I am a “Heritage American.” To parts of MAGA America that means I’m entitled to rule.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with the term, congratulations — it means you’re not spending too much time online. But sadly, remaining ignorant of this label is no longer healthy. It’s the not-so-hidden hand behind the birthright citizenship debate, and it’s behind the bigot eruption in Texas I wrote about last week, when Bo French, the Republican nominee for railroad commissioner, posted a profoundly racist insult of South Asian students at the University of Texas at Austin.
Even more disturbing, it’s an idea that has at least a certain amount of appeal to the vice president of the United States and to many of the people who form the so-called Vanceguard — the collection of intellectuals and activists who are (again, mainly online) trying pave the way for JD Vance to succeed Donald Trump as president and leader of the American right.
A Heritage American, in their formulation, is someone who can trace his lineage back to the founding of the country, preferably even before. Not long ago, a person posted a chart online. You get an A grade if you’re “colonial old stock,” meaning your ancestors came here between 1607 and 1789. You get a B if you’re “antebellum stock,” a C if you’re an “Ellis Islander.” You get a D if you or your ancestors arrived after World War II.
And what do those grades mean? You should essentially view them as categories of citizenship, or as Vance put it in a speech to the Claremont Institute, arguably the foremost think tank of MAGA America, “I think the 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.”
Well, by that standard, give me an A+. My grandmother belonged to the Mayflower Society, and our family lore is replete with stories of service and sacrifice running from Plymouth, Mass., to Valley Forge to the Civil War, and through both World Wars. Our roots in this country aren’t as deep as they are for Native Americans, of course, but they are very deep.
At the heart of the Heritage American idea is the concept of inherited virtue, the idea that public policy should orient itself toward benefiting people on the basis of their ancestry. My ancestors’ very existence should then grant me special considerations and privileges.
This is why, for example, many on the right are angry at the University of Texas for its diversity even after it adopted a colorblind, meritocratic admissions system that grants automatic admission to anyone who finishes near the top of their high school class.
Conservatives once favored this policy — and many still do — but not the new right, not any longer.
Too many Asians, especially from India and Pakistan, are gaining admission, you see, and that hurts the people whose families have been here a long time.
It’s a short trip from inherited virtue to inherited entitlement. And at its most extreme, the Heritage American idea bears an eerie resemblance to the so-called 14 words of white supremacy — “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”
The entire concept is toxic and pernicious. A citizen is a citizen, regardless of his or her parents’ ancestry. And while I’m certainly influenced by my ancestors, I’m not a more worthy person because they existed. The Declaration of Independence had it right: We are all equal — morally, culturally and legally.
I’m not writing only to debunk a poisonous idea — that’s been ably done, many times, by others, including Vivek Ramaswamy last year in The Times — but rather because it’s important not just to rebut bad ideas, but to counter them with better ones, in this case a better way to think about the role our history and our ancestors should play in our lives.
I’m concerned that ideas like Heritage American arise in part because we’ve created a vacuum. By not instilling a robust sense of what it means to be a citizen of the United States and a patriot in our younger generation, we’ve allowed malignant people and malignant ideas to fill the void. They’ve turned something good — an interest in our roots and pride in our families — into something dark.
I’m the grandson of a history teacher, and she taught me our nation’s history — and my family’s history — with all its complexity. There was much to be proud of (I remember my heart soaring when she talked about our ancestors at Valley Forge), but it’s hard to look back on your past with unvarnished pride when you also know that your ancestors wore gray during the Civil War.
Learning that history gave me an immense sense of gratitude overall and — as I got older — a strong sense of duty. The gratitude is easy to explain. I enjoy the blessings of liberty and prosperity that I did nothing to earn.
But with great blessings come great responsibilities. At their best, my ancestors gave me an example to aspire to. I can learn from their mistakes and failures as well. Learning about my Confederate ancestors was important to my own moral development. That uncomfortable history has led me to remind myself that my community is not always right and that sometimes it is necessary to disagree with and potentially defy the culture and even the church from which you came.
If I have enjoyed the fruits of sacrifices I did not make, don’t I have my own obligation to — forgive the cliché — pay it forward myself? I often think about the powerful conclusion to the movie “Saving Private Ryan,” when a dying Capt. John Miller tells Ryan to “earn this” — earn the sacrifice made on his behalf. We aren’t called simply to enjoy the bounties of this country, but to continue the struggle to uphold its ideals.
This brings to mind the words of C.S. Lewis, who defines healthy patriotism as a love of home, “of the place we grew up in or the places, perhaps many, which have been our homes.” But this type of patriotism, Lewis writes: “is not in the least aggressive. It asks only to be let alone. It becomes militant only to protect what it loves. In any mind which has a pennyworth of imagination it produces a good attitude toward foreigners. How can I love my home without coming to realize that other men, no less rightly, love theirs.”
Gratitude, humility, responsibility: Those are the virtues our overlapping histories — personal, familial, national — should instill. But the new right turns that upside-down. It replaces gratitude with a sense of entitlement, humility with arrogance, and a sense of duty with the will to power and the right to dominate.
Think of MAGA’s exploitation of young men. The movement has used the crisis of masculinity to paper over the emptiness in some young men’s lives with a “manosphere” that all too often encourages them to indulge their worst instincts. And now the worst parts of MAGA are doing the same thing with American history and American citizenship itself.
Our history matters. Our heritage matters. But they should call us to service and virtue, not to power and pride. That is what Abraham Lincoln emphasized at the end of his first Inaugural Address. His words mattered then, and they should matter now: “The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”
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