American identity is based on belief in a broad creed, not on ethnicity, religion, or ancestry. That point should be uncontroversial. Yet a small, ultra-online nationalist subculture now disputes it. The dispute publicly surfaced recently after Vivek Ramaswamy’s New York Times op-ed and his speech at the Turning Point USA AmericaFest conference, which basically made that point.

The wild online disagreement to it was shocking to most but centered around a mostly anonymous subset of people who are pushing the idea that “Heritage Americans,” those descended from the colonial era or at least the Civil War, are more American than the rest of us. This disagreement gets to the heart of why American society and the economy work so well while being so ethnically, religiously, and racially diverse.

The debate over Heritage Americans and what it means to be an American is in the backdrop of a mass deportation campaign by the Trump administration, the government’s anti-legal immigration policies, and a Supreme Court case that could reinterpret birthright citizenship. Reinterpreting what it means to be a real American isn’t necessary for those immigration restrictionist policies because they are happening without such a big shift in attitudes. It would be a titanic shift to redefine what it means to be an American in the way those small numbers of crude ultra-online nationalists want.

A recent YouGov poll asked, “What makes someone American?” Ranked in order of importance, the first unique cultural marker is speaking English, which is in seventh place. Tenth place is participating in American customs and traditions, which is as vague as you can be. Creedal definitions dominate: obeying the law, supporting the Constitution, citizenship, and adherence to shared principles. This is the way it should be. These are universal commitments, not ethnic markers, and therefore conflict directly with nationalist definitions of Americanness.



...read more at cato.org

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