America has a common culture that defines it and defines what it means to be America. While there are regional differences, those commonalities outweigh our regional and local diversity, or even the diversity between individuals. America is unicultural abet with a very diverse and dynamic one united in our fundamental commonality and participation in, and contribution to, a heritage that grew organically over nearly a thousand years. America, in this sense, is not “propositional”. Who is an American being defined not by a common culture, but by varying degrees of deoxyribonucleic acid coincidence; the belief that it is is the true view of America as a “propositional nation”.
To start with the conclusion, for the purpose of illustration, these people who deride “paperwork Americans” (or “fiat Americans”) define the American nation in a very European way, specifically that it is determined solely by blood of a pan-European multi-ethnic stock. Oh, they don’t say it outright, so they have to construct their arguments like pretzels in order to obfuscate all that.
In reality there are only two types of Americans: Those who are naturalized and those who are natural born. Though it is a separate in depth discussion, the actual cultural heritage which developed over half a millennium is that those born within the country bear allegiance to the country and are thus subjects or citizens, with extension to those born without being not a function of the Common Law, but of propositional statutory allowances. If this Common Law birthright is a proposition, it is one that was natural born. In time that proposition that those born outside of the country can become full and complete citizens or subjects became an organic part of our legal culture and heritage, while their own children born within the country are natural born and considered as such before any such proposition—despite these natural born citizens being declared proposition Americans! The “ideological connection, cultural tie, or apparent love of country” comes from being born in and part of American culture. It must be noted that simply being born here or having blood ties to some distant ancestor does not create ideological connection with American culture let alone the founding principles of America, nor does it necessarily impart a love or country, or even an affinity to that culture and heritage which these so-called “heritage Americans” seemingly hate and despise.
Yes, children of non-citizens do not agree to any proposition or indeed to any allegiance to any cultural heritage. But then, the same can be said of a child born to a descendent of a member of the Daughters or Sons of the American Revolution. The proposition that these people push is that only by blood can allegiance be truly transmitted. Ironically, they sort of admit it when they talk about hos the “modern [American identity] definition clearly isn’t working, and something new will require some tough conversations” and then condemn America as a propositional nation while proposing a new definition of America as a nation!
Some are more explicit in their almost curious racial definition. They define “heritage Americans” as being part of a tribe or blood based nation, while calling everyone else a fiat American no matter long far in the past one could trace their lineage. Modern day patricians lording it over the plebs? Many will declare that only those biological descendants of the Founding Stock can be American and that all others are only American by “paper fiat”; this is a propositional notion at odds with America’s actual heritage and history. But this measure, Americans have already been mostly replaced by those of foreign stock, including the Irish, Germans, Italians, &c.—all of which have been portrayed and considered not just ethnically alien, but racially inferior to the point of comparison with racist caricatures of American Blacks whose ancestors were around at the time of the Founding. Some try to get around this by shifting the dates to the 19th century (which would seem to include descendants of Chinese rail workers) or to 1865 (as if admitting that the aforementioned “allegiance” was broken unless there was a Yankee ancestor there to restore it).
And yes, they do mean “White” stock only. “Immigrants” don’t count… unless those immigrants are from the same “White” stock despite being foreigners from a foreign land with foreign cultures and foreign ideologies largely derived from a time without any shared history, either from England or Europe more generally. Indeed, they seem to be obsessed with “Whiteness”, which goes to show that they are simply the flip side of the Cultural Marxists on the Left who obsess over the same.
And this is what they mean by “Founding Stock”: Not actual blood descendance from the time of Americans in 1776, but the “stock” of “Whiteness” that that was also found in foreigners from a foreign land with foreign cultures and foreign ideologies largely derived from a time without any shared history. This propositional neo-ethnic group is defined by a pan-European grouping. Declaring that only a small number of immigrants came and stayed (with cherry-picked data, of course) and thus the growth in population was all of “Founding Stock” ignores that immigrants intermarried and hand children who themselves had children.
They attempt to get around this admission of “Founding Stock” including shared genetic sequences with foreigners by declaring that there was an amnesty for nation building that ended when “the Census Bureau declared the frontier closed in 1890” (in fact they said that there was no more discernable line for the “frontier”, not that it was closed). They excuse this by saying that they could be counted as “Stock” because there was a frontier that was built up by European White people before the magic date of 1890, while anyone who came after doesn’t deserve it despite many post-1890 immigrants building and developing this country far more than many “heritage Americans” today.
This would also seem to exclude many Eastern and Southern Europeans, or really anyone from Europe who has come since then, but they still have tricks up their sleeve And what is that trick? Declaring “America is the real European Union”. If that’s not “propositional”, then I scant know what would be!
This idea of a multi-ethnic derived assortment becoming a single nation with a common culture is not, per se, a crazy one. Ethnicities or nations arise or dissipate all the time throughout history. But culture, particularly American culture, is not race or even ethnicity. American culture was not created by the invention of a pan-European poly-ethnic conglomeration in a propositional manner. America was founded as English colonies and America inherited that Anglo-American heritage which stretches back nearly a millennium. Those non-English peoples did not cause America to cease to be America. Similarly, people coming from outside Europe and their descendants who may have been here since the 19th century at least do not cause America to cease to be America.
American culture will always evolve, even in the absence of immigration, either from foreign influence (as we influence others) or internally if total isolationism were somehow achieved. But the core has remained and the fundamentals have endured. The threat comes not from supplanting DNA (as it hasn’t from the past) but from supplanting foreign ideas—and all of those ideas have come from Europe and which largely arose after the United States severed ties and thus the common history (longer if you consider how different England was from continental Europe for centuries more).
If we want to save America from that which is foreign, we’d reject these more modern ideas of Nationalism (largely derived from the French Revolution), the Revolutions of 1848, Marxism, Nazism, the Frankfurt School, fascism, or modern European “social democracies”.
