SCHMITT: What Is an American?

The following are remarks as prepared by Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., on Sept. 2 at the National Conservatism Conference in Washington, D.C.

There’s a special significance to this conference this year. Donald Trump’s victory was not just a victory for his movement, but for the ideas of the people in this room. National conservatism is an idea whose time has arrived.

The battle for our future is not between democracy and autocracy, capitalism and socialism, or even “Right” and “Left,” in the old meaning of those terms. It is between the nation and the forces that would erase it.

For decades, many of those in power—not just here, but across the West—have been locked in a cultural war with their own nations. We see that in many of the countries of Europe today, where the immigration crisis threatens to transform the ancient fabric of those nations—and all who object are menaced by an increasingly totalitarian censorship state.

While our First Amendment has traditionally insulated us from the most extreme forms of censorship, America, too, is threatened by the same elites, driven by the same interests and ambitions. They are the elites who rule everywhere but are not truly from anywhere.

National conservatism is a revolt against this fundamentally post-American ruling class. This revolt is a revolt from the Right—but also, a revolt within the Right.

For too long, conservatives were content to serve as the right wing of the regime. They, too, waged foreign wars in the name of global “liberalism” and “democracy.” They, too, rewrote our trade policies in service of the interests of global capital. They, too, supported amnesty and mass migration.

The Washington Consensus was a thoroughly bipartisan affair. It required the support of both party establishments to survive.

Until President Trump, the mainstream Right quibbled over the Left’s means, but hardly ever challenged its ends. Conservatives cheered foreign intervention after foreign intervention—not to defend America’s actual national interests, but to pursue the same fantasy of a “world safe for democracy” that the Wilsonian liberals have peddled for a century.

They backed NAFTA and welcomed China into the WTO—not because it was good for American workers, but because it served the same vision of a borderless marketplace championed by the Left, differing only over whether to trim a regulation here or tack on a labor standard there.

But perhaps the best example was on the issue of immigration.

The old conservative establishment may have opposed something like illegal immigration on procedural grounds—simply because it was illegal. But they took no issue with it in substance, and if the same thing was achieved through “legal” avenues, many of them would celebrate and support it.

At this point, it should be clear that the fact that something is sanctioned by our government does not mean it’s good for our country. That much is obvious with various forms of legal immigration today.

For decades, we heard that so-called “high-skilled immigration” was an urgent necessity. The H-1B visa, for example, was sold as a way to keep America “globally competitive.” Of course, we do have an interest in attracting the truly exceptional few, the very best and brightest in the world. But that’s not how programs like the H-1B have actually functioned.

Instead, they’ve imported a vast new labor force from abroad—not to fill jobs Americans can’t or won’t do, but to undercut American wages, replace American workers, and transfer entire industries into the hands of foreign lobbies.

We have funneled in millions of foreign nationals to take the jobs, salaries, and futures that should belong to our own children—not because the foreign workers are smarter or more talented, but merely because they are cheaper and more compliant, and therefore preferable in the eyes of too many business elites who often see their own countrymen as an inconvenience.

While our trade agreements kneecapped blue-collar workers—a slow-moving disaster, decades in the making—abuse of the H-1B is kneecapping white-collar workers right before our eyes. For the tens of thousands of Americans who were forced to train their foreign H-1B replacements just to get their severance package, the fact that it was “legal” is little comfort.

For decades, the mainstream consensus on the Left and the Right alike seemed to be that America itself was just an “idea”—a vehicle for global liberalism. We were told that the entire meaning of America boiled down to a few lines in a poem on the Statue of Liberty, and five words about equality in the Declaration of Independence. Any other aspect of American identity was deemed to be illegitimate and immoral, poisoned by the evils of our ancestors.

The true meaning of America, they said, was liberalism, multiculturalism and endless immigration.

In a speech in 1998, Bill Clinton said that the continuous influx of immigrants was—and I quote—a “reminder that our America is not so much a place as a promise.”

Now, let me just say: I believe that our Founding Fathers were the most brilliant group of men to ever assemble in one room. Their ideas are central to who we are. You can’t understand America without understanding things like the freedom of speech, the right to self-defense, the ideals of independence, self-governance, and political liberty.

But these principles are not abstractions. They are living, breathing things—rooted in a people and embodied in a way of life. It’s only in that context that they become real.

Take a trip out to rural Missouri and spend a little time with the folks out there, and you’ll quickly realize that the Second Amendment isn’t a classroom theory, for them. It’s part of who they are.

If you imposed a carbon copy of the U.S. Constitution on Kazakhstan tomorrow, Kazakhstan wouldn’t magically become America. Because Kazakhstan isn’t filled with Americans. It’s filled with Kazakhstanis!

What makes America exceptional isn’t just that we committed ourselves to the principles of self-government. It’s that we, as a people, were actually capable of living them.

But the Left took these principles and drained them of all underlying substance, turning the American tradition into a deracinated ideological creed. To live up to that American creed, they told us, we had to transform America itself.

If America was a universal proposition, then everything we inherited from our specific Western heritage had to be abolished. So the statues come down. The names are changed. Yesterday’s heroes become today’s villains. The story of the nation has to be rewritten to align America with its true creed.

On the Right, the situation wasn’t all that different. The truth is, by the 1990s, too many on the Right had come to accept the same basic worldview as the liberal elites they claimed to oppose.

In foreign policy, trade, immigration and the domestic culture wars, too many conservatives defined the American identity as nothing more than an abstract and vaguely-defined proposition. Even if you didn’t want to immigrate here, you would be made to submit to that proposition anyway, via military crusades to bring Madisonian democracy to the furthest corners of the world.

For years, conservatives would talk as if the whole world were just Americans-in-waiting—“born American, but in the wrong place.” America was, as one neoconservative writer put it, “The First Universal Nation.”

That’s what set Donald Trump apart from the old conservatism and the old liberalism alike: He knows that America is not just an abstract “proposition,” but a nation and a people, with its own distinct history and heritage and interests.

His movement is the revolt of the real American nation. It’s a pitchfork revolution, driven by the millions of Americans who felt that they were turning into strangers in their own country.

They were the forgotten men and women, who wrapped themselves in our flag and drove hours to hear a real-estate tycoon from New York speak—because they knew he was speaking for them.

They were the Americans whose factories were gutted in the name of “free trade,” whose sons were sent to die in wars that served no American interest, whose neighborhoods were transformed beyond recognition by immigration.

They were the ones who worked the jobs, paid the taxes, fought the wars, and followed the rules that upheld the very system that attacked and dispossessed them—that mocked and smeared them as bigots and “deplorables,” even though it needed them to survive.

And yet, in spite of it all, they stubbornly refused to forget who they were. They were, as Barack Obama sneered, the “bitter clingers”—who still held to their guns, their religion and their memory of a country that once belonged to them.

These Americans had come to realize that their true adversary did not live in the faraway sands of some foreign nation, but in the halls of their own government. And in 2016, they discovered that millions of their fellow citizens had arrived at the same conclusion. In Donald Trump’s defiance, they recognized an echo of their own.

It is their interests that Trump spoke to in 2016, and it is their interests that he remains loyal to today. And it is their interests, their values, their lives that the American Right must defend, without apology or remorse, if it wants to have a viable future.

The Continental Army soldiers dying of frostbite at Valley Forge, the Pilgrims struggling to survive in the hard winter soil of Plymouth, the pioneers striking out from Missouri for the wild and dangerous frontier, the outnumbered Kentucky settlers repelling wave after wave of Indian war band attacks from behind their stockade walls—all of them would be astonished to hear that they were only fighting for a “proposition.”

They believed they were forging a nation—a homeland for themselves and their descendants. They fought, they bled, they struggled, they died for us. They built this country for us.

America, in all its glory, is their gift to us, handed down across the generations. It belongs to us. It’s our birthright, our heritage, our destiny.

If America is everything and everyone, then it is nothing and no one at all. But we know that’s not true.

America is not a “universal nation.” It is something distinctive, unique, and real—unlike any other place or people in the history of mankind.

Western civilization was defined by its restless, relentless, dynamic spirit—a drive to create, explore and discover that spurred the West to heights of political, intellectual and technological achievement unmatched by any other civilization in human history.

America was settled, founded and built by the most adventurous, the most courageous, the most curious and innovative and risk-taking sons and daughters of the West.

Our country is, in this important sense, the most essentially Western nation. For our settler ancestors, the American frontier stretched out as a horizon of infinite possibility. It was here, on this continent, that the West realized its destiny.

This, my friends, is why every great feat of the modern world bore American fingerprints.

It was an American who created the Morse telegraph—and later, the telephone—collapsing vast distances into a single instant.

It was an American who mapped the human genome, cracking the code of life itself.

It was an American who invented the microchip, the modern computer, and the internet, ushering in the digital age.

It was an American who gave the world the airplane. And 24 years later, it was an American (from Missouri, I might add) who first traversed the Atlantic Ocean in a single solo flight—a feat the world had dismissed as suicidal.

It was an American who broke the sound barrier, who split the atom, who built the first skyscraper.

It was an American who shattered all Earthly limits and planted the first human footprints on the moon.

It was an American—from Missouri, I might add again—who devised the Hubble Telescope and mapped the heavens.

This is who we are. We’re a nation of settlers, explorers, and pioneers—born on the ocean waters that carried the first ships to our shores and forged in the crucible of a wild frontier. Our people tamed a continent, built a civilization from the wilderness, and wrote our nation’s name in history.

We Americans are the sons and daughters of the Christian pilgrims that poured out from Europe’s shores to baptize a new world in their ancient faith. Our ancestors were driven here by destiny, possessed by urgent and fiery conviction, by burning belief, devoted to their cause and their God.

All nations die; most are quickly forgotten, confined to footnotes for the ages. But thousands of years from now, when we and our country are long gone, people will still know the name “America” because of what these Americans achieved.

The people who built our country were not villains. They were heroes. We can no longer apologize for who we are.

I’m a Missouri boy, born and raised. I’m from the state where Lewis and Clark launched their expedition. Where Jesse James lived and Daniel Boone died. The state that launched a thousand wagon trails, carrying American pioneers west to find their destiny.

They called St. Louis the “Gateway to the West.”

The frontier wasn’t a “legend” or a “myth” for folks where I’m from. It was real. It was in the names, the deeds, the land itself.

My ancestors arrived there from Germany in the 1840s, during the first real wave of new European settlers since Missouri became a state in 1821. Back then, Missouri was as far west as you could go.

Think about the kinds of people it takes to do that—to build a home at the edge of the known world. Those were the kinds of people our ancestors were.

The first settlers in my state were mostly Scots-Irish—a hard, proud, fiercely independent people, forged in the hills of Ulster and the backwoods of Appalachia, ideally suited to life on the edge of civilization. They were the ancestors—as it just so happens—of my friend and our vice president, JD Vance.

As the historian David McCullough writes, the Scots-Irish families that first settled Missouri “saw themselves as the true Americans”:

Their idol was Andrew Jackson, Old Hickory of Tennessee, ‘One-man-­with-­courage-­makes-­majority’ Jackson, the first president from west of the Alleghenies…

Their trust was in the Lord and common sense. That they and their forebears had survived at all in backwoods Kentucky—or earlier in upland Virginia and the Carolinas—was due primarily to ‘good, hard sense,’ as they said, and no end of hard work.

For some time now, we’ve been taught to be ashamed of these things that defined us—to treat our curiosity, adventurousness, and ambition as a stain on our moral conscience. We’ve been taught that, by settling this continent and building our home here, we committed a world-historical sin, and that we should rue the day that our forefathers arrived in North America, and condemn their vision, their strength, and their will as an expression of something perverse and evil.

We saw a funny little example of this just the other month.

The Department of Homeland Security’s Twitter account posted an image of the famous painting “American Progress”—one of the most iconic illustrations of Manifest Destiny, depicting settlers striding outward to the frontier, with Lady Columbia watching over them from above.

The reaction from the Left was swift and hysterical.

In the Washington Post, a Princeton history professor declared that the painting glorified “an American invasion of other people’s homelands.” The Independent reported that—according to the “experts”—the painting advanced a “mythic narrative” that “erased the reality” of American westward expansion. The LA Times speculated that it “might be… Nazi propaganda.”

Now, just as a matter of historical record, the Indians were perfectly capable of invading, killing and enslaving each other all on their own for centuries before we got here. They attacked, tortured, and brutalized our settlers, just as our settlers surely did the same to them.

When we carved out our Manifest Destiny on this continent, it was not because we were less morally righteous, but only because we had more sophisticated tools and methods. But that’s really beside the point.

For whatever human flaws one might point to, the American settling of the frontier was an expression of something deeper in the soul of our people. Most people in most places and times in human history lived by the laws of necessity—their thoughts and actions were all governed by mere utility, and nothing more. The value of a thing, for them, lay in what kind of immediate material benefit it could provide.

Men worked, fought, built and acted for purposes as narrow as the walls of their own towns and villages: to eat, to reproduce, to survive. They were not interested in knowing what might lie beyond the sunset. They lived, more or less, the exact same way as their ancestors had lived a thousand years before them.

That has never been true for us.

The American heritage is not a narrative of oppression and evil, but the unfolding story of our people’s pioneer spirit—a spirit that drives us to expand beyond limits, to assert ourselves upon the world. It is a spirit that began on the frontier, but it would soon go on to raise up great cities, cure diseases, discover distant galaxies, create marvels of technology and art, and forge new worlds in its image.

We’re not sorry. Why would we be sorry?

America is the proudest and most magnificent heritage ever known to man.

On July 4, 2020, as the George Floyd riots raged across our nation, President Trump traveled to Mount Rushmore to address the nation. On our nation’s anniversary, as anarchists looted and defaced and tore down statues and monuments all across the country, the president stood before the granite cliff face and declared: “This monument will never be desecrated, these heroes will never be defaced, their legacy will never, ever be destroyed.”

If you want to know who we are, look no further than the monument that stood behind him. Mount Rushmore took 14 years and hundreds of men to build. They climbed 700 stairs every day to be lowered down on ropes over the cliff face—sometimes in the blazing heat, sometimes in the bitter cold—to carve the faces of our heroes into the side of the great mountain.

There was no practical need for any of it. It’s just who we were. We were Americans. We did it because we could.

For decades, the people in power sought to turn our past into a repressed memory—something so awful that we would prefer to forget it altogether. They made self-hatred and shame our new civic religion.

Let me say this today, as clearly as I can: We are done being ashamed. We love our country, and we will never apologize for the great men who built it.

To transform a nation, you have to transform the way it understands itself.

In the French Revolution, the radicals abolished the old calendar and began the clock back over at Year One. The radicals of our time want to do the same.

It’s why they’re obsessed with controlling speech. They want to rewrite our language itself.

When they tear down our statues and monuments, mock our history, and insult our traditions, they’re attacking our future as well as our past. By changing the stories we tell about ourselves, they believe they can build a new America—with the new myths of a new people.

But America does not belong to them. It belongs to us. It’s our home. It’s a heritage entrusted to us by our ancestors. It is a way of life that is ours, and only ours, and if we disappear, then America, too, will cease to exist.

The sculptor who designed Mt. Rushmore intentionally left three extra inches of granite on the surface, so that natural erosion would gradually shape it into its final form over the next 30,000 years. What a confident testament to America.

He built it so that Americans thousands of years from now would still look in awe at the faces of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Roosevelt.

This fight is about whether our children will still have a country to call their own. It’s about whether America will remain what she was meant to be: The apex and the vanguard of Western civilization.

A strong, sovereign nation—not just an idea, but a home, belonging to a people, bound together by a common past and a shared destiny.

Thank you.

God bless you, and God bless the United States of America.

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