The Definition of a Nation

Now, I’ve watched this video along with multiple broadcasts of Tucker Carlson’s nightly show because I’ve genuinely wanted to see where he was coming from with his take on immigration policy. He’s been saying some provocatively interesting stuff while maintaining a “common sense” demeanor about him. His main sticking point is this: if you change the way our country looks so quickly, and doing so by bypassing legal channels, you are inviting massive friction and possible destruction. Further, average human beings simply cannot adapt to such rapid change in such a short amount of time. Tucker doesn’t confine this concept simply to immigration; he also identifies the massive yet unknowable influence the big tech companies are having on our society. We are building an entirely new infrastructure in this country. Correction: Google execs, AI robots, and illegal immigrants are building the new infrastructure in this country, and a large portion of American citizens are being swept under the rug.

I’ve seen counterpoints to Carlson’s observations, like Cenk Uygur bringing up that we’ve had waves of immigrants coming to this country before (). The iconic Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island are symbols of our inclusivity, which at that time in the early 20th century was mainly for Italians, Asians, and the Irish. This point can be summarized as “We’ve done it before. Can’t you see that nothing bad happened?” But I believe it masks something I don’t think neither Cenk nor even Tucker see. And that “something” is the conceptualization of what the country is to its citizens. That conceptualization is directly linked to posterity. A man or woman’s ability to identify with his or her country with pride lies in his or her ancestors’ influence on the country. What does any of what I’ve just said mean? Compare, for example, 18th and 19th century USA vs 20th century USA. Technically, they’re the same country, but that is not so once you take a closer look at it demographically. 18th and 19th century USA was built by white men of Anglo and Dutch descent and black men of African descent. These were the people who birthed and built America, for better and for worse. However, at the turn of the 20th century, there were two major world-changing occurrences taking place: the industrial revolution and mass immigration. America was getting a makeover. She was getting redressed in cars, roads, skyscrapers. And they were all getting built by immigrants from Italy, Ireland, and Asia. Why is this comparison so significant? It’s because the industrialized version of America in the 20th century rendered its prior identity as literally unimaginable. It created a conceptual distance from the 18th century in people’s minds. All of a sudden, those 18th century people like George Washington and Ben Franklin were different people from a different, archaic time. The past became the ancient past, when there was only 100 years difference (give or take a couple decades). If you were a 3rd generation Italian living and working in America in the 70s, your conception of America’s identity would be rooted and begin in the early 1900s at the start of your ancestors’ American journey. The prior history of America, such as the Revolutionary War, would be considered a conceptual relic, to be admired romantically from a distance.

Returning to Cenk Uygur’s point about immigration having been achieved in the past with successful results, I would say we still haven’t reconciled these identity issues. Whites and blacks whose ancestors built this country have a completely different mindset with their own unique peculiarities compared to 4th or 5th generation Italians, Irish, Asians, etc. And I, as a first generation citizen whose parents both came from Middle Eastern countries, have my own mechanisms of conceptual distance from the image of America as a booming 20th century powerhouse. The stories of soldiers fighting in WWII don’t have as much of an effect on me as they would on some of you, simply because my ancestors didn’t fight for America or in the war at all. Whats’ funny, however, is that I feel conceptually closer to Revolutionary America than Industrialized 20th century America. And that’s because the education curriculum we grew up with in the 90s and early 2000s stressed the importance of the Constitutional values and principles that the Founding Fathers placed so much weight in. Civic nationalism, rather than ethnographic-nationalism, was a big thing for many in our generation. Civic nationalism is the belief that ideas like liberty, freedom, and justice are what can bond us in our attempt to breed a functioning nation. It’s what Tucker Carlson seems to believe in. But does it work? I really don’t know. What I do know is that America’s identity is splintered. And until we recognize and stop ignoring the reality that a nation is defined by its people’s posterity, the issues we face will compound in interest.