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.
I don't think the Maga people will be surprised or offended to be called identitarians. They surely know it. And why shouldn't (conservative) white people create their own identitarian movement when woke (and proto woke civil rights liberalism) has been actively shutting them out of society and institutions, and elevating minorities, giving them special privileges, based solely on their identity.
They shouldn't because the identitarian movements haven't really helped minorities. On the contrary, they have kept them in thrall to racial grifters and purveyors of bad ideas. White people would not benefit from having equivalents of Al Sharpton and BLM.
You sound like Piers Morgan telling Nick Fuentes he's a racist and expecting Fuentes to be "hurt" by this accusation. Instead Fuentes just laughs at him.
It should hurt cuz it points out that maga folk are as retarded as woke folk. Whether maga folk are bright enough to perceive such a parallel, is a whole different story.
This statement is false historically, empirically, philosophically, and scientifically. It survives only in online grievance culture, not serious thought.
In reality, colorblind universalism is the intellectual backbone of modern civilization. It underlies modern science, constitutional law, capitalism, engineering, medicine, meritocratic education, and large-scale state capacity. You are essentially calling the most productive intellectual tradition in human history "dumb" because you don't like where the scoreboard ended up.
Race essentialism on the other hand is low-resolution thinking. It collapses millions of relevant variables into cartoon categories because racists can't handle high-resolution complexity.
It has:
*Zero predictive power (it conveniently explains outcomes after the fact)
*Metaphysical race categories that modern science directly contradicts
*Crude stereotyping that erases massive individual variation
*No falsifiability (it can never be proven wrong, only "reinterpreted")
Ironically, modern biology and genetics do not recognize biological race at all (and by the way, there are really good reasons for this, it's not a conspiracy or "woke" just because you don't understand). Which means you essentially just called scientists dumb. This is especially hilarious because scientists are the epitome of brilliance, intellectual rigor, and reality-based thinking. Technology that looks like outright sorcery to every generation before us proves it.
By the way, if whites were genuinely superior to, say, blacks, Asians, and Jews due to features like, say, intelligence, and thus deserved special treatment or privileges, then why not just cut to the chase and discriminate directly against low-intelligence people regardless of race? In what world is a dim-witted white redneck from Appalachia superior to Neil deGrasse Tyson just because he's white? Otherwise, it's clear that you're just defending skin color as an end in itself, no matter how mediocre the person, which is pretty pathetic and completely undermines your so-called superiority. At this point, it's obviously just a post-hoc narrative to make you feel good about yourself.
Sorry, this is a bit long but there are a few points to make.
The notion of Heritage Americans is absurd on several levels. So, born in the Caribbean, was Alexander Hamilton not a Heritage American? That'd be too bad because most historians credit him with ensuring the U.S. developed a stable and growth-oriented economy, in stark contrast to what emerged in South America in the wake of the Bolivar-San Martin revolutions. If he's not a "Heritage American" then he's proof that non-Heritage Americans add value to this country.
What about the ethnic Germans who came in such large numbers over the 18th century and settled Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Delaware, and Maryland? (The Hessian mercenary Konrad Döhla describes in his published diary that during the American Revolution, as he was marched from New York to Virginia, he repeatedly encountered villages along his way where the dominant language was German.) Are their descendants "Heritage Americans"? What about the Dutch, Swedish and Finnish settlers of the Middle States in the 17th century? A young Benjamin Franklin railed against these immigrants in 1751, revealing how the notions of "whiteness" as a racial concept have evolved over the centuries:
“23. Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion.
24. Which leads me to add one Remark: That the Number of purely white People in the World is proportionably very small. All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny. America (exclusive of the new Comers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth.” (Benjamin Franklin (1751). “Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind,” National Archives. Retrieved from: https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-04-02-0080)
And assuming this notion of "Heritage Americans" only includes white people, that of course excludes people whose ancestry goes back centuries, but who are not white. When the U.S. banned the slave trade (importing new slaves, but not the ownership of slaves or buying/selling of slaves within the country) in 1807, it suddenly jacked up the price of slaves in the country. At about this time the market prices for tobacco collapsed -- but Eli Whitney had invented the Cotton 'Gin, leading to the birth of a huge cotton industry that spread westward. Well, when slave owners couldn't import any more after 1807 but a new industrial agricultural economy was growing requiring mass labor, what happened was the Mississippi River basin cotton plantations went shopping and bought 1 million slaves from the Southeast tobacco plantations over 1807-1860, tearing slave families apart.
Translation: People who had been forcibly brought to American shores and over time, stripped of their native (African) cultures and languages -- and thereby culturally became, for all intents and purposes, Americans even if they were not allowed to be citizens, some of whom had roots in places like Virginia or Maryland going back to the 1620s, were now forcibly moved inland to the Mississippi region. These people in 1860 (much less their descendants today) had deeper roots in America than many of those J.D. Vance is whining about now... but they're not considered Heritage Americans... Interesting.
But let me take this apart in one more way. So, ignoring the reality that in 1776 the United Colonies were already a very ethnically and religiously mixed country, the question of what it means to be an American has been debated ever since. Oddly, the most American argument is what Vivek Ramaswamy proposes because there is desperately little argument for an ethnic basis. Put another way, the ethnic argument is a very European argument. This is how European nationalists define their countries, their "nations," and their ethnic groups. Blut und Ehren ("Blood and Soil") was the Nazi slogan but it was very much in line with how European nationalists delineated ethnic groups, as if they'd arisen, complete and fully formed (and distinct) right out of the ancestral dirt. (In that sense, they're kind of like Bram Stoker's Dracula; bound to their ancestral soil forever. How unfortunate, then, when historians can so easily pick apart the ethnic exclusivity and territorial arguments European nationalists make.) If American nationalists want to stick to something like this, then they need to create a mish-mash ethnicity of British ethnic groups (English, Irish, Scottish -- Ulster Scots, Lowland Scots, Highland Scots -- Welsh, Cornish, Manx, etc.), all sorts of German, Dutch, Huguenot French, some Scandinavian, and even some Polish just to describe the Founding Fathers, never mind the country as a whole in 1776.
In truth, most nationalists do what Vance is doing; ignore complexity and pretend there's a single, simple story that explains everything and justifies one group dominating others. Modern DNA studies are shredding nationalist arguments across Europe, but that's why nationalists condemn science and experts.
But to return to this recognition that Vance's "American Heritage" nationalism is not just exclusionary but a European ideological import, through her "Objectivism" belief Ayn Rand condemned nationalism as the political rightwing's version of collectivism. She very much equated it with communism in the sense that it was a belief system designed to allow one group of people to dominate another. Nationalist movements in Europe over the 20th and 21st centuries have always been anti-democratic and authoritarian (and Rand was about as anti-government authority as a person could be without being an anarchist); the Volk/People need a single voice -- Dear Leader! -- who can channel their energy and interests. Too many voices muddies the waters, so say nationalists. And as Mussolini wrote in his 1932 manifesto, the Western obsession with individuals and their rights was misplaced; he believed only the Volk/People/Nation mattered, not individuals.
Rand saw nationalism as elevating the group over the individual -- in her view, a very un-American thing. And she saw nationalism as a crutch as well, allowing individuals to take credit for things they had nothing to do with (e.g., Mussolini trying to position his regime as a continuation of the Roman Empire, or pretending you know anything about viticulture simply because you have a French heritage.) In other words, nationalism encouraged people to not take responsibility for themselves and their own actions, instead outsourcing their lives and responsibilities to a larger group. Nationalism is, in Rand's view, the exact opposite of traditional Edmund Burke-style Anglo-American conservatism. Rand was inconsistent in her own beliefs in a lot of ways, but her vision of libertarianism (at least some version of which many Republicans claimed to adore until the Trump years, when they did a 180 degree-turn) more closely aligns with the day-to-day reality of life in America. Vance's vision is more like the Amish worldview, where nothing changes and a small group of people live in lock-step devoid of freedom or choice. The U.S. today would be a far poorer and less developed country if it had followed Vance's vision.
I was making this point upthread, more Black Americans have ancestry dating back to pre-Revolutionary times than whites do, but I don't think Nick Fuentes considers them Heritage Americans. it really exposes that the underlying intent here is racial - only white people can be Heritage Americans - it really doesn't have anything to do with ancestry.
An outlier like Hanania who is at best a second generation ‘American’ with no connection to the country other than ‘a land of opportunity’ would naturally take umbrage at being reminded that belonging to a country requires more than believing in ‘creeds or propositions, ‘ and possessing a passport.
There is tension between America is An Idea, with lofty ideals (unique in the world) and America the Mundane, a physical place with borders and a population (much like any other country). In a legal sense, the lofty ideas win out when a new citizen gains 100% of the rights of a Mayflower descendant. But I'm not convinced the lofty side completely beats out the mundane side when it comes to other aspects of American-ness. Generational transmission of knowledge and values is a thing in human societies.
Except the new citizen ‘embracing values’ is an ancient trope with little in support of it. America is a country not an ideal. The Ramaswamy’s and Hanania’s don’t fool anyone. They came here for ‘opportunity’ not because they loved The Federalist Papers. All immigrants aren’t alike and until 1965 we successfully excluded these rootless opportunists.
They were considered a lower order category of people beneath Northern European stock but above Africans or East Asians. They were in no way considered as desirable from either a cultural or blood point of view by the sorts of people who cared about such things at the time. And even for people who didn't care about blood, Catholicism was a massive bugbear for a long time.
As just one example, the 2nd Klan reached its height of membership (around 2 million) and popularity outside the South at the point when it was maximally anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant in the early 20th century. The militant anti-black stuff never managed to get much purchase outside the South.
Wrong. That was never reflected in any official policy or in immigration policy. The Irish are also Northern European, so there’s that. Indians aren’t and never will be.
I said nothing except to your challenge to read history before the neoliberal era. I will take you up on that all day.
Are you seriously contending that the only thing that counts is official immigration policy and that culture and everything else is irrelevant? There absolutely were all kinds of anti-Catholic official policies (mostly at the state level) for the record though.
Culture is relevant as is race. America was always envisioned as a white, European derived , at least nominally Christian nation by U.S. ruling elites and early founders. The idea of a nation as a creed or proposition was not something they believed. No one denies there were cultural and ethnic differences at times among European settlers and immigrants in the U.S. or conflicts at certain periods. In the end the Irish and Italians fit in at least partially while Somalis, Indians, and Guatemalans never will. Not beyond very small numbers at any rate.
Being a "real American" certainly requires more than accidental ancestry or vague claims of being "from here" by blood. Being born near a patch of dirt does not confer insight, loyalty, or legitimacy. It confers nothing at all beyond the same kind of meaningless coincidence as the weather on the day you were born.
Also, the U.S. was never some mud-bound clan or blood-soaked ancestor cult. It's a complex political project that was built on the radical idea that legitimacy comes from institutions, law, and reason, not dirt-worship, blood myths, or lazy ancestor cosplay dressed up as destiny. Belonging here has always been defined by proactive participation and allegiance, not by sitting on your ass invoking genealogy as a substitute for effort, competence, or contribution.
The idea that you have some mystical "connection" to the country through the soil was always pure BS. From the standpoint of physics, biology, or basic reality, soil is just inert dirt, minerals, and decaying organic matter. It has no memory, loyalty, or preference for whose ancestors supposedly tilled it. Atoms don't care about your family tree. The ground under your feet feels exactly the same toward the descendant of Mayflower passengers as it does toward the child of yesterday's immigrant. The only thing it "remembers" is whatever fertilizer got dumped on it last season. Clinging to this dirt-magic fantasy isn't profound nationalism; it's the lowest form of cope for losers desperate to inflate accidental birth circumstances into cosmic significance because they have nothing else.
People like Hanania, who actually engage with America's founding propositions (e.g., individual liberty, rule of law, merit, and opportunity) are far closer to the spirit of the nation than someone whose sole claim to "belonging" is that their great-grandparents happened to die on the same continent. A passport plus active allegiance beats passive genealogy every damn time.
And let's not forget that a huge swaths of pure white Americans were outright traitors who fought against the United States. During the Civil War, millions of them took up arms for the Confederacy, murdered fellow Americans, and tried to shatter the republic because their "heritage" (cough cough slavery) mattered more than the Constitution. Fast-forward to today, and their underachieving descendants want to lecture assimilated immigrants about patriotism just a few years after they stormed the Capitol on January 6 like a rabid horde of beer-bellied barbarians chanting "hang Mike Pence" and beating cops with American flagpoles until blood ran down their faces.
Third world immigrants don’t assimilate, whatever that means. They asset strip and colonize. They also consider themselves as part of larger ethnic communities not atomized individuals clawing ea h other in search of ‘opportunity.’
Well, aside from the autism being expressed out here, that’s exactly what a real nation is.l; a people with a common origin, ancestry, culture, traditions. America as it is now is an empire not a nation. The only thing holding it together is money. Nations aren’t economic zones of rootless individual consumer drones as delusional reborn neoliberals who were spouting white nationalism under pseudonyms a decade or so ago are now espousing.
The roots of the U.S. are British and largely Protestant. Without these roots and foundational population, there would be no United States. The Founders were white racialists, supremacists, and not at all in favor of your particular very late 20th century version of Americanism.
What is your background and when did your folk come here? I’m betting on a few probable responses. You clearly harbor hatred and resentment towards actual Americans as you know deep done you aren’t one and never will be no matter how many times you read The Federalist Papers.
"Well, aside from the autism being expressed out here…"
Starting with ableist sneering is a confession, not an argument. It means you don't have a substantive response for a grounded material description of reality, so you reach for stigma.
Also: you're confusing "I don't like this" with "this is false." That's a toddler-level mistake.
"That's exactly what a real nation is: a people with a common origin, ancestry, culture, traditions."
No. That's a tribe or an ethnos.
A real nation is a large-scale coordination system for labor, capital, law, and infrastructure. Many nations choose ethnic or cultural filters, but nothing about them is strictly required for a nation to exist. It's just one possible rule-set, not a law of nature.
Belonging in such systems is always practical, procedural, and enforceable, not mystical or aesthetic. The system doesn't care who you are "deep down." It cares only whether you meet its active parameters and are recognized by its institutions. Nothing more is required. Nothing else matters.
You may have stories about reality where ethnic identity has intrinsic importance, but reality does not recognize them, so why should I?
Also: this belonging isn't "fake" just because it's constructed. All political membership is constructed, including ethnonationalist ones. The only difference is that the civic model is far more sophisticated, rational, and scalable. It allows strangers to cooperate without pretending they're cousins or killing each other. It values what you can do rather than how you look or where your grandparents happened to be born. It's no accident that systems built on this model ended up dominating the modern world and producing the highest levels of wealth, stability, and living standards in human history while blood-soaked dirt-magic fantasies stagnated, collapsed, or got absorbed into liberal democracies.
"America as it is now is an empire not a nation."
This is label-swapping to avoid the obvious.
Call it an empire, a federation, a republic, or a goddamn hamster wheel. It still doesn't change how belonging actually works inside it.
Citizenship, law, records, enforcement, and institutions still define membership.
Your feelings still do not.
It is never about ancestry unless the society is primitive, collapsing, or both.
Even if we entertain your definition: "common ancestry/culture" is not a law of nature. It's a preference you're trying to elevate into an obligation. However nothing in physics, biology, or logic actually forces it to be the case. That's you mistaking personal attachment and inherited sentiment for objective necessity. However, reality, as always, is not so easily fooled.
You're essentially doing theology with blood-soaked dirt-magic mysticism and flags.
Also: you don't get to declare something "not a nation" just because it fails your blood-soaked ancestor cult. Reality does not recognize your arbitrary mental Pinterest board of what an American "should look like." And neither do I.
"The only thing holding it together is money."
This is pure cope. Every large society is held together by incentives, rules, and mutual dependence. That's called civilization. If you want kinship tribes, go find twelve cousins and start a goat farm.
"Nations aren't economic zones of rootless individual consumer drones…"
This is a tantrum at modernity, not an argument.
Modern states are large-scale coordination systems for production, exchange, law, and infrastructure. That doesn't reduce people to "drones." It describes the mechanisms that let millions of strangers cooperate without murdering each other.
That's called civilization. Again, if you want kinship tribes, go find twelve cousins and start a goat farm.
"The roots of the U.S. are British and largely Protestant."
Sure. And the roots of computing are military and academic. That doesn't mean only uniforms and professors get to use laptops.
History has causes. It does not grant hereditary authority. If it did, we wouldn't be having this conversation, yet we do.
Roots explain history; they don't generate permanent ownership rights.
And again: none of this gives dirt and blood magical properties.
"Without these roots and foundational population, there would be no United States."
Trivially true and completely irrelevant.
Without Sumerians there's no writing, but nobody gets to claim modern literacy is an ethnic inheritance. Without early Britons there's no U.S., and without later immigrants there's no modern U.S. Either way, origin does not define legitimate membership now. If it did, we wouldn't be having this conversation, yet we do.
Early contributors don't own the future forever.
Also: causation is not consecration.
"The Founders were white racialists, supremacists…"
Some (but not all) were racist. Congratulations, you've discovered the 18th century.
But they still built abstract institutions precisely so the country would not be permanently bound to their personal prejudices. That's why citizenship is legal and civic, not genetic.
"…not in favor of your late 20th century Americanism."
This is just blood-magic ancestor worship.
The U.S. is not a museum exhibit frozen in 1776. Political systems evolve or die. That's not corruption. That's literally what happens when a society is alive.
You want embalmed tradition. Reality doesn't cooperate. Even the most cherished customs are products of change layered on top of earlier changes, revised, adapted, and repackaged so many times that people forget they were ever different. Every generation inherits a moving target and mistakes it for something eternal.
What you call "tradition" is just yesterday's innovation that survived long enough to feel sacred.
The past was never as static as you imagine. It changed then. It changes now. It will change after you're gone. And no amount of blood-magic ancestor worship is going to freeze it in place.
"Deep down you aren't one and never will be…"
This is pure dirt-worship mysticism. It treats belonging like a spiritual property instead of a functional contingent status. Sorry but I'm not interested in that kind of superstition. I'm interested in reality though, and reality does not care that "Vivek" doesn't fit your Pinterest board of what an American "should look like."
The system says Vivek belongs. Your feelings are not part of the process.
End of story.
If you want to worship blood-soaked dirt-magic, go find twelve cousins and start a goat farm. Just leave the rest of us alone.
Your entire argument essentially boils down to: "I don't like how this system works, so it shouldn't count."
Yeah, welcome to being alive, buddy. The universe didn't consult you about gravity either.
But somehow gravity learned to justify itself with equations. You just have to whine.
"You clearly harbor hatred and resentment towards actual Americans…"
"Actual Americans" meaning what, exactly? White? Protestant? British stock? Some arbitrary cutoff you personally like?
Just recently, I've seen a self-described "heritage American" in Twitter argue that Irish-Americans don't deserve voting rights or citizenship because they are "too stupid and greedy."
Who decided that your opinion on who qualifies as "real American" matters more than his, especially when his family was likely here long before yours given that you're Irish?
Why is your version of ancestry more authoritative than another person's who likely came before you?
Who decided your genealogy preferences get veto power over citizenship?
Because that's the whole game here: you arbitrarily redefine "American" to mean "my preferred ethnicity," then accuse everyone else of hatred for not bowing to it.
Also: disagreement with your dirt-mysticism is not "hatred." It's reality checking.
I’m not reading your garbage. As soon as I saw ‘ableist’ and ‘blood and dirt,’ I started falling asleep. I have nothing but contempt for people like you and your values that could well destroy my people. There’s no common ground.
Yes, your national identity is not earned through merit. If you are a naturalized citizen, then that means you also have a previous allegiance and a split national identity
What's missing from the debate? Here is the concept of a social contract.
Who has a duty to participate in the American Republic, and to obey its laws? Who has a to a say in making those laws, and to be defended by those laws? Americans, first and foremost. The answers to those questions give urgency to the definition of an American.
No, when I was a kid, this idea of a social contract seems to have been pretty routine. I have dim memories of arguing about it with other teenagers, with a kind of background assumption that it was a real thing. It wouldn't occur to most of us to point out that no one ever actually signed the social contract. If you did point it out, it would be one of those cleverly, dangerous and subversive points that everyone would immediately try to forget.
If you think there's a social contract, then signatories to the American social contract are Americans, and others are not.
Maybe it's because this sense of social contract has declined that these questions of identity suddenly become so agonizing. I think if you lose the belief in a social contract, there's no way to save traditional feelings of American Identity, and a lot of other things fall with that.
There's never even any plausible mechanism through which all this heritage American stuff is supposed to flow. They always propose these bizarre theories where the number of 'generations' you've spent in a country will somehow determine your personal investment, as if humans didn't rebel against their families all the time. Generational memory isn't a thing, and willingness to change your personal views based on circumstance is a sign of intelligence.
Most people don't actually know how many generations they've been in America because most people don't care about that nonsense at all, except as a matter of curiosity. Successful people define themselves through their own accomplishments. It's only the failures who have to look to their ancestors for achievements.
Peasant-brained morons, all of the people who believe in this. Cast them into the cold of Bumfuck Missouri with the shamans and witch-doctors, and bring a bunch of deserving world-class scientists from India and China in their place.
I was being deliberately inflammatory for effect, some parts of Missouri are probably cool.
Though I fear you may be caught on the wrong side of the border after the blue states secede and form Libtopia, while all the heritage Americans are left behind in Trumpistan.
Well, I am a Heritage American by anyone’s definition and I have 7 generations of ancestors in Missouri. So I guess I belong in Trumpistan, but I would really prefer to live in the USA, undivided haha.
I keep finding that the people most wanting to claim "Heritage American" status aren't even actually Heritage Americans. I'm nearly "pureblood" Scot-Irish/Anglo (a tiny bit of Scandinavian) with ancestors on my dad's side going back to the 1640s in Virginia and at least the early 1700s on my mom's (couldn't find records from before that). I come from deep flyover country. Albion's Seed is about me and my family.
And consistently the people yelling about how American this makes me will be someone with a Polish or Italian last name whose grandpa came here in 1910. I see a similar thing with people claiming to represent rural people and they usually come from like some suburb of Los Angeles or something and seem to think that makes them "rural." Same with Southerness. Most people who defend zombie Lost Cause weren't even actually raised with the Lost Cause.
I suppose I should ask these people if my impeccable, genuine heritage/rural/Southern pedigree means I can just walk up on any of their podiums I want and take the mikes from their hands? Will they just sit down and let me talk like Bernie Sanders did with those BLM activists that time? Probably not. I married a Jew and thereby did the worst thing you can do in this worldview. I took 400 years of "pure" bloodline and threw it on the garbage heap.
I actually *do* consider all this part of my identity, but even so I don't have to follow some mindless script.
Relevant book/essay plugs for "heritage" Americans (especially white Southerners) that have only thought about their identity from a hyper online rightwing idealogue point of view:
The Burden of Southern History by C. Vann Woodward
A Rose for Emily by Faulkner
Faulkner and Desegregation by James Baldwin
Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner's Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause by Ty Seidule
The BLM comparison is the key insight that gets overlooked. Both movements use identity to dodge substantive debate about actual policy, and both lead their followers into objectively harmful positions. The defund the police stuff was catastrophic for black communities with spiking homicide rates, just like protectionism would crater American living standards. I saw this samething happen in a local school board fight where "lived experience" became the trump card over actual data on reading outcomes. When identity becomes the argument itself, logic and evidence get tossed out the window.
What is amazing of this identitarianism is that for some reason it stops at the Mayflower.
Real "heritage Americans" had been living on the land for thousands of years.
Europeans (where some families have been living in Rome or Athens for thousands of years) correctly laugh at descendants of recent immigrants (seven or eight generations) wanting to "preserve the heritage" of their nation
The American nation did not exist prior to European settlement. The nation we now know as America was not formed by the Indians or even with the Indians, but it was formed in opposition to the tribal nations as an ever expanding settler state. Most American Indians were not even granted citizenship until the 1920s.
But if the American nation is a "settler state", it is by definition a nation of immigrants.
Nationhood is thus not defined by heritage, but by an idea.
Among nations of immigrants, the national idea in Israel is religion, in Singapore it's commerce and in the USA it's supposed to be freedom and the constitution.
Well I believe there is a type of heritage that does define American identity. Those whose ancestors founded America, fought for its independence, and settled the land have a true American heritage as opposed to people who move into a country that has already been founded and settled.
With that being said, assimilation is possible after generations of living in America and intermarriage, just look at the Irish, but today, diversity is being celebrated over assimilation for better of for worse (I believe for worse). I’m also unsure if assimilation is possible with the current immigrants arriving since large scale immigration of nonwhite often non-Christian people has not occurred before in American history.
Which brings us back to the arbitrariness that I was pointing out in the original comment.
You believe the "heritage" that defines American identity is formed by those who came 300 years ago and took the land; but *not* by those who were already living on the land for hundreds of years , *nor* by those who came since.
It would be more intellectually honest to just say that you want American identity to be defined by your ancestors and not by other people ancestors.
Also, large assimilation of nonwhites has indeed happened before in American history. Hundreds of thousands of black slaves were brought into the United States after 1776 (when the population was only about 2.5 millions).
If you're not racist, I think Black people are the greatest portion of heritage Americans. By blood, the average black American has more ancestors born on US soil than most Whites and by creed they were violently and irrevocably severed from their previous cultures and steeped in pure Americana from the start.
A point almost all of these people are missing is that, as a percentage of the population, African Americans are more likely than whites to have ancestors dating back to before the Revolution. That's because the white population was diluted by mass immigration from Europe in the 19th century. About 50% of American whites are descended from post-Civil-War immigrants (Donald Trump included). By comparison, over 90% of US blacks have at least one ancestor who goes back to the Colonial era. That's because almost all of them have some slave ancestry, and subsequent immigration from Africa was restricted until the latter 20th century.
By the same token, most whites actually had nothing to do with slavery and don't even have any relatives who ever owned a black slave.
But if you want to get into a battle of who is a "Heritage American" and who is not I think the Fuentes types are going to be in for a shock.
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.
My founding paternal ancestor arrived in 1649, but it's never really meant anything to me, just an interesting fact.
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.
The Clash of Civilizations is looking far more prescient than The End of History!
Nice post.
Telling maga righties that they’re identitarians just like woke lefties is delicious and hilarious irony.
I don't think the Maga people will be surprised or offended to be called identitarians. They surely know it. And why shouldn't (conservative) white people create their own identitarian movement when woke (and proto woke civil rights liberalism) has been actively shutting them out of society and institutions, and elevating minorities, giving them special privileges, based solely on their identity.
They shouldn't because the identitarian movements haven't really helped minorities. On the contrary, they have kept them in thrall to racial grifters and purveyors of bad ideas. White people would not benefit from having equivalents of Al Sharpton and BLM.
They shouldn’t be surprised or offended. Cuz it’s the truth. And truth hurts.
But why would it hurt?
You sound like Piers Morgan telling Nick Fuentes he's a racist and expecting Fuentes to be "hurt" by this accusation. Instead Fuentes just laughs at him.
It should hurt cuz it points out that maga folk are as retarded as woke folk. Whether maga folk are bright enough to perceive such a parallel, is a whole different story.
This statement is false historically, empirically, philosophically, and scientifically. It survives only in online grievance culture, not serious thought.
In reality, colorblind universalism is the intellectual backbone of modern civilization. It underlies modern science, constitutional law, capitalism, engineering, medicine, meritocratic education, and large-scale state capacity. You are essentially calling the most productive intellectual tradition in human history "dumb" because you don't like where the scoreboard ended up.
Race essentialism on the other hand is low-resolution thinking. It collapses millions of relevant variables into cartoon categories because racists can't handle high-resolution complexity.
It has:
*Zero predictive power (it conveniently explains outcomes after the fact)
*Metaphysical race categories that modern science directly contradicts
*Crude stereotyping that erases massive individual variation
*No falsifiability (it can never be proven wrong, only "reinterpreted")
Ironically, modern biology and genetics do not recognize biological race at all (and by the way, there are really good reasons for this, it's not a conspiracy or "woke" just because you don't understand). Which means you essentially just called scientists dumb. This is especially hilarious because scientists are the epitome of brilliance, intellectual rigor, and reality-based thinking. Technology that looks like outright sorcery to every generation before us proves it.
By the way, if whites were genuinely superior to, say, blacks, Asians, and Jews due to features like, say, intelligence, and thus deserved special treatment or privileges, then why not just cut to the chase and discriminate directly against low-intelligence people regardless of race? In what world is a dim-witted white redneck from Appalachia superior to Neil deGrasse Tyson just because he's white? Otherwise, it's clear that you're just defending skin color as an end in itself, no matter how mediocre the person, which is pretty pathetic and completely undermines your so-called superiority. At this point, it's obviously just a post-hoc narrative to make you feel good about yourself.
Sorry, this is a bit long but there are a few points to make.
The notion of Heritage Americans is absurd on several levels. So, born in the Caribbean, was Alexander Hamilton not a Heritage American? That'd be too bad because most historians credit him with ensuring the U.S. developed a stable and growth-oriented economy, in stark contrast to what emerged in South America in the wake of the Bolivar-San Martin revolutions. If he's not a "Heritage American" then he's proof that non-Heritage Americans add value to this country.
What about the ethnic Germans who came in such large numbers over the 18th century and settled Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Delaware, and Maryland? (The Hessian mercenary Konrad Döhla describes in his published diary that during the American Revolution, as he was marched from New York to Virginia, he repeatedly encountered villages along his way where the dominant language was German.) Are their descendants "Heritage Americans"? What about the Dutch, Swedish and Finnish settlers of the Middle States in the 17th century? A young Benjamin Franklin railed against these immigrants in 1751, revealing how the notions of "whiteness" as a racial concept have evolved over the centuries:
“23. Why should Pennsylvania, founded by the English, become a Colony of Aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our Language or Customs, any more than they can acquire our Complexion.
24. Which leads me to add one Remark: That the Number of purely white People in the World is proportionably very small. All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny. America (exclusive of the new Comers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth.” (Benjamin Franklin (1751). “Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind,” National Archives. Retrieved from: https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Franklin/01-04-02-0080)
And assuming this notion of "Heritage Americans" only includes white people, that of course excludes people whose ancestry goes back centuries, but who are not white. When the U.S. banned the slave trade (importing new slaves, but not the ownership of slaves or buying/selling of slaves within the country) in 1807, it suddenly jacked up the price of slaves in the country. At about this time the market prices for tobacco collapsed -- but Eli Whitney had invented the Cotton 'Gin, leading to the birth of a huge cotton industry that spread westward. Well, when slave owners couldn't import any more after 1807 but a new industrial agricultural economy was growing requiring mass labor, what happened was the Mississippi River basin cotton plantations went shopping and bought 1 million slaves from the Southeast tobacco plantations over 1807-1860, tearing slave families apart.
Translation: People who had been forcibly brought to American shores and over time, stripped of their native (African) cultures and languages -- and thereby culturally became, for all intents and purposes, Americans even if they were not allowed to be citizens, some of whom had roots in places like Virginia or Maryland going back to the 1620s, were now forcibly moved inland to the Mississippi region. These people in 1860 (much less their descendants today) had deeper roots in America than many of those J.D. Vance is whining about now... but they're not considered Heritage Americans... Interesting.
But let me take this apart in one more way. So, ignoring the reality that in 1776 the United Colonies were already a very ethnically and religiously mixed country, the question of what it means to be an American has been debated ever since. Oddly, the most American argument is what Vivek Ramaswamy proposes because there is desperately little argument for an ethnic basis. Put another way, the ethnic argument is a very European argument. This is how European nationalists define their countries, their "nations," and their ethnic groups. Blut und Ehren ("Blood and Soil") was the Nazi slogan but it was very much in line with how European nationalists delineated ethnic groups, as if they'd arisen, complete and fully formed (and distinct) right out of the ancestral dirt. (In that sense, they're kind of like Bram Stoker's Dracula; bound to their ancestral soil forever. How unfortunate, then, when historians can so easily pick apart the ethnic exclusivity and territorial arguments European nationalists make.) If American nationalists want to stick to something like this, then they need to create a mish-mash ethnicity of British ethnic groups (English, Irish, Scottish -- Ulster Scots, Lowland Scots, Highland Scots -- Welsh, Cornish, Manx, etc.), all sorts of German, Dutch, Huguenot French, some Scandinavian, and even some Polish just to describe the Founding Fathers, never mind the country as a whole in 1776.
In truth, most nationalists do what Vance is doing; ignore complexity and pretend there's a single, simple story that explains everything and justifies one group dominating others. Modern DNA studies are shredding nationalist arguments across Europe, but that's why nationalists condemn science and experts.
But to return to this recognition that Vance's "American Heritage" nationalism is not just exclusionary but a European ideological import, through her "Objectivism" belief Ayn Rand condemned nationalism as the political rightwing's version of collectivism. She very much equated it with communism in the sense that it was a belief system designed to allow one group of people to dominate another. Nationalist movements in Europe over the 20th and 21st centuries have always been anti-democratic and authoritarian (and Rand was about as anti-government authority as a person could be without being an anarchist); the Volk/People need a single voice -- Dear Leader! -- who can channel their energy and interests. Too many voices muddies the waters, so say nationalists. And as Mussolini wrote in his 1932 manifesto, the Western obsession with individuals and their rights was misplaced; he believed only the Volk/People/Nation mattered, not individuals.
Rand saw nationalism as elevating the group over the individual -- in her view, a very un-American thing. And she saw nationalism as a crutch as well, allowing individuals to take credit for things they had nothing to do with (e.g., Mussolini trying to position his regime as a continuation of the Roman Empire, or pretending you know anything about viticulture simply because you have a French heritage.) In other words, nationalism encouraged people to not take responsibility for themselves and their own actions, instead outsourcing their lives and responsibilities to a larger group. Nationalism is, in Rand's view, the exact opposite of traditional Edmund Burke-style Anglo-American conservatism. Rand was inconsistent in her own beliefs in a lot of ways, but her vision of libertarianism (at least some version of which many Republicans claimed to adore until the Trump years, when they did a 180 degree-turn) more closely aligns with the day-to-day reality of life in America. Vance's vision is more like the Amish worldview, where nothing changes and a small group of people live in lock-step devoid of freedom or choice. The U.S. today would be a far poorer and less developed country if it had followed Vance's vision.
I was making this point upthread, more Black Americans have ancestry dating back to pre-Revolutionary times than whites do, but I don't think Nick Fuentes considers them Heritage Americans. it really exposes that the underlying intent here is racial - only white people can be Heritage Americans - it really doesn't have anything to do with ancestry.
Most of that crowd doesn't want a real conversation about 'roots' and whose run deeper. They just want certain people to get the joke and pass it on.
They want a contrived legacy status.
Doesn't sound very American. Of course that was never the point.
An outlier like Hanania who is at best a second generation ‘American’ with no connection to the country other than ‘a land of opportunity’ would naturally take umbrage at being reminded that belonging to a country requires more than believing in ‘creeds or propositions, ‘ and possessing a passport.
There is tension between America is An Idea, with lofty ideals (unique in the world) and America the Mundane, a physical place with borders and a population (much like any other country). In a legal sense, the lofty ideas win out when a new citizen gains 100% of the rights of a Mayflower descendant. But I'm not convinced the lofty side completely beats out the mundane side when it comes to other aspects of American-ness. Generational transmission of knowledge and values is a thing in human societies.
Except the new citizen ‘embracing values’ is an ancient trope with little in support of it. America is a country not an ideal. The Ramaswamy’s and Hanania’s don’t fool anyone. They came here for ‘opportunity’ not because they loved The Federalist Papers. All immigrants aren’t alike and until 1965 we successfully excluded these rootless opportunists.
And the Irish immigrants of the late 19th century weren't "rootless opportunists"?
Some may have been individually but as a group, no. Irish culture is traditionally communitarian not individualistic.
Ahh, right, and Indians aren't? Irish immigration good! Indians bad! because reasons.
Very good reasons.
Someone with a name like O'Shaugnessy might remember that the Irish were once considered non-white and just as undesirable as Italians and Spaniards.
Maybe the required criterion might have been not being a Catholic?
The Irish were never considered ‘non-white’ nor were Italians, etc. familiarize yourself with U.S. history prior to the neoliberal era.
Help wanted. No Irish need apply.
You follow some creepy people.
Yes, and?
They were considered a lower order category of people beneath Northern European stock but above Africans or East Asians. They were in no way considered as desirable from either a cultural or blood point of view by the sorts of people who cared about such things at the time. And even for people who didn't care about blood, Catholicism was a massive bugbear for a long time.
As just one example, the 2nd Klan reached its height of membership (around 2 million) and popularity outside the South at the point when it was maximally anti-Catholic and anti-immigrant in the early 20th century. The militant anti-black stuff never managed to get much purchase outside the South.
Wrong. That was never reflected in any official policy or in immigration policy. The Irish are also Northern European, so there’s that. Indians aren’t and never will be.
I said nothing except to your challenge to read history before the neoliberal era. I will take you up on that all day.
Are you seriously contending that the only thing that counts is official immigration policy and that culture and everything else is irrelevant? There absolutely were all kinds of anti-Catholic official policies (mostly at the state level) for the record though.
Culture is relevant as is race. America was always envisioned as a white, European derived , at least nominally Christian nation by U.S. ruling elites and early founders. The idea of a nation as a creed or proposition was not something they believed. No one denies there were cultural and ethnic differences at times among European settlers and immigrants in the U.S. or conflicts at certain periods. In the end the Irish and Italians fit in at least partially while Somalis, Indians, and Guatemalans never will. Not beyond very small numbers at any rate.
Being a "real American" certainly requires more than accidental ancestry or vague claims of being "from here" by blood. Being born near a patch of dirt does not confer insight, loyalty, or legitimacy. It confers nothing at all beyond the same kind of meaningless coincidence as the weather on the day you were born.
Also, the U.S. was never some mud-bound clan or blood-soaked ancestor cult. It's a complex political project that was built on the radical idea that legitimacy comes from institutions, law, and reason, not dirt-worship, blood myths, or lazy ancestor cosplay dressed up as destiny. Belonging here has always been defined by proactive participation and allegiance, not by sitting on your ass invoking genealogy as a substitute for effort, competence, or contribution.
The idea that you have some mystical "connection" to the country through the soil was always pure BS. From the standpoint of physics, biology, or basic reality, soil is just inert dirt, minerals, and decaying organic matter. It has no memory, loyalty, or preference for whose ancestors supposedly tilled it. Atoms don't care about your family tree. The ground under your feet feels exactly the same toward the descendant of Mayflower passengers as it does toward the child of yesterday's immigrant. The only thing it "remembers" is whatever fertilizer got dumped on it last season. Clinging to this dirt-magic fantasy isn't profound nationalism; it's the lowest form of cope for losers desperate to inflate accidental birth circumstances into cosmic significance because they have nothing else.
People like Hanania, who actually engage with America's founding propositions (e.g., individual liberty, rule of law, merit, and opportunity) are far closer to the spirit of the nation than someone whose sole claim to "belonging" is that their great-grandparents happened to die on the same continent. A passport plus active allegiance beats passive genealogy every damn time.
And let's not forget that a huge swaths of pure white Americans were outright traitors who fought against the United States. During the Civil War, millions of them took up arms for the Confederacy, murdered fellow Americans, and tried to shatter the republic because their "heritage" (cough cough slavery) mattered more than the Constitution. Fast-forward to today, and their underachieving descendants want to lecture assimilated immigrants about patriotism just a few years after they stormed the Capitol on January 6 like a rabid horde of beer-bellied barbarians chanting "hang Mike Pence" and beating cops with American flagpoles until blood ran down their faces.
Third world immigrants don’t assimilate, whatever that means. They asset strip and colonize. They also consider themselves as part of larger ethnic communities not atomized individuals clawing ea h other in search of ‘opportunity.’
Well, aside from the autism being expressed out here, that’s exactly what a real nation is.l; a people with a common origin, ancestry, culture, traditions. America as it is now is an empire not a nation. The only thing holding it together is money. Nations aren’t economic zones of rootless individual consumer drones as delusional reborn neoliberals who were spouting white nationalism under pseudonyms a decade or so ago are now espousing.
The roots of the U.S. are British and largely Protestant. Without these roots and foundational population, there would be no United States. The Founders were white racialists, supremacists, and not at all in favor of your particular very late 20th century version of Americanism.
What is your background and when did your folk come here? I’m betting on a few probable responses. You clearly harbor hatred and resentment towards actual Americans as you know deep done you aren’t one and never will be no matter how many times you read The Federalist Papers.
"Well, aside from the autism being expressed out here…"
Starting with ableist sneering is a confession, not an argument. It means you don't have a substantive response for a grounded material description of reality, so you reach for stigma.
Also: you're confusing "I don't like this" with "this is false." That's a toddler-level mistake.
"That's exactly what a real nation is: a people with a common origin, ancestry, culture, traditions."
No. That's a tribe or an ethnos.
A real nation is a large-scale coordination system for labor, capital, law, and infrastructure. Many nations choose ethnic or cultural filters, but nothing about them is strictly required for a nation to exist. It's just one possible rule-set, not a law of nature.
Belonging in such systems is always practical, procedural, and enforceable, not mystical or aesthetic. The system doesn't care who you are "deep down." It cares only whether you meet its active parameters and are recognized by its institutions. Nothing more is required. Nothing else matters.
You may have stories about reality where ethnic identity has intrinsic importance, but reality does not recognize them, so why should I?
Also: this belonging isn't "fake" just because it's constructed. All political membership is constructed, including ethnonationalist ones. The only difference is that the civic model is far more sophisticated, rational, and scalable. It allows strangers to cooperate without pretending they're cousins or killing each other. It values what you can do rather than how you look or where your grandparents happened to be born. It's no accident that systems built on this model ended up dominating the modern world and producing the highest levels of wealth, stability, and living standards in human history while blood-soaked dirt-magic fantasies stagnated, collapsed, or got absorbed into liberal democracies.
"America as it is now is an empire not a nation."
This is label-swapping to avoid the obvious.
Call it an empire, a federation, a republic, or a goddamn hamster wheel. It still doesn't change how belonging actually works inside it.
Citizenship, law, records, enforcement, and institutions still define membership.
Your feelings still do not.
It is never about ancestry unless the society is primitive, collapsing, or both.
Even if we entertain your definition: "common ancestry/culture" is not a law of nature. It's a preference you're trying to elevate into an obligation. However nothing in physics, biology, or logic actually forces it to be the case. That's you mistaking personal attachment and inherited sentiment for objective necessity. However, reality, as always, is not so easily fooled.
You're essentially doing theology with blood-soaked dirt-magic mysticism and flags.
Also: you don't get to declare something "not a nation" just because it fails your blood-soaked ancestor cult. Reality does not recognize your arbitrary mental Pinterest board of what an American "should look like." And neither do I.
"The only thing holding it together is money."
This is pure cope. Every large society is held together by incentives, rules, and mutual dependence. That's called civilization. If you want kinship tribes, go find twelve cousins and start a goat farm.
"Nations aren't economic zones of rootless individual consumer drones…"
This is a tantrum at modernity, not an argument.
Modern states are large-scale coordination systems for production, exchange, law, and infrastructure. That doesn't reduce people to "drones." It describes the mechanisms that let millions of strangers cooperate without murdering each other.
That's called civilization. Again, if you want kinship tribes, go find twelve cousins and start a goat farm.
"The roots of the U.S. are British and largely Protestant."
Sure. And the roots of computing are military and academic. That doesn't mean only uniforms and professors get to use laptops.
History has causes. It does not grant hereditary authority. If it did, we wouldn't be having this conversation, yet we do.
Roots explain history; they don't generate permanent ownership rights.
And again: none of this gives dirt and blood magical properties.
"Without these roots and foundational population, there would be no United States."
Trivially true and completely irrelevant.
Without Sumerians there's no writing, but nobody gets to claim modern literacy is an ethnic inheritance. Without early Britons there's no U.S., and without later immigrants there's no modern U.S. Either way, origin does not define legitimate membership now. If it did, we wouldn't be having this conversation, yet we do.
Early contributors don't own the future forever.
Also: causation is not consecration.
"The Founders were white racialists, supremacists…"
Some (but not all) were racist. Congratulations, you've discovered the 18th century.
But they still built abstract institutions precisely so the country would not be permanently bound to their personal prejudices. That's why citizenship is legal and civic, not genetic.
"…not in favor of your late 20th century Americanism."
This is just blood-magic ancestor worship.
The U.S. is not a museum exhibit frozen in 1776. Political systems evolve or die. That's not corruption. That's literally what happens when a society is alive.
You want embalmed tradition. Reality doesn't cooperate. Even the most cherished customs are products of change layered on top of earlier changes, revised, adapted, and repackaged so many times that people forget they were ever different. Every generation inherits a moving target and mistakes it for something eternal.
What you call "tradition" is just yesterday's innovation that survived long enough to feel sacred.
The past was never as static as you imagine. It changed then. It changes now. It will change after you're gone. And no amount of blood-magic ancestor worship is going to freeze it in place.
"Deep down you aren't one and never will be…"
This is pure dirt-worship mysticism. It treats belonging like a spiritual property instead of a functional contingent status. Sorry but I'm not interested in that kind of superstition. I'm interested in reality though, and reality does not care that "Vivek" doesn't fit your Pinterest board of what an American "should look like."
The system says Vivek belongs. Your feelings are not part of the process.
End of story.
If you want to worship blood-soaked dirt-magic, go find twelve cousins and start a goat farm. Just leave the rest of us alone.
Your entire argument essentially boils down to: "I don't like how this system works, so it shouldn't count."
Yeah, welcome to being alive, buddy. The universe didn't consult you about gravity either.
But somehow gravity learned to justify itself with equations. You just have to whine.
"You clearly harbor hatred and resentment towards actual Americans…"
"Actual Americans" meaning what, exactly? White? Protestant? British stock? Some arbitrary cutoff you personally like?
Just recently, I've seen a self-described "heritage American" in Twitter argue that Irish-Americans don't deserve voting rights or citizenship because they are "too stupid and greedy."
Who decided that your opinion on who qualifies as "real American" matters more than his, especially when his family was likely here long before yours given that you're Irish?
Why is your version of ancestry more authoritative than another person's who likely came before you?
Who decided your genealogy preferences get veto power over citizenship?
Because that's the whole game here: you arbitrarily redefine "American" to mean "my preferred ethnicity," then accuse everyone else of hatred for not bowing to it.
Also: disagreement with your dirt-mysticism is not "hatred." It's reality checking.
I’m not reading your garbage. As soon as I saw ‘ableist’ and ‘blood and dirt,’ I started falling asleep. I have nothing but contempt for people like you and your values that could well destroy my people. There’s no common ground.
"...and if you are a citizen who swears exclusive allegiance to our nation..."
Underrated point Vivek made here. I've always thought dual citizenship is contrary to the American ethos.
Are those non-citizens who were awarded the Medal of Honor and subsequently were naturalized less than draft dodging descendants?
Yes, your national identity is not earned through merit. If you are a naturalized citizen, then that means you also have a previous allegiance and a split national identity
What's missing from the debate? Here is the concept of a social contract.
Who has a duty to participate in the American Republic, and to obey its laws? Who has a to a say in making those laws, and to be defended by those laws? Americans, first and foremost. The answers to those questions give urgency to the definition of an American.
No, when I was a kid, this idea of a social contract seems to have been pretty routine. I have dim memories of arguing about it with other teenagers, with a kind of background assumption that it was a real thing. It wouldn't occur to most of us to point out that no one ever actually signed the social contract. If you did point it out, it would be one of those cleverly, dangerous and subversive points that everyone would immediately try to forget.
If you think there's a social contract, then signatories to the American social contract are Americans, and others are not.
Maybe it's because this sense of social contract has declined that these questions of identity suddenly become so agonizing. I think if you lose the belief in a social contract, there's no way to save traditional feelings of American Identity, and a lot of other things fall with that.
Heritage Americans who reject the Constitution are not Americans. Afghans who honestly swear allegiance to it (and meet the other criteria) are.
There's never even any plausible mechanism through which all this heritage American stuff is supposed to flow. They always propose these bizarre theories where the number of 'generations' you've spent in a country will somehow determine your personal investment, as if humans didn't rebel against their families all the time. Generational memory isn't a thing, and willingness to change your personal views based on circumstance is a sign of intelligence.
Most people don't actually know how many generations they've been in America because most people don't care about that nonsense at all, except as a matter of curiosity. Successful people define themselves through their own accomplishments. It's only the failures who have to look to their ancestors for achievements.
Peasant-brained morons, all of the people who believe in this. Cast them into the cold of Bumfuck Missouri with the shamans and witch-doctors, and bring a bunch of deserving world-class scientists from India and China in their place.
Hey, I live in Missouri and we have plenty of world-class scientists from India and China here!
I was being deliberately inflammatory for effect, some parts of Missouri are probably cool.
Though I fear you may be caught on the wrong side of the border after the blue states secede and form Libtopia, while all the heritage Americans are left behind in Trumpistan.
Well, I am a Heritage American by anyone’s definition and I have 7 generations of ancestors in Missouri. So I guess I belong in Trumpistan, but I would really prefer to live in the USA, undivided haha.
I keep finding that the people most wanting to claim "Heritage American" status aren't even actually Heritage Americans. I'm nearly "pureblood" Scot-Irish/Anglo (a tiny bit of Scandinavian) with ancestors on my dad's side going back to the 1640s in Virginia and at least the early 1700s on my mom's (couldn't find records from before that). I come from deep flyover country. Albion's Seed is about me and my family.
And consistently the people yelling about how American this makes me will be someone with a Polish or Italian last name whose grandpa came here in 1910. I see a similar thing with people claiming to represent rural people and they usually come from like some suburb of Los Angeles or something and seem to think that makes them "rural." Same with Southerness. Most people who defend zombie Lost Cause weren't even actually raised with the Lost Cause.
I suppose I should ask these people if my impeccable, genuine heritage/rural/Southern pedigree means I can just walk up on any of their podiums I want and take the mikes from their hands? Will they just sit down and let me talk like Bernie Sanders did with those BLM activists that time? Probably not. I married a Jew and thereby did the worst thing you can do in this worldview. I took 400 years of "pure" bloodline and threw it on the garbage heap.
I actually *do* consider all this part of my identity, but even so I don't have to follow some mindless script.
Relevant book/essay plugs for "heritage" Americans (especially white Southerners) that have only thought about their identity from a hyper online rightwing idealogue point of view:
The Burden of Southern History by C. Vann Woodward
A Rose for Emily by Faulkner
Faulkner and Desegregation by James Baldwin
Robert E. Lee and Me: A Southerner's Reckoning with the Myth of the Lost Cause by Ty Seidule
The BLM comparison is the key insight that gets overlooked. Both movements use identity to dodge substantive debate about actual policy, and both lead their followers into objectively harmful positions. The defund the police stuff was catastrophic for black communities with spiking homicide rates, just like protectionism would crater American living standards. I saw this samething happen in a local school board fight where "lived experience" became the trump card over actual data on reading outcomes. When identity becomes the argument itself, logic and evidence get tossed out the window.
Yes that is the key, and I respect Richard's consistency in rejecting harmful identitarian movements on both the left and right.
What is amazing of this identitarianism is that for some reason it stops at the Mayflower.
Real "heritage Americans" had been living on the land for thousands of years.
Europeans (where some families have been living in Rome or Athens for thousands of years) correctly laugh at descendants of recent immigrants (seven or eight generations) wanting to "preserve the heritage" of their nation
The American nation did not exist prior to European settlement. The nation we now know as America was not formed by the Indians or even with the Indians, but it was formed in opposition to the tribal nations as an ever expanding settler state. Most American Indians were not even granted citizenship until the 1920s.
Sure.
But if the American nation is a "settler state", it is by definition a nation of immigrants.
Nationhood is thus not defined by heritage, but by an idea.
Among nations of immigrants, the national idea in Israel is religion, in Singapore it's commerce and in the USA it's supposed to be freedom and the constitution.
Land of the free.
Well I believe there is a type of heritage that does define American identity. Those whose ancestors founded America, fought for its independence, and settled the land have a true American heritage as opposed to people who move into a country that has already been founded and settled.
With that being said, assimilation is possible after generations of living in America and intermarriage, just look at the Irish, but today, diversity is being celebrated over assimilation for better of for worse (I believe for worse). I’m also unsure if assimilation is possible with the current immigrants arriving since large scale immigration of nonwhite often non-Christian people has not occurred before in American history.
Which brings us back to the arbitrariness that I was pointing out in the original comment.
You believe the "heritage" that defines American identity is formed by those who came 300 years ago and took the land; but *not* by those who were already living on the land for hundreds of years , *nor* by those who came since.
It would be more intellectually honest to just say that you want American identity to be defined by your ancestors and not by other people ancestors.
Also, large assimilation of nonwhites has indeed happened before in American history. Hundreds of thousands of black slaves were brought into the United States after 1776 (when the population was only about 2.5 millions).
If you're not racist, I think Black people are the greatest portion of heritage Americans. By blood, the average black American has more ancestors born on US soil than most Whites and by creed they were violently and irrevocably severed from their previous cultures and steeped in pure Americana from the start.
A point almost all of these people are missing is that, as a percentage of the population, African Americans are more likely than whites to have ancestors dating back to before the Revolution. That's because the white population was diluted by mass immigration from Europe in the 19th century. About 50% of American whites are descended from post-Civil-War immigrants (Donald Trump included). By comparison, over 90% of US blacks have at least one ancestor who goes back to the Colonial era. That's because almost all of them have some slave ancestry, and subsequent immigration from Africa was restricted until the latter 20th century.
By the same token, most whites actually had nothing to do with slavery and don't even have any relatives who ever owned a black slave.
But if you want to get into a battle of who is a "Heritage American" and who is not I think the Fuentes types are going to be in for a shock.