What is America to the Fourth of July? Part I

Against American Creedal Nationalism

Today American’s celebrate our national independence, what some call the birth of America. The document central to that event is, of course, the Declaration of Independence (which was actually signed on July 2, 1776). The Declaration—the circumstances surrounding its drafting and signing, its authorship, the meaning of the words, and the impact it has had throughout the years—has been debated since the beginning, and it continues to be debated to this day.

We need this debate because America is currently being managed by a ruling class (the “regime”), who hate what America was originally about and have succeeded (in many ways) in reshaping the country in their own grotesque image. America is occupied by a foreign people divorced from our history and traditions, and with no intentions of preserving those inheritances. And America is being recreated by an invasive and poisonous ideology taught by our academies, disseminated and buttressed by the media, and embodied by citizens whose souls have been shaped and deformed by it.

We should debate America’s Independence Day in order to counter and challenge these sad and unnecessary realities, and to educate those who can understand as to the truth about our beautiful country. To this end, this mini-series will be installed in three parts: in Part I, I will expound on the nature of American creedalism. In Part II, I will explain the true meaning of the Declaration as I understand it. And in Part III, I will discuss what it means to be an American in light of a true understanding of the Declaration.

American Creedal Nationalism

Few people stop to reflect on the fact that America marks her national origin with reference to a written document. This is odd, is it not? Few nations do this because few nations can do this. Perhaps the English could point to the Magna Carta (1215), and Israel to Mt. Sinai and the Mosaic Law or, for the modern state, the Israeli Declaration of Independence, but most countries’ origins lie veiled in an historically murky and often mystical past. It’s hard to say when nations begin because nations are more than just constitutions—they are a people and a way of life that is inherited and passed down generation to generation.

The fact that America’s national beginning sprang from a document signed by fifty-six men representing the thirteen colonies has caused many to claim that America is a “creedal nation.” This, in fact, is the dominant narrative or consensus view today, as books like Jon Meacham’s The Soul of America and today’s The Free Press substack aptly illustrate. American Creedal Nationalism claims that what makes America America—what makes her distinct from all the other countries of the world—is that she did not begin with blood (kin relations) or soil (physical land or bounded geography), but with an idea. That idea is that “all men are created equal” and they are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights,” and “that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

The power of American Creedal Nationalism is that if what defines a nation is an idea, then it is, in principle, open to anyone: any person can come to America and become an American by simply believing this creed. This is why, we are told, America has historically flung open her arms to receive the poor, tired, huddled masses of the world, and thus America has become, unlike any other nation, a nation of immigrants. Whereas to be Japanese or German or Australian you must have been born to Japanese, German, or Australian parents, American identity and citizenship rests only and entirely upon the American Creed as found in the Declaration of Independence.

I once believed this myth. I even penned an article years ago explaining and defending these ideas, proud of how they made America unique among the nations of the world. Within the world of conservative politics, traditionalists and paleoconservatives have long resisted and written against American Creedal Nationalism. Their complaints, beyond the historical and philosophical, is that creedalism creates centrifugal forces that lead to heterogeneity and eventual collapse. Creedalism is the reason for American multiculturalism and ethno-relativism, since America must be open to absorbing every culture and every ethnic group of the world. While creedalists like to talk about assimilation into a homogeneous culture and national character, wiser minds understand that sheer ideology in the form of philosophical propositions or written charters and constitutions are insufficient to bind disparate peoples together.

The current political and social unrest in France that has resulted in riots, looting, and arson are due to an estranged, ghettoized, and non-French migrant minority (around 14-15% of the population) that share nothing in common with the French people, their history, traditions, language, religion, and values. The same conditions exist in America currently due to the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 that indiscriminately welcomed outsiders from every corner of the world, and due to reckless and unrestrained illegal immigration across our southern border. Genuine assimilation is notoriously difficult to achieve, and more often than not incoming migrant groups dominate, conquer, and push out the indigenous host people.

American traditionalists also argue that American National Creedalism is a species of idealism and progressivism. These go together since the Declaration (supposedly) articulates a (utopian) ideal that has not yet been achieved (everyone equal in every way; authentic and fulfilling lives; maximal freedom without external intervention or coercion; and individualized notions of happiness), and thus necessitates a national ethos of striving to progress toward that ideal.

The driving philosophy behind this idealism is a Whig or Progressive interpretation of history that interprets historical events as part of a single cloth that is orchestrated, overseen, and guided by providential forces but actualized through human will and agency. Thus, while it is inevitable that humanity is ever progressing toward a better and brighter future, there is now urgent work to be done to achieve that future national bliss. Injustices must be righted, evil structures exposed and torn down, prejudicial histories pilloried and disparaged, and certain uncouth and intolerable ways of life demonized, trampled upon, and snuffed out.

In this scheme, the Declaration is always said to have planted moral and political seeds that have not yet sprouted. While it promised equality and freedom, those blessings were denied to black Americans until the Civil War and then the Civil Rights Movement. While it promised political liberty and equal citizenship, this was denied to women until the suffrage movement, the Nineteenth Amendment, and later feminist movements that freed women from the ‘cult of domesticity’ (having children and a family) and empowered her to equality in the workplace. Today, these mantras are extended toward “sexual minorities” under the “LGBTQ” moniker; tomorrow they will be applied to furries, pederasts, and pedophiles. This is the origin of radical egalitarianism and its drive to flatten every hierarchy, ameliorate every difference, smash every patriarch, and normalize every kinky fetish. There is always a new egalitarian horizon to be spotted, spurred on towards, and finally conquered. In this world, the “work” of American creedalism never ends.

Finally, American traditionalists claim that American National Creedalism is an implied and incipient form of globalism that has inevitably led to American global hegemony in the form of American Empire. If the soul of America is an idea that cannot be constrained by family ties, geography, religion, language, or an inherited way of life, then America is the World and the World is America. In fact, every person in the world is an American citizen waiting to happen. It is destiny, is it not, that tolerant, liberal, and democratic ideals have spread across the globe; there are now more nations with written constitutions containing these ideals than ever before in history.

Since this is the case, it only follows that America ought to take the dominant and preeminent role of World Leader by using her considerable economic, military, and moral might to fight communism, fascism, and Axes of Evil. America is justified in making the world “safe for democracy” through pre-emptive wars against terrorists, international peace-keeping efforts, regional free-trade agreements, military treaties and organizations, the creation of supranational political entities, and the maintenance of the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. The power behind these realities is not just that America can do this, but that she ought to as a matter of moral imperative stemming from her (almost) perfect Declaration of Independence.

The irony is that American Creedal Nationalism destroys nationalism in its quest for global dominance. This is what has happened to America. Our political elites are global elites. They care less about America as a particular nation and people to be led and preserved, and more about Davos summits, cocktails in Brussels, and lucrative deals with conniving Chinese businessmen. American creedalism gives them an excuse to throw open our borders to immigrant hordes, to neglect America’s own welfare in order to become Citizens of the World, and to encourage the American people to do the same. Consequently, America is, alas, no longer a nation.

American Creedal Nationalism is a dangerous solvent that rusts the cords of affection and productive cooperation that once united America and succeeded in forging her into a single people. The ‘mystic chords of memory’ that Lincoln spoke so eloquently about have snapped. How can you have a common history and memory when your neighbor speaks Spanish or attends a mosque? The American founders never wanted such a thing nor did they desire that the Declaration be reduced to a flimsy creed and wielded as a tool for national destruction. Yet if this wasn’t their understanding of the Declaration, then what was?

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In Part II, we will look at the Declaration in more detail.