“Heritage Americans” Want to Make Citizenship About Blood
The movement now driving the Trump administration would replace Constitutional citizenship with ancestral purity tests.
If I’m traveling outside of the United States, there’s a particular turn that the conversation has a tendency to take. I’ve come to think of it as the “nationality game.”
I’ve often had this experience in a taxi cab where the driver, without any other preamble, will suddenly lock eyes with me through the rear-view mirror and ask “Where are you from?” “I’m American,” I say. In not a single instance of playing this game has that been a sufficient answer. My interlocutor, then, will knit their eyebrows in a very particular way, or drop their voice as if to invite confidences, and say, “Where are you really from?”
From experience, I know how this game ends. If I say, “I’m Jewish,” the knitted brow will disappear and my interlocutor will be satisfied, but my part in the game is to delay that for as long as possible. “Like all Americans, I’m a mix,” I might reply. I might say that I grew up in New York, or I might volunteer that my ancestors came from different countries and arrived at very different times. “I’m basically a European mutt,” I’ll sometimes say, which has never, in all the times I’ve played this game, satisfied my interlocutor.
I make a point of being difficult, but I also feel that my obfuscativeness contains a deeper truth—in the United States we almost never play this game, and for good reason. So many Americans are so mixed that to ask for a “nationality” is usually meaningless, as well as offensive—it means questioning a fundamental premise of their citizenship.
For the past two years, I’ve been living in Kyrgyzstan in Central Asia—which means that I get the “what is your nationality?” question a lot—and I’ve been trying to really think through why there is such a diametric difference in the understanding of what “nationality” means in the United States compared to most other places I’ve been in the world. That felt to me like an idle, pass-the-time-of-day sort of query until it popped up in a very big way in U.S. political discussion, and, more specifically, on the websites of a variety of government agencies.
In July 2025, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) posted a painting on its Instagram of settlers in a Conestoga wagon celebrating the birth of their child and accompanied by the caption, “Remember Your Homeland’s Heritage.” Later that month, DHS posted “American Progress”—a painting closely associated with “Manifest Destiny”—on its Instagram along with the caption “A heritage to be proud of, a homeland worth defending.” Not to be outdone, the Department of Labor this month posted a highlight reel of events from American history surrounding a bust of George Washington along with the caption, “One Homeland. One People. One Heritage. Remember who you are, American.”
Outrage followed. Much of it was directed against the lily whiteness of the figures depicted in the Conestoga wagon, as well as the whiteness of the allegorical figure of Columbia in the “American Progress” painting. “Some historians say that D.H.S.’ battle cry, in the context of the painting, glorifies racism,” The New York Times wrote. And much of the outrage directed against the Department of Labor’s post has questioned whether “One Homeland. One People. One Heritage” is a direct allusion to Nazi Germany’s “Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer.”
Personally, I find it unlikely that anyone using those rhythms would not be aware of its resonance with Nazi sloganeering. But I want to bracket that out of this essay—it’s an unproven claim. What got my attention was the sudden ubiquity of the word “heritage,” and its theory of Americanness that runs counter to everything I cherish.
Over the course of the past year, the “Heritage American” movement—something I’d never come across before—moved out of the fringe and into the MAGA core, driving the rhetoric of Trump administration agencies. The “coming-out moment” for Heritage Americanism may well have been JD Vance’s speech at the Claremont Institute in July 2025, in which he said:
America is not just an idea. We’re a particular place with a particular people and a particular set of beliefs and way of life. Our ancestors realized that to carve a successful nation from new land meant creating new tangible things, new homes, new towns, new infrastructure, to tame a wild continent. That is our heritage as Americans.
Which “particular people”? The answer may be supplied by the “Heritage American” movement that centers itself on American Reformer Magazine and a group of intellectuals including C. Jay Engel, Auron MacIntyre, and Ben Crenshaw, who write lucidly, if not always with perfect logical consistency, about what they have in mind.
Let’s give them the floor for a bit. Here is how Engel explains it:
When I say Heritage American, this is what I mean: those who are ethno-culturally tied to the ethos and spirit of the United States prior to its definitional transformation into a Propositional Nation after World War II….When we speak of heritage America, we speak of an actual body of institutions created by a nexus of a specific people; dominated and defined by Anglos and their children.
Crenshaw, for his part, identifies “seven inheritances” that comprise Heritage America—the English language, Christianity, self-government, Christian government, liberty, equality under the law, and relationship with the physical land. He writes, “You might formally be an American citizen by birth or naturalization, but unless you understand these deeply-rooted and traditional aspects of American identity, you cannot be a Heritage American—a true American.”
There is much in here that my Kyrgyz cab drivers would agree with. Many nations, all over the world, do have a distinct concept of an ethnically dominant nationality. That ethno-centric vision of a state is built into 19th century nationalism (which was also, at the time, part and parcel of “liberalism”) and may be understood to be its guiding impulse. The notion of the ethnocentric state is also at the core of the decolonization movement—and the belief in “self-determination” tends to be closely connected to the idea of rightful rule by a dominant ethnic majority.
If that can be the case for national and decolonial movements all around the world, then why not also for the United States? And, actually, Engel adopts a strikingly decolonial position when he frames Heritage America as being under a state, essentially, of occupation by an “upper-class economic elite … working in tandem … with those on the economic margins of American life.”
If we were to really try to steelman this position, we might do so through the work of Samuel Huntington. Huntington, in his classic—and controversial—1996 book Clash of Civilizations argued that the barriers between civilizations are essentially insuperable. He divided the world into seven or eight civilizations—Western, Slavic/Orthodox, Confucian/Chinese, Japanese, Latin American, Islamic, Hindu, and “possibly” African. It might readily be objected that these are apples and pears—some are religions and some are geographical territories and some are ethnicities—but the strongest way to put Huntington’s position may be that time does the work. Over the course of centuries, values inculcate themselves within given cultural territories and do not pass so easily beyond a civilization’s frontier.
Indebted to Huntington and to the work of scholars like David Hackett Fischer, Paul Gottfried, and Donald Warren, the Heritage position would be that what is of value in the United States really is a distinct culture that took root over the course of several centuries. As Engel writes, “[Heritage America] is not an idea. It is a body of actual ways and habits and standards of culture and behavior, connected by a shared experience and the inheritance of that memory. It is communicated by certain aesthetics, certain art, certain folklore, certain music, and certain symbols.”
The Heritage thinkers have a tendency to plug for some pretty arbitrary divides about what constitutes a “true American,” but what they seem to be getting at is some notion of civilization frontiers. Huntington would create a great deal of mischief with his argument for an exclusionary approach towards Hispanics based on the idea that Latin America (but not Europe) belonged to a distinctly different civilizational sphere than North America. The recent deployment of thousands of ICE agents to Minneapolis, ostensibly to stamp out fraud in the Somali community, is based largely on that Heritage premise—that Somalis come from a very different civilizational outlook. Beneath Donald Trump’s many diatribes against Somalis—he has called them “garbage” and said “I don’t want them in our country”—is the assumption that Somalis are from beyond the ambit of the West and are therefore unassimilable.
If we try to give the Heritage view as much credit as we can, it is hard to argue that there is nothing in the notion of hard frontiers of outlook between different cultures. In my ex-pat life, I have become very aware of it. As much time as I spend in Kyrgyzstan, I know that I am very unlikely to ever fully understand the culture—differences in perspective are not surface but run through every imaginable interaction. Kyrgyz, unburdened by political correctness, tend to call it their “mentality,” and to treat it as something like the weather—an outlook that is not Western, that they may not necessarily be all that proud of, but that is just a fact of life.
If, again, we try to be as understanding of Heritage as possible, what they are asking for seems to be something that the liberal sensibility is willing to grant just about anybody else other than American whites—pride in one’s history and background; and the ability to mobilize politically as ethnic majoritarians. “It is a particular way of life that is proud and exclusive, but is welcoming to those who want to live in this manner,” writes Crenshaw of Heritage America. And that sense of aggrieved pride runs all across the Heritage position. There is so much to be proud of in Western, and specifically American, history—and the Heritage perspective finds it perplexing that the progressive view would seem to reduce so much of that history to domination or “white supremacy” that needs to be atoned for.
Like everything that’s truly dangerous, then, the Heritage movement has a certain internal coherence to it. It threatens to replace accepted notions of Americanness anchored in inclusivity and Constitutional authority with an amorphous but also sticky view of Americanness built around exactly when your distant ancestors got off a boat.
There are a few problems with this. I currently live, actually, in a country that’s going through an ethno-nationalist revival, and am seeing what it’s like when the dominant ethnic majority calls the “shots” politically—and, basically, it stinks. The flip side of nationalism is, of course, xenophobia—the rise in nationalism makes ethnic minorities very nervous and has generated outbursts of violence in particular against Pakistani migrants and students in Kyrgyzstan.
Ethno-nationalism also provides golden avenues for corruption, a work-around to any sort of meritocracy. In Kyrgyzstan, it’s always possible to work your way forward by wearing the right kind of hat or saying the right kind of phrase or appealing to the pedigree of one’s tribe, and that constant ancestral one-upmanship, along with the attendant obsessive focus on symbolic issues, comes at the expense of vital work like building infrastructure or developing sound, sustainable governance.
Then, the nationalities game, when you actually get into it, turns out to melt into incoherence. It’s not just that it really is meaningless to draw a line in the sand at 1880, as the Heritage blogger Ragnar Lifthrasir does, or after World War II, as Engel does, and say that immigrants who came before it are “true Americans” and those after it are not. It’s also that, when you really scratch deep enough, almost nobody can exactly build an identity around “descent.” If I ask myself whether I am a “Heritage American,” I would really have no idea. Yes, I do have branches of my family that were in America in the 17th century, including one that goes back, I believe, to the 1630s. But do those ancestors—that long line of Massachusetts potato farmers—somehow qualify me as more American than does the Italian branch who, within a generation of immigrating, sent five of their children to Yale and Harvard Medical School, or the Jewish branch who fought in World War II? My tangled family tree would, I imagine, be more typical of most Americans than not.
Then there is the lesson of American history itself. The Founding Fathers left out ethnic or religious stipulations for citizenship or office. And while the United States had a nativist political tradition all through the 19th century, the engine of industrialization essentially all by itself discredited that stance. Westward expansion, rapid industrialization, and the emergence of America into global power status in the 20th century, are all unimaginable without the tide of immigration. Vance maybe inadvertently acknowledged as much in his Claremont speech when, in speaking of American “heritage,” he paid particular attention to engineering feats, to space flight and the Moon landing. Vance must have known that the history of American science would look very different without Nikola Tesla, Enrico Fermi, Albert Einstein, or the 117 foreign-born Nobel Prize winners who did their critical scientific work in the United States.
And, actually, there is a view of the West, and of America, that shares some of Heritage’s premises while strenuously rejecting their conclusions. That view would hold that the West really does have a unique tradition of which there is an immense amount to be proud of, but that what makes the West distinct is precisely that it is not heritage-based. Scientific process, and complex managerial structures, and modern armies and systems of state administration are all based on a certain impersonalness—on members of the society being slotted into a given role based entirely on their individual fitness for the task as opposed to any question of ancestry or family network. Re-introduce kinship ties into the social structure and you lose precisely the feature that, over the last half-millennium, has made the West, and the United States as an extension of the West, so distinct and so successful.
All of this might seem a bit theoretical if the Vice President of the United States, and the Department of Homeland Security, and the Department of Labor, hadn’t adopted explicitly “Heritage” rhetoric in their public utterances over the last six months and done so, specifically, to question the rule of law in citizenship cases and to impose subjective tests about whether or not certain populations, in this case Somalis, are deserving of inclusion in “Americanness.”
The problem—apart from the total cruelty and inhumanity of the administration’s approach—is that it is, as the Heritage people are so quick to say of others, “un-American.” If you happen to believe, as I do, that the United States is a really distinct and successful country—a country to take pride in—the reasons for that are not the wonders of its folklore or symbols. All countries have folklore and symbols, and most struggle with management structures and with finding a rational path for individual advancement. The reason to take pride in the United States is the country’s unique synthetic identity structure in which your ancestry is the kind of thing you bring up only if all other conversational topics are exhausted, never to prove a point about yourself—in which a person is assessed not by where they are from, but only and entirely by what they do with their own life.
Sam Kahn is associate editor at Persuasion, writes the Substack Castalia, and edits The Republic of Letters.
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If ancestry makes people American, how do cities like New York work?
About 40% of New Yorkers were born outside of the US. This number has not moved much in recent decades, and was in fact about the same 100 years ago.
NY did not drift into the abyss or demand to secede. Kids in New York grow up speaking English and absorb broader American culture just as kids in Kansas do.
Sam Huntington simply did not understand the malleability of human culture and identification.
Thanks for the interesting essay, Mr. Kahn.
Maybe I missed it, but how do Vance and his ilk boosting the concept of Heritage Americans characterize the Native Americans?