Many posts have discussed the Founding.
Matthew Continetti at AEI on J.D. Vance's "blood and soil" rhetoric:
In June, Vance made a similar argument in a speech to the Claremont Institute, whose mission is “to restore the principles of the American founding.” The institute might try starting with the vice president. If an American is simply someone who agrees “with the creedal principles of America,” Vance said, that would include “millions, maybe billions, of foreigners,” while excluding “a lot of people the ADL would label domestic extremists, even though their own ancestors were here at the time of the Revolutionary War.”
Excuse me? Why the gratuitous reference to the Anti-Defamation League, a Jewish organization? And when did bloodlines trump lawfulness and reverence for the Constitution? There are more than a few American Jews whose ancestors lived in America during the Revolution. And certainly creedal principles mattered in
1776. The people who didn’t believe in them were called Tories. They became Canadian.
At the National Conservatism Conference in Washington, D.C., in early September, Senator Eric Schmitt of Missouri took up Vance’s line of thought. “We Americans,” he said, “are the sons and daughters of the Christian pilgrims that poured out from Europe’s shores to baptize a new world in their ancient faith.”
Stirring rhetoric, I suppose. But isn’t Schmitt leaving a whole bunch of people out? Like: the descendants of African slaves brought here involuntarily long before his German ancestors arrived in Missouri in the 1840s. And: the descendants of Jewish and Chinese and Japanese and Mexican immigrants. And: the naturalized citizens who’ve arrived since the 1970s and taken an oath to “defend the Constitution and the laws of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”
Ranking citizens by date of arrival has consequences. It creates a mirror-image identity politics as exclusive and unappetizing as the left-wing version. It empties civic nationalism of substance. It turns citizenship into Ancestry.com. It rejects all who believe that America represents something more than blood and soil—that it is the last best hope of earth.
Since Abraham Lincoln, Americans have read the Constitution through the lens of the Declaration—as a blueprint for the government of a national community that conceivably every person could join. Thus, after the Civil War and Reconstruction, citizenship became the criterion for belonging to the American People. The 14th Amendment, ratified in 1868, states that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.” Their “privileges and immunities” cannot be abridged.
What a tragedy it would be if we spend the next year celebrating America’s birthday—only to forget what America means.
