Is America a nation founded on a creed or on British stock and culture?

G.K. Chesterton said in 1921

America is the only nation in the world that is founded on a creed. 

The US's House Speaker Paul Ryan, a Republican, thinks so. He told interns in Congress this week that

America is the only nation founded on an idea not on an identity.

But is that right? Forty years after the American declaration of independence the South American republics were founded by deists and Freemasons based on the same creed. The
outcome was very different.

I blogged recently about the rise of 'proposition nations' based on values and how there are huge pressures on European countries to move from being ethnic states to being proposition nations, but many Americans argue that they are not a proposition nation either. The wonderful, formerly British, journalist, John O'Sullivan ‏whom I read each morning in the Daily Telegraph over breakfast in my teens, pointed out just now on Twitter 

several nations founded on an idea. USSR for instance, It's just that they tend not to stay around.

This discussion has been going on for some time in America. You may want to pay 
US ¢25 and read this article. For free you can read the speech another ex-British journalist, John Derbyshire, was prevented from giving last month at Williams College in Massachusetts on ”The National Question: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity In the 21st Century”. The students had invited him to be part of their “Uncomfortable Learning” speaker series of talks, talks designed to bring controversial viewpoints to the campus. It wasn't the students who prevented him doing so, as has happened with a number of speakers recently in American and English universities, including at Williams. This order came from the college president.

The truth is that America, meaning the thirteen colonies that became the USA, was a community of mostly British settlers, some owning African slaves, united by ethnic identity and British culture. Americans, those on the winning side in the Revolutionary War, adopted a creed as rhetoric which then refined and moulded them. 

This creed was not their invention. It consisted of British Whig ideas and eighteenth century Britain's idea of being a Protestant nation with a divine mission. George Washington has been aptly called a great Englishman, though I would call him a traitor. Benjamin Franklin was another Englishman, who complained about swarthy, stupid German settlers as being unused to freedom and speaking English with a thick accent.

I used to think Ann Coulter less a serious commentator than a sort of political comedian and what Romanians call a terebalista, someone trying to shock for the sake of it, but in the last few years she has become one of the people talking most interestingly about mass migrations from the poor to the rich world. In this interesting interview she said

Americans seem to be under the impression that they don’t have a country at all, but rather live in something like the international waiting room in JFK Airport. America is not a ‘nation of immigrants’, it is not ‘an idea’, it was never ‘diverse’ and ‘diversity’ is a catastrophe. If America were an idea, every country on earth could be America.

Her point is that America before 1965 was not very diverse. As she wrote in 'Adios, America',

Even as late as 1990 — a quarter century into Teddy Kennedy’s scheme to remake the nation — half of the American population traced its roots to the black and white populace of 1790.

And

Nearly the entire white population of America from 1600 to 1970 came from a geographic area of the world about twice the size of Texas. The entire black population came from an area of West Africa about the size of Florida.

Europe is bigger than twice the size of Texas and not all slaves came from Benin but her general point holds good that most Americans fell into two communities, one of European descent and the other of West African descent. 

It is interesting and surprising that apart from Ann Coulter, Pat Buchanan and Paul Gottfried very very few American commentators are talking about legal immigration. America is a country that takes more immigrants than any other country and since 1970 90% of them have been from the Third World. 

Three years ago it was reported that the majority of babies born in the USA were non-white and in a decade or two the majority of Americans will be non-white. This is the elephant in the drawing-room that is not discussed when illegal immigrants are. It's the reason why many Americans, particularly older ones and poorer ones, are drawn to Donald Trump. This includes some black Americans (many or most American blacks feel threatened by and dislike immigration). The truth is that Donald Trump, who in many ways is a left-of-centre candidate, and Hillary Clinton are competing for working class votes.

On the other hand perhaps the new Americans, whether Mexican or Muslim, will be as much Americans as the WASPs. Not knowing America (except for five hours in Buffalo in 1980) I am not in a position to say. G.K. Chesterton in 1921 again.

The Americans are very patriotic, and wish to make their new citizens patriotic Americans. But it is the idea of making a new nation literally out of any old nation that comes along. In a word, what is unique is not America but what is called Americanisation. We understand nothing till we understand the amazing ambition to Americanise the Kamskatkan and the Hairy Ainu. We are not trying to Anglicise thousand of French cooks or Italian organ-grinders. France is not trying to Gallicise thousands of English trippers or German prisoners of war. America is the only place in the world where this process, healthy or unhealthy, possible or impossible, is going on. And the process, as I have pointed out, is not internationalisation. It would be truer to say it is the nationalisation of the internationalised. It is making a home out of vagabonds and a nation out of exiles.

Chesterton was writing three years before the Immigration Act 1924 excluded Kamskatkans and Hairy Ainus, sharply reducing East European and stopping Asian and African immigration for forty years.

An American clergyman in Jerusalem told me that America always goes to extremes and will swing from extreme political correctness to racism. I must say I see no sign of that and don't expect the diversity ideology to weaken its grip in the next twenty years. But then in 1985 I didn't expect the Cold War to end for decades. Perhaps I am wrong and Donald Trump's popularity, though he is no racist, might be the beginning of a change in attitudes.