FEELING THE "CULTURAL DISTANCE":

"I think those tweets are racist and xenophobic," Hurd told CNN of Trump's attacks on the Squad, in which the president called on the lawmakers to "go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested places from which they came." Hurd noted at the time that the tweets about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ayanna Pressley, Rashida Tlaib, and Ilhan Omar were "inaccurate" and drive minorities away from the G.O.P. "This makes it harder in order to take our ideas, and our platform, to communities that don't necessarily identify with the Republican party," he said. Those July remarks echoed the conclusions of an election post-mortem the G.O.P commissioned after losing again to Barack Obama in 2012, which found Republicans would have to broaden their appeal to women and minorities if they hoped to be viable in the future. "Public perception of our party is at record lows," Sally Bradshaw, the former Republican strategist who co-chaired the study, wrote in 2013. "When someone rolls their eyes at us they aren't likely to open their ears to us."

But rather than widening the scope of their appeal, Republicans since then have dramatically narrowed it -- lining up behind Trump and his destructive policies and racist, sexist rhetoric. The fact that the party will soon have just one black lawmaker in congress -- Sen. Tim Scott -- both reflects that reality and could likely exacerbate it. 

[I]n her article, published in the Georgetown Law Review, Wax questioned whether immigrants can assimilate at all. She pursues her inquiry with respect to two models of nationalism.

The first, Creedal Nationalism, maintains that the essence of Americanness is "mainly comprised of abstract political ideals and beliefs." These include "equality before the law, fundamental human and Constitutional rights" and "commitment to democratic governance and institutions." Although this model demands assimilation, it is basically universalist: anyone, regardless of their background or race, can become an American by embracing these fundamentals.

Wax's second model, however, questions this universality. In what she calls Cultural Difference Nationalism, Wax cites right-wing thinkers who hold that America's "Anglo-Protestant heritage" was key to its political development. Building on this argument, some argue immigrants from cultures far from this "Anglo-Protestant" background will struggle to assimilate. They might even corrode the communities they enter.

Because this cultural argument often correlates with race, Wax notes, elites have been squeamish about engaging it.

In the Georgetown Law Review, Wax calls for a frank conversation and highlights taboo but, she argues, necessary viewpoints. However, at the National Conservatism Conference last week she committed herself to Cultural Difference Nationalism.

"According to this view," Wax told her audience, "we are better off if our country is dominated numerically, demographically, politically -- at least in fact, if not formally -- by people from the First World, from the West, than by people from countries that have failed to advance."

She didn't balk at the implications of this argument. Embracing Cultural Distance Nationalism means "taking the position that our country will be better off with more whites and fewer nonwhites."

Wax and the conference organizers insist this isn't a racist argument but rather a cultural one with racial correlations. Conservatives would be wise, Wax insisted, to resist politically correct attacks that would paint Cultural Difference Nationalism as racist.

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