchallenged, a party’s racism to be normalized, a nation’s history to be rewritten? Or will we push back with the force of truth, with the weight of history, with the unyielding conviction that America belongs to all its people, not just those deemed acceptable by the far right?

Silence is complicity, both on the part of our media and our politicians of both parties. Pretending this is normal politics is complicity. It’s time for every American who still believes in the Constitution, in equality, in pluralism, in democracy itself to speak out in favor of an inclusive America.

This is not about left versus right. This is about democracy versus fascism, inclusion versus exclusion, truth versus lies.

Eric Schmitt and those like him want us to forget who we are. They want us to forget the Declaration’s promise, Lincoln’s dedication, King’s dream, and the sacrifices of millions of ordinary Americans who fought for liberty and justice. They want us to forget the very idea of America as a pluralistic nation.

We must not forget. We must not be silent. We must not surrender America’s future to those who would drag us back into the darkest chapters of America’s past.

Louise’s Daily Song: “America’s New Confederacy”

The song that was inspired by this article is here.
My reading this article as an audio podcast is here.
My newest book, The Last American President: A Broken Man, a Corrupt Party, and a World on the Brink comes out soon and is now available for pre-order.
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