the real american tradition
Americanness isn't inherited
In a recent speech, Vice President JD Vance suggested that his job was to ensure a better life for people “in the country their grandparents built.”
He demanded deep gratitude for “the settlers who carved a civilization out of the wilderness” and sneered at those who still wish to improve the country: “Who the hell do these people think they are?”
This is not a fringe sentiment. It is an increasingly mainstream attempt to reframe American identity. It claims the language of patriotism, but its logic is fundamentally pre-republican. It seeks to narrow the country’s civic promise and to return to a country that never quite existed.
But that was never the American idea.
The American republic was not built on blood or cultural uniformity. It was built on the radical proposition that a people diverse in origin, belief, and circumstance, could bind themselves to a shared civic idea.
“It has been reserved to the people of this country,” wrote Alexander Hamilton in Federalist No. 1, “to decide the important question: whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice.”
Reflection and choice. Not inheritance and tradition.
The fantasy of sameness
“You cannot swap 10 million people from anywhere else in the world and expect America to remain unchanged.”
—JD Vance
The fear you notice in this statement is not about change itself, but about what kind of people are changing the country. It rests on the premise that there once existed a stable, unified cultural core that was white, native-born, and cohesive—and this gave the nation its shape and coherence.
That idea collapses on contact with reality.
I have traveled to at least 40 states. I didn’t encounter a single uniform “White American culture.”
New Orleans ≠ Vermont ≠ Appalachia ≠ Minnesota ≠ Dallas
People raise their children differently. They worship differently. They hold radically different views on family, religion, relationship to government, cultural rituals, dialect, cuisine, and self-expression.
A Cajun Catholic in Louisiana and a Scandinavian Lutheran in the Upper Midwest may share a census category but they are not the same, culturally.
What some now remember as 1950s cultural unity owes more to a few network television broadcasts in a Mid-Atlantic accent than to the actual diversity of white American life.
To long for sameness is to misremember the country entirely. What has unified Americans was never blood or background. It was shared structure. Shared laws. Shared narrative. Shared struggle.
And, often, conflict over who gets to be included. It is one of the most American traditions we have.
Bloodlines and belonging
Even those who now claim Tier One belonging as the original builders, were once denied it.
Vance’s Irish ancestors who settled in Appalachia were once considered racially suspect, religiously subversive, and fundamentally incompatible with the American project. They were met not with welcome, but with horrible cartoons depicting them as apes.
Italians and Jews were similarly seen as alien threats to the Anglo-Protestant order.
Some Americans’ ancestors did not come here freely. They were enslaved and counted as property for generations before they could claim legal personhood, let alone full citizenship.
Others never “immigrated” at all: their land was absorbed through war, annexation, or expansion. The border moved. They did not.
My own grandfather came to America in the 1940s, but naturalizing was not even an option. Even if he wanted to stay and quite literally build this country as a civil engineer for the Tennessee Valley Authority, he was ineligible under the laws at that time, an exclusion rooted in a 1923 Supreme Court decision (United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind), which held that Indians were not considered “white” or eligible for naturalization. And when that particular restriction was lifted in 1946, it was replaced with an annual quota of 100 Indian nationals per year. It wasn’t until the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 that racial bars for Asians were finally removed.
That, too, is part of the American story.
The idea that Americanness flows through ancestry, and that the most American of Americans are those with White ancestors, is not just historically false, it is philosophically incompatible with the American project and it is a call for caste.
When the border moved
There are tens of millions of Americans who never crossed into the United States. The United States crossed into them.
Native Americans. Native Hawaiians. Indigenous Alaskans. Puerto Ricans. Mexican-Americans in Texas, Arizona, New Mexico and California whose families were living on ancestral lands when borders moved and flags changed.
Their presence and their contribution to America poses an insoluble problem for any worldview based on ancestry, or demanding of gratitude.
If rootedness and lineage are the tests of legitimacy, then these communities pass with overwhelming clarity. But they are rarely included in rhetoric about “real Americans.” Their histories and their claims are too uncomfortable.
What this silence reveals is that the entire framework of inheritance, of cohesion, and of rightful belonging is a fiction. It cannot account for the reality of conquest, nor the fact that those most loyal to the country have often been those with reason to distrust it.
What patriotism demands
“America is beautiful, contradictory, unfinished. I am proud of our country even as we constantly strive to make it better, to protect and deepen our democracy, to fulfill its promise for each and every person who calls it home.”
—Zohran Mamdani“There is no gratitude here.”
“Who the hell do these people think they are?”
—JD Vance
To acknowledge contradiction is not to reject the country. It is to take it seriously. To call it unfinished is not ingratitude. It is fidelity. A republic cannot be preserved by pretending its faults have been fixed, once and for all.
The U.S. Constitution was not perfect at its creation but it was amendable. That was its genius. That is how it was fundamentally different than revealed religious texts that claim immediate and permanent perfection.
Twenty-seven amendments later, we are still reconciling a declaration of universal liberty with the fact that some of its signers owned other human beings.
Honest patriotism accepts human imperfection and chooses to keep building anyway.
The Americans who’ve carried that work forward don’t speak in the tone of inherited satisfaction.
Frederick Douglass, in his Fourth of July address, called the celebration a sham for the enslaved, but affirmed the Constitution’s potential.
Lincoln called the nation “unfinished.”
Martin Luther King Jr. described America as a promissory note—unfulfilled, but not illegitimate.
Ronald Reagan warned against moral monopoly, saying, “Freedom is the recognition that no single person, no single authority or government has a monopoly on the truth.”
This is the vocabulary of democratic faith.
To demand more of one’s country is not disloyalty. It is citizenship.
The real error of the inheritance worldview is that it mistakes ancestry for ownership. It treats citizenship as biological fact, passed down like eye color or surname, rather than a political commitment earned through labor, courage, and critique.
A nation worth belonging to is one that demands something of its citizens. Not just that their grandparents were born there.
A tradition of critique
“I love America more than any other country in the world and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.”
—James Baldwin
The promise of America lies not in its perfection, but in its capacity for reinvention.
From the Founders onward, progress has come not from those who merely inherited power, but from those who challenged its terms. The abolitionists were scorned. The suffragists were jailed. The civil rights movement was hosed and beaten by men who now quote its language. Still, they pushed forward.
To love your country is not to shield it from scrutiny. It is to demand that it live up to its own promises. That tradition belongs to anyone brave enough to carry it forward.
Adil Husain is a strategist, founder, and observer of global complexity. He has spent over two decades advising Fortune 1000 firms on market intelligence and international growth, with long stints living and working in the U.S. and China and shorter stints in other places. He is the Managing Director of Emerging Strategy, a strategic intelligence firm that helps enterprises navigate volatile markets, and the publisher of a rapidly growing B2B media platform with >200,000 subscribers in its first 90 days. View those newsletters here.
On The Husain Signal, he writes about business, borders, belief systems, and the things we’re taught to feel but not always to say.