Defining American Nationalism

Dennis Prager is a politically conservative orthodox Jew with a large following. He supports Donald Trump and Israel. He regularly attacks wacky leftists, including Jewish leftists, and praises orthodox Jewish morals. He wrote a column to clarify nationalism:

In order to make arguments for nationalism, we have to define it.

The first definition in Merriam-Webster is “loyalty and devotion to a nation.” But in a second paragraph, it adds, “especially: a sense of national consciousness exalting one nation above all others and placing primary emphasis on promotion of its culture and interests as opposed to those of other nations or supranational groups.”

Let’s be clear: If the second paragraph is the only definition of nationalism, nationalism is always a bad thing. ...

American nationalism, based as it is on the motto “e pluribus unum” (“out of many, one”), by definition includes Americans of all races and ethnicities. That is how conservatives define American nationalism. I have never met a conservative who defined American national identity as definitionally “white.” ...

Human beings need a descending order of commitments: first to oneself, then to one’s family, then to one’s community, then to one’s nation and then to humanity.

It is fine with me if he is loyal to Israel, as an ethnic nationalist state dominated by Ashkenazi Jews, but where does he get the idea that American nationalism is based on including everyone?

The "many" in the motto refers to the original 13 colonies, as led by those who fought the revolution and adopted the new constitution.

Americans certainly do have a long history of putting national culture and interests above foreign ones. It is hard to see how the nation would have survived otherwise.

Perhaps the most important political division today is not right v. left, but nationalist v. globalist.

Update: Hunter Wallace comments:

ACKSHUALLY Dennis, the decoupling of American national identity from whiteness didn’t occur until the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952.

The U.S. Supreme Court was declaring non-White immigrants ineligible to become naturalized American citizens on the basis of race until the mid-20th century. We had an immigration system designed to preserve not only a White majority in the United States, but a Northwestern European majority until the Immigration Act of 1965. The current pathetic deracinated and cosmopolitan version of American national identity was conceived by a group of Jewish activists known as the New York Intellectuals and was only popularized in the Cold War era. The Boomer generation was the first generation in American history to be brought up to believe this nonsense that their country was created to be some kind of miniature version of the United Nations.