Against Heritage Americanism
The New Right gets it wrong, yet again.
There has been a flurry of commentary from the so-called New Right in the past few months arguing against the idea that America is a propositional or creedal nation. These pundits and commentators see American identity as a version of European-inflected ‘blood-and-soil’ nationalism, instead of being based on a shared culture and creed accessible to all, suggesting that this was a mere invention of the post-World War II political class. Many in this movement believe that America was and is meant exclusively for the people they call “Heritage Americans” – effectively the ethnic population of the United States prior to 1940, with a strong emphasis on Anglo-Protestant Europeans. They claim that our nation can only be defined by these Heritage Americans and any conception of the polity or its culture outside of their version of them is automatically discredited. They call the internal strife between enslavement and liberty that culminated in the Civil War “a charming series of tensions that is only appropriate for Heritage Americans to debate about,” one in which they don’t “pick sides.”
I am loath to accuse anyone of white nationalism, as I feel the term is heavily overused, but these people come about as close as it gets. When you describe your ideology and conception of nationhood as “not racially essentialist in an absolutist way,” [emphasis mine] that tends to raise some eyebrows. It also doesn’t help that these New Right figures seem very highly concerned with an alleged plot to “erase,” “overwhelm,” “subjugate and liquidate Heritage Americans and their way of life.” Others think potential migrants should be judged on their “real character, rather than any set of ‘values’ or ‘commitment to ideals’,” leaving it up to the reader to decipher what exactly that means. (Hint: it de-individuates the immigrant and judges him entirely on the society he is choosing to leave instead of on his personal merit.) Some avoid this cowardly weasel-wording and say what they mean outright: that “Whites are the ethnic Americans, the Heritage American Nation.”
The New Right bases these claims on a very particular reading of American history, one that conveniently focuses on their conception of Heritage Americans as comprising the totality of the national experience. But this is entirely wrong and ahistorical. It ignores the significant nuance in our national history, our culture, and our ethnic fabric. It deliberately misreads our national documents and the evolution of our sociopolitical compact in the pre-WWII era to fit its biased and myopic conception of America. And conservatives should fully repudiate it.
Unlike the invented fantasy-world of the Heritage American crew, early America was replete with diversity of all sorts and did not fit neatly within the simple Anglo-Protestant box modern pundits put it in. There were broad variations in religion, ethnicity, national origin, and language – all things that mattered a great deal to the founding generations and in which they tolerated and embraced difference. The first thing to touch on, however, is the ahistorical conceptualization of Heritage Americans as “White.” This racial category was not at all defined then as it is now, with ethnicities as varied as Jewish, Greek, Italian, and Eastern European lumped in under the same classification. Instead, the term evolved over time to incorporate a much wider variety of ethnicities than it initially referred to. When these commentators claim that white people are Heritage Americans, what definition are they using? The one from 1824, 1924, or 2024?
Linguistic diversity was extremely prevalent in the Early American Republic as well, something that the New Right often ignores. You hear complaints today from this quarter about the widespread speaking of Spanish across many American communities, but the fact that English was not the only language spoken would have seemed normal to the Founding Fathers and the generations succeeding them. There is a reason we have never had an official language, after all. The first decades of our nationhood saw the use of French, Creole, Spanish, Dutch, and various Native American tongues. In fact, Martin Van Buren, our 8th President, spoke English as a second language, having been raised in Kinderhook, New York speaking Dutch. As the nation evolved and welcomed new waves of immigrants, languages like German, Italian, Yiddish, and a slew of Slavic and Scandinavian dialects grew in popular use. As people emigrated from Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean in the late-19th and early 20th centuries, they brought their native tongues with them. None of this was seen as abnormal or undesirable at the time. American linguistic diversity is as old and venerable as the Republic itself. The Anglicization of American linguistic heritage was a process that only began in the early 20th century Progressive Era – an exemplar of the myriad connections between the New Right and the Old Left – and has thankfully never taken full hold.
Religion is another area in which the Heritage American set invent their own version of the American past. They claim that the United States has always been and should always be a Christian nation, arguing that the Founders meant this to be the case. This is not entirely incorrect, but it applies a heavy presentist lens to the past and ignores the long history of minority religions woven into the American tapestry. Sure, looking back at 1840, the vast majority of Americans were some flavor of Christian. Today, we would see them as comprising part of the same broad religious association. In the minds of Americans at the time, however, the seemingly minor differences between Christ-worshipping sects were absolutely massive. Different groups of Protestants saw one another as heretics – in an era in which that word meant something – with Baptists, Lutherans, Puritans, Quakers, and Anglicans all in vehement disagreement. One of the few things that they agreed on was their distaste for Catholics.
Religious innovation was widely present in America as well, with Mormonism being the prime example of this trend toward theocratic diversity. Minority religions flourished, especially Judaism, which was viewed as profoundly American by George Washington himself. Various shades of atheism, agnosticism, and deism were commonplace, too, including among the founding generations. Many Americans throughout the pre-WWII era were relatively irreligious, having little to no connection to an established church; there is a reason why the various Great Awakenings had plenty of potential converts to attract and enthuse. The expansion of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam – all of which were present before 1945 – would be unsurprising to men that lived in an era of religious pluralism. The First Amendment protections for faith did not emerge from pure reason or spring fully-formed from the head of Zeus. They emanated from a specific cultural context, one of expansive diversity in religion that these men desired to protect and steward.
The New Right also claims that Heritage Americans shared a common “way of life” that more recent migrants lack entirely. This is a fiction that bears no resemblance to historical reality. America has, since the colonial days, been a land of distinct and separate regional cultures and folkways, all of which have evolved independently of one another. Our federalist system of government was specifically developed and implemented to allow these distinctions to flourish. The Western spirit was wildly divergent from the Eastern, the Northern from the Southern, the coastal from the inland, and the urban from the rural. Even within a region, ways of life varied significantly. The culture of New York in the Early Republic was quite dissimilar from that of Pennsylvania, which was entirely different from Maryland. Economic discrepancies were enormous, with industrialization impacting separate areas in distinct ways, specialization pushing society down divergent paths, and poverty and wealth being distributed differently. These differences created wholly unique cultures across the country, all fitting under the broader American umbrella. This does not speak to a single, shared “way of life” in any meaningful way. In fact, the development of an American monoculture is, ironically enough, a creation of the post-WWII era that the New Right seems to despise so deeply. Oops!
Acceptance of immigrants and refugees from across the globe has been a common and repeat practice since the beginning of our nation. We took in those fleeing the violence of the French Revolution, the forced depopulation of the Scottish Highlands, the failed German revolutions of 1848, the abhorrent famine in Ireland, the repression of Imperial Russia, and the antisemitic pogroms of Eastern Europe. We took in ethnic Caribbean populations, Latin Americans, Africans, and Asians. Immigrants in the pre-WWII era, contrary to the New Right contention, retained strong connections to their nations of origin and the cultures they left to come here. They maintained their ethnic identity through religious practice, local in-gathering, newspapers focused on ethnic issues and the Old World, specialty cuisines, and fairly regular communication with their families in their former homes.
These immigrants to the United States were not the world’s wealthiest people, but they were hard workers who sought to achieve the American Dream and provide for their families. They served their adoptive nation manfully and with steadfast dedication, fighting in America’s conflicts from the Civil War through the Second World War and beyond. One such example comes from my own family. My maternal grandfather emigrated from Italy in the 1920s and ended up fighting for America and against his former countrymen just two decades later. This was not an exceptional story, but one that has been repeated throughout our history. The people who came after 1945 are no different in this regard, contributing to society and the national fabric in a plethora of positive ways – serving in the military, building businesses, educating themselves, and working to improve our shared prosperity. Creating an arbitrary cutoff point for who counts as a real “Heritage American” is complete nonsense that is unsupportable by history or experience.
Not only have we historically accepted migrants and embraced ethnic pluralism, our national documents – the foundation of our polity – do not relate to a sole ethnicity, instead espousing a series of universalizing Enlightenment principles. The important things here are the ideas those documents promulgate, not the skin color, ethnic background, or religion of the people choosing to adopt them. Our citizenship test does not discriminate on background. It relates entirely to the acceptance of American ideals of freedom and individual rights, something anyone can theoretically do. America offers birthright citizenship, integrating immigrants automatically after a single generation. It does not require one to be white or Christian or a “Heritage American” to be a natural born citizen, which, along with age, are the only qualifications for the highest political office in the land. Lower offices, whether federal or state, are open to any and all American citizens, regardless of birth country. This has been the case since the 18th century. Americanism is accessible to all, as long as they cherish and promote our national values and ideals. That is what the nation was founded on, not a particular race or people. It is ethic, not ethnic.
That reality is what the conservative movement should embrace, not the false idea of Heritage Americanism. Our nation has a distinct ethos, not a distinct ethnos. We should focus on assimilating newcomers into that ideology, the cornerstone of our existence for nearly 250 years, not on putting up arbitrary barriers to Americanness that are ahistorical and immoral. Assimilation has worked impeccably well for the vast majority of our history, and it should be the approach going forward. Immigrants can and should retain their unique culture, but should integrate it into the broader American society. They came here to be Americans, not expatriates, and they should be expected to act as such. That means adopting foundational American principles, respecting our national ideology, and contributing to the fabric of American society by integrating within it.
To ease this process, we should orient our immigration system around attracting people who seek to embrace Americanism, not simply gain economic opportunities. Men and women around the world envy our liberties, not just our prosperity. Those are the folks we want as our fellow Americans. Permanently leaving one’s homeland to become a citizen of the United States is no simple decision; it is done for good reason. Often these migrants are departing their countries of origin because they find their living conditions, governments, or societies unacceptable and seek to be somewhere better – somewhere freer. These new Americans who embrace our values are not only good for the country, but they are good for the conservative movement. People who seek freedom and prosperity in America are generally quite interested in preserving those attributes for their progeny; that is a fundamentally conservative attitude that can be a powerful political motivator.
America is not merely an idea, but an idea embodied by people – of all backgrounds and ancestries – who choose to embrace it and center it in their individual lives. In that respect, “Heritage Americans” are no more American than the person who raises his right hand at a naturalization ceremony and swears an oath to “support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic” and “bear true faith and allegiance to the same.” And that is what makes America both unique and great.