It’s a sign of our benighted times that when people are talking about “Schmitt,” my first assumption is that they mean Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt. But no, this is a different Schmitt in the news, evidently of some relation to Carl,—if not by blood, then by adoption. This is Eric Schmitt, the junior Senator from Missouri, who was elected in 2022. Readers will be forgiven if they haven’t heard of this backbencher, but he’s apparently no longer content to serve as understudy to Josh Hawley and wants to peddle his own brand of creepy nationalism. On Tuesday, at this year’s National Conservatism (I call them the NatCs—get it.) Conference, he delivered a speech entitled “What is an American?” The answer, most likely, is “not you.” As any relatively learned observer can tell, the speech is chock full of the clichés of white nationalism and American volkisch kitsch. This is unsurprising: turns out he employs Nate “die Fahne” Hochman, the young staffer who was fired from Ron DeSantis’s campaign for overseeing the production of a video that contained a Nazi symbol, and this speech has his grubby fingerprints all over it.
Politely put, the speech is vintage “paleoconservatism:” it posits an American nationhood that’s particular and distinct and not reducible to an “abstract” creed like that of the Declaration of Independence. Not so politely, but more frankly put, it means “Americans = white European Christians:”
We Americans are the sons and daughters of the Christian pilgrims that poured out from Europe’s shores to baptize a new world in their ancient faith. Our ancestors were driven here by destiny, possessed by urgent and fiery conviction, by burning belief, devoted to their cause and their God.
The ruling conceit of the speech is that Trump’s movement is a putsch of the American Volk against anti-American interlopers who came to dominate the government with their alien ideology of universal freedom and equality. On this telling, even so-called “conservatives” became corrupted:
National conservatism is a revolt against this fundamentally post-American ruling class. This revolt is a revolt from the Right—but also, a revolt within the Right.
For too long, conservatives were content to serve as the right wing of the regime. They, too, waged foreign wars in the name of global “liberalism” and “democracy.” They, too, rewrote our trade policies in service of the interests of global capital. They, too, supported amnesty and mass migration.
This speech is cribbed from the work of Samuel T. Francis, the Republican staffer and editorialist who was the most articulate and visionary of the paleocon set. In 1995, Francis was fired from The Washington Times for addressing the white supremacist American Renaissance conference. Ten years later, he would die, embittered and alone, but he lives on in the hearts of the New Right.