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I’d like to register my disgust with this definition.
Civic nationalism, the choice to become an American through the legal naturalization process, is as fundamentally American as birthright citizenship. As long as my neighbors have come in through the front door, or were born on this land, I welcome them as my cousins.
If someone rejects America while living here, as many WEIRD socialists do, they are to me as alien as the person who snuck in under cover of night.
Is it?
Can you find support for it in the earliest writings of the founding fathers? I am open to being persuaded, but they left enough comments about their "posterity" and how the USA could only be possible among their type of people etc that I can't really see this claim being valid.
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That's fine, you can be disgusted, but no Italian or German or Mexican or Chinaman can be an American. They can be citizens of These United States of America. They can even have American children, provided they procreate with Americans and not other foreigners. But they cannot ever be American because that is an inheritance of blood, earned by my fathers, bequeathed to me.
So, not fundamental at all? Only a result of a despotic empire punishing its conquered enemies? Because what was fundamentally American were Free White Men of Good Character, and Negros and Indians not welcome.
It was a hundred years ago that people like Roosevelt and Wilson warned about hyphenated Americans. Was birthright citizenship really fundamental to America then? Hell no, and they both knew it. It's all post-WW2 dreck, and I'm tired of entertaining it.
This is insane to me. My cousins are my family, my neighbors are my neighbors. Living in proximity is not the same thing as sharing grandparents.
If immigration were still restricted to FWMoGC, then maybe I'd feel more like you, but when half the country thinks everyone on earth is already an American, some are just missing a plane ticket, then there's little room for me to do anything but say, "no."
Yeah, except that your fathers never put any such restriction in the founding documents of the country, and made no distinction between "Citizen of the United States" and "American."
You may believe that they never intended anyone but Anglo-Saxons of English descent to be Americans. Probably that is what many (not all) of them did believe. But that's not how they wrote the Constitution. They certainly didn't write anything like "Chinamen can't be Americans, but their children can be as long as they procreate only with Anglo-Saxons." Your entire formulation is idiosyncratic and appeals to your very specific prejudices, but it's neither coherent nor historical.
And if your objection to all this is "Foreign immigrants changed the deal that was understood to be in effect by my forefathers," well guess what, they changed the deal that was understood to be in effect by... the people who were here before them. Presumably you believe Anglo-Saxons coming here and creating America (and conquering the natives, and bringing slaves) was justified because... they could. So given that amassing sufficient power justifies altering the polity in which you find yourself, that's what happened.
Also, while you may disagree with people who think America is not defined by a single ethnicity, it's pure hysteria to call that opinion "genocidal." If you don't like leftists calling everything they don't like "genocidal" and "literal violence," then don't call things that are nothing like genocide genocide.
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