The Proposition Nation Question

The oft-repeated myth may still be better than the Left’s alternative

Is America a proposition nation?

The question inspired a fiery debate after Vivek Ramaswamy recently endorsed more immigration. Vivek responded to critics with a message outlining his vision of America: 

I’m an American nationalist. This country isn’t just an "economic zone", but it's not defined by ethnicity either. We’re *not* bound by the blood in our veins, we’re bound by the ideals that our Founders spilled blood to preserve. They wrote them out & we fought a Revolution, a Civil War, and Two World Wars to save them. I refuse to let the woke left or their intellectual cousins on the right browbeat us into thinking otherwise. I’m rooted *deep* in this country & I’ll stand my ground to the end if I have to. This is a good debate to have in the GOP, let’s smoke it out.

Vivek toes a fine line. He gives America’s heritage its due, but he ultimately advocates for a paleoconservative tinged variation of the proposition nation thesis. That upsets many right wingers, who insist that America is defined by its people, not its ideals. 

It’s hard to dismiss the more liberal argument that America is an idea. Both sides of the debate have a point. Our Founders imagined America as an empire of liberty that would inspire the world with its enlighten principles of government. They thought  the nation was defined by its ideals. At the same time, they saw the country as reserved for European stock, preferably Protestants and Northern Europeans. Blacks and Indians were excluded from the body politic. Asians were largely kept out before the 1950s. The 1924 Immigration Act even sought to keep out Europeans who were seen as too different from the Anglo-Protestant mainstream. 

But that obviously changed over the years. Blacks were eventually granted formal entry into the body politic in Reconstruction and forcefully integrated with whites 100 years later. Indians were granted citizenship in the 1920s. Laws that restricted naturalization to whites were scrapped in the 1950s. Mass immigration has fundamentally transformed the American people since the 1960s, turning a nation that was nearly 90 percent non-Hispanic white in 1960 to one that was just 57 percent non-Hispanic white in 2020. 

The ideological conception of America triumphed over the ethnic conception in 1965. But even before then, many American leaders insisted the nation was just an idea. “Americans, unlike other nationals, are not a race. Americanism is an idea,” declared J. Edgar Hoover in 1941. Hoover was nobody's idea of a leftist. He was fine with segregation, for example. And yet, even he articulated the proposition nation thesis—a common notion in the pre-1965 world. 

If Hoover was told that belief in that notion requires accepting unlimited immigration and whites becoming a hated minority, he would have reconsidered it. Regardless, he and many others said they believed in it. “America is an idea” isn’t a recent creation. 

This doesn’t mean the Founders intended for America to be a multicultural entity without a distinct people or heritage. That was unthinkable to them. They did believe the ideas of the founding documents–a unique product of our western heritage–set America apart from the world. Yet, all these founders were part of a particular people. We would not be America if we were founded by Spanish criollos, Iroquois tribesmen, or African freedmen. We are America because of the Anglo-Protestants who founded it and served as the core population throughout its history.

That’s an inconvenient truth worth stressing to a misinformed general public. 

However, among the general population, the “America is an idea” theory remains dominant. Most people genuinely believe any person can become an American and this nation is open to all. There is very little ethnic consciousness among Legacy Americans. Only 15 percent of whites say their race is important to them. (A majority of every other group says their racial identity is important.) America’s core population no longer sees itself as a people. They’re just individuals living in America. “Black, white, red, yellow, we’re all Americans!”

The vast majority of offline conservatives would have agreed with Vivek’s tweet. Only the Online Right vigorously disagreed with it.

The offline conservatives aren’t hopeless. They’re just not aware of competing notions. Instinctually, they get this stuff. They worry about America’s decaying culture and dramatic demographic changes. But they still revert to time-tested civic nationalism. It’s all they really know. The majority of these people oppose legal immigration, think anti-white racism is a major problem, and believe in the Great Replacement. But they also consider America an idea open to all. 

Liberals no longer believe in the proposition nation thesis. They propose something far worse.

The Left prefers a racial conception of America centered primarily around blacks. This view doesn’t see Anglo-Protestants as the true Americans–it sees blacks as the real founders. The 1619 Project and Critical Race Theory propose that this racist nation transform itself into a reparation program for BIPOC and their posterity. The nation is defined by its minorities and it should serve their interests. 

This conception of America undermines notions that we are an economic zone. If economics primarily guided our  leaders, we would have tough-on-crime laws, no racial quotas in education or hiring, reduced welfare, and immigration policies designed solely around business needs. This would all be good for economic health, and not bad for the culture war issues that animate conservatives. Instead, we get dangerous cities, racial quotas, increased government subsidies for POC, and an immigration policy solely focused on replacing the historic American people. None of these serve our economic interests.

Our country’s elites are morally committed to this racial conception of America. It’s why Juneteenth is a national holiday and schools teach kids to feel moral guilt over the country’s past. Advancing BIPOC America is a holy mission. Liberal elites neither see our nation as an economic zone nor an optimistic idea. In their eyes, the country is essentially a black improvement after school program. Blacks may not be in charge, they may not be the wealthiest people, and they certainly aren’t the majority. But they’re upheld as America’s core population whose success or failure is the yardstick against which our government is measured.  Other non-whites will be second, and whites will be last in this racial hierarchy.

America as a land of liberty, merit, and individualism sounds awfully better than that. 

For normies, the debate isn’t over whether America is a proposition nation or not. It’s over whether America is good or bad. Our people say it’s good, the Left says it’s bad. It’s that simple.

It would be nice if our base saw America as a distinct people rather than an idea, but they don’t. They can still be civic nationalists and oppose mass immigration, anti-white racism, and affirmative action. You’ve got to take what you can get with normie cons. 

It’s useful to draw attention to how Americans envisioned the country in the past to undermine liberal myths about a “nation of immigrants” and other tropes. That said, we need to be realistic about how our people envision the country right now. It’s not the same as how WASPs viewed America in the 1920s. We can definitely push people in the right direction, but it will take a lot of time. 

To most white Americans, the proposition nation thesis is preferable to the black ethnostate alternative. It’s hard to disagree with that. They just need to be disabused of fantasies that that America can remain America in a majority-minority future.