#Nationalism: the ethno-nationalist populism of Donald Trump’s Twitter communication

In this article, we explore the ethno-nationalist populism of Donald Trump’s Twitter communication during the 2016 presidential campaign. We draw on insights from ethno-symbolism – a perspective within nationalism studies – to analyse all 5,515 tweets sent by Trump during the campaign. We find that ethno-nationalist and populist themes were by far the most important component of Trump’s tweets, and that these themes built upon long-standing myths and symbols of an ethnic conception of American identity. In sum, Trump’s tweets depicted a virtuous white majority being threatened by several groups of immoral outsiders, who were identified by their foreignness, their religion, and their self-interestedness. The struggle against these groups was framed as a mission to restore America to a mythical golden age – to “Make America Great Again.

‘Dominant ethnicity’ and the ‘ethnic-civic’ dichotomy in the work of A. D. Smith

This article considers the way in which the work of Anthony Smith has helped to structure debates surrounding the role of ethnicity in present-day nations. Two major lines of enquiry are evident here. First, the contemporary role of dominant ethnic groups within 'their' nations and second, the interplay between ethnic and civic elements in nationalist argument. The two processes are related, but maintain elements of distinctiveness. Smith's major contribution to the dominant ethnicity debate has been to disembed ethnicity from the ideologically-charged and/or anglo-centric discourse of ethnic relations and to place it in historical context, thereby opening up space for dominant group ethnicity to be considered as a distinct phenomenon. This said, Smith's work does not adequately account for the vicissitudes of dominant ethnicity in the contemporary West. Building on the classical works of Hans Kohn and Friedrich Meinecke, Anthony Smith has also made a seminal contribution to the debate on civic and ethnic forms of national identity and nationalist ideology. As well as freeing this debate from the strong normative overtones which it has often carried, he has continued to insist that the terms civic and ethnic should be treated as an ideal-typical distinction rather than a scheme of classification