The Problem with "White Culture"

Identities are meant to communicate something about the world

Last week in a Senate confirmation hearing, we saw what happens when the Based Ritual collides with real world politics. Jeremy Carl, nominated to a top State Department post, was asked about some of his positions on anti-white discrimination and threats faced by “white culture.” It did not go well. When asked what white culture meant, Carl stumbled around, mentioning baseball, football, hot dogs, burgers, and the Scots-Irish.

Not even those sympathetic toward his views thought he did a good job articulating them. But we have seen some try to make the case that, even if Jeremy was not the best representative for the position, white culture does exist, no less than American black or Hispanic culture does, and it is being discriminated against.

This whole debate is pretty annoying, because it seems as if we’re fighting over words to hide what is a more substantive disagreement over ideas and empirical propositions. Sure, you can say “white culture” exists. You can group people together and divide them into whatever categories you want. Here is a list of cultures you can say I arguably belong to:

1. American

2. Arab-American

3. Palestinian-American

4. Jordanian-American

5. Arab American

6. Person of color

7. White

8. Gentile (non-Jew)

9. Chicagoan

10. Californian

11. Educated elite

12. Midwesterner

13. West Coaster

14. Westerner (as in Western civilization)

15. Libertarian

16. Male

17. Heterosexual

18. Asperger’s

19. English speaker

I could go on. We don’t have to ask which of these cultures are real and which are made up. It’s like trying to decide which races are real, or how many languages there are. These are human-made categories that we are free to accept or reject as they overlap and exist on continuous spectrums.

Yet the process of accepting or rejecting a certain identity communicates something about my place in the world and how I perceive it. I could be a “person of color” or “white” in the American context, but which I choose clearly tells you something about my politics. If I go around calling myself a “Gentile,” I’m probably cheekily communicating that I believe in Jewish conspiracies controlling the world.

So the question is, what exactly are “white culture” enthusiasts trying to communicate? If someone says that he is proud to be an Italian-American, it means that he enjoys quoting mob movies and his grandmother’s lasagna. There is nothing threatening or morally objectionable about this. But if the same person tells me he is proud to be a white American, he’s probably a fascist. It is rational to assume that such a person has a zero-sum view of the world, thinks that the 2020 election was stolen, and loved what Trump was doing in Minneapolis, meaning that he supports authoritarian means through which to achieve demographic goals. If you’re non-white, you have nothing to fear from an American of Irish descent who has an overly enthusiastic St Patrick’s Day, but you know that the guy who cares about white identity is coming for your family.

This doesn’t mean that “white culture” does not exist. Rather, only that it is a fundamentally unhealthy identity in the American context. This is in part because identities usually require some kind of parity to be seen as sportsmanlike. Imagine if East Asian countries decided to form a bloc to push around Africans. Most mentally healthy people would recoil from this, regardless of whether you can say East Asian culture exists. This is also why we look with suspicion toward attempts to organize around male or heterosexual identity. White Americans are a majority of the country, and collectively have so much power and influence that no macro-race can come anywhere close to competing. American identity is fine because the “other” in this context is usually powerful nation-states. Yet while invoking American nationalism in a competition with China is seen as an acceptable way to behave, to place tariffs on Swaziland because Trump thinks they are one of the countries that is “ripping us off” is grotesque.

Whiteness is the American default, and Americanism is becoming the global default. To worry about “white culture” being under threat in 2026 is like living in fear that Christianity is going to disappear at the height of the Middle Ages. If you’re a white American, people in every corner of the globe speak your language, practice your religion, wear your clothes, follow your politics, and generally accept your framing of reality. Most white Americans do not feel threatened, and those who do reveal a pathological degree of paranoia. “But I can’t say I’m proud to be WHITE!!!” If that’s your grievance, your true desire seems to be to shove your cultural hegemony in the face of others.

One argument for white identity is that it’s a necessity in the face of DEI and hostility from mainstream culture. Scott Greer takes a version of this position. I think that a lot of right-wingers are kind of hiding the ball here, or perhaps not even being honest with themselves. White culture is safe, but white demographic dominance is not. They go straight from the position that whites are becoming a smaller portion of the population to the idea that white culture is being erased.

That’s a testable proposition. Yet when they try to explain exactly how white culture is under threat, rightists end up mumbling about hot dogs and baseball. I live in a heavily immigrant area, and trust me, the NFL is still allowed and there are more than enough burger places in town. Sometimes rightists will talk about concepts like democracy and the rule of law being the products of white culture, but this line of argument has been completely discredited by Trump’s 2020 coup attempt, and the historically unprecedented levels of corruption and authoritarianism in his second administration. If you’re going to accuse any group in American society of rejecting Western political values, you should start with non-college whites. But I wouldn’t do that, because I don’t believe that higher order political outcomes are caused in straightforward ways by individual group characteristics.

Liberals are afraid that if they grant white culture exists, they might by their own logic have to buy into the right’s identitarian political agenda. The left’s position is somewhere between meaningless and completely false. Yet their instincts are correct in that they’re arguing with people who are paranoid, driven by grievance and hate, and completely unwilling to hold themselves to the standards they pretend to believe in.

There was already a term called “Western culture,” which was used by a previous generation of conservatives. One can argue that “white culture” means the same thing, but those who talk in such terms practically always have an underlying agenda that involves making race itself more salient. When someone talks about “Western culture” but dislikes the phrase “white culture,” you can assume that he’s a conservative who actually holds on to American values as they would have been understood by people on the right in a previous generation. Someone who insists on saying “white” is the kind of person who feels at home in Trump’s version of the Republican Party. The claim that they hold certain values like rationalism, honesty, and sportsmanship close to their hearts is belied every day by the activities of the administration that they support.