Andrew Beck has made a cogent case for why the U.S., like other countries, requires cultural and moral cohesion to protect its nationhood and act with a unified will on behalf of the common good. Beck correctly notes that the U.S. started out as a country with a well-defined collective identity. If we look back at America’s beginnings, we discover John Jay in Federalist 2 defining this original American identity in a memorable observation:
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.
At the time this was written, the newly formed American nation-state was composed overwhelmingly of Northern European Protestants; its legal institutions were largely British. Its shared culture was shaped by, among other things, reading and revering the King James Bible. Among the professional class, the Bible’s authority was supplemented by that of Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, Shakespeare’s tragedies, and (to some extent) classical texts like Plutarch’s Lives.
Protestant theologians went a bit further in their reading and would have also studied John Calvin’s Institutes, the works of St. Augustine, and perhaps some of Plato’s dialogues. Political thinkers back then might also have pondered John Locke, Montesquieu, Polybius, and a few other influential political theorists. In early America a shared understanding of civic virtue, social manners, and community arose from revering the same classics as well as holding similar religious beliefs and being, in most cases, “descended from the same ancestors.”
Even in Federalist 10 and 51, when James Madison addressed the possibility of the American polity becoming an extended republic, he was not recommending any modern concept of diversity or even disagreeing with Jay’s judgment about America’s strengths. He was simply explaining how a country that consisted of mercantile and agrarian sectors could be held together by a “common passion of interest.” Madison’s novel theory posited that a representative government could filter the popular will in such a way as to coordinate overlapping interests.
The homogeneity that the U.S. possessed at the time of its founding, and for at least several generations afterwards, was perhaps an irreplaceable strength. This strength may have been at work even when the country faced the ravages of civil war, which it survived because—as Lincoln observed—however calamitous their differences, both sides read the same Bible and prayed to the same deity.
Cohesion Without Coercion
In my view, these sorts of inherited, culturally sustained bonds of unity furnish the ideal conditions for a collective political identity. This unity was there at the beginning of the American republic, and did not depend for its creation on coercion by the state or military forces. The shared heritage that was obvious to John Jay bespoke a deeper unity than the one imposed on German Americans during World War I (and a fortiori, Japanese Americans during World War II). Perhaps Andrew Beck and I view this chapter of our national history quite differently.
Although European nation-states were formed partly by coercing those who resisted them into accepting a centralized form of sovereignty, such political entities were able to establish themselves by drawing on an already developed national consciousness. Frenchmen, Germans, Italians, etc., all identified with some kind of national history and culture even before they accepted or were forced to accept a unified national government. Force was not the main factor that generated unity among historic nation-states.
German Americans in the early 20th century already had a sense of being American, but were bullied with the help of government inducement into giving up their ancestral heritage. This took place after the Wilson Administration managed to push the U.S. into World War I. In my part of Pennsylvania, which was settled by German Pietist farmers, intimidation achieved its intended effect. Churches and other buildings had their German inscriptions effaced. The teaching and use of the German language ceased. Even schools like Linden Hall in nearby Lititz that were founded by German sects stopped offering German courses and have not revived them to this day.
I won’t get into the already widely known and horrendous treatment of the Nisei, or second-generation Japanese, after Pearl Harbor. I will say only that it may have exceeded in awfulness what was done to German Americans 25 years earlier. As should be obvious, Norwegians, Swedes, and many other ethnic minorities became Americanized without the tactics applied to German and Japanese Americans. This happened through a natural process of assimilation.
By now, the national unity that Andrew Beck properly values seems to have been mostly lost. I wonder whether the “America First” politics of the MAGA movement can recover it in any meaningful way. Once the American republic lost its original ethnic and religious unity, its leaders and intellectuals were obliged to turn to other ideas to hold American citizens together. In my youth, American public education still emphasized civic patriotism and a state-sponsored pantheon of national heroes.
That unifying effort succeeded for several generations, particularly since it was reinforced by a civil religion with recognizably Protestant cultural elements. This way of assimilating hyphenated Americans served well in two world wars and at least during part of the Cold War. It was the American public philosophy when I was growing up in the 1950s. An understanding of Americanness that did not depend on shared ethnicity may have worked well at the time because other unifying factors were at play. Most of the population remained Euro-American and had some Christian affiliation. Deeper cultural bonds united (for example) an Italian American and a Swedish American than those existing between either and a Third-World Muslim.
This unity through civic patriotism persisted until radicalized minorities began to vent their hate on “Amerika.” Since these irate “dissenters” proceeded to take over the mainstream media, education at all levels, and public administration, the older methods of assimilation and of producing a unified American identity became less effective. One might apply to this changed American identity a criticism that’s been leveled at the efforts of the present German regime to assimilate Third-World Muslim immigrants. Into what, exactly, can one assimilate foreign residents when public administrators, educators, and the culture industry have taught the indigenous population to hate their country?
Unhyphenated
Earlier attempts at generating unity, however, also ran into headwinds eventually. Non-Protestants, starting with a growing Catholic population, objected to attending “Protestant” public schools and seeing their religious and cultural traditions marginalized. Later the Jewish Left and anti-Catholic Southern Baptists called for a more thorough secularization of the public square in the name of separating church and state, furthering pluralism, or whatever other excuse they could find for making the U.S. less of what it had been before.
By now our ruling class and various influencers are trying to separate whatever they intend to make of this country from its Western roots. The still widely influential Anti-Defamation League, in a pamphlet last year entitled The New Primer on White Supremacy, explains quite straightforwardly that the designation “Western” is really a “codeword” for white racism. Indeed, according to the ADL, a racist, xenophobic taint also attaches to “Euro-American identity.” Such descriptive terms, according to this pamphlet, are used by those who oppose large-scale Muslim immigration into Europe and emphatically reject the LGBTQ agenda.
Another now-endangered vehicle of American assimilation is the melting pot concept, which still has many adherents in our conservative establishment. The August 1 edition of the New York Post highlighted the heavily attended Muslim funeral of a slain Bangladeshi police officer in New York City. “This most New York story,” we were informed on the Post’s front page, was intended as a celebration of the pluralism and diversity that the paper’s editors see as proof of the American melting pot at work. By now, according to this message, ethnically and racially diverse groups are coming to see themselves and each other as unhyphenated Americans.
Unfortunately, the same city with a multicultural sense of who we are is about to elect as mayor a vocally anti-Western woke Muslim (repeating something that Londoners already did when they elected Sadiq Khan, and which Minneapolis will likely do if it chooses Omar Fateh as its next mayor). The slain police officer Didarul Islam lost his life to a crazed black killer whom CNN, out of its anti-white derangement syndrome, described as “possibly white.”
By now, the melting pot view of assimilation and the stress on civic patriotism, which I regard as the best substitutes for an older American cultural identity, have given way to a woke dead end. Unless we can move beyond this divisive concept, it won’t be possible to return to less fracturing views of American identity. Targeting white male Christian heterosexuals as victimizers does not seem to be a satisfactory way of bringing together this country’s legal population. Unfortunately, large demographics, particularly college-educated women, have different ideas about what the managerial state should be imposing on the rest of us.