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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
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. --->READ MORE HERE
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