Source: Bigstock

All right, class, it’s time for a pop quiz. Which of the following is true?

(1) America is the homeland of a distinct people.

(2) America is an economic opportunity zone and a global commons.

Elon Musk checks box 2. This ontological revisionism forms the crux of his all-too-predictable falling-out with Donald Trump.

For the second view to hold, the United States must forever remain propositional, that is, defined by abstract principles alone. In turn, the nation’s core Anglo-Protestant identity and social cohesion must be sacrificed. Boomers have institutionalized this project with bipartisan consensus, albeit drawing on different rationales. On the one hand, progressive moralism demands it as penance for the “original sins” of the body politic. On the other hand, material narratives justify doing so at the neoliberal altar of GDP maximization and market absolutism. Musk’s technocratic utopianism is where the twain meet.

“This administration has a generational opportunity to reclaim the American dream for Americans—and it’s doubling down on it.”

Recall the multibillionaire’s unhinged tantrum over H-1B immigration last Christmas? “Temporary” skilled worker programs, such as H-1B and L-1 visas, act as subsidies to reduce corporate labor costs, benefiting major H-1B employers such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, and Tesla. It explains why Musk vowed to wage war against H-1B critics; his electric car company cannot afford to lose access to its low-wage labor supply. He condemned American white-collar workers who resist career loss and downward mobility as “unrepentant racists” and “contemptible fools,” embittered by their looming obsolescence. They deserve to be replaced by the supposed winners of natural selection from the global talent pool—in other words, his compliant foreign workforce. To reinforce this narrative, Musk misrepresents his own immigration path from South Africa via Canada as an H-1B success.

Amidst his rage-tweeting at advocates for the domestic workforce, he revealed his warped psychosocial logic of belonging. “America rose to greatness over the past 150 years,” Musk declared, “because it was a meritocracy more than anywhere else on Earth.” Notice how he erased the “blighted” first 250 years of American history. Moving the origin to the Second Industrial Revolution constructs a new founding myth in which the modern immigrant becomes the nation’s moral savior and technology the architect of American exceptionalism. Not only does this telling reimagine the U.S. as a performance-based system but it also invalidates inherited identity and civic continuity. Heritage Americans are thus stripped of historical legitimacy and reduced to squatters in a nation forged by their forebears.

Now let’s take a big step back and face the facts. Anglo-Protestant settlers tamed a wilderness long dominated by warring hunter-gatherer tribes. They conquered the land through sheer grit, daring, and innovation. The men and women who built an enduring system of laws, representative institutions, and cultural mores were not immigrants. Distinct folkways from the British Isles, along with influences from other northwest European peoples and enslaved Africans, converged in the new nation. Puritan egalitarianism, Southern chivalry, Quaker pluralism, and Appalachian independence together formed a unique mélange irreducible to a mere sum of its parts. It fostered a frontier spirit that spurred America’s expansion from a small republic hugging the Atlantic Seaboard to a transcontinental power. And despite its contradictions, the culture contained the philosophical ideals and political mechanisms for corrective measures such as abolishing slavery. This is what makes America great.

American greatness endured because successive waves of immigrants during the pre–Civil War and Ellis Island eras aligned their diverse contributions with the shared national heritage. Economic stability and low crime rates are necessarily incomplete measures of successful immigration. True assimilation requires honoring the nation’s historical and cultural roots, sharing solidarity with its citizens, and adopting its foundational values, including individualism and fairness. Heritage Americans have a profound stake in this multigenerational inheritance, a stake rooted in ancestral sacrifice and cultural embeddedness.

Needless to say, Musk is wrong. President Trump’s historic victory arose from his advocacy for the American homeland and its forgotten citizens, whose livelihoods have been devastated by unfair trade and unjust globalization. The 2024 election gave him an unequivocal mandate to overhaul immigration and codify America First principles into law. This administration has a generational opportunity to reclaim the American dream for Americans—and it’s doubling down on it. Voilà.

Exit stage left, Elon Musk.