For perhaps the first time in my nearly four decades, both of our two major political parties are headed over an impending cliff and threatening to take the nation with them.
Those of us in the vast, sane middle have every reason to fear that we will soon be longing for the days when Barack Obama, not Zohran Mamdani, was the up-and-coming star of the Democratic Party, and — wildly implausible as it may seem — when Donald Trump and not JD Vance led the Republicans.
The right called Obama un-American, unpatriotic and unwilling to enforce peace through strength. Really, he was none of the above. A product of white Kansas and Black Chicago, Obama dropped more drones across the Middle East than his Republican predecessor to keep the country safe. If he tipped his hand too much to the divisive, then-ascendant “identity left,” his unique combination of optimism and pragmatism ultimately rendered him opposed to their bleak, backward-looking worldview. It does not get any more American than that.
But I fear the next generation of the Democratic Party, as embodied by Mamdani, will in fact be un-American, unpatriotic and unwilling to enforce peace through strength — and not just abroad, but also on the streets of our own cities. Mamdani made his governing worldview clear in the myriad technocratic TikToks and fact-free policy proposals that endear him to many young, college-educated elites and many immigrants. But it didn’t fool many Black voters in the Bronx or white ethnic voters in Staten Island.
Kamala Harris’s 2024 Democratic National Convention was a multiethnic tapestry, with people of all backgrounds and colors awash in just three: red, white and blue. Take a look at Mamdani’s victory celebrations and note the total absence of any American symbolism. His New York is a rootless, globalist metropolis with no patriotic priors, unconstrained not only by the existence of Israel but also by that of America. This is the new anti-Americanism of the left.
Meanwhile, on the other side, the left called Trump a fascist and a racist. Really, he’s a crude, brash New York hotel mogul and reality television star who has, both in government and in his prior businesses, hired (and fired) all kinds of people with all kinds of identities. Like many an irascible male CEO of his generation, his sole measure of others’ worth is their personal loyalty to him.
Should presidents operate like mafia dons? No, but it can in fact get worse than a narcissistic master of attention too self-involved to be beholden to any ideology — and I fear it’s about to.
The next-generation GOP as embodied by Vance will, there is reason to suspect, in fact be nativist in a way that smacks of racism, not to mention masculinist in a way that is predicated on seemingly benevolent sexism. They will call both — and indeed will look, on the surface — merely meritocratic. Vance crystalized his understanding of America in his speech at the 2024 Republican National Convention.
America is not “just an idea,” he told us. Channeling “Gangs of New York’s” “Bill the Butcher” and the 19th century Know Nothings who feared and hated the immigrant Irish mostly because of their adherence to Vance’s own adopted Catholic faith, the now vice president waxed poetic about the hills of Kentucky where his own body will one day be laid to rest alongside those of many generations of his ancestors.
This is the codification of a “blood and soil” sort of nationalism that has been percolating in the Republican Party for decades. Until now, this force has been mostly kept at bay — first, by George W. Bush’s inborn New England elitism layered on his adopted Texas egalitarianism, and then by Trump’s New York cosmopolitanism, from which his “America first” impulses ultimately cannot be separated. But now, in the person of Vance and the “bro podcaster” brigade to which he is attached, nativist nationalism is the new anti-Americanism of the right.
To appreciate how enormous and dangerous a change Mamdani and Vance represent, consider this: Unlike Obama, Trump, Harris, Bush and everyone else who has been taken seriously as a national political figure in my lifetime, neither one really seems to care whether or not Iran has nuclear weapons.
Mamdani doesn’t care because, to him, Israel and America are just as bad as Iran anyway. To his adherents on the left, “globalize the intifada” is the new “we shall overcome.” And Vance, though he had to play along to an extent with Trump’s attack on Iran’s nuclear sites, given his role in the administration, doesn’t particularly care either. To him, “America first” really means “America alone.” To his allies on the “new right,” Israel is essentially a supplicant that should take care of itself, not a necessary a respected ally whose safety is bound up with our own (not to mention with the moral order).
To understand as one reality that Iran should not have nuclear weapons, that New York needs more, not fewer, police, and that Vance’s first-generation American wife is just as American as he is, we must reject both the new anti-Americanism of the left and the new anti-Americanism of the right.
For all our own talk to the contrary, America up until now has been largely an exception to the tribal realities that have defined, and continue to define, politics and political conflict in most of the world. The truth is that American exceptionalism — reflexively maligned by the left, facilely vaunted by the right — has ultimately been made manifest in our politics since World War II. Few modern American progressive leaders have been totalitarians or anarchists, and few modern American conservative leaders have been fascists or nativists.
But we have thrown these words around anyway, like the nation that cried wolf. And as in the fable, our comeuppance — in the form of two new, vocal and increasingly politically viable anti-Americanisms — may now be at hand.
Elizabeth Grace Matthew is based in Philadelphia. She writes about books, politics, and culture, including on Substack.
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