America is not a nation of immigrants. We are a nation of settlers, of conquerors. When the Europeans came to the Americas, they did not integrate themselves into the existing order. They did away with it and created something new. This is the difference between a “settler” and an “immigrant.” The shift from settler to immigrant occurred in stages over time; by the time the West was settled, and North America was under the purview of Washington DC at the end of the nineteenth century, the frontier was closed and we began to transition to an immigration model.

When I say Heritage American, this is what I mean: those who are ethno-culturally tied to the ethos and spirit of the United States prior to its definitional transformation into a Propositional Nation after World War II. This therefore includes the type of people that came here during the Ellis Island generation, even if that was a significant sociopolitical mistake.

We are also the product of our mistakes as a nation. It includes the blacks of the Old South (like Booker T Washington), though it repudiates any instinct that some of them have to leverage their experience for the purposes of political guilt in our time. It also includes integrated Native Americans with the same stipulation. It affirms however the domination and pre-eminence of the European derived peoples, their institutions, and their way of life.

Heritage America is centered around the experiences and norms of Anglo-Protestants. It was their customs, their instincts, their priorities, their norms, their struggles, their perspectives, that set the tone and vision of Heritage America. Anything outside of that either assimilated or was killed off.

When we speak of heritage America, we speak of an actual body of institutions created by a nexus of a specific people; dominated and defined by Anglos and their children. It is not an idea, it is a body of actual ways and habits and standards of culture and behavior, connected by a shared experience and the inheritance of that memory. It is communicated by certain aesthetics, certain art, certain, folklore, certain music, and certain symbols. Excludes all of the items in those categories that are not consistent with the character of our version of them.

Once that ethos was liquidated, America was subverted and taken over. Heritage America has strong ethnic, correlations—and even types of hierarchies— but it is not racially essentialist in an absolutist way (after all we are not social rationalists). However, I should also note that this does not preclude any ethnic consciousness that might be necessary to confront the ethnic consciousness of the left in their own definition of friends and enemies.

The point is that heritage America affirms the basic goodness and defensibility of America as it existed prior to World War II and defined itself in light of a shared experience of an actual people, not mere propositions voluntarily assented to. To support heritage America is to consider all the various factions (Yankee vs Dixie or Whig vs Democrat) as part of our story and Mosaic. In other words, we don’t let outsiders make us pick sides on those things. It is a charming series of tensions that is only appropriate for heritage Americans to debate about.

Once we are critiqued by the outsiders, we stand together and affirm the goodness of it all.

I am an Augustinian classical Protestant who has somewhat of an irenic demeanor about my faith. I have found myself drawn to the Anglo-Lutheran paradigm of historic theology. Here I can emphasize the Creedal catholic faith, reformed by the theological labor of the Protestant Reformation. I like my theological convictions broad, and am drawn to statements like the great Ecumenical Creeds, as well as the 39 Articles.

I have absorbed much from the Reformed tradition as well, and serve in a layman capacity in a Reformed church.

The reason I describe myself as “Anglo-Lutheran” has much more to do with the framework of biblical theology than with my disagreement with the major contours of Reformed particulars. That is, I’ve been persuaded away from the specific Westminster-Puritan version of Covenant Theology, as well as the Regulative Principle of Worship, and Presbyterianism as divine obligation.

I am very much a counter-revolutionary, emphasizing that the warnings of Edmund Burke and Joseph de Maistre about the consequences of the universalism of the French Revolution would work to extinguish our European civilization. Because their lessons were unheeded, the West fell to a variety of cultural and political revolutions by the time we got to the twentieth century, and Conservatism became a dangerous impulse. In our present setting, the revolutionary aspects of postwar “Americanism” have devoured completely the American heritage, and the counter-revolutionary posture is imperative.

I am a political realist in the tradition of the Machiavellians. Ideals are important in understanding law and justice, but behind this law and justice sits the foundational questions of legitimacy, authority, political sovereignty, and the clash of Friends and Enemies. This is the truly political aspect of politics, and here I have absorbed the lessons of Thomas Hobbes read through the insights of German jurist Carl Schmitt. To be a political realist is to look beyond the rhetoric, the myths, the catch phrases, and to look at politics as it really is: a quest for power and the ability to position oneself in a place where your vision can be the one employed.

I often say that I wished we lived in an age when we could uphold the great principles of Conservatism, of Richard Hooker, of Edmund Burke. But alas, we have fallen, and Thomas Carlyle’s bold confrontationalist politics will rule the day.

As a result of my political realism, I am also an economic realist; for economics is subservient to the well-being of the political order. If I had to describe my economic disposition, it would be along the lines of Chesterton and Belloc’s Distributism; wherein there is a decentralized principle in capital formation. Families should be property owners, private property is a great bulwark against state-managed economies (socialism) and corporate dominated orders (managerial capitalism).

I believe in the goodness of private capital formation; and that savings and thrift is the true foundation of a sustainable economic order. In our time, interest rates are based not on savings, but on an artificiality of the credit supply; this leads to moral-cultural corruption, as well as nefarious economic consequences.

I am not an ideological protectionist, but believe that because the integrity of the political order and the cultural well-being of our people is paramount over things like consumption opportunities, I am neither a ideological free-trader. I believe not in protectionism as a path to prosperity, but protectionism as a cultural principle. I care more about economic continuity and the passing on of skills and vocations from one generation to the next than I do about having access to cheaper gadgets.

We live in perilous times. We ought neither to fall for a paralyzing nostalgia or a drunken optimism. The American order will either falter or it will continue; in either path, the America of the twentieth century is no longer. If the empire dissolves, chaos will arise. If the empire plateaus or extends itself, Heritage America and its older way of living will continue to vanish from our memory.

Thus, either way, our age calls for good men to carve out regional spaces for themselves, to set up a place for their children to inherit in an increasingly tense national situation. Creating boroughs, areas of regional dominance that can attract like-minded and like-dispositioned, is crucial. A place that our children can grow and pass on long after we are gone.