America Isn’t A ‘Proposition,’ It’s A People

At the recent NatCon conference in Washington, D.C., Sen. Eric Schmitt of Missouri delivered a powerful speech about American identity, arguing that our nation isn’t merely an abstract proposition about human equality and rights, but a distinct people with a shared past and a common future.

“For decades, the mainstream consensus on the Left and the Right alike seemed to be that America itself was just an ‘idea’ — a vehicle for global liberalism,” Schmitt said. “We were told that the entire meaning of America boiled down to a few lines in a poem on the Statue of Liberty and five words about equality in the Declaration of Independence. Any other aspect of American identity was deemed to be illegitimate and immoral, poisoned by the evils of our ancestors. The true meaning of America, they said, was liberalism, multiculturalism, and endless immigration.”

Not so, argued Schmitt. America’s principles, he said, are not abstractions. “They are living, breathing things — rooted in a people and embodied in a way of life. It’s only in that context that they become real.”

This is absolutely correct. Those who would reduce America to an abstract proposition either misunderstand or misrepresent our history and heritage. As I argued at NatCon last year, nearly everyone who argues that America is a proposition is wrong about what the proposition is and what it means. “All men are created equal” is a specifically Christian claim, not a universal call to multiculturalism and mass immigration. It emerged as a political ideal from Christian Europe, and arrived in America by way of settlers and pioneers who came here specifically to establish a nation where they could practice their Christian faith as they saw fit.

In other words, America isn’t a grab-bag of Enlightenment tropes about free speech and equality, but the product of Christian Europe. The ideals that animated our founders are universal in the same way that the Christian faith is universal: God created all men equal, they all bear the imago Dei, the image of God, and are all His children. But the only people who ever took that self-evident truth and used it as a foundation on which to forge a new nation were the English colonists in America.

To speak in these terms is of course offensive to the left, which sees our Christian heritage as nothing more than a litany of crimes and a legacy of oppression, ignoring the historical reality that it was Christian moral theology that provided the basis for the modern concept of human rights.

No surprise, then, that Schmitt’s speech upset the usual suspects on the left, especially Obama bro Jon Favreau, who posted on X that all you have to do is skim the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Gettysburg Address, or the monuments around Washington, D.C. to see that America is just an idea. “Our ancestors were fighting for a proposition. They were fighting for an idea. They have told us that. They wrote it down,” Favreau wrote on X — adding for emphasis, “You fu-king morons.”

Had Favreau skimmed the Declaration himself before posting this, he would have seen, right there in the first line, the refutation of his argument: “When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another…” (emphasis mine).

The Founders understood that what they were doing to be specific to the American people, that instituting a government on the basis of the Christian doctrine of imago Dei would require, as John Adams famously put it, a “moral and religious people.” They knew, moreover, that to maintain this form of government would require being careful about who was allowed to join the new American nation, and that too many foreigners would threaten its very existence.

That’s why John Jay, in Federalist No. 2, wrote that “Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people — a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs, and who, by their joint counsels, arms, and efforts, fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established general liberty and independence.”

What he’s describing here is a nation, a specific people bound together by a common culture and ethnicity and religion, not an abstract proposition or a set of ideas to which anyone, anywhere could assent to and become an American. Shared memory, experience, ethos, customs and beliefs are what make up a nation. Propositionalists like Favreau are trapped in a kind of gnostic rationalism. They think that being an American is an entirely cerebral activity, disconnected from all these other things that actually make up a nation and a people.

This way of thinking about America — let’s call it Ellis Islandism — is actually rather recent. The notion that what really made America great was immigration, that we’re actually a “nation of immigrants,” didn’t really become popular until the 1980s, when the youth of the 1960s were finally in positions of real cultural and institutional influence. That’s when you began to see, in a sustained way, propaganda about how evil America’s past was, and how our redemption and true greatness was not to be found in our heritage but in our embrace of multiculturalism.

Indeed, where liberals get hung up on all this, and where they’re quick to accuse conservatives of being racist, is that there are strong ethnic correlations to things like language, religion, customs, habits, and collective history and memory — all the things that Jay said made our country “one united people.” That’s why for much of our history we based immigration policy on national origin, and treated different peoples around the world differently. We knew that some of them would be better suited to becoming Americans than others.

That’s still true today, and it isn’t racist or a betrayal of our founding creed to say so. The founders themselves said it and created policy around it, and we should too. Muslims from Pakistan or Hindus from India are going to have a much harder time becoming Americans than the Afrikaner descendants of Dutch Calvinists. For people who choose to retain the alien culture and customs of their native lands, it simply won’t ever be possible to become American. It’s not racist or xenophobic to admit that, it’s simply a recognition of reality.

And reality is exactly what has long been missing, until recently, from our debates over immigration policy, which in the end were just a proxy for our debates over American identity. Now we are finally starting to have the real, long overdue debate. Contributions like Schmitt’s speech, as well as Vice President J.D. Vance’s speech at the RNC last summer, are a good start. We’ve spent the last 60 years indulging liberal nonsense about America being a proposition, and it’s long past time to be done with all that, clear our heads of cant, and return to the wisdom of our founders.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.