The Left’s Misdefinition of Americanism
31st August 2025
This week, Axios ran a fascinating piece about the supposed “redefinition” of Americanism under President Donald Trump. Titled “Inside Trump’s American identity project,” Axios posited that “President Trump is wielding government power to enforce a more rigid, exclusionary definition of what it means to be American.” What would this new definition entail? “In MAGA’s telling, America is the heir to ancient European civilizations, built on a Judeo-Christian foundation of white identity, meritocracy, traditional gender roles and the nuclear family,” says Axios. “These tenets are cast as universal truths — and mantras such as ‘America is an idea’ or ‘diversity is our strength’ are dismissed as liberal fictions.”
First off, America is heir to ancient European civilizations — particularly with reference to private property, the common law system, traditions of free speech and freedom of religion, among others. Second, America is built on a Judeo-Christian foundation. Third, America is built on the meritocracy, which argues that the best and most productive ought to succeed in a free system. America is built on traditional gender roles and the nuclear family, as is every successful society in history. While America is an idea — or a set of ideas — those ideas must be reified in institutions and human behavior. And the notion that any nation can be built on a completely specious phrase like “diversity is our strength” is counterintuitive at best.
So, what is Axios attempting to do? Axios is attempting to link actual traditional definitions of Americanism with white supremacy. Never mind that all the ideas Axios cites as “traditional” fundamentally reject ethnic identitarianism: equality before law, for example, presumes racial indifference; Judeo-Christian religion rejects racial classification; the meritocracy is definitionally opposed to racial preferences; and traditional gender roles and the nuclear family are institutions held in common by people of all races. The goal is simple: a forced choice between “racism” and a left-wing definition of Americanism that bears zero weight.
Wokeness pretty much boils down to “White people bad, males bad, white males especially bad and responsible for all that’s wrong in the world.” They depend on white people hating themselves for this trick to work, and it’s getting to the point that white people are fed up.