Letters from an American: December 12, 2025

Today former Alabama senator Doug Jones launched his campaign to become the state’s next governor. He announced on November 24 that he would enter the race, but said in a speech tonight that he chose today for the official launch because the date marks exactly eight years since he won a 2017 special election for the U.S. Senate. In that election, voters tapped Jones, a Democrat, to fill the seat formerly held by Republican Jeff Sessions, who left the seat empty when he went to Washington, D.C., to be President Donald J. Trump’s first attorney general.

Jones’s election was an “earthquake,” Daniel Strauss of Politico reported at the time. For the first time in 25 years, the Senate seat Jones had won would go to a Democrat in what Strauss called “a huge political setback” to Trump. After he won, Jones told his supporters: “At the end of the day, this entire race has been about dignity and respect. This campaign has been about the rule of law. This campaign has been about common courtesy and decency.”

If Jones wins the Democratic primary for governor, he will likely face off for the governorship against current Alabama senator Tommy Tuberville, a former Auburn University football coach who beat Jones to win the Senate seat in 2020 after then-president Trump strongly backed him. During the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol to prevent the counting of the certified electoral votes that would make Democratic candidate Joe Biden president, both Trump and his then-lawyer Rudy Giuliani called Tuberville to get him to delay the counting of the votes.

Tuberville has remained a staunch Trump ally, embracing the increasing MAGA emphasis on protecting “western culture,” insisting that undocumented immigrants are, as Representative Michael Rulli (R-OH), said today, “terrorizing our people,” “killing our children,” “raping our women, just like they do in England,” and “destroying western culture.” That language is at the heart of the administration’s recent National Security Strategy, which advanced the idea that the U.S. and Europe must protect a white, Christian, “Western identity.” This week, Tuberville echoed it when he claimed that Alabama’s Muslims embrace an “ideology…incompatible with our Western values.”

The MAGA claim that white Christians in the United States and Europe are engaged in an existential fight to protect their superior race from being overwhelmed by inferior racial stocks has roots in the U.S. that reach all the way back to the fears of white southerners in the 1850s that if human enslavement could not spread to the West, the growing population of Black Americans in the South would overwhelm them, probably with violence.

The theory that race defined history got its major “scientific” examination in the U.S. in 1916 with a book by lawyer Madison Grant titled The Passing of the Great Race: Or, The Racial Basis of European History. Grant’s book drew from similar European works to argue that the “Nordic race,” from England, Scotland, and the Netherlands, was superior to other races and accounted for the best of human civilization. In the U.S., he claimed, that race was being overwhelmed by immigrants from “inferior” white races who were bringing poverty, crime, and corruption. To strengthen the Nordic race, Grant advocated, on the one hand, for an end to immigration and for “selection through the elimination of those who are weak or unfit” through sterilization, and on the other hand, “[e]fforts to increase the birth rate of the genius producing classes.”

Grant’s ideas were instrumental in justifying state eugenics laws as well as the 1924 Immigration Act establishing quotas for immigration from different countries. But his ideas fell out of favor in the 1930s, especially after Germany’s Adolf Hitler quoted often from Grant’s book in his speeches and wrote to Grant describing the book as “my bible.”

In this era it is easy to see the strand of American history that informs the worldview of someone like Tommy Tuberville. But Jones has also inherited a strand of American history.