American Identity
Americans
This is the start of a three part series on American identity.
I break this down into three layers: Americans, Americanism, and Americanness. The first layer tackles the body, the second focuses on the American mind, and the third hones in on the unique behavior emanating from the combination of the two.
Before diving in, I want to make a few things clear. Every nation on earth has a number of similarities and overlaps. Good and bad people. Smart and stupid people. Soldiers, merchants, priests, and laborers. Mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, cousins, friends, etc. Just like human beings have an incredibly similar substrate, every nation is remarkably similar. But, this is about Identity, which is constructed out of differentiation. You can only identify by focusing on how it differentiates itself. This is how classification works. It does not remove the similarities nor does it confer complete separation. America is both remarkably similar and very different to every other nation, and for that matter, so is every other nation.
Since we are embodied beings, we must start with the body politic of Americans. The American population is not incidental to American civilization. It is the hardware our OS runs on. Some OS’ are restricted to only one or a few types of hardware, some are more flexible, but the hardware any of them run on isn’t infinitely arbitrary. There is a limit. Change the hardware enough and you’ll eventually need a new OS.
Four Phases
The founding population was overwhelmingly from the British Isles with some northwest European minorities, Germans, Dutch, French, and Irish, sprinkled in the mix. In 1790, close to 90% of the population of the Constitutional United States was from the British Isles, the rest being an assortment of the aforementioned Northwest European peoples.
The next phase of American ethnogenesis expanded the scale of these minority populations, especially the German and Irish portions.The British supermajority had been reduced to a majority and high levels of intermarriage and cross ethnic reproduction created a highly integrated anglo-celt-germanic admixture. By the late 19th century, the United States became decidedly Northwest European overlaid on top of unmistakenly English core.
Running alongside this Northwest European admixture, on a separate track, was the African American population. Neither fully inside nor outside the assimilation sequence, shaped simultaneously by coercive exclusion, cultural prejudice, and conscious self-alienation and self-differentiation. They constitute a somewhat separate ethno-genesis that till this day has been difficult to fully assimilate: a semi-parallel society within the civilization.
From the late 19th century until the mid 1920s massive waves of Central, Southern, and Eastern European immigration hit the founding baseline like a solvent. Italians, Poles, Jews, Greeks, Slavs, and more created a Pan-European American identity.
The third phase of American ethnogenesis began in 1965 and continues today. The Pan-European baseline became the core for an eclectic mix of pan-global inputs to assimilate into: Latin American, Asian (West & East), and African. The Pan-European admixture is the current majority but the scale of pan-global inputs will continue to dilute its demographic weight.
As our population composition has evolved, it has indelibly altered the “hardware” upon which our institutional and cultural operating systems run on. This ongoing process of admixture and movement necessarily manifests in mild, and in some ways, profound consequences.
Health
Multi-generational genetic admixtures, within a genetically compatible range, produces a documented biological benefit called heterosis. Relatively more inbred populations accumulate more deleterious recessive alleles over time; outbreeding masks them. The healthy copy from one parent suppresses the damaged copy from the other. Applied to American ethnogenesis, four centuries of compounding pan-European and then global admixture might have produced a modest genetic dividend: a population carrying a lower expressed burden of recessive genetic disorders.
While more complex traits outside of immunological plasticity are governed by thousands of genes, large-scale genomic studies have shown that reducing a population’s relative inbreeding acts as a rising tide for general polygenic fitness, marginally shifting the entire baseline of an admixed population towards improvements in some physical traits like height, cognition, metabolism, as well as cardiovascular and lung function.
However, capturing these benefits do not require global or cross-continental mixing. Over 90% of the advantage is achieved simply by avoiding close inbreeding; once two parents are merely unrelated within a standard, open regional population, the genomic masking of harmful traits and the prospect of improved polygenic fitness is close to maxed out, yielding steep diminishing returns for any wider outcrossing.
Although it is true that greater levels of outbreeding can reduce recessive genetic disorders and improve polygenic fitness, this is most true in comparison to populations with high degrees of genetic isolation and inbreeding. The founding population of the United States, with its strong social and legal taboos against incest, in combination with its NW European admixture, already had enough heterogeneity within it to capture most of these benefits. Later admixtures might have nudged it very slightly in the “improved” direction but this is impossible to prove and whatever the level of improvement was, if there was any, might have been completely inconsequential in biological function at scale. But, what is also true, high levels of heterogeneity from immigration did not have any notable deleterious biological effects.
Zōon Logon Echon & Zōon Politikon
Raw physical fitness is important but the most consequential dimension of human fitness is cognitive capacity. Aristotle distinguished human beings from the rest of the animal kingdom via man’s rational faculties and political orientation: zōon logon echon and zōon politikon. Human beings could deliberate individually and communally to solve problems and coordinate at scale, over long time spans and distances. It shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that populations with higher levels of cognitive capacity can solve harder problems involving more people over great expanses of space and time.
Garret Jones’ Hive Mind explores this in rigorous detail. The book claims that a nation’s average IQ is multiple times more important for the nation’s prosperity than an individual’s IQ is for their own prosperity, which is already substantial. According to Jones’ work, collective IQ non-linearly improves a country’s fortunes. Intelligence operates as a network effect on institutional quality. Jones argues there are four different channels through which intelligence manifests in social outcomes: intelligence is associated with patience leading to behaviors like higher savings rates; greater levels of cooperation (predicts greater pro-social behavior in public goods and prisoner’s dilemma games); creation and competent use of high-value production technologies; and stronger support for market-oriented institutions.
The late 18th-century American population, composed largely of genetic stock from the British Isles and some NW minorities, likely operated with an average cognitive profile in a speculative range of roughly 85–95 on modern scales, centered around the high 80s to low 90s. Early German immigrants were frequently described as hardworking and skilled while Irish immigrants faced far harsher stereotypes that portrayed them as less intelligent, impulsive, and unfit for self-government.
These stereotypes largely track the levels of achievement and social dysfunction in these groups. German immigrants were much more likely to become middle class, successful farmers and entrepreneurs, and hold patents. The Irish were much more likely to be impoverished and engage in criminality. A funny neo-nativist line on this is “It’s easy to hate the Somalians but do you have the courage to hate the Irish?”
Obviously differences within demographic groups can be vast. There were very successful Irish individuals and families as well as struggling, anti-social Germans. But the aggregate pattern is nonetheless true. What both supplied was the population scale needed to rapidly industrialize and populate the vast frontier.
Post-Civil-War America had a pseudo-immigrant wave that was non-geographic. The incorporation of former slaves into the political body was extremely difficult for both American society, especially the devastated South, and former slaves to adjust to. A combination of systemic legal and cultural discrimination, low cultural capital, and relatively lower cognitive capacity made life extremely difficult for most freed slaves. There political incorporation gave the United States a fresh wave of labor that could shift into industrial development and away from agrarian interests while also opening up a new pool of outlier talent to be incorporated into the talent pool of the United States. After former slaves’ incorporation, the next big waves of immigration primarily came from Southern and Eastern Europe.
By the early 20th century, the first quantitative testing indicated that more recent Southern and Eastern European arrivals tended to score lower than native-born Americans, with the exception of Ashkenazi Jews, with noticeable improvement tied to longer time in the country. Post-1965 immigration brought sharper contrasts: East and South Asian streams often performed strongly, reflecting high educational selection, while Latin American inflows showed lower averages that narrowed only partially across generations. These differences track variations in source-country human capital and the degree of positive selection among migrants, with generational gains reflecting both acculturation and the ongoing operation of the Flynn effect. Although high numbers of immigrants came in that lowered the average cognitive capacity of the nation, the US was still remarkably successful in attracting, unearthing, and empowering outlier talent to invent, found, discover, and lead. complementing its own native outliers.
This broad outline of different waves of new groups I give, strongly tracks the geography of average IQ in the United States. The states with the highest percentage of people with northwest european admixture, the upper northeast, midwest, and northwest, tend to have the highest average IQs. The lowest tier tend to be former slave states and border states with a lot of latin american immigration. However, some states closer to the general American average host a large amount of outlier talent, native and immigrant talent. Places like California, Texas, New York, and Florida have attracted a lot of outlier talent domestically and internationally, helping them become powerful socio-economic engines, even though the average cognitive capacity in their states are middling. My unscientific guess for why this is the case is these are generally states people want to live in, especially native outlier talent, and they attract and recruit their immigrant compatriots to join, lead, and/or assist them.
This barbell of high levels of immigration that lowers the overall average cognitive capacity and high levels of outlier talent correspond nicely to the changes and continuities we see in the different channels Jones identifies. On the one hand, our ability to create and manage complex techno-economic production has remained extremely strong. However, it’s widely acknowledged by many that, across the ideological spectrum, our institutions and public spaces have degraded while markers of patience like savings rates have plummeted. Banana Republic is a pejorative used by both political polarities to describe the increasing dysfunctional tendencies, rhetoric, and aesthetics of the United States. However, only one side has a strong and simple, but highly uncomfortable answer, as to why this is the case.
Neo-America
The ethnogenesis of the next American century is already underway. The two big features of this change will be the reduction of the demographic weight of the pan-european (white) population without a transfer of weight to some other already defined group, but rather the bulk of the transfer will be to the steady rise of a loosely defined multi-racial group, the majority of which will be half white and/or some fraction white. If we project these trends further, to our next 250 years, by 2276 the multi-racial population will be the clear majority of “Americans”. The majority of Americans will genetically look like the composite of today’s more racially defined composite meta-American. Half-ish white with a large mix of pan-global inputs.
Ironically, a more restrictive immigration policy over the next 100 & 250 years achieves the “Melting Pot” ideal faster than a policy that allows for uninterrupted high flows.
Continuous high immigration replenishes the United States with distinct categories of race and nationality. A more restrictionist regime, by contrast, allows the existing population to organically churn across generations without as many new entrants who revitalize feelings of racial distinctions. This gradual accumulation of generational inter-marriage and cultural assimilation creates the ground for the production of a more homogenous, multi-generationally mixed population where modern distinctions have slowly, voluntarily, and organically dissolved into a Neo-American lineage by 2276.
Large, continuous immigration flows seed the ground for further racial balkanization, inter-racial conflict, and revitalizing taboos around miscegenation. Immigration proponents point to the US’s long history of successful immigration. Like many generalizations this is partially true with the caveat of it completely white-washing the incredible multi-dimensional stresses this put on the social fabric which led to various curtailments and shut downs of these flows that allowed the political body to fully incorporate the newcomers.
Immigration proponents who want to make the United States a more diverse place should take the win; they already won by a substantial margin. It is in their interest to concede ground to the neo-nativist faction, if they value a socially coherent, high functioning, United States. If they genuinely want to create more racial conflict, social tension, and institutional breakdown then I guess they should continue to advocate for large continuous flows in perpetuity.
Neo-nativists should be ok with the continued incorporation of international immigration that is truly outlier talent. Not above average, but truly gifted people. By definition this is extremely rare within any population and the network effects of adding more to your own native crop has an exponential character to it. The United States can continue leading the world via techno-economic dynamism, which provide large and broad benefits throughout society.
The Verdict
American genetic identity is defined by the cooperation and tension between strong continuity and rapid change. There is an identifiable core, english and northwest european, that has remained a persistent center of American identity, while new peripheral waves are layered on top to form something adjacent but novel.