Gordon Wood, the preeminent living historian of the American Revolution, had these remarks to say about MAGA nativism.
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Wood had something important to say to us about today. He delivered his core message up front:
"There has been some talk recently that we aren’t and shouldn’t be a creedal nation—that beliefs in a creed are too permissive, too weak a basis for for citizenship and that we need to realize that citizens with ancestors who go back several generations have a stronger stake in the country than more recent immigrants.
I reject this position as passionately as I can."
Wood went on to describe the efforts of American statesmen, especially in the early years of the republic, to deal with the fact that the United States was never “a nation like other nations.” He quoted John Adams’s doubts about this new nation where there was nothing like “the patria of the Romans, the Fatherland of the Dutch, or the Patrie of the French.” He noted Adams’s lament that the U.S. featured “such a Hotch potch of people, such an omnium gatherum of English, Irish, German, Dutch, Swedes, French, &c. that it is difficult to give a name to the Country.”
Immigration continued after the founding period, and the country became even more ethnically diverse. Yet Americans devised a way—thanks especially to Abraham Lincoln, “who found in Jefferson’s Declaration a solution to the great problem of American identity”—to forge “a bond that holds together the most diverse nation history has ever known.”
And so Wood concluded, “To be an American is not to be someone, but to believe in something. That is why we are at heart a creedal nation, and that is why the 250th anniversary of the Declaration next year is so important.”
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https://www.thebulwark.com/p/amateur-hour-at-1600-pennsylvania-avenue-white-house-flailing
IMO, its a feature, not a bug.
