In 1764, perhaps 200 largely Irish settlers from Pennsylvania’s back country rode to Philadelphia to confront a government they despised. The angry country folk, who had already slaughtered a group of peaceful Indians in their outrage, blamed the English Quakers who had long run the colony for the attacks they had endured in previous years from Indian raiding parties. Expecting mob violence, many of the Quakers abandoned the pacifism they were famous for and picked up muskets. The colony was spared from potential civil war only by the diplomacy of Benjamin Franklin.
Instead, a war of pamphlets ramped up, one that had been giving voice to the toxic stew of grievances held by the wide mix of ethnic and religious groups in the middle colonies.
There were pamphlets that accused the Quakers of taking secret satisfaction in the slaughter of Irish and German settler families at the hands of the Indians, and that called for Quakerism to be “extirpated from the face of the whole earth.” In the reverse direction, Irish Ulster Presbyterians were described as “Ulceration” “Piss-brute-tarians.” Franklin himself referred to the Irish settlers as “Christian white savages” and Germans as “Palatine boors” who refused to assimilate or learn English.
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.
It’s a sentiment that’s been warmly welcomed in the Trump administration.
White asylum seekers would be favored over nonwhite ones under White House proposals to stanch the flow of refugees recently reported by The New York Times. The proposals explicitly aim to counteract growing diversity in America, which the Trump administration regards as a destabilizing cultural force.
“The sharp increase in diversity,” documents submitted in connection with the proposals say, “has reduced the level of social trust essential for the functioning of a democratic polity.”
The Department of Homeland Security has likewise hinted at its distaste for modern American diversity, posting on X about our country’s “heritage,” accompanied by paintings of the founding fathers and cloying images of westward expansion, between videos glorifying mass deportations. One of them was reposted by the “white advocacy” website American Renaissance under a single word: “Endorsed.”
The word “heritage” has taken on a special significance on the right, with the rise of the notion of “Heritage Americans,” those of Protestant faith and Anglo-European ethnicity or culture who can trace their lineage to the early days of our republic. (Some who use the term include Black descendants of slaves in the category.)
Vice President JD Vance appears to share the belief that there is something uniquely authentic to this group of Americans. Attacking leftists who he said demand that Americans adhere to a set of liberal principles, Mr. Vance told the Claremont Institute, “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.”
The message echoed Mr. Vance’s acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention last year, where he scorned the conception of the United States as a country built on a creed. “America is not just an idea,” he intoned. “It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation.”
But the mythology these conservatives are spinning is historically delusional. Americans have never been “a group of people with a shared history.” The founding fathers were an assortment of people from different histories and backgrounds who coexisted — often just barely — because they didn’t have any other choice but to do so. This was true even within the British majority; Puritans and Quakers alike were banished from Anglican Virginia, Quakers were hanged in Massachusetts, and English colonists in New England and the Tidewater region sided with and in some cases fought for opposing sides of the English Civil War. America was a nation that emerged in spite of itself.
In his book, “Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America,” the Rutgers historian Peter Silver describes how the various groups of colonists responded to the diversity they unwillingly found themselves within, not with cultural assimilation but with its opposite. Quakers became chauvinistic, displaying their virtue-signaling plainness of dress ostentatiously and disowning one another for marrying outside of the denomination. Lutherans fretted about replenishing their stock of German-speaking ministers, lest their children be lost to vulgar English ways. Irish Presbyterians renewed their covenant with God, an act of rejection of “the abominations of the age and place in which we live.”
In embracing old orthodoxies, they were no different from second- and third-generation young Americans today celebrating their Mexican, Korean, Somalian or other ancestries, or for that matter, immigrant parents despairing that their children would rather play video games than worship at the mosque or respond to them in English when addressed in their parents’ native tongue. The disorientation of pluralism inclines people to cling to the things that make them distinct. It’s exactly what the right is doing today.
Mr. Vance’s idealization of his own Appalachian, Scots-Irish ancestry is the same reflex American colonists showed when they each presumed their own ancestral traditions to be bulwarks of purity against the rising tide of cultural chaos around them.
Even as he praises his wife, the daughter of Indian immigrants, Mr. Vance, like other nativists, refuses to acknowledge that cultural diversity, with all of its prejudices and conflicts, is in fact the through line of American history. The United States isn’t exceptional because of our common cultural heritage; we’re exceptional because we’ve been able to cohere despite faiths, traditions and languages that set us apart, and sometimes against one another. The drafters of the Constitution tried to create that cohesion by building a government that could transcend our divisions.
If the colonies had been a monoculture, the achievement of the founders would have been far less remarkable. It is the very rejection of the pretense that one group deserves some kind of privileged status, that has made us, in Mr. Vance’s words, “in short, a nation.” It is what it means to be American.
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Leighton Woodhouse is an independent journalist, documentary filmmaker and author of the Substack Social Studies.
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