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Notes -
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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