Thanks Kim. That's exactly the kind of place where the whole arguments breaks down. I don't think they spend too much time talking about Native Americans. Engel writes, "Heritage America includes integrated Native Americans with the same stipulation" - i.e. that they "repudiates the instinct to leverage their experience for the purposes of political guilt in our time." Huntington, I think, argues that the real essence of America is a "settler" mindset, which is made up by the initial (largely Anglo) settlers and so it's that initial act of settlement that creates the culture. But the whole thing is a bit ridiculous. What is the authority of Engel to include Native Americans in "Heritage" stock depending on the attitudes of Native Americans in the present day? (Isn't the whole point that being Heritage gives you a kind of ownership over Americanness regardless of your political opinions in the present?) And how exactly does Huntington get to draw the line in the period of early settlement as opposed to anything that happened before or anything that happened after? I'm reminded of that t-shirt showing Native American warriors and saying "Homeland Security: Fighting Terrorism Since 1492." Once you get out of real legal norms for citizenship, or belonging, and into subjective notions like Heritage's, you get into a place of relativism, or else - and this, I think, is where Heritage really goes with it - into "might makes right."
Thank you, Sam. The perspectives are interesting (and probably somewhat convenient for the Heritage camp), but I agree there must be a lot of distortion to rationalize / prioritize the Heritage perspective. For the true believer's, they must have an incredible "gate system" so they always come out on top.
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.
Rural yokels. Progressives love Tolerance, but not for the despised producing class. Yup, farmers -- mere producers of the food that everyone needs. Yokels they are, they know what's real and what's nonsense because on the farm reality sorta hits you in the head when you ignore it. No sophistication, those farmers. They know that bulls can't get pregnant because they simply can't. An urban progressive like yourself -- who thinks that food comes from the store -- would ask, firstly, if the bull has actually made a gender selection and deplore the farmer for having Assigned a gender to it cisheteronormatively.
Nope, we're out of our holes and going to make trouble for the ancien régime. It's not a question of Left or Right, that's a diversion, the same way that General Foods markets the same product under different brand names. It's a question of the yokels -- the sans culottes if you will -- vs. the parasites.
Many thanks for this timely and essential rebuttal of “heritage” (aka Blut und Boden) notions of American nationality. Our greatest moral leaders, Lincoln among them, always insisted that our citizens were united by shared principles, not ancestry. In his great “Electric Cord” speech, July 10, 1858, during Know-Nothing frenzy, he agreed that Americans take pride around the Fourth of July in being descended from the men who wrote and signed the Declaration of Independence. But, there are many among us now who are not descended by blood. BUT if they believe these truths are self-evident, if they share the same “moral sentiments”—then they may claim to be “blood of the blood and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration of Independence.” Contemporary account of speech notes “loud and long continued applause.”
Yes, I think what Heritage calls a "propositional" notion of belonging is far, far more clear-cut and enduring than these appeals to blood, which actually tend to collapse under closer inspection and are subject to a great deal of manipulation and posturing.
One critical point: you can move to Germany, become a citizen, but you can never be a German. But when newly sworn naturalized citizens take the oath of allegiance, they are Americans whatever the Heritage people claim.
> Our greatest moral leaders, Lincoln among them, always insisted that our citizens were united by shared principles, not ancestry.
Sure. But here's the paradox: Those shared principles come from ancestry. America is like America because it was founded by Englishmen with Enlightenment values. Brazil is like Brazil because it was founded by Catholic Portuguese. They are the best of friends now, but France and Germany are very different countries because the French are quite different from the Germans.
The more united a country's people are the less they will need to worry about Heritage. When you 'have it' you can ignore it. The author supposes that a 'Propositional' country gains its propositions from the vacuum, but that's not correct. 'Heritage' is being reasserted now only because that foundational unity has been undermined. Thus the nation is -- inevitably -- forced to re-ask the question: 'Who are we? Where do we come from? What are our values?' Had the globalist progressives and their woke allies not done everything possible to undermine the nation's values, there would be no need to even think about 'Heritage'.
One of the many problems of the "Heritage Americans" concept is that just about every possible heritage/cultural/racial/ethnic/religious group that is here now was here then, whether then is 1700, 1776, 1860, or 1880.
Israel is legitimately the nation state of the Jewish people, so are others like France for the French or Ireland for the Irish. Nothing wrong with that. The U.S. is not that kind of state. It has a different origin story. It is based on the idea of liberty backed up by the Constitution.
So are we going to be required to take some kind of blood test now to vote (one ancestor was William Bradford, so I guess I “count” to these fools but…). How exactly are they going to untangle the skein of ancestries?
I don’t want to be pedantic about this but I feel you are a kindred spirit and would also like the essay, “What is a nation?”
1882, written in early years of Third Republic by great scholar Ernest Renan-in deliberate opposition to notion of Volk on the other side of the Rhine. Common religion is NOT essential. Pace Vance. Jews and Protestants explicitly welcomed as fellow citizens. Trump and Vance are not steeped in international Republican classics
I am betting “common religion” IS on the agenda for many of these folks. Not for Trump, whose only religion is “gimme gimme gimme”, but certainly for people in the CN fold.
They started getting divided amongst themselves once they get into these questions. American Reformer Magazine is a magazine for "Protestant Social and Political Thought," so a few of them, Crenshaw especially, really move in a very theocratic direction on this. Huntington does as well. Others seem to realize that insisting on settler heritage is already a big ask without pushing religion as well - and there's also the pesky problem of the Founding Fathers being so strong on religious freedom and the separation of church and state.
Again the paradox: The FF were strong on religious freedom because there was sufficient religious commonality anyway that there was no need/reason for the state to get involved in it. The FF did not declare America to be a Christian nation because it was so obviously the case that mentioning it was superfluous. And, given the solid Christian foundation, the luxury of freedom of religion was easy to grant -- no threat to the heart of the nation. A united people, secure in their own nation, will also be a tolerant people. But, destroy that unity, destroy that heritage, and those same people will get ugly.
What is this unified “Christian Heritage” you are babbling about? The early settlers were eager to demonize Christians of the “wrong” sect. See: the fervid fermaongering about the outbreeding Catholic hordes which lasted until JFK! And most of the ff would be demonized as heretics in your glorious unified Christian state. I also love the nasty little threat beneath the surface of your post. Just like Islamic theocracies ALLOW the infidelity people of the book to live…at the sufferance of the glorious arbiters of the Religion of Peace, I see a fun little bit of religious policing there
... nice creatures when they feel secure and their basic needs are met. But take those away and people can become the nastiest animals on the planet. Sorry, I miss the innuendo as to 'the nasty little threat'. I say that genuine tolerance proceeds from societies that have nothing to fear from tolerance. IOW states where the heritage of the people is respected and nobody is trying to overturn it. As Vance, people start to think about their heritage only when they have to -- when it is under attack. And since the defense of heritage can end up being such a messy business, I'd rather it didn't come to that.
> The early settlers were eager to demonize Christians of the “wrong” sect.
Sure. Debates about whether to make the sign of the cross with two fingers or three could get pretty intense. Nevertheless Christian sects had/have enough in common that they all decided they could live with each other, which they in fact did. If half the country were Muslims that would not have happened. Your argument is of the form: American religious commonality was imperfect therefore it did not exist whatsoever.
> your glorious unified Christian state
As a half Jewish agnostic, no, I'd not enjoy living in the sort of state you are caricaturing. Again you miss the point -- deliberately I suspect: The more unified a people are, the less likely it will be that draconian oppression will ever occur because people will not feel insecure. Humans are rather nice creatures ...
This is the perfect example of getting it wrong. When a nation has sufficient internal cohesion -- no, you can't 'point to it', there's no one test, no set of binary metrics. You can't 'point' to a nice day and explain with mathematical precision why its a nice day. People who's roots run deep in a given soil are, all else equal, slightly more likely to have an equally deep loyalty to that soil. This is true, but not a binary test. But when the author, or someone like him, says that Ilhan Omar is every bit as American as Thomas Jefferson, I reply that no, she is not a 'real' American at all. It's not race, religion, ethnicity as discrete tests, it is the totality of her alien-ness. If the globalist continue their efforts to deconstruct not just American heritage, but the *roots* of that heritage, the day when we have blood tests could arrive, and that would be very unfortunate.
> 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.
What on Earth??
How many times do we have to play this game of paredolia (and WHY)?
Yes, I do think it's a coincidence. Lists of 3 items are common in English sloganeering, so let's compare them side by side to get a more quantitative feel for this:
English: "One Homeland. One People. One Heritage."
Can you explain how it looks like "It's pretty close" to you? In Wordle, I wouldn't count 1/3 misplaced 2/3 wrong as "pretty close", and I'm not personally inclined to change my policy here.
Edit: for fun, compare this level of coincidence to the latitude of the Great Pyramid (29.9792458° N) being the same to 9 sig figs as the Speed Of Light (299,792,458 m/s). Anyone amused should read https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/05/the-pyramid-and-the-garden/ for discussion.
Your conclusion seems to be that if a given set of social tensions in one situation lead to the Nazis that we must, ergo, pronounce that that outcome was wicked. Alas, wicked or not, those same tensions can and will and are pushing Western societies in the same direction and rather than denouncing it, I'd suggest a better idea is to stop pushing our society down the same path.
I did not know this Heritage movement existed, but why should the phrase American Heritage necessarily imply blood kinship? Quotes presented on this issue are mixed. The quote from Vance clearly does not suggest anything “ethnic”. It is completely true that healthy democracy requires citizenry unified not just by ownership of passports but by a healthy dose of patriotism (aka ‘civic virtue’), and that includes cherishing common American heritage. Kahn himself writes that “the West really does have a unique tradition of which there is an immense amount to be proud of.” Evidently, he applies that phrase specifically to America as well. But American Heritage is precisely this “unique tradition”. There are lots of Americans who cringe at mentioning “American Heritage” because they deny the value of American tradition. There is also the line of hard multiculturalism preaching that the more recent immigrants shall identify with ethnic cultures of countries they chose to leave, but disclaim any pride in the unique American tradition. I believe some enthusiasts of the American Heritage movement link this heritage to blood, though I don’t understand how even drawing a line at arrivals before World War II (highly artificial as it is) implies that “Americans by Heritage” are defined by blood kinship. The idea that appreciation of American Heritage is crucial to the health of democracy should not be rejected simply because some people misinterpret it.
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?
Thanks Kim. That's exactly the kind of place where the whole arguments breaks down. I don't think they spend too much time talking about Native Americans. Engel writes, "Heritage America includes integrated Native Americans with the same stipulation" - i.e. that they "repudiates the instinct to leverage their experience for the purposes of political guilt in our time." Huntington, I think, argues that the real essence of America is a "settler" mindset, which is made up by the initial (largely Anglo) settlers and so it's that initial act of settlement that creates the culture. But the whole thing is a bit ridiculous. What is the authority of Engel to include Native Americans in "Heritage" stock depending on the attitudes of Native Americans in the present day? (Isn't the whole point that being Heritage gives you a kind of ownership over Americanness regardless of your political opinions in the present?) And how exactly does Huntington get to draw the line in the period of early settlement as opposed to anything that happened before or anything that happened after? I'm reminded of that t-shirt showing Native American warriors and saying "Homeland Security: Fighting Terrorism Since 1492." Once you get out of real legal norms for citizenship, or belonging, and into subjective notions like Heritage's, you get into a place of relativism, or else - and this, I think, is where Heritage really goes with it - into "might makes right."
Thank you, Sam. The perspectives are interesting (and probably somewhat convenient for the Heritage camp), but I agree there must be a lot of distortion to rationalize / prioritize the Heritage perspective. For the true believer's, they must have an incredible "gate system" so they always come out on top.
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.
New York u.s. HELL ON EARTH to the gated community tools and rural yokels who are the far right base.
Rural yokels. Progressives love Tolerance, but not for the despised producing class. Yup, farmers -- mere producers of the food that everyone needs. Yokels they are, they know what's real and what's nonsense because on the farm reality sorta hits you in the head when you ignore it. No sophistication, those farmers. They know that bulls can't get pregnant because they simply can't. An urban progressive like yourself -- who thinks that food comes from the store -- would ask, firstly, if the bull has actually made a gender selection and deplore the farmer for having Assigned a gender to it cisheteronormatively.
Back in your hole.
Nope, we're out of our holes and going to make trouble for the ancien régime. It's not a question of Left or Right, that's a diversion, the same way that General Foods markets the same product under different brand names. It's a question of the yokels -- the sans culottes if you will -- vs. the parasites.
Mr. Kahn,
Many thanks for this timely and essential rebuttal of “heritage” (aka Blut und Boden) notions of American nationality. Our greatest moral leaders, Lincoln among them, always insisted that our citizens were united by shared principles, not ancestry. In his great “Electric Cord” speech, July 10, 1858, during Know-Nothing frenzy, he agreed that Americans take pride around the Fourth of July in being descended from the men who wrote and signed the Declaration of Independence. But, there are many among us now who are not descended by blood. BUT if they believe these truths are self-evident, if they share the same “moral sentiments”—then they may claim to be “blood of the blood and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration of Independence.” Contemporary account of speech notes “loud and long continued applause.”
Yes, I think what Heritage calls a "propositional" notion of belonging is far, far more clear-cut and enduring than these appeals to blood, which actually tend to collapse under closer inspection and are subject to a great deal of manipulation and posturing.
One critical point: you can move to Germany, become a citizen, but you can never be a German. But when newly sworn naturalized citizens take the oath of allegiance, they are Americans whatever the Heritage people claim.
> Our greatest moral leaders, Lincoln among them, always insisted that our citizens were united by shared principles, not ancestry.
Sure. But here's the paradox: Those shared principles come from ancestry. America is like America because it was founded by Englishmen with Enlightenment values. Brazil is like Brazil because it was founded by Catholic Portuguese. They are the best of friends now, but France and Germany are very different countries because the French are quite different from the Germans.
The more united a country's people are the less they will need to worry about Heritage. When you 'have it' you can ignore it. The author supposes that a 'Propositional' country gains its propositions from the vacuum, but that's not correct. 'Heritage' is being reasserted now only because that foundational unity has been undermined. Thus the nation is -- inevitably -- forced to re-ask the question: 'Who are we? Where do we come from? What are our values?' Had the globalist progressives and their woke allies not done everything possible to undermine the nation's values, there would be no need to even think about 'Heritage'.
One of the many problems of the "Heritage Americans" concept is that just about every possible heritage/cultural/racial/ethnic/religious group that is here now was here then, whether then is 1700, 1776, 1860, or 1880.
Israel is legitimately the nation state of the Jewish people, so are others like France for the French or Ireland for the Irish. Nothing wrong with that. The U.S. is not that kind of state. It has a different origin story. It is based on the idea of liberty backed up by the Constitution.
So are we going to be required to take some kind of blood test now to vote (one ancestor was William Bradford, so I guess I “count” to these fools but…). How exactly are they going to untangle the skein of ancestries?
Brian
I don’t want to be pedantic about this but I feel you are a kindred spirit and would also like the essay, “What is a nation?”
1882, written in early years of Third Republic by great scholar Ernest Renan-in deliberate opposition to notion of Volk on the other side of the Rhine. Common religion is NOT essential. Pace Vance. Jews and Protestants explicitly welcomed as fellow citizens. Trump and Vance are not steeped in international Republican classics
I am betting “common religion” IS on the agenda for many of these folks. Not for Trump, whose only religion is “gimme gimme gimme”, but certainly for people in the CN fold.
They started getting divided amongst themselves once they get into these questions. American Reformer Magazine is a magazine for "Protestant Social and Political Thought," so a few of them, Crenshaw especially, really move in a very theocratic direction on this. Huntington does as well. Others seem to realize that insisting on settler heritage is already a big ask without pushing religion as well - and there's also the pesky problem of the Founding Fathers being so strong on religious freedom and the separation of church and state.
Again the paradox: The FF were strong on religious freedom because there was sufficient religious commonality anyway that there was no need/reason for the state to get involved in it. The FF did not declare America to be a Christian nation because it was so obviously the case that mentioning it was superfluous. And, given the solid Christian foundation, the luxury of freedom of religion was easy to grant -- no threat to the heart of the nation. A united people, secure in their own nation, will also be a tolerant people. But, destroy that unity, destroy that heritage, and those same people will get ugly.
What is this unified “Christian Heritage” you are babbling about? The early settlers were eager to demonize Christians of the “wrong” sect. See: the fervid fermaongering about the outbreeding Catholic hordes which lasted until JFK! And most of the ff would be demonized as heretics in your glorious unified Christian state. I also love the nasty little threat beneath the surface of your post. Just like Islamic theocracies ALLOW the infidelity people of the book to live…at the sufferance of the glorious arbiters of the Religion of Peace, I see a fun little bit of religious policing there
... nice creatures when they feel secure and their basic needs are met. But take those away and people can become the nastiest animals on the planet. Sorry, I miss the innuendo as to 'the nasty little threat'. I say that genuine tolerance proceeds from societies that have nothing to fear from tolerance. IOW states where the heritage of the people is respected and nobody is trying to overturn it. As Vance, people start to think about their heritage only when they have to -- when it is under attack. And since the defense of heritage can end up being such a messy business, I'd rather it didn't come to that.
> The early settlers were eager to demonize Christians of the “wrong” sect.
Sure. Debates about whether to make the sign of the cross with two fingers or three could get pretty intense. Nevertheless Christian sects had/have enough in common that they all decided they could live with each other, which they in fact did. If half the country were Muslims that would not have happened. Your argument is of the form: American religious commonality was imperfect therefore it did not exist whatsoever.
> your glorious unified Christian state
As a half Jewish agnostic, no, I'd not enjoy living in the sort of state you are caricaturing. Again you miss the point -- deliberately I suspect: The more unified a people are, the less likely it will be that draconian oppression will ever occur because people will not feel insecure. Humans are rather nice creatures ...
This is the perfect example of getting it wrong. When a nation has sufficient internal cohesion -- no, you can't 'point to it', there's no one test, no set of binary metrics. You can't 'point' to a nice day and explain with mathematical precision why its a nice day. People who's roots run deep in a given soil are, all else equal, slightly more likely to have an equally deep loyalty to that soil. This is true, but not a binary test. But when the author, or someone like him, says that Ilhan Omar is every bit as American as Thomas Jefferson, I reply that no, she is not a 'real' American at all. It's not race, religion, ethnicity as discrete tests, it is the totality of her alien-ness. If the globalist continue their efforts to deconstruct not just American heritage, but the *roots* of that heritage, the day when we have blood tests could arrive, and that would be very unfortunate.
> 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.
What on Earth??
How many times do we have to play this game of paredolia (and WHY)?
Errr. It's pretty close. You think that's just total coincidence?
Yes, I do think it's a coincidence. Lists of 3 items are common in English sloganeering, so let's compare them side by side to get a more quantitative feel for this:
English: "One Homeland. One People. One Heritage."
German: "One People, One Empire, One Leader"
Comparison: Totally Different, Wrong Order, Totally Different.
Can you explain how it looks like "It's pretty close" to you? In Wordle, I wouldn't count 1/3 misplaced 2/3 wrong as "pretty close", and I'm not personally inclined to change my policy here.
Edit: for fun, compare this level of coincidence to the latitude of the Great Pyramid (29.9792458° N) being the same to 9 sig figs as the Speed Of Light (299,792,458 m/s). Anyone amused should read https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/11/05/the-pyramid-and-the-garden/ for discussion.
Alright, keep telling yourself that!
Good reasoning and Persuasion on display, Sam!
Your conclusion seems to be that if a given set of social tensions in one situation lead to the Nazis that we must, ergo, pronounce that that outcome was wicked. Alas, wicked or not, those same tensions can and will and are pushing Western societies in the same direction and rather than denouncing it, I'd suggest a better idea is to stop pushing our society down the same path.
Sometimes Persuasion is great. Sometimes it is nonsense
Just go "ultra-Heritage" - spouses of non-Heritage Americans instantly lose citizenship.
I did not know this Heritage movement existed, but why should the phrase American Heritage necessarily imply blood kinship? Quotes presented on this issue are mixed. The quote from Vance clearly does not suggest anything “ethnic”. It is completely true that healthy democracy requires citizenry unified not just by ownership of passports but by a healthy dose of patriotism (aka ‘civic virtue’), and that includes cherishing common American heritage. Kahn himself writes that “the West really does have a unique tradition of which there is an immense amount to be proud of.” Evidently, he applies that phrase specifically to America as well. But American Heritage is precisely this “unique tradition”. There are lots of Americans who cringe at mentioning “American Heritage” because they deny the value of American tradition. There is also the line of hard multiculturalism preaching that the more recent immigrants shall identify with ethnic cultures of countries they chose to leave, but disclaim any pride in the unique American tradition. I believe some enthusiasts of the American Heritage movement link this heritage to blood, though I don’t understand how even drawing a line at arrivals before World War II (highly artificial as it is) implies that “Americans by Heritage” are defined by blood kinship. The idea that appreciation of American Heritage is crucial to the health of democracy should not be rejected simply because some people misinterpret it.