In case you hadn’t noticed from my surname with all the vowels, my heritage is Italian, Sicilian to be exact. It became a topic of debate on Twitter when someone wondered if I could be an American. The question is, what is an American and how does one become one? The answer isn’t as simple as you might think.
Most normal people don’t spend time interacting with strangers on social media, so they might not know of the concept of heritage America or Americans. It’s a reaction to the left’s globalism and open boarders fetish, and their aversion to nations, but especially nationalism. Since Obama and the push of globalists throughout Europe to allow unfettered immigration into their countries, much of it illegal, there has been an understandable backlash. Brexit in the UK in 2016 and Trump later that year in America were part of that backlash. The concept of Christian nationalism is also a something that vexes people on the left and right alike, although for different reasons. Ever since a certain little man with a mustache terrorized Europe in the name of National Socialism, Western cultural elites have had an aversion to nationalism of any kind. A phrase I’ve heard used to tar the heritage America types is ethno-nationalist, and that apparently is not a good thing. “Blood and soil” is another phrase that’s apparently not good.
Something else giving rise to a heritage America movement is, “America as an idea,” something that has been popular among conservatives since the movement started in the 1950s. It goes back to Lincoln and the Gettysburg Address when he began his historical speech with these eloquent words:
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.
In other words, America is the “proposition nation,” which proposition goes back to Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
In 1776 this was a radical notion because the only self-evident truth up to then was that no men were created equal, be that in class or station or talents or intelligence or ambition, or any number of other things. In due course equality became not only a basic American assumption, but a right. To even question it was to be un-American. The left turned it into egalitarianism, an obsession to make all people equal through the force of law. Whatever the details, they now call it equity. In due course America as an idea was accepted as axiomatic.
The conversation on Twitter I had on this topic came from someone who posted a link of Ronald Reagan saying something that offended him:
Anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American…This, I believe, is one of the most important sources of America’s greatness.
With a predictable slap at boomers, he said this made Reagan a “full blown globohomo,” or a global man. I know, this is a strange thing to say of the President whose slogan in his campaign against Jimmy Carter was, Make America Great Again. Yes, Trump took it from Reagan.
I responded that my grandfather had come from Sicily in 1912 at the age of 16, pushed by his mother because she wanted him to have a better life than being a peasant in Sicily. When he eventually started a family he would not speak Italian in his home because he was a proud American. Then my Twitter friend asked this question.
Why/how was he an American?
I’ll confess that the old Italian blood got boiling on that. Somewhere in my mind I thought, how dare you question the patriotism of my grandfather, that somehow because he wasn’t born here, or whatever, that he wasn’t as American as anyone else. I replied and finished with this:
Who qualifies to be an American and when to the “heritage America” crowd? I’m sympathetic to you guys, but it does get annoying after a while.
Then he followed up with another question:
If he went to Kenya and did the same, would he have been Kenyan?
Seriously? He’s comparing America to Kenya? Is he implying that America isn’t unique? Isn’t in some way different than every other country in the world? That all nations are just nations? This is when I knew I had to write about this and figure out why this annoyed me so much, and at the same time why I see value in this idea of heritage America.
I’ll share my conclusion before I make my case. The reason people from all over earth can come to America and become Americans is because America is both an idea and a heritage to be lived and embraced, and assimilation makes all the difference. My grandfather couldn’t do what he did in quite the same way in any other country on earth.
What Makes America Unique
When I use the word unique, I use it technically as defined, “existing as the only one or as the sole example; single; solitary in type or characteristics.” There is not, and has never been, a country, a nation like America, truly a novus ordo seclorum, a new order of the ages—a phrase included on the Great Seal of the United States, designed in 1782, and on the back of the U.S. one-dollar bill. Few people, if any, would question this, but America’s uniqueness isn’t just because of ideas in a document declaring American independence from England. This gets to the heart of the matter.
Lincoln in 1862 said that America is “the last, best hope of earth,” a quote Reagan often used during the Cold War. Mere ideas don’t do that, don’t create a nation drawing people from all over the earth for 250 years, as Emma Lazarus wrote, “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” A phrase that captures this is one our leftist countrymen loathe: American exceptionalism. To them it reeks of xenophobia, as if pointing out the obvious makes us fearful of “the other,” of those culturally different from us. That word culture is the issue. Let’s see what created the unique American culture and identity, and continues to this day.
English settlement and the origins of the American consciousness, began with Jamestown and Captain John Smith in 1607, but really picked up steam with the great Puritan migration to New England from the 1620s through the early 1640s. John Winthrop, who settled Massachusetts Bay Colony, modern Boston, in June 1630, was part of this migration. Winthrop, like all Puritans, believed the God of the Hebrews and their Savior was a covenant making God who promised faithfulness and blessing if they remained committed to obedience and His glory. As he penned the famous words, if they were faithful, “we shall be as a City upon a Hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.” And if not, they “shall be made a story and byword through the world.” The founders echoed the Puritans that this experiment depended on the blessing of obedience to God, and curses if not. In fact, various studies have shown the Bible is the most quoted book of the Founders and the founding generation, Deuteronomy being one of the favorites, especially chapter 28 of the blessings for obedience and curses for disobedience.
But it wasn’t just Puritans and New England. America wouldn’t have become America if its development had not happened exactly the way it did with a variety of types of British peoples moving so far from home confronting the daunting American geography, a situation unique in the history of the world. This is wonderfully captured in A Patriot’s History of the United States by Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen. They masterfully tell the story of how these circumstances are without parallel in history, how a new world was forming a people whose character, mentality, and vision was forged for liberty and self-government in an unforgiving land of boundless opportunity far from their motherland.
I would add, without the specific Protestant versions of Christianity they all embraced to one degree or another, America doesn’t happen. Here is a quotation from A Patriot’s History to emphasize the ubiquity of Christianity in the American consciousness of the eighteenth century. Writing about something every colonial settler and western pioneer understood:
[C]haracter was tied to a Christian tradition, which was then tied to liberty through a widespread acceptance of common law, and liberty to property—preserved and protected by titles and deeds and, soon, by a free market. All four were needed for success, but character was the prerequisite because it put the law behind property agreements, and it set responsibility right next to liberty. And the surest way to ensure the presence of good character was to keep God at the center of one’s life, community, and ultimately, nation. . . . It went back to that link between liberty and responsibility, and no one could be taken seriously who was not responsible to God. “Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.” They believed those words.
The First Great Awakening of the 1730s and 40s was another powerful influence on the social and political life of Americans for it drove the implications of Christianity deep into the American consciousness. Robert Curry in his book, Common Sense Nation, Unlocking the Forgotten Power of the American Idea, agrees: “the Great Awakening prepared the way for the American Revolution in too many ways to be counted.” Pulpits across America, influential in a way modern Americans can’t comprehend, were aflame with justifications for liberty and revolution. Americans as Englishmen saw their rights earned centuries before being blithely discarded by the British government. None of this was in the realm of abstract “rights” intellectual conservatives love to argue about. In other words, it wasn’t just about an idea, a mere proposition. It was real, boots on the ground, everyday living as self-governing people before God who granted them the liberty to live their own lives.
Americans were eminently practical people, including its intellectual leaders. Russel Kirk also shows how the founding was not merely an idea, or some abstract intellectual debate about “natural rights.” In his book, The Roots of American Order he writes :
When educated Americans of that century approved a writer, commonly it was because his books confirmed well their American experience, justified their American institutions, appealed to convictions they had held already: with few exceptions, the Americans were not fond of intellectual novelties.
Yoram Hazony in Conservatism: A Rediscovery, confirms this, asserting that America emerged from “a century and a half of civil social order in North America and more than seven centuries of British experience.”
America is also a common sense nation. America’s intellectual class was as dialed in to Enlightenment ideas as anybody could be at the time, but the ideas coming from Europe would take on a distinctly American cast through the influence of scholars and clergy who brought ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment to colonial America. These ideas combined with the unique circumstances and the Founders’ genius, allowed them to create something entirely new in the history of the world. The primary influence of the Scots on Americans was Thomas Reid and what came to be called Scottish common sense realism. This philosophy was a pushback against more abstract and speculative philosophical ideas of the time.
People, especially Americans, were hungry for the real, and common sense realism gave it to them. Simply, it states we all have innate ideas that can be known and don’t have to be taught to us. As esoteric as this may sound, it had world transforming implications for the America of the late eighteenth century and its politics, grounding human knowing not in isolated human reason, but in moral sense. One more thing is critical to the American common sense state of mind, probably the most unique idea of the founding argued initially by Locke—popular sovereignty. In societies previously, only the ruling elite were seen as capable of ruling the common people. That all radically changed in America as stated by Robert Curry:
Here then is the rock upon which the Founders will build their idea of republican self-government: because a person who is capable of acting with common prudence in the conduct of life is capable of discovering what is true and what is false in matters that are self-evident, self-government is possible. . . . [Because] the rightful purpose of government is securing its citizens’ unalienable rights, government is necessarily limited government, limited because its reach is defined by the vast field of liberty reserved for the citizens.
Vast field of liberty, I like it! The Founders could make such arguments because of the Hebrew and Christian idea of a personal Creator God of Scripture and man made in His image everywhere assumed and taught in American culture of the time. Not to mention the Christian England and common law tradition bequeathed to the Founders since Alfred the Great, and these ideas developing over centuries.
The Scot’s had other practical influences on America’s founding, including in the development of how people thought of government. According to Curry:
John Knox, the Martin Luther of the Scottish Reformation, founded the Presbyterian Church in 1560-1561. Long before the Founders began to make their argument for popular sovereignty, Knox preached popular sovereignty as a matter of doctrine. Political authority, Knox taught and the Presbyterians believed, ultimately belonged to the people. According to Knox, the people had the right to choose those who would manage their political affairs, and it was the people’s right to remove them at will.
The church, or as the Scottish called it, the Kirk, from the beginning was a representative system of government, unheard of in the world up to that time. The entire way the Kirk was managed was representative from top to bottom. Curry adds:
Both the doctrine of popular sovereignty and a functioning representative governing body that embodied the doctrine of popular sovereignty were unique to Scotland during the time.
Knox also laid the theological foundations for the right of Christians to resist wicked rulers. Most Christians at the time believed it was morally wrong to revolt against the king. In fact, many people called it a Presbyterian revolution.
Lastly, the variety of types of British peoples who came to carve out new lives in the vast wilderness of America all brought Protestant Christian convictions with them, including how their churches and communities should be governed. The Puritans, Presbyterians, and Congregationalists who then came to America brought these ideas with them and they eventually made their way into the consciousness and government of Americans.
America: Both an Idea and a Heritage
As I said above, these two perspectives on America are not contradictory or mutually exclusive, and they are what make America truly unique among all the nations of the world. Pat Buchanan, who has been right about these things for a long time, encapsulated why the heritage piece of the equation is the priority:
It is not true that all creeds and cultures are equally assimilable in a First World nation born of England, Christianity, and Western civilization. Race, faith, ethnicity and history leave genetic fingerprints no ‘proposition nation’ can erase.
This is not to say one has to be of Anglo American descent to be allowed to live in America and be considered an American, or none of my family and millions like us would be American. This is because the propositions of America’s founding promise are in some sense to “all men,” as long as they are willing assimilate to Anglo, Christian, American culture. It’s also why people from all over the world can come here and if they fully participate in the spirit of America, what we call assimilation, can become Americans. If they are not, mere citizenship will not make them Americans. This twofer, if you will, is why we can’t just export the Constitution to another country, and it become like America with the same blessings of liberty, order, and prosperity.
The unique American DNA consists of ideas stemming from our experience as a people over several hundred years. Think of those who first migrated to America prior to the Revolution. They were 3,000 miles from home and had a vast hostile continent to tame. That meant they needed to be a self-governing people who valued their independence and be willing overcome seemingly insurmountable challenges against insurmountable odds. These historically unique circumstances seemed to be made for an Anglo-Saxon people who had been schooled for 500 years in Anglo idea of the rule of law since Magna Carta in 1215 through the Glorious Revolution in 1688. America’s founders were as steeped in this history as they were of Ancient Greece and Rome, and Christianity. All of these ideas seeped into the American psyche to make the most exceptional nation the world has ever known.
The power of the two together, ideas and heritage, are what allowed America to endure endless waves of migration over two centuries and maintain its unique identity. Globalist Democrats and their leftist base despise that because they despise America as founded. Opening our boarders to multitudes of illegal immigrants who have no desire to assimilate, or even understand it, is a strategy form them to take down what is truly unique about America. They want to turn it into America the unexceptional. Thank God for Donald Trump who in 2015 was the only politician, Democrat or Republican, willing to call this out for what it is, the desire to destroy America. In addition to halting illegal immigration as he has done, we also need to significantly limit legal immigration, as we did prior to 1964. As great and unique as America is, it can only handle so much cultural assimilation and not turn into something different. Every American needs to be a heritage American.
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