Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher once remarked that Europeans were made by history, but only Americans were made by philosophy.

Erick Erickson has a fantastic takedown of the so-called “Heritage American” movement being floated among the nationalist right by the likes of Charles Hayworth, Jack Posobiec, Nick Fuentes, and others. All of these individuals have rejected conservatism in the sense we might understand the tradition from Jefferson to Burke to Goldwater to Reagan and Buckley. The maxim of free minds, free speech, free markets, and a free society would fall deaf on their ears.

There is a sense among these individuals that the old classical liberal split between conservatives and liberals is what they would term a dead consensus. Politics should reflect the highest good (God) rather than the common good, and in fact all lawmaking should be an effort to reflect the highest good rather than a common weal. They will not only argue that political liberalism in the Jeffersonian and Madisonian understanding was a mistake. That self-government is an impossibility as evidenced by the abuses of freedom committed by the political left (abortion, same sex unions, drag queen story hour) and the political right (unfettered free markets, immigration, productivity over community). What is required is not just a return to tradition, but a certain type of tradition — a ‘protestant Franco’ — which seeks to help its friends and harm its enemies. If not Polymarchus from Plato’s Republic, then most certainly the ideas of Carl Schmitt and Julius Evola.

America and Virginia as an Idea: Jefferson and Liberty

George Will gave a talk with the National Churchill Museum back in 2021 at the Kemper Lecture which, I think, exemplifies the difference between this European ethno-nationalism trying to take root in America against the Jeffersonian idea of our country and its promise:

Regarding the foreign policy, the American mind is bifurcated. On the one hand, we are a nation of immigrants. We are all descended from people who came here to get away from there, wherever “there” was. From places too entangled with wars and revolutions. America’s instinctive isolationism sleeps lightly when it sleeps at all. On the other hand, we are creedal nation, whose creed impels us to lean into the world in a way that Churchill encouraged. In a way that saved Churchill’s nation as he well knew, on the night of Pearl Harbor, when we were at last blasted into the world conflict.

Today there is much American soul-searching about the nature of our nation. There are those who advocate a kind of tribal nationalism. An ethno-nationalism. A nationalism suited for what these advocates call a Caucasian-Christian nation. But a few Europeans have understood America better than some of today’s Americans do. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, the most Churchillian Briton since Churchill himself, correctly said this: “European nations were made by history. The United States was made by philosophy.” That philosophy, the heart of which is the doctrine of universal natural rights, is always and directly pertinent to US foreign policy.

Jefferson argued that to become an American, all it required was an assent to a few certain and basic truths: life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness.

Now I have family that can trace roots to Virginia back to 1660. Lawrence Washington served under one of my great-grandfathers (Edward “Old Grog” Vernon). I can trace my lineage back to Normandy in the 8th century. I suppose in one sense, I could check the box for these ethno-nationalists in a way they never could. On the other hand, my Irish-Lebanese forebearers were more recent arrivals which barely check off the Aristotelian requirement for being a native of the city — four generations.

Yet deeper than this, blood and soil nationalism was never a Virginian idea and never was.

The Cavalier spirit, the code of a gentleman, hospitality and honor, there’s a deeper creed than the American one perhaps, but still a creed where all it takes is to assent to a few basic truths and defend a handful of unalienable rights.

Remember the old poem:

To wit, the ethno-nationalists make the following argument. Powhatan was right. The early Virginians were going to change their way of life forever. Surely we did. When the next wave of indentured servants and African bondsmen came to Virginia, they too radically changed what it meant to be a Virginian. When the Tidewater planters felt their political power slipping away, they too felt that their world was changing. After the Civil War, tens of thousands of immigrants flooded the coal mines of southwest Virginia. After the Second World War, millions of people flocked to Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads. Over the last three decades, Virginia has grown by 2.2 million people and less than half of Virginians today were actually born in Virginia.

That is most certainly going to change one’s ideas about a place. Few people would deny the difference between someone recently moving into a condo in Northern Virginia and someone whose farm has been in the family for seven generations and whose grandparents are buried in the family plot. Even if the idea of seven generations seems old to Virginians, but laughably short to Europeans whose families stretch back beyond the reach of history.

Strong Enough to Welcome Newcomers

In the most tactile sense, we are all immigrants — strangers in a strange land — who are born into family traditions. All of us are immigrants, some less so. Yet even if most Virginians today are Virginians by adoption, the running joke is that most folks got here as quick as they could.

The catch is that despite the demographic changes, the old Cavalier Country still endures precisely because the tradition itself brings forward something of the good, beautiful, and true that endures. The code of a gentleman still applies. Honor isn’t a byword. Handshakes are stronger than contracts. Hospitality isn’t just a custom. We can still go to places such as the Cavalier Hotel, the Williamsburg Inn, the Jefferson Hotel, Boar’s Head, and the Homestead and see Old Virginia alive and well. Despite efforts to disintegrate it, the University of Virginia still exudes the values and integrity of the old.

For myself, Virginia is strong enough to welcome newcomers. The irony to me is that these so-called ethno-nationalists have their argument backwards. They claim Virginia and America cannot assimilate; therefore we should abandon the very values they claim to defend? Aren’t they the very evil they describe?

Not so — in fact, one might go so far as to raise the question did they ever love America? Did they ever understand Virginia? For all the failure of others to assimilate to American exceptionalism, what precisely separates them from the very worst caricatures of ‘radical Mooselambs’ or ‘woke-DSA Antifa’ or ‘drag queen story hour’? Shouldn’t we be more concerned about a ‘protestant Franco’ or a mindset which implies ‘no enemies to the right’ so as to cloak the very worst? In fact — isn’t this long-endured mindset of ‘pas d’ennemis à gauche’ precisely what drives Republicans up a wall as liberals watch their own party be consumed by actual socialists?

Of course, there are plenty of bad actors in this world who profit from being bad actors, with willing media and paid consultants perfectly happy to amplify the threat so as to create a caricature. In the words of my generation? Whatever.

America isn’t a blood test and Virginia isn’t all red clay. What makes us special is the idea of Virginia and the gift this commonwealth gave to America. A nation of laws — not blood and soil — born from a philosophy that all men are created equal by God with rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of their own happiness.

That a gentleman can indeed become what he wills to be. That’s not just an American sentiment; that’s a Virginia gentleman defined.

Virginia hasn’t always been perfect on this score, nor are we ever likely to be perfect. Yet once again, Madison writes it into our organic document and what American schoolchildren used to know by heart:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity…

Not achieve, but form. Not some ethno-nation state, but the people of these states united to establish, insure, provide, defend, promote, and secure. That sounds like a pretty open-ended deal, and I’ll take as many allies in that fight as I can against all enemies — foreign and domestic.

The difference between an American and a so-called Heritage American is the difference between a chair and an electric chair. Whatever these ethno-nationalists intend, it sure as hell isn’t American — and will find no roots in the soil of Old Virginia.