With the Left and Right both tussling over illegal immigration, the most crucial aspect of this fight is defining what it means to be American. Can a man be considered American if he came here illegally? Can a woman be considered American if her loyalties are still to her home country? Can a migrant be considered American without having passed a citizenship test?
The Right would answer “No” to all three queries because we believe it takes more than squatting illegally somewhere in the U.S. interior to make you American. We would also prefer proof of love for and commitment to our country and its ideals, which is seriously lacking in those trespassing the border. To quote Vice President JD Vance, “America is not just an idea. It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation.”
The Left is happy to flood this country with illegals and let them claim to be American. Why? Because they think America is an idea, a political experiment, a patchwork of diversity, so minorities fleeing worse countries deserve the chance to partake in the bounty of America. After all, we can afford it.
Leighton Woodhouse is a freelance journalist and documentary filmmaker based in Oakland, California. He recently penned a think piece for The New York Times wherein he argues that America is a place of multicultural diversity — and diversity is what makes our country great. He further opines that American heritage is a “right-wing myth,” intimating that believing in an American heritage is not only absurd but racist.
Woodhouse is incorrect in his assertions. There is such a thing as American heritage, and it’s not racist to insist that those who come to America assimilate into American culture.
Why is American heritage “racist”?
Those who founded our nation were largely Western European, white, and Christian. Therefore, according to leftist thinkers, if we believe that our Founders’ Judeo-Christian principles were the very foundation of our heritage as Americans, then we are racist. Ironically, this is anti-white racism, an idea so absurd that it should be discounted entirely.
What is American heritage?
Woodhouse begins his attack with a story of a pre-Revolution pamphlet war between Irish Presbyterian settlers and Quakers. He goes on to talk about the German Lutherans, though he totally forgot about the English Catholics who settled Maryland. His point was that these fighting factions prove there’s no common culture among Christians/Europeans; therefore, American heritage is a myth.
Having a shared faith in Christ and a shared history in coming from Europe are exactly why we were able to band together and carve out a nation. By default, America was not a multicultural diversity experiment, as Woodhouse tries to intimate.
As The Federalist’s John Daniel Davidson wrote in rebuttal:
The only reason to torture history like this is to degrade and ultimately destroy our Anglo-American inheritance. Woodhouse does it in the sophisticated version for the Times, but it’s basically the same thing as Mehdi Hasan’s crude assertion recently that Muslim slaves built America, which serves as the basis for his claim that if Christians are allowed to have their church bells then Muslims should be allowed to blast their call to prayer through neighborhoods at all hours of the night.
But what Woodhouse and Hasan don’t seem to get is that the embrace of an Anglo-American cultural identity isn’t just for the white descendants of European colonists, it’s for every American citizen — especially for those outside the Anglo-American inheritance. Absent that inheritance, there is no way for Americans from all walks of life to live together in peace and dignity.
It is that very Judeo-Christian foundation that is the American heritage. It’s why America abolished slavery only 90 years after declaring itself a country. It’s why those from diverse cultures can come here and reap the benefits of what our Founding Fathers figured out. We can live together in peace because we share this common culture. Political pundit Ben Shapiro put it best in an interview with Bill Maher:
Shapiro: So Bill, you and I agree on morality. I would say like 87%.
Maher: Morality, but not from the Bible.
Shapiro: I have a question. Why?
Maher: Because it’s for slavery — because it’s okay for slavery.
Shapiro: Why do you and I agree on morality like 87.5%? I’m a religious Jew. You’re an atheist. Why do we agree on those things? I’ll tell you. I mean, I can give you my answer.
Maher: Yeah, please.
Shapiro: Because we probably grew up a few miles from each other in a Western society that has several thousand years of biblical history behind it. And so you can think that you hit that triple and you formed your own morality, but the reality is you were born morally on third base.
As Americans of all races, stripes, and creeds, we can all enjoy the meshing of lifestyles because we’ve all agreed to assimilate under one culture. That’s why an Orthodox Jew like Shapiro and an atheist like Bill Maher or a reformed Christian like this writer can agree on morality most of the time. It’s also why Johnny-come-lately Americans like Ilhan Omar, who refuses to assimilate and instead chooses to make Minneapolis a colony of Somalia, are antithetical to American heritage. It’s also why economic migrants are antithetical to American heritage: They don’t love our country; they love what they can take from it.
Davidson continues:
Arguably those who come to our country from alien cultures have the most to gain by America’s embrace of its western cultural heritage. It’s the one thing that will protect them from the end-state of true multiculturalism, which is the extermination of one tribe by another, the unending cycle of clan violence that still defines much of the non-western world. It hardly needs to be said that in such societies, the only thing that keeps sectarian violence at bay is the heavy hand of the state, which in order to maintain peace cannot allow liberty.
The genius of our American nation is that we figured out how to maintain both peace and liberty. We didn’t do that thanks to some form of proto-multiculturalism, but thanks to the civilizational inheritance we received from our English fathers and Christian Europe. Only by preserving that inheritance can America continue to be a land of peace and liberty for all those who come here and make it their home.
Woodhouse implies that nativist elitism is behind this idea of American heritage. He believes that JD Vance in particular pushes this narrative. In truth, there is a vast difference between what Vance was talking about versus what Woodhouse asserts he was talking about: namely, that Vance is more American because he’s been here longer.
My husband and I are both equally American. Our extended families had many members who immigrated from other countries, yet they were also American. Why? Because we shared a language, a culture, and a history. We are a distinct nation of people.
The notion of letting a newcomer who has no loyalty or respect for laws dictate our cultural mores makes about as much sense as letting a stranger off the street become the CEO of a company. It’s a recipe for disaster. They don’t know what they’re doing, they don’t know who they’re working with, and they certainly don’t have a vested interest in the overall success of the business.
Demeaning our civilizational inheritance is not progress; it’s suicide. If we needed further proof of that, we need only look at what’s happening in Western Europe right now. Mass migration without assimilation has led to great suffering and tribalism. It could culminate in war. To deny that reality is just whistling past the graveyard.
Denying American heritage is a silly, disingenuous notion put forth to justify modern political leftism, legitimize illegal immigration, and demonize mass deportation. Such denial should be filed in the rubbish bin.
