I cannot recall the number of times right-wing trolls in North Carolina have accused me of being a “Yankee transplant.” I do not take offense at this, because I believe that the influx of fellow Americans and international immigrants to North Carolina has been one of the greatest boosters to our state’s dynamism that we have seen our long history. But for the record, it is not true. I was born in Greenville, NC and have lived the large majority of my life in Raleigh or Chapel Hill–including when the City of Oaks had the political habit of electing Newt Gingrich followers to city government.

Why have I indulged in this bit of navel-gazing? Because conservative web warriors’ obsession with ostracizing any liberal as a devious Yankee is enormously revealing of what fuels the conservative rage-fire in the Trump era. It is, in short, a form of right-wing nationalism. And this nationalism stands in sharp contrast to what Americans should aspire to create in a multicultural age.

Right-wing nationalism has deep roots in the West. Combining xenophobia, cultural traditionalism, and hatred and distrust of outsiders, conservative nationalism seeks to fuse together the long-settled volk against “cosmopolitan elites” (this phrase often serving as a code-word for Jews) and other threats to the country’s supposed way of life. For many generations, right-wing nationalism merely lurked on the fringes of the American polity while such regimes as Fascist Spain and Vichy France replaced the ethos of liberty and equality with a grotesque mixture of repression and exclusion.

Enter immigration. Starting with the passage of Lyndon Johnson’s landmark Immigration and Nationality Act, people from all around the world began immigrating to the United States, changing its social fabric and injecting a measure of cultural diversity into a country that had, for the previous 40 years, explicitly rejected immigrants who did not come from northern Europe. This trend picked up speed in the 1990s and early 2000s with big influxes of Latino immigrants, causing the Hispanic population of the United States to grow from a rounding error into the country’s single biggest ethnic minority group.

Though right-wing nationalism had seldom occupied center stage in American politics, a sense of exclusionary ethnic nationhood has always loomed potently in the mindset of many white Americans. They conflate Christian whiteness with an essential American identity, and claim ownership of the country with other races and belief systems being, at best, grudgingly tolerated guests in the castle. In some of the most conservative parts of the country, white people tell the census that their ethnic heritage is not white but simply, “American”–taking for granted that Americans represent a coherent group to which they, but not others, belong. Thus, the cultural changes of the last 20 years have dealt a searing pyschic blow to the white nationalists.

Right-wing nationalists have often aggressively claimed the vernacular of American identity. George Wallace called his third-party effort the “American Independent Party.” Fascist sympathizers in the 1930s coined the phrase “America First,” which of course has become the rallying cry of Donald Trump and his fascist movement. In these assertions of ownership over the language of “Americanism,” we see a clear conflation of white-conservative identity with the essence of the nation. This is at least as clear an extrusion of racial essentialism as any left-wing social theory the Republicans want banned from American education.

Back to me. My Trumpist interlocutors infer that I am some heavily pierced and tattooed drum circle drum major from the region that crushed the good ol’ rebs in the War of Northern Aggression because, simply, I disagree with them. I am a liberal who reviles the Confederacy and thinks the right-wing turn in North Carolina politics has been tragic. These people, by contrast, believe that the white South is a clan, membership in which demands strict loyalty to the mores and prejudices that have mired this region in backwardness century after century while the rest of the country moved forward. This is right-wing insularity of the most repulsive sort, and I hope I live to see the day when it is no longer invoked by people who consider themselves patriots.