On December 17th, 2025, amid his floundering campaign to become governor of Ohio, the New York Times published an article by Vivek Ramaswamy titled “What Is An American?” [Archive link]In this piece of multicultural propaganda and borderline anti-youth screed, Vivek Ramwaswamy, an anchor baby born to non-citizen Indian immigrant parents, repeats all the old tropes that Americans have become familiar with over the past 50-or-so years. Vivek explicitly rejects an American identity based on “blood and soil,” and he labels such a concept as a “white-centric” idea pushed by the “Groyper right.” Instead, he insists that to be an American, you need only to adopt a set of nifty prepacked ideals.
In his own words Vivek writes:
“The alternative (and, in my view, correct) vision of American identity is based on ideals.
Americanness isn’t a scalar quality that varies based on your ancestry. It’s binary: Either you’re an American or you’re not. 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.
As Ronald Reagan quipped, you can go to live in France, but you can’t become a Frenchman; but anyone from any corner of the world can come to live in the United States and become an American. 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. This is what makes American exceptionalism possible.”
I may shock a few older Conservatives by saying this, but it needs to be said: Ronald Reagan was wrong and so is Vivek Ramaswamy. To be an American is not proclaim loyalty to a set of abstract and GOP-focus-group-approved ideals. To be an American is not based on “waiting your turn,” and it is not based on a post-war creed invented as justification for mass-immigration. Rather, to be an American is to have an intimate connection to a nation that is more than three centuries old, and which sports a culture, identity, and yes, demographic composition, that is as unique as those of Japan, Germany, Ireland, or Lesotho.
With his choice of rhetoric, it is clear that Vivek either lacks an understanding of American history between the Revolutionary War and 1965, or he chooses to ignore this history in order to continue his attempt at claiming a piece of America’s inheritance. As a son of this great nation, and indeed a descendant of colonials from Vermont, I feel it would do well to inform both Vivek and any curious reader about the actual history of America’s identity. In doing so, I will address much of the rest of this article directly to Mr. Ramaswamy.
Let’s start with a simple look at the demographic history of the United States which reveals that this country’s population has been remarkably homogeneous for the vast bulk of its history. From 1610 to 1970—a 360-year-plus timespan—the demographics of the United States were roughly 87% White American and 12% African American. No other racial group garnered above 1% of the national demographic composition until Hispanics become 1.2% of the population in 1930. No racial group broke 5% of the population until Hispanics surpassed that milestone in the 1980 census. America is not a historically diverse nation that accepts anyone from anywhere, rather it is a nation built by Christian Europeans. Christian Europeans built and defined the cultural, institutional, and economic framework of the United States while our one significant minority group, African Americans, made their own cultural contributions through the centuries.
Lest you object, Vivek, this demographic dominance of the foundational White and Black populations is not a result of some bizarre happenstance but rather of deliberate policy that began with the very Founding Fathers you claim established a credal nation. For almost 200 years, the United States established a succession of immigration laws that maintained the founding demographic balance of the country by favoring immigration and naturalization of people of European and predominantly British heritage. America’s very first immigration law, the Naturalization Act of 1790, limited naturalization to free white persons who could demonstrate good character for two years. The Naturalization Acts of 1795 and 1798 increased the time of residency necessary to become an American citizen to five years, then fourteen years all while retaining the condition that those seeking naturalization were free white persons.
At the start of the 19th century, Congress passed the Naturalization Act of 1802 which reduced the residency period back to five years but still retained the requirement to be a free white person. It is worth noting that this law was signed by Thomas Jefferson who was by all measures a comparative liberal of this time period and was a fan of the universalist French Revolution. Yet still, he understood the importance of America’s ethnic identity. Naturalization would eventually expand in the latter half of the 19th century to African Americans with the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment. Congress then passed the Naturalization Act of 1870 which extended naturalization to “aliens of African nativity and to persons of African descent” but did not grant any meaningful opportunity for Africans to immigrate to the country. The 1870 act, just like the oft-misinterpreted 14th amendment, was not some kind of declaration of a multicultural America that would take in the entirety of the Third World. Restrictions on Asian immigration were left in place. In fact, the Page Act of 1875 explicitly listed Asian immigration to the United States as undesirable while the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 tried to end Asian immigration to the United States entirely. The restrictions on Asian immigration would be renewed again in the Geary Act of 1892 and in 1902.
As the United States entered the 20th century, its leaders continued to pass laws and implement policy that maintained the now centuries-old demography of the country. For example, a gentlemen’s agreement with Japan in 1907 restricted immigration while the Naturalization Act of 1906 sought to standardize naturalization procedures after the Federal government found that state courts were applying the law haphazardly. Congress was so seriously dedicated to ensuring the poor masses of the Third World did not come to this country that it overrode a presidential veto in 1917 to pass the Immigration Act of 1917 which implemented the Asiatic Barred Zone (which included India) and a literacy test.
The global literacy rate at the time was incredibly low, especially in Eastern Europe and the Third World. In other words, the Immigration Act of 1917 was yet another bill intended to preserve the Western European demographic character of the United States.
Furthermore, in response to large-scale Catholic immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe, Congress passed the Emergency Quotas Act in 1921. What followed was the now famous (or infamous if you hate America) 1924 Johnson-Reed Act which established a system of national origins quotas based on the 1890 census. The Johnson-Reed Act quotas gave 98% of immigration places to Europeans and 72% of immigration places to Brits, Germans, the Irish, and the Dutch. To put it another way, three fourths of immigrants from 1924 onward were to come from a geographic area of Europe about the size of Texas—the same area from which the vast majority of America’s immigrants had always come. The act was updated again as late as 1952 (within my grandparents lifetime) and retained an immigration system that gave 94.4% of spots to Europeans.
Lest you are still in denial, Vivek, the United States has not only explicitly excluded entire continents worth of people from immigrating to the country but has also taken several opportunities to denaturalize culturally alien groups—including subcontinental Indians. When a 1923 Supreme Court ruling United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind classified Indians as non-White (and therefore ineligible to become US citizens) the United States government retroactively denaturalized 50-70% of Indians between 1923 and 1927.
Another mass-denaturalization happened between 1929 and 1939 when American authorities, state and local, deported anywhere from 300,000 to two million Mexicans. Yet another large-scale demographic correction happened from 1945 to 1956 when federal authorities under Eisenhower oversaw the removal of more than two million Mexicans from the country.
As you can see, America and Americans were always dedicated to retaining the European character of the United States. Ultimately America’s leaders would not abolish this European-preference immigration system until 1965, and they did so against a backdrop of coordinated opposition from American heritage organizations and a public that was 33% in favor of reducing immigration, despite it being at an all-time low, 39% in favor of keeping levels the same, and only 7% of whom wanted immigration increased.
So I have to ask, Vivek, do you label this 200-year history of particularist immigration policy which was implemented and upheld by every president until Kennedy as “identity politics?” If that is the case, then the Founding Fathers were the very woke identitarians you claim to oppose. Every president up to Kennedy, including both Roosevelts, Eisenhower, and even Lincoln were Woke Identitarians according to your framework. Your commentary about Americans who hold to the vision of these men is very clear:
“This new online-right movement doesn’t represent the views of most real-world Republican voters — take it from a son of Indian immigrants who dominates polling in Ohio’s G.O.P. primary for governor. But as one of the most vocal opponents of left-wing identity politics, I now see real reluctance from my former anti-woke peers to criticize the new identity politics on the right.
This pattern eerily mirrors the hesitance of prominent Democrats to criticize woke excess in the run-up to the 2024 presidential election, even though most Democratic voters clearly never believed that math is racist, or that hard work and the written tradition are hallmarks of whiteness. That’s a big part of why Kamala Harris lost in such spectacular fashion. If the post-Trump G.O.P. makes the same mistake with our own identitarian fringe, we will meet a similar fate.”
My guess is that you don’t have a coherent answer just as you don’t have a coherent understanding of American history and identity. After all, both are exogenous to you.
Rather, what you are doing is playing borderline anti-White word-games in an attempt to quash your political opposition and reestablish an Overton Window boundary favorable to yourself and your political ambitions by throwing around racism allegations. Allegations that huge numbers of young white men under 30 are now immune to. This enrages you, as you admit:
“First, conservative leaders should condemn — without hedging — Groyper transgressions. If, like Mr. Fuentes, you believe that Hitler was “really f-ing cool,” or if you publicly call Usha Vance a “jeet,” then you have no place in the conservative movement, period. The point isn’t to clutch pearls, but to prevent the gradual legitimization of this un-American animus. This online edgelording reminds me of toddlers testing their parents’ limits: The job of a real Republican leader is to set firm boundaries for young followers, as a good father does for a transgressive son.
That doesn’t mean censorship; it means moral clarity instead of indulgence. On policy debates, the Overton window should remain broad. It should be acceptable on the right to criticize U.S. aid to Israel or immigrant visas, but it is downright unacceptable to spew poison toward Jews, Indians or any other ethnic group. We must practice what we preach: My current Democrat opponent in Ohio is a Jewish woman, and while I criticize her policy record unsparingly, I will be her most vocal defender against antisemitic attacks from left or right.”
You are uncomfortable because taboos are being broken. They are taboos which you and others like you need to be upheld if your tenuous grasp on a piece of the American inheritance—which is not your birthright—is to be retained. Because of this necessity on your part, you are painting anyone who insists that America is a distinct nation composed of a distinct people as a-Hitler-loving-Nick-Fuentes-fan who hates Usha Vance. You may claim to be a father figure who wants to guide the young right. But if that is the case, then you are a step-father we never asked for and whose authority we reject.