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Funny enough I tend to agree with the "America is a set of ideas" conception and thus a 'true' American is someone who subscribes to that set of ideas wholeheartedly, and gives their allegiance to the nation which is founded upon/represents those ideas over any other political allegiances they could have.
The set of ideas that I think represents "The American Way" would roughly look like:
1. Private property is sacrosanct.
not only is the phrase "No person shall be... deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law" directly stated in the Fifth Amendment, the concept is bolstered by the Second, Third, Fourth, and Ninth Amendments. We had to resolve the wee little dispute over whether other humans could be treated as property, but that debate actually further supports that private property was a fundamental precept of the nation.
2. The "state" is the fundamental political unit around which the rest of the system revolves.
Tenth Amendment supports this directly. The debates over secession and the Civil War cloud the issue. But end of the day the Union can only persist so long as its member states resolve to stay unified. This is also why, historically, the idea of making Canada or its provinces into new States is far from a wacky suggestion. Just, ideally it would be done via a consensus mechanism and not invasion.
3. The Federal Government exists primarily to protect the interests of the citizens writ large, and to preserve the union of states from internal conflict and external threat.
Ah, here's the really tricky one. Its absolutely uncontroversial, or should be, that the Federal Government gets to handle international dealings on behalf of all the member states and citizens, and the states have representation via congress to approve treaties and such, but cannot enter treaties of their own. And likewise, rather than states going to war with each other, the FedGov has mechanisms to quickly and peacefully resolve disputes without bloodshed or lasting damage.
But Federalism creates some small paradoxes, such as the fact that states don't get to control immigration across their own border, but FedGov can control (or not) immigration across the national borders, and states don't get to treat their own residents with favoritism (at least, not much) whilst an American citizen can freely choose which state they want to reside in and favor, and can swap that allegiance at any time. Americans therefore are governed by their states but really owe little to nothing to the state they live in, can't be constrained from leaving their state, and for all pursuits and purposes can consider themselves an American Citizen first and a resident of a given state second.
So how much authority does an American really want the Federal Government to have? And if they decide they owe more allegiance to the Federal Government than their chosen state, are they still an "American?"
4. Citizens ought to be free to pursue whatever objectives they prefer and take whatever course they think is most likely to get them there... SUBJECT TO the rules and limitations set by the state they reside in.
This follows from the combination of the above three points. If you can own property, if you can move to whichever state has the set of rules you find most agreeable, if you can expect the Federal government to enforce your "fundamental" rights where-ever you are, then you have the basic control of your own life-path and are not required to submit your own vision or goals to that of some arbitrary political authority. Unless you WANT to, of course.
You can choose to practice your preferred religion (submit to the church or god of your choice), you can enter a marriage (submit your vision to your spouse's interests), you can enter an employment contract (submit to the will of an employer or corporation), or you can carve out your own niche and not submit to ANYONE so long as you pay your tax bill to the state and Fedgov.
There are no kings here to assert their will, there is no mob rule to force you into conformity, there is not an order of specially appointed priests who will subject you to an inquisition for failing to hew to a particular religious doctrine.
That's what "Americans" want. That's how "The American Dream" functions. YOU define your dream, you pursue it, and so long as you don't step on anybody else you will be allowed to chase it as long as you want.
But this does lead us to a potentially frightening question. What of those who are culturally or maybe even genetically averse to such ideas? There are plenty of places where private property ISN'T sacrosanct. Communism as an ideology rejects that precept.
There are likewise places where the basic political unit is your village, or it could be whichever regional warlord currently control the territory your family lives in, or in a handful of places there is indeed still a singular monarch in whom all political power theoretically resides. The idea that a defined territory would be governed by a defined entity according to clearly defined rules is not universal on this earth.
And of course, some governments don't operate as though they owe their citizens squat, the assumption flows the other way. The citizens owe the state allegiance, support, labor, and even their lives if called upon to fight for the nation.
And without those supporting ideals, well, you can't believe in an "American Dream" that one can pursue, since every person is required to submit their own vision or goals to the political authority and can't expect their own preferences to be protected, so why should they expect to be allowed to chase their goals in peace, ever?
Current technology might enable us to actually answer the question: are there groups of people who are more or less genetically predisposed to be "Americans" i.e. to subscribe the aforementioned set of ideas and therefore provably capable of pledging allegiance to the nation that represents those ideals? And if we can identify that, surely, SURELY as a nation of ideas we should be careful about only letting in those people who can provably pledge allegiance and aren't predisposed to defect.
And then, what if anything should we do if it is noticeable that this ability to accept these ideas has a strong correlation with ethnicity?
I mean in order for freedom to work properly, you do need some fairly specific cultural beliefs. You’d have to believe in public order, in respecting private property, and respecting the rights of others you disagree with. That’s a tall order, and very few cultures accept all of those things. In a lot of places (MENA, Africa, and South America in particular) these things aren’t expected, and in fact tge general assumption is that you’d better take precautions to protect yourself and your property because you will lose what you can’t protect.
Right, but "magic dirt" theory suggests that any human who comes here is capable of adapting to the culture and assimilating.
As long as the norms and ideas here are better and stronger then why should their culture of origin bother us?
In small enough numbers over a long enough time, I think it’s possible to do that. But if you’re taking in thousands of MENA Muslims into your country at a time, you get an ethnic enclave that doesn’t assimilate to the norms of the rest of society. The same can be said for Africans or South Americans.
Yes, and I've pointed out how mass communications make assimilation less likely.
If you can communicate freely with the home country, and consume home country media, and by extension avoid consuming American media and thus 'absorbing' American norms and expectations, if you can fly back to your home country for relatively cheap... not surprising if you'd still maintain allegiance there regardless of how long you spend in the U.S.
I'm not sure it would help very much if they could only consume American media; we are not in the times of the Hays Code before the rural purge when media tried to be morally uplifting.
If African immigrants assimilate into ghetto hood culture through rap and hip-hop, or if female immigrants assimilate into the false life plan through romance novels and movies, that's worse than useless.
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I think we’re in agreement on that as well. Assimilation is the key to making immigration anything other than importing a fifth column into your country from places that often don’t share any culture and beliefs with your country. In small numbers, I think a relatively motivated group can become assimilated, but if you create a situation where you’re building Little Pakistan in London where Muslim norms, practice, and morals are the culture of that enclave, you simply slowly turn London into Pakistan.
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Even before the wave of European immigration in the early 1900s, I think that (1) and (2) would not have been uncritically accepted by all Americans.
There are two very serious problems with proposition-based nationhood even in the absence of immigration:
If "disagree with" means "voice their dissent and yet abides by the court's ruling in the legal realm, that's incredibly American!
If 'disagree with' means "refuse to accept the ruling and revolt against any attempt to enforce it" then yeah, I'd suggest that's Anti-American.
I mean, Supreme Court Justices themselves can disagree with the Supreme Court's ruling, That's what a 'Dissenting Opinion" is! If they're persistent their interpretation can supplant the previous one.
I think its safe to say that if a large majority of the citizens of your nation wholesale reject the ideas upon which the Nation was formed, you have to wind things up and pack it in, yeah. Even if we don't strip citizenship from people who have come to reject those ideas, I am okay with making their lives otherwise so unpalatable that they renounce citizenship on their own. See also the discussion on free speech as an ideal vs. deporting people expressing anti-american sentiments.
If every single person outside of the nation rejects those ideas, I guess its a question of how hard the nation will fight to maintain its status and standing as an independent unit.
Hence why it does remain very important for a 'nation of ideas' to be careful about who it admits in and grants citizenship to.
Why not the opposite? Reform the nation on the beliefs that the now majority of your citizens espouse? To an extent that is what the Civil war did no? Massive disagreement about a specific ideal, fought a war over it, reformed shattered state with the new status quo in place (to an extent at least).
Or to put it another way was the Confederacy or the Union the anti-American ones in this context? Slavery had been part of America for some time, so was the abolition unAmerican or was the fact slavery contradicted some of the idealistic founding rhetoric enough to make abolition actually the American thing to do?
If you're aiming for a Convention of States then yeah, that'd be an appropriate approach.
I would suggest, however, that American values haven't 'shifted' as a whole, but that there is a severe divergence in values. There is no real 'majority view' on values to be identified.
So attempting to reform "The American Way" to favor either side's preferences would just mean no further union was possible.
The alternative is redesigning the meta-rules to allow peaceful co-existence, but that would look very similar to the rules we already have.
By definition the Confederacy was 'Anti-American' if we characterize them as the ones who wanted to exit the union and reform under a slightly different set of rules. They removed themselves from the compact and went off to do something different.
On the other hand, going to war to prevent states from leaving seems to betray the issue in #2 above, that States are supposed to be the prime political unit and able to determine their own fate.
So it is in fact possible that both sides were 'betraying' true American values, just each was betraying a different one.
As a side note: I do wonder how history might be different if the U.S. Civil War had been avoided or mitigated and they'd found a peaceable way to bring slavery to an end. Like how most other countries did.
Maybe safe to say it could have sparked later over some other major issue.
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These foundational ideas are good as far as they go, but I think makes it clear the point the girl was getting at: these are the minimum basic requirements to be an American. Is there nothing more? Is that all there is? Sam might say, no there is nothing more. Everything else is an illusion or not genuinely American, but I think this is (a) profoundly unsatisfying for a lot of people and (b) not historically genuine. What are the aspirational aspects of being an American? I can think of a few things that I thing makes someone a good American:
I don't think there's anything the slightest bit untoward about desiring to live in an America with more people who share those values and fewer people who wreck the commons, bugger their neighbors, and exhibit antisocial behavior. Yes, it's possible to tolerate those who don't share these values, and it's better to grant dispensation than engage tyranny to force an outcome. But it is unpleasant and it would surely create a more desirable society if people would, through the power of assimilation and persuasion, voluntarily adopt such values. I'm baffled and increasingly despondent that people find this to be a totally unreasonable imposition, and demand that instead Americans give up these values to accommodate people who don't share them and don't feel inclined to change.
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