{"id":91102,"date":"2016-03-24T07:24:53","date_gmt":"2016-03-24T15:24:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=91102"},"modified":"2016-03-24T07:24:53","modified_gmt":"2016-03-24T15:24:53","slug":"america-was-founded-on-anglo-identity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=91102","title":{"rendered":"America Was Founded On Anglo Identity"},"content":{"rendered":"

Scott Greer writes<\/a>: The 2016 election\u2019s unprecedented nastiness provided House Speaker Paul Ryan yet another opportunity to pontificate on his \u201cpositive\u201d conservative vision.<\/p>\n

Lamenting the \u201cdisheartening\u201d state of the current election, Ryan offered his alternative Wednesday \u2014 a politics focused on ideas.<\/p>\n

According to the Republican leader, \u201cAmerica is the only nation founded on an idea \u2014 not an identity. That idea is the notion that the condition of your birth does not determine the outcome of your life. Our rights are natural. They come from God, not government.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ryan then decided to give a history lesson on the idea-obsessed founders and how America\u2019s greatest leaders have always come together through compromise and debate.<\/p>\n

With that lesson in mind, he called upon America\u2019s modern politicians to return their focus to \u201cideas\u201d and instead of pandering to their respective bases.<\/p>\n

The speech is obviously a rather gooey attempt to bridge the political divide, but there\u2019s one line that stands above the platitudes and cliched allusions \u2014 America is a nation founded on an idea, not an identity.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a popular notion to think that our nation was created in a vacuum and created solely to uphold abstract principles. That line of thinking believes there\u2019s no cultural basis to the American proposition, and there\u2019s no real national identity outside of the belief in meritocracy.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s pretty quaint \u2014 and largely untrue.<\/p>\n

If Ryan had probably read the late Harvard professor Samuel Huntington\u2019s indispensable tome \u201cWho Are We?\u201d he\u2019d know that America\u2019s founding ideas are actually an outgrowth of the nation\u2019s Anglo-Protestant identity. Put another way, that unique identity gave birth to the unique ideas that made us the nation we are.<\/p>\n

America\u2019s belief in individual rights, liberty and equality of opportunity could only come about from the specific culture and institutions that were brought to the New World by British settlers, as Huntington notes. That culture \u2014 which placed a premium on liberty and representative government \u2014 was unique to Anglo-Protestants and provided the worldview from which our Founders forged a nation.<\/p>\n

If the 13 colonies were primarily settled by another people \u2014 such as the French or Spanish \u2014 we would almost certainly not be the country we are today.<\/p>\n

Our Anglo-Protestant culture also bequeathed the nation\u2019s strong commitment to hard work and the adoption of English as the all but official language of the land. Ryan endorsed that last quality by delivering his speech in that particular language, not French or Spanish.<\/p>\n

It is true that our Founding Fathers were very much animated by ideas, but they also didn\u2019t conjure up our country out of thin air. The reason many of them wanted to separate from the British crown and start a new country was over the feeling they were being denied their rights as Englishmen, not that they one day suddenly thought it\u2019d be better to found a country on the idea that \u201cthe condition of your birth does not determine the outcome of your life.\u201d<\/p>\n

And our Founders were keen to emphasize the cultural identity the citizens of the new country would share.<\/p>\n

As John Jay wrote in the Federalist No. 2, \u201cWith equal pleasure I have as often taken notice, that Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country, to one united people; a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs, and who, by their joint counsels, arms and efforts, fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established their general Liberty and Independence.\u201d<\/p>\n

Sounds like Jay believed America was founded upon a clear identity \u2014 one that was shaped by war, history and blood.<\/p>\n

The opening line of our Constitution gives credence to the idea that the citizens of this country share an identity which gave us our unique rights as Americans.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.\u201d<\/p>\n

The heavy emphasis on \u201cwe\u201d and \u201cour\u201d reveals a document that sees its people as more than a random collection of people who believe in meritocracy.<\/p>\n

The sentiment expressed by Paul Ryan Wednesday, in contrast, makes it seem like our country was formed out of a void by that random collection of people. The fact is that America, while exceptional in its accomplishments and character, is not so different from other nations. It is based on an identity \u2014 one shaped by a shared culture, history and language among its citizens.<\/p>\n

To think that a nation can be founded on the sole idea that every person can have a successful job no matter what their station in life is not enough to sustain unified body of citizens. Of course, many Americans do cherish the idea just described, but there is so much more to our country than that.<\/p>\n

Assimilation is such an arduous, yet necessary task for immigrants to perform because it requires the new arrivals to imbibe the culture and values of Anglo-Protestantism. If assimilation only required you believe that you can do something different than what you were born into, over half the world could become an American overnight.<\/p>\n

No wonder Congressman Ryan is arguably the GOP\u2019s biggest fan of mass immigration.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s clear that America is much more than an idea. Without our long-established identity, America would cease to be a unified nation and would instead become devolve into a continental strip mall, populated by people with nothing in common.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Scott Greer writes: The 2016 election\u2019s unprecedented nastiness provided House Speaker Paul Ryan yet another opportunity to pontificate on his \u201cpositive\u201d conservative vision. Lamenting the \u201cdisheartening\u201d state of the current election, Ryan offered his alternative Wednesday \u2014 a politics focused … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[21791,29620],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-91102","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-america","category-wasps-2"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91102","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=91102"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91102\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":91103,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91102\/revisions\/91103"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=91102"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=91102"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=91102"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}