Who are the "Real" Americans? Heritage, Culture, and the Striving to Define American Identity on the New Right

On the 250th of the Declaration of Independence, the New Right is battling over what it means to be American

What does it mean to be American? In the Oscar-nominated film The Brutalist (2024), there is a scene where the protagonist, László, having just arrived in America from World War II-ravaged Europe, reunites with his cousin in Philadelphia. The cousin — having largely shed his accent, married a Christian girl, and changed his last name to Miller — is meant to stand in stark contrast to the main character who still has a harsh Hungarian accent and can be seen regularly attending synagogue throughout the film.

The film is characterized by somewhat heavy-handed messaging, perhaps epitomized by an upside-down Statue of Liberty that László sees upon first entering America. However, in scenes like these, the film suggests that aspects of László’s character — his Jewishness being paramount — are incompatible with Americanness. The path to being a real American lies in becoming like his cousin: he must renounce his former identity and adhere to a narrow 1950s white-picket-fence aesthetic.

This largely left-leaning critique of the narrowness of American identity — that America remains unable to truly incorporate peoples from across the world and of different backgrounds — contrasts with a narrative that has taken hold of the New Right (see my previous blog about National Conservatism for some additional background). Rather than the United States having too narrow of a conception of what it means to be American, according to this section of the New Right, Americanness has become much too broad. The idea of America and its culture has been rendered meaningless. In this conception, if, as Barack Obama argued in a 2016 speech at the United Nations, “the spirit that animated the American Revolution is universal,” then what, precisely, distinguishes Americans from anyone else who shares those ideals? If nearly everyone is American in belief, then the citizenship category ceases to have meaning.

This section of the New Right argues that if the United States admits peoples from all across the planet into its heartland, “true” American heritage and culture will dissolve into this melting pot. As with the Ship of Theseus, if too many immigrants enter America, “America will cease to be America.” America will no longer be composed of the “one people” to which Thomas Jefferson referred in the Declaration of Independence but rather a fractured and disparate assortment of people united only by their place of residence. As stated by Vice President J.D. Vance in a speech at the Claremont Institute:

“I’d also say that citizenship in the 21st century necessarily means building, because America is not just an idea. We’re a particular place with a particular people and a particular set of beliefs and way of life.”

To ostensibly combat this seeming dystopian future, a relatively new concept of America and Americanness has been popularized within the New Right: Heritage America. In this argument, instead of America being a creedal state built on a shared belief in Enlightenment values enshrined in the U.S. Constitution, the United States at its core is made up of a particular set of largely Anglo-Protestant Heritage Americans. Heritage Americans are those who have a real claim to the U.S. and the right to decide the country’s future. Heritage Americans define the essence of the United States and Americanness: the country’s culture, its religion, and its true ethnic makeup.

America for Heritage Americans

So who are these Heritage Americans with a real claim to the country? This question sparks some debate online across segments of the New Right. After all, the strictest definitions exclude most of those who are United States citizens today. A strict definition would disqualify many of the very people debating, using, or bandying the term about. From figures like Jack Posobiec and Steve Bannon to Vice President J.D. Vance and President Trump (whose family immigrated to the United States in the 1880s), many of the apparent leaders of the New Right might only have tenuous claims to be called Heritage Americans.

In its strictest formulations, Heritage Americans are White American citizens who can trace their ancestry to the Founding in 1776. In a looser interpretation — reflecting some of the debate about the term — Heritage America includes those whose families arrived before or through the immediate aftermath of WWII (sometimes encompassing American Descendants of Slaves [ADOS] as well as Native Americans). This loose definition would only exclude the most recent waves of mostly Asian, Latin American, and Middle Eastern immigrants following the passage of the Immigration and Nationality (Hart-Cellar) Act of 1965 that abolished national-origin quotas — when my own parents immigrated to the United States. (This particular immigration act is especially decried by parts of the New Right and those who subscribe to the Great Replacement conspiracy theory as accelerating the displacement of Heritage Americans.)

The United States has undergone multiple waves of immigration from various parts of the world.

The term “Heritage Americans” remains contested, but it has broadly come to mean White Americans whose families were already in the United States before Reconstruction, the post–Civil War period of the late nineteenth century. Heritage Americans, it is argued, are thus a people of a particular stock (largely English, Scottish, German, Dutch and Scandinavian) who ostensibly molded themselves into a new mostly homogeneous American cultural and ethnic group in the period following the American Revolution. Heritage Americans are those whose forefathers participated in the Constitutional Convention. Heritage Americans fought the British in the Revolutionary War. Heritage Americans were the soldiers led by Ulysses S. Grant and Robert E. Lee in the Civil War. By this reasoning, today’s Heritage Americans can lay stronger claim to the country because their ancestors helped form the ideals of the nation at the Founding in 1776 and subsequently fought in bloody conflict after bloody conflict to defend the country’s ideals.

In this conception, the rest of America (Southern Europeans, Eastern Europeans, Jews, Africans, Asians, and Latin people who immigrated or were forcibly brought to America) are meant to adopt and support the largely Anglo-Protestant North and Northwestern European culture of Heritage Americans who make up the true essence of the American identity, since their culture and ancestors gave birth to the American nation.

If the Heritage America claim is taken seriously, it implies a radically different distribution of democratic legitimacy. What would the nation look like if political power were weighted toward this population? Using data from the U.S. census from the 1790s onward, immigration data, and several rough estimations based on previous academic research, I built a Monte Carlo simulation-based model to estimate the percentage of Americans in each state whose ancestry would be majority Heritage American (using the definition of Heritage Americans people whose ancestry is descended from White Americans present in the United States before Reconstruction).¹

As seen in the above map, a higher proportion of Americans who live in the Midwest and Appalachia could be considered Heritage American with the highest proportions in states like West Virginia and Tennessee and the lowest proportions in states like California, Rhode Island, North Dakota and Massachusetts.

If political power resided only in these Heritage Americans, the electoral map would also look quite different: states like Ohio and Indiana would have more electoral votes than population centers like California, Florida, and New York. In this hypothetical map, based on the states each candidate won in their respective races, Donald Trump would have bested both Joe Biden (295-243) and Kamala Harris (363-175).

The assumed cultural prominence of “Heritage America” by some members of the New Right is fairly at odds with the current state of the U.S. as a nation of immigrants. Collectively, my model estimates that only around 19-21% of the U.S. population today could be considered majority Heritage American by ancestry. Including ADOS, Native Americans, and minority populations that were present in the U.S. in the 1870s, this number would increase to around 35-37%.² While this is only meant to be an estimate, it is clear from much of the census and immigration data that Heritage Americans are not the majority of the U.S. population. According to this model, Heritage Americans have not been the majority since WWI.

This picture of declining percentages of Heritage Americans has found political salience on the New Right, particularly through calls for greater crackdowns on both illegal and legal migration. This has ranged from vocal support for crackdowns on H-1B visas — leading the current administration to attempt to put a $100,000 fee on the coveted visa for technical workers largely from India and China — to aggressive arrest quotas for the removal of undocumented migrants. For example, in a speech in 2025 while accepting the Claremont Institute’s Statesmanship Award, Vice President J.D. Vance stated:

Too many on the far left seem destined to erode the very thing that makes Americans put on a uniform and sacrifice their lives for our common nation.

Now, part of the solution — and I think the most important part of the solution — is you first have to stop the bleeding. And that’s why President Trump’s immigration policies are, I believe, the most important part of his successful first six months in the Oval Office.

Social bonds form among people who have something in common.

Putting this more explicitly, in a recent interview, Jeremy Carl, author of The Unprotected Class — a book which makes the argument that White Americans are in danger of becoming an underclass — and who was previously nominated to a State Department post by the Trump administration said:

I've called for a net zero immigration. I'm not running away from that or apologizing for it. I think we need a long pause to reconstitute what this country is, what our new identity is going to be. The Democrats are obviously totally opposed to that in every way. And we have just a fundamental impasse.

The particular language of “Heritage America” being under threat has also made its way into advertisements on X for ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) by the Department of Homeland Security. For example, some of these posts state for potential recruits to “Defend your culture” and “Remember your Homeland’s Heritage.”

From New Life in a New Land to American Progress to the slogan “Serve your country! Defend your culture!”, American “heritage” is visualized through frontier settlement, Manifest Destiny, and cultural defense.

A Creedal Nation

The underlying logic of Heritage America becomes clearest when placed against its main rival: the idea of America as a creedal nation. A leading voice on the New Right and one of the most firmly rooted National Conservatives (see my previous post), Vice President J.D. Vance, while never explicitly using the term “Heritage American,” has argued that the creedal vision of America is not enough. In his Claremont Statesmanship speech in 2025, he argued:

If you think about it, identifying America just with agreeing with the principles, let’s say, of the Declaration of Independence, that’s a definition that is way over-inclusive and under-inclusive at the same time.

What do I mean by that? Well, first of all, it would include hundreds of millions, maybe billions, of foreign citizens who agree with the principles of the Declaration of Independence. Must we admit all of them tomorrow? If you follow that logic of America as a purely creedal nation, America purely as an idea, that is where it would lead you.

But at the same time, that answer would also reject a lot of people that the ADL would label as domestic extremists, even though those very Americans had their ancestors fight in the Revolutionary War and the Civil War.

And I happen to think that it’s absurd — and the modern left seems dedicated to doing this — to say, ‘You don’t belong in America unless you agree with progressive liberalism in 2025.’

I think the people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War have a hell of a lot more claim over America than the people who say they don’t belong.

This debate about what it means to be truly American is a recurring pattern in history. Even before the U.S. was founded, in his 1751 essay Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Founding Father Benjamin Franklin mused about barring people of “swarthy complexion” including Swedes, Spaniards, Italians, French, and Russians. A particular worry of his was Germans, whom he feared would “Germanize” the state of Pennsylvania. Later, the Know-Nothing Party flourished in rejecting all things Catholic during the antebellum period of the 1840s and 1850s. The Immigration Act of 1924 (Johnson-Reed Act) was specifically meant to limit immigration from Asia and Southern and Eastern Europe.

Most Americans have never heard the term “Heritage American.” Indeed, most Americans would find the idea of Heritage America to be at odds with the nation’s values. A July 2025 YouGov survey of U.S. citizens found that “obeying U.S. law”, “supporting the U.S. Constitution”, and “believing in the principles of the Declaration of Independence” were considered the most important aspects of being “American.” At the bottom were being White and being Christian. Most Americans have adopted the view that being American is largely creedal — it involves believing and sharing a strong commitment to certain abstract ideas, among them life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

This is not to say that the United States does not have a particular culture informed by its history. If I wrote about how Guy Fawkes’ Day was an American staple, many would beg to differ! Further, as argued by conservative commentator Ross Douthat, many of the political defaults that Americans take for granted are not universal — America’s libertarian commitment to the First Amendment’s guarantee of free speech would be difficult to recreate elsewhere. However, as put by the President of the U.S. during the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln, a sincere commitment to the principles of the Declaration of Independence and to the country’s future is what makes someone American. The creation of new cultural practices — and the ongoing persuasion of others to jointly incorporate them into the nation’s story — is also American. Speaking about recent immigrants to the United States during the 1850s who did not have a blood connection to the American Revolution, Abraham Lincoln, in his “Electric Cord” speech, stated:

But when they look through that old Declaration of Independence they find that those old men say that “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” and then they feel that that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men, that it is the father of all moral principle in them, and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration, and so they are.

1. See https://github.com/hanshanley/pre1870_pop if you want to scrutinize the data or run the model yourself.

2. My estimate comes to a number similar to a calculation from the Manhattan Institute.