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"Once the naturalization oath is taken, a person born in Iran or Korea or Guatemala can proudly assert, as my grandfather once did, that they are genuine Americans."

Not fully, because they can never become US President.

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I don't think this makes them less genuine Americans. If a president is impeached and convicted this also makes them ineligible to run again for president, but does not make them less genuine an American.

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There is a difference. First generation Americans usually don't become as culturally fluent (or, often, as fluent in English) as their American-born children. They (at least the ones I know, who were all scientists and engineers like me) would refer to their kids as "American" in a way they themselves were not, because they had this earlier existence as something else. But that goes away in a single generation, after which people of pretty much every ethnicity are standard issue Americans.

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In my experience, cultural and linguistic fluency is often not very closely tied to creedal affinity, there are people who barely speak English and couldn't tell you the difference between the Superbowl and the World Series, but who have quite a clear sense and deep appreciation for the creed. I can imagine the creed surviving a change of language and national pastime, and can also imagine a departure from the creed without much of language or popular culture.

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I'm attracted to the creedal notion of citizenship, but it's never been clear to me how it interacts with one of the core American values in the creed, freedom of conscience. When an American citizen becomes a white nationalist or an anarchist, or some other stripe of radical that opposes the Constitution, they don't lose their citizenship. Nor should they!

This makes me think that American citizenship is really just a legal status with a mixed definition. For first generation immigrants it has a creedal component, but for others it really doesn't.

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Fukuyama is third generation and there are many like him. The Bill of Rights (including the freedoms you mention) is of course a linchpin of the creed, and the creed is not diminished or dilited by protecting the rights of people who disagree with it.

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Maybe we mean different things by American identity here? I was thinking the question was when we are willing to call someone an American. By that standard Fukuyama would still be "an American" even if he joined ISIS or something and repudiated American values. But maybe the question you and he had in mind is more like when does someone count as an American "in good standing," which is something we wouldn't say about Richard Spencer or Anwar al Awlaki even though they are/were both American.

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I think the question is whether or not someone naturalized yesterday is any less of a genuine American than one with generations of ancestors in the ground. Fukuyama says no, that is contrary to the American creed, and that is a good thing. Americans can (and often do) have all kinds of noxious views but that doesn't make them any less American. And these views can include a rejection of the creed.

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If we had nothing more to go on but that one quote from Vance, it would not be particularly troubling. There is noting in it that implies Trump's anti-immigrant attitude.

I'd say that notwithstanding our racist past, American citizenship has always been creedal, the idea that "everyone" (except, oops, the enslaved people) came to escape religious and political oppression.

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Fukuyama's point is that it was creedal in name only, based not only on race but also gender and property ownership. The grandfather clauses during the Jim Crow period explicitly referenced ancestry.

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