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Obama’s Americans
Is the United States a nation-state, in which there is an “American people” whose members have more in common with each other than merely being subject to the jurisdiction of American federal, state, and local governments? Or is the United States just a random agglomeration of tribes and individuals who share nothing except an agreement to abide by certain minimal rules? The answer is the latter, according to Barack Obama. In a plutocratic fundraiser for the reelection campaign of Joe Biden, the former president declared:
But what has always made America exceptional is this radical idea that you can get people from every corner of the globe—don’t look alike, don’t have the same name, worship differently, speak different languages, have different cultural traditions—and somehow they’re going to come together under a set of rules and we’re all going to pledge … that’s our creed …
It may seem pedantic if not cruel to dissect boilerplate political rhetoric like this. Obama is merely saying the same thing that countless Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives, say in contemporary Fourth of July speeches and other orations. This kind of talk combines a historical assertion—the United States has always welcomed people from every background—with a political theory—the mere existence of a set of legal rules and political institutions can “somehow” generate a national community out of people who otherwise share nothing in common, including the language in which they communicate. While it doubtless serves the purpose of discouraging xenophobia and encouraging toleration of differences in a diverse society, it is bad history and bad political science.
Let’s start with the history. You don’t need to be a left-wing opponent of “settler colonialism” to see that Obama’s account of American history is, well, whitewashed: “What has always made America exceptional is this radical idea that you can get people from every corner of the globe.” This is true, if you are referring to the United States from 1965 to the present. It is not true of the U.S. before 1965.
Most Americans—though not all—from 1776 onward have shared and continued to share a common language, a common culture, and common values that transcend particular religious groups.
The first Congress held under the auspices of the federal Constitution convened from March 4, 1789, to March 4, 1791, during the first two years of the presidency of George Washington. It is sometimes described as “the Congress of the Founders” because so many representatives and senators had taken part in the drafting of the new Constitution. They passed the Nationality Act of 1790, under which only “free white persons” could become naturalized citizens of the United States. Not until 1952 was the exclusion of nonwhite immigrants from naturalization eliminated, and only in 1965 were the vestiges of racism completely purged from federal immigration law by the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. This meant that for most of U.S. history if you were Irish or German you could move to the U.S. and become a naturalized citizen in a few years, but if you were an Indian or Japanese immigrant you could never be eligible for American citizenship, no matter how long you lived.
To keep out Chinese, Japanese, Indians, and other Asians, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. The bar on Asian immigration was expanded in subsequent acts in 1892 and 1902, and confirmed in the federal immigration acts of 1917 and 1924 which established a quota system for white immigrants favoring those from Northern and Western Europe.
In denying citizenship to nonwhite immigrants and discouraging their immigration before the 1960s, the United States was anything but “exceptional.” All of the major English-speaking lands of settlement, including Canada, New Zealand, and Australia with its “White Australia” policy that lasted from 1901 until 1975, banned or limited nonwhite immigration and naturalization until after World War II.
OK, so Obama is wrong about pre-1965 America. Is he right that since 1965 the U.S. has demonstrated that people who “don’t look alike, don’t have the same name, worship differently, speak different languages, have different cultural traditions” have “somehow” created a community even though they agree on nothing except “a set of rules”? To put it in more academic language—does the experience of the U.S. since the 1960s prove that a democracy can function without a shared extra-political culture of some kind, even one that excludes racial and religious tests for citizenship? The answer is no, because most Americans—though not all—from 1776 onward have shared and continued to share a common language, a common culture, and common values that transcend particular religious groups.
