The mass rioting and destruction across France in recent weeks has laid bare the direct connection between multiculturalism and authoritarian political movements across the West, as does the similar chaos in countries such as Albania, Belgium, Italy, and Portugal.
The resemblance to the mass disturbances in the United States in 2020 is obvious, with all these incursions combining ethnic agitation with socialism and Marxism, a red-green alliance financed significantly by outside forces such as foreign billionaire Neville Roy Singham and communist parties around the world.
America is the home of Americans: a people born of liberty who are intent on maintaining the world’s greatest home for freedom and serving as an example to the rest of the world.
This combination shows that the planned destination of multiculturalism is hard socialism or, looking further down the road to perdition, outright communism.
The same struggle over identity and political power is visible in American cities and states where progressive movements seek to make group identity the organizing principle of public life. The Trump administration has begun reversing Biden-era immigration policies, but enforcement alone cannot answer a more fundamental question: What holds Americans together?
A fierce argument over national identity runs through our immigration debate. The 250th anniversary last week of an obscure Virginia bill offers a revealing glimpse of how long that argument has endured.
On October 14, 1776, Thomas Jefferson presented a naturalization bill drafted by Edmund Pendleton to Virginia's General Assembly. He entitled it “Naturalization of Foreign Protestants” and proposed citizenship for foreign Protestants who swore fidelity to the commonwealth and obedience to its laws. The bill also offered newcomers $20 toward passage and 50 acres of unappropriated land. In Pendleton's original conception, the invitation was explicitly religious: Protestants would enlarge a people whose convictions he regarded as central to the commonwealth.
Jefferson revised the bill, removing its Protestant restrictions and replacing “foreign Protestants” with broader language. The editors of Jefferson’s papers say his changes were designed to open citizenship to Jews, Catholics, and other non-Protestants. The Assembly did not enact the bill. Yet the disagreement survives in another form today: Is America a particular people shaped by an inherited way of life, or a proposition to which newcomers can subscribe?
Pendleton emphasized the formation of a people, while Jefferson rejected a religious test for joining it. Both drafts required an oath of fidelity; neither can be reduced neatly to today’s slogans. But they reveal different instincts about what a political community needs in order to endure.
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Americans still debate those instincts. One vision sees the United States as a “shining city on a hill,” a people demonstrating the value of a distinctive inheritance. Another emphasizes its welcome to the “wretched refuse” of other nations, placing faith in the power of American principles to transform those who arrive. The economic claims made for immigration are important, but the fiercest disagreements concern what newcomers must share with the people already here.
Those who describe America chiefly as a proposition often claim the moral high ground, dismissing their opponents as bigots or religious zealots. That tactic has proved effective in a cultural struggle in which collectivists seek to redefine the country in their own image. In my view, progressives, socialists, and communists increasingly subordinate freedom of speech, religion, association, and enterprise to an expansive conception of equality enforced by the state.
The result is a politics that invokes equality while giving ever more authority to government officials. If America is only an abstract proposition, the meaning of that proposition can be rewritten by whoever captures the institutions that teach and enforce it. Equality can then displace liberty as the nation’s defining value.
We have reason to take the ideological change seriously. In a July survey, the Cato Institute found that 38% of Americans under 30 held a favorable view of communism. That is a striking measure of the ground an ideology once broadly rejected has gained among the young.
The answer is not to replace a purely propositional identity with an ethnic test or a mandatory religion. Pendleton’s Protestant requirement was itself a statement of values, however narrowly he understood them. He wanted to establish Protestantism as the premise behind Virginia’s expansion of immigration, considering an obvious connection between Protestantism and the rise of representative government.
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In reality, America’s inheritance is centuries of struggle to build and preserve a constitutional order that protects liberty. Americans are born into that legacy, and newcomers can join it. The common obligation is to sustain it, even when powerful institutions press us to abandon it. Such an identity requires more than a passing declaration of agreement with an abstract creed.
The public may be more receptive to this argument than our political disputes suggest. Cato also found that 71% of Americans surveyed believe the ideals and institutions of the founding are part of their inheritance. That is a foundation on which to build a common national life.
We need to build on that attitude and reinforce the public appreciation of our inheritance as Americans. The flying of other nations’ flags at anti-government rallies is an obvious manifestation of the weakening of our national identity by mass immigration and collectivists’ domination of the nation’s education system and mass culture over the past several decades.
Protection and reinvigoration of respect for the nation’s founding values will require a general agreement on the answer to the question of “What is an American?” I believe that the unifying answer is that America is the home of Americans: a people born of liberty who are intent on maintaining the world’s greatest home for freedom and serving as an example to the rest of the world.