A Nation of Englishmen, Actually
by
A woke new thesis claiming that the U.S. is a blank slate of origins and defined by different ethnic groups, is nonsense.
Politico recently published an article titled, “Immigrants Once Avoided Some Regions of America: That’s A Big Reason We’re So Divided” by Colin Woodard, the director of the Nationhood Lab at Salve Regina University’s Pell Center of International Relations and Public Policy. And like many academics before him, Woodard asserts that he has figured out why Americans are polarized on the immigration issue.
For a variety of reasons, however, the good professor has completely missed the boat.
Woodard argues that America actually consists of nine distinct “nations,” that were “built on massive differences in ideas about freedom, identity and belonging that go back to rivalries between this continent’s competing colonial projects that date back three and four centuries.”
According to Woodard, “Those colonial projects had different experiences with immigrants and immigration,” and that has created a polarized debate about immigration policy.
He further contends that, “On one side are ethnonationalists who assert that only the people with the right lineage and faith can belong to America. On the other is the civic nationalist tradition where anyone who shares the universal ideas about human freedom in the Declaration of Independence is a potential American.”
At first glance, Professor Woodard’s approach may seem novel.
In reality, it is neither novel nor even particularly creative. He simply throws a new coat of paint on the same tired tack taken by countless others, reducing any concerns about assimilation or the soundness of mass migration policies to mere racism. And to reach this foregone conclusion, he emphasizes insignificant divisions while ignoring profound unifying factors.
The “nations” that Woodard contends are the products of diverse influences actually share more commonalities than differences. They are all inheritors of the Western moral, political, legal, intellectual, and religious traditions. Western culture, as noted by Christopher Dawson in his Religion and the Rise of Western Culture, is a product of Judeo-Christian thinking.