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by rayiner
17 days ago
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> I'll see your Hamilton and raise you a Washington [0] If America can be defined in terms of a "creedo"--which is your position, not mine--then surely that creedo can't include things that architects of the country like Hamilton and Jefferson disagreed on? The creedo must be the things they had in common, like federalism, republicanism, and property rights? > And of course, the most famous statement of the American attitude towards immigration: The American creedo cannot logically be defined by some poem some activist wrote a century after the founding. |
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But if you do want to play the founders game, Jefferson had a much larger impact on American self-identity than Hamilton. Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence, created the Democratic Party, which is the only party that has survived throughout all of American history, and championed the idea of democracy, which Hamilton was highly skeptical of. Hamilton was a monarchist, as I mentioned before. He had a major impact on the American financial system, but was much less successful as a political figure in his own right and did not shape American cultural and political identity in the way Jefferson did. His political party collapsed within 20 years, and his conceptions of an elite politics were overtaken by the rapid democratization of the US.
There have always been minority streams in American politics that have been xenophobic and have opposed immigration - you just happen to belong to the latest one. But these movements have consistently lost out over the course of American history. Successive waves of immigration have brought new groups to the United States. Xenophobes like yourself have constantly said that every new group would ruin America. The Irish didn't ruin America. Neither did the Germans. Neither did the Italians. Giving African Americans civil rights didn't ruin America. Chinese and Indian people haven't ruined America. Haitians aren't ruining America.
You seem to have some sort of obsession with Mamdani, which is weird, since he's as American as Apple Pie. It's actually difficult to think of anything about Mamdani that comes across as particularly foreign. He speaks perfect American English. He acts just like any other progressive New Yorker. He's extremely hooked into American culture. What, exactly, is it about Mamdani that's foreign or dangerous to America?
When you ask what makes immigration part of the American credo, this is what does that: the US is not a country founded on any ethnic identity. It's a country founded and peopled by immigrants, whose only common identity is belief in the American project, which is defined in purely secular and civic terms. Throughout its history, immigrants from all over the world have embraced that identity and have been rapidly incorporated into the society of the country. You don't like that, and want to undo it. Too bad.