There have been growing tensions on the American right over the past few months, but the past week has been particularly explosive. At what felt like a defining edition of Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest, held just months after the murder of its co-founder Charlie Kirk, Vivek Ramaswamy, Ohio Republican gubernatorial candidate, publicly rejected the idea that some Americans are ‘more American’ than others by dint of their ancestry. This was not a left-wing critique, but a rebuke delivered to a conservative audience at a conservative event. ‘I think the idea of a “Heritage American” is about as loony as anything the woke left has actually put up’, Ramaswamy told the conference in Phoenix.
There is a broader context to this intervention. Ideological fractures within MAGA-aligned politics are widening, with some commentators describing the early stages of an internal ‘civil war’. One flashpoint has been the so-called Groypers, loosely defined as followers or associates of far-right activist Nick Fuentes, who are known for advancing a racialised politics grounded in resentment and exclusion.
The question, then, is why the American right is increasingly divided over questions of heritage, identity and belonging. The rise of ‘Heritage American’ thinking, which Ramaswamy directly challenges, is not a return to conservatism but the adoption of identity politics under a different name. It is already destabilising the right from within.
Ramaswamy’s core claim is that American identity cannot be ranked by lineage: one is either American or one is not. To be American, on this account, is to inherit and assent to a constitutional tradition, a political inheritance grounded in liberty, civic obligation and patriotic loyalty to the republic. This has long been the orthodox understanding of Americanness within the conservative tradition. It does not deny the historical reality that some Americans can trace their lineage in the country further back than others, but it rejects the idea that such ancestry confers greater political legitimacy.
That Ramaswamy felt compelled to articulate this so forcefully is revealing. His intervention suggests that ‘heritage’ thinking is no longer a fringe provocation but influential enough to require public repudiation.
This rift on the right confirms that identity politics is not merely a left-wing ideology. It is a distinct moral logic. Within this framework, identity precedes agency, group membership confers moral authority, and politics becomes a zero-sum contest between groups. Crucially, this grammar is ideologically portable. Once normalised, it can be adopted by any movement that begins to reason from identity first. The ‘Heritage American’ discourse mirrors these assumptions. Ancestry is treated as destiny, demographics as political fate, and grievance is framed through perceived status loss. This is not conservatism rediscovering its roots, where inheritance is understood as obligation rather than entitlement, but conservatism absorbing the conceptual framework of the modern left.
‘Heritage American’ nationalism is identity politics translated into racial terms. It retains the ‘progressive’ premise that identity determines political legitimacy but simply substitutes one identity for another. In this logic, being a descendant of the Mayflower confers authority over someone descended from the Apache or from enslaved Africans. Blood politics is not an alternative to identity politics – it is its terminal form. Ironically, it also requires overturning the Enlightenment-inspired foundations of the American republic: law, consent and moral universals. The very principles that made the nation what it is.
The ‘Heritage American’ idea has intensified the divides between institutional conservatives, populists and identitarian factions. Anxiety over extremist influence on MAGA now sits close to the surface. Vice-president JD Vance, in particular, has faced mounting media pressure in recent months to take a more assertive stance against the Groypers, especially since initially declining to publicly rebuke Nick Fuentes, after he referred to Vance’s wife using a racial slur.
In a recent interview, Vance clarified two things. First, that American identity is not static but accumulative, and that a nation frozen in ancestral time is inconsistent with US history and practice. Second, addressing the Fuentes episode directly, he stated that anyone who attacks his wife ‘can eat shit’. The bluntness of the response was telling.
This is precisely what identity politics produces: endless boundary policing, factional escalation and loyalty tests. As we have already seen on the left, when identity becomes the governing principle of a movement, the result is permanent grievance, internal radicalisation and eventual fragmentation. A politics that defines belonging by essence rather than obligation cannot sustain a shared future.
The real dividing line, then, is not between right-wing factions but between two ways of seeing the world. One treats ethnic identity as destiny. The other understands belonging as grounded in the Enlightenment-inspired moral covenant of the US Constitution. A society that forgets how to argue for belonging without reference to race will eventually be ruled and trapped by race.
Jide Ehizele is a cultural critic and writer on identity, faith and belonging.
