Does America Require an "Anglo-Protestant" Majority?

with Amy Wax

In this clip from my recent conversation with Amy Wax, she claims that the US must maintain an “Anglo-Protestant or pan-European” majority if it wants to ensure its continued success. The United States was largely founded by these groups, so, her argument goes, actively working to keep “Anglo-Protestants and pan-Europeans” in the majority may be necessary to preserve the institutions and way of life that define us as a nation.

One of the threats to those institutions and that way of life that Amy lists is immigration. But that makes little sense to me. If immigrants are coming here because they want the quality of life this country offers, why would we assume they would change the things that make it possible? If they’re coming here seeking safety from violence and government repression, a functional economy, more work at better pay, quality education, opportunities for social advancement, and all the individual freedoms guaranteed by our constitution, then it remains to be demonstrated that they would, en masse, try to undo those conditions once they establish themselves here.

I’m not saying such a change isn’t possible, nor am I saying that it couldn’t happen as an unintended consequence of large, unchecked influxes of migrant populations. But the claim that, aside from their historical origins, there is something inherently “Anglo-Protestant and pan-European” about our laws and institutions requires more evidence than I’ve seen. As I say below—and Amy agrees—South Korea has a capitalist, constitutional democracy much like our own. South Korea has its problems, just as we do. But you can’t look at its progress from a war-torn, recently colonized nation in the 1950s to a global economic and cultural power in the 2020s without giving enormous credit to its people’s capacity to adopt and adapt the West’s most successful institutions.

That doesn’t mean we should heedlessly fling open our borders to whoever feels like coming—we should not. Yet we’ve seen waves of immigration from Italy and Ireland and Asia and the Jewish diaspora, each of which provoked much panic about the “unassimilable” nature of these groups. The children and grandchildren of these immigrants became as American as any sixth-generation Anglo-Protestant. Did they require the specific presence of an Anglo-Protestant majority to discipline them into Americanness? Or were they following laws, rules, institutions, and cultural norms whose success derives from the pragmatic value of their practice rather than their ethnic origin? I’m open to debate on the issue, but it seems pretty clear to me that it’s the latter.

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This is a clip from the episode that went out to paying subscribers on Monday. To get access to the full episode, as well as an ad-free podcast feed, Q&As, and other exclusive content and benefits, click below.

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AMY WAX: I have said to my students, and they listen with great curiosity, I think our country is better off if we have one dominant demographic, one dominant culture. That doesn't mean we persecute and oppress people who don't belong to it, but I think they need to be in the minority. And that dominant culture, I said, needs to be strongly Anglo-Protestant or pan-European, because those are the people that created this country. Their values, their traditions, their institutions, their understandings and commitments created this country and made it great.

GLENN LOURY: Anglo-Protestant?

Yes. Where do you think we come from?

Who are “we”? But okay. I accept that the American civilization rests on a certain historical and cultural foundation. I accept that.

And you know what? Students from all around the world say you're right.

But we're in the twenty-first century, we're 330 million people, and we are, as you are loathe to put it, diverse. Ratifying this ethnocentric, hierarchical structure, people are going to say that's racist, Amy. No wonder they call you a racist. I don't know how to come to terms with that.

You know, here's the thing. Just slap the label “racist” on it and that's the end, right? And every time people call me a racist and I say, can you define that term for me? Can you tell me what makes [one] a racist? And they can't do it.

My view is, let's zoom past this labeling, which is a showstopper, and ask ourselves, is this a good policy? Is this a good philosophy? And when I put it to students from all around the world, actually—Asian students, Hispanic students, the students who sign up for my classes, who are remarkably diverse, actually—and they hear it. I say, here's the thing, people from all around the world want to come here because of that culture. They admire that culture. They look up to that culture. It's produced prosperity. It's produced a stable republic. It's produced all sorts of goods. Why would you want to come in and destroy it? That's crazy.

Hold on, I want to flesh out that argument a little bit. So the historical fact that I'm gonna stipulate, that there's a cultural origin, historically, in terms of the evolution of the American civilization and it's been successful in prosperity and maintenance of order, et cetera. I stipulate that.

The historical fact redounds to a kind of causal connection—it was because of that culture that this prosperity and stability issue—which hasn't been argued for. And the further assumption that the people are attracted to the country because of the culture, even though they are going to, if they come in from certain origins, undermine it and destroy it and we should be alert to that, assumes that people are not coming for the prosperity as opposed to coming for the cultural historical roots of the prosperity. Something like that.

Do you see what I'm getting at? Anglo-Protestant? Come on, Amy. That's so late-nineteenth century.

So what? People have said to me, the reason that people flock to “white-controlled countries,” like Northern Europe or the Anglosphere or the United States—a very small part of the globe, Glenn. A tiny part of the globe. And the rest is, I will just say, variable degrees of mess. People are not flocking to Zimbabwe, they are not flocking to Venezuela, they are not going on vacation in Haiti. They're not.

I understand that some nations have failed. I like this book by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, Why Nations Fail. The importance of institutions. There's this whole literature in economics, I'm sure you're familiar with it, and I appreciate the fact that there's a magic sauce kind of thing in North and Northwestern Europe and think the success that we're seeing in the Far East in China and so on is indicative of something.

They're doing well.

I've been to Korea. North Korea and South Korea, the differences are very stark, and they're not coming from nowhere. They're coming from the institutions. And those institutions are Western in the origins that you stipulate. I agree with that.

They've adopted, too, a lot of our best practices. But let me just finish my thoughts here. The answer I get is they come because of our wealth because of our prosperity. And I said here's the problem with that answer. Where does our wealth and our prosperity come from? You can't just, stipulate that this fell from the sky and had nothing to do with how we behave, our high social trust, our practices, our understandings, our respect for property, for the rule of law, for various traditions, for the slow evolution of cautious democracy—you just go on and on—of what we've inherited through our founders and say, look, we should not treat these people as villains. We should respect our origins and try to preserve, protect, and defend those.

But what does that entail? That entails being very cautious about being flooded by other cultures, people from other places.

Let me ask you a question. Do you see evidence of the degradation of American culture that you think that you can trace to the difference in the cultural beliefs of immigrant migrant populations as compared to the incumbent population, where they're, as it were, pulling down the average?

Let me put it this way: it's a contributor, but it's working in unholy alliance with certain tendencies in far-left progressivism. So when you put together homegrown erosion, which is undeniably there, the turning against our very origins, our very precepts, that has occurred, no question about it.

We have an enormous amount of self-hatred coming from our own population. But you put that together with the cult of multiculturalism, which is fueled by bringing in people from very variable cultures, some of which are quite antithetical to our founding culture, and you've got a very bad situation here.

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