Would An Indian President Still Be American?

Joe Biden and Ann Coulter offer two contrary views on national identity

President Biden utters a major gaffe every chance he gets. They’re typically baffling comments that could only come from a senile mind. But sometimes, they reveal something important about the liberal worldview. One of those occasions of tactless honesty was his recent criticism of Japan and India for being “xenophobic.” Biden claimed in the speech delivered to Asian donors that America is prosperous and the land of the free because “we welcome immigrants.” 

"Think about it. Why is China stalling so badly economically? Why is Japan having trouble. Why is Russia? Why is India? Because they're xenophobic. They don't want immigrants,” he told the crowd. “Immigrants are what makes us strong. Not a joke.”

It’s a major gaffe to attack allies and lump them in with supposed enemies like China and Russia. But the White House didn’t apologize—the administration doubled down. White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters that the president was trying to make a “broader case” that “when it comes to who we are as a nation, we are a nation of—of immigrants. That is in our DNA.”

Biden expressed a deeply held view of America. According to this view, we distinguish ourselves from the rest of the world by being a nation of immigrants. We have no core people or culture. What defines us is that we’re from all parts of the world and we believe in “freedom” and a prosperous economy. It’s a universal identity open to all, and that universalism is what makes America America.

This is a sentiment not exclusive to liberals. Many conservatives also espouse this. Ronald Reagan argued for this vision in his presidential farewell address. “We lead the world because, unique among nations, we draw our people—our strength—from every country and every corner of the world. And by doing so we continuously renew and enrich our nation. While other countries cling to the stale past, here in America we breathe life into dreams,” he declared.

However popular this notion is, it’s dead wrong. America is not the creation of a bunch of random individuals united by their shared love for abstract ideals. It was founded by white men—predominantly Anglo in origin—who forged a nation with the language, values, traditions, and norms they brought with them from Europe. Technically, anyone can be an American. But when we think of Americans, it’s intrinsically linked with whiteness. Just look at the Founding Fathers. What sets them apart from the Japanese? I don’t think it’s their penmanship. 

Critical race theorists see white when they look at American history. That’s why they wage war on our heritage. Becoming American means assimilating to whiteness. This is why blacks have a distinct identity from regular Americans and non-white immigrants feel more out of place in this country. The old immigrants from Italy and Poland could easily assimilate over the generations—the newer ones can’t.

Ann Coulter offered an opinion similar to this in her viral interview with Vivek Ramaswamy. She made headlines after she told Vivek she could not vote for him for president because he’s Indian. Most didn’t bother listening past that point. However, she made an interesting case for her position.

“There is a core national identity that is the identity of the WASP,” she told Ramaswamy. “And that doesn’t mean we can’t take anyone else in―a Sri Lankan or a Japanese, or an Indian. But the core around which the nation’s values are formed is the WASP.” She says she would vote for one of his kids if they married a Daughter of the American Revolution. She insists that the office of the president, due to its high symbolic value, demands someone with partial English ancestry. 

This is largely true, but the way it’s expressed is almost anachronistic. While the founding stock were white, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant, the core population has come to encompass a lot of white people who don’t fit that. The two men Coulter recently supported for president don’t hail from the founding stock. While Germans and Scots were present during the Revolution, none of them were Donald Trump’s ancestors. His grandparents and his mother were born in Europe. It would be ridiculous to claim his fairly recent immigrant background puts him outside of the core population. Trump is an over-the-top expression of whiteness. He hews closer to the founding stock than Barack Obama, who allegedly has 14 ancestors who fought in the Revolutionary War. 

Coulter ditched Trump long ago and eventually found her man in Ron DeSantis. The Florida governor is no WASP—he’s an Italian Catholic. It appears all of his ancestors came after the Civil War. Yet, he completely fits in among the core population. His lack of WASP credentials didn’t persuade Ann to ditch her support. It’s his whiteness that made Ron fundamentally American.

In case you thought Ann used “WASP” as a stand-in for “white,” you were wrong. She emphatically denied she meant white in multiple X posts.

That’s just silly.

The only reason to use WASP or Anglo-Protestant is to soft pedal white identity. Many recoil if you say white, so sometimes it’s better to use a euphemism. However, this becomes a problem when the euphemism replaces the true meaning. There are problems with insisting on this WASP identity instead of whiteness. Few Americans identify as WASPs and the term (unfortunately) has negative connotations among the population. White is the more fitting term. It’s abundantly clear in our daily lives; there’s just a great taboo against identifying with it. 

But even that taboo can’t hide the central role whiteness has played in American life. That quality, not the universal identity of abstraction favored by Biden and Reagan, is what made America America. It’s what makes us truly different from Japan and India. Only a senile idiot would attribute our greatness to mass immigration.