I was rummaging through some boxes of books the other day and stumbled across an antique pamphlet I’d forgotten I own, the theme of which bears directly on our cultural and political moment, and indeed our survival as a nation. It’s about what makes an American.
Entitled I Am An American: What Every Citizen Should Know, it’s the kind of patriotic pamphlet that was common in this country prior to and during World War II. Printed in 1940, the 128-page pocket-sized booklet is not just a little treasure trove of American history, poetry, and music, it’s a manual on how to be a good American.
The top of the opening page reads, “I am an American — I am a believer in The American Creed.” What follows, written in 1917 by William Tyler Page, is about as straightforward a declaration of American identity that one could hope to find:
I believe in the United States of America, as a government of the people, by the people, for the people; whose just powers are derived from the consent of the governed; a democracy in a republic; a sovereign Nation of many sovereign States; a perfect union, one and inseparable; established upon those principles of freedom, equality, justice, and humanity for which American patriots sacrificed their lives and fortunes. I therefore believe it is my duty to my country to love it, to support its Constitution, to obey its laws, to respect its flag, and to defend it against all enemies.
The next pages list the rights and privileges we have as Americans — “I may think as I please. I may speak or write as I please, so long as I do not interfere with the rights of others,” and so on — and also the corresponding duties we share with our fellow citizens. Among those duties are the obligations “to obey my country’s laws … defend my country, if need should arise … to abide by the will of the majority, to stand behind my government, so my nation may be unified in time of crisis.”
The rest of the booklet includes the full text of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and Bill of Rights, a brief explanation of the Monroe Doctrine, a primer on how our government works, a primer on the flag of the United States, a list of American holidays, selected quotations and speeches from notable Americans, a brief synopsis of “America’s Glorious History,” some patriotic songs and poems, and selected anecdotes of famous Americans.
All together, the little pamphlet paints a portrait of a healthy civic culture built by a nation of men who know their freedom comes with duties and obligations that cannot be shirked, and who have a deep affection for their homeland. It’s a cultural artifact of a people who are confident in their American identity and patrimony, and know what they expect of the rising generation and those who would become Americans.
Indeed, the fear of losing their nation to a hyphenated Americanism (what today we would call multiculturalism) is palpable throughout, as one would expect in a country that had absorbed so many immigrants in the century between 1840 and 1940. Even Woodrow Wilson, the epitome of a liberal ideologue, is quoted expressing disdain for hyphens: “For my part I think the most un-American thing in the world is a hyphen.” Theodore Roosevelt is quoted on the necessity of the English language: “We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language, for we intend to see that the crucible turns our people out as Americans … and not as dwellers in a polyglot boarding house.”
At the time of its publication, most of our immigrants had come from Europe, and therefore shared more points of cultural contact with the American people than today’s immigrants do. Yet there was nevertheless an insistence in the 1940s on an undivided American identity. Anyone who, in Roosevelt’s phrase, “tries to keep segregated with men of his own origin and separated from the rest of America … isn’t doing his part as an American.” A key feature of what was once called Americanism was the insistence that newcomers must leave behind all foreign allegiances and identities. As Henry Cabot Lodge put it,
Let every man honor and love the land of his birth and the race from which he springs and keep their memory green. It is a pious and honorable duty. But let us have done with British-Americans and Irish-Americans and German-Americans, and so on, and all be Americans — nothing more and nothing less. If a man is going to be an American at all, let him be so without any qualifying adjectives, and if he is going to be something else, let him drop the word American from his personal description.
Reading this, one is struck by how far we have drifted from these sturdy ideas. All these quotes and excerpts, meant to train up and educate Americans in the middle of the last century, today appear as detritus from a vanished civilization.
Liberals today — and not a few self-described conservatives — would decry much of this as racist and bigoted. The entire idea of an American identity has been rejected in favor of the flimsy notion that America is merely an idea. Anyone from any part of the world, goes the thinking, can become an American so long as he assents to a set of abstract propositions about individual rights and goes through a neutral administrative process.
According to this attenuated view of American identity, being an American doesn’t mean loyalty to this country, gratitude for its glorious history, reverence for its founders and heroes, or love for its people and land. It certainly doesn’t mean adherence to a common morality, language, or way of life. It simply means securing a set of documents that confer citizenship, or even just legal status. For such people, it doesn’t really matter what you love or where your loyalties lie; all that matters is that you have sufficiently engaged the relevant bureaucracies.
This of course is how you destroy a nation. As Aristotle explained at the beginning of his Politics, the nation comes into being through the civic comity and natural affection that arise from a common language, morality, and culture, which he calls philia. From this arises telos, which is the natural end or purpose of a thing. In American political terms, we might say that our national telos is “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” — understanding that last phrase, “pursuit of happiness,” to mean what the founders meant: not a relativistic seeking after pleasure or fulfillment, but the acquisition of moral virtue.
Together, philia and telos make a nation. When you eliminate or substitute one or both of those elements, the nation begins to disintegrate from within, to commit suicide. Mass illegal immigration is the most obvious example of how philia can be stamped out in a nation. But the admittance of legal immigrants who are not willing to become Americans, or who actively seek to destroy America, is another, less-discussed example.
Consider the Democrat primary last week in New York City, in which a 33-year-old Muslim communist named Zohran Mamdani emerged as the winner and is therefore likely the next NYC mayor. In what sense is Mamdani an American? Yes, he was naturalized as a U.S. citizen in 2018, a fact that corporate media outlets have been quick to highlight — as if this will shield him from all criticism of his candidly anti-American beliefs, socialist politics, and racist worldview.
But there’s a difference in America today between formal U.S. citizenship and actually being an American. We have so watered down what it means to be a citizen that simply noting someone is technically a U.S. citizen tells us almost nothing about whether that person is an American. In the case of Mamdani, we can say confidently that although he might be a naturalized citizen, he is in no way an American.
What makes someone an American is, after all, not nearly as complicated or fraught a question as liberals or the libertarian right would have us believe. As the aforementioned pamphlet from 1940 makes clear, America is a nation and a people, a union of philia and telos, not an idea or a set of abstractions. To be an American therefore means not only assenting to the philosophical and theological claims in our founding documents, but also to share in our customs, morality, behavioral proclivities, and general way of life. In Federalist No. 2, John Jay summed up it up rather nicely: “Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people — a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs.”
Indeed, the Declaration of Independence itself, which is often associated with “individual rights,” does not open with a statement about rights or individuals, but with an assertion about a people: “When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another …” The founders understood themselves to be not merely a collection of individuals with inalienable rights but one people, with a shared past and a common future, alike in their language, manners, and morality. Only a people — specifically, a people drawn from the English — could form the American nation. No other people could have done it, and none other did.
Up until about the middle of the last century, it was commonly understood that we needed to remain one people, with an un-hyphenated American identity, in order to preserve our nation. The great mistake we made was in thinking that all we needed was the telos, a mere set of abstracted ideas about rights and government, and that the philia from which a nation arises must be actively resisted and eliminated. After the 1960s, freedom of association itself was effectively outlawed at the federal level and vilified by our elites. We were told that it was racist and bigoted to see any virtue in commonality of language, religion, customs, or professed values.
Dissenting from that means active persecution, even today. We are told that we must believe, against all historical experience and common sense, that someone like Mamdani, a foreign-born Muslim who has only been a naturalized citizen for seven years, is just as American as the descendants of the English colonists. This is why, for example, the corporate press insisted on referring to Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Salvadoran gang member and criminal illegal alien, as a “Maryland man.”
The result of this decades-long ideological campaign has been the stamping out of the Aristotelian understanding of the nation, and the attempt to replace it with multiculturalism and moral relativism. If we continue down this path, we will truly come apart, and one of the manifestations of our coming apart will be that men like Mamdani will gain public office and political power.
That is to say, foreigners who are openly hostile to the American nation will be put in positions of authority over it. We actually have mechanisms in place to prevent this. Arguably, Mamdani should not only be barred from public office; he should never have been naturalized in the first place.
One of the statutory requirements for naturalization in federal law is that the applicant be “attached to the principles of the Constitution of the United States.” The Code of Federal Regulations elaborates: “Attachment implies a depth of conviction which would lead to active support of the Constitution. Attachment and favorable disposition relate to mental attitude, and contemplate the exclusion from citizenship of applicants who are hostile to the basic form of government of the United States, or who disbelieve in the principles of the Constitution.”
Mamdani is of course hostile to the basic form of government of the United States and is in no way attached to the principles of the Constitution. Neither are his fellow travelers on the left like Bernie Sanders, AOC, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib. They want a socialist revolution in America and an entirely new form of government, alien to our history and customs, incompatible with our morality and American identity.
Since his victory in the NYC Democrat primary, some have called for Mamdani’s citizenship to be stripped and for him to be deported. Rep. Andy Ogles of Tennessee sent a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi last week calling for Mamdani to be subject to denaturalization proceedings for expressing support for convicted Islamic terrorists prior to his naturalization.
Ogles isn’t putting forward some crazy theory. In both the naturalization statute and the Communist Control Act of 1954, we actually do have a means of protecting our republic from radicals and revolutionaries who would destroy it. Mamdani need not have expressed solidarity with convicted terrorists to run afoul of these laws; he need only express his communist views, which he has done often and loudly.
Whether we have the requisite political will and desire for self-preservation to enforce these laws and protect our nation from people like Mamdani is another question, and the answer is probably that we do not. But we should at least be honest about the situation we’re in and look for ways to recover and reassert our American identity over and against those who would destroy it.
And we must be honest. To recover and reassert our American identity means the mass deportation of illegal immigrants. It also means denaturalizing and expelling every foreigner who professes views hostile to our American civilization, or who refuses to assimilate into it. As Theodore Roosevelt said, “There is room here for only 100 percent Americanism, only for those who are Americans and nothing else.”
If we return to that understanding of America, we might yet survive as a people and a nation. If we don’t, we’ll surely die — and our death will have been a suicide.