Heritage Americanism Is Massively Overrated and Counterproductive

S ocial media has lit up with another self-inflicted wound for Republicans, after Texas Railroad Commissioner candidate Bo French reacted to the Texas Longhorns’ massive upset victory over Ohio State last weekend — by attacking the celebrating Longhorns crowd for containing too many fans of South Asian descent sitting together (nearly all of them in Longhorn orange, and some of them in cowboy hats).

A normal human might ask what sort of idiot, running for elective office in Texas, decides to take sides against Longhorn fans when the local team just erased a 20-point deficit to clinch a thrilling one-point win over the top-ranked team in the country, but that is not the only sort of idiot that Bo French is.

And yet, defenses of Bo Frenchism have sprung up from the most online quarters of social media. Among other things, what they have revived once again is a debate over how important it is to be a “Heritage American” with multigenerational family roots in the country, to the point that second- and third-generation Americans (I’m one of the latter, all four grandparents having come here in 1923) are somehow less American — and less American in a way that should be considered greatly important.

This is nonsense. There’s a motte-and-bailey quality to this argument, as if those of us who don’t buy it are claiming that having family roots in this country is entirely irrelevant (although I would say that at this juncture, it is of vanishingly little difference whether your ancestors came here in the 1650s or the 1850s). It of course is true to some extent that long family history on the soil tends to bind people more firmly to the nation and that multigenerational presence here tends to acclimate people more to American mores. But that is just one of multiple factors and often it is not the strongest one.

Appeals to our ties to the soil are not nearly enough to justify placing any great public or policy importance on how long your family has been here. In point of fact, the power of America’s ideals, the seductiveness of its culture, and the scope of the opportunities it offers have always been good (not perfect, but very effective) at making Americans out of new arrivals, and fairly quickly. We’ve always attracted people who wanted to be Americans, immediately loved becoming Americans, and in many cases fought and bled for this country within the first generation off the boat.

Lots of Heritage Americans decided in 1861 to dissolve their connection to the country. Because the soil to them could just as easily be the same soil under a different flag, a different constitution, and a rejection or rewriting of the Declaration, they left. Robert E. Lee in 1861 had never earned a dollar in his life that wasn’t from Uncle Sam. His home was a shrine to George Washington, for whom he was executor of the family estate. His father gave Washington’s eulogy. And he still made war on our flag. The very nature of the American republic — spanning a continent, filled with people and places who differ in so many ways — is such that blood-and-soil localism can tear us apart just as easily as it can bind us together.

American history shows that we’ve always managed to build loyalties among people who just got here or people who moved away from where they were reared, and both have always been a large share of Americans in general and leading Americans in particular. The ties of blood to soil are weaker in America precisely because we have such a large country and so much internal mobility. If your ancestors were Pilgrims, why don’t you still live in Plymouth? Because we’re Americans. We’re restless. We move. That’s who we are and what we do.

Reading the history of the 1850s, as I have done so much of lately while writing a book on the period, so many of the key figures in our national life started out in New England or upstate New York and moved west or to the cities. Others started in the West or the South and kept moving. That list includes Abraham Lincoln, Stephen Douglas, Salmon P. Chase, Brigham Young, Horace Greeley, Sam Houston, John C. Fremont, and Frederick Douglass. Even in later times, Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush both went west for opportunity; Dwight Eisenhower went north and east.

Our high levels of immigration and high levels of internal mobility are both part of the same traditional American story. The immigrant experience, the pioneer experience, and the settler experience are our history, which would be unrecognizable if we expunged them. One reason why the Pilgrims represent such a potent founding myth is precisely that they didn’t just live here, they fled here. And the reasons why they came helped build the American idea: You could come here and do your own thing, in their case in building a religious community despised in the old country. Others came for economic opportunity, or to flee political persecution and speak their minds. It is rare to read a good biography of a major American that doesn’t make some effort to trace when their ancestors came here, and from where. The story of coming to America is intertwined with who we are, and how we have always understood ourselves. It is our heritage.

On top of this, making a political project out of Heritage Americanism is self-defeating. This stuff turns off far more normal Americans, regardless of the depth of their lineage here, than it attracts in online weirdos. A mere glance at the demographics of Texas should illustrate why. The Republican Party, by tradition, has been the party of people who considered themselves part of the American mainstream, while the Democrats have always cobbled together uneasy coalitions of those who felt themselves its outsiders, from the plantation masters to the immigrant enclaves to black civil rights marchers, feminists, and gay activists. Republicans win when they make more people feel as if they are a part of that mainstream and have a stake in it — not by encouraging the further salami-slicing of the electorate into identity-politics groups that define themselves by whom they exclude.

None of this is an argument for open borders. We can and should, of course, control our borders and have immigration policies that put the interests of America and Americans first. We can and should avoid immigration levels so massive that we have more immigrants than domestic births, at which point we enter the deranging territory of literal demographic replacement. We can and should acknowledge that rapid demographic shifts to a neighborhood or a state inflict tangible harm on existing inhabitants who value their own culture for legitimate reasons.

But if we turn our backs on the immigrant experience, we are turning our backs on ourselves, our own culture, our own history, our own heritage, and our own patrimony. We are choosing to forget who we are and where we came from. I refuse to engage in that sort of ritual of forgetting — even for clicks.