Guess my vacation is over.—

It’s a sign of our benighted times that when people are talking about “Schmitt,” my first assumption is that they mean Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt. But no, this is a different Schmitt in the news, evidently of some relation to Carl,—if not by blood, then by adoption. This is Eric Schmitt, the junior Senator from Missouri, who was elected in 2022. Readers will be forgiven if they haven’t heard of this backbencher, but he’s apparently no longer content to serve as understudy to Josh Hawley and wants to peddle his own brand of creepy nationalism. On Tuesday, at this year’s National Conservatism (I call them the NatCs—get it.) Conference, he delivered a speech entitled “What is an American?” The answer, most likely, is “not you.” As any relatively learned observer can tell, the speech is chock full of the clichés of white nationalism and American volkisch kitsch. This is unsurprising: turns out he employs Nate “die Fahne” Hochman, the young staffer who was fired from Ron DeSantis’s campaign for overseeing the production of a video that contained a Nazi symbol, and this speech has his grubby fingerprints all over it.

Politely put, the speech is vintage “paleoconservatism:” it posits an American nationhood that’s particular and distinct and not reducible to an “abstract” creed like that of the Declaration of Independence. Not so politely, but more frankly put, it means “Americans = white European Christians:”

We Americans are the sons and daughters of the Christian pilgrims that poured out from Europe’s shores to baptize a new world in their ancient faith. Our ancestors were driven here by destiny, possessed by urgent and fiery conviction, by burning belief, devoted to their cause and their God.

The ruling conceit of the speech is that Trump’s movement is a putsch of the American Volk against anti-American interlopers who came to dominate the government with their alien ideology of universal freedom and equality. On this telling, even so-called “conservatives” became corrupted:

National conservatism is a revolt against this fundamentally post-American ruling class. This revolt is a revolt from the Right—but also, a revolt within the Right.

For too long, conservatives were content to serve as the right wing of the regime. They, too, waged foreign wars in the name of global “liberalism” and “democracy.” They, too, rewrote our trade policies in service of the interests of global capital. They, too, supported amnesty and mass migration.

This speech is cribbed from the work of Samuel T. Francis, the Republican staffer and editorialist who was the most articulate and visionary of the paleocon set. In 1995, Francis was fired from The Washington Times for addressing the white supremacist American Renaissance conference. Ten years later, he would die, embittered and alone, but he lives on in the hearts of the New Right.

The basic notion of Franciscan ideology is that a revolutionary right must craft a new nationalist myth to replace both worn-out 19th-century conservatism and liberal, “managerial globalism” in order to mobilize “the core or nucleus of American civilization, the Real America, the American Nation.” Schmitt’s speech is what an LLM would spit out if you prompted it with Francis’s 1992 essay “Nationalism, Old and New:”

The myth of the managerial regime that America is merely a philosophical proposition about the equality of all mankind (and therefore includes all mankind) must be replaced by a new myth of the nation as a historically and culturally unique order that commands loyalty, solidarity, and discipline and excludes those who do not or cannot assimilate to its norms and interests. This is the real meaning of “America First”: America must be first not only among other nations but first also among the other (indi- vidual or class or sectional) interests of its people.

In fact, Schmitt’s speech is so unoriginal that it comes close to plagiarism. Compare Schmitt:

His movement is the revolt of the real American nation. It’s a pitchfork revolution, driven by the millions of Americans who felt that they were turning into strangers in their own country.

They were the forgotten men and women, who wrapped themselves in our flag and drove hours to hear a real-estate tycoon from New York speak—because they knew he was speaking for them.

They were the Americans whose factories were gutted in the name of “free trade,” whose sons were sent to die in wars that served no American interest, whose neighborhoods were transformed beyond recognition by immigration.

They were the ones who worked the jobs, paid the taxes, fought the wars, and followed the rules that upheld the very system that attacked and dispossessed them—that mocked and smeared them as bigots and “deplorables,” even though it needed them to survive.

To Francis:

They are the Americans sneered at as the "Bubba vote," mocked as Archie Bunkers, and denounced as the racists, sexists, anti-Semites, xenophobes, homophobes, and hate criminals who haunt the dark corners of the land, the "Dark Side" of America, even as their own energy, sacrifice, and commitment make possible the regime and the elite that despise them, exploit them, and dispossess them. They are at once the real victims of the regime and the core or nucleus of American civilization, the Real America, the American Nation.

I called Vance’s July 5th speech at Claremont an “Anti-Declaration.” This one can be called an “Anti-Gettysburg.” Over and over again, Schmitt. rejects the idea that America is a “proposition:”

The Continental Army soldiers dying of frostbite at Valley Forge, the Pilgrims struggling to survive in the hard winter soil of Plymouth, the pioneers striking out from Missouri for the wild and dangerous frontier, the outnumbered Kentucky settlers repelling wave after wave of Indian war band attacks from behind their stockade walls—all of them would be astonished to hear that they were only fighting for a “proposition.”

They believed they were forging a nation—a homeland for themselves and their descendants. They fought, they bled, they struggled, they died for us. They built this country for us.

America, in all its glory, is their gift to us, handed down across the generations. It belongs to us. It’s our birthright, our heritage, our destiny.

Compare this to Lincoln at Gettysburg:

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

(Keep in mind that’s the whole speech. The power, simplicity, and elegance of Lincoln’s words are unmatchable.)

The removal of Lincoln from the national story is not accidental; it’s precisely what Francis had in mind when he cooked up his new nationalism, that it replace the “old nationalism” of Lincoln. The godfather of the paleocons and Francis’s mentor M.E. Bradford’s entire mission in life was to erase Lincoln’s identification of “all men are created equal” as a proposition of universal human worth, calling it a “millenarian infection spread and almost institutionalized by Lincoln,” which originated among the Yankees in New England, “that ‘other Israel’ surrounding Boston.”

Francis tips his hand: While this rhetoric pulls in all the mythic imagery of the American frontier, of the Puritans and the settlers, and so forth, he is fully self-conscious that it is a myth, a fiction, a synthetic product, and an innovation. Writing of the neo-Nazi terrorism of the 1980s, Francis imagined that they were “in the process of articulating something that has never existed in America: a national myth, rising above and overshadowing private interests, to which a revolutionary right can adhere and for which its adherents would gladly spill their own blood and that of others.” For Francis, America has never quite been a nation, but this movement would finally make it one. The word for the politics that makes a pastiche of past glories to create a new type of regime is “fascism.” Its sources are quite literally un-American: Francis drew this business of revolutionary, national myths from Georges Sorel, the heterodox French syndicalist who inspired Mussolini. Francis at least had the courage of his convictions: He called himself a fascist.

One may not believe that Trumpism deserves the title of a real fascist movement, but the Schmitts and Hochmans of the world clearly wish it were. Whatever it is, I’m against it.

Now, I hate to do this, but if you want to learn more about the paleoconservative movement, what it believes, and what it has to do with Trump, I have a book I can recommend.