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.
The Founding Fathers themselves saw America as a White Westerner nation and an extention of the Anglo-Saxon world. They were not color-blind Civic Nationists at all
Even Tucker Carlson acknowledges that we can't go back to a notion of the US as a white nation. There is no point in bringing it up. It just stirs things up for no reason. It's OK to debate whether e.g. new Somalis are bringing a positive impact to the US, or even advocate restrictionism in order to promote an integration/assimilation period, but this entire "white western nation" stuff is nonsense. You can't put the toothpaste back in the tube.
The Founding Fathers established a democratic system where the people could vote to change government policies, including immigration policy, and the people chose to do so. End of story.
And yes, if it matters, I am a "Heritage American" with ancestors going back to Jamestown and the Revolution based on clicking around on some ancestry websites (surprisingly easy and fun). Wasn't able to find a single ancestor who arrived after the US Civil War.
Seems like a catch-22, if I don't mention it people might accuse me of being biased due to recent family immigration.
I see it as similar to how black people are perceived to have greater moral authority to push back on wokeness. Similar to how you saw the rise of the "based black guy", perhaps we will have viral videos along the lines of "hey I'm a wine mom and I'm part of the daughters of the american revolution and I love brown immigrants".
In any case, I find Lee Kuan Yew's perspective on the topic of ancestry plausible: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlewPrqoYK0 I suspect he is correct that it's not healthy for any person to become totally deracinated and disconnected from their roots, regardless of ethnicity. The challenge in a multicultural society is to accommodate multiple such narratives simultaneously. Celebrate your culture without saying "my people good, your people bad" (at least not publicly). And seek to learn about, appreciate, and celebrate the highlights of other cultures as well. A small price to pay for reduced intercultural tension.
The United States was founded on opposition to hereditary nobility, so telling people "I'm better than you because I have the right ancestors" would go against what the nation's founders fought for. Nifty little paradox.
I agree that is the challenge(problem, i would say). But im less optimistic that a solution will be found. Seems to me any group of humans will look for ways to divide themselves. Race, religion, nation, faction, etc. Right now in america its left vs right. But the rights another group, and they want to divide as well, so its "heritage". Its all just dumb shit people make up so they have a reason. A reason to hate. Bc humans just cant live without hate, not for any length of time.
What you described is very much how i remember the 90s. Ofc it wasnt perfect, but everybody was chill, and pride in cultures was encouraged, blah blah blah(im sure someone will come along and point out how it *wasnt* that way, and they wouldnt be wrong, but its as close as weve ever gotten).. and thats my point. People started looking for the problems. Dont have to look far ofc, so then it becomes an us vs them situation. And we end up here.
The internet and social media have only amplified this human tendency. So i expect the process of division to happen quicker, and with more extreme swings/splits.
You really think people will culturally coexist? Do you think thats even possible beyond the most superficial layer? I dont.
Well I myself want to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem, even if I'm not ultimately successful.
I remember the 90s fondly as well.
The internet rewards divisive rhetoric. But it also gets bored quickly and move on to the next thing. In the early days of the internet, Christianity/Atheism flamewars were huge. We had huge feminist/MRA flamewars. We had Black Lives Matter. Now we are in a big US vs Europe phase, among other things. Maybe the realistic best-case scenario is we keep cycling through different flamewar topics in an ADHD fashion where nothing ever hardens into serious conflict.
I recently made an argument that accent discrimination could be the least bad form of discrimination available. Since it's never been tried before in the US, maybe it will go viral at some point, as the internet gets bored with other forms of discrimination. https://substack.com/@ebenezer1/note/c-190133417
Ultimately I favor some sort social media reform, e.g. different platforms pay a tax which is indexed to a poll or citizen's assembly which estimates the degree to which that platform is beneficial for society. Create an incentive for the platforms to serve the people and gain widespread approval among the population.
Oh theres some accent discrimination in my red-neck of the woods lol. But yeah i get your point, or idea as it were.
Id love to be part of the solution, i just dont know that one exists. Well, not on the trajectory we're currently on anyway. Obviously its possible to do better, we have in the past, and im sure i can be achieved again. But not by us lol! We're moving *away* from the better we just had. Now we might do even better the next time, but i think that time is a ways away. Or more likely will happen somewhere else. We've got too much bad blood(and i dont mean genetics lol) thats not going to go away.
But humans are nothing if not adaptable, and its our ability to do the completely unexpected that gives us our edge in the world. So maybe we can pull our shit together before its too late, if its not already
I’m pretty versed in founding-era history and I don’t know of many examples of them expressly espousing such views. Perhaps the example quotations are just suppressed as unwoke? Please do share.
Read the writings on figures such as Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, George Washington, etc on race. They all saw America as a spin-off of England, and they didn't want too many Non-Anglo Whites (and basically no Non-European people at all) immigrating to the nation.
Is there reason to believe that, by limiting naturalized citizenship to whites, they were trying to prevent Asians or Persians from attaining citizenship, as opposed to just not wanting to cover blacks?
There was no need for such a law before the late 19th century because hardly anyone from outside of Europe came to America at those times save for African slaves and some Chinese in California
(A) The fact that we are even discussing what the founding fathers thought denotes that we are a propositional nation. We care some level care about their thoughts precisely because they established a nation on ideals, not ethnicity.
(B) If they did think it was essential, they certainly had a funny way of showing it. First by writing a declaration based on universalistic principles, and then creating a constitution that allowed amendments to change fundamental parts of the nation, which is precisely what happened with the 14th amendment.
Sure, they also kicked the can down the road on the issue of slavery and blacks were a double-digit percentage of the population or an outright majority in most of the South. Even if massive immigration of nonwhites didn't happen later, you were always going to have to answer who all these Africans who got brought here through no choice of their own were in relation to the Republic.
(This is, of course, also completely ignoring the Indians as well).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Samuel Huntington was a pseudointellectual charlatan
The Clash of Civilizations is looking far more prescient than The End of History!
One book being less shit than the other doesn't mean that it isn't shit
The Founding Fathers themselves saw America as a White Westerner nation and an extention of the Anglo-Saxon world. They were not color-blind Civic Nationists at all
Cool. We ignored them. What now?
The majority of Americans agreed with the Founding Fathers until the Civil Rights era
Okay. The country is now half not-white. What now?
I never said that a multiracial America was a bad thing
Deport the nonwhites? What do you want us to say? lol
Good luck.
Even Tucker Carlson acknowledges that we can't go back to a notion of the US as a white nation. There is no point in bringing it up. It just stirs things up for no reason. It's OK to debate whether e.g. new Somalis are bringing a positive impact to the US, or even advocate restrictionism in order to promote an integration/assimilation period, but this entire "white western nation" stuff is nonsense. You can't put the toothpaste back in the tube.
The Founding Fathers established a democratic system where the people could vote to change government policies, including immigration policy, and the people chose to do so. End of story.
And yes, if it matters, I am a "Heritage American" with ancestors going back to Jamestown and the Revolution based on clicking around on some ancestry websites (surprisingly easy and fun). Wasn't able to find a single ancestor who arrived after the US Civil War.
Well does it matter or doesnt it? I tend to assume it does matter to a person if theyre bothering to give me their pedigree.
Seems like a catch-22, if I don't mention it people might accuse me of being biased due to recent family immigration.
I see it as similar to how black people are perceived to have greater moral authority to push back on wokeness. Similar to how you saw the rise of the "based black guy", perhaps we will have viral videos along the lines of "hey I'm a wine mom and I'm part of the daughters of the american revolution and I love brown immigrants".
In any case, I find Lee Kuan Yew's perspective on the topic of ancestry plausible: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlewPrqoYK0 I suspect he is correct that it's not healthy for any person to become totally deracinated and disconnected from their roots, regardless of ethnicity. The challenge in a multicultural society is to accommodate multiple such narratives simultaneously. Celebrate your culture without saying "my people good, your people bad" (at least not publicly). And seek to learn about, appreciate, and celebrate the highlights of other cultures as well. A small price to pay for reduced intercultural tension.
The United States was founded on opposition to hereditary nobility, so telling people "I'm better than you because I have the right ancestors" would go against what the nation's founders fought for. Nifty little paradox.
I agree that is the challenge(problem, i would say). But im less optimistic that a solution will be found. Seems to me any group of humans will look for ways to divide themselves. Race, religion, nation, faction, etc. Right now in america its left vs right. But the rights another group, and they want to divide as well, so its "heritage". Its all just dumb shit people make up so they have a reason. A reason to hate. Bc humans just cant live without hate, not for any length of time.
What you described is very much how i remember the 90s. Ofc it wasnt perfect, but everybody was chill, and pride in cultures was encouraged, blah blah blah(im sure someone will come along and point out how it *wasnt* that way, and they wouldnt be wrong, but its as close as weve ever gotten).. and thats my point. People started looking for the problems. Dont have to look far ofc, so then it becomes an us vs them situation. And we end up here.
The internet and social media have only amplified this human tendency. So i expect the process of division to happen quicker, and with more extreme swings/splits.
You really think people will culturally coexist? Do you think thats even possible beyond the most superficial layer? I dont.
Well I myself want to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem, even if I'm not ultimately successful.
I remember the 90s fondly as well.
The internet rewards divisive rhetoric. But it also gets bored quickly and move on to the next thing. In the early days of the internet, Christianity/Atheism flamewars were huge. We had huge feminist/MRA flamewars. We had Black Lives Matter. Now we are in a big US vs Europe phase, among other things. Maybe the realistic best-case scenario is we keep cycling through different flamewar topics in an ADHD fashion where nothing ever hardens into serious conflict.
I recently made an argument that accent discrimination could be the least bad form of discrimination available. Since it's never been tried before in the US, maybe it will go viral at some point, as the internet gets bored with other forms of discrimination. https://substack.com/@ebenezer1/note/c-190133417
Ultimately I favor some sort social media reform, e.g. different platforms pay a tax which is indexed to a poll or citizen's assembly which estimates the degree to which that platform is beneficial for society. Create an incentive for the platforms to serve the people and gain widespread approval among the population.
Oh theres some accent discrimination in my red-neck of the woods lol. But yeah i get your point, or idea as it were.
Id love to be part of the solution, i just dont know that one exists. Well, not on the trajectory we're currently on anyway. Obviously its possible to do better, we have in the past, and im sure i can be achieved again. But not by us lol! We're moving *away* from the better we just had. Now we might do even better the next time, but i think that time is a ways away. Or more likely will happen somewhere else. We've got too much bad blood(and i dont mean genetics lol) thats not going to go away.
But humans are nothing if not adaptable, and its our ability to do the completely unexpected that gives us our edge in the world. So maybe we can pull our shit together before its too late, if its not already
I’m pretty versed in founding-era history and I don’t know of many examples of them expressly espousing such views. Perhaps the example quotations are just suppressed as unwoke? Please do share.
Read the writings on figures such as Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, George Washington, etc on race. They all saw America as a spin-off of England, and they didn't want too many Non-Anglo Whites (and basically no Non-European people at all) immigrating to the nation.
Specificity would be great thanks. No rush
Is there reason to believe that, by limiting naturalized citizenship to whites, they were trying to prevent Asians or Persians from attaining citizenship, as opposed to just not wanting to cover blacks?
Maybe they valued social cohesion.
There was no need for such a law before the late 19th century because hardly anyone from outside of Europe came to America at those times save for African slaves and some Chinese in California
(A) The fact that we are even discussing what the founding fathers thought denotes that we are a propositional nation. We care some level care about their thoughts precisely because they established a nation on ideals, not ethnicity.
(B) If they did think it was essential, they certainly had a funny way of showing it. First by writing a declaration based on universalistic principles, and then creating a constitution that allowed amendments to change fundamental parts of the nation, which is precisely what happened with the 14th amendment.
Sure, they also kicked the can down the road on the issue of slavery and blacks were a double-digit percentage of the population or an outright majority in most of the South. Even if massive immigration of nonwhites didn't happen later, you were always going to have to answer who all these Africans who got brought here through no choice of their own were in relation to the Republic.
(This is, of course, also completely ignoring the Indians as well).
You are a Low IQ idiot lol. Actually read what the Founding Fathers said about race
Why don't you tell us what the Founding Fathers said about race that upsets you enough to call a person you've never met an idiot?
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.
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.
Classical Liberals/Colorblind Universalists are the dumbest of the all
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.
The Founding Fathers were essentially Identitarians too.
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.
"...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.