The expansionist impulse was revived in Trump’s first term as he looked north to Greenland. The prospect of the deal was resurrected when Donald Trump Jr. visited the nation last month as his father prepared to reenter the White House. The new President now says that America’s purchase of Greenland “must happen.” This follows on the heels of President Trump warning Justin Trudeau that if Canada can’t handle American tariffs, it ought to become the 51st state. And now, Trump has floated an American annexation of Gaza—a notoriously unstable warzone with a local population that would likely mount a sustained military resistance to such an effort.
After nearly a quarter-century of American leaders’ neo-imperialist efforts to remake global backwaters into Western-style democracies—a quest that did nothing but spend untold billions, get American soldiers killed, and fund the international war machine—one might think that the MAGA rank-and-file would bristle at this rhetorical (?) embrace of old-fashioned territorial imperialism. But no—on X, any number of prominent conservatives were eagerly anticipating a new era of expansionism, where the United States’ territory would spread across North America and the world.
This apparent revival of Manifest Destiny comes at a strange time. Only weeks ago, when Vivek Ramaswamy, Elon Musk, and Trump himself defended expanding the number of H1-B visas granted to “qualified” foreigners, MAGA promptly exploded in a fit of cultural protectionism. More foreigners, they said—qualified or “unskilled”—will further imperil traditional American norms and our way of life! But now, so many of those same people are ready to add 45 million Canadians to the mix of American society? What gives?
After decades of worship by American institutions, the doctrine of multiculturalism is finally facing strong, sustained challenges at home and abroad. In essence, multiculturalism was a globalist imperative that masqueraded in the Western world as a moralistic form of cosmopolitan sophistication: acolytes congratulated themselves for believing that all cultures were equally valuable and desirable. Further, they not only asserted that all cultures can peacefully cohabitate in Western democracies, but they insisted that this cohabitation makes a nation stronger. After all, “our diversity is our strength.” For multiculturalists, the operating assumption is “the more cultures we can pack into a nation, the better.”
At its peak, this ideology was publicly unquestionable. Worrying about assimilation—a central concern that had guided immigration policy since the founding—was recast as xenophobic bigotry. This was the logic that gave us the open border policies that have defined the 21st century thus far. From the 1970s to the 2000s, multiculturalists slowly moved from the position that “all cultures are equal” (which at least implicitly acknowledged the value of American culture) to “other cultures are better” (which explicitly frames American culture as defective and undesirable). After that transition was complete, it followed that the official (if unstated) objective would be to flood America with as many people from other (non-Western, non-European) cultures as possible.
Many commentators have recently revisited the question of how to define a “nation.” It’s an important one, but it also invites a generalized answer: a definition applicable to all the nations of the world. Thus, “What is a nation?” sometimes sidelines concerns about cultural particularity. For this reason, we must attend to an even more pressing question: what is an American?
Before offering an answer, it’s important to note that there is no national consensus on this matter. Some believe that anyone who happens to reside in the United States is an American—regardless of “immigration status.” That perspective is evident in how we conduct our census, knowingly including non-citizens in the count—and disallowing census-takers from even asking whether residents have legal status.
Others celebrate a “creedal” identity that defines what it is to be American. Defenders of multiculturalism often use creedalism to dismiss the concerns of their critics: what does someone’s cultural background matter as long as we all share a common set of values? But which creed? Which values? By now, it is now apparent that the multiple cultures coexisting in America each have their own creeds—and some are more hostile to the American tradition than others.
In the growing absence of a shared creed, some have retreated to citizenship as the sole criterion required to be an American. As long as you’re a citizen, you’re an American, they say. Full stop. And there is some truth to that. All U.S. citizens are, in fact, Americans. But not all to the same degree. There are legal criteria for being an American. But there are also cultural criteria for being an American. Being fully American requires that an individual satisfy both standards. The hard truth, then, for Democrats devoted to a vision of radical equality, is that some Americans are more American than others.
For at least two decades, though, institutions have instructed young Americans that the core element of American culture is a dedication to multiculturalism. We know that is untrue because it is a paradox: the defining aspect of a culture cannot be that it has no distinctive aspects other than the fact that it has none.
A culture only exists to the extent that it reflects a considerable difference from other cultures. Thus, a culture with nothing distinctive is no culture at all. This exposes the true nature of multiculturalism: it is a cultural solvent, an ideology that aims to dissolve any particular culture by diluting it with other cultures. This is why leftists and multiculturalists are opposed to any serious effort to assimilate newcomers. Their goal is precisely the opposite of assimilation. Consciously or unconsciously, they want to annihilate a shared American culture. By importing so many cultures that our traditional way of life is simply one among others, they seek to erode the preeminence of traditional American culture in America.
So, it is true that every citizen is an American—but not to the same extent. Someone from a family that has lived in the state of Nebraska for eight generations is, in some meaningful sense, more American than the unassimilated American-born child of foreigners. A citizen who speaks fluent American English is more American than a citizen who does not. A citizen who lives in accordance with the founding principles of America—limited government, republican democracy, natural rights, tolerance, private property, and more—is more American than an American who does not.
Defenders of multiculturalism will be quick to claim that recognizing different degrees of Americanness runs afoul of the values of tolerance and equality. They might say that seeing different orders of Americans makes one less American than the person who embraces the current vision of tolerance and equality. But the current vision of tolerance and equality that undergirds their reasoning is badly corrupted.
Tolerance, in the American tradition, means allowing people to express cultural differences. But in practice, today’s promoters of tolerance require that we celebrate and encourage cultural difference. Indeed, this ideal is the basis of many history and social science curricula in our country. The real goal of celebrating culture difference is to erode the privileged status that American culture enjoys in America.
But America was never conceived as a nation where all cultures had equal legitimacy and social force. On the contrary, maintaining a distinctly American culture is necessary to defend the proper notion of tolerance as defined above. Equality, in the American tradition, means nothing more than equality before the law and in the eyes of God. Other visions of equality (material equality, cultural equality, or otherwise) are actually threats to the true premises that make America different—the premises that Americans of higher degrees affirm and uphold.
If this truth—that not all Americans are equally American, culturally speaking—seems to threaten some kind of cultural caste system, this is another misunderstanding. Every culture, national or otherwise, offers incentives and advantages to those who embrace it. In Japan, an ethnic Japanese person will enjoy certain privileges and opportunities that a Japanese citizen of a Western background or not. In many African nations, someone with a heritage that places them within a dominant tribe will have intangible advantages over those from minority tribes. And at the all women’s gym, a biological female will naturally enjoy certain social benefits that a biological male who “identifies” as a woman will not.
The good news is that (unlike these examples), American identity is not based on immutable characteristics like race or sex. This is one of the distinctive features of American culture: a citizen can become more American. You can learn English. You can align yourself with traditional American values and ways of life. And to the extent that you do, you too will reap the intangible advantages that accrue to Americans of the higher degrees.
Assimilation, then, isn’t merely something imposed upon the individual by the larger society as a necessary means to protect the integrity of the majority culture. In America, assimilation offers rewards that can help newcomers lay claim to the “better life” that many claim to seek. Understood in this way, assimilation isn’t a kind of cultural violence. Rather, it is something to aspire to—a way to become American in the fullest sense. No other society offers this opportunity to immigrants in the way that America does.
As the Trump administration tackles the immigration problem and makes new policies regarding the border, H1-Bs, and illegal immigrants, we must be mindful of these things. While the question of nationhood is undoubtedly important, the question of the defining character of Americans is perhaps more so. If importing a million Indian workers would upset the cultural balance in the United States, what would be the effect of welcoming 40 million Canadians, 50,000 Greenlanders, 3 million Puerto Ricans, and untold numbers of Mexicans and Central Americans? Canada has a culture, too—and contrary to popular belief in the United States, it’s very different from our own.
Even if Trump succeeds in dramatically reducing immigration and deporting millions of recent illegal arrivals, immigrants will remain a part of American life. In keeping with our culture, we must tolerate their expressions of cultural differences. Thus, with few exceptions, we should only invite the ones who are willing and, indeed, eager to accept our way of life. To that end, we also must place a new emphasis on assimilation, creating policies that highlight the advantages of assimilating to the majority culture of the United States, and creating powerful incentives for newcomers to do so.
This is a way to unify the American people, to attain greater equality when more Americans take on the characteristics of citizens who represent the nation to the fullest degree, and to protect the beliefs and behaviors that make our nation and culture different. After all, it is that difference that inspires people around the world to come to America. We must also exercise restraint in territorial expansion, which inevitably dilutes culture and makes it harder to maintain. “Multiculturalism” is a cultural death sentence, and we owe it to the world to remain who we are.