Andrew Beck has articulated a thick version of the assimilation of immigrants (rightly so, in my view) that harkens back to the spirit of Americanization that was prevalent from the Founding to roughly the 1960s. Louis Brandeis, a liberal and political ally of the detestable Woodrow Wilson, expressed this common idea of assimilation in his July 5, 1915, Americanization Day Speech:

What is Americanization? It manifests itself, in a superficial way, when the immigrant adopts the clothes, the manners and the customs generally prevailing here. Far more important is the manifestation presented when he substitutes for his mother tongue the English language as the common medium of speech. But the adoption of our language, manners, and customs in only a small part of the process. To become Americanized the change wrought must be fundamental. However great his outward conformity, the immigrant is not Americanized unless his interests and affections have become deeply rooted here. And we properly demand of the immigrants even more than this. He must be brought into complete harmony with our ideals and aspirations and cooperate with us for their attainment. Only when this has been done will he possess the national consciousness of an American.

We could think of Americanization as the highest form of assimilation—patriotic assimilation. When an immigrant and their first-generation children leave a previous people and join the American people, it means they have an emotional attachment to our country and instinctively identify with historic America: our principles, history, and culture.

Even though the newcomers and their children may come from China, India, Guatemala, or Norway they embrace Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Hamilton as their ancestors. When reading about the history of the War of 1812, they identify with historic America and think, “We fought the British in 1812,” as opposed to thinking that they (white males) fought other white males 200 years ago. Patriotic assimilation happens when our nation’s story has become part of their inheritance as Americans.

In the late 19th century, Wisconsin U.S. Representative Richard Guenther epitomized patriotic assimilation. He was born and educated in Prussia and didn’t emigrate to America until his early 20s. He was involved in the German American community and Republican politics in Wisconsin and was elected to Congress as a Republican in 1880. Guenther came from an ethnic subculture, but Andrew Beck would be pleased that he recognized the primacy of America’s Leitkultur (dominant culture).

From 1887-89 America was on the verge of a war with Bismarck’s Germany over a geopolitical crisis in the Samoan Islands. Understandably, other congressmen wanted to know where Guenther and his fellow German Americans stood. Guenther responded in this way:

We will work for our country in time of peace and fight for it in time of war…. When I say our country, I mean, of course, our adopted country. I mean the United States of America. After passing through the crucible of naturalization, we are no longer Germans; we are Americans….. We will fight for America whenever necessary. America, first, last, and all the time. America against Germany, America against the world; America right or wrong; always America. We are Americans.

This brings us to the controversy that launched this symposium, namely Andrew Beck’s concern that the erection of a “giant statue depicting the monkey-faced Hindu deity, Hanuman” in Sugar Land, Texas, suggests a lack of assimilation into America’s culturally Christian civilization by the Indian immigrants who commissioned it. Mark Tooley says that Beck should not worry since religious freedom for minorities is part of the “principled pluralism” of the American order.

How do we address the issue between Beck and Tooley?

Examining it through the lens of patriotic assimilation, we should ask where the ultimate political loyalty of the architects and adherents of the Hanuman statue lies. If there is a war or a lesser conflict between the United States and India, with negative consequences for one or the other nation, where would the Hanuman advocates stand? Would they echo Congressman Guenther and back the United States through thick and thin (“always America, we are Americans”). Or would they share the sentiments of Representative Delia Ramirez (“a proud Guatemalan before an American”) and favor a foreign nation over America?

In the past, Americans from minority ethnic groups have chosen the path of militant patriotic assimilation affirmed by Guenther. One thinks of the German Americans who fought Germans at the Argonne Forest in 1918, the Italian Americans who killed Italians in Sicily in 1943, and the Japanese Americans who fought Japan’s ally Germany throughout Europe in World War II.

Abstractions Abound

I agree with Andrew Beck, Mark Krikorian, Paul Gottfried, and James Hankins that our assimilation problem is self-imposed. The fault is with us, not with immigrants. More specifically, the “us” means our woke progressive elite that has successfully instituted a cultural revolution against historic America.

The lack of patriotic assimilation in contemporary America is, as Hankins notes, because “our public schools and cultural institutions, public and private, have embraced a new religious faith: that of multiculturalism.” He suggests undermining this new religion along with its evil siblings, DEI, anti-racism, radical gender theory, and all forms of wokeism. Krikorian, Gottfried, and Hankins all appear to hope that our schools and cultural institutions will once again transmit a patriotic civic religion to immigrants and the native-born. The American Left will, of course, oppose patriotic assimilation in principle. It is no accident that the Biden Administration prohibited the use of the word “assimilation” in government documents.

The question of who we are as Americans raises the issue of what exactly immigrants should be assimilating to. Does it mean assimilating to a set of universal principles and ideas or a particular people and culture? Or both? Is there an ideological component to being an American?

During the 1990s and the first decade of the 21st century, conservative thought leaders overemphasized the concept of America as a “proposition nation.” They taught that unlike other countries, America was founded on ideas rather than culture or traditions. This attitude went hand in hand with support for mass immigration, coupled with little or no emphasis on assimilation. If our nation is based solely on ideas, then anyone in the world can easily become an American if they agree with them.

Furthermore, liberal conservatives (today’s “FreeCons”) argued that since assimilation was successful in the days of Ellis Island, it would continue to be successful. However, this ignores the two main reasons assimilation worked in the early 20th century. American leaders like Theodore Roosevelt and Calvin Coolidge insisted on Americanization, and immigration was drastically cut in the 1920s.

The American Right’s overemphasis on the proposition nation narrative was a mistake. Not surprisingly, the American Left adopted this ideological narrative and reinterpreted core American ideas as the revolutionary expansion of the progressive project, promoting DEI, LGBTQ rights, and the “fundamental transformation” of the United States.

Both/And

In 2001, the eminent East Coast Straussian Walter Berns wrote a magnificent monograph entitled Making Patriots. Berns embraced America’s civic religion and affirmed the absolute necessity of a citizenship education that inculcates a “love of country” in both immigrants and the native-born and focuses on “how to transmit” that love “from one generation to the next.”

However, I have one crucial point of disagreement with Berns. He writes that American nationhood is unique because it is based “not on tradition, or loyalty to tradition, but on an appeal to abstract and universal and philosophical principles of political right.” Because of this attachment to principled ideas, Berns asserts that Stephen Decatur, the greatest American naval hero of the early 19th century, was being somehow unpatriotic or “un-American” when he declared in a famous toast after defeating the Islamist Barbary pirates, “Our country, in her intercourse with foreign nations, may she always be right, but our country right or wrong.”

Decatur, who served his country with extraordinary bravery and prowess in war, revealed an instinctive love of America and a concrete attachment to American nationhood. These sentiments should not be disparaged as being beyond the pale of an acceptable form of patriotism. As Montesquieu argued, an emotional attachment and instinctive love of country are necessary for any republic to survive. We could use many more Stephen Decaturs today.

I maintain that American patriotism rests on both ideas and culture. Charles Kesler said correctly, “The American creed is the keystone of American national identity, but it requires a culture to sustain it.” There is an ideological component to American nationhood, and there are times when ideas trump culture. Paul Gottfried notes that 18th-century American colonists were shaped by a shared culture, including the King James Bible, Shakespeare, Protestant theology, Plutarch, and the like. True, American patriots and Tories shared the same culture, but from 1776 to 1783 they killed each other over what constituted the best regime.

With that said, what is to be done today?

First, we must mobilize the emotion-laden concepts of Americanization and patriotic assimilation and send them into battle against the Left’s weaponized theories of multiculturalism and diversity everywhere—in universities, schools, foundations, non-profits, civic organizations, corporations, faith-based institutions, and all levels of government: federal, state, and local.

Second, Mark Krikorian is right that we must “reduce immigration across the board,” both legal and illegal. Current levels of immigration are clearly harming the prospects of assimilation.

America faced a similar situation in the 1920s when Calvin Coolidge argued, “New arrivals should be limited to our capacity to absorb them into the ranks of good citizenship. America must be kept American.” We should act on Coolidge’s sage advice today.