Nobody, to my knowledge, has ever accused Rep. Ilhan Omar of being a nationalist. But if her recently surfaced comments about Somalia are any indication, she is, in fact, an ardent one — just not for the nation of America.

A few months ago, controversy broke out surrounding comments Omar made during a speech about Somalia (delivered to a predominantly Somalian crowd in Minneapolis): “We are people of brotherhood, people of blood, people who know themselves to be Somalis, to be Muslims,” Omar thundered, according to the English-translation subtitles. “We are a gifted set of individuals with a patriotic spirit that acknowledges our homeland and strives to protect it.” In a shockingly candid admission, Omar openly bragged to the crowd about her ambition to serve the interests of a foreign nation while ostensibly representing American voters in the U.S. government: “The U.S. government will do what we tell the U.S. government to do,” she boasted. “That is the confidence we need to have as Somalis.… For as long as I am in Congress, no one will take over the seas belonging to the nation of Somalia and the United States will not support others who seek to steal from us.” 

“Us,” of course, did not refer to the United States. No serious observer of politics could ever imagine the congresswoman describing America in such terms.

Omar was not the only Somali-American politician to openly boast of a dual (at best) loyalty. Earlier this month, Ohio state Rep. Ismail Mohamed touted the emergent bloc of Somalia Firsters in U.S. politics: “We have 20 or more different political representatives. And of course, Ilhan Omar is our representative at the federal level…. Our main objective is to discuss things that concern Somalia. It’s our country. It’s our people. Our aim as [a] united front is to lobby for Somalia.”

Tempting as it may be, it is difficult to lay all the blame for this nation-within-a-nation phenomenon — a potent impulse among many ethnic blocs within America today, well beyond Somalians — at the feet of Omar and Mohamed. In many ways, Omar and Mohamed are rational actors; they came to this country as Somalians, and this country gave them no reason to rethink or abandon that identity. Their comments are the inevitable result of a nation that no longer has the political will to both inspire and demand loyalty to this country, and only this country, from all who wish to reap the considerable benefits of U.S. citizenship.

The concept of the American “melting pot” found its popularity in a now-forgotten play penned by the Anglo-Jewish writer Israel Zangwill more than a century ago. Zangwill’s The Melting Pot, released in 1908 amid the first great wave of mass migration into America, features a Russian-Jewish “pogrom orphan” protagonist named David Quixano, who — having escaped his mother country to New York — is enamored by the utopian possibilities of a multiracial, multicultural, universal America, where all sectarian distinctions have melted away into a final, almost eschatological oneness: “German and Frenchman, Irishman and Englishman, Jews and Russians — into the Crucible with you all! God is making the American.”

In the final scene of the play, David — speaking to his love interest, Vera — exclaims:

East and West, and North and South, the palm and the pine, the pole and the equator, the crescent and the cross—how the great Alchemist melts and fuses them with his purging flame! Here shall they all unite to build the Republic of Man and the Kingdom of God. Ah, Vera, what is the glory of Rome and Jerusalem where all nations and races come to worship and look back, compared with the glory of America, where all races and nations come to labour and look forward!

If this original articulation of the melting pot strikes readers as dubious — even verging on fanatical — subsequent iterations are hardly much more convincing, or less bizarre. In the Huffington Post, Rev. Kevin Wildes described the melting pot as “a gumbo of sorts, in which people come from all over the world, from different nations, ethnicities, and cultures, to become one.” “While the Europeans may have been the primary founders of our nation, the nation has enjoyed human ‘ingredients’ from Africa, Asia and South America,” Tim Constantine added in the Washington Times. “When we exclude or separate out an ingredient, the recipe is clearly missing something.” One can’t help but wonder if these authors were writing on an empty stomach. 

On the contemporary left, Zangwill’s contribution to the pantheon of American political metaphors is regarded with a substantial amount of hostility. In lieu of the melting pot mythology — which is held to be culturally insensitive, insofar as it implies that new arrivals should have to assimilate into anything at all — the preferred culinary analogy is that of the “salad bowl,” which “maintains the unique identities of individuals that would otherwise be lost to assimilation,” a 2019 Journal of Ethnic and Cultural Studies essay explained. “The immediate advantage of the Salad Bowl theory is that it acknowledges the discrete identities and cultural differences of a multicultural society.”

As the Left has abandoned the concept, the Right — as it is always wont to do — has positioned itself as its fiercest defender. Aside from the (inextricably linked, but still distinct) idea of the “creedal nation,” few neologisms are so central to the neoconservative understanding of America as that of the melting pot. Essays in outlets from National Review to Commentary to the Wall Street Journal have continued to praise the virtues of America’s multicultural fondue, valiantly defending it against its left-wing critics.

Writing in 2012, the Hoover Institution’s Bruce S. Thornton laid out the more or less conventional definition of the metaphor and the view of American identity that underlies it: “the historically exceptional notion of American identity as one formed not by the accidents of blood, sect, or race, but by the unifying beliefs and political ideals enshrined in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.” This stunningly abstract conception of Americanism allowed immigrants to be “free in civil society to celebrate and retain [their old] cultures through fraternal organizations, ethnic festivals, language schools, and religious guilds,” Thornton beamed. Still, he cautioned, new immigrants “had to make their first loyalty to America and its ideals.”

As for what, precisely, “America” is — other than a set of “unifying beliefs and political ideals” — Thornton didn’t deign to explain. Very few of these apologetics ever do, save for obligatory hand-waving about “ideals” and “beliefs” and “creeds.” That is a feature, rather than a bug, of the concept: When you reduce your country’s identity to a shapeless, inchoate ooze of incoherence — a pot that melts away all that is concrete and distinctive — it becomes impossible for that identity to mean much of anything at all. The melting pot abstracts America out of existence. (READ MORE from Nate Hochman: Becoming Haiti: How Biden Is Transforming America Into a Gang-Infested Wasteland)

In fact, the “melting pot” theory of American identity is far broader and more abstract than any actual melting pot — or, at least, any melting pot whose contents are worth serving. The dishes one prepares in a melting plot have a distinctive flavor — ideally an appetizing one — requiring that the cook carefully choose what to put in to them while simultaneously leaving many things out of them. Not only that, but the mix of what the cook adds must meet a specific, predetermined balance; too little salt leaves a dish bland, and too much makes it inedible.

No such limits or considerations exist in the melting pot theory of American multiculturalism. To hear many of its staunchest defenders tell it, the theory is merely the practical application of American universalism, which recognizes no distinctions at all other than an abstract set of “ideas.” And if America is merely a set of ideas, then a tribesman in the remotest reaches of the Amazon who happens to believe those ideas — even if he has never set foot on American soil and has no intention of ever doing so — is just as (if not more) American than you or me.

It is possible to be “so open-minded,” G.K. Chesterton wrote, “that your brains fall out.” The same could be said of a country. The fact is that there are a wide array of people, customs, cultures, practices, traditions, and beliefs that we Americans should not want melting into our country, and that we have every right to refuse them entry to our national pot. America, as it turns out, is not a melting pot at all; America is a real, concrete nation, with a specific character, culture, history, and way of life. That is who we are, and that is what our newcomers should assimilate into if they hope to ever become American, in the real and true sense of the word.