Heritage Americans: An Inconvenient Concept
Key to understanding why the Heritage American concept ruffles so many feathers is recognizing the equally unique nature of American nationality.
Former Republican presidential candidate and current Ohio governor candidate Vivek Ramaswamy re-ignited the “Heritage American” debate in a column for The New York Times and then at a right-wing political event. The term “Heritage American”, very simply, refers to Americans who can trace their ancestry in the United States all the way back to Founding. The implication is that these people are more American than other Americans whose ancestry in the country doesn’t go as far back in time.
The term is controversial because it runs counter to the predominant liberal narratives about American citizenship and nationality. America, according to them, is a “civic” nation. As such, things like ancestry, your family’s time in this country, none of that matters. America most certainly isn’t a “blood-and-soil” nation, where identity is ethnically defined and tied distinctly to a specific geographic space. As such, most Americans reject or would reject the concept of a Heritage American. As it stands currently, just showing up and becoming a citizen makes you American.
As with all things liberal, this conception of American nationhood is a mix of truth and lies. As for the latter, they’re mostly lies by omission. One needs to leave a good chunk of the American story out to settle on the civic nationalist conception of the country. We don’t have the time nor space to do too deep a dive into it all, but we can touch upon some of it to gain a better understanding of whether the Heritage American concept means anything now, or if it ever did.
Is America Even A Nation?
The first step towards addressing the Heritage American controversy is to answer the question of whether the United States is even a nation, whether Americans even constitute a nation. The short answer is yes. The long answer is complicated.
The term “nation” has a broad definition. In its simplest form, a nation is a group of people, size notwithstanding, who share a common identity. That identity can be defined by a variety of features - ethnicity, shared history, language, religion, to name a few. History shows that certain features matter much more than others, but we won’t get into that here. What matters right now is that a nation is a group of people with a shared collective identity of some form.
There are two features which distinguish nations from other group forms, such as clans and tribes. The first is that they’re entirely social constructs. This doesn’t seem all that meaningful, since all groups are, to an extent, socially constructed. However, clans and tribes are at least biologically rooted, based off family and lineage. Nations aren’t, at least they don’t need to be. What makes a nation peculiar is that we don’t need to know any of its members personally. Just by having one or two things in common is enough to make us all part of a collective. To make this possible, however, someone or something has to make it so. Nations are an “unnatural” form of community, which is why they’re a relatively recent phenomenon in historical terms.
Adam Van Buskirk said a few months back:
And:
At the time, I didn’t fully agree with what he was saying. With the passage of time, the better of an understanding I have of what he was trying to say, even as I still think he overstates the point. Nations aren’t naturally-formed entities, and while they aren’t always created by the state, they still need to be created, as they’re simply not an organic form of human organization.
The second major distinction between nations and other forms of community is that the nation is an expressly political community. This isn’t to say all members of a nation share the same political views - they obviously don’t - but it’s to say a nation is a collective formed out of a desire to promote, preserve, and defend group interests through governance.
Which brings us to the concept of the nation state. Where the question of whether the U.S. is a nation or not gets muddled because the terms “nation” and “nation state” are conflated. The nation state is one where the state - the central government - explicitly represents an ethnic group or is dominated by a single ethnic group. Basically, the nation and the state are one in the same. Nation states, like nations themselves, are also a relatively recent phenomenon in history and aren’t a common form of statehood throughout the world despite the ubiquity of the term.
Let’s return to the original question: Is the U.S. a nation? Is it a nation state? I found a decent, though not great, answer to the question:
The United States is often referred to as a nation-state, but it is more accurately described as a federal republic. A nation-state is typically defined as a sovereign state whose citizens or subjects are relatively homogeneous in factors such as language or common descent. The United States, however, is a diverse country with a population that includes people from various ethnic, cultural, and linguistic backgrounds.
While the United States has a strong national identity and a shared set of values and principles, it is not a nation-state in the traditional sense. Instead, it is a federation of states, each with its own government and laws, united under a central federal government. This structure allows for a high degree of autonomy among the states while maintaining a cohesive national identity.
In summary, the United States is not a nation-state but rather a federal republic that encompasses a wide range of cultures, languages, and ethnicities. Its unique structure and diversity set it apart from the traditional concept of a nation-state.
Clearly written by a liberal-minded person, this answer promotes the idea of America as a multicultural society. Still, it’s correct in saying the country isn’t a nation state, and instead a federal republic. The state isn’t dominated by a single ethnic group, and it doesn’t profess to predominantly represent a single ethnic group either.
America isn’t a nation state. But is it still a nation? Nominally, yes. Key to understanding why the Heritage American concept ruffles so many feathers is recognizing the equally unique nature of American nationality.
America As An Idea
Though ethnicity isn’t the only way a nation can be formed, all nations are, to an extent, an ethnos. This is another example of how practice often diverges from theory. When a nation is formed, that identity “solidifies” into something more concrete over time, even as it remains a social construct. To use Adam Van Buskirk’s example from the preceding section, the nationalities of Latin America - Argentine, Brazilian, Colombian, Mexican, Peruvian, etc. - constitute ethnic groups as well, regardless of how they were formed in the first place. If you disagree, consider that within the American Hispanic community, its members distinguish each other based on ethnicity.
American is a interesting case in that it possesses many of the features of an ethnic group - common history, common language, and, for a time, common religion - and therefore has all the building blocks of nationhood, even if not a nation state. However, the American nationality as it exists today is bizarre in the sense that it rejects the traditional building blocks of nationhood. It rejects the idea that Americans need to share a common history, a common language, and most certainly a common religion in order to form a united, cohesive whole. If I’m to be honest, it’s not clear what American nationhood even constitutes. It seems to change depending on the intent of liberals.
The only thing they seem to agree on is that Americans united in difference, that the simple fact that we share nothing in common, yet we share the same space, it what unites us. It’s an utterly bizarre concept, one that becomes increasingly nonsensical the more you think about it. But the whole point is that you’re not supposed to think too critically about it. For the Left, it’s not “America First,” it’s “Ideology First,” so you’re supposed to accept the concept without a second thought and just move on. Why are you so obsessed, anyway?
Well, I’m obsessed because this is the reality we’re forced to live under and I’d like for it to make sense. The world is defined by contradictory forces pulling against one another, but we’re talking about a social framework. Social frameworks need to make sense and should more or less reflect reality. When social frameworks like nationhood aren’t based in reality, you’re inevitably going to run into problems, like we are today. The majority of discontent and rancor in America is over this simple fact: nothing makes sense.
Civic nationalism is something which makes no sense in practice. When liberals do decide to form a more concrete vision of what American nationalism is, this is what they settle on. Proponents argue that America is a place where our collective identity is formed by shared ideas and values, such as rule of law, adherence to the Constitution. In other words, if you believe all the right things, you’re an American. This is a hugely profound statement, one coming with all sorts of strings attached.
I’m going to get into it more later, but for now, just ask yourself: How many Americans do you know actually believe in these ideas and values? How many Americans do you know who actually understand what are values are within a historical context, along with that history itself?
The reason why civic nationalism is nonsense is primarily two-fold. One, it assumes you can make a nation where everyone agrees on the same basic principles. It’s quite obvious today this was a stunningly native assumption to make. Our differences today aren’t even political, not really. They’re philosophical. Philosophical differences are ultimately irreconcilable. Two, if America truly is an ideological identity, then there are no arguments against imposing ideological tests. Yet liberals have come out consistently against that, stating that they infringe on the “rights” of all people to come here and live in America however they wish to do, which is ultimately the only consistent value liberals seem to hold.
But on that second point, if America is a civic nationalist country, if ideas are what make you American, then clearly the identity is in fact pretty well-defined (it kind of has to be, no?), and it’s worthwhile to test newcomers to see if they truly believe in our so-called ideas and values, isn’t it? The only way this wouldn’t be so is if liberals also believe that American values are universal and every culture shares American values, a patently ridiculous belief. It seems that for liberals, when it comes to diversity, food is the only thing that distinguishes cultures.
Otherwise, civic nationalism calls for ideological tests to see who can be an American and who cannot. There’s no argument against ideological tests, because civic nationalism makes political ideology the core of our identity. Again, liberals wouldn’t dare, because imposing ideological tests, according to their standards, makes them Nazis. This means even liberals don’t really believe in civic nationalism, it’s just a way for them to pretend like they believe in a strong national identity. In reality, civic nationalism is as exclusionary as any other form of nationalism.
Consider the results of the following survey, one often proudly cited by liberals as affirmation of the civic nationalist concept:
Clearly, most Americans believe that they believe in civic nationalism. It’s here we return to the following questions: How many Americans do you know actually believe in these ideas and values? How many Americans do you know who actually understand what are values are within a historical context, along with that history itself?
I’d wager to guess: not many. Our culture glorifies law-breaking and Americans are addicted to disorder, regarding order as fascism. At best, some people must obey the law at all times, while others aren’t required to do so, like black people and illegal immigrants. As for the Constitution, you can’t support something you don’t understand, can you? Most Americans know nothing about the Constitution beyond the Bill of Rights and even then, their understanding is superficial. They have no idea the Constitution specifies what the government cannot do more than what it can. As for the Declaration of the Independence, Americans understand it even less than they do the Constitution. The Declaration has been appropriated over the years to justify all sorts of nonsense, when in fact the Declaration was a very period-specific document which needs to be viewed in context. That’s not to say the Declaration has no enduring message, but it’s to say the message has been subverted over time that it bears little resemblance to the original motivations of the Founders.
More startling is what Americans don’t believe necessary to make an American. Fewer people believe it necessary to be a citizen, even as an overwhelming percentage see it as important. Even fewer think it necessary to owe allegiance exclusively to the U.S., which defies common sense, or to participate in American customs and traditions. Taken altogether, it makes me think Americans have been successfully indoctrinated by the institutions to buy into the civic nationalist conception of America, unquestioningly so. Not a single American thinks to intellectually challenge any of this nonsense, and the few who do are shot down immediately for blasphemy. It’s civic nationalism or nothing else. Better to destroy the nation.
The State Nation
So what kind of nation are we? While America isn’t a nation state, I think we can be somewhat accurately described as a “state nation.” In other words, if the nation state has a state centered on a people, then the state nation has a people centered on a state. The U.S. federal government is basically what our national identity is centered on. Not ancestry, not culture, definitely not religion, and as I’ve argued, no idea unites Americans. The federal government, its supremacy, and the belief this country wouldn’t exist without it is about the only thing that unites Americans today.
This is somewhat in line with the Latin American version of nationhood, which saw the state establish the nation, as opposed to a nation establishing a state. The difference is, in Latin America, they at least underwent ethnogenesis to where a distinct people exist. America never underwent ethnogenesis, so there’s no distinct “American” people, to say nothing of the fact nobody seems to agree who an American is. It’s literally anyone and everyone all at once. Though Colombians aren’t like, say, the French, it’s not just accepted blindly that anyone who shows up in Colombia is Colombian, either.
In other words, Colombia started off as a proposition, then it became a “real” nation after ethnogenesis created a distinct ethnic identity. Why this never happened in the U.S. is a long story, but a short answer is that it never had to. For centuries, ours was a majority-White society with a dominant British-descended, Anglo-Protestant class atop the social hierarchy. Whose country it was wasn’t a question with a million different answers like it is today. It was only really in the second-half of the 20th century that the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant, the people who created America, lost their dominant place in society. This, more than anything else, had and will continue to have the most profound impact on the country.
It wasn’t a moment, but more of a process. Still, WASP’s losing their dominant place in America left a power vacuum, and we’re living through the power struggle today. Hence, the many attempts on both sides to redefine what an American is. Since society cannot arrive at the answer, the state must instead do so, since it’s the only institution which can legitimately impose a definition by force. Obviously, the state adheres to liberal civic nationalism, but it also does so under duress. For one, it cannot be anti-national, since this would undermine the very basis of the American federal state. But it cannot establish an exclusionary form of nationality, either, due to the significant racial and cultural minorities of America, and to keep them placated.
As it stands now, America is a state-defined nation modeled along civic, creedal lines, though it’s clearly a failed model, based if only on the fact most Americans reject it in practice, if not in theory. By the way - if obeying the law is important to being an American, why aren’t criminals stripped of citizenship? As with most things, liberals can’t keep their logic straight.
A Minority In Their Own Country
Hence, we come full circle back to the question of whether a Heritage American is a real thing and whether it’s a useful concept.
I think X account “i/o” says it best:
A person who legally migrates to the US from a non-Western country, subscribes to our core values, and becomes a citizen is fully an American and should be acknowledged as such.
But let’s get real. An American who can trace ancestors on both sides of his family back to the 18th century or earlier and whose forebearers fought in the Revolutionary and Civil and World Wars can legitimately claim to have a more meaningful connection to America.
Anyone who suggests otherwise is just being intellectually dishonest.
Another one of the endless absurdities our liberal cultural and political regime imposes on us is the idea that someone who shows up and plants their feet on American soil today is just as American as someone who’s been here 50 years or whose family lineage goes back to the Founding. Their only reasoning for this being the case is that this is just how it is. Of course, it has no basis in American history. Not a single person can point to anything that says just being here makes a person American. If we truly believed that, we’d make everyone citizens just for showing up.
I’ve spent most of this essay arguing against the prevailing liberal conception of American nationhood. But I also don’t share the belief American identity is something determined by race or ethnicity. Nor do I think it’s defined by ancestry, not entirely. The reason is simple: “American” has been more of political identity than anything else. In early America, most identified more closely with their states than the union. It was more of an elite practice, specifically within the political class. The public tagging “American” as one’s singular national identity didn’t really go full-bore until the 20th century. So while liberals are wrong, some on the Right are wrong when they try to ascribe an ancestral or ethnic definition to the American identity.
Not to mention many of today’s Americans whose ancestry can be traced back several generations aren’t exactly the most enthusiastic, most patriotic of Americans. Many of them curse their ancestors, their culture, and their inheritance. Are these people American? In that sense, I think the civic nationalists do have a point, even if their position isn’t one which they hold with genuine conviction.
I do believe the American identity to be culturally defined, however, and there really isn’t any debating this. All societies of the world are ultimately distinguished by culture. If an American culture doesn’t exist, as liberals insist, then America by definition cannot exist. The challenge to this proposition, of course, is that America is a state nation. As long as the federal government exists and is able to claim the existence of a nation, it doesn’t matter if America has a distinct culture or not. It’s a nation in name only, effectively.
The other side of the coin is that America does indeed have a culture, there’s just not much to it. It’s what Scott Greer refers to as “slop,” defined entirely by commercialism and what happens to be trending on social media at a given moment. For all the rancor about making it the official language, just about everyone speaks English. You can’t really make it in America unless you do. Our culture is an anti-culture, where we grudgingly do things entirely out of necessity, not out of any sense of oneness or unity with a broader collective, and where in fact the objective is to further sever ties with others, because what business is it anyone else’s what we do? The only social relations that matter are the ones we choose for ourselves. That’s real freedom. That’s America!
Like the Heritage American concept, however, the cultural nationalist model of the U.S. means very few in the country are truly American. As the results of the poll cited earlier shows, Americans believe less in the importance of participating in American customs and traditions, even as a majority still believe that it’s important to being American. If a country without a culture isn’t a country at all, then a country where a minority participate in its customs and traditions is hardly a country, either. If anything, Americans have become an ethnic group unto themselves, a minority in the country named for them.
If the real, “heritage” American culture was White Anglo-Saxon Protestantism, that culture is now just one of many in a broader gray blob that’s called “American” today. Though I consider Anglo-Saxon Protestantism to be the real American culture, I also concede there’s no pathway back to that. We’re stuck with the gray blob - we’ll call it “The Thing” - and that’s what passes for American culture, even though it’s really not. For one, it’s not really tied to anything other than U.S. commercialism and corporatism. It’s a culture that exists entirely due to American prosperity, which means it’s been bought. The only way it’s going to die is if something fundamentally changes in the American order.
This is all a long way of saying that yes, being a Heritage American is a real thing. But it’s also not all that meaningful, not in 2025. The loss of Anglo-Protestantism as our culture is the bigger problem, because no matter how many Heritage Americans we have, none of it makes a difference unless their culture was preserved and passed down through the generations. So it’s kind of a waste of time to argue over Heritage Americans.
As I stated earlier, we’re living through something of a power struggle resulting from Anglo-Protestantism ceasing to define American culture. Everyone, from blacks to Jews to Muslims, want their culture to become dominant. Nobody’s as much of a multiculturalist as they pretend to be. The Heritage American meme is a way for Anglo-Protestants to reclaim what’s theirs, and while I’m sympathetic to their cause, the reality is they’re a minority, even within their coalition.
Something will eventually replace The Thing as American culture, just as something once replaced Anglo-Protestantism as the culture, sooner rather than later. What comes next is anyone’s guess, depending on which faction wins the coming struggle. But that’s a talk for a another time.
Civic Nationalist Nonsense
Before closing it out, let’s tackle a few of the civic nationalist multiculturalists’ highly falacious arguments. We’ll start with Tahmineh Dehbozorgi:
The claim that America is the organic product of a singular “Anglo-American Christian culture” misses the most important fact about the founding: the Revolution was an act of rejection of the “Anglo” part.
The Declaration of Independence is not a celebration of English lineage or inherited authority. It is literally an indictment of it. It rejects monarchy, hereditary rule, parliamentary supremacy, and the idea that rights flow from tradition, blood, or crown. Those were Anglo values—and the Founders broke with them deliberately.
Really now, Ms. Dehbozorgi? Of course, she can prove all this through history, correct? Because it says something entirely different. In no way did the Founders or other Americans reject Anglo values. They continued speaking English, for one. They retained Anglo religious views. Their condemnation of the king has been revised as anti-monarchy, but in reality, most Founders viewed the king favorably up until the revolution. Culturally, early America was very British, even as life in North America inevitably created a distinctly American culture which, over time, diverged wildly with that of the homeland. In fact, an argument could be made that Americans didn’t make a “clean” break with Britain until the War of 1812, over 30 years after first gaining independence. Early America was also an aristocratic society. The U.S. was intended to be a British republic and that’s exactly what it was for roughly the first half of its existence.
What Dehbozorgi seems to be doing is what many so often do - conflate the American Revolution with the French Revolution, thereby turning the former into as much of an ideological crusade as the latter. This isn’t the time nor place to go into it in detail, but there was nothing “revolutionary” about the American Revolution. It was “reactionary” and wasn’t ideologically-motivated. By engaging in revisionist history, however, liberals can make the American Revolution out to be a triumph of present-day leftist values.
Most Americans don’t realize how much of our history has been revised and re-written over the decades. In many ways, the real history of America has been lost and I’m not sure there’s a way to get it back. It makes you think the only way forward is to win the coming struggle and to rewrite history once again, tell a different story than the one we’ve been told our whole lives. History is written by the victors, after all.
Continuing on:
What makes America exceptional is not which ethnic group the Founders were, but what they built: a system capable of binding strangers into a single people through law rather than lineage.
I often wonder if liberals actually listen to some of the stuff they say, because when you read stuff like this, not only does it not make sense, it makes it impossible to take these people seriously. Strangers don’t just become a single people by force of law. A stranger doesn’t become a trusted compatriot just because the law says we’re the same people. I think liberals would absolutely disagree if someone told them they weren’t officially in a relationship with someone unless the law said they were, yet that’s precisely the argument being made here.
We discussed earlier how nations are political constructs, yet the viability of that construct depends a lot on whether it’s rooted in something concrete. Unknowingly, Dehbozorgi hasn’t only exposed how hollow American nationhood is, but also how we’re not so different from totalitarian regimes like that of the Soviet Union or Yugoslavia, which bound strangers into single peoples through force of law.
More:
Reduce America to ancestry, and you reduce the Constitution to folklore. The Founders believed their ideas were universal—or they wouldn’t have risked everything to declare them so.
Not in the way liberals believe in universalism, no. And though I agree that ancestry alone doesn’t make an American, I also believe Americans are a distinct people with a distinct identity, one that’s been forgotten. There’s no evidence the Founders ever believed America was a land for all, and even with a more diverse America, you can still agree with the Founders that this country is only for a certain people.
Finally:
And here’s a photo of one of the greatest Americans, Marquis de Lafayette, who was famously not born in America.
As much as Americans should celebrate Marquis de Lafayette, there’s one big problem with her statement: Marquis de Lafayette wasn’t American. Imagine making this kind of elementary error and expecting to be taken seriously for it.
Next up is our favorite public intellectual, Richard Hanania:
At his very core, Hanania isn’t a serious person, it’s just that he sometimes makes serious arguments. This isn’t one of those times. A nation isn’t a literal family, no. Nobody’s making that argument and Hanania is being obtuse in raising that point. It is, however, a collective that holds a vested interest in the well-being of all its members. So yes, it does have some similarities to a family.
Look at it this way: if a nation doesn’t have as its top priority the well-being of its own before all others, what purpose does the nation serve? Even if he believes in the most open-ended, civic nationalist concept of an American nation, it’s meaningless if it doesn’t put its members first. No matter what form of nationhood one opts for, the purpose is the same. But then again, liberals are all about pretending like they don’t understand anything. That, and the fact the one thing the educated class struggles with most are the simplest of things.
Speaking of which:
What exactly does she find idiotic? I get that it’s offensive to her, but that doesn’t make it wrong. Is she insinuating that societies aren’t defined by the kinds of people it has? How did America turn out the way that it did? Why’s India the way that it is? How is it that countries founded by White Europeans so much better places to live than those founded by Indians?
Going back to Richard Hanania:
Once again, an unserious person who occasionally makes serious arguments. Both he and Cathy Young seem to be of the mind that the quality of a society is independent of the type of people they have. I doubt they sincerely believe this, but to remain compliant with the ideology, they have to pretend like they believe insanely stupid things.
Leading us to the next howler:
Yes, because Germans and Somalis are the same kinds of people, right? They’re not even from the same continent. It’s interesting how liberals will talk about diversity and how different everyone really is, yet when it comes time to judge different groups, we’re all suddenly the same people. It’s not rocket science: different groups have different outcomes because we’re all different. It’s getting exhausting have to hear this nonsense from people who are supposed to be the most educated ever. Nobody makes a greater joke of education than the educated themselves.
When judging immigration of the past versus now, remember also that assimilation was a very real thing back then. Germans didn’t radically change American culture, and less cultural distance made it more possible for Germans to assimilate into American Protestant culture. When liberals use historical German immigration to justify bringing millions of Third Worlders into the country, they’re saying that the Somali or Syrian Muslim is basically the same as a German Christian. It’s, again, a profoundly stupid argument, one someone believes only if they’re forced to or they’ve been thoroughly indoctrinated into doing so.
Never has been more apparent than lately that X is a Third World retard gallery:
Again, acting like they don’t know anything. Or in this case, just speaking nonsense. There’s this thing called “degrees.” There’s a greater degree of difference between a Third Worlder like Zaid versus two White Americans in different parts of the country. The idea that the difference among Whites is the same as the difference between Whites and Third Worlders is just an unimaginable level of stupidity.
I think this from our friend Dr. Nicole Williams explains a lot of this rhetoric:
I once explained that older immigrants have less grievances towards America, it’s their children or younger immigrants who do. A big reason multiculturalism is a failure is because no other place in the world has been so open and inviting to all, yet it’s the children of immigrants and younger immigrants who apparently feel like they belong the least in America. If the conditions for integration are so favorable, yet what they choose to do instead is to make themselves strangers in their so-called own country, there’s no way to consider this a success.
Finally, before the big wrap-up:
Being American is an overwhelmingly creedal identity with a few cultural markers like English. But even if we were to embrace a “Heritage Americans are more American” blood-based identity, there will be big problems such as the fact that a huge percentage of the U.S. population wouldn’t be the most American Americans. That would be an unfortunate outcome pushed by the people most concerned about assimilation and undivided loyalties.
This was written by Alex Nowrasteh, an open-borders advocate who never found an immigration law he liked. The fact that a large percentage of Americans aren’t meaningfully American is certainly inconvenient, but inconvenience doesn’t make it false. In fact, the critical reaction to the Heritage American concept is one borne almost entirely of discomfort: liberals simply don’t like the idea that some people have a deeper connection with this land. Moreover, if Alex Nowrasteh is going to point out that speaking English is a big part of what makes a person culturally American, then he ought to be reminded of how controversial it was to suggest English ought to be our official language.
More [bold mine]:
There are other practical difficulties of assigning more Americanness based on ancestry. Virginia was first settled in 1607, and slaves were imported in 1619. Does that make the descendants of the initial settlers at Jamestown and those first slaves more American than the Puritans who settled Plymouth in 1620? What about the descendants of the settlers who came with William Penn in 1682 to take possession of Pennsylvania? Of course, there’s also the inconvenient fact that the earliest continuous settlements in America were Spanish in St. Augustine, Florida, settled in 1565, and San Juan de los Caballeros, New Mexico, settled in 1598. Are the descendants of those two cities more American than the descendants of Jamestown, and by how much?
Again, I don’t know whether I ought to be surprised at this point by the poor quality of thinking from the Left. The Spanish colonists who arrived in the 1500s were of Spain. The United States, what we call “America” today, was 200 years away from establishment. The Spaniards who stayed became Americans much later in time, as much as they’re American today. This is such a simple concept to grasp, but we already know what type of person struggles with the simple things.
There are other practical difficulties. How American is somebody today who counts among their descendants a settler at St. Augustine, a member of Penn’s first colony, and an immigrant who arrived from Mexico in 1980? Does it matter that the Mexican was an illegal immigrant? How to compare to a person today who can trace all their ancestors back to the Mayflower, except one branch of the family tree who were the descendants of Chinese immigrants who arrived in 1970? There is no good answer, nobody can check. Worst of all, the questions are foolish but they would dominate in a country where identity is paramount.
There’s really nothing all that difficult about this. An illegal immigrant by definition cannot be American. If America is a creedal country, if obeying the law is what makes a person American more than anything else, then an illegal immigrant has already disqualified themselves. On top of it all, if your family’s time in the country doesn’t make you any more American than anyone else, then coming to America today doesn’t make you American, either. Time is a completely irrelevant point when it comes to civic nationalism and it works both ways. Alex Nowrasteh cannot pick and choose when it matters and when it doesn’t.
Bottom line: Heritage Americans have a deeper, more meaningful connection to this country. It doesn’t mean newcomers can’t become Americans. I believe American identity to be culturally defined, just like any other country. But I also believe any country will have people who’ve known nothing else for generations, for whom there’s no real homeland to return to. That means something. It has to. Otherwise, what’s the point of having a country?
Enough from me - what do you think? Does the Heritage American concept mean anything? What’s the basis of American identity, in your opinion? What’s the future of American identity? What are some bad takes you’ve seen from the civic nationalists lately?
Share your thoughts in the comments!
Max Remington writes about armed conflict and prepping. Follow him on Twitter at @AgentMax90.
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Also, on liberals who confuse the French and American revolutionary ideologies...
You know that famous Adams quote about "a Constitution made for a moral and religious people"? It wasn't a speech in Congress. Or at the Convention. It was a letter written to a militia commander in 1798. The date and context are important.
https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/99-02-02-3102
Adams is lamenting the failure of the French Revolution's ideals ("our Country remains untainted with the principles and manners... which assumes the Language of Justice and moderation while it is practicing Iniquity and Extravagance") and contrasting them with his hopes for the nascent country of which he is President. Within a year of this letter, the aforementioned "principles and manners" having wrecked France, Napoleon will march on Paris.
The only commonality of 1776 and 1789 is Thomas Paine. But the Left (a label ironically derived from the seating arrangement in the French Revolutionary Parliament) has always conflated the two.
The poll graphic is hilarious. The only 2 things a majority of people DON'T think are important for being an American are "being white" and "being Christian". Yet both these likely the most common, bare-minimum criteria accepted at the founding of the country.
Pat Buchanan in the 90's: "A nation is borders, language, and culture." Lose any 1 of them and your country falls apart. The older I get, the smarter Pat appears to have been. Prophets always look like kooks, until they're proven right.