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I really do think that thinking of some Americans as more American than other Americans is one of the most pernicious phenomena in public discourse, and it really is shocking how commonly this shows up implicitly or explicitly in a range of literature.
This is obviously a foundational trait of Christian nationalism (Christian Americans are more American) and white nationalism (white Americans are more American) but I also think it was lurking in the incessant New Yorker calls to read Hillbilly Elegy.
These have all shown up again in 2020 and the implication seems to be pretty clearly that people who live in Richmond and Charlotte (which are part of New England and/or Silicon Valley now) need to learn what real Americans are like.
It's clear that this is the logic that is running wild in calls on SCOTUS to literally disenfranchise millions of Americans and pick a new winner. Texas v PA doesn't even allege fraud- it says that we can't know if fraud happened, so the GOP should get to pick the president.
On one hand, this is just pure little-boy logic: the most just thing that can ever happen is for me to get my way. It's also failure of empathy: it doesn't matter if other people can't vote if I get what I want, because no one is more important than me.
And of course, it's also just a natural byproduct of our insistence on making some Americans more American than others. Of course Texas should get to pick the president and not Pennsylvania, because people who live in Philadelphia are not as American as Texans.
I’m particularly reminded of reports of @SenRonJohnson in @BulwarkOnline, in which he argues that Biden voters want to “change America” from what it truly is while Trump voters want to preserve it. This is a shocking claim, unless what you mean by “truly American” is white.
Note that the people who want to end the tradition of American representative government and suspend civil rights are “preserving” America. The ones who want to keep our constitutional government alive, and want Detroit to participate? They’re destroying it.
What’s the metric by which what America truly is is determined in Johnson’s framework? America isn’t about rights, voting, elections, and representation. It’s about white people in red states. Because they’re the real Americans, and America is whatever they say it is.
This is surely the only way to explain how so many Americans can see people who want to suspend elections, declare martial law, rally around secession, and shoot governors as freedom-loving patriots, despite the fact that this is the literal opposite of freedom-loving patriotism.
