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I've always respected the logical consistency of this position, but it is so far outside the realm of possibility that to debate it feels like stepping into some alternate dimension where the platonic forms of nationalism, true communism (tm), and libertarianism exist unmoored from the flesh and blood human beings they are supposed to apply to. How much pre-1866 ancestry is enough? Is someone whose grandparents came through Ellis Island but only identifies as American really less worthy of the title than me, who has colonial ancestry but also an immigrant mother and speaks a foreign language at home? If some immigration officer with a Polish last name comes to deport me one day, can I pull out my SAR badge like an Uno reverse card and send him to Warsaw instead, or would we have to compare blood quanta first? In short order this gets as messy as trying to dole out reparations for slavery would.
For most people, common sense says no, if they observed all aspects of my life they would conclude that I am in fact less American than the third generation Italian, or the Korean adoptee who hasn't been outside the midwest since she was a baby and speaks only English, or even the Indian doctor in the UK who would love nothing more than to become an American and believes it's the greatest country in the world. The fact that there were minutemen with my last name in the New England militias 250 years ago doesn't change that. Now, if both majority pre-Civil War ancestry and belief in the existence of an Amerikaner ethnos defined by said ancestry are necessary to make one a true American, that leaves you with a population of several thousand Twitter shitposters and a lizardman's constant of rednecks. That's not nothing; Australia was created with less, but you aren't winning a civil war against the civic nationalists anytime soon.
We have to start somewhere, and you start by asserting your frame and believing in it.
Yes, actually. Your SAR card is the whole point. After all, the Constitution says that its purpose is to secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. That means you, and it doesn't mean Polaski or Tinetti.
The fact that there are so many immigrants that we have so many halfsies is itself the problem, and it's a problem that is solved by shutting the doors, repressing foreign language and culture, and forcing intermarriage. The third generation Italian in America, who has six different people all choosing to inbreed instead of intermingle, is also the problem. Third generation isn't even that old, we could be talking about the grandparents who immigrated in the 1950s or 60s. The Italians are more like five generations, which again, you couldn't have found a few mixed marriages among thirty people?
We're talking in generational terms already. I'm hoping my sons and grandsons think more this way, and act like it, too.
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