Amid the pomp, circumstance, and occasional rhetorical infelicities of King Charles’s welcome to the White House on Tuesday, President Donald Trump delivered vitally important truths about America’s roots in British culture.
Trump said, “The American patriots who pledged their lives to independence in 1776 were the heirs of a majestic inheritance. … In recent years, we’ve often heard it said that America is merely an idea, but the cause of freedom did not simply appear as an intellectual invention in 1776. The American founding was the culmination of hundreds of years of thought, struggle, sweat, blood, and sacrifice on both sides of the Atlantic. … Fate drew a long arc from the meadow at Runnymede to the streets of Philadelphia that ran through the lives of people born and bred on the British code that no man should be denied either justice or right.”
This passage and the rest of the speech had several purposes, one being to overcome the seeming oddity of the king joining celebrations of America’s decision 250 years ago to cut its connection to the crown that Charles III now wears. Trump’s narrative of a shared political philosophy and culture built over centuries underscores the fact that the U.S.’s founding was not just a break but also, in an important sense, a continuation and perfection of ideas and rights first codified in the Magna Carta, signed by King John at Runnymede in 1215.
King Charles’s visit is also important to Britain as a much-needed four-day diplomatic blitz to repair the “special relationship” that has been left in tatters by London’s obstruction and criticism of the U.S. war against Iran, and before by Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s grotesque recognition of Palestinian statehood at the precise moment when the United States was pressing Hamas terrorists toward a peace deal with Israel.
But above and beneath these immediate diplomatic purposes, there was something much bigger. Trump used the king’s visit to push back against history-denying multicultural fantasies about where the U.S. comes from, what it stands for, and what it means.
The words quoted above were part of a theme underlining the fact that America’s animating ideas and the dignified traditional character of its people did not simply appear out of thin air 250 years ago. They did not burst into life as though by spontaneous combustion. They came from a specific culture and history and could not have come from anywhere else.
That culture and that history are British, and more particularly English. They are not equally Mexican, Somali, Nigerian, Chinese, or Indian. They are not alien. They are not multicultural. They are our inheritance from Britain — ideas and traditions derived from struggles among a specific people who inhabited those islands on the northwestern edge of Europe.
These facts have been denied, fudged, and deprecated for decades as supposedly racist by the progressive Left and even by many notional conservatives who promote the idea that the U.S. is merely a “propositional nation.” By this, they mean that the U.S. is somehow a free-floating set of ideas and that its particular history and common culture are irrelevant. This is a fiction crucial to multiculturalists, who want to expunge America’s European heritage and pretend that other ethnic groups from scattered lands around the world were just as important in its creation and that their ideas and values are not largely extrinsic to our great national experiment and its success.
In this campaign of national erosion, there is a deceitful effort to blur the distinction between two separate things. Yes, it is true that anyone can become an American, but it is not true that they can become American in any profound and moral sense merely by taking the citizenship oath and obtaining a passport. To be fully American means accepting this nation’s values and modes of conduct, which have come to us through generations from our British forebears. It means dropping much of what one was before being American in order to become what we are. It means assimilating.
King Charles differed from this in his tone with the allusions in his speech to Congress on Tuesday afternoon. Although he spoke of the long-shared history of the U.S. and United Kingdom, as Trump did, he glossed over the implications of this fact with a multicultural varnish about “diversity” being our shared strength.
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But diversity is not unity. Unity comes not to a nation fissured by many cultures, as multiculturalists insist, but from a shared culture to which all the people of a nation subscribe. This used to be understood, and it was once reflected in the aspirations of immigrants themselves as much as in the demands made of them by this host nation.
A nation can only be strong if its people subscribe to a single unifying culture. That culture has its roots in Britain. Cut those roots, dispense with the culture and character that we inherited from Anglo-Americans who made this country, and the country itself will wither and fade.