America’s Turkish Future

As the American Right shifts from internally-directed nativism to externally-directed xenophobia, a new national identity is being forged

Those amongst us who have been known to diligently skim their ‘For You’ page will have noticed that one of the consequences of the so-called ‘vibe shift’ following the re-election of Donald Trump has been a reignition of American nationalist chauvinism. This includes the same kind of chest-thumping which ultimately led to that country’s disastrous invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq (alongside others, such as Britain, who were morally exhorted to join them). Quite aside from various echoes of military adventurism — air strikes on Iran, the kidnapping of Maduro, and now threats against Denmark over Greenland — this has also manifested in an outward xenophobia of a kind quite different to the rather more honest, ‘Pepe-smirking’ racism of the 2016 era.

The targets in this older era were chiefly domestic minorities: blacks and Hispanics. This has changed. Indians, a race who almost nobody in America cared about in 2016, are now derided for a number of fairly obvious normie-sadistic reasons. The Chinese, who as recently as 2019 still had some kind of cachet as a vaguely impressive, un-Woke (if not quite anti-Woke) authoritarian power, even if as a rival to the United States, are now reduced to the hive-minded ‘Han Menace’ who should be drowned to death in their hundreds of millions with a bombing of the Three Gorges Dam. Both of these groups are attacked irrespective of whether they are within or outside of the United States — and indeed, increasingly it seems like these attacks are focused externally, not internally.

Another victim of this shift towards xenophobia has, of course, been Europeans. Needless to say, unlike with Indians and Chinese, these attacks are solely on those Europeans who are outside of the United States. While 2016 did have its share of anti-European bigotry (with Sweden being one particularly egregious victim), the tenor of the vitriol faced by the White Man of the Old Continent is now simply feverish. We are impoverished; we are cuckolds; we are boring; we are unambitious; we are docile. We’re pacifistic Sitzpinklers when we don’t spend money on the military, and Russophobic warmongers when we do.

This escalating (and mostly incoherent) disdain for Europeans not only highlights America’s xenophobic turn, but also — I would argue — reflects a deeper reconfiguration of white identity in a diversifying society.

In 2018, a book called Whiteshift by political scientist Eric Kaufmann made a splash in the Anglophone world. The book’s overall focus was on how white ethnic majorities in Western societies were losing demographic centrality via immigration and intermarriage. One of the book’s bolder predictions was that ‘whiteness’ would be transformed into a broader, more mixed-heritage majority identity (‘white shift’), rather than there being an outright extinction of that identity. While Kaufmann’s thesis is interesting, and it’s certainly not my intention to thoroughly critique his book, I would contend it’s incomplete for the American context. In the United States, the outcome may not be a strictly white-identifying majority but something more assimilationist and detached from traditional racial categories, leading to a uniquely American identity.

Let us start by assessing the background of the most prominent American of the twenty-first century: Donald Trump. President Trump was born in 1946 in an America which was 9% foreign-born, of which the overwhelming majority was born in Europe. As many have noted, Donald Trump’s own mother was a Gaelic-speaking immigrant from Scotland; his father, though born an American, was himself raised in a German-speaking household, and young Donald would have known his own German-born grandmother Elisabeth reasonably well (she died when Trump was 20).

While Trump is indeed more closely connected to the Old Continent than many of his generation, I have met American Boomers who share Trump’s basic background and sentiment. Many were born into households which had some residual connection to the Old Continent, where — say — the Boomer’s grandparents, born c.1890, would have still had a command of the old country’s language, and where the Boomer’s parents still celebrated vaguely ethnic festivals and cooked old-country cuisine, and where the Boomer himself, in advanced age, has embraced a sentimental interest in their family history and traditions (see Trump’s own obvious personal affinity towards Scotland).

Obviously, I accept that America’s pre-1945 history is also one marked by a certain political distance from Europe, and an insistence on isolation and noninterventionism for a number of reasons (many of them good reasons). It is also a history that — admirably — contrasted its own tradition of republican liberty against the fetid feudalism of a Europe which knelt at the feet of kings. But this was not, on some level, particularly different to the political traditions and armed neutrality espoused by, say, Switzerland, in that while it did posit a certain exceptionalism or political difference, there was no denying that they were still of the white (European) race.

The reality today is that due to the complete crowding out of European immigration into the United States by post-1965 sources from outside of Europe (and the drying up of what were formerly incredibly rich streams from places such as Ireland, Poland, and Italy), the average white American is more genuinely ‘American’ than ever. Some back-of-the-envelope numbers would suggest that if white immigrants were ≈7% of the white American population when Trump was born, they are perhaps ≈1% of that group now.

That 1% figure also, of course, does not take into account the fact that the American people as a whole are increasingly non-white, even further compounding the demographic decline of European-born people in the United States. Moreover, this immigration-led demographic transformation is not only more wholesale than in Europe: it is also more meaningful because the average non-white immigrant into America actually has some affinity towards America, or at least a certain image of America that he has in his mind that is not entirely incompatible with the one held by bona fide Americans. In one sentence, the immigrant and his family ‘assimilates’ quickly into America’s various mores and customs.

The average non-white immigrant to America is also generally more economically dynamic and intellectually advanced than the average non-white immigrant in Europe. American liberals of the broad majority will regularly point to their immigrants and ethnic minorities as being a generally higher quality than those in Europe. This is clearly true: they are, for the most part, more ‘selected’. But the corollary of this is that there is less ‘buy-in’ to remove those people and to retain the ‘white’ character of the American Republic.

By contrast, immigrants into Europe from places like Pakistan and Syria and Congo and Somalia and Eritrea, and indeed their descendants, do not genuinely see themselves as belonging to the nations in which they are raised. When they do affirm that they are British, or German, or Swedish, they almost always do so only selectively and negatively: ‘Are you saying I’m not British?’, ‘I have the passport bro’, et cetera. Intermixing is rather minimal among most of these groups (this is especially true of Muslims) and these people fit quite neatly into their traditional ethnic identities. They run little shops, work menial jobs, deal drugs, claim benefits, and then the next generation marries their cousin and repeats the process. For obvious reasons, far fewer people would be opposed to removing these people.

Of course, America does have some immigrants like that. America is a big country with many people. It has, for example, many Somalis in Minnesota — of which there has been so much recent hubbub — who behave rather like this. And of course, Europe also does have some examples of the opposite (for example, recent East Asian immigrants working white-collar jobs in the City, or South Asian and Arab doctors on Harley Street). America also, however, has a lot of things which are much rarer in Europe than even the economically dynamic immigrant. It has nominally ‘Chinese’ Americans with names like Clarissa. It has ‘Mexican’ Americans who don’t speak Spanish. It has ‘Indian’ Americans who own dogs as pets. It has ‘Arab’ Americans who attend gay weddings. America is an assimilation machine, and the obvious factualness of that statement is something celebrated by leftists, liberals, and centre-rightists of that country, while nonetheless representing an uncomfortable truth for genuine nativists.

20% of the US population is Hispanic. This category is obviously a rather broad and ambiguous one, but we can accept that this basically means a combination of Amerindian and European ancestry (sometimes with black admixture too), with the exact composition depending on where the Hispanic in question is from (and there has been a gradual tilt towards more Amerindian-dominated countries in Central America in terms of the origins of these immigrants), as well as their social class. According to 2015 Pew data, 27% of Hispanic newlyweds (to be clear, this refers to newlyweds, not married people in general) were intermarried to other races. 29% of Asians were too. Unsurprisingly, as they are the dominant group, the overwhelming share of these intermarriages were to whites: 11% of white newlyweds in 2015 were themselves intermarried.

These are higher numbers than in Britain or anywhere else in Europe, where the data suggests that where there are inter-ethnic relationships, the majority are between a member of the native group and someone who is an immigrant from somewhere else in Europe. There is quite simply a far greater cultural gulf between Europe’s immigrants and its natives than there is in America — and again, many Americans celebrate this or use it as a point to hammer at Europe’s own (obviously) poor immigration policies.

But while high intermarriage rates underscore America’s ability to ‘mix’ at a fundamental biological level, this integration increasingly extends beyond the personal and into the political realm. In the 2000s, Steve Sailer proposed the ‘Sailer Strategy,’ urging Republicans to maximise white support through immigration, cultural issues, and mobilising non-college-educated whites — a strategy that was seemingly vindicated by Trump’s 2016 win.

And yet, intriguingly, Trump has continued to make impressive gains amongst non-whites. Trump won 28% of the Hispanic vote in 2016, 34% in 2020, and 45% in 2024. He won 18% of the Asian vote in 2016, 28% in 2020, and 40% in 2024. This is quite simply an incredible shift in popular support, just at the time that these groups are gaining enough demographic momentum to influence elections — particularly in states such as Texas, so long seemingly destined to ‘go blue’ and with it, America as a whole; equally importantly, Florida, with its 30 electoral votes, has moved from a perennial swing state to a safe Republican state thanks to the strongly rightward shift of Hispanics. Trump even gained a bit with blacks, and especially black men, in part because some of them remembered him as the man who gave them $1200 stimulus checks in March 2020. Trump’s black support went from 8%, to 12%, to 15% in 2016, 2020, and 2024 respectively. In the meantime, Trump support amongst whites stagnated at 57-58% across the three elections.

Was the Sailer Strategy a victim of its own success? The bandwagoning of America’s ethnic minorities onto Donald Trump as a leader goes to show that millions upon millions of black, brown, and yellow Americans are happy to support him and what he stands for, and Trump — for lack of a better word — is an American nationalist. Of course, an important caveat here is that we don’t know who will succeed Trump: Trump is a one-of-a-kind figure with no obvious spiritual heir, and if there is a ‘Trumpism’ it is hard to imagine it without him. It is possible that the American Right may retreat back towards its traditional base after 2028, though the demographic situation there seems to militate against such a move.

That anything like this level of ethnic minority support could be achieved in Britain or Europe for a nationalist party is incredibly hard to believe. For instance, Indians are widely believed to be strongly Conservative-leaning in Britain (and are probably the only major non-white immigrant group in the entirety of Europe that could even be plausibly argued to be right-leaning). Yet in 2024, less than a third of Indians voted for a rather milquetoast Conservative Party that was actually led by an ethnic Indian (Rishi Sunak) and had a number of other Indians in prominent positions in recent years (Priti Patel, Suella Braverman, Claire Coutinho). Meanwhile, Reform — Donald Trump’s actual analogue in Britain — won just 5% of the Indian vote. While Reform are likely to improve on that performance in the next General Election thanks to their generally increased vote share, it is unlikely that these figures will come even close to Trump’s support from Hispanics and Asians — and this, of course, is a best case scenario, with effectively all other non-white immigrant groups in Western Europe except Indians in Britain voting in banana-republic numbers for left-wing parties.

America is also, fundamentally, a ‘nation of immigrants’. Now, I fully accept that America’s constitutional foundations never meant to include anyone other than Free White Persons of Good Character (as has previously been argued in this journal). I also appreciate that Trump is trying to get rid of birthright citizenship. I also grant that ICE, despite a somewhat slow start, is currently deporting illegals, and that the southern border has stopped leaking (for now). And yet: America is still, fundamentally, a ‘nation of immigrants’.

There are various cultural, geographical, and constitutional barriers to America implementing policies that seem to repudiate its status as a ‘nation of immigrants’. For instance, a guest worker system — a system which the Gulf states and Singapore rely upon today, and which the likes of Germans were told they would have in the early post-war period — would seem quite alien to Americans, even very right-wing Americans.

A world of 2050 where most European countries have Israel-style racialist citizenship policies and a formal ‘remigration’ policy, perhaps with some kind of Gulf-style rotational labour system, seems far more conceivable. Europe already doesn’t have birthright citizenship, and many nations (including Germany and Italy) already offer citizenship by descent. Furthermore, an important object of competition for many European states — most notably Britain — is increasingly the United Arab Emirates, and there will be a push to look to this country and its neighbours as an economic model as they increasingly brain-drain Europeans to their benefit and our loss. Even if some of the minorities currently present in Western Europe stay, a solution closer to a formalised recognition of their inherent ‘otherness’ seems more likely than their full integration into the body politic.

I imagine that in the long run, post-1960s stalwart sources of immigration into the United States, like China and Mexico, will give way to other sources. Hispanic immigration to America, as mentioned, has already shifted in a southerly direction. If Trump’s Wall keeps out Bolivians and Ecuadorians, then that is one matter solved. But the H-1B route will continue to be a weak spot; even if there are efforts to wind back the more obvious excesses of Indian nepotism, Asia will have many willing would-be emigrants and the presence of people from what statistical agencies call the ‘Rest of Asia’ — a category which includes countries from Burma to the Philippines — has exploded in the last fifteen years.

Amid these shifts, blacks may well modestly lose out, in relative terms. Indeed, it was often Soyjak-smirkingly suggested in the 2010s by commentators on the Online Right that a majority-minority America would be bad for blacks. This is true, notwithstanding that it would be bad for white people too. Blacks obviously benefited from an arrangement where they were the single sizeable minority living alongside whites. As just one minority amongst others — albeit a ‘Heritage’ one, with certain privileges — they can be expected to lose out. Trump’s ban on affirmative action is one such example of this. I could quite easily see casual anti-black racism becoming a bit more widely accepted than it is today. However, this will be accompanied by a general increase in xenophobia and antipathy towards those who do not embrace American norms, both at home and abroad.

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The long-term consequence of all of this will, in my view, be the formation of an American identity which bears some strange similarities to Turkishness. To be a Turk in Kemalist Turkey was to take on a civic identity anchored in language and culture. It was highly assimilationist in expecting minorities to melt into a single Turkish identity, with a single Turkish language, and regularly used coercion to achieve these ends. It was categorically not a racial or ethnic identity, for this would have been incompatible with the continued existence of the rump ‘Turkish’ state that remained after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire (much as establishing an explicitly ‘Han’ China after the Xinhai Revolution of 1911 would have meant being forced to relinquish many of the conquests of the Qing Dynasty). This is something that has only slightly changed in recent years with a re-Islamisation of identity and a rehabilitation of the Ottoman Empire, but these are still marginal within Turkish nationalism. Despite Erdoğan’s twenty-two years in power, openly attacking Atatürk and his legacy remains taboo.

Turks view themselves, with some justification, as a unique Eurasian civilisation that is not European, not Near Eastern, and not Central Asian, despite taking aspects from all three. The basic structure of the Turkish state is clearly European, and not merely in a cosmetic sense (as could be claimed of numerous other post-colonial ‘republics’). Some of Turkey’s people are too, but only a fairly small (but not insignificant) minority. Geographically, and symbolically, Istanbul sits on two continents; geopolitically, it is a member of NATO despite its fraught (and sometimes schizophrenic) relationship with many European states and institutions. Turkey’s national language comes from a group of horse-riders from the steppe, and under Atatürk was largely stripped of Arabic and Persian influences; and yet, despite the central role of these people in both language (which anchors the entire identity) and modern Turkish national myth, they are mostly irrelevant in genetic terms. The bulk of Turkey’s population is Muslim — something that is clearly seen as external to Europe (notwithstanding the existence of Bosnians and Albanians) — yet the state itself, in line with its basically ‘European’ character, is secular, and sometimes aggressively so (until 2008, it was illegal to wear a hijab on a university campus).

Some Turks are white. Some Turks are not. Yet Turks today are, if not quite genuinely ‘race-blind’, far more so than Europeans, and indeed Americans also. There are obvious ethnic differences between many Western Turks (many of whom are descended entirely or almost entirely from bona fide Europeans, including Greeks, Albanians, Bosnians, and Serbs) and Eastern Turks (few of whom are meaningfully ‘European’, with most having higher Early European Farmer ancestry than the vast majority of European groups, and far higher Iranian/Caucasian ancestry than all European groups). Internally, these differences come across phenotypically (Anatolians and European Turks simply look different), culturally (Anatolians are far more religious and socially conservative), politically (most European Turks despise Erdoğan), and in IQ tests (Turkey has an abnormally large variance in IQ by region).

Yet these differences, which will seem so obvious to most readers, are acknowledged far less frequently in Turkey than most readers — and indeed most Europeans, including left-wing Europeans — would expect. This is before even discussing the complete denial (until recently) of the existence of any ethnic distinctiveness of Kurds, who were simply designated ‘Mountain Turks’, from other Turks — they were not inferior or alien, but simply misnamed. To some extent this Turkish ‘race-blindness’ is a product of legal, institutional, and social sanctions (including an obvious fear for the long-term viability of the state should a racial consciousness begin to emerge); however, to a surprising extent, it is also genuine.

None of the purported contradictions of diversity seem to be able to stop Turks from being highly nationalistic, as anyone who has observed Turks online will be able to attest. The same may well apply to a future America.

The coming American mythos is going to go something like this:

The American nation was founded by settlers who we call ‘Heritage Americans’. They represented a superior breed to the Europeans they left behind on the continent. Our conception is quite literally racial. We were and are genetically different to the Old World Europeans: we are stronger, smarter, and more godly. The Europeans are biological leftovers whose greatest fled them to form colonial stock, and then saw their bravest defeated in the wars of the twentieth century, which is why they now face predation from Muslims.

Around our genetic core of Heritage Americans who gave us our superior polity, we have added the finest immigrants in the world who were also similarly selected for their strength, smarts, and love of God and Liberty — reinforcing the traits which the Old World Europeans allowed to atrophy due to their inferior genetics. We have people with heritage from places like Mexico, India, the Dominican Republic, China, and the Philippines, but the good ones speak English and work hard and assimilate and are expected to throw off their old allegiances immediately.

We also have a group of people called African-Americans, who are descended from slaves (to which some would add: ‘…and they were brought over by the Jews’). They are troublemakers and sometimes we hate them with justification, but it cannot be denied that they are an entertaining race, and on some level their presence in global popular culture is itself an expression of American cultural superiority.

As we can see, this is not a nationalism that is truly post-racial, in the sense of not being linked to ancestry. It cannot be said to be a mere descendant of various older left-wing attempts to forge a new, fully inclusive national identity: quite apart from the special role that is given to ‘Heritage Americans’, the flagrantly biological language alone — which openly celebrates the alleged superiority of the racial groups that are said to have built America — would be completely unacceptable to such people. Yet it is also clearly different from older forms of right-wing American nationalism: while some older right-wing American nationalists would have partially accepted the cleaving of white Americans from Europeans, the language used would have been far less absolute; and, even more importantly, all (or almost all, given the special position of African-Americans) non-white Americans would have been excluded from the category of ‘real Americans’. It is, in short, a novel twenty-first century form of American nationalism.

There may be reason to believe that America will not quite so radically ‘turn-Turk’. In particular, it will be extremely difficult for Americans to sufficiently unlearn racial discourse to the extent that the Turks have: whereas in Turkey there is something of a conspiracy of silence surrounding race, modern American trends suggest that — if anything — racial topics will be discussed more (and more offensively) than they were in the past, despite the declining salience of race when it comes to politics and national identity. Whether these apparently contradictory trends are compatible in the long term is up for question. Nor will America have anything like the coercive Kemalist state that sought to force non-compliant ethnic minority groups (as there are bound to be in America) into line.

In the long term, America may instead become something more like Russia: a country which goes hot and cold on ‘Europe’ and whether it is in fact ‘European’, plagued by similar neuroses where different political forces advocate for competing visions of identity — one pulling toward a reimagined Western alignment, the other toward a distinct exceptionalism. White Americans disillusioned with their country’s multiracial political project might then end up representing a camp akin to those in Russian politics who bought into Navalny’s idea of Russia as a ‘normal European country’, rendering them susceptible to foreign influence campaigns and internal fractures.

That said, despite the dramatically different reasons for adopting such a national identity (a fragile, already-diverse post-imperial state versus an incumbent superpower that is rapidly diversifying due to mass migration), the Turkish analogy seems particularly elegant due to the exceptional diversification of the American body politic. Unlike Russia’s more homogeneous ethnic core and historical ambiguities, America’s aggressive assimilation of diverse immigrants, forging a civic identity detached from historical racial or territorial ties, more closely mirrors Turkey’s Kemalist melting pot than the Russian Federation.

All considerations of metaphors aside, it does seem that America’s fate is no longer bound with that of Europe’s. In the long term, the two are likely to diverge further, as America’s evolving civic identity shaped by its unique assimilationist trajectory pulls it away from shared European roots. This need not preclude mutual goodwill in matters of geopolitics and trade; pragmatic cooperation could endure. Yet, our bonds of sentiment, once anchored in a common racial and cultural heritage, will inevitably fray and diverge, fostering a future where transatlantic kinship feels increasingly distant and vestigial.

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This article was written by Strategic Advisor, a Pimlico Journal contributor. Have a pitch? Send it to submissions@pimlicojournal.co.uk.

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