Andrew Beck’s “Assimilation and Its Discontents” helps us understand why assimilation is an urgent concern. Anthropologists and historians make it clear that human beings, from bands of hunter-gatherers to modern nation-states, have always lived in sociopolitical groups that were distinct from one another. This enduring, fundamental reality elevates the importance of determining each group’s far edge. Who’s in and who’s out? And by what standard do we make this distinction?
The United States of America has been not only one of the most heterogeneous social orders in human history, but also one of the most successfully heterogeneous. Even in America, however, there is a limit beyond which heterogeneity renders a nation incoherent in both senses of the term: it doesn’t make sense; and it can no longer hold together as a single sociopolitical entity wherein Americans feel they have important ties and obligations to one another for no reason other than a shared national identity. To exceed that limit, Beck warns, invites the collapse of our nation into “fractious, tribal chaos.”
“Assimilation and Its Discontents” is, however, only inadvertently helpful in making clear that heterogeneity’s outer limit poses a question that is, in addition to being important, quite difficult. The question of how dissimilar is too dissimilar—dangerously dissimilar—is the flip side of the question about any sociopolitical group’s character: What makes us us? We need, writes Beck, “to be specific about what makes an American an American.” But such specificity is not easily attained.
Examining the word “assimilate” shows why. The verb—part of the English language for some 600 years according to Merriam-Webster—originally meant “to make similar.” And, indeed, similarity has always been politically important. According to Carnes Lord’s translation of Aristotle’s Politics, “The city is a community of similar persons, for the sake of a life that is the best possible.” Aristotle does not say how similar these persons must be to constitute a proper city, but the irreducible minimum of similarity is another way of expressing the unsurpassable maximum of dissimilarity, the question Beck examines.
Aristotle does, however, address the related question of the ways in which a city’s persons are similar. Happiness, according to Aristotle, is “the actualization of virtue and a certain complete practice of it.” The fact that “some people are able to partake of” this actualization of virtue “while others are able to do so only to a small degree or not at all” is the reason why there are “several kinds and varieties of city and several sorts of regime.” In other words, the character that defines a city, and differentiates each from others, is a distinct conception of what the good life entails, what it would mean to achieve the complete practice of virtue, and what it means to pursue the best way of being human.
Other translations of the Politics have Aristotle saying that the state, or the city-state, is a community of similar persons. As Harry Jaffa explained in his essay on Aristotle for History of Political Philosophy, translators face a challenge because no modern word really captures the meaning of polis, the term Aristotle used. Jaffa defined the polis as “the community that includes all other human communities, while itself being included by none.” As such, the polis comprehends “within its own end or purpose the end or purpose of every other form of community.” The polis is not simply a compilation of these other communities, any more than a human being is simply the sum of his tissues and organs. As Aristotle himself said, in the Lord translation, the polis “is not any chance multitude, but one self-sufficient with a view to life.” This self-sufficiency means that the lesser, subordinate communities encompassed by the polis must satisfy the economic, spiritual, and governmental needs for life, fitting with and promoting the distinct kind of life that a particular polis considers good: there must be “a multitude of farmers who will provide sustenance, artisans, a fighting element, the well-off, priests, and those who decide regarding things just and advantageous.”
A Truce Among Gods
The polis of the classical world was not only permeated with teleological commitments that the modern nation-state has pared back but, not coincidentally, was much smaller, with tens of thousands of citizens rather than tens of millions. Modern transportation and communications technologies, which facilitate feelings of commonality among people who are otherwise distant strangers, explain part of the contrast between the polis and the nation-state. So too does the fact that a type of natural selection has been at work across the centuries: big nations with big armies have a very high winning percentage when fighting or otherwise competing with small nations and their small armies, so that small sociopolitical entities were more likely to disappear, being conquered or absorbed by larger ones.
In a 2001 Claremont Review of Books essay, Jaffa specified one other factor at work: the emergence and widespread acceptance of Christian monotheism. Starting more than three centuries after Aristotle’s death, this unprecedented development brought about a “fundamental transformation in the human condition,” in Jaffa’s words, “from a world in which each city had its own god,” the world Aristotle inhabited, “to one in which there was but one God for the human race.”
Aristotle did not know, and probably could not imagine, a world where there was a distinction and sometimes a contradiction between what we are obliged to render unto Caesar and what we are obliged to render unto God. Rome’s persecution of the early Christians was cruel but not crazy. Starting from the ancient worldview they shared with Aristotle, Roman rulers took for granted that patriotism and piety were distinguishable, if at all, only as threads of a tightly woven fabric. Thus disposed, they paid Christians the honor of taking them seriously. The Christians’ revolutionary insistence that piety was categorically different and functionally separate from patriotism was indeed a threat to Rome’s continued existence.
The Protestant Reformation and subsequent fragmentation of Christendom into many denominations only compounded the problem of ascertaining the border between tolerable and intolerable dissimilarity within a sociopolitical entity. The two centuries of warfare that devastated what had been Christendom flowed from the premise, one of the few shared by all combatants, that people with strikingly different, irreconcilable beliefs about theology’s truths and piety’s duties could not possibly be compatriots while also regarding one another as infidels and heretics.
Whatever their theoretical merits, the social contract ideas advanced by Enlightenment philosophers were warmly received because they offered a practical way for people to cohabit in a nation despite different religious beliefs. This resolution, a humble but welcome alternative to the prospect of endless sectarian warfare, was to agree to disagree. The separation of church and state meant, to an unprecedented degree, the separation of religion and politics. The relegation of religion to the private realm, where it would have nothing consequential to do with the public questions of war, safety, justice, and prosperity, was best summarized by Thomas Jefferson in Notes on the State of Virginia. “The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others,” he wrote. “But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.”
The Outer Limits
For all that, doubts persist that a nation can be bound together successfully and durably by nothing more than a spirit of live-and-let-live, combined with common assent to a set of strictures about how political life is to be conducted and fellow citizens are to regard and treat one another. The question Beck raises about national identity remains on the table. (The word “identity” shares with “identical” the Latin root of “same.” Those who identify as Americans are not just similar but, in some crucial respect, the same.) The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, adopted by the United Nations in 1966, states at the outset that “All peoples have the right of self-determination. By virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development.” But as the British political theorist Margaret Canovan (1939–2018) pointed out in The People (2005), despite ubiquitous invocations of “the people” as the bedrock of sovereignty and legitimacy, we have never achieved consensus or clarity about how “the collectivities that have the right of self-determination [are] to be identified.” And whatever else may be said on behalf of democracy, it does nothing to solve this problem. We cannot put the question of the limits or even existence of a people to a vote: stipulating which persons are eligible to vote in such a plebiscite presupposes that we already have a workable understanding of a polity’s existence and extent.
The problem is not that there is no answer to the question of what makes some people a people. It is that there are several answers but no clear way to choose among or apportion them. In Considerations on Representative Government (1861), John Stuart Mill devoted a chapter to the question of nationality, which in effect examined in a modern context Aristotle’s concern for similarity within a polis. “A portion of mankind may be said to constitute a Nationality,” Mill wrote, “if they are united among themselves by common sympathies which do not exist between them and any others—which make them co-operate with each other more willingly than with other people, desire to be under the same government, and desire that it should be government by themselves or a portion of themselves exclusively.” Mill later anticipates Beck’s warnings about the danger posed to self-government by excessive diversity and an attenuated national identity. “Free institutions are next to impossible in a country made up of different nationalities,” he stated. “Among a people without fellow-feeling, especially if they read and speak different languages, the united public opinion, necessary to the working of representative government, cannot exist.”
He goes on to say that the common sympathies that form the basis for nationality may derive from several sources: ethnicity (“identity of race and descent”); a shared language and religion; or a heritage that includes long attachment to a specific geographical location. Mill contends that “strongest of all” is “identity of political antecedents; the possession of a national history, and consequent community of recollections; collective pride and humiliation, pleasure and regret, connected with the same incidents in the past.” But rather than suggest how to determine which of these sources of nationality is decisive in a particular case, Mill instead points out that each of these sources may, in certain cases, turn out to be neither necessary nor sufficient. Switzerland, for example, “has a strong sentiment of nationality, though the cantons are of different races, different languages, and different religions.”
Beck contends that Christianity—as in the “Christian civil religion,” “Christian order,” or “Christian civilization”—is at the heart of Americanness. This is not obviously wrong, but it poses too many problems to be simply or obviously right. America’s political history offers reasons to think that making Christianity central to the nation’s political identity draws too small a circle. In 1790 Moses Seixas, warden of the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island, wrote to President George Washington to express his fellow worshippers’ “deep sense of gratitude” for a government whose signal virtue was “generously affording to all Liberty of conscience, and immunities of Citizenship.” In his famous reply, Washington said that Seixas’s expression of gratitude, though appreciated, was unnecessary, even misplaced. “It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it were the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights,” Washington wrote. The hallmark of America’s government under its new Constitution, he continued, was that it “requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.”
With this statement, Washington locates American heterogeneity’s outer limit beyond the point that Beck describes. The latter has several complaints about his Hindu neighbors in Texas, but none rise to the level of asserting that they have been bad citizens or failed to give the American government under the Constitution their effectual support. Nor is there any evident way to reconcile Washington’s letter with Beck’s claim that the First Amendment guarantee against laws prohibiting the free exercise of religion was intended only “to protect dissenting Christian sects within a Christian moral framework.” And, finally, it seems not to have occurred to Washington to criticize the Newport Synagogue, constructed in 1763, as the public manifestation of an unassimilated culture and “a declaration of intent to remain unassimilated,” the terms in which Beck denounces a Hindu statue in Sugar Land, Texas.
Protestant-Coded
Looked at in another way, however, Beck’s argument about Christianity’s central place in American life draws too large a circle. In Who Are We? The Challenges to America’s National Identity (2004), political scientist Samuel Huntington (1927–2008) repeatedly describes America’s core culture as “Anglo-Protestant.” It “combined political and social institutions and practices inherited from England, including most notably the English language,” he wrote, “together with the concepts and values of dissenting Protestantism.” The Englishness of Americanness goes without saying, though it is also notable that the Declaration of Independence begins by asserting that it had become “necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another,” which suggests that America’s national identity is best characterized as, if not anti-English, then at least a-English or post-English.
Protestantism’s place in American national identity is even more interesting. Taking pride in America’s record of religious liberty generally entails interpreting this aspect of our national life as a stance of principled neutrality among religions or beyond religion altogether. But, to borrow some modern academic jargon, American religious liberty “codes” Protestant. Emphasizing the individual conscience’s inviolable sovereignty is a secularized rendering of Protestantism’s defining feature. Reflecting these assumptions, Catholicism was widely regarded for most of American history not as a sincere faith deserving religious liberty, but as a clannish, hierarchical fifth column that threatened religious liberty.
Not until 1928, when New York Governor Al Smith ran on the Democratic ticket, did a major political party nominate a Catholic for president. And the belief that Catholicism could not be fully assimilated to the American way of life was strong enough that a respectable mainstream publication, Christian Century, warned that Smith’s election would place “the representative of an alien culture, of a medieval, Latin mentality, of an undemocratic hierarchy and of a foreign potentate in the great office of the President of the United States.” These sentiments, published four decades closer to our own day than to the ratification of the Constitution, cannot be squared with Andrew Beck’s suggestion that America’s heritage of religious freedom was never meant to apply to non-Christian faiths, but is instead limited to any sect or denomination that follows the Nicene Creed, regarding all such as in accord on the main point and disputing only secondary doctrinal questions irrelevant to the health of the body politic.
It took another 32 years after Smith’s defeat before America elected its first Catholic president. Yet during his 1960 campaign, John Kennedy resorted to explaining his Catholic faith in terms that sounded more Protestant than Catholic and, indeed, more secular than religious. “I believe in an America,” JFK told an audience of Protestant clergy in Houston, “where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials” (emphasis added). “Whatever issue may come before me as President,” he continued, “I will make my decision in accordance with…what my conscience tells me to be the national interest, and without regard to outside religious pressures or dictates.” Such formulations, the Catholic intellectual George Weigel lamented in 2010, were probably necessary to overcome the suspicions of Catholicism, which remained robust as late as 1960, but had the unfortunate effect of encouraging the belief that the true meaning of religious freedom was the political irrelevance of religion altogether.
The fact that most of the German immigrants living in Texas, whose “forced assimilation” during and after World War I Beck considers “politically and morally justified,” were Christians further complicates the argument that Christianity is central to America’s national identity. (It appears that, among all German immigrants to America, there were roughly twice as many Protestants as Catholics, that the Protestants were predominantly Lutheran, and that believers and non-believers who cannot be classified as either Protestant or Catholic constituted a small portion of the total.) If Christian belief, or even a somewhat vaguer Christian orientation, figured as decisively in what makes an American an American as Beck contends, the vigorous measures taken to absorb Texas Germans into American life ought to have been a solution in search of a problem.
What Mad Brute, Its Hour Come Round at Last
The Texas episode Beck recounts brings up a second tricky aspect of the word “assimilate”: it can be used as either a transitive or an intransitive verb. As an example of the former, Merriam-Webster offers a sentence that appeared in the Anchorage Daily News in 2022: “The schools were part of a twin U.S. policy to assimilate Native Americans while taking their land.” A sentence from the Los Angeles Times in 2023 gives the second way of using the term: “Lewis explained in order to adjust to their new lives, her family had to change their way of life and assimilate to customs in the U.S.” When “assimilate” is used in the first manner, the assimilators are those in Group A, the larger or dominant one, who use some combination of persuasion and coercion to induce those in Group B, smaller and/or subordinate, to become more similar to Group A in certain respects. To become assimilated. In the second use of the term, those in Group B are self-assimilators, undertaking voluntarily to reduce or erase the dissimilarities between their way of life and Group A’s.
The example given above describes self-assimilation as a conscious, strategic decision, which is frequently the case. But it often operates in more spontaneous ways that the self-assimilator doesn’t plan or even notice. Humans appear to be hard-wired to try to fit in with those around them and, as a result, constantly adjust their facial expressions, gestures, cadence, accents, posture, and demeanor to more closely resemble those of the people they’re with. Hillary Clinton was mocked in 2007 for speaking to a Baptist congregation in Selma, Alabama, with diction suggesting that she, like Steve Martin in his 1979 movie The Jerk, believed she had been born a poor black child. Pandering may have been part of the cause, but the common phenomenon known as the echo effect, or linguistic accommodation, was almost certainly at work as well.
To generalize broadly, self-assimilation seems more likely to promote domestic tranquility than induced assimilation. And, given the range of ways people can self-assimilate, the unconscious and incremental is better than the planned and strategic on the grounds that instinctive behavior is rarely insincere. Even though Andrew Beck endorses the vigorous, transitive-verb assimilation of German-Texans by Anglo-Texans as a “welcome precedent,” he shrinks from calling for its emulation. “No one,” apparently including Beck, “is advocating deliberate government persecution of American citizens who observe certain religious tenets or have recent ancestors from foreign nations.” This disclaimer makes it hard to know the practical significance of the welcome Texas precedent. The implication is that while it is inspiring to know that in America “the state, backed by public sentiment,” has on at least one occasion “enforced a program of assimilation with remarkable efficiency,” a program that extended to monitoring and seeking to influence sermons in churches and private conversation among individuals, it would be inadvisable to undertake such a program now, or even to advocate for it.
Indeed, Beck’s reference to the forced assimilation of the German-Texans yields more questions than answers. From his summary, we don’t know why these immigrants were so much more likely to resist or avoid assimilation than others who arrived in the U.S. in the late 19th or early 20th century. We might speculate that the vastness of Texas lent itself to insularity in a way that was impossible in the crowded cities where Irish, Jewish, Italian, and Eastern European immigrants were more likely to establish themselves in the New World. Beck also mentions but does not dwell on the fact that the primary motive for the assimilation imposed on the German-Texans was World War I, when anti-German sentiment was intense, and further intensified by the Woodrow Wilson Administration’s authoritarian measures and demagogic propaganda.
In short, the vigorous assimilation of the German-Texans may have required circumstances unlikely to be repeated. And, even if we assume the recurrence of such circumstances for the sake of a thought experiment, the treatment of the German-Texans was not an obviously defensible response, much less an admirable one. Claremont Institute publications are not ones that typically praise Woodrow Wilson, even by implication.
Of Punditry and Prudence
Most important for our purposes, the German-Texan precedent does nothing to bolster Beck’s contention, asserted more than demonstrated, that the place where many Indian immigrants have chosen to situate themselves falls outside the limit of tolerable heterogeneity. “Large numbers” of them, he says, cluster together “to speak their native language, eat their traditional foods, and practice their religion,” Hinduism. As a result, “Indians remain insulated from and unassimilated to American culture.”
Perhaps. There’s no way to settle the question conclusively, but I am less pessimistic than Beck for two reasons, one general and the other hyper-specific. The general one is that America’s record of assimilating dissimilar groups is quite formidable. These groups were widely considered resistant to or unfit for assimilation—the disparagement of Catholics by the Christian Century in 1928 is in keeping with thousands of denunciations and warnings going back to the early 1800s—a fact that should give us pause before declaring confidently that a recent group of immigrants is destined to reject the American way of life for as far into the future as we can see.
The specific reason for my guarded optimism is Usha Vance, wife of Vice President JD Vance. She was born in Southern California in 1986 to parents who immigrated from India “in the 1980s,” according to published accounts, so no more than six years previously. She met the future author and politician when they were both students at Yale Law School. In a separate ceremony following their 2014 wedding, their union was blessed by a Hindu pundit. Usha Vance remains Hindu, while her husband, raised Protestant, converted to Catholicism in 2019. Asked in 2024 how they make family life with three children accommodate their different faiths, Mrs. Vance said, “And the answer really is, we just talk a lot.”
“America is not just an idea,” the vice president said earlier this year at a Claremont Institute gathering. “We’re a particular place, with a particular people, and a particular set of beliefs and way of life.” He added, “You cannot swap 10 million people from anywhere else in the world and expect America to remain unchanged,” because “our shared qualities—our heritage, our values, our manners and customs—confer a special and indispensable advantage.” I agree with Vance (and Andrew Beck) that these are valid, serious concerns. We are a nation dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. For the purpose of building and sustaining such a nation, however, it does not follow that all cultural heritages are created equal. Some are less conducive than others to liberal democracy. We jeopardize the separation of church and state, for example, by immigration policies that welcome large numbers of Muslims who believe that the separation of mosque and state is not only wrong but incomprehensible.
Yet to reflect on what JD Vance says in light of how he lives supports the idea that there is a good deal of play in the joints of such notions as a particular American way of life and a shared American heritage. Certainly, a republic where 1% of the population is Hindu requires less in the way of tolerance, forbearance, and muddling through to sustain a workable degree of cohesion than does a marriage where 50% of the spouses are Hindu. The political challenge is to find a balance: to be vigilant against the danger of excessive diversity and vigilant against excessive certitude about the exact boundaries of the American way of life.
Indeed, epistemic humility about the location of heterogeneity’s outer limit is a better basis for limiting immigration than confident but contestable assertions about the point at which we pass from the tolerable to the intolerable. Precisely because it is hard to say, and hard to know, when diversity imperils national cohesion, prudence requires proceeding slowly and cautiously. (Prudence requires, in addition, constant awareness that immigration policy mistakes are not symmetrically reversible. A nation that decides its past policy has been excessively restrictive can be less restrictive. A nation that decides its past policy has been insufficiently restrictive quickly discovers that it is easier to keep people out than to get them out.) Safety dictates that we drive slower through the fog at night than we do on a clear, sunny day. We should govern in the same manner.