Heritage Americans don’t exist – UnHerd

On Monday, the US Department of Homeland Security tweeted out a painting of a 19th-century American pioneer couple cradling a newborn baby. They’re sitting in a wagon, and beyond them you can see the vast landscape of the American West. “Remember your Homeland’s Heritage,” read the accompanying text.

You could contrive many different ways to interpret this tweet, but in the context of American politics, one of them is impossible to ignore. Both the language of the tweet and the aesthetics of the painting evoke a gauzy, nostalgic white nationalism that has become a subculture of what used to be called the “alt-Right”. Whether this was the painter’s intention is irrelevant. To anyone steeped in the vocabulary of the online culture wars, it’s obvious what the tweet is meant to convey.

Naturally, DHS doesn’t come right out and say it. Like any good shit poster, it leaves just enough room for ambiguity to allow it to answer its accusers with feigned shock and ridicule: how could you possibly infer racism from this wholesome depiction of our common American heritage? But this trolling doesn’t fool anyone. What’s being said is this: some Americans are more American than others. Specifically, those who can trace their lineage in the United States back many generations are more American than naturalised US citizens, or even the native-born American children of immigrants.

The word “heritage” is the giveaway. Among nativist-leaning American nationalists, the term “Heritage Americans” refers to those who can trace their lineage in the US back to the genetic stock of colonial America. To its proponents, Heritage Americans constitute an “American ethnicity” — basically WASP, with a smattering of German, and a sliver of Scandinavian. Some would also count black descendants of slaves as Heritage Americans, though others would not. Those who cannot claim this lineage are presumed to be somehow less American than those who can.

While DHS can’t say this outright, MAGA influencers such as Jack Posobiec can. A few days ago, at a Turning Point USA conference, Posobiec, aping Trump, claimed that New York City Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani, a naturalised US citizen, is not, in fact, an American. “This idea that if you just hand someone a piece of paper that makes them American,” he said, referring to US citizenship, “guess what, it’s failed. It’s wrong. It’s not true.” “You are fake Americans,” Posobiec growled, “and we are going to smoke you out, every single one of you.”

A couple of days later, Posobiec’s “fake Americans” net grew even wider. Referring to Minneapolis mayoral candidate Omar Fateh, he tweeted: “This is clearly not an American.” Fateh was born in Washington, D.C., to immigrant parents from Somalia. There is no question of his citizenship status, though Trump’s executive order purporting to repeal birthright citizenship could conceivably change that. (When I asked Posobiec to explain exactly what separates a real from a “fake” American, he replied: “Everyone knows what an American is.”)

What Mamdani and Fateh have in common is that neither of them are “Heritage Americans” — a term that isn’t just legally meaningless, but also historically delusional. The conceit behind it is that the early Americans shared a common culture and set of values. This is because they were mostly English and universally Christian. Therefore, the narrative goes, they were united in their belief in such core Anglo-American virtues as democracy, rule of law, and limited government. Later waves of migrants, like those who went through Ellis Island, were further removed from these shared Anglo-American folkways, but not entirely so, as they were almost entirely from Europe. Since Americans opened their country to the rest of the world in the later 20th century, however, the nation has been inundated with people who are completely alien to American political and moral culture. From that began the dissolution of American society. This is roughly JD Vance’s point of view.

This is all ahistorical mythmaking. There was little that was culturally unifying across Colonial America. Just because the colonists were English and Christian didn’t mean they all got on — in fact, it meant the opposite. In the Old World, Christianity had been the source of endless fragmentation and war for 100 years, while England had been torn apart by those divisions more than perhaps any other country in Europe. These hatreds found their apotheosis in the bloodbath of the English Civil War, whose ripples spread across the Atlantic Ocean to the American eastern seaboard. There, the colonists of Virginia and the greater Tidewater region were faithful servants of the deposed King — many of them had fought for him as Cavaliers. Meanwhile, the colonists of Massachusetts Bay shared the Puritan faith of those who had chopped off the King’s head. What the two colonies had in common wasn’t “shared values”, but deep mutual contempt.

“This is all ahistorical mythmaking.”

In the Old World, the various regional populations of England despised one another. In the American colonies, they could live apart in mutual disdain. With their newfound isolation and political autonomy, the differences between them became even more pronounced. In New England, the Puritans established a flat, communitarian social order topped by a strong and sometimes authoritarian government. Meanwhile, the Tidewater gentry reproduced the fixed hierarchical order of the English aristocracy as best they could. They in turn were loathed by the anti-statist Ulster Scots of the Appalachian backcountry, who for centuries in Britain had fought for what they regarded as their natural, God-given liberties against the constant oppression and predations of the English and Scottish crowns. The Deep South idealised a Roman-style slaveocracy ruled by oligarchs, while the Quakers of Pennsylvania established a pacifist society based on tolerance and Christian love.

These disparate cultures could not have been more hostile to each other. The unification they achieved under the drafting of the Constitution and Bill of Rights was the result of painstaking horse trading and compromise in the face of a common enemy. Even that wasn’t enough to prevent secession and an American civil war a century later. What finally cohered American civilisation, if anything, was the dilution of regional and sectarian identities in the bloody mess of westward expansion — a historical process that involved not just Americans of European ancestry but people from all over the world, from Sweden to Peru to China.

“Heritage Americans” would have you believe that America’s founding was easy, due to the natural cultural affinity and brotherly affection of its people. But this is an affront to America’s history, whose exceptionalism is found in the yawning fissures it overcame, against the odds, through its commitment to democracy. This may sound like postmodern revisionism to the Right, but the fact is that the United States has always been a multicultural society. It’s only through the distortion of our modern eyes that we fail to perceive the cultural and political diversity out of which we forged a nation.

“Heritage” is a relic of feudal Europe, in which social status was a function of one’s bloodline. America was founded specifically to leave all that behind. What united us was not a common history or language or tradition, but a shared drive to seek prosperity for our families through hard work, rather than resign ourselves to our stations of birth. In this commitment, the immigrants who seek opportunity in the US today are as American as those who landed on the Mayflower. It’s those who would replace this American self-conception with an anachronistic caste system based on ancestry who betray the founding ideals of the country.