This is something I wrote in response to what I was seeing in Facebook yesterday and today. I posted it there, but I thought it would fit here, as well:
My favorite aphorism about being an American comes from one of my least favorite Americans, President Ronald Reagan in his final speech as president:
“You can go to Japan to live, but you cannot become Japanese. You can go to France to live and not become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey, and you won't become a German or a Turk.' But then he added, 'Anybody from any corner of the world can come to America to live and become an American.”
What Reagan was saying is that Americanism, unlike any other nationality, is not an historical or generational inheritance, it’s more of an adoption.
Another of my least favorite Americans, George Will, further explained that we become American not by birth or inheritance, but by the simple adoption of a set of principles. To paraphrase him, to be an American, we must simply believe in a set of premises:
- the rule of law,
- the supremacy of the Constitution of the United States of America,
- the rewards of hard work, and
- the freedom to pursue our dreams.
Once we have done this, we have become as American as anyone who’s family can trace their heritage back to the Colonist’s side of the Revolution.
I firmly believe in the truth of what Reagan said and of what Will further explained. Both men are about as far from me on the political spectrum as our politics allow, but on these points we are in full agreement.
And full agreement on these points is the basic foundation of who we are supposed to be. As long as we agree on these points, we have the foundation on which we can move forward, from which we can debate and to which we can return in order to find our way forward.
But agreement on these basic principles of Americanism has been hard to come by, not just recently, but throughout our history, because there is a subset of our citizenry who have long refused to adopt into these core American principles.
That subset is not a minority, it is our historical plurality, the Royal We of America. It is our Center Culture consisting of a swath of our multi-generational Anglo-Saxon (and Germanic) Protestant Christian Caucasians and, those who, either directly, through emotional connection, marriage, community, or through fear or aspiration identify primarily with Anglo-Saxon Christian Caucasians.
They have long wanted Americanism to be as hereditary as Frenchness, and they have always been a major force in our society. Their loudest voices were the slavers of the 18th and 19th Century, the Jacksonians of the 1820s and 1830s, the Nativist America (Know-Nothing) Party of the 1840’s, the Segregationists of the post Civil War era, the Populists of the early 20th Century, the Eugenicists who dominated our Progressive politics, the social darwinists who defined our popular thinking on race, class, and worth, the anti-immigration activists of the 1910s and 1920s, they were the anti-Communists of the 1930s, the McCarthyites of the 1950s, the Dixiecrats of the 1940s, the re-segregationists of the 1950s, and the proponents of the Southern Strategy in the 1960s, 70s, 80s, 90s, and 00s. They were the Tea Party, and now they are Trumpists.
But it’s not their loudest voices who are their most dangerous, it’s the millions who stand idly by in tacit complicity. For every firebrand, raconteur, and pedagogue they produce, there are millions of silent citizens who passively approve of their message, who argue for cooler heads to prevail and say we need to find common ground.
But as long as there is an argument for hereditary Americanness, there is no common ground possible. Unless we agree on those core principles, the ones articulated by Reagan (whether or not he believed them) and fleshed out by Will (whether or not he lives by them), we have no way forward.
We are either a nation where ideals are adopted, or a nation where national identity is inborn. We cannot be both.
These chants of “Send Her Back,” The ongoing travesty at the border, the refusal of refugees, the questioning of patriotism of those who disagree, the narrowing of the definition of American to simply include those who agree with the administration – the conditionalizing of Americanism will be the death of everything we hold dear, and the problem isn’t just those who are doing it, the problem is those who are standing idly by while it happens because they don’t want to get people upset or say something wrong.
Silence at a time like this is the least patriotic, least American thing one can do. Those principles? They demand defense.
Conditional Americanism is the enemy of our very essence, and those who promulgate it are instigating yet another direct attack on the very core of our national identity. One cannot love America while allowing its core principles to be destroyed.
When you see something, when you hear something, SAY SOMETHING.
It’s the only American thing to do.