America America: A Nation of Assimilants, Not Immigrants Attracting immigrants is not what sets America apart; it’s the ability to make them Americans. As America approaches its 250th birthday, the question of who are the American people who have sustained this nation for two and a half centuries and who will sustain it for ages to come is worthy of exploration. One of the most persistent myths in modern American politics is that America is a “nation of immigrants.” The phrase is repeated so often that few pause to examine what it actually implies, yet it obscures the true source of American success. America’s greatness was never its ability to attract immigrants. It was its ability to turn them into Americans. America is not a nation of immigrants; America is a nation of assimilants. Immigration is the act of arrival. Assimilation is the act of becoming. Our most successful immigrants do not remain what they were before they arrived. They become Americans and embrace our culture, institutions, and way of life. Human beings have migrated throughout history, and every empire, trading port, and frontier society has drawn newcomers, but there is nothing uniquely American about immigration itself. What made the American experiment remarkable was the capacity to transform strangers into fellow countrymen. The immigrant arrived as an Italian, a German, an Irishman, a Pole, a Greek, a Jew, a Swede, a Cuban, or a Vietnamese, and his children became Americans. That transformation was the miracle. Today one of the central debates on the right asks whether America is fundamentally a creed or a nation. Is it simply a set of ideas open to anyone who professes them, or is it a particular people living in a particular place with a particular inheritance? The question itself is flawed because you cannot separate the people from the idea. The American creed did not descend from the heavens. It was forged by a particular people, in a particular place, under a particular set of historical circumstances. The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the institutions of self-government were the political achievements of the American people. At the same time, the American people are more than an ethnic group occupying a continent, and what binds us is a shared inheritance of laws, institutions, customs, memories, symbols, stories, and ideals. The people need the creed as much as the creed needs the people. Without the creed, America becomes just another nation-state. Without the people, America becomes merely a theory. America is the product of both ideas and the real historical experience of a real people. John Jay understood this when he described Americans in Federalist 2 as “one united people” inhabiting “one connected country.” The Constitution was not written for humanity in the abstract. It was written for a people already bound together by common habits, common memories, and common affections. The Founders did not create Americans, but rather Americans created the Founding. Later at Gettysburg, Abraham Lincoln did not describe America as merely a proposition. He called it a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. The proposition gave the nation its purpose, and the nation gave the proposition life. The creed and the country cannot be separated. One of the most revealing observations about the limits of legal status and abstract belief came from Malcolm X. In 1964 he declared, “No, I’m not an American.” Malcolm was not denying his citizenship. He was insisting that merely occupying the territory or holding the documents does not make someone fully part of the nation. I disagree with his conclusion—black Americans were and are full and equal members of the American people and the American nation—but Malcolm’s underlying insight was nevertheless profound and correct. A nation is more than paperwork, territory, or even shared political principles. A nation is a people bound together by shared loyalties, memories, institutions, and affections. Ironically, Malcolm X grasped something that many modern advocates of a purely creedal America still miss. Genuine membership requires more than presence or profession. It requires joining the people in their common life. Theodore Roosevelt made the same point with characteristic force. In 1919 he wrote: If the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the person’s becoming in every facet an American, and nothing but an American…. There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn’t an American at all. Assimilation, in other words, is not exclusion. It is the pathway to full and equal membership in the American people. The immigrant who takes that path does not lose a heritage. He gains a home, a people, and a future he can pass on to his children. George Washington understood this when he wrote that a common country has a right to “concentrate your affections.” Affection is not a legal category. It is loyalty and belonging. It is the conviction that this country is yours and that you are responsible for its future. This abandonment of “concentrated affections” is where modern America has lost its way. For decades Americans have been told that “diversity is our strength”, meaning the racial and cultural diversity that immigration brings.  The reality is that diversity is not our strength. Diversity is simply a fact. A nation can be diverse and strong. It can be diverse and weak. It can be diverse and united. It can be diverse and fractured. Diversity itself tells us almost nothing. What matters is whether a nation possesses the cultural confidence to transform diversity into unity. America’s strength was never that we came from different places. America’s strength was that we became one people, the opposite of diversity. The national motto captures this perfectly with the phrase E Pluribus Unum: out of many, one. Notice the direction of the phrase. It does not celebrate permanent fragmentation or diversity. It celebrates the creation of a common national identity. The old American model was simple. We welcomed immigrants, and we expected them to become Americans. That model succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. The Irish did not remain permanently Irish, nor the Italians Italian, nor the Poles Polish. They and their descendants became Americans. They learned English, adopted American customs, served in American armies, built American businesses, and married other Americans. They moved across the continent and made America’s history their own. The result was not multiculturalism. The result was nationhood. This is why the phrase “nation of immigrants” ultimately misses the point. The defining feature of America was never immigration. The defining feature of America was assimilation into the American nation. Anyone can become an American. That is one of the greatest strengths of the American nation, but not everyone will and not everyone wants to. Anyone can join us, but joining us requires becoming one of us. That is not exclusionary. It is the very essence of nationhood. Every successful nation in history has required newcomers to adopt the loyalties, obligations, and identity of the nation they join, and America is no different. The immigrant who assimilates contributes enormously to America, not because he adds another category to a demographic spreadsheet, but because he strengthens the American people themselves. The assimilant becomes part of the American story. He inherits the American creed and loyalty to the American people and in doing so he helps carry the nation forward. No modern figure illustrates this truth more powerfully than Elon Musk. Born in South Africa, he immigrated to the United States, became an American citizen, and built companies that made him the richest man in the world. Through SpaceX, he restored American space predominance and reestablished national pride after a period in which we shamefully relied on the Russians for access to space. None of this could have happened anywhere else. Only in America could an immigrant arrive with ambition and determination, fully join the American people, and create enterprises of such scale that they directly strengthen the nation’s technological leadership, industrial capacity, and strategic position for generations to come. America is not a proposition floating in the air. It is not an ethnicity. It is not merely an economic zone or a set of borders. America is a people, living in a place, carrying an idea. That is what previous generations built and what assimilation preserved. An insistence on the assimilation of immigrants is what we must recover on the occasion of our 250th birthday as a nation if we wish to remain one nation, under God, indivisible, for generations to come. America is not a nation of immigrants. It is a nation of assimilants, and it must remain one if it is to enjoy another 250 years. The post America: A Nation of Assimilants, Not Immigrants appeared first on The American Conservative.

Takimag Bored on the Fourth of July Happy Fourth of July! Whatever that means—I dunno, I’m English. TakiMag My cousin was born on the Fourth of July. He wasn’t Tom Cruise in a wheelchair, just an ordinary English boy to whom, other than the annual anniversary of his own existence, the occasion meant absolutely nothing whatsoever. Sometimes, when he was very small, his parents would highlight footage of Fourth of July celebrations taking place thousands of miles away across the Atlantic whenever they appeared in Hollywood movies, and lie that such pretty fireworks were all being staged for his own personal birthday benefit. He believed them. My cousin was not, and is not, a retard. He helps build and design airplane components for a living, so you’d better hope not, anyway. It is just that, in other countries across the globe, knowledge of many domestic commonplaces of U.S. history are not the universally known cultural and civilizational lodestones U.S. natives may have been raised to expect they might be. Benedict Arnold, Stonewall Jackson, George Washington and the cherry tree, Ichabod Crane and the Headless Horseman: all events and figures basically unknown to the average non-American abroad. When, as a child myself, I heard someone on TV describe President Ronald Reagan as “signing his John Hancock” on some treaty or other, I wondered why he was doing it with his privates. Surely not because he couldn’t afford a pen. Was it just to show contempt for the Russians?  Even though London was America’s old colonial overlord, many ordinary descendants of Redcoats over here don’t know the slightest thing about American history, or even its modern politics; 90 percent of Brits probably think the House of Congress is a Washington brothel. (In the Clinton years, they may have been right.) And what was the Gettysburg Address, when it was at home? Abraham Lincoln’s P.O. Box number?  The whole current “America 250” thing is therefore something of a mystery to many of us over here, especially when we turn on the news and see it being celebrated by a big homoerotic wrestling match on the White House lawn. Two hundred and fifty years since what? many would ask in complete, unfeigned ignorance. Since the initial founding of the WWE wrestling league? With his stovepipe hat, Lincoln did look a bit like an Undertaker. Surveys continually ridiculing Americans for their lack of knowledge about other countries’ geography or history are common, but the same pattern works the other way around too. Ironically, one of the main stereotypes about Americans in European nations is that they are educationally ill-informed. Maybe Europeans should try looking in the mirror sometime.  The main problem here in the UK would appear to be that American history (with one key thematic exception, which we’ll come to later) just isn’t taught in modern-day British schools. But then again, quite a lot just isn’t taught in modern-day British schools. I should know, because during a former career I used to be responsible for not teaching it. The levels of general ignorance amongst certain students were quite shocking. I don’t just mean never having heard of Thoreau, Whitman, Emerson, or the New England Transcendentalist movement; literary lacunae like that are understandable. I mean genuine gaps in simple common knowledge like (and these are all real examples from my own time in the classroom) not knowing what an octopus or a pickaxe or a helicopter are. One child refused to believe dinosaurs ever existed “because I’ve never seen one.” Me neither, to be fair.  Another girl truly did not know London was the capital of England. Mind you, looking at the state of its inhabitants 20 years later, I can see why she might have been confused. One teenager was even more confused by an end-of-term reward screening of Ghostbusters, asking how the filmmakers had managed to train all the ghosts to act on cue for them on camera like that. I still cherish the semi-informed adolescent female who thought Tolstoy had written a novel called Anna Kournikova: “Game, Set, and Match, Count Vronsky.” In terms of Americana, she no doubt thought Alexander Hamilton et al. had written The Federer Papers.  When it came to their formative “knowledge” of American history, most English children (including myself) absorbed it mainly from watching imported cartoons, primarily The Simpsons; so, a substantial proportion of Brits probably now consider the U.S. historically a yellow country, not a white one. Likewise, thanks to the recent “racially blind” musical of his life, I truly think the majority of UK citizens believe the highly obscure (to us) Alexander Hamilton was black or Hispanic. Cowboys and Indians always puzzled us as kids, too. The Indians we knew never tried firing any arrows at us; they just got on quietly with running their corner shops.  Around a quarter of students I taught honestly didn’t realize Britain had once “owned” America in the first place. Teaching them English Language at A-Level (the leading UK exam qualification for 17- to 18-year-olds), when it came to bringing in Noah Webster, it soon transpired that a small minority didn’t realize Americans spoke English at all, never mind why. “They don’t! They speak American!” I was told, not as an adolescent satire of how you all call “football” “soccer,” or “pavements” “sidewalks,” or “crisps” “potato chips,” but as a genuine “factual” opinion.  “America and Britain are two nations divided by a common language,” George Bernard Shaw once supposedly said, and it turns out he was correct. But did he speak these words in English or American? One year, in order to “celebrate multiculturalism”, our school staged a “Global Citizen Week”, where I was assigned responsibility for designing and delivering a quiz about the Americas. Ordered to include a few (theoretically) impossible-to-get-wrong answers so as to avoid any particularly dim infant suffering the indignity of getting a final score of zero, one of the joke queries I posed was “On what date do Americans celebrate the Fourth of July?” Some of them didn’t know. And if they didn’t know when the Fourth of July was, the chances of them knowing what it was were even slimmer. It all sounds very amusing, but such chronic unawareness had its darker side too, as it meant the children were far easier to manipulate in terms of forming their naïve view of the USA. Lack of knowledge represents an intellectual vacuum into which the leftists who design UK school curriculums these days can pour their anti-Western poison all the more easily. The one area of American history which does appear all over the curriculum in British schools in the 21st century is slavery and the civil rights movement. As a result, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, and Teddy Roosevelt are largely a mystery to British kids; Emmett Till, Martin Luther King, and Rosa Parks are not. The whole point is to (mis-)represent America—and, by extension, the entire Western world from whose historic white European inheritance it grew—as irredeemably and inarguably wicked and racist, and therefore to deserve tearing down like a statue of an old Confederate general.   During my own ’80s and ’90s schooldays, this was not really the case. When, happily unindoctrinated by schoolyard Race-Marxism, I first saw Spike Lee’s Malcolm X in my teens and it got to the scene where he was shot, I thought the fool deserved it. By the time I reentered the classroom as an English teacher myself in the mid-2000s, after left-wing Blair-era educational “reforms” had enjoyed enough time to work their malign effect, I was bemused to find myself endlessly teaching To Kill a Mockingbird and Of Mice and Men. I wanted to read H.G. Wells’s Invisible Man with the kids, not Ralph Ellison’s; in the end, it was one of the reasons I finally quit.  If you ever wondered why Black Lives Matter caught on so easily across the pond in England, where we never even had any domestic black slavery or official racial segregation to protest about, this might help explain it.  So, when they hear the phrase “America 250,” a substantial number of Brits have by now been conditioned by decades’ worth of media, education and political brainwashing to think it automatically means not 250 years of World Wrestling Entertainment, but 250 years of a different WWE entirely: White Western Evil. Without really stopping to do the math(s), some who are particularly well up on their imported New York Times reeducation programs may even reflexively think the year being referred to by that significant semiquincentennial number is 1619, not 1776. Still, there is some consolation for disappointed transatlantic history teachers. Whilst non-American schoolkids these days might not know what the Fourth of July is, you can be damn sure they all know what Juneteenth is. The post Bored on the Fourth of July appeared first on The American Conservative.

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