What An American Is
The Great Citizenship Debate
Vivek Ramaswamy is back lecturing Americans on what it means to be an American, this time in the New York Times (his article was originally entitled “What Is an American?” but has since been changed). He’s wrong, and it would be easy to dismiss him with a wave of the hand, but we need to know why he’s wrong.
Ramaswamy continued his diatribe against “blood and soil” nations and once again championed the idealistic and creedal vision of America. In his words, “You are an American if you believe in the rule of law, in freedom of conscience and freedom of expression, in colorblind meritocracy, in the U.S. Constitution, in the American dream, and if you are a citizen who swears exclusive allegiance to our nation.” This is a “binary,” Ramaswamy insists; you are either an American or you are not, as “Americanness isn’t a scalar quality that varies based on your ancestry.”
Ramaswamy regurgitates common myths: America is unlike every other country in that anyone can become an American as long as they follow the rules; this is why America is exceptional. A zealous commitment to this belief leads Ramaswamy to absurd conclusions, namely that “No matter your ancestry, if you wait your turn and obtain citizenship, you are every bit as American as a Mayflower descendant, as long as you subscribe to the creed of the American founding and the culture that was born of it.” No honest soul thinks that recent Muslim arrivals in Dearborn, MI, or Somalians in Minnesota are just as American as Mayflower descendants.
Typically, Ramaswamy uses his platform to attack all the convenient evils: racism, antisemitism, xenophobia, the “groyper” followers of Nick Fuentes, and socialists in New York City. All of these trends he believes fall under “wokism” and “identity politics,” tribal pitfalls that the New Right must avoid if it not only wants to be politically viable in America’s democracy but also live up to its highest aspirations.
A few days after his New York Times philippic, Ramaswamy took to the stage at TPUSA’s even,t AmFest, for round two. Propounding to “speak the truth with courage,” Ramaswamy thundered that “blood doesn’t make you American, loyalty does.” Rejecting both the “woke left” and the “heritage America” idea of the right, Ramaswamy insultingly proclaimed that “the idea of a Heritage American is about as loony as anything the woke left has actually put up.” Instead, to be an American is “to believe in ideals,” such as meritocracy, rule of law, free speech, open debate, and that only the content of one’s character should determine a person’s destiny. Ramaswamy’s offensive comments led to a firestorm of online debate as to what American citizenship is—or what it means to be an American.
Jus Soli for Me but Not for Thee
Vivek supposedly rejects “blood and soil” politics without being aware that his American citizenship is a product of “soil” politics—especially the idea of jus soli that emerged under English common law after the famous Calvin’s Case (1608) determined that those born within the King’s domain were his natural subjects and owed him allegiance. A version of this practice was transmitted to America, although with certain critical reformulations that have led to confusion, debate, and legal challenges today.
The American founders rejected the British legeance practice of sovereignty and subjectship, and instead invented the idea of American citizenship (although they retained the allegiance and protection stipulations, but this time under constitutional consent). The Supreme Court in the 1795 case Talbot v. Janson explained the difference: “Citizenship is the effect of compact; allegiance is the offspring of power and necessity. Citizenship is a political tie; allegiance is a territorial tenure. Citizenship is the charter of equality; allegiance is a badge of inferiority. Citizenship is constitutional; allegiance is personal. Citizenship is freedom; allegiance is servitude. Citizenship is communicable; allegiance is repulsive. Citizenship may be relinquished; allegiance is perpetual.”
American citizenship, the founders emphatically proclaimed, was not merely about being born within a certain kingly realm and thus tied in perpetuity to a potentate (i.e., the king’s political body). Instead, citizenship was participation in a self-defined and self-determining political body that, when joined by the bonds of common human society, becomes a “moral person.” American citizenship was demanding: as sovereign, the political community had the right to reject any immigrant wanting to join it, and for those who did join, permission had to be granted, and immigrants had to follow the law to gain naturalization. Instead of being sworn in allegiance to the king, citizens would swear allegiance to the Constitution and to what it represented: the American way of life.
Naturalization was neither easy nor assured; immigrants were vetted, first through ethnic and residency tests, then through characterological assessment to see if they were capable of the rigors of American republican citizenship. Those who were morally degenerate, slothful, conniving, or otherwise criminal were rejected for citizenship. After naturalization, immigrants were intentionally and sometimes ruthlessly assimilated into the American way of life. American assimilation was known as “anglicization” or “anglo-conformity,” which included learning English, submitting to Protestant norms, laws, and public education, and eventually, intermarriage with the historic American stock (majority English, minority German, Irish, Scottish, French, and Nordic).
Ramaswamy throws a bone to this American tradition when he describes American citizenship as subscribing to “the American founding and the culture that was born of it” (italics added). What this “culture” is, Ramaswamy does not say, nor does he seem to know or care. The irony is that if Ramaswamy really believed his own philosophy, he would renounce his American citizenship and self-deport to India. This is because, under current Supreme Court interpretation of the Citizenship Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment as articulated in the 1898 case of Wong Kim Ark, domicile (i.e., jus soli) matters for citizenship: “Every citizen or subject of another country, while domiciled here, is within the allegiance and the protection, and consequently subject to the jurisdiction, of the United States” (United States v. Wong Kim Ark 169 U.S. 693 [1898]). For the Court, the exchange of allegiance for protection followed from domicile alone, which made non-citizen permanent residents in America “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” of the laws of the United States, and thus their children natural born citizens. While this understanding of the Fourteenth Amendment, and U.S. citizenship law in general, is currently being contested in the Supreme Court due to President Trump’s executive order, it was the law at the time of Ramaswamy’s birth.
Despite his claim to utterly reject “blood and soil” politics, Ramaswamy is only a U.S. citizen because he was born on U.S. soil. His parents were legal immigrants to America, probably here on work visas, but neither was a U.S. citizen at the time of his birth, and thus neither was fully under the protection of U.S. constitutional law nor sworn in allegiance to it. Ramaswamy’s mother subsequently became a naturalized citizen while his father refused American citizenship, keeping his Indian citizenship to this day. If Ramaswamy really believed that U.S. citizenship should only be determined by explicit allegiance to the U.S. Constitution, then he should reject his own jus soli birthright citizenship. He ought to renounce his U.S. citizenship and repatriate to India, and then, if he still wants to become an American citizen, get in the back of the line and apply for naturalized citizenship.
The Problem of “Paperwork Americans”
The question of American citizenship—the legal and constitutional conditions under which one is given the rights and privileges of citizenship—is a different question than Americanness. Most commentators miss this point, mistakenly assuming that citizenship, and citizenship alone, defines what it means to be an American. On this view, the moment you become a citizen—voila!—you are now an American—and as much an American as anyone else. As Ramaswamy harangues, “There is no American who is more American than somebody else.” But this is false.
The distinction between legal citizenship and Americanness is the distinction between peoplehood vs. constitution or nation vs. nation-state. In all cases, the people, their culture and way of life, and their organic life together as a nation are temporally prior to and causally the foundation of the nation-state—its legal and constitutional order. This is why, before the drafting of any constitution in America, Thomas Jefferson spoke of the Americans as being “one people” in the Declaration, and why David Ramsay, in his 1789 dissertation on American citizenship, declared that “the United States are a new nation, or political society, formed at first by the Declaration of Independence, out of those British subjects in America…” The American people, as a people—as an ethnic stock with a religion, language, customs, moral norms, public decorum, work ethic, and entire way of life—not only come before the Constitution and legal citizenship, but are the wellspring and standard for that political order.
Another way to understand this is through the lens of the Ancient Greeks. The Greek word for “law” is nomos, but this is also the word for “custom.” For the Greeks, law was nothing other than the formalization of custom. Custom explains the particular way of life of a people, unique and distinguished from other peoples. Thus, law is downstream of a people and their way of life, not only a reflection of who they are, what they believe, and how they wish to organize themselves socially and politically, but also an instrument to preserve themselves as a people. If the law becomes twisted or interpreted in such a way as to undermine the people and their way of life, or is deliberately turned against the people in an attempt to subjugate and destroy them, then the law ceases to be legitimate. The law must be torn down and replaced by a just law. This is what the Declaration means when it pronounces that Americans have the right and duty to “throw off such Government” that has engaged in a “long train of abuses” that has reduced the American people to slaves in their own land.
The relationship between the American people and American citizenship means that immigrants who become naturalized citizens have only taken the first step in becoming American. Citizenship does not make you an American; it only bestows upon you certain rights, duties, privileges, and immunities within the American constitutional tradition. Becoming an American is much more than completing the legal paperwork that declares you a citizen, as it involves adoption or engrafting into the American nation, her way of life, language, religion, ethos, and much more. Newly minted citizens must now live up to this way of life—which applies to both naturalized citizens and natural-born citizens. This occurrence is not assured, as it is possible to gain legal citizenship but refuse to become American. This has become a major problem in modern American society, as there are now millions of legal “Americans” who hate America and are using their newly acquired legal powers to pillage the nation and destroy the historic American people. Vivek Ramaswamy is one of these problem citizens.
The American Identity
In his seminal 2004 work, Who Are We?, Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington convincingly argued that America is many things all at once. The distinction, Huntington claimed, between “civic nationalism” based solely upon political principles or ideals and “ethnic nationalism” based upon race, ethnicity, religion, and the like, is a false dilemma. America is both, and the relationship between them is what is important.
While most Americans assume that America began in 1776, Huntington shows that “before there could be Founding Fathers, there were founding settlers. America did not begin in 1775, 1776, or 1787. It began with the first settler communities of 1607, 1620, and 1630.” This is why Huntington describes the essence of America as “an Anglo-Protestant settler society” which has, “more than anything else, profoundly and lastingly shaped American culture, institutions, historical development, and identity.” This was the people, culture, and way of life the American founders drew upon and is what made the founding successful in the first place: “What happened in the 1770s and 1780s was rooted in and a product of the Anglo-American Protestant society and culture that had developed over the intervening one and a half centuries.”
From this perspective, it is not hard to conclude that for over a hundred years, American identity was defined “in terms of race, ethnicity, culture, and most importantly religion,” and that “the creedal component of American identity only began to emerge as relations with Britain deteriorated.” Thus, American “creedalism” came last, and arguably, it emerged out of the previous identities. Without the ethnic, cultural, and religious realities of the American colonies—a phenomenon best described as “Anglo-American Protestantism”—there would have been no belief or declaration that “all men are created equal” or that there are natural rights that government should protect, or that communities have the right to govern themselves under their own legislative bodies. These ideas and beliefs do not just pop out of thin air or fall from heaven. Few other civilizations or peoples around the world and throughout history have believed in these things, let alone sought to implement them into their national law and character. Accordingly, if you destroy the people and way of life that gave America her political ideals, then those beliefs and the political society built upon them will collapse.
This is why America is unlike any other nation in the world; this is the true origin and character of her exceptionalism. She is not exceptional because her “creedalism” allows anybody the world over to become an American. She is exceptional because out of her particular people came an empire of liberty: a “united people—a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs, and who, by their joint counsels, arms, and efforts, fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established general liberty and independence”—in the words of John Jay. All of this is American exceptionalism, and anyone who claims to the contrary that it is merely certain ideals or principles detached from ancestry, land, and religion are flatly and historically wrong.
Conclusion
From the foregoing analysis, we can confidently say that Vivek Ramaswamy may be a legal citizen, but he is not a true American. He only partially understands what it means to be an American, and even the “creedal” aspect he does not fully grasp. On his own views, he should not be a citizen, because he rejects “blood and soil” politics and thus jus soli under the common law and the current interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment. Nor does he truly believe in his pretentious creedalism, for if he did, he would be calling for the denaturalization and deportation of all those who hate America, those who are attempting to undermine American political ideals, or are working against the principles of the Declaration and Constitution. Finally, Ramaswamy’s life and actions in America—particularly his Roivant scam and other shady business dealings by which he has frauded Americans and become filthy rich—disqualify him for citizenship under the standards put forward by founders like Alexander Hamilton. Vivek Ramaswamy is a charlatan and problematic “paperwork American” who knows nothing of the American heritage.