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Notes -
America has never been an ethnostate. If anything it is the literal anti-ethnostate. As far back as 1776, Thomas Paine pointed out that less than a third of Pennsylvanians were of English descent and so any claims of being an English nation were already moot.
The direction has been clear since then: from just Anglos to accepting all Germanic and Celtic peoples to accepting all "Judeo-Christians" and so on. I too have colonial ancestry, but I don’t see how my New England Puritan, New Netherland Dutch, and Palatine German ancestors formed any sort of ethnos. They certainly wouldn't have said so, those of them that even had a language in common to communicate in. Their blood may be mingled in me now, but so is that of subsequent waves of immigration from Europe and Asia. Where do you draw the line?
There is a path towards a single American nation, the same one followed by the Romans from a civic identity that encompassed the whole of the Mediterranean world from Gauls to Numidians to an ethnic one of Greek-speaking Romanoi living in the Eastern Empire after losing most of the Middle East to the Arab invasions.
However, the road to Byzantium is a hard one and involves the loss of prestige and power on the world stage and a retrenchment into more parochial, local concerns. In many ways we are already on it, but it is not the rediscovery of a centuries old white ethnic identity (though depending on the exact demographics it may be framed that way by some) but rather the binding together of those populations that are already here, be they of European, African, Asian, or indigenous descent, and from our perspective it may seem as strange for that new people to claim the mantle of "American" as it would be for Augustus to see some Greek Christian from Anatolia in the 10th century claiming to be "Roman."
While it is true that Pennsylvania and the Southern upcountry weren't ethnically homogeneous by any means, the colonial and early US absolutely had an ethnic nation: Yankee New England. It was a ridiculously homogeneous area -- culturally and ethnically -- for North American subsequent experience. Their culture was also very influential on American culture generally for a long time, too. So, America has historically had at least sub-national ethno-states in the past.
Now, however, they have greatly subsumed into 'general American' culture, fully assimilating into the broader gestalt of the republic. When was the last time you ever saw someone called a 'WASP'? Even New England itself is plurality Catholic these days so, while Yankee heritage is still probably very widespread there, there is a new ethnicity living in New England that is descended from the Yankees and a whole lot of newcomers.
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