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Notes -
The thing is, you assume that 'ideals-based identity' and 'ancestral identity' are separate and orthogonal to one another. But even if we put aside tribal allegiance, it's pretty clear that emotional predispositions (openness, authoritarianism, neuroticism, etc.) are at least partially genetic. And this is going to correlate somewhat with race, because most places have had fairly stable demographics for hundreds or thousands of years.
The ideal of "free speech" is going to look very different in a country of high-openness, high-extroversion people vs high-neuroticism, low-openness. Likewise "self-governance". Moved from one country that considers itself meritocratic, self-governing and devoted to free speech to a very ethnically-different country with the same ideals really drove that home for me.
American notions of what their founding ideals mean has already shifted pretty clearly since the country was founded, and I doubt that's independent of the demographic changes that America has been through since the founding. Anyone who wants to preserve modern American values has to consider the demographics of the population upholding those values and passing them down to their children.
(Look at how much work it took for Roosevelt et al to get federal jobs allocated by exam scores not patronage. Both factions considered themselves thoroughly American, but one defined 'merit' as 'decades of loyal service' and the other as 'intelligence and diligence").
There's a standard counterargument here: even accepting this, ancestry is at most weak proxy for values---the distributions always have significant overlap. Using the weak proxy instead of more direct measures of values is silly. I bet even English proficiency and being able to pass a civics test gives more information on acceptance of the current American values than ancestry. I'm not going to complain if this picks out different proportions of different ancestry groups---just don't prejudge anyone based on very weak correlates when there's a better way!
Sounds nice but in practice it doesn’t produce good results:
Seriously, I’m not trying to gotcha you with clever arguments. One of the reasons I moved towards an ancestral-based understanding of Britishness was watching all the immigrants who’d taken the mandatory civics test on ‘British values’ turn around and condemn those values the moment they got their visa. We wanted skilled immigrants who would uphold our values too, who doesn’t? But in general that’s not what we got, and the children are worse.
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