The Declaration of Independence’s 250th birthday offers responsible American citizens a golden opportunity to reflect on what is distinctive about our nation and way of life. The anniversary has also led to a renewed debate on the Right.
Is America merely an idea, or is it the project and inheritance of a particular people? Do justice and wisdom require us to orient ourselves primarily by our creed, or does prudence dictate that we define ourselves by our heritage and culture instead? The American Founders would have rejected this false choice as shallow and reductive.
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Many of those who want to emphasize heritage or culture over creed come by the impulse honestly. Many on the Left and some on the Right have been brandishing the slogan, “America is an idea,” as a partisan and ideological weapon for decades. They wish to exile anyone who would qualify that statement from the American political tradition.
This facile creedalism has played a substantial role in many policy disasters since the end of the Cold War, from democracy-building in the Middle East to reckless and irresponsible immigration policy. The impulse to overcorrect by falling back on a radical particularism — America is substantially the heritage of a specific people and their descendants — is understandable.
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But the Declaration itself gives us more clarity on these questions than we get by resorting to either side of the contemporary debate. It refers to Americans as “One people” but also says we “hold these truths to be self-evident.” Those truths include the truth of human equality. But it was specifically the American people that asserted their right to form a government “most likely to effect their safety and happiness.”
The Constitution that would succeed the Articles of Confederation gave the naturalization power to Congress. The American creed never required the American people, as a matter of right, to extend the privilege of citizenship to anyone without their consent.
Serious students of politics and history cannot disregard the heritage, culture, and way of life of a people and a place. But in America’s case, the Declaration of Independence broke decisively with certain aspects of our heritage as British subjects. We rejected allegiance to the British crown, titles of nobility, and a nationally established church. In their constitutions and at conventions after July 4, 1776, states such as Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, and Virginia explicitly rejected those parts of the common law contrary to America’s new principles or to natural law.
The heritage, tradition, and habits of self-government in the American colonies were forged first in 150 years of experience as colonies ruled lightly from afar by Britain. The Declaration of Independence emerged from within the British-colonial culture of the preceding years, but it also repudiated that heritage and birthed a new creature: the American. The American creed helped give rise to a new American culture. The English-speaking peoples retained much in common, but their ways of life, habits, and political moralities diverged decisively after American independence.
So, what makes a good American, properly understood? Acceptance of, and assimilation into, the creed and the culture that it created. This includes the habits of American self-government: self-reliance, responsible civic participation, and a jealous attachment to one’s natural and God-given rights — always attended by a sense of duty to protect those same rights in one’s fellow citizens. We should aspire to fulfill this imposing list of responsibilities ourselves, and demand of any immigrants we admit to our shores that they aspire to fulfill it as well.
Different peoples across the globe, with different habits, and sometimes very different religions and civic creeds, will be less likely to meet America’s responsibilities of citizenship than other peoples with less cultural difference. To acknowledge this is not racism or xenophobia — it is realism and common sense. We can reject ethnic and cultural determinism as irrational while acknowledging that to admit immigrants openly hostile to our creed and culture is to court a disastrous civic breakdown.
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It is not an accident that those who repudiate Americans’ right to make these sorts of determinations are overwhelmingly those who long ago rejected America’s creed of natural rights and the culture that it created.
The defining task of American statesmen for the coming generations will be to persuade increasing majorities of the American people that their safety, happiness, and prosperity are inextricably linked to an increasing and renewed attachment to the principles of the American founding that made this country both great and good. That’s the only way we will make it to America 500 still in possession of our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.
Ryan P. Williams is president of the Claremont Institute and publisher of the Claremont Review of Books and The American Mind.