Why Vivek Ramaswamy Is Wrong About American Identity

You might have noticed there is a heated debate underway on the American right over the question of American identity. What makes someone an American? Is it based on lineage or is it propositional? Is America a nation and a people, or is it an idea based on universal principles?

After World War Two, these questions were largely swept under the rug. The dominant narrative, pushed by nearly every mainstream institution and both political parties, was that America was a credal, propositional country. Anyone, from any part of the world, professing any religion or worldview, could become an American. To suggest otherwise was racist and xenophobic, and frankly un-American. By the 1980s, the notion that America is a “nation of immigrants” had taken root in public discourse. America, we were told, was not a particular people but an ideal to which every human being on earth could aspire. It was for everyone.

In an op-ed for The New York Times this week, Vivek Ramaswamy defends this view, arguing that being an American really means nothing more than assenting to a set of intellectual propositions and swearing allegiance to the United States. Agree to a few key principles about good governance and human rights, sign some documents, and voila! you become an American.

“Americanness isn’t a scalar quality that varies based on your ancestry,” writes Ramaswamy. “It’s binary: Either you’re an American or you’re not. You are an American if you believe in the rule of law, in freedom of conscience and freedom of expression, in colorblind meritocracy, in the U.S. Constitution, in the American dream, and if you are a citizen who swears exclusive allegiance to our nation.”

In Ramaswamy’s telling, Americanness is based on a set of beliefs. He posits this over and against what he describes as a blood-and-soil version of American identity that’s supposedly growing on the right, one based on lineage and “the creation of a white-centric identity.” Those who push this view are self-described “heritage Americans,” whose ancestors might have crossed the Atlantic in the 17th century or fought in the Civil War, but are no more American than a first-generation Somali migrant who successfully navigates the immigration bureaucracy and gets his papers.

There are two related things to note about Ramaswamy’s argument. First, he is misrepresenting (intentionally or not) the position of those of us on the right who insist that America is a nation and a people, not merely a creed or a set of principles. Ramaswamy presents a false binary: either you agree with American propositionalism or you are a racist.

But actually it’s possible, and in fact necessary, to insist on a synthesis of America as an idea, a proposition, and America as a people and a nation with a particular history and culture. That culture, because it is at its core English and Christian, requires an affirmation of a very specific set of intellectual propositions that are unique to England and the Christian faith that shaped the English.

The propositions themselves, however, are not enough. They are necessary but not sufficient, because they rely for their coherence on a set of cultural folkways and attitudes that are particular to a people and a place, and which emerged from a specific historical context—distinctly Christian and English. The source of our liberty, for example, is not our Founding documents (great as they are) but our folkways. The former emerged from the latter, not the other way around.

Hence, the ideas articulated in those documents are not as universal as we have been led to believe. “You are an American if you believe in the rule of law,” says Ramaswamy. But many cultures and nations believe in the rule of law. What matters of course is how the law is made, how it is enforced, and whether it meets the demands of justice. You are an American if you believe in “meritocracy,” he says. But many Asian countries embrace meritocracy more fully than the United States does. Singapore has the rule of law and meritocracy. And yet Singapore is not America — or American in any meaningful sense.

The point here is that the universal ideals Ramaswamy claims are at the heart of American identity only make sense in light of English common law, constitutionalism, and Christianity — all of which belong to a particular people from a particular place. Without that context, they become meaningless. Generations of certain people, descendants mostly of the English, brought forth a nation that reflected and codified their particular religious beliefs, morality, language, customs, and folkways. They were not making a proposition for a universalist political project. Indeed, the Founders told us who America is for: ourselves and our posterity. John Jay famously described America as “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.”

Secondly, Ramaswamy is offering instead what amounts to a form of intellectual Gnosticism about American identity that can never really take concrete form. If Americanness is based merely on a set of professed beliefs about government and individual rights, and not on the solidity of cultural customs and practices, then American identity becomes something insubstantial and impossible to define. Even a person whose own cultural practices are totally alien to American life and society — cousin marriage, women in burkas, animal sacrifice — could be considered just as American as anyone else. American identity is thus reduced to basically nothing, a contentless void.

As Nate Hochman memorably put it on X, obviously commenting on Ramaswamy’s piece, “America is great because it does not exist. That’s what makes us exceptional: We are the absence of form. Without essence, beyond comprehension. A black hole, a void outside space and time. Nobody knows who we are or how we got here. Anyways, that’s why I love this country.”

According to Ramaswamy’s theory of American identity, then, we could import millions of people from the Ganges Delta or the African littoral, and as long as they say they agree with the Constitution, they are Americans.

And in fact, that is what Ramaswamy, along with a certain swath of Romney-era Republicans, actually think. They have no problem, for example, with large corporations that don’t promote American values or interests, or that will gladly ship American jobs overseas. They share the basic worldview of corporate elites, who see the American people as nothing more than labor inputs, replaceable cogs that can be swapped out for cheaper ones in Asia or Africa, as need arises.

This is actually the logical endpoint of Ramaswamy’s credal view of Americanness. If anyone can be an American, then no one really is an American, and nothing in particular is owed to the American people by their leaders. If millions of workers in India or Pakistan want to come here to make more money, and they will do the job for a lower wage than native-born Americans, on what grounds should we deny them entry?

Ramaswamy has no answer to that question. His anemic view of American identity prevents him from acknowledging that some peoples, from some cultures, will never become Americans — no matter how much they might embrace the abstract propositions Ramaswamy mistakenly thinks are at the heart of our nation.

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.