Ep 144 - Back Porch Files: Who Decides Who's American?

When I was a kid, Schoolhouse Rock taught me that America was a melting pot—a place where people from different backgrounds, cultures, and religions came together to create something extraordinary. I believed that was what America was supposed to be. And perhaps naively, I assumed most Americans believed it, too. Fifty years later, I'm increasingly struck by how many people seem determined to decide which of their fellow citizens deserve a place in that pot. 

America’s strength comes from our differences, not from letting someone else decide who belongs.

At a Donald Trump rally in Port Huron, Michigan, on October 25, David Beamer, the father of Flight 93 hero Todd Beamer, offered his assessment of the two candidates running for the United States Senate. Republican Mike Rogers, he declared, was an American. Democrat Abdul El-Sayed, who was born in Michigan, apparently didn't qualify. Beamer acknowledged El-Sayed's citizenship before announcing, “A birth certificate doesn't make you an American.”

He went further, describing El-Sayed's political views as anti-American and suggesting that he had chosen not to be an American at all. Whatever one thinks of El-Sayed's political positions, there's a significant difference between arguing that someone has bad ideas and declaring that the person holding those ideas doesn't belong to the country.

And that raises a fairly obvious question. Who the hell gets to decide?

The Constitution establishes the legal framework for citizenship. We have laws governing birthright citizenship and naturalization. None of them require the approval of a political party, a religious organization, or somebody standing behind a podium at a campaign rally. Yet some people seem convinced that citizenship is merely the first step, followed by some undefined examination of whether you're sufficiently American.

What makes that particularly troubling is that the examination never seems to have an answer key.

The America I Grew Up Believing In

I grew up watching Schoolhouse Rock. Like a lot of kids in the seventies, I learned about conjunctions, the legislative process, and American history through catchy little cartoons that somehow managed to make education entertaining. But one song stayed with me more than most: “The Great American Melting Pot.”

It presented America as a place where people brought different languages, traditions, religions, and customs, and together created a shared national identity. It was an optimistic lesson, and certainly an incomplete one. The cartoon didn't dwell on slavery, the dispossession of Native Americans, or the ugly discrimination that accompanied so much of our immigration history. But it taught an ideal that I still consider worth pursuing.

And there's something about that melting-pot metaphor I've come to appreciate even more as an adult. The song describes America as a recipe. Think about what that actually means.

When you make a good soup or stew, the ingredients contribute different things. The potatoes, onions, carrots, meat, and seasonings all bring something to the finished dish. Their flavors mingle. They influence one another. Together, they create something none of them could have produced alone.

Now imagine insisting that every ingredient added to the pot must become exactly like the first one. Congratulations. You've made an enormous pot of potatoes. Bon appétit.

That's why the demand for total cultural assimilation makes so little sense to me. A shared society needs common laws, civic responsibilities, and mutual respect. But it doesn't require everyone to abandon the qualities that make them different. Cultural exchange is a two-way process, and those differences can enrich the society we share.

We've Been Having This Argument for Centuries

Unfortunately, the impulse to decide who qualifies as a real American is almost as old as the country itself.

Benjamin Franklin complained about German immigrants in colonial Pennsylvania, worrying that their language and customs would threaten the character of the colony. In the nineteenth century, Irish Catholics faced hostility from Americans who questioned whether Catholicism was compatible with loyalty to the country. The Know Nothing movement turned that suspicion into a political platform.

The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 transformed prejudice into federal immigration restrictions. During World War II, the United States incarcerated approximately 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry, most of whom were American citizens. And Black Americans spent generations fighting for rights that citizenship was supposed to guarantee.

These experiences weren't identical. But they reveal a recurring willingness to draw boundaries around national belonging, often according to ancestry, religion, or race.

What's remarkable is how many communities once regarded as threatening outsiders eventually became ordinary, unquestioned parts of American society. It makes you wonder how many generations a family must live here before nobody asks whether they really belong.

Patriotism Isn't Obedience

I've never believed patriotism is measured by how loudly someone proclaims their love of country, how many flags they display, or how enthusiastically they applaud a president.

To me, patriotism means a commitment to constitutional principles and to one another. All of us. Including the Americans whose politics, religions, and opinions differ profoundly from our own.

That means criticizing government policies isn't inherently unpatriotic. Protest can be patriotic. Demanding reform can be patriotic. The country itself emerged from people challenging established political authority, which makes the suggestion that dissent is somehow un-American particularly difficult to understand.

And the reverse matters just as much. Disagreeing with a president doesn't automatically make someone disloyal. Agreeing with him doesn't automatically make someone patriotic. Obedience and patriotism are not synonyms.

Perhaps we spend too much time arguing over one supposedly definitive set of American beliefs. Maybe what America stands for, at its best, is pluralism itself. The idea that people with different backgrounds and convictions can share a constitutional society without being required to think alike.

Of course, pluralism presents a challenge. What happens when someone believes other people shouldn't enjoy the same freedoms? Philosopher Karl Popper addressed that problem in his Paradox of Tolerance. A society that tolerates absolutely everything, including efforts to destroy tolerance itself, can ultimately undermine its own freedoms.

That doesn't mean every objectionable opinion should be silenced. It means respecting someone's right to hold a belief doesn't require accepting attempts to deny fundamental rights to others. We can recognize that people with exclusionary beliefs are Americans while challenging efforts to turn those beliefs into persecution or discrimination.

The Political Convenience of Calling Someone Un-American

There's another aspect of this that I find particularly objectionable: the political usefulness of accusing somebody of not being a real American.

If a politician claims an opponent's tax proposal will hurt working families, voters can examine the proposal. If somebody argues that a candidate's healthcare plan will cost too much, we can debate the numbers. Those claims have substance that can be investigated.

But declare that your opponent isn't a real American, and the whole conversation changes.

You don't necessarily have to define the accusation. Your audience can do that for you. One listener might hear socialist. Another might hear Muslim. Someone else might think immigrant, liberal, or simply somebody who doesn't share their values. The speaker can leave the meaning vague while each listener supplies an interpretation.

And how is the accused supposed to respond? A birth certificate? A passport? Perhaps a signed affidavit from a bald eagle?

That's what makes the accusation so convenient. The person making it can avoid establishing any consistent standard, while the person receiving it is expected to prove something that hasn't even been defined.

Donald Trump has repeatedly used accusations concerning loyalty and patriotism against political opponents. In 2018, he characterized Democrats' failure to applaud during his State of the Union address as un-American and invoked treason. At the recent Michigan rally, both Trump and Beamer attacked El-Sayed's loyalty and national identity while campaigning against him.

I can't establish what every politician privately believes when using this rhetoric. Some may be entirely sincere. Others may recognize its political advantages. But the consequences of the accusation don't depend entirely on whether it's sincere or calculated.

When voters are worried about groceries, housing, healthcare, gasoline, tariffs, and foreign policy, politicians ought to be prepared to defend their records and explain their proposals. Suggesting an opponent isn't a genuine American offers a way to change the subject from what that person believes to whether that person belongs.

And in my view, using somebody's national identity as electoral rage-bait is a particularly craven substitute for substantive political debate.

The Country Belongs to All of Us

The danger goes beyond a candidate losing votes because of an ugly accusation. When we normalize the idea that some citizens are less American than others, we encourage people to see their fellow citizens as outsiders whose membership in the national community is conditional.

Social exclusion isn't the same thing as losing legal citizenship. But rhetoric can influence the way people understand one another's rights, legitimacy, and place in society. History provides plenty of reasons to take that possibility seriously.

And here's something I think is essential to remember: the principle has to work in both directions. Someone whose politics I find appalling doesn't stop being American. Someone who rejects pluralism doesn't lose their citizenship. Their ideas can be challenged, their conduct criticized, and their policies opposed. But their belonging cannot depend upon my approval any more than mine can depend upon theirs.

Which brings me back to that Schoolhouse Rock cartoon I watched as a kid.

Maybe the America it portrayed never fully existed. Certainly, our history has been far more complicated, and often much uglier, than a three-minute children's song could explain. But I refuse to believe that an ideal loses its value simply because a country has repeatedly failed to live up to it.

I still believe America can be a place where people of different backgrounds, religions, cultures, and political beliefs create something worthwhile together. Not because we agree on everything. Not because we surrender everything that makes us different. But because we recognize that the country belongs to all of us.

That melting-pot recipe was never about making every ingredient the same. It was about what those different ingredients could create together.

And if somebody thinks they get to decide which Americans belong in the pot, I'd suggest they've fundamentally misunderstood the recipe.

SOURCES

David Beamer's remarks about Abdul El-Sayed at Trump's October 25, 2026, Michigan rally — https://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/politics/trump-islamophobic-rhetoric-michigan-rally/4485198/

Full transcript of Trump's October 25, 2026, Port Huron rally, including David Beamer's remarks — https://rollcall.com/factbase/trump/transcript/donald-trump-speech-political-rally-port-huron-michigan-october-25-2026/

Schoolhouse Rock, “The Great American Melting Pot” — Song history and lyrics — https://www.schoolhouserock.tv/Great.html

Benjamin Franklin's 1751 writings on immigration and German settlers — https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/franklin-the-autobiography-and-other-writings-on-politics-economics-and-virtue/observations-concerning-the-increase-of-mankind-peopling-of-countries-c-1751/BEB22816F701F43A90B4DA1B6A13B0F2

Benjamin Franklin's 1753 criticism of German immigrants in Pennsylvania — https://www.huntington.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/lhthpennsylvania.pdf

Library of Congress — Anti-Irish and anti-Catholic discrimination in American history — https://www.loc.gov/classroom-materials/immigration/irish/religious-conflict-and-discrimination/

Smithsonian Institution — The Know Nothing Party and anti-immigrant politics — https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/immigrants-conspiracies-and-secret-society-launched-american-nativism-180961915/

National Archives — Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 — https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/chinese-exclusion-act

National Park Service — Japanese American incarceration during World War II — https://www.nps.gov/articles/japanese-american-incarceration-archeology.htm

National Archives — Fourteenth Amendment, citizenship, and equal protection — https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/14th-amendment

National Archives — United States Constitution and its amendments — https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs

Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies — The Paradox of Tolerance — https://www.hallofpeople.com/en/book-excerpts.php?id=325

Donald Trump's 2018 remarks calling Democrats “un-American” for not applauding — https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-to-visit-ohio-company-that-gave-out-1000-bonuses-following-tax-overhaul/2018/02/05/a2cec73c-0a91-11e8-8b0d-891602206fb7_story.html