AMERICA IS NOT A CREED

The Tower of Babel by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, 1563.

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Vivek Ramaswamy has written a tidy little pamphlet for the managerial age: America, he insists, is not a matter of ancestry but of assent. It is binary, he says—either you are an American or you are not—and what makes you one is belief in a list: the rule of law; freedom of conscience and expression; the Constitution; colorblind meritocracy; the American dream. He even borrows the Reaganite sermon: you can’t become French, but you can become American. 

Neat. Uplifting. Exportable. And fatally liberal—not only because it rejects an “American identity… based on lineage [and] blood and soil,” but because it replaces the nation with a creed that floats above history in hackneyed naïveté. 

De Maistre, in Considerations on France, saw the same sleight of hand long before anyone spoke of like Reagan and Vivek. A constitution can be drafted for Man in the abstract, but nations are not inhabited by abstractions: “The Constitution of 1795, like its predecessors, was made for man. But there is no such thing as man in the world. In my lifetime I have seen Frenchmen, Italians, Russians, etc.; thanks to Montesquieu, I even know that one can be Persian. But as for man, I declare that I have never in my life met him; if he exists, he is unknown to me.” 

A people is not a set of propositions. A people is the slow accumulation of kinship, memory, religion, speech, manners, and sacrifice—hardened into instinct and transmitted more often by cradle than by classroom. The Left conquered our institutions precisely because it understood this: you can keep “the words” while gutting the world that made the words intelligible. If your nation is merely a slogan sheet, it is always one Ivy League seminar away from semantic coup. 

Espinosa Pólit, in his work Rome and Our American World, puts it plainly: some peoples have personality, some lack it, and “the only people that survives is that which does have its own personality and is able to maintain it before others as a legitimate barrier of defense.” Ramaswamy’s vision fails because it lacks that personality; it tries to define America in a way that costs nothing. It is the nation as a customer-service kiosk: swipe your allegiance, print your identity, and step aside for the next applicant. If that is America, then America is not a nation at all. 

You can add people to a polity; you cannot mass-manufacture the thing the polity is made of. 

And that is the real insult buried inside his pieties. When he assures us that a newly-naturalized is “every bit as American as a Mayflower descendant,” he is being metaphysically illiterate. The Mayflower descendant is not “more American” because he can recite the pledge with better elocution. He is more American in the only sense that matters: his Americanism is ancestral, atavistic, embodied—the sort of belonging that precedes argument. You can add people to a polity; you cannot mass-manufacture the thing the polity is made of. 

You can describe America in layers. Most liberals only permit the thinnest layer—the legal one—and then act shocked when the thicker layers reassert themselves in uglier forms. America is, first, a people: a historically continuous stock formed by settlement, intermarriage, common speech, and shared memory. “We the people” are real. America is also a civilization: an Anglo-European offshoot formed by Christian moral grammar and inherited institutions. Espinosa—speaking of the Americas as a whole—insists that to deny the European civilizational inheritance “would be madness,” and he adds that “the present America is essentially Christian.” One can debate how many modern Americans believe it, but one cannot debate that the civilization was built under it.

And America is a place—a particular land with borders, regions, and loyalties beneath the national abstraction: a republic of towns, churches, counties, and inherited attachments. With those borders comes the obligation to defend them from invaders who are predisposed to an antithetical way of life. 

Ramaswamy’s creedal nationalism flattens all three layers into one bureaucratic line item: “citizen.” 

At this point the usual retort arrives: assimilation. Anyone can become American, we are told, because America assimilates. But modern America does not assimilate at scale. Assimilation requires three things: a confident host culture; institutions willing to demand conformity; and numbers small enough that the host remains the host. We have none of the three. We import millions, teach them (and their children) to distrust the nation’s past, and then call it “diversity” when they retain their disparate languages, religions, and loyalties. 

Ramaswamy himself unintentionally provides the illustration. Publicly he markets an “ideals” nationalism; privately the civilizational gap is obvious. He is a Hindu—raised in a Hindu household—and his political theology treats religion as a tool of cohesion rather than the highest truth. That posture is not unique to him; it is simply unusually visible in him. And it is exactly the posture that produces a country you can join without being formed by it. 

Here we should be frank: citizenship can be conferred quickly. Nationality, however, cannot. Once you admit America is a people and not a proposition, the immigration question stops being a sentimental morality play and becomes what it has always been: a question of national continuity. 

A serious nation asks: how many outsiders can we absorb without ceasing to be ourselves? And if the answer is “not many,” then the moral obligation is not to keep importing in the name of ideals, but to preserve the nation’s inherited form—its demographic, cultural, and religious stability—so that it remains a real thing to hand down. That yields a simple, publishable program. 

Ramaswamy and his ilk think the Right’s problem is that some young radicals have adopted a blood-and-soil vocabulary, and that the cure is to restate the creed in cleaner terms.

First, net-zero immigration for a generation. Our nation is neither an employment agency for Fortune 500 labor needs, nor a charitable intake valve for the world’s discontents. We have tried the managerial formula—constant inflows, cheap moral rhetoric, and the promise that “assimilation” will occur by osmosis—and it has produced the opposite. If we want an America that is still recognizably itself when today’s children are raising their own, we need a long pause—long enough for institutions to recover the capacity to form citizens, and for the nation to remember that self-preservation is not a vice. 

Second, end birthright citizenship as an automatic demographic lever. Citizenship should be precious, not ambient. If you want a country to take its identity seriously, you must stop treating citizenship as a passive byproduct of border failure. A republic can invite newcomers, adopt outsiders, and reward genuine loyalty—but it cannot survive if it denies any distinction between the inherited nation and whoever happens to arrive within its perimeter. When citizenship becomes automatic, it ceases to be a bond. 

And then there is the question that everyone dances around: what to do about those who are already here. If America is going to have a serious fighting chance—if we mean to fortify its culture, restore the authority of its institutions, and position the nation to inherit what it rightly ought—then we must recover something the managerial Right treats as impolite: scale matters. Cohesion is not infinitely elastic. A country can be a universal proposition, open to indefinite recomposition, or it can be a people with a bounded common life; it cannot be both. Our modern regimes have treated the United States as a container to be perpetually refilled, confident that some vague “assimilation” will occur by osmosis. 

And this is where repatriation belongs—not as an act of malice, but as an act of national realism. The last decades created millions of people suspended between worlds: present in the territory but not fully integrated into national life, often because we imported far faster than we could ever reasonably handle. A serious state can acknowledge that limbo without theatrics. It can offer a means of return for those who choose to resettle where language, kinship networks, and civil life are native. Such a policy reduces the permanent pressure created by mass inflows, eases the strain on institutions already incapable of assimilation, and helps reconstitute the cultural density that makes self-government possible. 

Ramaswamy and his ilk think the Right’s problem is that some young radicals have adopted a blood-and-soil vocabulary, and that the cure is to restate the creed in cleaner terms. But the deeper problem is not vocabulary. It is that the Right has spent decades accepting the false liberal premise that a nation is basically an idea plus an economy, and that history is a decorative accessory. 

So the choice is not between the “hundreds of slurs” decorating Vivek’s social media and his proposed “colorblind meritocracy.” Those are both symptoms of a nation that has forgotten what it is. The choice is between America as a living inheritance and America as a spreadsheet. If we choose the spreadsheet, we will get the logical end: a prosperous, rootless, cosmopolitan, demographically transformed administrative zone, governed by people who can recite the necessary creeds while despising the civilization that produced them. If we choose inheritance, we will have to say the unfashionable truth: America has a founding stock and a civilizational form, and political legitimacy is inseparable from continuity with both.

The Republic will not be saved by better slogans. It will be saved—if it is saved at all—by a renewed will to be a people again: to know ourselves, to preserve what is ours, to limit what dilutes us, and to hand down something thicker than an idea.