Yes, There Is Such A Thing As A Heritage American
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The Thirteen Colonies didn’t have a unified culture at the outset of the American Revolution, so that means a Muslim immigrant is just as American as someone whose ancestors have been here for 400 years. America has never had a common cultural heritage, and you’re an evil right-wing bigot if you think it did, at least according to a recent article in The New York Times.
The author of the article, Leighton Woodhouse, conveniently spells it out in his headline: “The Right-Wing Myth of American Heritage.” His evidence for this so-called myth? Some Irish Presbyterians and English Quakers had a disagreement in colonial Pennsylvania and called each other bad names in a pamphlet war.
According to Woodhouse, “This was the state of relations between European settlers on the brink of the American Revolution. It’s a history that is inconvenient to the latest ideological project of the nativist right.”
True Americans, proponents of this emerging patriotic mythology believe, are the cultural descendants of founders who were united by a shared system of values and folkways even more than by an Enlightenment political creed of equality, liberty and democracy. Those founders were Protestant, largely English-speaking, Northwestern Europeans. Those who can trace their bloodlines to that group, which one essay describes as a ‘founding ethnicity,’ are, in some spiritual sense, deemed more American than those who cannot. And the dilution of that pure American stock by mass immigration has made the country less culturally unified.
“But the mythology these conservatives are spinning is historically delusional. Americans have never been ‘a group of people with a shared history.’”
This entire argument is, of course, nothing but leftist propaganda trying to convince you that bringing in Third World migrants who have no cultural affinity for American values and have no desire to assimilate is just part of the great American experiment.