Gordon Wood writes eloquently about “why America is a creedal nation.” Two slices:
There has been some talk recently that we aren’t and shouldn’t be a creedal nation—that beliefs in a creed are too permissive, too weak a basis for citizenship and that we need to realize that citizens with ancestors who go back several generations have a stronger stake in the country than more-recent immigrants.
I reject this position as passionately as I can. We have seen these blood-and-soil efforts before. In the 1890s, we also had a crisis over immigration. Some Americans tried to claim that because they had ancestors who fought in the Revolution or came here on the Mayflower, they were more American than the recent immigrants.
My wife and I have recently gotten to know a couple who came from Romania in the 1970s and became American citizens in 1980. Although they speak with a slight accent, I believe with all my heart that they are as American as someone whose ancestors came on the Mayflower. That is the beauty of America.
The United States isn’t a nation like other nations, and it never has been. There is no American ethnicity to back up the state, and there was no such distinctive ethnicity even in 1776, when the U.S. was created. Many European countries—Germany, for example—were nations before they became states. Most European states were created out of a prior sense of a common ethnicity or language. Some of them, like the Czech Republic, were created in the 20th century and are newer than the 249-year-old U.S. Yet all are undergirded by peoples that had a pre-existing sense of their own distinctiveness, their own nationhood. In the U.S. the process was reversed. Americans created a state before they were a nation, and much of American history has been an effort to define that nationhood.
America’s lack of a national identity and a common ethnicity may turn out to be an advantage in the 21st century, dominated as it is by mass migrations from the south to the north. It certainly enables the U.S. to be more capable of accepting and absorbing immigrants. The whole world is already in the U.S.
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Since the whole world is in the U.S., nothing but the ideals coming out of the Revolution and their subsequent rich and contentious history can turn such an assortment of different individuals into the “one people” that the Declaration says we are. To be an American is not to be someone, but to believe in something. That is why we are at heart a creedal nation, and that is why the 250th anniversary of the Declaration next year is so important.
[Heritage Foundation president Kevin] Roberts’ decision to stand with Carlson was the last straw for many people affiliated with the think tank. But the move was perfectly in keeping with the direction Roberts has taken Heritage since he was hired four years ago. And he is only the most prominent movement leader to assume control of a venerable conservative institution and hitch it to an ethos of “no enemies to the right” that always, sooner or later, seems to devolve into running cover for people who traffic in racialist and authoritarian ideas.
It’s not as though Carlson’s decision to platform Fuentes—a Gen Z livestreamer with a history of making Holocaust jokes, who predictably used his appearance on Carlson’s show to rail against “organized Jewry in America”—came out of nowhere. Anyone who’s been paying attention knows that the former Fox News star left the world of responsible politics behind long ago.
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It should not have taken an interview with Fuentes to show people who Roberts’ pal has become. “Carlson’s odious turn toward the fever swamps of the Right is manifest,” the conservative columnist Henry Olsen recently wrote. “Turning his platform over to racists, antisemites, and those who think Winston Churchill was the bad guy in World War II is not journalism. Nor is his fawning praise of Russian President Vladimir Putin and life in modern Russia’s gilded gulag…. Whatever Carlson’s past, his present is antithetical to anything remotely resembling American conservatism.”
Or as the historian and Heritage Foundation alum Alvin Felzenberg puts it, “I just don’t know how somebody who wants to be a leader of a responsible conservative organization would have such a person for a friend.”
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[Curtis] Yarvin, Fuentes, and Carlson are also among those who question or reject the notion that anyone who accepts this country’s founding creed should be welcome here. Instead, they suggest—sometimes explicitly, sometimes subtly—that a certain ethno-religious or cultural background is a requirement to be truly an American, such that newcomers have less of a claim to belonging than do “legacy” or “heritage” Americans who can trace their bloodlines to the land for many generations.
Such thinking was until recently considered idea non grata on the mainstream right, and to see it making inroads into respected intellectual institutions has been a cause for alarm among many more traditional conservatives. In a speech at the American Enterprise Institute’s annual gala on Monday night, the historian of the American Revolution Gordon S. Wood pointedly warned against a view of American nationhood as rooted in blood, soil, religion, or race. Though he didn’t mention Carlson by name, the impetus for his remarks wasn’t hard to guess.
Life is unfair, as JFK once memorably said, and while McKinley has his admirers and Kennedy his critics, their posthumous lives are, to some degree, a measure of how selective historical memories can be. Posterity can be capricious. The world grew much smaller, and more closely connected, between 1901 and 1963. McKinley’s America had no airplanes or interstate highways or late-night talk shows, and hardly any automobiles. The automated world of Kennedy’s America resembles our own environment more closely than the early 1960s recalled the end of the Victorian era.
Joakim Book is a fan of Johan Norberg’s new book, Peak Human. A slice:
His almost metaphysical perspective on societies growing and changing shines through; his painstaking collection of catchy quotes and observations by contemporary voices and historians is golden. Walking us through the rise and fall of seven famous empires — from Athens and Rome to Baghdad and Renaissance Italy and, of course, the Anglosphere takeover from around 1600 — we’re treated to some recurring patterns. Civilizations grow rich from their openness, creativity, and relatively free markets; they consequently fall apart when rulers squeeze too hard, overreach in their military adventures, and abandon the ideals and market liberty that once made them rich.
This is the story of human civilization, seen not over election cycles or decades but generations and centuries. His great strength as an author and intellectual was always weaving together an inspiring, relevant story from a mismash of confusing scholarly records.
My Mercatus Center colleague Alden Abbott continues to write insightfully about antitrust.
“The middle class is buckling under almost five years of persistent inflation.” A slice:
The University of Michigan’s consumer sentiment survey showed that 44% of middle-income respondents said their financial situation was worse than it was a year ago, while 23% said it was better, based on a three-month average ending in September. Those who feel worse off overwhelmingly said it was because of higher prices.
Their gloomy outlook was in contrast with the most affluent families, who are enjoying stock-market gains and powering the economy with their spending. Many in the middle class also have stock investments and retirement funds, but they are more apt to feel pinched, and resentful of rising costs of everything from the price of a steak to a new couch.
“People feel like their living standards are falling behind,” said Stefanie Stantcheva, a Harvard economics professor who has studied the psychology of inflation. Her research has found the sentiment about rising prices is more pronounced among lower earners.
