The Federalist On Tuesday, Leighton Woodhouse wrote for The New York Times that conservatives are “spinning” a “mythology” that is “historically delusional.”
The delusional mythology Woodhouse is referring to? The belief that Americans are a “group of people with a shared history.”
According to Woodhouse, “The founding fathers were an assortment of people from different histories and backgrounds who coexisted — often just barely.” These “different” histories, however, were all rooted in Christianity. But Woodhouse wants readers to believe that this type of variety in Christianity proves America was born out of a multicultural diversity experiment.
Of course it wasn’t. The colonists shared a common language, moral framework, and writ large, a lineage. Yet Woodhouse insists otherwise.
The United States isn’t exceptional because of our common cultural heritage; we’re exceptional because we’ve been able to cohere despite faiths, traditions and languages that set us apart, and sometimes against one another. The drafters of the Constitution tried to create that cohesion by building a government that could transcend our divisions.
In other words, Woodhouse is arguing that America is not the product of Americans at all. Rather, it’s just a cosmopolitan conglomerate held together by particular processes but not people. It’s why Woodhouse invokes “Mexican, Korean, Somalian” “anestries” as similar examples of American heritage just like English, Irish, and Scottish settlers. The implication of course is that America would be just as American even without “heritage Americans.”
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