Hail, Columbia

Nations do not spring from mere political necessity. They are born from the stories they tell about themselves, stories that explain how they became a people and what ties them to their homeland. States which desire to remain unified, much less great, ensure that each generation is raised up in these noble myths. The Romans, for instance, believed that their native city was built by Romulus, son of the she-wolf and descendant of the exiled Trojan hero Aeneas. As befits a nation with an unwritten constitution, the English have no single myth to point toward, but one might find in the Arthurian cycle and the story of the Norman Conquest certain foundational elements of the character of the English gentleman. In perhaps my favorite story of this kind, the ancient Thebans believed that their founders sprung from the very earth, growing from dragons’ teeth sown in their native soil.

While we like to believe that we have left myth behind in favor of history, America is no different. Increasingly, however, we have abandoned the cult of the Founders in favor of a very different set of founders—America, as every schoolchild now knows, is a “nation of immigrants.” The colonial generations did no more than to set the stage on which future generations of migrants could display the fruits of their own native lands. As we have heard all too often, American culture per se does not really exist, instead ever developing thanks to gifts brought from distant corners of the world.

Indeed, to say that “America is a nation of immigrants” is primarily a statement about American identity, not historical fact. Statements of this kind—“America is”—are not merely descriptive. They necessarily involve a normative perspective on what America ought to be. The point of claiming that “America is a nation of immigrants” is to create distance between people—in many cases, people whose families have been American for enough generations that they are aliens anywhere else—and their nation. It is to suggest that the national and cultural identities of our non-American ancestors should still be front-of-mind today. It is to suggest that none of us should quite feel at home among our own countrymen.

To self-identify as an immigrant is to set oneself apart from one’s host nation. In some places, this may be a necessary corollary of that nation’s own self-conception. The Japanese or the French, for instance, would likely not recognize an American as one of their own, no matter how long he lived there. But in an assimilationist country such as the United States, such a posture is little more than a refusal to participate in the national project. To be an immigrant, as the left treats the term today, is to be an exile from some other land. A nation of immigrants is no nation at all.

This is not to say that America cannot welcome outsiders. Despite the efforts of progressive activists to inspire ethnic consciousness among America’s minority populations, most people do not maintain dual loyalties. But we still need to manage immigration carefully. Setting aside technical questions of immigration policy, this requires us to maintain a strong sense of national identity and purpose for new immigrants to assimilate into—a goal which is not served by continually highlighting our cultural and historical differences. One suspects that progressive activists know this; the project of mass immigration is intended not to serve the world’s poor but to accelerate the dissolution of a national identity that they hate.

That identity was born out of a very different founding story, one which happens to have the benefit of being true. It sees the American people as something which grew organically out of the efforts of great men who inspired a people and the hardworking colonists who brought that vision to reality. What mattered about those men was not whether they were born in England or North America but whether they maintained the fortitude necessary to make their families and colonies flourish. They came here not because life was easy but because it gave them a chance to make their names, to provide for their families, to build something utterly new. It gave them that concentrated form of freedom felt only by the explorer and the pioneer.

Birthed by Bradford, and Smith, and Winthrop, American civilization was nurtured by generations of colonists until it was well-developed enough for the Founders to give it political form. The various strands of the American experience were at that time woven together into something unified enough to be distinguishable. As the Massachusetts-born author of the Novanglus essays wrote in 1775, “the ancestors of the Virginians are our ancestors, when we speak of ourselves as Americans,” and his nation thence expanded to fill a continent. This history belongs to all of us. It belongs to those whose ancestors are literally recorded in the history books and to those whose parents were born abroad, provided, of course, that they treasure it, that they see themselves as responsible for defending it, and that they enculturate their children in it.

This conception of national identity produces a particular kind of man. Most immediately, he is the kind of man who privileges the virtues his ancestors relied on to bring an unknown land under their power: resourcefulness, generosity, even stubbornness. He understands that his nation was made to build out a grand moral order, one inspired by the Christian faith, holds himself to its standards, and works to bring it about. He maintains a very particular relationship between individualist self-reliance and the needs of his community, wherein he freely gives of himself for the common good but resists encroachments on his freedom to choose that for himself.

In trading this narrative for Emma Lazarus’ lower-resolution picture of America as the “Mother of Exiles” (and, as a corollary, treating as the chief heroes of our national story not those men who built the nation but those who protested it), we lose this sense of personal connection to the American project. Our moral duty, insofar as it remains at all, is to fix America, not to build it. We adopt the position of the man on the outside, perpetually looking in. We lose, in other words, a feeling of being at home in our own native land.

What happens when we acknowledge the “Mother of Exiles” as our own? Any Harvard student can answer this question. Even though the stated mission of this college is “to educate the citizens and citizen-leaders for our society,” the fruits of this self-imposed exile are constant waves of internal economic and political migration. To paint with an admittedly broad brush, the typical Harvard graduate leaves behind his roots and resettles in one of a handful of cities. Like most people, he tends to associate with people like himself, but he defines that closeness not by faith, not by local or even national ties, but instead by his class. He has more in common with the elites of Brussels or of Shanghai than the average resident of Cleveland or Montgomery. Other than a large tax payment, he does little for his nation; the idealism with which he entered college has all but faded.

We must furthermore remember something that the progenitors of our American union never denied: we have duties to our states as well as the nation. We need local leaders who can build national consensus, not cosmopolitan elites who impose on localities with their 5,000 mile screwdrivers. To use economic language, our hometowns deserve a return on their investment in our success. This is, for some of us at least, no act of charity. The debt owed to the community which raised a man can hardly be repaid by him.

It is not surprising that people would be indifferent to a nation where they do not feel at home; it is difficult to blame such people for failing to fulfill the traditional obligations of their elite status. But disaffection from patriotism—especially among the graduates of this university—cannot be allowed to fester. We cannot allow ourselves to coast off the fumes of the achievements of our ancestors. They deserve better. Our children deserve better. Ours is a problem of inspiration: we need to tell each other better stories. Perhaps we cannot convince Americans that they sprung up from Johnny Appleseed’s plantings and George Washington’s tobacco fields. But we can maintain a richer vision of what it means to be a loyal nephew of Uncle Sam. We can give ourselves a reason to be the kind of leaders our nation needs. After all, we owe something to this country for the privilege of attending this university, and for the greater privilege of being American citizens. Do not live as a stranger in your own home.

PUBLIUS

A version of this article originally appeared in Terra Firma, the May 2024 print issue of the Salient.