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Notes -
The strawman is real.
American nationalism is more or less incidental to these people's worldview- they believe in a Christian culture, that might be led by the USA or France or Canada or Spain or any other particular country. They are however, Americans who believe patriotism is a virtue and notice there aren't a lot of other candidates. Most of them are probably Catholic supremacists; but they do believe in a broader Christian culture and focus on that. Moreover, many aren't traditional Catholics; American traditional Catholicism exists in a broader landscape of orthodox and politically conservative Catholicism heavily influenced by John Senior and, despite the personal sympathies of John Senior, the traditionalists are not the largest group therein(that would be charismatics). It is extremely possible that John Senior would have preferred a more moderate group had the religious landscape in 90's Catholicism been different; certainly the SSPX is a minority of self-described traditionalist Catholics today in a way it wasn't in the 90's. It is probably fair to say that they have an ideological... predisposition to further integration with Latin America, even if that comes at some cost, and this is probably why they generally oppose strict immigration enforcement- because they think in terms of civilizations and not nations, and they are elites who tend to like western hemisphere integration anyways.
If you're asking 'why does the GOP struggle with American ethnic nationalism' that's a fair answer- they simply do not have access to American ethnic nationalist elites, because America is an empire and doesn't produce ethnic nationalist elites. Instead they have... that.
It's not that the GOP doesn't have access to ethno-nationalist elites so much as ethno-nationalist elites despise civic nationalism in general and MAGA in particular and MAGA returns the favor
I would not call hypenated-Americans ethno-nationalist elites. If you want to say Israel-supporting (and therefore ethno-nationalist) Jewish-Americans, say so. But I do not think that there are a lot of Irish- or Italo-American elites who are meaningfully ethno-nationalist.
Also, MAGA despises elites generally. RFK and Hegseth are decidedly not members of the intellectual elite, and that is precisely why they are in Trump's cabinet.
Italian and Irish Americans are also not in any particular beef with MAGA.
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MAGA does not despise elites generally, though it does despise much of what the Blue Tribe regards as elites. To MAGA, both Trump and Hegseth are elite.
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