Alex Nowrasteh
American identity is based on belief in a broad creed, not on ethnicity, religion, or ancestry. That point should be uncontroversial. Yet a small, ultra-online nationalist subculture now disputes it. The dispute publicly surfaced recently after Vivek Ramaswamy’s New York Times op-ed and his speech at the Turning Point USA AmericaFest conference, which basically made that point.
The wild online disagreement to it was shocking to most but centered around a mostly anonymous subset of people who are pushing the idea that “Heritage Americans,” those descended from the colonial era or at least the Civil War, are more American than the rest of us. This disagreement gets to the heart of why American society and the economy work so well while being so ethnically, religiously, and racially diverse.
The debate over Heritage Americans and what it means to be an American is in the backdrop of a mass deportation campaign by the Trump administration, the government’s anti-legal immigration policies, and a Supreme Court case that could reinterpret birthright citizenship. Reinterpreting what it means to be a real American isn’t necessary for those immigration restrictionist policies because they are happening without such a big shift in attitudes. It would be a titanic shift to redefine what it means to be an American in the way those small numbers of crude ultra-online nationalists want.
A recent YouGov poll asked, “What makes someone American?” Ranked in order of importance, the first unique cultural marker is speaking English, which is in seventh place. Tenth place is participating in American customs and traditions, which is as vague as you can be. Creedal definitions dominate: obeying the law, supporting the Constitution, citizenship, and adherence to shared principles. This is the way it should be. These are universal commitments, not ethnic markers, and therefore conflict directly with nationalist definitions of Americanness.
Nationalism is ethnic politics, as Azar Gat convincingly argues. It’s the idea that ethnic groups should have states that represent them, called nation-states. The United States has never been a nation-state because we don’t have an ethnic definition of what it means to be an American, despite what 1619 Project progressives and Nick Fuentes-style nationalists believe—albeit for different reasons. The United States is obviously a great country, but not one defined by ethnicity, race, or religion. It’s based on ideas or a creed.
Every country has a mix of creedal and other cultural or ethnic markers that are necessary to prove membership, and the United States is no exception. On that spectrum, belonging in a country like Japan is overwhelmingly based on ethnicity, but there are some cultural socialization markers, such as adherence to unspoken social norms. The United States is on the opposite side of that spectrum, with creed dominating, but the cultural identifier of English fluency remains strong. It’s not an ethnic, racial, or religious marker, and it’s a skill that anybody can pick up, but it’s important and will persist.
What matters is that America’s cultural markers are easily acquired. English has high global value, which speeds immigrant integration, lowers native resistance, and accelerates identification as American. Birthright citizenship is another tool that speeds up assimilation because there is no population of people born here with black market legal status that prevents them from fully participating in American life. When other countries shift their citizenship rules more in the American direction, immigrants and their children assimilate just a bit more. This means that anybody can culturally become an American if they want to, which is a huge advantage in terms of attracting the best and most committed people.
Being American is an overwhelmingly creedal identity with a few cultural markers, such as 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 US 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.
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?
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.
Many progressive organizations tore themselves apart arguing about who had greater status by virtue of victimhood as judged by the tenets of wokism and intersectionality. Advancing the organization’s mission became less important than internal social justice status-building. As destructive as that model is to the functioning of human organizations, it’s a more coherent framework than genealogy weighted by date of arrival, legal status, religion, or any other mediating variable you can shake a stick at. Genealogy is a fun hobby, but it’s a poor basis for awarding different levels of citizenship or status as an American. Weighing arguments by the identities of the speaker is a surefire way to undermine an organization.
In addition to the practical difficulties, what’s even the point of redefining what it means to be an American by embracing a more blood and soil mentality or giving more “American citizen points” to some of us based on what our ancestors did? Cynics could say that they just want reparations, affirmative action, or some sort of other advantages. Movements for those could arise in the future, but they aren’t dominant yet. Perhaps they simply want a social leg up, a boost of unearned status based on the location of birth. Schopenhauer said so in a rude way when talking of his own time.
The most likely explanation is that the embrace of the “Heritage American” idea by a small number of people is just an online way to use identity to win arguments without wit, the right-wing equivalent of the woke, “A black woman is speaking, listen and learn,” mentality. This ultra-online point-scoring contest against bots bled over into the real world, as happens so often these days. I’ve never met a person in real life who unironically used the term “Heritage American” in a positive way, and I doubt that you have either.
If seriously embraced, a blood and dirt conception of Americanness would destroy one of the most essential elements that make this country so successful and perhaps even its existence. Let’s leave the idea to rot on server farms overseas where it belongs.