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Academics in Saudi Arabia are Sunni muslims, Academics in Berlin were national socialists in 1940 and communists in 1960. People probably greatly overestimate the influence of academia and underestimate the extent that academia promotes what is popular. Universities are finishing schools that train the future employees of government and business. They train their students in what their future employers want. There are academics of all opinioins but only some get attention. Michelle Foucault got CIA funding, other academics had the security state working against them.
The US isn't as much a country as it is the center of a global empire. Having an empire requires not having a strong central culture or people. An empire is almost by definition multicultural. Maintaining an empire with one ethnic group at the core and one culture at the core is hard unless the colonials are far behind the people in the imperial core.
Early Rome could be racist and intolerant. A Rome in which latins were a tiny minority had to be inclusive, diverse and tolerant of norms outside of the norms of the latin tribes. The big cities in the US aren't just big american cities, they are imperial centers. They will therefore have to have lots of people from other countries. Having strongly enforced WASP culture and WASP ethnonationalism is hard when the empire largely consists of and is largely staffed by non WASPs.
Also the US dollar is far too expensive compared to how many dollars are printed. This means that prices in the US will be too expensive. Having a global reserve currency and having prices that aren't completely through the moon requires having a large imported underclass that works in agriculture, food services and construction. There can't be a conservative WASP ethnostate with tens of millions of latin American and Filipino migrant workers.
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