Weekend reading: Mass deportation plans, attempts to incite a pogrom against immigrant communities, and JD Vance gets to decide who is an “illegal alien.”
I wrote about the Right’s desire to cleanse the “homeland.”
This week’s piece:
🧵1/
thomaszimmer.substack.com/p/blood-and-so…
I wrote about the Right’s desire to cleanse the “homeland.”
This week’s piece:
🧵1/
thomaszimmer.substack.com/p/blood-and-so…
Flashback to the Republican National Convention: While delegates wave hundreds of “Mass Deportation Now!” sign, JD Vance declares that America is not an idea, but a white Christian “homeland,” and those who are bound to it by ancestry and blood decide who belongs. 2/
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. 3/
The political conflict is shaped by the struggle between two different definitions of America: A credal nation, at least aspirationally committed to egalitarian, pluralistic ideas – vs the conception of America as a land in which wealthy white Christians deserve to dominate. 4/
This struggle is playing out across politics, society, and culture – in the “history wars,” for instance: The Right is determined to (re-)entrench the prerogative of a white Christian elite to dictate the national story and purge anyone and anything daring to deviate. 5/
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. For the homeland to be safe for “real Americans,” the enemy within must be purged too. 6/
The central promise of Trump’s election campaign is to conduct an unprecedented mass deportation of tens of millions. Their plans are not confined to undocumented people. Their goal is to radically redraw the boundaries of the body politic. 7/
Such extremism is fully in line with the blood-and-soil nationalism that has taken over the Right: The allegiance to the “real American” homeland overrides all else, and those undermining it must not be tolerated. Legal status is irrelevant, citizenship is always conditional. 8/
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