Objections by ‘heritage Americans’ seem designed to prove my point.
In my column on some people’s effort to make the status of “heritage Americans” (i.e., descended from multiple generations on American soil) a basis for political and policy arguments, I observed that “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.” I also noted that “making a political project out of Heritage Americanism is self-defeating,” and that America is more effectively held together by spreading its traditional and founding ideals (the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the classical liberalism of the Founding, the Gettysburg Address, the great causes of our history, etc.). I’ve written about how we should, to fortify that national glue and keep it sturdier than mere ties of blood and soil, gear our immigration policy more toward bringing in people who share our ideas, remain grateful for our history, and keep alive what Reagan proposed in 1989 in the form of an “informed patriotism” that values the sacrifices made to bring us to this point.
Brianna Lyman’s response to me in The Federalist seems designed to prove my point about the motte and bailey:
Heritage Americans (of which I am proudly one, sorry McLaughlin) cleared this land, founded towns, raised churches, built the very institutions we use today, fought for independence, settled our frontier, defended this country, cultivated its land, and handed their descendants a nation worth inheriting. Acknowledging that debt simply means giving the people who built and have preserved the country the credit that McLaughlin once insisted successful builders deserve…Heritage Americans owe no one an apology for recognizing and taking pride in what their ancestors built. The rest of the country owes them a debt of gratitude.
Most of this is not only unobjectionable but precisely what I’ve argued for years: we should, indeed must, value what our forebears gave us. We should, moreover, do so (as Abraham Lincoln argued in his 1858 electric-cords speech) in ways that make that patrimony feel like the inheritance of all Americans, not only the lineal blood descendants of the Founders. The part of this that’s wrong, unless I’m missing something important in her biography, is where Lyman tells us that she is one of the people who did all those things. I do owe a debt of gratitude to those who came before us, and I’m all in favor of that gratitude’s lending some pride in America and in its heritage to their descendants. But I do not owe any gratitude to those descendants, much less any sort of deference to them in matters of politics or policy.
Lyman goes on: “Gratitude for Heritage Americans — and what their families built and what they sustain daily — is not some type of evil supremacy as McLaughlin tries to make it out to be.” That’s the retreat to the motte: the claim that this is all about gratitude for the past, rather than exclusion of some people in the present for not having the same bloodlines. Then we get this, after an extended effort to argue that immigrants are nothing like the people who emigrated here to be settlers: “America may look different if we removed every immigrant story from its history. But America would be nonexistent if the settlers and founders were erased from the story, as McLaughlin desperately wants to do.” I, of course, have argued the exact opposite for years; I just don’t think that the settlers’ great-great-great grandchildren are the ones who deserve the credit for that. Sorry, you didn’t build that.
Moreover, the notion that only the first settlers of a place built any of it is silly — every bit as silly as the claims of open-borders Democrats that, say, Somalis built this country. Quite a lot of America’s infrastructure was built with immigrant labor, most famously the Transcontinental Railroad. Many of our great industries and scientific discoveries were made by immigrants, ranging from Andrew Carnegie, Alexander Graham Bell, and Levi Strauss to Albert Einstein and Elon Musk. At the start of the Civil War, Carnegie himself led the engineering team that reconnected our capital city by rail and telegraph to the North, riding into Washington on the front of the first locomotive.
Lyman quotes another “heritage American” author who quibbles with my Civil War examples: “Both sides saw themselves as the true inheritors of the founding, so the South isn’t trying to get away from American identity. Southerners believe they are the true inheritors of the founding principles.” Now, this was partly true as far as Southern self-image was concerned, and truer in Southern propaganda. There’s a reason why Jefferson Davis was inaugurated on Washington’s birthday. But, to begin with, it ignores the fact that they tried to break up the country and that we should want to avoid a repetition of that attempt. Moreover, they seceded over losing a presidential election — which is not at all a legitimate way to honor our constitutional compact — and did so in good part because they feared that Republican postmasters would stop interdicting abolitionist pamphlets in the mail. But also, it misses the point that the more honest expositors of the Confederate philosophy understood — as Alexander Stephens said forthrightly in his “Cornerstone” speech — that the founding of the Confederacy assumed that the Declaration’s ideas were “fundamentally wrong”:
They rested upon the assumption of the equality of races. This was an error. It was a sandy foundation. . . . Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea.
In fact, if you study the South, you see in the years leading up to the Civil War an erosion of the republican and liberal ideals that were shared by the Founders, Southern and Northern alike. The South was less protective of free speech, for example, even jailing people for owning copies of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Southerners in the 1850s no longer shared Jefferson’s enthusiasm for republicanism abroad, because they feared that upsetting the monarchical and aristocratic order elsewhere would undermine their control of slaves at home. The Confederate Constitution planted the roots of the Wilsonian administrative state. Like today’s progressives, the Confederates had grown tired of the American constitutional system and its founding promises. By contrast, the Union Army that saved the nation from secession was approximately one-quarter foreign-born, as were dozens of its generals, who haled from Ireland, Prussia, Russia, Hungary, Baden, Sweden, and France. Many of them felt that they were fighting not only for a homeland but for the cause of self-government, which remained exceptional in the world of the 1860s. That, too, is our heritage.