Imagine my surprise when I researched the origin and underlying ideology of the term “Heritage American” and where it came from.
Ironically, or perhaps not so ironically, this term didn’t actually come from a deep love of American history and tradition.
It came from the European New Right ideas of Alain de Benoist, and Alexander Dugin’s ethnosociology and Fourth Political Theory. Transmitted through Paul Gottfried’s into American paleoconservatism and then into the American Reformer.
Yes I traced the entire ideological lineage and it’s fascinating. Article will drop later but here’s a little preview.
In the American constitutional system, American citizenship is a legal status that allows you to participate in civics. You are either born here or you go through the naturalization process and become a citizen.
Even when the 1790 naturalization law restricted eligibility to “free white persons,” we granted citizenship based on the law. It was never based on proof of inherited nobility, or even colonial descent.
Now Europe is different. They had dynasties, nobility, aristocracy.
The Heritage American has nothing to do with being an American citizen. It’s about a special new class of aristocracy or nobility that this country never ever had.
Alain de Benoist’s French New Right provided the original theory of ethnopluralism: “humanity consists of distinct, rooted peoples whose cultures should remain separate from liberal universalism and demographic homogenization.”
In 1989, Dugin met with him during the fall of the USSR. But he didn’t just meet with him. They actually collaborated and met in Moscow and Paris.
Dugin took that theory and enlarged it into an all encompassing geopolitical one by “adding Heidegger’s Dasein, Carl Schmitt’s friend-enemy politics, Orthodox/Traditionalist metaphysics, multipolar civilizational blocs and the idea of Russians as the state-forming people within a multinational order.”
Equal citizenship by birth or naturalization was swapped out with Dugin’s “culturally rooted founding people” collectively as a group. They stand above citizens just like Dugin’s primordialism. American tradition always assigned citizenship based on qualification under law. In Dugin’s world the politic is “organic people whose identity grows from ancestry, language, religion, land, customs and collective memory.”
American tradition is individualism.
Dugin tradition is collectivism.
American Reformer took Dugin and inserted a Christian vocabulary and renamed it Heritage American.
Heritage Americanism creates an American version of Dugin’s land-versus-sea argument.
More detail on idealogical transmission into American politics in the article but it came by way of Akros and Gottfried.
C. Jay Engel credits Gottfried as the main influence of his ideas, works within the same Chronicles network, and uses identical rooted-people and friend-enemy theories to arrive at “Heritage Americans.”