American Identity Isn’t Just A ‘Creed,’ It’s A People And A Place

In recent weeks, the term “heritage American” has predictably come under sustained attack in left-wing media circles, where it is characterized as a form of white supremacy, dismissed as bigotry masquerading as philosophy, or rejected entirely as an incoherent concept.

While such pushback from the left is to be expected, similar objections have surprisingly been raised by those on the right. This framing from both sides sidesteps the deeper question the term raises: whether America can endure without acknowledging and defending the cultural and historical inheritance that made it a nation in the first place.

Against this backdrop, Ohio Republican gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy recently took aim at the term “heritage American” and those on the right who argue that being an American is more substantive than merely working hard and professing a belief in abstract ideals like “liberty” and “freedom.”

“The idea of a ‘heritage American’ is about as loony as anything the woke left has put up,” Ramaswamy said. “There is no American who is more American than somebody else. … It’s crazy talk. … We believe in ideals. That is who we are.”

But what is more “loony”?

1. The idea that heritage and lineage are important factors in forging and perpetuating America as a cohesive nation?

Or…

2. The idea that anyone from anywhere can become an American, meaning there are 8 billion potential Americans on Earth?

A nation that cannot answer this question honestly has little chance of surviving.

Unfortunately, both the radical left and much of the modern right have retreated from defining America as anything other than a purely credal nation. Surprisingly, both sides routinely point to the same source for this credal justification: the Declaration of Independence.

On the left, although America’s founding is widely described as racist, Thomas Jefferson’s “hypocritical” claim that “all men are created equal” is nevertheless treated as a promise America must eventually fulfill — but a promise to whom?

Jefferson’s preamble may have articulated universal truths, but it was never intended to establish universal jurisdiction. It was written for a specific people living within a specific place. Today, however, it is interpreted as an open-ended invitation, if not an obligation, to the world. “All men are created equal” has morphed into the claim that all cultures are equal. Anyone who seeks “the pursuit of happiness” should be welcomed here, regardless of cultural compatibility. The right to “life” and “liberty” turns into the universal right to immigrate to America and claim its promise for oneself.

Under this logic, mass immigration, especially from cultures antithetical to America’s founding culture, is what actually makes America “stronger,” while also functioning as a form of atonement for America’s original sin of slavery and restrictive (i.e., “racist”) immigration laws. Thus, demographic transformation becomes the means by which America’s “original promise” is finally realized. Whether this immigration is illegal or legal is beside the point. After all, “no human is illegal on stolen land.”

For much of the right, the framing is eerily similar. According to many mainstream conservatives, the American founding was nothing short of a glorious war for universal human principles and ideals.

The “proof” for this can also be found in the Declaration of Independence, which is said to be a promise to “all men” of the world — a promise that conservatives also say the founders fell short of fulfilling in their time. Under this framework, anyone who espouses the beliefs of liberty, freedom, and equality and dedicates himself to working hard in his “pursuit of happiness” is definitionally an American-in-waiting. 

This appeal to “civic nationalism” is now a pillar of mainstream conservatism, which is then used to justify mass immigration from anywhere in the world — but only the “legal” kind, of course.

Though the justifications are slightly different, one rooted in a disdain for the nation as founded and the other rooted in Reagan’s “anyone can become an American” optimism, the outcome is the same: a pincer movement that dissolves both American heritage and inherited national identity.

However, to define and promote the importance of “heritage American,” or whatever you’d prefer to call it, is to acknowledge that the United States did not emerge from a vacuum of abstract philosophy committed to parchment but from a specific cultural lineage. 

American Heritage

This heritage is primarily rooted in the Anglo-American and later Western European people who settled the continent and established its foundational institutions. This is not merely an ethnic distinction, though it is important, but a recognition of the “cultural water” in which the United States swam for nearly two centuries.

The ethnogenesis into a distinct American people was further solidified when Calvin Coolidge effectively shut down immigration with the Immigration Act of 1924, a law that allowed the existing cultures to meld into a singular, cohesive American identity over a period of nearly 40 years. At that time, the nation was nearly 90 percent white (i.e. European), and the move was seen not as a departure from the founding but as a preservation of it, as Coolidge stated in 1923:

America must be kept American. For this purpose, it is necessary to continue a policy of restricted immigration.

American life, law, and social cohesion were predicated on a shared European ancestry. Within this framework, “American” was never intended to be a universal label available to all people on Earth but was instead a specific inheritance passed down by a people who shared a common history, faith, and English legal tradition. This idea was so important to the Founding Fathers that they specifically appealed to the need to secure the “blessings of liberty” not to the world but to “ourselves and our posterity.”

It was this very inheritance, not a global promise of abstract rights, that the founders sought to protect in 1776, which ultimately held despite immense friction during the Ellis Island immigration waves — that is, until the seismic shift of the 1965 Hart-Celler Act began America’s cultural unraveling.

This historical reality of pre- and post-Hart-Celler America reveals a profound truth: The restricted immigration of the early 20th century was not a departure from or a betrayal of America’s founding but a much-needed defense of its original architecture.

In fact, John Jay, in Federalist No. 2, explicitly argues that America’s success before and during the war for Independence was due to America being…

…one united 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 their general liberty and independence.

The Credal Myth

When we look back to 1776 through this lens, we see that the Declaration of Independence was never a universal admission slip for the world. It was a promise made by a particular people, for a particular people, who resided in a particular place, first to secure their rights as Englishmen and ultimately their rights as Americans. This endeavor would not have been successful if not for their united heritage — but don’t tell Ramaswamy.

The American Revolution, according to Ramaswamy, “marked the first time a people went to war explicitly in the name of universal human principles & ideals.”

As nice as this sounds, it is simply not true. Worse still, the promotion of this myth is designed to further erode the tangible bonds that bind a people to a specific nation, substituting the importance of heritage with the superficial bonds of civic nationalism. 

In 1842, a Dartmouth student named Mellen Chamberlain interviewed 91-year-old Levi Preston, who had fought at Concord as a Massachusetts Minuteman in the American Revolutionary War. When asked why he took up arms against the British on April 19, 1775, Preston brushed aside the familiar list of grievances historians often cite when discussing what caused the Revolution. As told by Levi, he “didn’t feel” any of the intolerable oppressions, “never saw one of those stamps,” and, as for the tax on tea, he “never drank a cup of the stuff.” Preston also dismissed the idea that he had been inspired by the philosophical writings of Algernon Sidney or John Locke, saying he had “never heard of ’em.”

What animated Preston and others like him who fought for independence was far simpler and far more tangible. He explained: “We always had governed ourselves, and we always meant to govern ourselves. [The British] didn’t mean we should.”

Contrary to Ramaswamy’s assertion that Americans “went to war explicitly in the name of universal human principles,” the truth of the Revolution lies not in the preamble’s prose but in the Declaration’s legal heart.

While most Americans stop reading after the aspirational “all men are created equal,” the document’s core consists of 27 specific violations of the colonists’ rights as Englishmen — rights rooted in the Magna Carta in 1215 and the English Bill of Rights in 1689. The Declaration of Independence is much more of a legal brief than a philosophical manifesto. 

We often forget that the Olive Branch Petition preceded the Declaration, explicitly arguing directly to the king of England that the colonists were being denied their birthright as British subjects. When this was rejected, a pivot to asserting the “natural rights” of the colonists was made, not as a rejection of their English heritage but as a strategic “sales pitch” to the world, most notably France.

It is no coincidence that Benjamin Franklin departed for Paris shortly after the Declaration was signed, armed with its idealistic preamble, to secure war material and a badly needed alliance.

This is not to say the founders were not steeped in Enlightenment ideals; they most certainly were. However, the strategic shift to natural rights and independence was also due, in part, to the 18th-century Law of Nations, which stated that a monarch could not legally intervene in the “domestic affairs” of another sovereign. This was for self-preservation. If the conflict in the American colonies had remained framed as a civil war between a king and his subjects over securing their rights as “Englishmen,” neither France nor Spain would have risked an alliance.

Thomas Paine admitted as much in Common Sense, writing:

Under our present denomination of British subjects, we can neither be received nor heard abroad; the custom of all Courts is against us, and will be so, until by an independence we take rank with other nations.

To “take rank with other nations,” the colonists had to rebrand their specific struggle from a civil war into a movement for national independence.

Ultimately, the meaning of America is not found in a vacuum of universalism but in the tangible heritage that made those ideals possible. To suggest, as Ramaswamy and other civic nationalists do, that American identity is merely a set of propositions that any of the 8 billion people on Earth can inhabit by simply working hard is to participate in the left’s deconstruction of American identity.

The civic nationalist vision of an America that exists for everyone is an America that exists for no one. America’s 20-plus years of spreading “liberal democracy” to the Middle East should serve as proof that aspirational propositions alone do not make nations. 

If America is to survive, we must stop defending a “proposition” and start defending a home. A creed cannot sustain a people who have forgotten their lineage, and a nation that views its own heritage as “crazy talk” will eventually cease to exist. 

Adam Johnston is a senior contributor to The Federalist whose work has been featured in The Blaze, WrongSpeak Publishing, and Man’s World Magazine. He is also the creator of conquesttheory.com, where he regularly writes about politics, history, philosophy, and technology. You can find him on X @adamkjohnston.