The Federalist America is a people and a nation, not an idea, and the hard truth is that not everyone can become an American.
At the recent NatCon conference in Washington, D.C., Sen. Eric Schmitt of Missouri delivered a powerful speech about American identity, arguing that our nation isn’t merely an abstract proposition about human equality and rights, but a distinct people with a shared past and a common future.
“For decades, the mainstream consensus on the Left and the Right alike seemed to be that America itself was just an ‘idea’ — a vehicle for global liberalism,” Schmitt said. “We were told that the entire meaning of America boiled down to a few lines in a poem on the Statue of Liberty and five words about equality in the Declaration of Independence. Any other aspect of American identity was deemed to be illegitimate and immoral, poisoned by the evils of our ancestors. The true meaning of America, they said, was liberalism, multiculturalism, and endless immigration.”
Not so, argued Schmitt. America’s principles, he said, are not abstractions. “They are living, breathing things — rooted in a people and embodied in a way of life. It’s only in that context that they become real.”
This is absolutely correct. Those who would reduce America to an abstract proposition either misunderstand or misrepresent our history and heritage. As I argued at NatCon last year, nearly everyone who argues that America is a proposition is wrong about what the proposition is and what it means. “All men are created equal” is a specifically Christian claim, not a universal call to multiculturalism and mass immigration. It emerged as a political ideal from Christian Europe, and arrived in America by way of settlers and pioneers who came here specifically to establish a nation where they could practice their Christian faith as they saw fit.
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Read Full Article Here…(thefederalist.com)
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