The Nativist Wave

On December 2, 2025, Will Saletan posted a piece, as from The Bulwark, on Substack (I think), entitled "Now Trump Is Threatening Naturalized Americans."

As a way to get started, I'll replay the closing paragraphs of that piece:

Trump wrapped up the cabinet meeting with another diatribe against Somali-born people living in the United States. “They contribute nothing. I don’t want ’em in our country,” he fumed. “I could say it about other countries, too. We don’t want ’em.” He went on: “We’re gonna go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country.”

In particular, he lambasted Congresswoman Ilhan Omar, a naturalized American who was born in Somalia and who, according to Trump’s Thanksgiving rants, is “always wrapped in her swaddling hijab” and should be thrown “the hell out of our country.” In front of the cameras, the president told his cabinet on Tuesday: “Ilhan Omar is garbage. She’s garbage. Her friends are garbage. These aren’t people that work. . . . These are people that do nothing but complain. . . . We don’t want ’em in our country. Let ’em go back to where they came from and fix it.”

With that, the president ended the meeting, and his cabinet vigorously applauded. There’s no need for dog whistles anymore. The government of the United States now openly stands for bigotry. It’s not just closing our borders; it’s targeting Americans. And depending on where you came from, you might be next.

There's a lot to dislike about the outrage-factory closing of this piece, which is, I think, quite typical of the work of writers focused on the rising nativist wave in the US: a wave, we all know, that is not produced by Donald Trump (who believes in little beyond his own gratifications), or the Republic Party (which believes in little beyond ensuring its hegeony by any means necessary), or "the government of the United States" (as Saletan has it), which has, we are learning, no beliefs whatsoever: it is a machine for executing, well or poorly, a set of policies and practices that can be wiped out or instated with a few handfuls of executive orders, and a willing political leadership.

There is, without doubt, a rising nativist wave in the dirty ocean of US politics.

There are aspects of the New Nativism -- because nativism, per se, is definitely not new in US culture -- that are far more insidious than the thoughtless bigotry of our current President, whose unscripted remarks are nearly always disturbing (or would be, if one didn't think that, ultimately, our current President believes in nothing at all beyond his own gratifications, and speaks to gratify himself, rather than to communicate).

The shape of the New Nativism, and that of the Old Nativism that preceded it, are worth examining, in detail: not because such an examination will change the belief system of a single nativist, or because knowing more about the New and Old Nativism will somehow better arm the Right-Thinking in their noble battle with the Bloody-Minded and the Brain-Dead (which noble battle is presumably is undertaken to change the belief systems of the Bloody-Minded and the Brain-Dead).

Knowing more, or better, does not produce -- and never has produced-- change in any dimension of politics, but particularly not in the domain of the political belief system: that peculiar soup of confirmation bias, cognitive dissonance and unexamined psychogenic garbage, on which US politics -- of the Right and of the Left -- feeds, incessantly.

The New and the Old Nativism are worth examining because we are not, as yet, at the Orwell Point in US politics: at the moment of inflection when the State successfully controls the rewriting of the past. We are, it seems to me, far from that point, outrage factory minions' wailings aside. History still matters, independently of who's building a ballroom attached to the White House. And historians, who write for posterity and not for eyeball-snaring, still have a job to do, on many fronts.

The history of American nativism is one of those fronts.

No pasaran.