You might have noticed there is a heated debate underway on the American right over the question of American identity. What makes someone an American? Is it based on lineage or is it propositional? Is America a nation and a people, or is it an idea based on universal principles?
After World War Two, these questions were largely swept under the rug. The dominant narrative, pushed by nearly every mainstream institution and both political parties, was that America was a credal, propositional country. Anyone, from any part of the world, professing any religion or worldview, could become an American. To suggest otherwise was racist and xenophobic, and frankly un-American. By the 1980s, the notion that America is a “nation of immigrants” had taken root in public discourse. America, we were told, was not a particular people but an ideal to which every human being on earth could aspire. It was for everyone.....
But actually it’s possible, and in fact necessary, to insist on a synthesis of America as an idea, a proposition, and America as a people and a nation with a particular history and culture. That culture, because it is at its core English and Christian, requires an affirmation of a very specific set of intellectual propositions that are unique to England and the Christian faith that shaped the English.
The propositions themselves, however, are not enough. They are necessary but not sufficient, because they rely for their coherence on a set of cultural folkways and attitudes that are particular to a people and a place, and which emerged from a specific historical context—distinctly Christian and English. The source of our liberty, for example, is not our Founding documents (great as they are) but our folkways. The former emerged from the latter, not the other way around.
Hence, the ideas articulated in those documents are not as universal as we have been led to believe. “You are an American if you believe in the rule of law,” says Ramaswamy. But many cultures and nations believe in the rule of law. What matters of course is how the law is made, how it is enforced, and whether it meets the demands of justice. You are an American if you believe in “meritocracy,” he says. But many Asian countries embrace meritocracy more fully than the United States does. Singapore has the rule of law and meritocracy. And yet Singapore is not America — or American in any meaningful sense.
And in fact, that is what Ramaswamy, along with a certain swath of Romney-era Republicans, actually think. They have no problem, for example, with large corporations that don’t promote American values or interests, or that will gladly ship American jobs overseas. They share the basic worldview of corporate elites, who see the American people as nothing more than labor inputs, replaceable cogs that can be swapped out for cheaper ones in Asia or Africa, as need arises.
This is actually the logical endpoint of Ramaswamy’s credal view of Americanness. If anyone can be an American, then no one really is an American, and nothing in particular is owed to the American people by their leaders. If millions of workers in India or Pakistan want to come here to make more money, and they will do the job for a lower wage than native-born Americans, on what grounds should we deny them entry?
Ramaswamy has no answer to that question. His anemic view of American identity prevents him from acknowledging that some peoples, from some cultures, will never become Americans — no matter how much they might embrace the abstract propositions Ramaswamy mistakenly thinks are at the heart of our nation.
