"Heritage Americans" Is a Claim to Unearned Status
What is at stake in the debate over identity
Vivek Ramaswamy has provoked a new controversy with his NYT op-ed on American identity.
You are an American if you believe in the rule of law, in freedom of conscience and freedom of expression, in colorblind meritocracy, in the U.S. Constitution, in the American dream, and if you are a citizen who swears exclusive allegiance to our nation…
No matter your ancestry, if you wait your turn and obtain citizenship, you are every bit as American as a Mayflower descendant, as long as you subscribe to the creed of the American founding and the culture that was born of it. This is what makes American exceptionalism possible.
One form of response to this piece on Twitter has been to look for logical paradoxes to refute his argument.
But Vivek has logical paradoxes of his own! If you adopt the idea that time in the country is part of what makes someone an American, he says, then Bernie Sanders is more American than Bernie Moreno, and Joe Biden is more American than Donald Trump, since the current president is himself the son of an immigrant. To a conservative crowd, this is obviously unacceptable.
I think that the Trump example actually hits at something here, since nobody thinks that he can be called less American than anyone else because his mother was Scottish. Obviously, this entire discourse is at a practical level meant to single out people who are non-white and non-Christian and assign them second-class status, socially and perhaps legally too.
But this game of trying to catch the other side in a logical contradiction isn’t really that helpful. Identity is not a scientifically precise concept, but a social category we’re free to construct how we want. Any definition of Americanness we agree to will have edge cases and apparent contradictions.
The real question is what are we even doing here? Consider the one question I’ve been posing to the Heritage American crowd: If everyone accepts you are correct and whiteness or time in the country determines your Americanness, what exactly are we supposed to do with that conclusion?
If I end up agreeing that people in the hills of Appalachia are more American than me, should I send them some money? Demand that they be given two votes instead of one in elections? Adopt their beauty standards and praise them on a daily basis? Stop thinking for myself and let random people with the right ancestors tell me what I should believe about public policy questions?
What is going on here is that members of one political faction are grasping for unearned status at the expense of others. As with woke, this is also a means of shutting down debate, where one group of people can simply invoke an identity-based characteristic and act as if that absolves them of coming up with reasons or arguments for what they believe. Appeals to identity are always used selectively to attack political opponents. BLM didn’t care much about the “lived experience” of Clarence Thomas, and rightists who believe so-called Heritage status entitles them to deference want to tear down institutions built and maintained by old stock Americans if they are woke.
It is not a coincidence that the most identity-obsessed parts of the left have had the most illogical political views, as they embrace a style of thinking that is hostile to rational thought. BLM wanted to defund the police, which is one of the worst public policy interventions imaginable from the perspective of protecting black lives. Heritage American types want to stop immigration and trade, which would lead to a collapse in living standards and a decline in our status on the global stage. But identitarians on either side are not interested in criminology, economics, or anything that requires a familiarity with data or an ability to follow logical arguments. They want to invoke their immutable characteristics as a shortcut to political victory.
In contrast, an ideas-based American identity provides hope of keeping the focus on questions like what is true, virtuous, and good. I can accept that replacing the American population with Nigerians and Somalis would create a country that is completely unrecognizable as a theoretical matter, but since no one is proposing such a policy, I don’t see what we are supposed to do with this conclusion. Immigration doesn’t actually extract the people who live here (they somehow seem to be confused on this point), and if you think that those currently coming in at the pace they’re arriving pose a threat to the continuation of the republic, you’re going to need to provide evidence instead of coming up with fantastical scenarios in your head involving all of us suddenly turning black.
It is also worth reminding ourselves that the most strident forms of identity politics came out of the least rigorous fields of academia. While some African American Studies scholars do good work, there is a history of departments being created as the result of political pressures, and some of them have even been used as the easiest way to commit academic fraud and keep less bright collegiate athletes eligible to compete. Here we have another parallel with the identitarians of the right. When I look at those who call themselves Heritage Americans, it is hard for me not to be completely overcome by the stench of aggressive mediocrity. They didn’t go to good schools and don’t have real credentials, which could be fine, but they are also not known for contributing anything to the discourse other than reminding you of their skin color and religion. They’re often conspiratorial, and show little ability to either engage in rational discourse or move beyond repeating the same handful of talking points. If accepting an ancestry-based definition of Americanness means putting these kinds of people in charge of your movement, then that alone should be enough to settle the identity debate.
I am about as heritage as they come - a ancestor who sailed on the Mayflower on my mother's side and my namesake was an indentured servant to William Penn, but I don't see that as making me more 'American'. My first wife's ancestors fought for the Confederacy, mine for the Union. So my two daughters from that marriage are definitely 'heritage'. Daughter #1 married a Jew. Are her children still viewed as 'Heritage' by the purists? My second wife came to the US in the 90's from Western Ukraine. Are my children with her still 'Heritage'? Frankly, the true 'Heritage' Americans are the Amerinds, who have been here for greater than 10,000 years, not a paltry few centuries.
I don't count myself more American than my high school peers, one of whose parents were refugees from Shanghai after the revolution, or my other peers who were children of the Holocaust survivors. My friend, the Chinese refugee descendant, spent his entire career as a Physicist for the US Navy.
I never had any use for idiots who were trying to claim social status by the activity / accomplishments of their distant ancestors. My first wife's family had members deep into the Daughters of the American Revolution and the equivalent Confederacy ancestry organization. I could not care less.
What have you accomplished? What have you tried to do - but failed at? I give credit for trying to do something interesting or significant, not what did your ancestors did many generations ago.
Personally I'm highly sympathetic to the perspective of the late Samuel Huntington, who articulated in his book Who Are We the distinction between a nation united by ethnicity and culture and a nation-state as a political entity governing a large group of individuals. As many have been noted, at times nation states have in fact contained multiple nations, as exemplified by the former Yugoslavia.
I've always been struck by the claim made in Who Are We and other books like Alien Nation by Peter Brimelow that if immigration had completely ceased after 1790 that the American population even as recently as 1990 would've been around half of its actual size at that time. A sizable portion of white Americans can in fact trace their heritage back to the original colonial stock.
That being said, I think many people missed the point of Vivek's tweet. He followed up his initial comment by clarifying that he wasn't advocating for unfettered immigration, but rather that he was arguing against the notion of employing a caste system to rank Americans based on their ethnic heritage. While we certainly can be selective about whom we let become American citizens, the idea of a heritage citizen above and beyond any other American is ultimately counterproductive. What would be the end goal of such a distinction? Would it be to somehow create different rights based on the grade of American one was deemed to be?
Ultimately, as Vivek argued and as I also believe, we can recognize America's ethnic history and heritage without becoming captive to it.