During the 2012 presidential campaign, Barack Obama infamously told business owners, “If you’ve got a business — you didn’t build that.” Obama argued individual success was fake, instead, success depended on other people. Republicans heard the real point: Obama was trying to diminish the work, sacrifice, and legacy of successful business owners.
Dan McLaughlin understood the problem at the time. “If you convince people that success has little to do w/work & merit, you justify more burdens on successful.”
Fair point. People who build something deserve credit for building it. But that principle should apply not just when the achievement belongs to a single business owner, but to generations of Americans whose families built this country from nothing and have sustained it thus far.
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.
Yet in a milquetoast piece that can be found in National Review, McLaughlin dismisses the notion of Heritage Americans as “massively overrated and counterproductive.”
The whole debate began a few days ago when Texas Republican Railroad Commissioner nominee Bo French posted a photo showing students — of all whom appeared to be of South Asian descent — cheering at a University of Texas football game. French said “The problem is now obviously worse than anyone imagined” and later appeared to explain the underlying concern of such post, which is that Americans “have been displaced by foreigners.”
Whatever you think of French’s post, the debate that has ensued exposes the greatest question we face: What is an American, and does America need Americans?
McLaughlin’s answers are effectively “I don’t know ” and “no.” First generation American citizens have just as much claim and stake in America as someone whose family settled this country. Heck, someone who spent the first 40 years of their life in Mexico, India, Somalia, or whatever other Third World country you can think of is just as American as someone whose family stepped off the Mayflower, and if you say otherwise, you’re a bigot.
But McLaughlin’s entire argument is so flimsy that it falls apart without much scrutiny.
McLaughlin himself concedes that “long family history on the soil tends to bind people more firmly to the nation and that multigenerational presence here tends to acclimate people more to American mores.” But after admitting lineage strengthens national loyalty and transmits American culture to each next generation, he insists those roots should have little to no importance.
But 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. Saying all citizens of America today inherited a country built by earlier Americans simply means everyone today owes something to the people that created that inheritance — and being proud that your ancestors were those that created such inheritance is nothing to be ashamed of (even if people like McLaughlin, whose family has been here just shy of 105 years, tells you so).
Lineage is obviously not everything. A person can be a Mayflower descendant and a communist. A naturalize citizen can be a lover of America and this republic more than said Mayflower descendant.
But lineage is not nothing either.
A family’s connection to a country — its land, history, institutions, culture, sacrifice — is not meaningless simply because that connection doesn’t automatically result in every descendant believing in what McLaughlin describes as the “idea” of America. Being born into a family does not mean that child will honor his parents, but nobody ever concludes that that child is interchangeable with a stranger who may show a little more respect to the parents. You can betray or squander your inheritance, but it’s still an inheritance.
McLaughlin then attempts to prove the irrelevance of lineage by pointing out that Heritage Americans seceded during the Civil War.
“Lots of Heritage Americans decided in 1861 to dissolve their connection to the country. Because the soil to them could just as easily be the same soil under a different flag, a different constitution, and a rejection or rewriting of the Declaration, they left … The very nature of the American republic — spanning a continent, filled with people and places who differ in so many ways — is such that blood-and-soil localism can tear us apart just as easily as it can bind us together.”
But as The Federalist’s Hayden Daniel (Heritage American) explained, “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. They saw themselves as separating from the government, not from the culture and traditions of America. Nothing about Southern society radically changed (and not even their government either, the Confederate constitution is a near carbon copy of the U.S. Constitution) with secession. Southerners believed that they are Americans, but the perceived threat of a tyrannical government caused them to seek secession as a solution.”
Therefore McLaughlin’s example actually shows the opposite, that is, the inherited American identity was so powerful that both sides tried to claim it.
McLaughlin next argues “the power of America’s ideals, the seductiveness of its culture, and the scope of the opportunities it offers have always been good (not perfect, but very effective) at making Americans out of new arrivals, and fairly quickly.”
But, Dan, where did those ideas, that seductive culture, those opportunities come from?
They did not sprout from the soil like a wildflower. They were created. They were cultivated. They were defended. They were given to the next generation. The opportunities, culture, and way of life McLaughlin correctly celebrates are the product of Heritage Americans whose families for generations sustained and grew those things.
In a way perhaps Dan may understand, his article is another way of saying “you didn’t build that.” Apparently America’s culture, institutions, and success simply exist. They owe nothing to past generations.
“Our high levels of immigration and high levels of internal mobility are both part of the same traditional American story,” McLaughlin continues. “The immigrant experience, the pioneer experience, and the settler experience are our history, which would be unrecognizable if we expunged them.”
But settling and founding a nation is nowhere near the same as immigrating to an established one. The settlers formed communities, established our institutions, developed customs, fought wars, and went so far in the Constitution to say all of it was being done for our “posterity.”
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.
McLaughlin then invokes the Pilgrims as evidence for his immigration story, saying they “fled” to America to establish the idea that “you could come here and do your own thing.”
McLaughlin’s claim is a shallow interpretation and historically illiterate one at best.
The Pilgrims crossed the Atlantic as a religious community that intended to construct and preserve a distinct moral and social order. They governed themselves together, raised families, worshipped together, and built the foundations upon which we walk (literally and metaphorically). They did not think they were creating something or a platform in which anybody from anywhere could arrive and “do your own thing.”
Further, if we are to take McLaughlin’s false claim that Pilgrims were immigrants as truth, then it completely undermines his entire claim about the benefits of immigration.
The Pilgrims came here and they transformed the land, established their own enclave, developed their own government. Less than 200 years later, the Pilgrim’s descendants, along with other settlers’ descendants then overthrew the government that established all of the major colonies and instead established their own, the very one we enjoy now. So if the Pilgrims were indeed immigrants who then fundamentally changed the land, culture, and institutions, then we should not at all want any more immigration if we like America the way she is.
But perhaps the most revealing pitfalls of McLaughlin’s argument can be found in his X exchange with Federalist CEO and co-founder Sean Davis.
“A person who became a citizen five seconds ago is not in any way, shape, or form ‘every bit as American’ as someone whose family has been here for centuries. It’s a self-evidently absurd proposition. Ilhan Omar is not ‘every bit as American’ as a man running the country farm his ancestors bought and cultivated in the early 19th century. Zohran Mamdani is not ‘every bit as American’ as one of John Jay’s descendants. Abdul El-Sayed is not ‘every bit as American’ as war hero Jim Webb or as a Sooner who staked out land out West. Rashida Tlaib is not ‘every bit as American’ as a boy who can count as an ancestor one of the Texas Rangers who fearlessly hunted and conquered the evil Comanche. Moving to New York doesn’t magically make you a New Yorker, putting on a dress doesn’t make you a woman, and a piece of paper doesn’t magically make you American,” Davis posted.
“This bizarre need to cheapen what it means to be American by making it nothing more than a box-checking paperwork exercise is so sad and pathetic. And if we are going to boil the whole thing down to paperwork, a naturalized citizen can be denaturalized. So clearly they’re less American than someone who can’t be denaturalized,” Davis continued.
McLaughlin responded: “What makes you American isn’t how long your family has been here or what your ancestors did. Nor is it just whether you live here or are a citizen. It’s how much you love our country, share its Founding ideals, & prefer its way of life to that of any other place. Our heritage as Americans is its ideas & culture, not its bloodlines.”
“Not everyone can become an American. But anyone can. You just have to want it, believe in the idea, & commit to it,” McLaughlin continued.
It sounds like a good slogan until you give it more than five seconds of thought.
If believing in America’s founding ideals is what makes someone an American, does rejecting those ideals make him no longer American? If a natural born citizen rejects the idea of the Founders, should we send him off to a penal colony? If a naturalized citizens hates the Constitution, rejects the Founders, prefers a foreign way of life, does McLaughlin support denaturalizing and deporting said person?
Presumably not.
So if America is merely an idea, but rejecting that idea has no consequences — if citizenship is enough, but paperwork citizenship requires no oath of loyalty or allegiance to the founding ideals, and if culture matters but the lineage that created that culture doesn’t matter, then “America is an idea” is a joke.
One X user, Old Stock Appalachian, succinctly put the importance of recognizing Heritage Americans: “The Heritage American debate isn’t just about severing your connection to the American past. The more sinister idea is that what you do today carries no inheritance forward. Serve your country. Build something. Sacrifice. Endure. Die for it. Then be told your descendants have no special claim to your story, no right to take pride in your sacrifice, no deeper connection because of what you gave. Once you convince a people that inheritance, lineage, and posterity mean nothing, you’ve weakened one of the oldest reasons men sacrifice for a future they’ll never live to see.”
Mocking or minimizing the connection Heritage Americans have to this country, its institutions, its people, or pretending that inheritance is indistinguishable from a newly minted American citizen does not make America better or stronger. It severs the very link between sacrifice and posterity that make a nation, a nation, as Old Stock Appalachian points out.
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.
