For some, what makes Americans American is being a “common people”, a “common land”, and a “shared history”. This is true of practically every single people with a homeland that have been identified as such for long enough. This is not what makes Americans, well American.
The idea, to some, that America is an “idea” is anathema and diminishes us from having a common and civic nation with deep historical roots in a land where those values are part and parcel of the deepest underlying pillars shared by others who are American, and relegates Americans as just a collective based on some sufficiently minimal blut und boden whose sufficiently distant ancestors also had. Unsurprisingly, it is this later view which may be the reason why so many purported “Nationalists” seem to feel more in tune with “Nationalists” of foreign countries more than they do their fellow Americans.
“[I]t’s a place and a people with a shared history” is something that could be said of any nation or group on Earth. What makes America exceptional and defines it is not just it being “ours” vs. “theirs”, but something beyond mere superficiality that many have forgotten. Such equivalization of legitimacy is no different than the Left’s insistence that all cultures are equal. Though some may be chauvinists of Western Civilization, those same people are not chauvinists of American Culture beyond a simple belief that it is special to them because it is theirs and not because is superior based on a more universal or objective criteria.
Your humble author is reminded of Locke’s two famous treatises, in this regards. Though a gross oversimplification, Locke identified many of the elements which make the civic nature of England (and the Anglo-sphere thereafter more broadly) conducive towards liberty in addition to virtue. Locke was both in error and accurate when he extrapolated this natural derivation of the culture going back centuries into universal values. It is true that only with that type of history built upon the Magna Carta, the Anglo-American Common Law, and all the associated expectation of rights and privileges thereof, could those values have come into existence, and they can not arise naturally elsewhere, but only be spread and incorporated elsewhere. The true genius of America, beyond what even the rest of the Anglo-sphere could claim, was that sharing those values on a more intrinsic and integral level is what defies us as a people and the place where those values are an intrinsic and integral element exist. That history is shared not with the present and the past, but with the future, regardless of whether we in the present or those in the future had an ancestor who shared the past.
America itself is a repudiation of that more European sense of nationalism. Before independence, Americans and the British were a people and a place with a shared history… until an American ideal drove them apart. That civic nationalism is a core element of America, and we wouldn’t be America without it. One of the things that makes America so exceptional is that it has a heritage that anyone so inclined can adopt and make their own, or that any native born American so inclined, can reject/forfeit.
America was founded by a new people in a new land to make a new history — and grounded in an idea that had already organically come to be.
Though not limitless, America has shown the incredible capacity to assimilate those from around the world, regardless of ethnicity, who embrace those civic virtues and that distinct culture and by so embracing become part of the American people and not only embrace but also become part of America’s history. Not only inward, but outwardly too, has land become American be it British relinquishment, conquest, or purchase. That all of this is true is part and parcel of what makes America uniquely American beyond “a place and a people with a shared history”. And that unique American essence is not even limited to any place, people, or past: Americanization by the power of our laws, business, and culture is a good type of imperialism that helps perpetuate into the future that core essence, and thus who Americans are and what America’s legacy is and ought to be.
That is what actually puts America first.
