Thread by @ConceptualJames

What has always distinguished America as a nation is that it has always worked to reject an ethnonationalist conception of itself, as was encoded in our founding documents. Americans are a people in a place but a people who unite around the idea that ethnos isn't who we are.

America is exceptional. It's the greatest nation in the history of the world. America is exceptional because it has a completely different conception of itself than every other nation on Earth. It is not an ethnonationalist project but one built on self-evident truths.

You can turn to Stalin or Hitler or the 1924 English dictionary or any other sort of source you want and look up "nation" and find that it carries at least ethnonationalist connotations ("a specific people..."), but in so doing you miss America completely.

America in 1776 dared to conceive of itself as a nation that's different than that. It conceived of itself as a people in a place where the people are defined by their commitment to the Cause of Liberty built upon the self-evident, common-sense truths of human existence.

What makes Americans American is that they're American. In other words, Americans accept that if they hold these truths to be self-evident, that they are endowed by their creator (Laws of Nature or Nature's God) with certain unalienable rights, then they're American.

Today, heavy pressure is coming in from the "New Right" or "Dissident Right" or "[Muted Term, aka Ostrich Right]" to reconceive of America as an ethnic project when in fact it was a project built around people escaping the tyranny of ethnic and religious demand.

What makes Americans American is rejecting that in favor not of some "higher" truth but in fact of something much more common-sense and down-to-earth. People who want to take responsibility and govern themselves can live together peacefully and profitably regardless of ethnos.

You might argue that the ethnonationalist wankers have a point here, that what I'm saying demands assimilation. I don't fully disagree. Multiculturalism wasn't just a failed experiment; it was a rebranded Soviet ethnic conflict project called Korenizatsiya in the "Motherland."

Americans have to be American for the American experiment to work. That means they have to set aside their ethnos to some degree, though not entirely, in favor of a wholehearted acceptance of the American belief in a set of self-evidently true ideas about human beings.

Leaning into ethnos and encouraging ethnos versus ethnos cannot improve this situation; it only makes more multiculturalism. When you hear that white people have to incorporate to defend their culture and interests, that's more multiculturalism. The answer is less.

It's time for Americans to remember what it means to be American again. It's time to Make America America Again, and America was never built to be an ethnostate. It was built to unlock the power of freedom for all people who believe in freedom, and that's why it's great.

Definitions of "nation" are fine and technical and whatever, but they also simply miss America and what makes America America in the first place, and what Makes America Great. Nation, in America, is built around its foundational ideas of liberty, equality, and individual rights.