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| WILLIAM WARBY/UNSPLASH |
If America is to ever experience a renewal, it must first understand not only what was taken from it, but the mechanisms, etched in American mythos, that allowed it to happen.
America’s 250th birthday feels more like a funeral.The lack of enthusiasm most recently presented itself when musicians set to play in the Great American State Fair concert series this summer withdrew, pointing to the polarizing and political nature of the event that had, in their words, been sold to them as a nonpartisan and neutral celebration of America. Country music singer Martina McBride wrote as much on social media, stating that the invitation to perform at a “nonpartisan” event “turned out to be misleading.”
Yet America was hardly a nonpartisan, harmonious nation 50 years ago.
In the lead-up to the bicentennial, the nation was still dealing with the aftershocks of the civil rights era; the Weather Underground had spent years bombing courthouses, banks, and government buildings in a leftist-fueled domestic terror campaign; the Vietnam War had ended in heartwrenching defeat; and the nation was mired in massive inflation, rising unemployment, and pervasive economic despair thanks in part to staggeringly high oil prices.
And yet America’s 200th birthday featured Elvis, the Eagles, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and Aerosmith performing before packed stadiums, while 6 million spectators witnessed Operation Sail. Despite all the turmoil, the American people managed to unify in an outpouring of patriotism. But how? Because Americans were still largely a people with a historic memory and a sense of national “self.” That identity had been largely forged during 40 years of restricted immigration — beginning in 1924 and ending with the Hart-Celler Act in 1965 — that allowed a singular American identity to solidify.
American statesmen like Theodore Roosevelt railed against “hyphenated Americanism.” President Calvin Coolidge, signing the Immigration Act of 1924, was explicit about his desire to keep America American. These were not fringe positions, but the mainstream convictions of a nation that understood itself as a people, not merely a set of propositions.
America in 2026 is no longer the same nation. In fact, in far too many crucial ways, it is no longer a nation in the traditional sense at all. After all, the Latin word for nation is natio, originating from the word nasci, meaning “birth,” denoting a people, not a paperwork process. The ethnic and cultural composition of the country has been altered so fundamentally from its 1976 state that inherited national memory, cultural continuity, and common civic reference points have all but evaporated.
It is within this deliberate restructuring that America fell victim to a decades-long effort by academic, media, and political elites to redefine it as a “propositional” nation — weaponizing the myth that anyone can become an American by simply adopting a set of ideals. Proponents of “America is an idea” have relied on four specific texts to accomplish this redefinition. I call them the Four Myths of American Civic Universalism: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence, Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, Emma Lazarus’ poem on the Statue of Liberty, and JFK’s “A Nation of Immigrants.”
Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence
The universalist misreading begins with none other than the nation’s founding document, the Declaration of Independence. Two phrases in particular, “all men are created equal” and “unalienable Rights … to Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” have been interpreted to apply not just to Americans, but to the world at large. Most people never read beyond them.
Upon closer inspection, the Declaration was a carefully crafted diplomatic sales pitch designed to win French sympathy and support for the war. It’s no coincidence that Benjamin Franklin went to Paris soon after, armed with its appeals to Enlightenment ideals.
In reality, the core of the Declaration of Independence is legal, not philosophical, citing 27 violations of the colonists’ rights specifically as Englishmen, which were rooted in the Magna Carta and the English Bill of Rights. It followed the Olive Branch Petition, which argued that the colonists were being denied rights as British subjects. Ultimately, it is in our English heritage, and not just Enlightenment universalism, that the document’s true meaning lies.
Today, “all men are created equal” has morphed into the claim that all cultures are equal. That anyone seeking “the pursuit of Happiness” should be welcomed regardless of cultural compatibility. Leftists use this to argue that mass immigration is both rooted in the founding and a form of atonement for America’s past sin of slavery and restrictive (that is, “racist”) immigration laws. Conservatives make an eerily similar case, casting the founding as a war for universal principles that makes anyone who works hard and loves liberty an American-in-waiting.
What gets lost is that the Constitution of 1787 was effectively a counterrevolution to the radical excesses of 1776. There’s a reason universalists, such as Abraham Lincoln, point to the Declaration’s preamble while traditionalists ground themselves in the Constitution’s “to ourselves and our posterity.” Without that constitutional grounding, the Declaration of Independence becomes an open-ended mandate for cultural revolution and demographic transformation.
Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address
G.K. Chesterton wrote in 1922 that America was “the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed,” tracing it to the Declaration of Independence. Conservatives rightfully revere Chesterton, but he was an English outsider describing an America that had already been transformed by the Civil War’s ideological revolution.
That revolution was Lincoln’s deliberate substitution of the “universal creed” found in the Declaration of Independence for the constitutional heritage, as stated in his now-famous Gettysburg Address. “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” This served a practical political purpose.
Lincoln was fielding a Northern force that was 25 percent foreign born, with another 18 percent being second-generation immigrants, and he needed an aspirational and ideological hook in the absence of a shared “American” heritage to unite the German revolutionaries and Irish immigrants against a South that was 95 percent native born. So Lincoln shoehorned a universalist rationale into a war initially launched to preserve the Union. --->READ MORE HERE
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