What makes a American (or Australian)? By John Daniel Davidson.
You might have noticed there is a heated debate underway on the American right over the question of American identity. What makes someone an American? Is it based on lineage or is it propositional? Is America a nation and a people, or is it an idea based on universal principles?
Just beliefs (i.e. memes)?
After World War Two, these questions were largely swept under the rug. The dominant narrative, pushed by nearly every mainstream institution and both political parties, was that America was a credal, propositional country.
Anyone, from any part of the world, professing any religion or worldview, could become an American. To suggest otherwise was racist and xenophobic, and frankly un-American. By the 1980s, the notion that America is a “nation of immigrants” had taken root in public discourse. America, we were told, was not a particular people but an ideal to which every human being on earth could aspire. It was for everyone. …
Agree to a few key principles about good governance and human rights, sign some documents, and voila! you become an American. …
Just lineage (i.e. genes)?
A blood-and-soil version of American identity [is] supposedly growing on the right, one based on lineage and “the creation of a white-centric identity.”
Those who push this view are self-described “heritage Americans,” whose ancestors might have crossed the Atlantic in the 17th century or fought in the Civil War, but are no more American than a first-generation Somali migrant who successfully navigates the immigration bureaucracy and gets his papers.
It’s a synthesis, because it is based on a culture:
[It’s really] a synthesis of America as a idea, a proposition, and America as a people and a nation with a particular history and culture. That culture, because it is at its core English and Christian, requires an affirmation of a very specific set of intellectual propositions that are unique to England and the Christian faith that shaped the English. …
The source of our liberty, for example, is not our Founding documents (great as they are) but our folkways. The former emerged from the latter, not the other way around.
Many cultures and nations believe in the rule of law. What matters of course is how the law is made, how it is enforced, and whether it meets the demands of justice….
Many Asian countries embrace meritocracy more fully than the United States does. Singapore has the rule of law and meritocracy. And yet Singapore is not America — or American in any meaningful sense. …
The universal ideals … at the heart of American identity only make sense in light of English common law, constitutionalism, and Christianity — all of which belong to a particular people from a particular place.
Without that context, they become meaningless. Generations of certain people, descendants mostly of the English, brought forth a nation that reflected and codified their particular religious beliefs, morality, language, customs, and folkways. They were not making a proposition for a universalist political project.
Indeed, the Founders told us who America is for: ourselves and our posterity. John Jay famously described America as “one united people; a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs.” …
No:
If Americanness is based merely on a set of professed beliefs about government and individual rights, and not on the solidity of cultural customs and practices, then American identity becomes something insubstantial and impossible to define. Even a person whose own cultural practices are totally alien to American life and society — cousin marriage, women in burkas, animal sacrifice — could be considered just as American as anyone else. American identity is thus reduced to basically nothing, a contentless void.
If anyone can be an American, then no one really is an American, and nothing in particular is owed to the American people by their leaders. If millions of workers in India or Pakistan want to come here to make more money, and they will do the job for a lower wage than native-born Americans, on what grounds should we deny them entry?
UPDATE: An interesting video related to the topic:
Africa is also renowned for being the continent without maintenance.
The blank slate axiom of the left is obviously wrong.
UPDATE:
hat-tip Mark E.