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What Is An American? The Civic Nationalists Have No Idea

A football game in Texas last week exposed the emptiness of ‘civic nationalism’ as a durable source of American identity.

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What is an American? There’s been some confusion about that lately as we debate, with increasing ferocity, immigration, assimilation, and the sources of American identity.

Generally, there are two schools of thought. The so-called heritage Americans argue that Americanness is mostly based on a combination of history, ethnicity, shared culture, and ancestral heritage. The civic or propositional nationalists think it’s based on a set of ideas, an American “creed” or set of Enlightenment propositions that in theory anyone can adopt, no matter their background, culture, or religion.

Most Americans today probably gravitate towards the latter definition, if only because we’ve all been taught for the past half-century that anyone can be an American if they profess the creed and get their paperwork in order. We fear, too, that tying American identity to culture or heritage smacks of the “blood-and-soil” nationalism of European fascists and homegrown racists.

But after decades of mass immigration, legal and illegal, and the social disruption and discontent that has resulted, the question of American identity isn’t going away. We have to talk about it because it keep coming up.

Just look at what happened over the weekend when an X post from Texas Railroad Commissioner candidate Bo French ignited a weeklong controversy over this very question. French posted an image from last weekend’s University of Texas-Ohio State football game that showed a crowd of UT students, most of them of South Asian descent, cheering the Longhorns’ upset victory. He wrote, “I heard UT graduation this year looked like this. I didn’t believe it. The problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined.”

What followed was exactly what you’d expect. Establishment Republicans like outgoing Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, who lost his primary to Attorney General Ken Paxton, denounced French’s post as racist and intolerant. James Talarico, the weird little man who won the Texas Democratic primary for Senate, agreed with Cornyn and challenged Paxton to condemn the post. Paxton responded by denouncing Talarico for saying that white men are America’s top terror threat.

Online, a debate erupted over whether it’s okay to notice that South Asians, most of them immigrants from India or the children of immigrants, are now massively overrepresented at places like the University of Texas, while white men are massively underrepresented.........

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