Is the Right Pining for Racial Purity? | The American Spectator

Leighton Woodhouse is a filmmaker who wants to be a historian but writes like a preacher for the coastal elite. In his New York Times essay, “The Right-Wing Myth of American Heritage,” he paints conservatives as bitter nativists clutching a fantasy of racial purity — a cartoon version of America that only exists in the minds of left-wing writers who rarely step outside their own social circles. It’s history as performance, designed not to inform but to inflame.

Woodhouse opens with a bloody 1764 feud between Irish settlers and Quakers, suggesting that America was always divided by hate and that modern conservatives are simply continuing the pattern. But this is a sleight of hand, not scholarship. The clash of colonial factions tells us nothing about the people who today go to work, raise families, and vote for a government that doesn’t insult their beliefs. By pretending otherwise, Woodhouse replaces complexity with contempt.

What he gets most wrong is his claim that the right defines itself by bloodlines. The modern conservative isn’t defending “pure stock,” but continuity — the simple belief that a nation should still recognize itself from one generation to the next. Conservatives talk about heritage because they care about inheritance. They care about what’s passed down in customs, duties, and habits, not in DNA. To conflate that with racism is either dishonest or willfully dense.

Woodhouse also misreads America’s present. If he’d actually remove himself from the Times bubble, he’d see that interracial marriage is not just accepted but celebrated by nearly everyone — left, right, and in between. Ninety-four percent of Americans approve of it, including the vast majority of Republicans. Churches across the country are filled with mixed families, children of every complexion sitting side by side. America has moved on. But Woodhouse and his editors cannot, because division is their business model. (RELATED: The Myth of the Radical Young Right)

This is the Times’ formula: find a thorny truth, turn it into ideology, and then congratulate themselves for their intelligence. The 1619 Project did it with slavery. Woodhouse does it with patriotism. Both turn nuance into narrative. Both exist to make the reader feel morally superior. And both miss the point entirely. The genius of America isn’t that it was born perfect, but that it built a system capable of correcting itself. The right’s respect for that system is born of reverence, not race. But gratitude remains a forgotten language in a culture fluent only in grievance.

What Woodhouse truly despises is not racism — he’d have no job if it disappeared — but rootedness. He mocks people who cherish continuity because it reminds him of what the modern left has lost: a sense of belonging, of objective reality, of boundaries that mean something.

His own worldview depends on the very virtues he ridicules. Without the discipline of those “nativists,” there would be no free press, no constitutional order, no country for him to condemn. The America he derides was built by imperfect people striving toward ideals that transcended tribe. The America he champions — one defined by perpetual fragmentation — would devour itself within a generation. (RELATED: Why Are So Many Young Americans Killing Themselves?)

The 1619 Project tried to redefine the nation through guilt; Woodhouse tries to redefine its defenders through shame. Both insist that patriotism is a mask for prejudice, that respect for the past is a refusal to grow. But America’s endurance proves the opposite. Its resilience comes not from rejecting its heritage but from refining it — holding on to what works while learning from what didn’t. (RELATED: Celebrating Independence From Anti-American History Propaganda)

The great irony of Woodhouse’s work is that he accuses others of mythmaking while peddling myths himself — of unity through cynicism, virtue through accusation, progress through perpetual resentment. It’s a tired ritual at the Times: call every expression of loyalty dangerous until there’s nothing left worth being loyal to. But America endures despite its critics, not because of them. And when the fashionable myths fade, the truth will still stand. Not in the editorials of Manhattan, but in the quiet, steady heart of the country they refuse to see.

His idea of “heritage” as a dirty word also betrays a deep misunderstanding of ordinary patriotism. When conservatives speak of it, they mean the things that still hold a fraying nation together — respect for faith, the flag, and the family. A country can have many backgrounds, but only one backbone. Woodhouse mocks this as nostalgia because he cannot distinguish between custom and control.

He writes about conservative America as if it were a different species — suspicious, backward, irredeemable, and dangerously feral. The people who serve in the military, maintain America’s infrastructure, and build the towns that journalists fly over are reduced to a faceless mass of “nativists.” It’s easy to sneer at people you’ll never meet. Easier still when you never plan to.

What Woodhouse also misses is that the new right isn’t shrinking. If anything, it’s growing younger, more based, and more articulate. They don’t see the right as a fortress of whiteness but as one of sanity. That reality doesn’t fit his script, so he ignores it.

By the end of his essay, Woodhouse has devolved into an intellectual drunk — slurring history, stumbling over logic, and mistaking self-righteousness for sobriety. The right’s argument isn’t — and never was — that America was once an Edenic paradise. It’s that America has always had a center — a shared sense of duty, reverence, and gratitude. And that center, though battered and berated, remains worth defending. Woodhouse calls the past vile so he can feel virtuous in the present. But his history is selective, his empathy absent, and his understanding of half the country non-existent. He doesn’t reveal who conservatives are, only how little the modern left can see beyond the sight of its own ugly reflection.

READ MORE from John Mac Ghlionn:

The Myth of the Radical Young Right

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