What is an American?

“You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or a Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.” — Ronald Reagan

There’s a meme going around on right-wing social media, where right-wing influencers ask “What is an American?”. Some don’t give answers, and simply assume that people who read the question will start thinking along the lines they want:

Others merely prompt the reader with evocative images:

But some do give answers, and their answers give a glimpse into how the political right is thinking in America nowadays:

What’s interesting on this chart is that the author — who may or may not himself be American, but who is certainly doing a good job of riling Americans up on social media — doesn’t try to establish a hard and fast cutoff, but instead defines a system of grades, where the longer your ancestors were in the country, the more points you get.

This kind of thing is natural in a polyglot country of immigrants like America. In every country you’ll find some form of restrictive nationalism — the idea that no matter what the citizenship laws say, only certain groups of people are truly members of the nation. But in most countries, there’s some kind of hard cutoff you can use — usually, membership in a specific ethnic group or religion. But America is so diverse that any attempt to draw a hard, bright line around which groups are “real Americans” is probably going to fail, because the cutoff will be transparently arbitrary. And so our restrictive nationalists resort to drawing concentric circles, defining a whole spectrum of American-ness based on some combination of family history, race, ethnicity, and religion.

This idea seems to be gaining power on the right. Online, you hear the term “Heritage American” thrown around a lot. C. Jay Engel, who has done a lot to popularize the term, sees “Heritage Americans” as people who value both the racial composition and the racial hierarchy of the U.S. before World War 2:

When I say Heritage American, this is what I mean: those who are ethno-culturally tied to the ethos and spirit of the United States prior to its definitional transformation into a Propositional Nation after World War II. This therefore includes the type of people that came here during the Ellis Island generation, even if that was a significant sociopolitical mistake. We are also the product of our mistakes as a nation.

It includes the blacks of the Old South (like Booker T Washington), though it repudiates any instinct that some of them have to leverage their experience for the purposes of political guilt in our time. It also includes integrated Native Americans with the same stipulation.

It affirms however the domination and pre-eminence of the European derived peoples, their institutions, and their way of life. Heritage America is centered around the experiences and norms of Anglo-Protestants.

This is pretty vague — there’s no test you can really do to tell if someone is or isn’t a “Heritage American” under this definition. In fact, the right can’t agree at all who exactly qualifies. A blogger calling himself “Ragnar Lifthrasir” defines the idea purely in ethnic terms (though he allows for other ethnicities to attain “ally” status):

[U]nderstanding who Heritage Americans are has never been more urgent. These descendants of the Founding Americans—Protestant, English-speaking, Northwestern Europeans who built the nation from Jamestown through the 1870s—represent more than ancestry. They embody a distinct American ethnicity forged through centuries of frontier experience, constitutional development, and cultural synthesis…

[There are also] those who are not Heritage Americans but who unequivocally support Heritage America…I call these citizens, “Ally Americans”. They can be of any ethnicity or faith or immigration vintage. But they advocate for America remaining a predominantly White, Christian nation governed by the spirit and letter of America’s founding documents.

Ben Crenshaw, on the other hand, adds an ideological element to the definition (something that Engel explicitly rejected):

For most nations of the world, to be considered a true German or Italian or Chinese or South African you must be a blood descendent (and thus exhibit common genetic traits), you must live in a geographical location where those people have historically lived, and you must abide by certain customs and ways of life. While America is not a “propositional nation,” neither does she neatly align with how other peoples have historically associated. Heritage America is not reducible to “blood and soil” fearmongering, yet neither are family, kin, and the land unimportant in America’s identity.

What does it mean to be an American? Heritage America is best understood as involving seven inheritances: the English language, Christianity, self-government, Christian government, liberty, equality under the law, and relationship with the physical land.

All these people can agree that “Heritage Americans” are an important group, but none of them can agree on who exactly belongs in that group.

It’s important to recognize that all of these ideas are well outside of the mainstream. YouGov did a poll this summer asking Americans what makes someone an American. Most of the items at the top of the list were behaviors like obeying the law, voting, speakin