\n<\/p>\n
In August, a guest on Tucker Carlson\u2019s podcast said something that immediately caught his interest. The United States faces a fundamental rift \u201cbetween heritage Americans and the new political class,\u201d Auron MacIntyre, a columnist for Blaze Media, argued. \u201cHeritage Americans\u2014what are those?\u201d Carlson asked.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou could find their last names in the Civil War registry,\u201d MacIntyre explained. This ancestry matters, he said, because America is not \u201ca collection of abstract things agreed to in some social contract.\u201d It is a specific set of people who embody an \u201cAnglo-Protestant spirit\u201d and \u201chave a tie to history and to the land.\u201d MacIntyre continued: \u201cIf you change the people, you change the culture.\u201d \u201cAll true,\u201d Carlson replied.<\/p>\n
That same phrase\u2014heritage American<\/em>\u2014has been rippling across the right, particularly on the social web. Politicians have started flirting with the idea as well. During a speech at the Claremont Institute in July, Vice President J. D. Vance said that \u201cpeople whose ancestors fought in the Civil War have a hell of a lot more claim over America than the people who say they don\u2019t belong,\u201d referring to those on the \u201cmodern left\u201d who conceive of American identity \u201cpurely as an idea.\u201d And here\u2019s Senator Eric Schmitt of Missouri at the National Conservative Conference last month: \u201cWe Americans are the sons and daughters of the Christian Pilgrims that poured out from Europe\u2019s shores to baptize a new world in their ancient faith.\u201d America, Schmitt said, is \u201cour birthright. It\u2019s our heritage, our destiny.\u201d (Spokespeople for Vance and Schmitt did not respond to requests for comment, nor did Carlson or MacIntyre.)<\/p>\n The question of who counts as American has been debated for generations, and people have answered it in different ways in various eras\u2014often depending on their own background and ideology. C. Jay Engel, a self-described \u201cheritage American\u201d whom Politico<\/em> credits as having helped popularize the term, has repeatedly said that he is not a \u201cracial essentialist\u201d and believes that \u201cblacks of the Old South\u201d and \u201cintegrated Native Americans\u201d also count as heritage Americans. But he has also argued that \u201cthe majority of blacks have demonstrated that they cannot function within the old European cultural standards\u201d and that the concept of heritage Americans affirms \u201cthe domination and pre-eminence of the European derived peoples, their institutions, and their way of life.\u201d<\/p>\n When I called Engel to ask him about all of this, he told me that he does not believe that genetics are \u201cthe chief explanation\u201d for how Anglo-Protestant ideals are transferred from generation to generation\u2014but added that \u201cthere is an ethnic or racial correlation\u201d between who embodies such ideals and who doesn\u2019t. Our conversation was polite, but strange at times. I mentioned that as a half-Iranian American who was born and raised in the U.S., I share more in common ideologically with the Anglo-Protestant Founders of the United States than I do with Middle Eastern theocrats. \u201cI would also contend that there is something deep inside of you that is attracted to or finds familiar portions of Iranian history,\u201d he said, as though I am genetically predisposed to find the conquests of Darius the Great uniquely moving. I don\u2019t, and told him as much. \u201cI\u2019m not contending that you can\u2019t take someone and raise him within a certain cultural environment and he begins to adopt the taste and all that,\u201d Engel responded. \u201cBut I do contend that if you bring in massive groups of people over time, it\u2019s going to, in a few generations, be a lot culturally different than it would otherwise have been if you never had done that.\u201d<\/p>\n Speaking with Engel reminded me at times of MacIntyre, Vance, and others who tend to speak in nativist terms. They frequently appeal to an idea that only some Americans are truly legitimate\u2014and often this means Americans of European ancestry\u2014while leaving room for enough plausible deniability to avoid seeming straightforwardly racist. During his conversation with Tucker Carlson, MacIntyre made the point that although one\u2019s Americaness is tied to blood and the land, that \u201cdoesn\u2019t mean that other people can\u2019t be grafted in.\u201d In the same speech in which Vance connected American identity to ancestry, the vice president also defended some immigrants. \u201cMy lovely wife is the daughter of immigrants to this country,\u201d he said, \u201cand I am certainly better off, and I believe our whole country is better off for it.\u201d<\/p>\n The far-right writer and podcaster Scott Greer said this plainly. \u201cLiberals look stupid when they freak out over such an anodyne term,\u201d he wrote in an August column for The American Conservative <\/em>endorsing the term. This vagueness is strategically useful, he argued, because \u201cheritage American is more palatable to the public than \u2018white.\u2019\u201d (In 2018, The Atlantic <\/em>revealed that Greer wrote under a pen name for a journal run by the white supremacist Richard Spencer. He later apologized and said that his views had \u201cevolved.\u201d)<\/p>\n