If you keep tabs on the more unsavory segments of the American right, you’ve probably heard the phrase “heritage Americans” in the last year. It’s used by the most militant anti-immigrant conservatives, who reject inclusive civic nationalism in favor of a conception of Americanness that’s tied to ancestry. In this conception, even people who were born in the United States aren’t quite full Americans if their grandparents were immigrants.
We’re reaching the point where, while depressing, it’s not particularly shocking to hear people talk this way. It would, however, be deeply surprising if someone said, “I believe that America belongs to heritage Americans. It’s our country, and it’s vitally important that we make sure that heritage Americans are eternally the majority, or else the whole point of the country will be lost. That doesn’t make me a conservative though. I’m a liberal!”
The idea of “liberal Zionism” is intrinsically confusing in the same way. All forms of nationalism fall somewhere on a spectrum from pure civic nationalism, where “the nation” is everyone living within the nation’s borders, to pure ethnic nationalism, where “the nation” is a particular ethnic subset of the population and everyone else is, at best, a kind of graciously tolerated guest. Historically, American nationalism has been about as close as any real case gets to pure civic nationalism, especially in the generations since the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the end of racist immigration quotas. That’s what the conservatives who use the term “heritage American” are trying to change. On the other end of the spectrum, Zionism is just about the purest form of ethnic nationalism in the world today, especially if we limit ourselves to countries that have many of the trappings of liberal democracy. The explicit idea is that Israel should be a specifically “Jewish state,” even though a large portion of the people who live there…
Auteur: Ben Burgis
