In August, a guest on Tucker Carlson’s podcast said something that immediately caught his interest. The United States faces a fundamental rift “between heritage Americans and the new political class,” Auron MacIntyre, a columnist for Blaze Media, argued. “Heritage Americans—what are those?” Carlson asked.
“You could find their last names in the Civil War registry,” MacIntyre explained. This ancestry matters, he said, because America is not “a collection of abstract things agreed to in some social contract.” It is a specific set of people who embody an “Anglo-Protestant spirit” and “have a tie to history and to the land.” MacIntyre continued: “If you change the people, you change the culture.” “All true,” Carlson replied.
That same phrase—heritage American—has been rippling across the right, particularly on the social web. Politicians have started flirting with the idea as well. During a speech at the Claremont Institute in July, Vice President J. D. Vance said that “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,” referring to those on the “modern left” who conceive of American identity “purely as an idea.” And here’s Senator Eric Schmitt of Missouri at the National Conservative Conference last month: “We Americans are the sons and daughters of the Christian Pilgrims that poured out from Europe’s shores to baptize a new world in their ancient faith.” America, Schmitt said, is “our birthright. It’s our heritage, our destiny.” (Spokespeople for Vance and Schmitt did not respond to requests for comment, nor did Carlson or MacIntyre.)
The question of who counts as American has been debated for generations, and people have answered it in different ways in various eras—often depending on their own background and ideology. C. Jay Engel, a self-described “heritage American” whom Politico credits as having helped popularize the term, has repeatedly said that he is not a “racial essentialist” and believes that “blacks of the Old South” and “integrated Native Americans” also count as heritage Americans. But he has also argued that “the majority of blacks have demonstrated that they cannot function within the old European cultural standards” and that the concept of heritage Americans affirms “the domination and pre-eminence of the European derived peoples, their institutions, and their way of life.”
When I called Engel to ask him about all of this, he told me that he does not believe that genetics are “the chief explanation” for how Anglo-Protestant ideals are transferred from generation to generation—but added that “there is an ethnic or racial correlation” between who embodies such ideals and who doesn’t. Our conversation was polite, but strange at times. I mentioned that as a half-Iranian American who was born and raised in the U.S., I share more in common ideologically with the Anglo-Protestant Founders of the United States than I do with Middle Eastern theocrats. “I would also contend that there is something deep inside of you that is attracted to or finds familiar portions of Iranian history,” he said, as though I am genetically predisposed to find the conquests of Darius the Great uniquely moving. I don’t, and told him as much. “I’m not contending that you can’t take someone and raise him within a certain cultural environment and he begins to adopt the taste and all that,” Engel responded. “But I do contend that if you bring in massive groups of people over time, it’s going to, in a few generations, be a lot culturally different than it would otherwise have been if you never had done that.”
Speaking with Engel reminded me at times of MacIntyre, Vance, and others who tend to speak in nativist terms. They frequently appeal to an idea that only some Americans are truly legitimate—and often this means Americans of European ancestry—while leaving room for enough plausible deniability to avoid seeming straightforwardly racist. During his conversation with Tucker Carlson, MacIntyre made the point that although one’s Americaness is tied to blood and the land, that “doesn’t mean that other people can’t be grafted in.” In the same speech in which Vance connected American identity to ancestry, the vice president also defended some immigrants. “My lovely wife is the daughter of immigrants to this country,” he said, “and I am certainly better off, and I believe our whole country is better off for it.”
The far-right writer and podcaster Scott Greer said this plainly. “Liberals look stupid when they freak out over such an anodyne term,” he wrote in an August column for The American Conservative endorsing the term. This vagueness is strategically useful, he argued, because “heritage American is more palatable to the public than ‘white.’” (In 2018, The Atlantic revealed that Greer wrote under a pen name for a journal run by the white supremacist Richard Spencer. He later apologized and said that his views had “evolved.”)
The term also has obvious potency as the Trump administration enacts mass deportations of undocumented immigrants and pursues a project of redefining America more broadly. Immediately upon returning to office, in January, the president signed an executive order to reinterpret the Fourteenth Amendment to ban birthright citizenship, the legality of which is still being debated in the courts. Heritage Americans seems engineered to move the goalposts even further. “A lot of people are asking, ‘Okay, we understand mass deportations for illegals. We get that,’” MacIntyre said to Carlson, “‘but what about legal immigrants? How does that work? Who is an American, ultimately, right?’ And that’s really going to be the question of our age.”
When Engels and I spoke, he ran through a list of possible immigration restrictions that he would pair with ongoing mass deportations. He seemed to recognize that America can’t deport everyone: “We need to be realistic and can’t turn back the past,” he said. But in politics—especially on the right—new buzzwords can signal what policy goals are coming. Backlash to critical race theory and “groomers” that started online helped galvanize a real-life movement to strip discussions about race and LGBTQ matters from school curricula. The rise of rhetoric about the “Great Replacement”—the conspiracy theory that there is an intentional plot to replace white people with people of color—helped supercharge support for mass deportations among American voters.
Heritage Americans is similarly “a framework that gestures to an intellectual justification for policy,” Nicole Hemmer, a historian at Vanderbilt who studies the right, told me. Taken to the extreme, some of these same ideas lead to remigration, the notion that nonwhite citizens who haven’t properly assimilated should be deported. Remigration has already gained traction among the nativist right in Europe. President Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Stephen Miller have already floated the concept as a potential solution to what they see as America’s immigration problems, and in May, the State Department announced that as part of a pivot away from refugee resettlement within the U.S., it would create an Office of Remigration.
Over the summer, Trump posted a lengthy message on Truth Social about his desire to put the full force of his administration behind his goal to “reverse the tide of Mass Destruction Migration that has turned once Idyllic Towns into scenes of Third World Dystopia.” The president went on: “Our Federal Government will continue to be focused on the REMIGRATION of Aliens to the places from where they came, and preventing the admission of ANYONE who undermines the domestic tranquility of the United States.”
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