It’s more than a little late, but conservatives are finally beginning to shake off the absurd idea that America is not an actual nation of people, but an idea:
It the recent NatCon conference in Washington, D.C., Sen. Eric Schmitt of Missouri delivered a powerful speech about American identity, arguing that our nation isn’t merely an abstract proposition about human equality and rights, but a distinct people with a shared past and a common future.
“For decades, the mainstream consensus on the Left and the Right alike seemed to be that America itself was just an ‘idea’ — a vehicle for global liberalism,” Schmitt said. “We were told that the entire meaning of America boiled down to a few lines in a poem on the Statue of Liberty and five words about equality in the Declaration of Independence. Any other aspect of American identity was deemed to be illegitimate and immoral, poisoned by the evils of our ancestors. The true meaning of America, they said, was liberalism, multiculturalism, and endless immigration.”
Not so, argued Schmitt. America’s principles, he said, are not abstractions. “They are living, breathing things — rooted in a people and embodied in a way of life. It’s only in that context that they become real.”
This is absolutely correct. Those who would reduce America to an abstract proposition either misunderstand or misrepresent our history and heritage. As I argued at NatCon last year, nearly everyone who argues that America is a proposition is wrong about what the proposition is and what it means. “All men are created equal” is a specifically Christian claim, not a universal call to multiculturalism and mass immigration. It emerged as a political ideal from Christian Europe, and arrived in America by way of settlers and pioneers who came here specifically to establish a nation where they could practice their Christian faith as they saw fit.
In other words, America isn’t a grab-bag of Enlightenment tropes about free speech and equality, but the product of Christian Europe. The ideals that animated our founders are universal in the same way that the Christian faith is universal: God created all men equal, they all bear the imago Dei, the image of God, and are all His children. But the only people who ever took that self-evident truth and used it as a foundation on which to forge a new nation were the English colonists in America.
The fundamental falsity of the proposition nation can perhaps be most obviously seen in the way that “a nation of immigrants” has subsequently been applied everywhere from England and Sweden to, most recently, Japan, of all places. It’s a psychological operation, not a philosophical truth.