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That case is more evidence of 'the US is a civic nation that Indians can't assimilate into' than 'the US is a nation of white people or a subset thereof.' By then, you had the 14th Amendment giving blacks citizenship, the 1917 granting of Puerto Ricans citizenship, and the 1920s granting of Amerindians citizenship. I agree with you that the US of the time was White Supremacist and that it was part of the US legal architecture at the time. You also did have a minority of Americans, such as the Know Nothings, arguing for an explicitly ethnic conception of the US.
What I'm arguing is kind of a finer point; the bulk of Americans did not say "We are a nation of a specific ethnicity/ethnos that people assimilate into.". The bulk of Americans then said instead "We are a nation of different peoples tied together by common civic rules and a common civic culture. Non-whites are to a greater or lesser extent incapable of fulfilling the duties of citizenship." While in practice those identities are quite similar in many aspects, they are conceptually different and those differences do have practical effects.
Most white nationalists argue for the first identity, which is ahistorical. For white nationalists who argue for the second identity, they are arguing for a historic identity. The argument there is a factual question of if x/y/z group is unable/unwilling to assimilate.
I can't speak for their arguments, but I have my own viewpoint on this. I think a sort of "Red Tribe" nationalism is not workable. Red Tribe is a pretty heterogenous coalition of people. There are various groups of Christians, rural groups, working class groups, and other groups. There are also groups like Conservative Blue Tribers and Hispanic Evangelicals who are non-central cases. They are bound together in agreement on certain baseline values, but it is neither desirable or practical to try and separate those groups from other groups in the US at the moment. At the same time, the Right should practice patronage for the groups that support and ignore the groups that don't; not act as stewards of the entire nation.
One thing I think may elucidate my viewpoint is to contrast what I'm saying above with the mid/late 20th century US right. From the Civil War to the Great Depression, a reasonable oversimplification of US politics would be that Republicans were the party of Yankees who wanted to turn all of the US into Yankee-stan, economic policies included, and the Democrats where the party of all the different groups who did not want that. There was a national identity and patriotism, but the Republicans never got the unified and uniform national culture they wanted. With the New Deal, WW2, the Television, and national economic and cultural integration you really had a strong, semi-uniform national identity for the first time in the mid 20th century.
As a result of the semi-uniform national identity and preexisting trends, the Republicans in the mid to late 20th century changed their self image to desiring to be the party of the American mainstream/middle class. They considered themselves stewards of the nation in general. Patronage still existed, but the Republicans even as they became the explicitly right wing party in the 80s still viewed themselves as the party of the whole country. The cultural consensus, if it ever existed in reality, that Republicans viewed themselves as the representatives of no longer exists. As a result, they should simply be an interest party of their constituents and cooperate only on mutually beneficial policies.
The reason I mentioned this is that it is a case of Asians putting the interests/cultural values of Blue Tribe over their own 'racial interests'. If Asians were maximally ethnocentric, they would not have stopped pushing Stop Asian Hate once the focus got on black criminals. That they stopped shows that blue-tribe Asians value blue-tribe norms over personal ethnocentrism. If you look at how they vote and act, red-tribe Hispanics either value red-tribe norms over being Hispanic or view it as no conflict.
You listed American whites and Russians as peoples that create separate cultures when they congregate. What do you consider to be the descent that people should rally around? How much of that inheritance is genetic vs. cultural? Since you separated the above two, it seems we are talking in terms more granular than the big three races. My particular issue is that I don't think European descent is a good dividing line for 'makes a good neighbor' and 'want to share a body politic' with.
My reading of stuff like the 1790 Immigration Act and that court case suggests that historically there was a specifically "white" conception of American nationhood with "whites" as the titular ethnicity of America the way Germans are in Germany or Russians are in Russia. A lot of immigrants, oddly enough, seem to agree with me and call whites "Americans" while referring to other people by their ethnic backgrounds. I don't think that most Americans before the 19th/20th century diasporas identified strongly with their particular European roots as some happy coalition of groups of Dutchmen, Englishmen, Scotsmen, etc coming together to be Americans, these people were already mixing in large numbers and creating a new people before the Revolution, I believe Jefferson wrote about this. Regional and state identity was a lot stronger but I don't see how that's really so different than Germans or Italians having regional identities.
I basically agree with your thoughts on "Red Tribe" nationalism. You may have picked up that I'm a very right-leaning "blue," culturally speaking, which leaves me as a bit of an awkward member of the Republican coalition. I'm not necessarily arguing that the right in general should be spending lots of effort trying to win over white left-wingers, my point that started the whole discussion is more that a white progressive is meaningfully part of a cultural ingroup that a Muslim immigrant isn't.
It's cool and good when we can make common ground politically with immigrants or people from other cultures, but there are a lot more meaningful differences than just political ones. I would go farther and say that I prefer to live in a more left-leaning white area to a right-leaning Asian one and I think most whites would agree with me given experience living in heavily Asian areas. Their norms on education, family, work, and many other things are radically different and create an environment that is pretty unpleasant for whites even in the absence of racial animosity. A piece of evidence for this viewpoint is white flight from what are otherwise extremely wealthy and well-functioning Asian suburbs. I don't think it'd be unreasonable to prefer progressive whites as neighbors but conservative Asians as voters. I think my case for white progressives is much stronger with (some groups of) Muslims, who are not only foreign like East Asians but outright hostile.
As for descent, American whites are mostly Northwest Europeans with some ancestry from assimilated people from outside of there. The heterogeneity of modern American whites is seems hugely overstated to me when considering that the majority of them have the majority of their ancestry from closely related parts of Europe like the British Isles and Germany. They are not quite as perfectly defined an ethnic group as Afrikaners but it seems to me that there's clearly an ethnic core and recognizable group of people. Whites from Northwestern Europe tend to build meaningfully different societies than whites from Southern or Eastern Europe, which is why I brought up the Russians. I think this is an underrated challenge of Latin American immigration - even if our Hispanic immigrants were 100% white Iberian Spaniards they would be much more alien to American culture than a German or Brit. We can look at the challenges caused by Italian immigration and note that proportionally, there are 5 times as many Hispanics (and soon more than that), and extrapolate from that.
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