Remembering the particular cultural heritage of the Founding keeps us anchored in a uniquely American identity — one the left is desperate to destroy
The Thirteen Colonies didn’t have a unified culture at the outset of the American Revolution, so that means a Muslim immigrant is just as American as someone whose ancestors have been here for 400 years. America has never had a common cultural heritage, and you’re an evil right-wing bigot if you think it did, at least according to a recent article in The New York Times.
The author of the article, Leighton Woodhouse, conveniently spells it out in his headline: “The Right-Wing Myth of American Heritage.” His evidence for this so-called myth? Some Irish Presbyterians and English Quakers had a disagreement in colonial Pennsylvania and called each other bad names in a pamphlet war.
According to Woodhouse, “This was the state of relations between European settlers on the brink of the American Revolution. It’s a history that is inconvenient to the latest ideological project of the nativist right.”
True Americans, proponents of this emerging patriotic mythology believe, are the cultural descendants of founders who were united by a shared system of values and folkways even more than by an Enlightenment political creed of equality, liberty and democracy. Those founders were Protestant, largely English-speaking, Northwestern Europeans. Those who can trace their bloodlines to that group, which one essay describes as a ‘founding ethnicity,’ are, in some spiritual sense, deemed more American than those who cannot. And the dilution of that pure American stock by mass immigration has made the country less culturally unified.
“But the mythology these conservatives are spinning is historically delusional. Americans have never been ‘a group of people with a shared history.’”
This entire argument is, of course, nothing but leftist propaganda trying to convince you that bringing in Third World migrants who have no cultural affinity for American values and have no desire to assimilate is just part of the great American experiment.
“The United States isn’t exceptional because of our common cultural heritage; we’re exceptional because we’ve been able to cohere despite faiths, traditions and languages that set us apart, and sometimes against one another,” Woodhouse writes later in the article. “The founding fathers were an assortment of people from different histories and backgrounds who coexisted — often just barely — because they didn’t have any other choice but to do so.”
The author tortures the definition of “common culture” to be as wide or narrow as he needs it to be to push his agenda. Apparently, Irish Presbyterians and English Quakers were so different that they were at each others’ throats and it’s a miracle they were able to cohere into a nation, but having Protestant Europeans, Catholic Latinos, Hindu Indians, and Muslim Arabs in the same country is a recipe for a melting pot utopia. --->READ MORE HERE
A shared American identity and cultural heritage isn’t some nativist delusion, it’s the only reason we’re not a collection of warring tribes.
The most important debate in America today is not about immigration policy but about what it means to be an American. Our immigration debate is of course a proxy for that. It’s easier to argue over asylum policy, or ICE enforcement protocols, than it is to tackle the fraught question of who is an American and who isn’t, who really belongs here and who doesn’t.
At the heart of this debate are competing historical narratives about our heritage. On the right, there’s a growing willingness to argue straightforwardly and unapologetically that America isn’t just a creed or a proposition but a nation with a shared history and culture. Vice President J.D. Vance endorsed this view last year in his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention. “America is not just an idea,” he said. “It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation.”
To truly be an American, in this view, means embracing an Anglo-American and Christian inheritance and insisting on certain western cultural norms. It means rejecting multiculturalism in favor of our founding Anglo-American culture, with the understanding that preserving this cultural base is the only way to ensure liberty and dignity for all American citizens, regardless of national origin.
By contrast, the liberal narrative foisted on us aggressively for the past forty years is that if being an American means anything it should mean apologizing for your nation’s history, repudiating its Anglo-American inheritance, and celebrating non-western cultures while allowing unlimited immigration from every corner of the globe.
Resistance to that received narrative is growing. The phrase “heritage American” is now embraced by some quarters of the right that rightly think someone whose ancestors fought in the Civil War is more American than someone who just arrived here from a foreign country.
The left understands the right’s newfound confidence in asserting an American heritage and identity is a direct threat to multiculturism. To fight back, some liberals are taking direct aim at the entire concept of American heritage, deriding it as nativist and racist. A recent article in The New York Times by Leighton Woodhouse argues that the notion of a shared American identity traceable to the colonial era is historically delusional: “The founding fathers were an assortment of people from different histories and backgrounds who coexisted — often just barely — because they didn’t have any other choice but to do so.”
To back up this bizarre claim, which the founders themselves rejected, Woodhouse cites various conflicts between Puritans, Quakers, Anglicans, and Presbyterians — as if relatively minor disagreements between these different Christian groups in the colonial era is qualitatively the same as unresolvable religious conflict between Muslims and Christians, or cultural differences between American evangelicals and Pakistani Hindus. --->READ MORE HERE
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