America and Americanness at 250.
My colleague and friend Andrew Beck has written a useful and provocative essay about a subject that has been simmering in American politics for decades. The dual accelerants of events and ideology brought that simmer to a boil in 2020. The disputed question remains open: What is an American? It’s impossible to answer that question without its predicate: What is America? If we answer those questions, we are led to the primordial question of politics, which concerns justice: Are America and her institutions good?
These are the fundamental queries at the heart of the assimilation debate. What are we assimilating new Americans to—and why? The Right remains divided on these issues, as it has in different and shifting ways in the postwar era. Until the Left moderates on the topics of citizenship, assimilation, and civilizational stability, it will be up to the American Right (and its fellow travelers across the Atlantic) to have a rational argument about the preservation of American and Western civilization.
Creedal Mutations
Mr. Beck writes about assimilation in terms of America’s “historic way of life,” “American culture,” “language,” “mores,” “Christianity,” and “civic ideals.” America’s “principled assertiveness” of a “unifying identity,” which is made up of these components, “transformed a continent of European colonists and later immigrants into a single people.” He is correct that “Christianity shaped our institutions, our conception of law and liberty, our ethos of charity, and our traditions of self-rule.”
But we must remember that after decades of self-government and increasing conflict, the American people decided to break with a mother country that shared these common cultural touchstones. Any consideration of a “unifying identity” that has driven assimilation for most of American history after that break must reckon with a new American political culture, forged in the principles and experiences of the American Revolution.
It is fashionable, especially on the young Right, to disparage the place of America’s creed in the American way of life. Abstractions about all men being created equal and natural rights are waved away or denied. Even worse, the American creed—that is, the political thought of the Declaration of Independence—is thought to be a source of the ills of modernity.
However, sober interlocutors in this debate should acknowledge that many on the Right have come by this passion honestly as an overcorrection for intellectual laziness and moral confusion about America being only an idea. Add to that the decades of irresponsible and utopian foreign adventurism in pursuit of “spreading democracy.” Finally, throw in 65 years of heedless immigration policy lacking any due consideration of the cultural distance between the American people and those the ruling class would admit as new Americans. The natural reaction to such a misguided and perverted elevation of the modern so-called “creed” to the exclusion of all else inevitably led to a snap back to a culture-first, or even culture-only, reflex.
But to understand America properly and fully requires an appreciation of the crucial importance of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, in addition to the dominant Anglo-Protestantism present at the American Founding. Both creed and culture matter in America, and after 250 years, they have fused our habits and self-understanding. Picking creed over culture, or vice versa, is utopian because it neglects public opinion and political reality.
In addition to understanding the original blend of American creed and culture at the Founding, it is also vital to understand the ways in which America’s creed and constitutional culture have been warped and appropriated over the last century by the Left, whether under the evolving banners of progressivism, FDR liberalism, post-1960s leftism, or wokeism. If America is to endure, we must rehabilitate the creed after a century of distortion and neglect, while also ensuring our immigration policy doesn’t further erode America’s constitutional culture and way of life.
The O.G. Creed and Its Culture
America’s leading thinker on the relationship between creed and culture in the American Founding is my colleague Charles Kesler. He has been writing about the problem for at least 20 years, sometimes using the great Samuel Huntington as a foil. Huntington was no enemy of America’s creed, but in his book Who Are We?, he put primary emphasis on the Anglo-Protestant culture of America’s Founding. In 2019, Kesler gave an underappreciated speech at the first National Conservatism conference, pointing out the difficulties with Huntington’s culture-first approach:
Huntington is left awkwardly to face the fact that his beloved country began, almost with its first breath, by renouncing and abominating certain salient features of English politics and English Protestantism. Namely, King, Lords, Commons, parliamentary supremacy, primogeniture and entail…and the established national church. There were of course many cultural continuities—Americans continued to speak English, to drink tea, to hold jury trials before rogue judges, and to read the King James Bible. But there has to be something wrong with an analysis of our national culture that literally leaves out the word “American.” “Anglo-Protestantism”—what’s American about that, exactly? The term would seem to embrace many things that our country tried and gave up and that have never been American at all, much less distinctively so. Huntington tries to get around this difficulty by admitting that the creed has modified Anglo-Protestantism, but if that is so, how can the creed be derived from [the culture] of Anglo-Protestantism? When, where, how, and why does that crucial term “American” creep onto the stage and into our souls?
Thomas Jefferson called the Declaration an “expression of the American mind.” I need not rehearse in full America’s creed here. Most readers of The American Mind know it well.
In a speech at the Claremont Institute’s 2025 Statesmanship Award dinner in July, Vice President JD Vance gave voice to a view on the Right that is gaining momentum:
“[I]dentifying America just with agreeing with the principles…of the Declaration of Independence—that’s a definition that is way overinclusive and underinclusive at the same time. What do I mean by that? Well, first of all, it would include hundreds of millions, maybe billions, of foreign citizens who agree with the principles of the Declaration of Independence. Must we admit all of them tomorrow? If you follow that logic of America as a purely creedal nation, American purely as an idea, that is where it would lead you.
Within the principles of the American creed itself, however, this is a problem that is easily handled. If all men are created equal—that is, they have equal claims to the natural right to liberty—then they cannot justly be ruled without their consent.
The American people also announced their right and duty in the Declaration “to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.” The question of admitting new members of the political community was incorporated into the U.S. Constitution, ratified 12 years after the Declaration. Acting through their representatives in Congress, the American people would control the rules for naturalization. They were thus amply empowered to be the guardians of the velocity and nature of expanding the political community as new immigrants arrived in America.
The question of what kinds of arriving peoples and cultures would be most likely to assimilate to this new American culture, shaped by this new creed, can be found throughout public and private discussions and writings in the early republic. American officials acting on behalf of public opinion would have to guard the understanding of Americanness as America inevitably grew.
Kesler calls this “the statesman’s point of view,” encompassing “both the proper role of creed and culture” in the formation of “a national identity and a common good”:
In the 1760s and early 1770s American citizens and statesmen tried out different arguments in criticism of the mother country’s policies. Essentially, they appealed to one part of their political tradition to criticize another, invoking a version of the ancient constitution to criticize the new constitution of parliamentary supremacy—in effect, appealing not only to Lord Coke against John Locke but to John Locke against John Locke. In the Declaration of Independence Americans appealed both to natural law and rights on the one hand, and to British constitutionalism on the other, but to the latter only insofar as it didn’t contradict the former…. Thus, the American creed emerged from within, but also against, the predominant culture. The revolution justified itself ultimately by an appeal to human nature, not to culture, and in the name of human nature…the American people, and God—as supreme creator, lawgiver, judge, and executive—the revolutionaries set out to form an American union with its own culture. Everyone recognized in the Founding that certain qualities of mind and heart would be required of American citizens. If so, politics…had to help shape a favoring culture. Most of the direct character formation, of course, would take place at the level of families, churches, state and local governments—and eventually public and private schools.
This question of the “certain qualities of mind and heart” necessary for a durable and responsible republican citizenry applies with equal force to the presence, or lack thereof, of those qualities in the future citizens we admit as immigrants. As Pavlos Papadopoulos reminded us recently at American Reformer, George Washington worried even about how a group of moderate European academics, imported all at once into one place, would assimilate to American life in 1794.
This throws into stark relief Beck’s worries about the message being conveyed by the statue of the Hindu deity Hanuman that was erected in Sugar Land, Texas. His worries are Washington’s, updated for our current circumstances and recent immigrant flows in America. By importing enclaves of immigrants while neglecting crucial questions of hearts, minds, and assimilation, Beck fears we are exacerbating the conditions that have been diluting our common national identity for decades.
Immigration and Assimilation—Right and Left
To embellish Beck’s argument in Kesler’s terms, we have neglected the crucial questions of “character formation” that are the rightful and primary province of “families, churches, state and local governments,” and public and private education. If all these institutions were more robust and assertively American, Beck would have had much less reason to raise the questions he does.
The average reader of The American Mind, I suspect, will object that I’m being much too coy. America’s dominant public ruling philosophy has done far worse than just “neglect” the character formation necessary for the perpetuation of our republican institutions. At least 60 years of liberal public policy, NGO legal activism, and cultural warfare have done much to dismantle, disrupt, and corrupt the family; infiltrate American churches, undermining their core tenets; homogenize and defang state and local governments’ superintendence of health, safety, and morals; and transform public and private education into enemies of any confident American identity.
The old creed and culture have their champions, and might still live in the hearts and minds of perhaps even a majority of the American people, however latently. But the prospect of revived momentum and increasing success on various fronts in the Right’s project to revive the older American way of life has radicalized the Left, revealing the depths of its hostility to America as it once was. Our divisions are increasingly over the very ends themselves, not simply just the means.
The critics of Vance’s Claremont speech indignantly invoke the principles of the Declaration and Abraham Lincoln’s praise of them to vilify his caution about a creed-only approach to immigration and assimilation. But a careful reading of the leading documents and public arguments of modern liberalism over the last century shows an intellectual and political movement dedicated to the appropriation and fundamental transformation of America’s founding creed and constitutional culture rather than the application of the old creed’s principles to changing times. The modern Left not only rejects, in Lincoln’s words, “the standard maxims of a free society” laid out in the Declaration of Independence, but also the entire anthropology and cosmology of America’s founding creed.
As Kesler put it in the conclusion of his 2019 NatCon speech, Samuel Huntington’s uncritical acceptance of this modern story liberals tell about themselves and their project led him to misdiagnose our current ills and their civilizational remedy:
He persisted in thinking of liberals…as devotees of the old American creed who pushed its universal principles too far. Who rely on reason to the exclusion of a strong national culture. But when liberals, or progressives, renounced individualism and natural right decades ago, they broke with the American creed and did so proudly. When they abandoned nature as the ground of right, progressives broke as well with reason, understood as a natural capacity for seeking truth, in favor of reason as a servant of will, or of culture, or history, fate, and finally nothingness. In short, Huntington failed to grasp that our liberals attack American culture because they reject the American creed around which that culture has formed and developed from the very beginning…. The American creed is the capstone of American national identity, but it requires a culture to sustain it. And our task…is to recognize the indispensability of the creed but also the absolute necessity of a hospitable culture, which, combined with political wisdom, can help to shape a people who can live up to its own principles.
Those principles and their sustaining culture are at issue in our current debates about immigration and assimilation.
We have two rival creeds and accompanying constitutional cultures vying for public acceptance and legitimization. The Founders’ creed and its limited-government republicanism—however beleaguered and weakened—continues to endure, stubbornly. The Left’s rival creed of lifestyle identity politics and unlimited bureaucratic government has been slowed by reality, internal contradictions, and a revived sense of purpose and political momentum on the Right.
The two rival creeds mean we have two immigration and assimilation paths in front of us. The continued revival, reinvigoration, and assertion of America’s founding creed, constitutionalism, and civilizational confidence can make possible a coherent approach to immigration and assimilation that will preserve American republicanism through our 250th birthday and beyond. However, if we continue down the path of modern liberalism and its insistence that any cultural or creedal assertion by Americans is xenophobic, colonialist, or racist, then assimilation will transform into bureaucratic and despotic balkanization, as we lose the cultural and creedal touchstones that could continue to shape and preserve one American people.
