Who Is an American?

Hint: It should not be about ancestry.

Today, we are thrilled to share with all of our readers one of Francis Fukuyama’s first articles since he and American Purpose joined the Persuasion family: a characteristically deep and thoughtful reflection on what it takes—and, just as importantly, what it doesn’t take—to be an American.

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In his acceptance speech for the vice presidency at the Republican National Convention, JD Vance stated that “one of the things that you hear people say sometimes is that America is an idea.” But, Vance asserted, the country was not just a “set of principles … but a homeland.” He went on to illustrate this by referring to his family’s cemetery where he hoped seven generations would be buried in a plot in eastern Kentucky. He said the country welcomed newcomers like his wife’s family from India, but “when we allow newcomers into our American family, we allow them on our terms.”

Taken at face value, this should not be particularly controversial. American identity has always been based on ideas like liberty and equality, making it what is sometimes labeled a “creedal nation.” But it also is a nation of shared memory and experience. And it is doubtless true that immigrants to the United States need to accept certain basic conditions for being an American, as required by their taking the oath of naturalization during the citizenship ceremony.

The real question is what Vance means by the phrase “on our terms” as a condition for Americanness. I would have thought that “our terms” meant precisely those ideas that constitute the American creed: loyalty to the Constitution and to the rule of law, and acceptance of the words of the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal.” But Vance seems to be making the point that in addition to these ideas, ancestry is somehow also critical to Americanness. That quality is conferred by your progenitors, and is not simply a matter of your individual choice.

And here we have a problem. For many decades after the Founding, American identity was indeed based on ancestry. Americans struggled mightily to move beyond ancestry to an identity based on ideas alone. 

We can trace changing ideas of American identity by the evolution of requirements for voting and citizenship. The first sentence of the Constitution refers to “We the People of the United States of America,” but does not define who “The People” are. It was in fact quite restrictive. At the moment of the Constitution’s ratification, only white men who owned property qualified as full rights-bearing members of the political community. The property qualification was lifted in most states by the 1820s, but the country moved dangerously towards civil conflict over the question of race and whether one American could hold another American as a chattel slave. It took a civil war that killed over 600,000 Americans to settle that question; in the war’s wake, the country ratified the Fourteenth Amendment that stated:

All persons, born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State in which they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

For the first time black men could vote, and African Americans were elected to office both in the states and at a federal level. But shamefully, these rights were progressively taken away as the Southern states were readmitted to the Union after 1876, and the country looked away as legal segregation and restriction of voting rights for black people were imposed. Throughout this period, women did not have the right to vote either; their citizenship was codified only by passage of the Nineteenth Amendment after World War I. It was not until the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts in the 1960s that the promise of the Fourteenth Amendment was finally realized and women and racial minorities were accepted as full rights-bearing citizens, even if they faced continued discrimination on a social level.

It is important to step back and understand what was going on as a result of these changes. American citizenship and therefore American identity were initially based not simply on ideas, but on ascriptive characteristics like social class, race, and gender (“ascriptive” meaning things you are born with and have no control over). The full promise of the Declaration’s assertion of human equality was not formally implemented until the Civil Rights era. In other words, American identity was made creedal over time, by stripping out those other qualifications based on ancestry. Getting to a creedal identity was therefore a huge achievement, one that required war, death, struggle, and nation-wide mobilization.  

Creedal American identity has always been important to me personally. My paternal grandfather came to the United States from Japan in 1905 and my mother after World War II; I grew up in New York City during the 1950s and ‘60s when there was no Japanese-American community to speak of in the city. I would periodically get teased in school for being Asian, with some white kid pulling back his eyes and yelling “Ching-chong Chinaman!” When I asked my father how I should respond, he said “Just tell them that you are an American; that’s all you need to say.” To this day, I still bristle a bit when someone (usually a first-generation immigrant) asks me where I’m from; I usually say I’m from Chicago. If they persist and say “but where are you really from,” I say “OK, I was born in Chicago but I really grew up in New York City.”

What JD Vance seems to be proposing is to go backwards to the period before the Civil Rights era and to re-insert ancestry as a condition for being an American. He is cagey about exactly what forms of ancestry should be important, and his reference to his Indian wife suggests he’s not thinking in racial terms. But many of his fellows on the MAGA right are more overt in their advocacy of religious or racial qualifications. Donald Trump has periodically talked about ending birthright citizenship, citing a narrative about undocumented immigrants giving birth to “anchor babies” as a means of staying in the United States. This would be a pretty hard lift given the clear language of the Fourteenth Amendment, but some conservatives hang their hat on the Amendment’s phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” to exclude the undocumented. (This phrase however was meant to refer to Native American nations that were granted their own sovereignty; at the time of the Fourteenth Amendment’s passage, all immigrants to the United States were undocumented, but nonetheless subject to the nation’s laws.) JD Vance in any event doesn’t seem to think that presidents necessarily need to abide by the Constitution or Supreme Court decisions.  

It’s true that America’s creedal identity has always been a bit thin when compared to those in Europe and Asia, societies like France, Germany, Italy, Japan, or Korea with shared linguistic, literary, culinary, and folk traditions. There have been efforts to thicken the American sense of identity: Ken Burns’ film on baseball shows how the game was deliberately promoted in the decades after the Civil War precisely to give Southerners and Northerners something to celebrate in common. Similarly, Abraham Lincoln created Thanksgiving as a national holiday in 1863 in the midst of the Civil War, to remind Americans that they had many things for which they should be grateful, even as they were killing each other on the battlefield. Thanksgiving remains my very favorite holiday in the calendar.

The important point, though, is that any attempt to build a national identity that goes beyond the American creed must be one, like baseball or Thanksgiving, that can be shared equally by all Americans. The “one” that we are building out of the “many” in E pluribus unum must be accessible to the de facto diversity of contemporary America. Anyone who has attended a naturalization ceremony can attest to how moving they are, and how seriously they are regarded. Once the naturalization oath is taken, a person born in Iran or Korea or Guatemala can proudly assert, as my grandfather once did, that they are genuine Americans. Acceptance into the American family should not depend on how many generations of ancestors you have buried in American soil, but on what you as an individual choose and believe. 

Francis Fukuyama is Senior Fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. He writes the “Frankly Fukuyama” column, carried forward from American Purpose, at Persuasion.

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