The nationalist’s nostalgic whitewashed fantasy vision of American national identity cannot be restored, because it never existed. What they seek to impose is fundamentally hostile to a nation forged in the defining American struggle for equal freedom, and we become who we are as we struggle against them.
No doubt we are experiencing some real challenges lately but the freedoms we enjoy as US immigrants is by far greater than what we had even in our countries of birth. We can still virtually criticize the president to his face which may earn you a coffin in Guyana. I think there are many factors in play now and it is not all nationalism although nationalism is grabbed on to because it is the easiest to handle. I believe that the bigger factor is economics and the continually shipping of American jobs overseas over the past 30 years. The level of damage that did to the middle class (the largest segment of American society) was bound to show up in peoples behavior. While white Americas were probably longing for a purely white America, they were outwardly fine with its changing demographics until they suddenly had no food on their tables. A hungry man is after all an angry man. Trump is just the vehicle by which they get to express that anger. The failure of the Democrats have also assisted as their ideas and governance have been marred by corruption also. I have no idea when the city of Opalocka will get a city government that is not corrupted but no matter how many of them are jailed, the new ones seem to follow in their footsteps. The US congress would have been more Democrat leaning if so many Democrats did not separate themselves from Obama during the 2010 mid terms elections. They just didn't have the courage to fight. That lack of courage has made room for Republicans lacking in substance but still full of courage to control Congress.
And we have to also consider the over the top bombastic attitudes of some of the newer immigrants who seem unwilling infuse into the American society. Many are coming and loudly criticizing America and Americans and many Americans don't appreciate it and one cannot blame them for it. Trump's statement that if you don't like our country, you can go back to your own is not so egregious as it ended up except that it was uttered by him. The statement in itself is very reasonable. There is a reason we end up leaving Guyana just like there is a reason many from other parts of the world end up leaving their homeland and the one common factor is that the countries we left was for lack of a better word, shithole countries.