In less than a month, America is turning 250. We should mark the occasion with an attempt to land on an answer to a particular question engulfing the American right: What does it mean to be an American? A timeless question, for sure, but one that needs to be answered time and time again.
Currently plaguing the American right’s ranks is an internecine dispute between those who believe America is predominantly a people (an assemblage of persons formed by the crucible of story, lineage, borders, a shared language, cultural perpetuity, and a dominant religion) and those who believe America is largely based in a particular set of propositional ideals (a commitment to the rule of procedural law, pluralism, civil liberties, equality of opportunity, liberty), and that no single organizing vision can reasonably hope to unite all Americans.
Before offering my own attempt to resolve this dilemma, let me say up front that this is indeed a healthy debate. Just as it is wrong and shortsighted to cast all those in the “people” camp as exclusionary nativists, so it is an exaggeration to lambaste all propositionalists as thinned-out proceduralists with no concern for assimilation and cultural identity.
Those who locate America in a story, culture, and people are correct to observe that Americans possess a historical and cultural consciousness, while at the same time it must war against the ever-present temptation to elevate genealogy, history, and cultural sameness to such heights that it would exclude would-be Americans from the American compact. The peoplehood argument can quickly breed an exclusivism that restricts the offer of American ideals to those who would likewise champion them. Similarly, the creedal and propositional perspective, without a commitment to a common culture (however defined), can quickly mutate into a bare-bones minimalism that treats America as primarily an economic zone, or is wary of expecting immigrants to assimilate, or views any ethnic-religious storyline as bigoted.
Both camps need one another. We saw a healthy fusing of the two perspectives in a recent address by Secretary of State Marco Rubio at the Munich Security Conference. Rubio, the son of immigrants, defended the propositional legacy of America—but within a narrative frame of a particular people who settled this land to begin a new project of self-government under God’s providential ordering and embedded cultural particularities. Culture, story, and ideals suffuse Rubio’s speech.
A week hardly goes by when I’m not asked where I stand on the “Heritage American” category, those who believe that creedalism sacrifices peoplehood. Rubio’s speech clarifies why pitting the two camps against one another risks forgetting why one needs the other. It risks unnecessarily attenuating the balance between the need for both story and principle. By the narrow standards of those who speak of “Heritage Americans” as the exclusive foundation for American identity, Marco Rubio does not qualify. Yet, if one were to watch Rubio’s speech in its entirety, one would see a second-generation American deliver one of the most quintessentially American speeches in our history, uniting what some in our age insist is an unbridgeable chasm between propositionalism and peoplehood. Rubio does not pit propositions against the people who birthed them and the culture that carried them forward. He unites them.
As is often the case with forging false dichotomies, it’s not an unbridgeable divide.
As Rubio’s speech shows us, a particular people can simultaneously embody a proposition and be shaped by it—the propositions at the center of American public philosophy helping propel them into the nation they would become and which others could someday participate in if they, too, entered the American story. Ross Douthat is correct to see that “creedal Americanism is itself a culture, in which the formal commitment to a principle is intertwined with other habits and practices that make the commitment meaningful, successful, real.” As Douthat is quick to observe further, “creeds are not self-interpreting.”
He’s right—a proposition like that found in the Declaration of Independence’s preamble presupposes a people formed within a Judeo-Christian social imagination, an imagination executed under God’s providential and moral governance and with the foregoing Protestant ethos by which the nation was formed. A particular people lived out that proposition, such that propositions are fitted to, defined by, and expressed in the cultural practices and habits of a people who embody those ideals. To carry Douthat’s proposal forward, if creeds are not self-interpreting, neither are they self-executing. Ideals are ideas, and their realization requires expression within particular peoples, spaces, times, and cultures. No matter what the globalist-minded naysayers may insist, we need not be embarrassed by American culture one bit. Give me more hot dogs, more apple pie, and more fireworks.
Thus, to be maximally American is not to insist upon a particular skin color nor an exclusive theological zeal (many of the Founders were, after all, non-Christians even if their worldview was shaped by Protestant Christianity), but neither is it to insist that the preceding eras, religious influences, and cultural memories play no part in shaping who we are in the present. There is a particular dynamism, a play in the joints, where newly minted Americans can and should locate themselves within a political community’s own story. This is obligatory, I should bluntly add, and it’s what Rubio did. And when propositionalists insist upon bypassing the American story and all of its glories (and tragedies) as little more than an American substrate, we must push back on such proposals as little more than cultural self-hatred and embarrassment. But here is where another warning to pure propositionalists enters: Without an expectation that immigrants assimilate to the history and story of America, the American experience quickly falls prey to a denuded minimalism, a minimalism that requires nothing of a would-be American apart from thin proceduralism and the bare memorization of supposedly history-free “principles.”
But in truth, those principles defining the American experiment are bound by space, time, and memory. “Principles,” shorn of historical memory and moral communities, quickly descend into the anarchic maxims we see today, where history is interpreted as a catalogue of wrongs, where unborn human beings are treated as dregs of one’s autonomy, where family life is viewed as an accessory only after one properly exercises their pelvic liberties, and where drag queens gyrate in front of children, all in the name of enlightenment and civil liberties.
Contra these distortions, that creedal impulse, rightly enacted, is transmitted through procedural maxims and formed by a historical consciousness and moral memory that newcomers can aspire to join—as Rubio so aptly demonstrated—even if they do not possess a family connection. What sets America apart is that the creedal experience, from the start, as Douthat says, was “open, often radically open, to newcomers in a way that many cultures aren’t. But the assimilation to American norms is still a process rather than a single act of intellectual assent, and if the social and cultural inheritance carried by native-born Americans disappeared tomorrow, you couldn’t easily recreate the creedal culture from its first principles alone.” That is correct. Simply transposing the Declaration’s preamble onto the Middle East offers no safe assurances that millennia-old traditions can be discarded quickly in service of ideals that still require a people with the historical readiness and consciousness to practice them.
Practically speaking, what does this mean? It means the outer boundaries of both perspectives can quickly fall prey to extreme distortions of each if not held in healthy tension. We risk an attenuated Americanism if the only options are pure history or pure idealism. Understandably, we do not like tension—we want to quickly dispatch it. But I want to suggest that we learn to live with this tension, love it, and see it as an indispensable ingredient in this grand experiment that made America so unique in world history. America is, after all, sui generis—a category unlike all others, one that stands on its own for what it avails those long embedded within its boundaries, and those global onlookers who wish to make its promises their own.
It means, in an applied example, that I will call the first-generation Venezuelan evangelical victimized by communism and who values limited government and free enterprise more American over someone who traces their ancestry to the pilgrims but performs abortions; or the Constitution-loving Egyptian who pledges fealty to the Constitution and finds himself marching in a July 4th parade with streamers and waving flags than the third-generation “Heritage American” from Portland who views America as an oppressive regime bathed in white supremacy; or the Chinese dissident who sees more security in their rights being secured inalienably by their Creator—instead of by the state—more than the globalist libertarian who thinks American ideals easily map onto any geographic locale.
The genealogical connections may stretch deeper for “Heritage Americans,” but their principles may bear only a darkened reflection compared to the shimmering commitment of immigrants who make America’s story—and its ideals—their own.
The answer to this riddle is located neither in pure pathos nor in pure logos. The story of America is an ethos—an ethos defined by the pathos of storied people and the logos of governing ideals. It also means that if America is to remain America, it cannot unhook itself from the moral and metaphysical propositions that made America intelligible from its start. The greatest danger at present is not just the elimination of these ideals but also a historical amnesia that treats America’s uniqueness as merely the product of those ideals, without regard for the context in which they originated. That is not bigotry; that is history—and history is the inescapable realization that present-day realities are forged by past prologue.
Let’s resist the urge to forge a false dichotomy between these categories—if only because the answer to their unity is found in Americanism.
This article originally appeared at WORLD Opinions on June 13, 2026.
