Albion’s Seed and the Dream of Heritage Americans

What is an American, really?

I was in DC over the summer. I was considering a career change, and I had to case the joint. While I was there, I joined a salon conversation at someone’s house. The topic was—among other things—what a post-liberal, right-wing, nationalist conservative view of “America” might look like.

One man—we were almost all men—suggested a threefold account:

1. This new right believes that political power must be seized and wielded for the Good.

2. It is skeptical of secular, liberal, international institutions—instead it argues that sovereign nation states should govern in accordance with their national interests.

3. This new right rejects that the United States is a propositional nation based on ideas—instead, it posits that the United States is built on a culture, a land, and a heritage.

That’s the word—heritage.

The conversation segued to what kinds of allies the United States must seek out, should we reject liberalism. The group agreed that such civilizational allies would—at least—try to perpetuate themselves, instead of decaying from low birthrates and unconstrained immigration.

One guy said, “I don’t actually care if Western allies look like liberal American democracies.”

Another responded. “I don’t actually care if America stays a democracy.”

I am ambivalent about this ideological package. I’ve shared my face; you can look at it again and reasonably deduce why I may feel this way. But this account of Heritage Americans is internally coherent. It is plainly clear that the Founding Fathers were of a particular ethnic stock, religious foundation, and intellectual tradition. It is also plainly clear that I, a naturalized citizen with a fondness for Duchamp’s readymades, do not share their ethnic, religious, or intellectual origins. The lazy accusation is to frame nationalist conservatives as white supremacists, but American white supremacists are remarkably ethnically syncretic. The proponents of heritage-based nationalism are more specific: they recognize that race is too broad a brush to paint on people, so instead they focus on ethnicities. And the core of their argument against the propositional nation is the assertion of an American ethnicity: the Heritage American.

There is, of course, a rather straightforward account of what it means to be a Heritage American: do you see your family in Albion’s Seed (1989), by David Hackett Fischer?

Four British Folkways in America

The subtitle suggests the thesis. Fischer’s history claims that describing the heritage of these the United States as White, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant misses important details about who settled the original American land, why they did so, and how different these cultures really were. I’m sure you’ve heard the pitch—many accounts of Vice President J.D. Vance invoke a degraded echo of this book. Up north arrived the Puritans: stuffy, over-educated, in each others’ business, an austere people who thought black was too dramatic a color for commoners to wear and who in some cases returned to England to support the Republicans in the English Civil War. In the war’s wake, a cadre of second-son Cavaliers, loyal to the Crown, traveled to Virginia to replicate the gentlemanly life of the Old Country: cards, horse-racing, loud fashions, and a trickle-down dispersion of repression and violence. In between lived the Quakers, genuinely radical pacifist egalitarians who earnestly sought a pluralistic society of Mennonites, Anabaptists, Pietists, and even friendly Indians…as long as the Friends married one another after gauntlets of committee approvals for each match. And out in the country were the Borderers, the Backcountry men, the Scots-Irish barbarians who migrated from one frontier hill country to another, doing battle with the native peoples with a bourbon in one hand and a rifle in the other.

Each of these cultures, in Fischer’s account, were distinct peoples. Their vernacular architectures were different; their marriage and death rituals were different; their attitudes to work and time were different; their approaches to the English language were barely intelligible to one another. I suspect that many revolutionary Yankees scarcely considered their Appalachian countrymen human, much less English. Yet they all, through national, martial, cultural, and genetic agglomeration, became a single people: Americans. That cohort had some fundamental contradictions—the American Civil War brought some of them to light—but even that conflict failed to completely rend apart the nation. And to this day, Vermont, South Carolina, Ohio, and Texas fly the same flag—even if some of the stripes have been recolored.

This is a clean account of the American ethnicity: heterogenous, but unified. Spiritually pluralist, but Christian. British by birth, but distinct from Yookay mores. There are, of course, unfortunate redactions from this account: particularly, anyone whose American stories started among the tired, the poor, the huddled masses landing on Ellis Island. Many of these people’s descendants checked “White” on their 2020 Census forms, but if you are a nationalist conservative, you have to draw a line somewhere. And even in 1900, about 60% of this Nation of Immigrants could trace their lineage to Britain. The decline of British ancestry in the American population and cultural hegemony is rather new: it started with the New Deal.

Again, building an account of the Heritage American off Albion’s Seed is entirely coherent—and if it disqualifies some nationalist conservatives from the ethnicity they champion, that’s their L to hold.

But There Are Two Problems

The first is a quirk of the immigrants. As Fischer relays, the immigrants did not merely assimilate: they assimilated into the folkways of the cultures they moved into. Fischer provides as examples Walter Fauntroy Jr., a black politician with the airs (and name) of a Virginia gentleman; and Barry Goldwater, a Jewish man who took up the square-jawed grit of a backcountry Westerner. I’m an example, too. I am not, will never be, and do not seek to be an East Anglian Congregationalist. But I grew up a Yankee. I, too, value education, hard work, and inconvenient snobbery. I, too, seek to “improve the time” and thus find lassitude grating. I am an Indian Brahmin, yes, but I’m a Boston Brahmin, too. The old Yankee WASPs are mostly gone, and the torchbearers of the Puritans’ prudish, nosy, Matthew 5:14-16 moralism are…the woke. Ignore how they dress: the greatest pearl-clutchers of the modern age are the Miku Binder Jefferson tenderqueers. And their utopia is as stifling and as prone to six-hour sermons in the cold as anything John Winthrop dreamed of. I was there for it.

I, too, recognized my people in Fisher’s history.

The second problem is deeper: the endpoint of Albion’s Seed argues that the United States is built not on one proposition but on four: a bespoke account of freedom for each of the four core British roots of America. From New England came an “Ordered Liberty” in which a properly functioning society enabled greater latitude for each to better see God. From Virginia came a “Hegemonic Liberty,” a right to rule himself and those below him, as a gentleman in his castle. From the Delaware Valley came a “Reciprocal Liberty” built on taking Matthew 7:12 to its ultimate conclusions. And from Appalachia came a “Natural Liberty” to live your own life on your own terms, and to point a shotgun at anyone who dares intrude.

You are welcome to question Fischer’s account. Contemporary reviews of Albion’s Seed argue that his thesis of American heritage is too clever by half and underbaked in some respects. But I cannot shake the argument that the only thing that united these states in the first place is the agreement that they would no longer allow a transatlantic Crown to impose its will upon them.

To the Founding Fathers, it really was about freedom.

The United States as a Promise

Geopolitical analyst, intrepid backpacker, and occasional ex ano commentator Peter Zeihan offers another valuable but too-clever-by-half account of the American culture as it relates to the land. To Zeihan, the American culture was born of the Mississippi River system. Between the Louisiana Purchase and…let’s say the construction of the Lincoln Highway, Americans trickled into the deep interior of the United States, finding some of the best farmland on the planet, situated within the greatest river network on the planet, for low (if not Homestead-Act-subsidized) land prices. In such a bountiful heartland, a national ethos formed: that God really does have a special providence for fools, drunkards, and the United States of America. That in America, you don’t need connections, or rank, or status, or even a strong state to protect your family and wealth. You simply need to work hard. Such a mythos has its limits, of course, but compare the Mississippi to the Yellow River, a near-mudslide of a waterway held in place by ever-rising dikes and irrigation systems, threatening to kill millions unless managed with a budget only a great king could afford. Hard work has historically not been enough on the North China Plain.¹

It certainly wasn’t on the northern edge of the Deccan Plateau. My father grew up poor. He was the quiet youngest son: reedy, awkward, insecure, no connections, no influence, not even the bravado to fake it until he made it. All my father had was immense intelligence and the work ethic to apply it. In India, that was insufficient. But in the United States, it was. Simply by writing effective computer code, he could secure wealth and comfort for his family. Hard work was enough: the machinery of America handled the rest.

I suspect that the emotional core of nationalist conservatism is the impression that in the United States of 2025, hard work is no longer enough. The jobs worth having have been walled off by insufferable HR departments, earmarked in part for H1B immigrants like my father. The streets are no longer safe, the women are no longer interested, and the video games that provided solace in 2014 have proven hollow. A lot of these men found salvation in God, in blood, and in the soil. And good for them! But I know the depths of despair whence their conversions started—I know a chan meme when I see one. And I get it. It was hard getting a job in the 2010s, and it’s only gotten worse in the 2020s. The straight-and-narrow path is long gone.

But I’m Fundamentally Unsympathetic

My emotional response to the above grievances is “skill issue.”

Consider how I got my most recent job: posting about the electric utility industry, as a zero-revenue “side hustle.” Nearly six months in, I had sixty subscribers. But I was providing a service with more demand than supply, and the market responded. This is a book review Substack now.

Listen, I’m a leftist by training. Yet even I could literally bootstrap a career pivot. Hard work—carpal-tunneling, sleep-robbing, despair-granting, brain-melting hard work—was all I needed. And I’m not alone: the United States is uniquely replete with stories of people doing thankless work for poor pay and leveraging that into real wealth. I’ve seen it done. I agree with the nationalist conservatives that the United States isn’t defined by a philosophical underpinning: I didn’t need to read Publius to feel like an American. And I’m happy to seek coalition with them: I, too, want to seize and wield power for the Good, and I broadly like their industrial policy. This new right need not consider me a “real” American—I’m too useful to deport, and enough people know it.

But the American Dream is real.

Hard work is enough.

Because this country is so free, you can choose your favorite kind of freedom from a list of four.

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1. Reforming and Opening Up increasingly reads like an exception that proves the rule.