The Online Right’s Favorite Nativist Slogan Is Gaining Traction in the Real World

Like many social media users, the conservative writer and entrepreneur C.Jay Engel uses his short bio on X to list a few phrases describing himself and his background: “Son of the California Sierras”; “Classical Protestant”; and, in a nod to his proudly reactionary politics, “Counter-Revolutionary.”

But the first descriptor in Engel’s bio is the most notable: “Heritage American.”

It’s not a term that the average social media user has likely encountered, let alone heard in casual conversation. But among a certain cohort of young and well-connected conservatives, “heritage American” — used to describe people who trace their roots to the founding generations of the United States — is gaining traction as a kind of slogan of the new nativist right that’s coalesced behind Donald Trump and the MAGA movement.

{snip}

“Major players in the mainstream are starting to absorb some of the things that we’re thinking about,” said Engel, whose writings on the topic helped popularize the term. “There’s a zeitgeist at play.”

{snip}

While the specific worldview surrounding “heritage America” may have been incubated online, it is increasingly finding its way into the policies and rhetoric of the Trump administration. In a speech at the conservative think tank the Claremont Institute in July, Vice President JD Vance urged conservatives to reject the view that America is founded exclusively on a common creed, reviving a theme from his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention last year. “America is not just an idea — we’re a particular place with a particular people and a particular set of beliefs and way of life,” said Vance, pointing to the frontier mentality that allowed “our ancestors … to tame a wild continent.” If the subtext wasn’t clear enough, he added: “That is our heritage as Americans.”

The iconography of the heritage America movement has surfaced in the Trump administration’s messaging in less subtle ways as well. In early July, the Department of Homeland Security’s official account on X posted a painting of a pioneer couple cradling a baby in the back of a covered wagon, under the caption: “Remember your Homeland’s Heritage.” Later the same month, DHS followed that post up with another one featuring John Gast’s painting American Progress, captioned “A Heritage to be proud of, a Homeland worth Defending.”

{snip}

The self-identified members of heritage America know what you’re probably thinking: isn’t the term just a not-so-subtle euphemism for “white”? Indeed, as the term has gained traction on the right, critics have charged that conservatives have adopted the term principally as a way “to launder white nationalism with facially neutral language,” as the New York Times’ Ezekiel Kkweku recently put it. Others charge that it’s little more than blood-and-soil nationalism rebranded under a new label.

{snip}

Regardless of their disagreements about the term’s origin, proponents of heritage America ground their use of the term in a shared historical narrative. This story draws heavily on a handful of historical texts — including Frederick Jackson Turner’s The Significance of the Frontier in American History, David Hackett Fischer’s Albion’s Seed and Samuel Huntington’s Who Are We? — to argue that the original generations of American colonists represented distinctive Anglo-Protestant “folkways,” whose members brought with them specific political and cultural customs from the British Isles. By the middle of the 19th century, this mélange of customs had given rise to a uniquely American identity, forged via the settlement of the American frontier and in contact with Black and Indigenous cultures.

{snip}

In the eyes of the heritage America crowd, the emergence of propositional nationalism marked a fundamental re-definition of American citizenship — and one they’d like to reverse. {snip}

{snip}