A newly published essay in The Federalist is escalating an intramural fight on the right over who counts as an American — and whether the country owes a particular debt to the descendants of its earliest settlers. The piece, pegged to a viral social media post from a Texas Republican official, takes direct aim at National Review writer Dan McLaughlin for calling the concept of “Heritage Americans” massively overrated and counterproductive.
The Federalist essayist — who describes themselves as a proud Heritage American and addresses McLaughlin by his first name throughout — argues that the same logic conservatives once used to defend business owners against Barack Obama’s “you didn’t build that” line ought to apply to families that cleared land, founded towns, established churches and built institutions across generations.
“Acknowledging that debt simply means giving the people who built and have preserved the country the credit that McLaughlin once insisted successful builders deserve,” the author writes.
The Post That Started the Fight
The broader argument was touched off, according to the essay, by Texas Railroad Commission nominee Bo French, who posted a photograph showing students cheering at a University of Texas football game. The author describes the students as appearing to be of South Asian descent. French wrote that “the problem is now obviously worse than anyone imagined” and, in subsequent remarks as characterized by the Federalist piece, framed the concern as Americans having “been displaced by foreigners.”
The Federalist author does not dwell on French’s post itself, conceding “whatever you think” of it, but argues the resulting debate exposes a fundamental question: what is an American, and does America need Americans?
In the author’s telling, McLaughlin’s answers amount to “I don’t know” and “no.” The essay summarizes McLaughlin’s position this way: first-generation citizens have just as much claim and stake in the country as someone whose family arrived on the Mayflower, and anyone who says otherwise is a bigot.
Attacking the Counterargument
The Federalist piece works through McLaughlin’s case point by point. It notes that McLaughlin himself concedes that “long family history on the soil tends to bind people more firmly to the nation” and that “multigenerational presence here tends to acclimate people more to American mores” — then argues he turns around and insists those roots should carry little to no importance.
“Lineage is obviously not everything,” the author writes, allowing that a Mayflower descendant can be a communist and a naturalized citizen can love the republic more than that descendant does. But the essay argues a family’s connection to a country’s land, history, institutions, culture and sacrifice is not meaningless simply because it doesn’t guarantee every descendant embraces what McLaughlin calls the “idea” of America. The author compares it to a child who may fail to honor his parents — nobody concludes the child is interchangeable with a stranger who shows the parents more respect.
The essay also takes on McLaughlin’s use of the Civil War as evidence that lineage is irrelevant, quoting his argument that “lots of Heritage Americans decided in 1861 to dissolve their connection to the country” and that “blood-and-soil localism can tear us apart just as easily as it can bind us together.”
In response, the Federalist author cites The Federalist’s own Hayden Daniel, who argued that both sides in the conflict saw themselves as the true inheritors of the founding — meaning the South was separating from a government, not from American culture and identity. The Confederate constitution was, in Daniel’s telling, a near carbon copy of the U.S. Constitution, and Southern society did not radically change with secession. The Federalist essay concludes McLaughlin’s example actually proves the opposite of what he intended: inherited American identity was so powerful that both sides fought to claim it.
The Pilgrims and the Question of Who Built America
Toward the end, the essay turns to McLaughlin’s invocation of the Pilgrims as evidence for America’s immigrant story — the claim that they “fled” here to establish the idea that you could come and do your own thing. The Federalist author calls that reading shallow and historically illiterate, arguing the Pilgrims crossed the Atlantic as a religious community intent on constructing and preserving a distinct moral and social order, governing themselves, raising families and worshipping together — not creating a platform for anyone from anywhere to arrive.
The essay pushes further: if the Pilgrims really were immigrants who transformed the land, built their own enclave and developed their own government, and whose descendants then overthrew the government that established the colonies and replaced it with the one Americans live under now, then McLaughlin’s own analogy undercuts his argument about the benefits of immigration.
The piece closes its thought by noting that America might look different if every immigrant story were removed from its history — but in the author’s framing, it would be nonexistent if the settlers and founders were erased instead, which is what the essay accuses McLaughlin of wanting to do.
McLaughlin, the essay notes, is himself the descendant of a family that has been in the United States for just under 105 years — a detail deployed against him as evidence that he is lecturing older-stock Americans about their own history. Reached through his published work, McLaughlin has not backed off his position that the Heritage American framing is counterproductive for the coalition he says he wants to build, and National Review has not responded directly to the Federalist essay.
What the Exchange Signals
The back-and-forth is a window into a live dispute on the right over assimilation, ancestry and national identity — one that pits an older emphasis on civic ideals and the immigrant story against a newer emphasis on lineage, inheritance and the question of who sustained the country across generations. Both writers agree on at least one thing: a family’s history on American soil tends to bind people more firmly to the nation. Where they split is whether that fact should carry any moral weight.
Source: thefederalist.com — https://thefederalist.com/2026/09/17/you-owe-a-debt-of-gratitude-to-all-heritage-americans-for-making-america-great/