Some excerpts from Schmitt's address:
"If America is everything and everyone, then it is nothing and no one at all. But we know that’s not true.
America is not a “universal nation.” It is something distinctive, unique, and real—unlike any other place or people in the history of mankind.
Western civilization was defined by its restless, relentless, dynamic spirit—a drive to create, explore and discover that spurred the West to heights of political, intellectual and technological achievement unmatched by any other civilization in human history.
America was settled, founded and built by the most adventurous, the most courageous, the most curious and innovative and risk-taking sons and daughters of the West.
Our country is, in this important sense, the most essentially Western nation. For our settler ancestors, the American frontier stretched out as a horizon of infinite possibility. It was here, on this continent, that the West realized its destiny.
This, my friends, is why every great feat of the modern world bore American fingerprints."
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"We Americans are the sons and daughters of the Christian pilgrims that poured out from Europe’s shores to baptize a new world in their ancient faith. Our ancestors were driven here by destiny, possessed by urgent and fiery conviction, by burning belief, devoted to their cause and their God."
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"For decades, the people in power sought to turn our past into a repressed memory—something so awful that we would prefer to forget it altogether. They made self-hatred and shame our new civic religion."
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When they tear down our statues and monuments, mock our history, and insult our traditions, they’re attacking our future as well as our past. By changing the stories we tell about ourselves, they believe they can build a new America—with the new myths of a new people.
But America does not belong to them. It belongs to us. It’s our home. It’s a heritage entrusted to us by our ancestors. It is a way of life that is ours, and only ours, and if we disappear, then America, too, will cease to exist."
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Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
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If America was a universal proposition, then everything we inherited from our specific Western heritage had to be abolished. So the statues come down. The names are changed. Yesterday’s heroes become today’s villains. The story of the nation has to be rewritten to align America with its true creed.
On the Right, the situation wasn’t all that different. The truth is, by the 1990s, too many on the Right had come to accept the same basic worldview as the liberal elites they claimed to oppose.
In foreign policy, trade, immigration and the domestic culture wars, too many conservatives defined the American identity as nothing more than an abstract and vaguely-defined proposition. Even if you didn’t want to immigrate here, you would be made to submit to that proposition anyway, via military crusades to bring Madisonian democracy to the furthest corners of the world.
For years, conservatives would talk as if the whole world were just Americans-in-waiting—“born American, but in the wrong place.” America was, as one neoconservative writer put it, “The First Universal Nation.”
That’s what set Donald Trump apart from the old conservatism and the old liberalism alike: He knows that America is not just an abstract “proposition,” but a nation and a people, with its own distinct history and heritage and interests.
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The Continental Army soldiers dying of frostbite at Valley Forge, the Pilgrims struggling to survive in the hard winter soil of Plymouth, the pioneers striking out from Missouri for the wild and dangerous frontier, the outnumbered Kentucky settlers repelling wave after wave of Indian war band attacks from behind their stockade walls—all of them would be astonished to hear that they were only fighting for a “proposition.”
