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I would like to spotlight this comment by @urquan in last week's thread because it touches upon something that I feel warrants it's own discussion seperate from all of the drama surrounding the death of Renee Good. Specifically this line here...
Over the years I have often heard cosmopolitan liberals express a sentiment to the effect "the United States has no culture". I used to find this deeply frustrating, and even as a teenager it seemed obvious to me that there were clear cultural distinctions between the East Coast and West Coast, North and South, never mind between the US and UK or the US and France. We have an entire host of uniquely American, myths, stories, heroes, sports, holidays, figures of speech, etc... How could anyone be so blind as to think that the United States has no culture? It was as I got older that I came to understand that what they really meant was something more like "the United States has no culture worthy of consideration". The more I think about it, the more I think it is this distinction that the modern culture war is really being fought over.
In the blue corner we have liberals and post-modernists who seem to view the idea of nationalism and a national identity as something distinct from one's political, racial, and sexual identity as either "fake and gay" or something to be deconstructed and dismantled. To the extent that the existence of a distinct American national identity is acknowledged, it is as something to feel embarrassed about and apologize for.
...and in the red corner we have this guy. Yes I am aware the commercial itself is for an electric car, but let's be real, its a Cadillac, and I think we all know who that character would have voted for in 2024.
This ties into the rest of @urquan's post and what I see as the core appeal of Trump. I think that a large part of the reason that Trump evinces such strong reactions, both positive and negative, is that he gives off this vibe of being quintessentially capital-A AMERICAN in a way that I don't think any US President really has since the Cold War.
I have been accused of "trolling" and "rage-baiting" by users here for quoting Teddy Roosevelt's "Hyphenated-American" speech, but its something I stand by, and that I feel bears repeating.
It is that sense of one's real heart-allegiance that I feel is sorely missing from much of the modern immigration debate.
Define "cosmopolitan liberals", because I have also heard this over the years. Based on that experience, I think you are probably overreacting to a couple of oikophobes* (or, if you're on the internet, Europeans), who are themselves overreacting to some chest-thumping chauvinists with a highly exclusionary conception of American culture. In that sense, this is a perfect microcosm of the modern culture war in general: people getting worked up over minor or even imagined issues, often involving a fantasy strawmen (or, at the very least, cherry-picked weakmen) of their opponents.
The major difference between liberals and conservatives with respect to America is their willingness to adopt critical attitudes. Liberals are, in general, far more likely to become disappointed/critical if they perceive the US to be failing to live up to its ideals and are far less interested in performative patriotism. The latter in particular I think right-wingers tend to mistake for antipathy. Conservatives, by contrast, are much more adaptive in their principles while demanding uncritical loyalty ("love it or leave it") and deeply love patriotic pageantry.
"Our enemies hate us because we're too cool."
People hate Trump largely for the reasons they say they hate him: they see him as distinctively - almost uniquely - loathsome and stupid individual. He is distinctively American only insofar as we basically elected Florida Man as president, but that certainly doesn't set him above our other post-CW presidents in being AMERICAN. He is perhaps the most declasse president of the post-Cold War era, but to say that makes him more quintessentially American is an example of the exclusionary conception of American culture I mentioned earlier.
I broadly concur with @LiberalRetvrn here: Trump is a vulgar tribalist (at best) of the kind that can be under any rock in any corner of the Earth. For all the flag-waving and shallow patriotic verbiage exhibited by Trump and his supporters, I find that they are people who have contempt for the history and values of the United States, as well as outright hate for their countrymen.
With all respect to TR, he was just wrong with this one. The persistence of superficial identification and cultural elements was not and is not a problem. German Americans are one of the most prominent examples of this: German American culture endured until it was more or less forcibly suppressed during WWI (Chester Nimitz grew up in a German-speaking household, for example). However the problem there was not German immigrants, who were quite well-behaved, but fearful xenophobes. We can go through a list of immigrant groups and see again and again that the fears of immigrants being disloyal or not assimilating is largely unfounded.
Conversely, the most prominent expressions of disloyalty in US history came from the unhyphenated, and one of the ironies of the "a country is not an economic zone" shibboleth is that the people saying it are by far the worst about treating their country and countrymen as things to be exploited rather than a community of common interest.
As an aside, TR is making a common and understandable but nevertheless important error: divided loyalty is inherent in the human condition. You cannot be American and nothing else. It is not entirely without merit to note that immigrants often have interests other than pure loyalty to their new country, but the singling out of immigrants is a distinct double standard. The same concern could equally apply to, e.g. religious affiliation or personal loyalty (a very real risk, as we saw in 2021).
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*as an illustrative anecdote, when an acquaintance raised the idea in very progressive company, basically everyone scoffed and told him he was being an idiot. I think you are more likely to find liberally-minded people who don't like American culture than think it doesn't exist, though IME they are making a shared mistake with Southerners in conflating American culture with the culture of the South.
In my experience, it is most likely encountered as an argument against the claim that too much indiscriminate immigration alters our culture in undesirable ways.
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