America is so obviously an idea

There's no other way you can make it work.

There’s a cheeky phrase that certain right-wing types in the US have recently grown quite pleased with: America is not an idea. It’s a clear thesis statement of a new flavor of rightist thought that’s unapologetically illiberal, anti-democratic, and (by my definition) anti-American; a new breed of conservative eager to conserve something other than the Constitution, the spirit of the Revolution, the postwar world order, and indeed American culture and society as it has been practiced in the context of these things. Many of these types revel in their own imagined naughtiness; since “America is an idea” is a very famous, even cliched thing for presidents and the like to say, they mischievously reply that um actually, no it isn’t. Take that, Reagan!

John Daniel Davidson has a piece in The Federalist where he tries to make a case for what’s become known as the “a nation, not an idea” thesis. He does this mostly by suggesting it’s somehow very self-evident that white South Africans (he specifically says “Afrikaners”) would be good Americans in a way other types of immigrants would not.

This is very obviously a racial essentialist argument, though John pretends it’s not. We can tell it’s a racial essentialist argument because John projects all sorts of romantic imagined qualities onto the Afrikaners as a collective, who are then analogized to a certain romantic conception of True Americans:

If we prioritize the Afrikaner farmer, as Trump proposes, it’s because his cultural and ancestral roots are largely the same as the pioneers and pilgrims who first came to America from Europe and whose descendants founded our republic. Last week Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins said Trump’s “vision is the right one: this is the sort of immigrant we want, and if the South African regime now — kleptocratic, anarchic, and increasingly incompetent — does not want this historic class of entrepreneurs, then America does.”

Rollins is correct, and her characterization of Afrikaner farmers as “the sort of immigrant we want” gets to the heart of the matter—and it’s not about race or ethnicity. We don’t want the Afrikaner because he is white, we want him because of his many cultural ties to America. Rollins mentioned some of these in her statement, lauding “the Afrikaner devotion to land and heritage. Pioneers in the best tradition, they made gardens of the wilderness and transformed their country into the breadbasket of a continent.”

The plain fact is that an Afrikaner farmer, a descendant of Dutch Calvinists who settled in South Africa more than three centuries ago, will assimilate to our American way of life much faster and more easily than a Muslim from the Middle East or a villager from the Peruvian highlands—or even a computer programmer from India.

It’s not clear to me that John Daniel Davidson knows who “Afrikaners” are. Within the context of South African whites, they are the ones who — due in large part to how they chose to honor their Dutch Calvinist heritage — have been traditionally considered on the most reactionary end of South African society. My grandparents were Dutch Calvinists from Holland who tried to immigrate to South Africa because they considered the postwar Netherlands a sinful, decadent place. They would have been good Afrikaners.

South Africa’s Dutch Calvinist settlers are known for resisting British rule around the dawn of the 20th century, culminating in the Anglo-Boer war of 1899-1902 (“Boer” being another term for the Dutch settlers). Canadians participated in that war, which was spun as a very patriotic battle between the civilizing forces of the British Empire and the savagery of the Boers. The Nazis would later use the plight of the Boers in anti-British propaganda, and pro-Nazi sentiment among the Afrikaner population was a major crisis for South Africa’s pro-British government of the time. I once worked with an old man who was an English South African. His father had served in the war and was later murdered by a gang of pro-Nazi Afrikaners.

After World War II, South Africa’s Afrikaner population mobilized to elect an Afrikaner nationalist government that cut ties to the British Commonwealth and established a new political regime in their own image. This included making Afrikaner Dutch (“Afrikaans”) the dominant language of the state, and marginalizing the country’s black majority through the notorious Apartheid system of racial segregation (introduced by Dutch-born prime minister H.F. Verwoerd). The Afrikaner-supremacist regime, known to South Africans as the “National Party” era, would proceed to become a pariah state to much of the world until a new constitution introducing multiracial democracy came into effect in 1994. Many English South Africans, who were more liberal, and made up the bulk of the white opposition to the National Party regime, emigrated to the west during its reign, including America. Elon Musk, for instance, came from an English family and emigrated to Canada with his divorced mother in 1988 (John wrongly calls Elon “an Afrikaner,” which Elon has explicitly denied being).

I bring up all of this just because it shows that there’s no reason to assume Afrikaners are ideal Americans based on some vague appeal to “culture.” If one believes, as John writes, that America’s “culture and way of life are indelibly English” then it’s pretty easy to observe that a lot of Afrikaners have consistently stood in opposition to that “culture and way of life” over the last century or so.

The only way it’s possible to see Afrikaners as better would-be Americans than any other type of person, in turn, is if we display absolutely no curiosity into the nuances of South African culture or politics, and instead simply assume that all their white people are basically the same, and because America was founded by white people the Afrikaners will barely have to assimilate at all! It is romantic nonsense to assume that Afrikaner farmers have some inherent compatibility with the 21st century United States (agriculture work as a share of total employment: 1.2%) on the basis of their imagined similarities to the pilgrims, while also displaying zero curiosity about the ways in which Afrikaner and American culture (even the most Anglo-supremacist definition of it) have deviated since pilgrim times.

This highlights the absurdity of trying to evaluate the fitness of future Americans according not to their identities as individuals, but rather sweeping generalizations of the groups they belong to — especially if said generalizations are made by ignorant men equipped only with half-informed cliches rooted in racial stereotypes.

I know this is a triggering statement to some, but as a New World nation settled by immigrants, the United States has always been diverse, and it’s impossible to create a “nationalistic” immigration system for a diverse country without first attempting to order the existing diverse population into some sort of hierarchy of national worth, and then trying to carefully solicit people from some corresponding hierarchy of all the outside world’s nationalities. John might be excited by the thought of undertaking such a viciously Darwinian project, but luckily it’s not necessary, since the United States is a country defined by a secular, liberal constitution that articulates the essence of being American in terms of ideas, not make-believe ethnic inclinations.