Aria S. Halliday, Ph.D., top right, holds the Marie Rich Endowed Professorship and is associate professor in the Department of Gender and Women’s Studies and program in African American and Africana Studies at the University of Kentucky. PHOTOS COURTESY OF ARIASHALLIDAY.COM AND FACEBOOK VIA AMERICAN EAGLE

American Eagle Outfitter – American Eagle – created an uproar in some quarters with a video ad featuring the actress Sydney Sweeny, a blue-eyed blonde, saying, “Genes are passed down from parents to offspring, often determining traits like hair color, personality and even eye color,” then quipping, “My jeans are blue.”

Aria Halliday, a University of New Hampshire associate professor and author of “Buy Black: How Black Women Transformed US Pop Culture,” told The Guardian she was not surprised by the ad. In recent years, Halliday said, “we have seen an influx of media reasserting the beauty of thin, white, blonde, and blue-eyed people” and that many brands were “invested in re-presenting the wholesomeness and sanctity of conservative white values.”

Republican Texas Sen. Ted Cruz responded on social media, “Wow. Now the crazy Left has come out against beautiful women.”

But it is not a question of coming out against “beautiful women.” And it is good that American Eagle pulled the ad. That indicates that there is still a strong sentiment against promoting whiteness as a superior culture, as the ad evidently seems to be. That idea was advanced in English playwright Thomas Middleton’s 1613 work “The Triumphs of Truth” which some critics have said provided justification for slavery and genocide.

And there is an undercurrent of it now that has begun to bubble up to the surface, such as in the “national conservatism” doctrine of which Yoram Hazony, an influential Israeli American political theorist, is a leading proponent. He endorses the claim that America was built by the early European settlers and that its “center” has been gradually eroded since the 1980s. It was the urgent task for “nationalists” to reverse that trend.

Hazony is a leader in the drive to eliminate all traces of the “multiculturalism” and “liberalism” which he claims have been eating at the soul of America, as he argued in his 2018 book, “The Virtue of Nationalism” which some reports say helped shape the thinking of Vice President JD Vance – whom President Donald Trump recently said he could tap as his successor – and nativist leaders such as prime ministers Viktor Orbán of Hungary and Georgia Meloni of Italy.

Hazony recently discussed his views in an 80-minute interview on the “Ezra Klein Show” podcast of the liberal political commentator, journalist and New York Times columnist. The Times released an edited 11,500-word transcript of the exchange about “national conservatism,” which, however Hazony whitewashes it, embraces, according to one definition, the “Christian heritage” of Europe and defends “Western civilization.”

“If you look at the way that tribes are built in the Bible or other ancient texts, you’ll see that families join with other families into clans, and clans form with other clans into tribes, and tribes into nations…,” Hazony stated. A nation can have lots of “internal diversity” but there has to be “a center to hold the thing together, in order for a society to be able to endure over time. … Is there a dominant culture that consists of a group or groups that have a strong loyalty to one another? If there is such a thing, then there can be lots of minority groups that have very different approaches. They can be closer or further. They can feel more a part of it or less.” It was “possible to have a successful relationship with all sorts of small minority groups when you could count on there being a center.”

The “small minority groups” are the Indigenous peoples, the formerly enslaved Africans and their descendants and migrants, who, in extreme conditions, helped to create America at its “core.” Between 5,000 and 8,000 Africans served in the Continental Army, including Crispus Attucks, who was of Indigenous and African heritage and was the first martyr of the American Revolution. Around 179,000 soldiers of African descent comprised 10 percent of Union Army soldiers and another 19,000 served in the Navy.

One study found that the enslaved Africans produced about 12.6 percent of the national product in the pre-Civil War era. By 2020, their descendants, who are about 14 percent of the population, had a buying power of $1.6 trillion or 9 percent of the nation’s total buying power and that is expected to rise to $3 trillion by 2030.

Indigenous peoples had been subjected to genocidal policies which reduced their number now to about four million. Their economic activities generate $46 billion in income and employ hundreds of thousands of workers.

Documented immigrants comprise 48 million or about 14 percent of the population – roughly the same as African Americans. They contribute more than $1.6 trillion to the economy and pay more than $579 billion in taxes annually. The estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants – three percent of the population – pay around $60 billion in federal taxes and about $37 billion in state and local taxes annually

Still, the nation’s “center,” as Hazony put it, “recognized that America was founded by Anglo-Protestants, recognized that it was also a nation that brought in Catholics and Jews in large numbers and succeeded – I think very well – in bringing them into this Anglo-Protestant country.” He claimed that the “center” held until the 1980s through “mutual loyalty and almost everybody was part of it…” Hazony claimed the country is at the point where there is “division … into tribes that don’t feel a strong loyalty to one another … There is more talk of civil war. There’s more and more talk, on both the left and right, saying that the others are not legitimate, that they need to be driven from the political landscape, driven from the country.”

According to Hazony, the clearly partisan actions which President Donald Trump and senior aides are taking is based on their belief that “If you take aggressive actions to halt immigration and decrease the size of the illegal immigrant population; if you take aggressive action to halt the hemorrhaging of American industry to other countries and reverse it through aggressive trade negotiations; if you take aggressive action to withdraw primary American responsibility for security arrangements in Europe, the Middle East, South East Asia, and put other people who are allies in charge – those three things – then we’ll be so much stronger, and then we’ll be able to get to other things.” Notably, there is no mention of the domestic climate.

Asked by Klein when he expected that “center” would be restored, Hazony responded that if Trump, Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth “and their 20 closest allies and advisers … were in charge of America for the next 12 years, then I think they would, in the end, succeed in convincing a lot of people … not that all their values are correct, but that they are people who look for tolerance, they are capable of it, they want to build an America that’s tolerant and that not everybody has to accept…”

Klein asked whether those officials were displaying tolerance and Hazony replied, “No. The way they’re acting now, to me, is the evidence of the opposite. It’s the evidence of an extreme resentment and horror at a Republican Party that had become politically inactive and inert over an entire generation.”

Hazony did not, in the interview, touch on the domestic scene, where major institutions are under siege, whether in education, media and the judiciary and religion, through what historian and biographer Sam Tanenhaus termed Mafioso-type tactics which, he claimed, Trump learned growing up at the side of his father in the cut-throat life environment of New York real estate development.

Whatever the driving force for the President’s hardball tactics, the end result could be what Hazony hoped, a return to the center, but which, in effect, would be a second Reconstruction realizing the long-held dream of many of those who have ascended to power: entrenching white superiority in tomorrow’s America.

It could be argued that this is the end game of the “Make America Great Again” movement: creating – or recreating a “center” around a monoculture and using it to assume a leadership role of the like-minded regimes and movements overseas that promote or agitate for a dominant panwhite world.

In such a world, ads such as American Eagle’s genes/jeans promotion would fit right in.