Davidson at The Federalist presents a fiery essay about Americans. It is a re-run of what Pat Buchanan proposed, by the way. Here's the core:
... But of course one need not be an ethno-nationalist to reject the creedalists’ claims about American identity. Indeed, those claims can be rejected on the basis of religion alone. At the very heart of American identity, after all, lies the Christian religion and the principles of government derived from its theological precepts. Put another way, if America is a “propositional nation,” as they say, then the proposition is Christianity and all that it entails. You cannot have, as the basis of nation, the assertion that “all men are created equal,” that all men are given unalienable rights by their Creator, without Christian theological claims undergirding those assertions. That doesn’t mean every American has to be Christian, as if we’re some kind of theocracy. But it does mean that every American has to endorse a Christian theological cosmology.
The point about religion is that America is not an Enlightenment-era parlor game. It is a people who came from a particular culture and religion, British and Christian. Its creed is universal in the same way the Christian creed is universal: it is open to everyone willing to convert, change their life, and be transformed. That’s what assimilation really means. The immigrant must leave behind the cultural practices of his homeland and adopt American culture and habits as his own — above all, he must adopt the Christian idea that all men are created equal, with all the implications that flow from that. That is harder to do than it seems, and it doesn’t happen at all under conditions of mass immigration....
That has consequences.
...Not everyone who emigrates here will become an American. Ilhan Omar, for example, will probably never become an American, no matter how long she lives here. That’s because being an American doesn’t mean just being physically present in the United States, with all your documents in order, in hopes of making a lot of money or amassing a lot of power. It means joining, and being adopted into, an existing people — a people with a shared past and a common future and a distinct heritage and cultural patrimony.
Most foreigners, if they fully understood what it meant, would not even want to assimilate. People after all tend to love their own cultures and ancestral homelands, and they generally do not want to leave them behind for another. That’s why so many immigrants today fail to assimilate, or don’t even try....
His main thesis?
...That’s also why, in 2026, it’s worth asking whether we should keep allowing them to hold high federal office. ...
By the way, the claptrap (adopted by Gorsuch, who should know better) that America was originally a "land of immigrants" was demolished in the essay.
Hmmmm.
No comments:
Post a Comment