American heritage has never been static — a closed system incompatible with newcomers. Rather, it has always been distinguished by openness and dynamism, by the simultaneous assimilation and evolution that new arrivals undergo and bring about.
Conservatives tend to scoff when liberals say that America is a “nation of immigrants,” because progressives often use that sentiment to decry any lawful restriction on migration. But, of course, America is a nation of immigrants and their descendants. Unless you’re Native American, none of your ancestors were here a thousand years ago. At least two of them had to get on a boat or a plane and come over at some point, leaving another place they formerly called home. Accordingly, there exists no American culture that preceded American immigrants.
The first English settlement in America, Jamestown, was founded by what we now call economic migrants, seeking profit in a bountiful new world. The second settlement, Plymouth, was built by refugees — Puritans escaping legal persecution because of their divergent faith. They were distinctly English, yes, but also distinctly their own.
Most Europeans who came to the Thirteen Colonies between 1630 and the Revolution came as indentured servants. They were usually destitute, willing to surrender their freedom for many years for a chance at someday acquiring land. Before the war, Americans complained that England was dumping its wretched refuse on the colonies — shipping over tens of thousands of prisoners, vagrants, and other undesirables. But those miscreants soon became Americans, too. So-called heritage Americans can claim many of them as their ancestors. By the Founding era, just three-fifths of the white population in America was of English descent. The rest were of Scottish, Irish, Dutch, French, German, Swedish, or other origin. Hundreds of thousands more had been brought from Africa. America was then the most ethnically and religiously diverse republic the world had ever seen. It remains so today.
The framers of the Constitution drafted the document to “secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.” They also knew that the American posterity would include many newcomers. The Constitution authorized Congress to “establish an uniform Rule of Naturalization” for future citizens. No one was more concerned with sustaining the nation’s republican character than the patriots in Philadelphia. It is therefore interesting that they specified how immigrants could become the people’s representatives in Congress after a certain number of years as naturalized citizens — less than a decade. An amendment to increase the wait time to 14 years was voted down at the Constitutional Convention.
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Large-scale immigration continued from the 19th century into the 20th, interrupted just for a few decades by stringent laws before resuming. Immigrants arrived increasingly from unfamiliar places like Italy, Russia, and Poland. Later, from Asia and Latin America. Today’s nationalists claim to preserve America’s history and institutions. Does Ellis Island not count among them?
America’s nationhood, to self-proclaimed nationalists, is just like that of a European country. Bloodline is everything. But American blood has never not been a mixture, because immigration has never not been a part of the American story. There is nothing here to keep “pure,” besides our defining impurity.
We’re seeing the re-emergence of an age-old debate. Most people see America as an experiment in classical liberalism, whereby the founders created a system of limited government, religious pluralism and liberty. Religious leaders are free to spread their message through the culture—but not to take control of the levers of power and base lawmaking on their sectarian Bible interpretations. The Constitution protects everyone’s natural rights, with its main purpose limiting the sphere of government—not implementing rules to assure proper religious observance.
There really is no other way to seriously read our Constitution, but many religious people still argue the founders were Christians who envisioned a Christian nation. Some of the founders were indeed devout Christians and these folks cherry-pick Christian quotations from them. The Heritage Foundation, which has recently taken a nationalist detour, argued in 2011 that the most-reasonable read is the founders simply were “influenced by Christian ideas.”
Indeed. I’m a Christian who believes our faith centers on kindness, charity, redemption and free will rather than empowering tribunals to decide who gets publicly stoned or flogged for violating some biblical admonition. Consider the madness that will ensue if religious interpretation becomes the legal standard. Then again, the hilarious fights at city councils between Calvinists and Catholic integralists over the proper manifestation of God’s will might be worth the price of admission.
Christian nationalists often argue that America cannot survive as a multicultural, multi-religious nation. To which I’ll quote a 1788 rebuttal from George Washington: “I had always hoped that this land might become a safe and agreeable asylum to the virtuous and persecuted part of mankind, to whatever nation they might belong.” As we approach the 250th anniversary of our founding, Americans must not let Washington’s brilliant legacy and the nation’s ideals get hijacked by wackadoodles.
A campaign [in Britain] to keep people away from hospitals during the holidays is underway, which includes begging the public to seek out other forms of treatment for “less serious” injuries and ailments. The British press compares the messaging to “Covid-era stay-at-home pleas,” which included asking patients who needed care to avoid medical facilities in order to “protect the NHS.”
That messaging worked — so well, in fact, that the health service has been playing catch-up ever since. There were 6.24 million individual patients waiting to get treatment in England as of October. That’s about 1 in 10 people in the country waiting in the queue.
A stiff upper lip is one thing in wartime — and during a once-a-century viral outbreak. It’s something else when you’ve got a hernia.
This is the dark reality of single-payer and a cautionary tale for the third of Americans who mistakenly believe Medicare-for-all is a good idea. Both funded and run by the taxpayer, the NHS relies on rationing treatment to stay afloat. This results in patients with serious health problems forced to wait for months or years to access treatment, hoping they don’t die before the doctor sees them. Wait times get exacerbated by the politics that inevitably become intertwined when government, rather than consumers, calls the shots.
History shows quite clearly that the societies most capable of generosity and liberalism are not those trapped in poverty but those that have escaped it. An abundance of wealth does not corrupt moral life; it enables it. Economic growth is not a rival to our highest values. It’s a precondition to their most vigorous pursuit.
This truth is easy to forget precisely because modern growth has been so successful. We take for granted the material abundance that allows us to debate its spiritual costs. For most of human existence, life was defined by constant vulnerability. Hunger, disease, and early death were ever-present. The idea that ordinary people could expect anything different—let alone genuine comfort or opportunity—would sound fantastical to our preindustrial ancestors.
As economic historians like Deirdre McCloskey have shown, the dramatic acceleration of growth beginning in the 19th century—the “Great Enrichment”—transformed human prospects on a scale unmatched by any previous moral or political revolution. Living standards rose exponentially. Poverty declined. Education spread. And with this abundance came a greater capacity for tolerance, pluralism, and peaceful coexistence.
So what do I think about the 4.3% growth for Q3? Honestly, I am surprised but also not all that surprised. As it turns out, the American economy is incredibly resilient because the American people are incredibly resilient. It would take a massive amount of government stupidity to overcome the incredible strength of the American worker, which serves as the source of our economy’s resiliency.
Still, growth is slower this year than it was during 2024, at least so far. To get to a growth rate above what we saw in 2024, we would need to see Q4’s annualized growth rate hit over 4% again.
When is the last time we had two consecutive quarters of over 4% annualized growth? Excluding the pandemic years and the insanity for national income accounting statistics during that time (does anyone really believe that we grew at 34.9% during Q2 2020?), the last time this happened was in the 1998.
Matt Yglesias makes a good point: “Fossil fuel executives are not why we have prohibitively high tariffs on Chinese EVs.” (HT Scott Lincicome)
