Hi everyone!
I'm here at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington, DC, listening to all kinds of speeches and talks about the state of American conservatism when it comes to borders, sovereignty, arts, but underneath all of it there's one question that keeps coming up over and over, "what is an American?" And the way this question is answered speaks to many disparate ideas of what the nation is itself.
What we do know is that our nation is fractured. There's no more TGIF, no more must-see TV, where the next day at school or at work we've all pretty much been entertained the same way. There's no more mainstream news even, where everyone gets the same news breakdown. Now, when I open the headlines every morning, every news outlet from newspapers to TV is leading with completely different stories.
That the coasts have one view of America and the expansive middle a half dozen more has long been the case, but what is true is that we don't even consider ourselves one people. All the various identity groups have their own enclaves, whether IRL or online, and there are few bridges between those groups.
It's widely agreed at NatCon that assimilation is key to immigration, if people are going to come here, they have to have buy-in to American values and culture. But that comes with an incredible slowing, if not a virtual stop, of immigration altogether. The idea is that we have to preserve and strengthen the culture we've got before diluting it anymore.
In arts and publishing, the concern is that we have lost what America is all about. So much of the art, entertainment, and media we consume is along identity lines. Podcasts just for one group or another, novels that emphasize a retconned heroes' journeys that are more about (again) contemporary identity politics, groups blaming groups, oppressors and victims, than the tried and true heroes' path we all know and love from literally the dawn of letters (Odysseus, Hamlet, Moses, Jesus). (edited)
I don't claim to have any real answers, but I am fascinated by the question. The new batch of immigrants, legal or illegal, maintain ties to their home countries and go there on vacations to see their families. This is a far cry from the Ellis Island set, who had to abandon their homeland and set out for the new, and that concept would have been even more foreign to those who set out on big wooden ships, abandoning Europe forever.
For many of us who have been here for generations, there is no other nation we can call home, there is no other nation that would own us. Like, if I go to Italy, no Italian would recognize me as a paisan. I'd have to go to Jersey or New York for that—that's the origin of my true heritage, not wherever they stepped off from in the old country.
So what are we? A nation of immigrants? A nation of settlers? A dream? An idea? Are we our own ethnicity now? When we look at our children, the ancestral map they could draw up of their roots spans literally the globe. Our children could not be made anywhere else. Perhaps the most American thing of all is that after 250 years, we're still trying to figure out who we are and we still don't quite know what we want to be when we grow up.