Are You a ‘Heritage American’?
By: Ali Breland (The Atlantic)
Yes, I am a heritage American, since you're asking. The Civil War is rather late in my ancestral legacy of being American.
One thing for certain is that Donald Trump is not a heritage American. The Trump family arrived well after the Civil War. No Trump ancestor has served in the US military. There aren't any colonial subjects, patriots, or emancipators on Trump's family tree.
As a heritage American I am offended by Trump's cultural appropriation. Trump has stolen my heritage the same way he steals valor.
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
In August, a guest on Tucker Carlson’s podcast said something that immediately caught his interest. The United States faces a fundamental rift “between heritage Americans and the new political class,” Auron MacIntyre, a columnist for Blaze Media, argued. “Heritage Americans—what are those?” Carlson asked.
“You could find their last names in the Civil War registry,” MacIntyre explained. This ancestry matters, he said, because America is not “a collection of abstract things agreed to in some social contract.” It is a specific set of people who embody an “Anglo-Protestant spirit” and “have a tie to history and to the land.” MacIntyre continued: “If you change the people, you change the culture.” “All true,” Carlson replied.
That same phrase—heritage American—has been rippling across the right, particularly on the social web. Politicians have started flirting with the idea as well. During a speech at the Claremont Institute in July, Vice President J. D. Vance said that “people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War have a hell of a lot more claim over America than the people who say they don’t belong,” referring to those on the “modern left” who conceive of American identity “purely as an idea.” And here’s Senator Eric Schmitt of Missouri at the National Conservative Conference last month: “We Americans are the sons and daughters of the Christian Pilgrims that poured out from Europe’s shores to baptize a new world in their ancient faith.” America, Schmitt said, is “our birthright. It’s our heritage, our destiny.” (Spokespeople for Vance and Schmitt did not respond to requests for comment, nor did Carlson or MacIntyre.)
The question of who counts as American has been debated for generations, and people have answered it in different ways in various eras—often depending on their own background and ideology. C. Jay Engel, a self-described “heritage American” whom Politico credits as having helped popularize the term, has repeatedly said that he is not a “racial essentialist” and believes that “blacks of the Old South” and “integrated Native Americans” also count as heritage Americans. But he has also argued that “the majority of blacks have demonstrated that they cannot function within the old European cultural standards” and that the concept of heritage Americans affirms “the domination and pre-eminence of the European derived peoples, their institutions, and their way of life.”
When I called Engel to ask him about all of this, he told me that he does not believe that genetics are “the chief explanation” for how Anglo-Protestant ideals are transferred from generation to generation—but added that “there is an ethnic or racial correlation” between who embodies such ideals and who doesn’t. Our conversation was polite, but strange at times. I mentioned that as a half-Iranian American who was born and raised in the U.S., I share more in common ideologically with the Anglo-Protestant Founders of the United States than I do with Middle Eastern theocrats. “I would also contend that there is something deep inside of you that is attracted to or finds familiar portions of Iranian history,” he said, as though I am genetically predisposed to find the conquests of Darius the Great uniquely moving. I don’t, and told him as much. “I’m not contending that you can’t take someone and raise him within a certain cultural environment and he begins to adopt the taste and all that,” Engel responded. “But I do contend that if you bring in massive groups of people over time, it’s going to, in a few generations, be a lot culturally different than it would otherwise have been if you never had done that.”
Speaking with Engel reminded me at times of MacIntyre, Vance, and others who tend to speak in nativist terms. They frequently appeal to an idea that only some Americans are truly legitimate—and often this means Americans of European ancestry—while leaving room for enough plausible deniability to avoid seeming straightforwardly racist. During his conversation with Tucker Carlson, MacIntyre made the point that although one’s Americaness is tied to blood and the land, that “doesn’t mean that other people can’t be grafted in.” In the same speech in which Vance connected American identity to ancestry, the vice president also defended some immigrants. “My lovely wife is the daughter of immigrants to this country,” he said, “and I am certainly better off, and I believe our whole country is better off for it.”
The far-right writer and podcaster Scott Greer said this plainly. “Liberals look stupid when they freak out over such an anodyne term,” he wrote in an August column for The American Conservative endorsing the term. This vagueness is strategically useful, he argued, because “heritage American is more palatable to the public than ‘white.’” (In 2018, The Atlantic revealed that Greer wrote under a pen name for a journal run by the white supremacist Richard Spencer. He later apologized and said that his views had “evolved.”)
The term also has obvious potency as the Trump administration enacts mass deportations of undocumented immigrants and pursues a project of redefining America more broadly. Immediately upon returning to office, in January, the president signed an executive order to reinterpret the Fourteenth Amendment to ban birthright citizenship, the legality of which is still being debated in the courts. Heritage Americans seems engineered to move the goalposts even further. “A lot of people are asking, ‘Okay, we understand mass deportations for illegals. We get that,’” MacIntyre said to Carlson, “‘but what about legal immigrants? How does that work? Who is an American, ultimately, right?’ And that’s really going to be the question of our age.”
When Engel and I spoke, he ran through a list of possible immigration restrictions that he would pair with ongoing mass deportations. He seemed to recognize that America can’t deport everyone: “We need to be realistic and can’t turn back the past,” he said. But in politics—especially on the right—new buzzwords can signal what policy goals are coming. Backlash to critical race theory and “groomers” that started online helped galvanize a real-life movement to strip discussions about race and LGBTQ matters from school curricula. The rise of rhetoric about the “Great Replacement”—the conspiracy theory that there is an intentional plot to replace white people with people of color—helped supercharge support for mass deportations among American voters.
Heritage Americans is similarly “a framework that gestures to an intellectual justification for policy,” Nicole Hemmer, a historian at Vanderbilt who studies the right, told me. Taken to the extreme, some of these same ideas lead to remigration, the notion that nonwhite citizens who haven’t properly assimilated should be deported. Remigration has already gained traction among the nativist right in Europe. President Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Stephen Miller have already floated the concept as a potential solution to what they see as America’s immigration problems, and in May, the State Department announced that as part of a pivot away from refugee resettlement within the U.S., it would create an Office of Remigration.
Over the summer, Trump posted a lengthy message on Truth Social about his desire to put the full force of his administration behind his goal to “reverse the tide of Mass Destruction Migration that has turned once Idyllic Towns into scenes of Third World Dystopia.” The president went on: “Our Federal Government will continue to be focused on the REMIGRATION of Aliens to the places from where they came, and preventing the admission of ANYONE who undermines the domestic tranquility of the United States.”
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The colonists created the American culture. And, I agree, the descendants of those colonists should have a greater claim to that American culture and a greater voice in protecting that culture.
The late comers shouldn't be allowed to tell me what it is to be an American. Not even Trump. (That's why Barack Obama was so damned insulting.)
I have two replies to that - nonsense and so what?
Now, now, strip away the onion layers and we're all part Euro-trash ... on a musty, fusty and/or dusty scale.
I've always considered an American culture as being a melting pot of other cultures since we are all descendant of immigrants if you go far enough back.
No. Colonists are NOT immigrants. A colonist creates a culture that an immigrant assimilates into. There's English is the common language of the United States. There's a reason the Protestant Christianity has been the predominant religion in the United States. The colonists created that cultural legacy.
The American culture was established before there was a United States. And that culture continues today.
Do the first Africans to come here (unvoluntarily) have a claim to contributing mightily to America culture? The first Africans arrived at the same time the Mayflower did.
No because they were not free to create a culture. Slaves were involuntarily forced to assimilate.
I'm an Irish American heritage American, if that counts.
Morning John..and I think that causes more trouble than it's worth with you mob..
Why do you refer to yourselves as Irish American? African American? Hispanic American etc etc..why stop there?..the mind boggles..
What happens if your great great grandparents were from England, Scotland, Ireland and German..so does that make you an, English, Scottish, Irish, German American? Or another example an African, Mexican, Scottish American etc for some one else?
That is really odd to us..to us you are simply American or affectionately Yanks no matter what your family roots are..no one gives a stuff here...
If I said I was an English Australian I would be laughed out of house and home here..
I can hear the comments now..
"You bloody wanker, you are an Aussie what's this English Crap"..
I said I am Irish American as a response to someone claiming the are a "heritage" American.
Do you think people who can trace their "heritage" back to the first colonies are more American than anyone else? Going by some of your other comments I assume your answer would be no.
Morning you are correct the answer is no...I don't regard anyone here if they can trace their roots back to convicts or free settlers anymore Aussie than I am..
I wish I had convict heritage as I checked it all out but alas it was not to be..to have convict history here is regarded as a honour and a privilege and other people and countries don't grasp that...We revel in it..
It's part of our nature to rebel especially against the Brits..there is nothing more hotly contested in this country when we are playing the Poms in test cricket. Which by the way we just slaughtered them..4-1 and sent them packing back home bawling into their tea cups...
I worked with many Americans at Alcoa and use to drive me nuts when they use to say African American, Hispanic American etc..I use to think what the??..
Was always nice to hear when they simply answered "American"..and that said it all..
We often hear these "heritage Americans " whining when blacks bring up slavery . "That was 200 years ago! No one alive now was born then"
But its supposed to be ok to bring up the colonists as a supporting argument for being a heritage American. LOL
Morning...we are all "blow ins" unless you are descended from the original indigenous inhabitants..
Doesn't matter in you were convicts or pilgrims, we all rolled up a couple of hundred years ago..Us because of you mob and your war of Independence..😁
The indigenous inhabitants have been here and there for tens of thousands of years..we aren't even a blip on the radar in the passage of time..