What is an American?
The question has repeatedly cropped up in political discourse over the past several years, since it became exceedingly apparent that America doesn’t look anything like it did just a couple of decades ago, including in the context of the common tech industry practice of mass-hiring foreign workers using the H1B visa system.
Invited to speak at a Montana State University Turning Point USA recently, Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy — a vocal proponent of high-volume visas for highly-skilled foreign workers — attempted to provide an answer.
So what does it mean to be an American in the year 2025? It means we still believe in those ideals of 1776. It means we believe in merit, that the best person gets the job regardless of their genetics, that you are judged not on the color of your skin but on the content of your character and your contributions. It means we believe in the rule of law. And I say this as the proud son of legal immigrants to the United States. That means your first act of entering this country cannot break the law. It means we believe in free speech and open debate without censorship, whether you’re Nick Fuentes or Alex Jones or Jimmy Kimmel. It means that words are not violence, that violence is violence. And violence is never an acceptable response to words. It’s not just about our constitutional principles… That’s America. That’s who we are. It’s about our constitution, but it’s about even more than that. It’s about a culture that is distinctive to our nation. It means we believe in accountability. It means that we are courageous, that we are brave, even heroic, when called upon to serve our country, that we take bold risks. Sometimes we fail, but we still pick ourselves up and do it again. It means we don’t view hardship as the same thing as victimhood. Because hardship from time to time is what teaches us who we really are.
What Ramaswamy is advancing here is the concept of the “propositional nation,” the thesis of which is that the nation is not fundamentally comprised of the people who comprise it, but rather that the glue that binds is an “idea” — thus opening the door for anyone and everyone who subscribes to that idea to become claim a stake.
Via National Affairs (emphasis added):
Abraham Lincoln, it seems, was the first to introduce the idea in these terms when he declared that America was "dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." But in a broader sense the idea predated Lincoln, as statesmen such as Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, and Henry Clay spoke of the country in similar ways.
When we speak of America as a propositional nation, we refer to the fact that at its origin as a political entity was a pronouncement or proposition (or series of "truths") that expressed an explicit doctrine of justice to which it then and later has aspired. America is sometimes seen as the exemplary propositional nation. Political scientist Martin Diamond, for example, wrote that the "term Americanism expresses the conviction that American life is uniquely founded on a set of political principles." Diamond quoted another writer who asserted that "Americanism is...not a tradition or a territory...but a doctrine — what socialism is to a socialist."
The Democrats have long championed — in tandem with replacement migration as national policy — the “propositional nation” theory. The Brandon entity made it a central pillar of his campaign back in 2020, when he also called for migrants to “surge the border.”
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Ramaswamy made waves earlier this year when he declared on X that skilled foreign-born workers have a superior culture to native-born Americans, citing that superiority as justification for continuing the practice of importing them en masse to fill lucrative positions in tech:
The reason top tech companies often hire foreign-born & first-generation engineers over “native” Americans isn’t because of an innate American IQ deficit (a lazy & wrong explanation). A key part of it comes down to the c-word: culture….
This can be our Sputnik moment. We’ve awaken from slumber before & we can do it again. Trump’s election hopefully marks the beginning of a new golden era in America, but only if our culture fully wakes up. A culture that once again prioritizes achievement over normalcy; excellence over mediocrity; nerdiness over conformity; hard work over laziness.
That’s the work we have cut out for us, rather than wallowing in victimhood & just wishing (or legislating) alternative hiring practices into existence. I’m confident we can do it.
The reason top tech companies often hire foreign-born & first-generation engineers over “native” Americans isn’t because of an innate American IQ deficit (a lazy & wrong explanation). A key part of it comes down to the c-word: culture. Tough questions demand tough answers & if…
— Vivek Ramaswamy (@VivekGRamaswamy) December 26, 2024
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Of course, no matter how much social engineers and multinational corporations might wish otherwise, no nation in the history of nations has been defined by an “idea” — at least not one that lasted more than a couple of generations.
For instance, communist Vietnam — its civil society replete with communist symbolism — is perhaps the most nationalistic country I’ve ever been to. They are Vietnamese first and communist second, if at all. One cannot simply show up in Vietnam, declare oneself a Marxist, and claim Vietnamese citizenship.
Communist China and communist Vietnam went to war, in fact, in 1979. There was no international “brotherhood of ideas” in that circumstance any more than in any other example throughout history.
