Evolutionary Group Selection for Freedom Through Migration and Assimilation: Responding to Nicholas Wade

I have often argued that cultural group selection through migration and assimilation favors Lockean liberal regimes.  Human beings "vote with their feet" in that they tend to move from poorer, violent, and exploitative societies into richer, peaceful, and more just societies.  And thus immigration tends to promote the spread of ideas and institutions that favor prosperity, peace, and justice.  Beginning in the 18th century, classical liberal regimes based on Lockean political thought--like Great Britain and the United States--have attracted immigrants because of the prosperity, peace, and justice that liberal regimes promote.   

This explains why John Locke argued for England having a policy of open borders and general naturalization of immigrants.  Some people objected to Locke's position by claiming that immigrants would not be assimilated into English society.  Locke responded by saying that once immigrants are naturalized,

they are then in interest as much our own people as any.  The only odds is their language, which will be cured too in their children, and they be as perfect Englishmen as those that have been here ever since William the Conqueror's days and came over with him.  For 'tis hardly to be doubted but that most of even our ancestors were foreigners (1997, 325).

If immigrants do not speak English, that will impede their assimilation into English culture, but their children will speak English and thus become "perfect Englishmen."  After all, most Englishmen are descended from foreign ancestors.

Notice also that contrary to the claims of the illiberal nationalists, Lockean liberalism can recognize the importance of the national identities that distinguish one people from another, because here Locke recognizes the cultural identity of the English people as a distinct nation rooted in the English language and other cultural traditions that have emerged from the cultural history of England.

Evolutionary theorists--such as Robert Boyd and Peter Richerson--have seen that Locke was right about immigration, and that cultural group selection working through selective migration and assimilation has favored the spread of Lockean liberal culture around the world (Boyd & Richerson 2009; Richerson & Boyd 2008).  This confirms what I have argued in various posts about the evolutionary history of Lockean liberalism as symbolic niche construction.

But against this, Nicholas Wade warns--in his new book The Origin of Politics: How Evolution and Ideology Shape the Fate of Nations--that when immigrants fail to assimilate into their new society, they create a cultural diversity that weakens the social cohesion necessary for any stable social order.

Social cohesion is inevitably weakened by any influx of people who don't share the socially bonding attributes of the residents, such as language, religion, and ethnicity.  And the weakening of social cohesion is deeply feared, even if at a level that many people cannot articulate, because it undermines the strength of a society and hence the chances of its members' survival (173).

Here Wade repeats one of the primary arguments made by nationalist conservatives like Yoram Hazony and J.D. Vance for why immigration needs to be severely restricted.

But where's the evidence that most immigrants cannot or will not assimilate and therefore threaten social cohesion?  Wade's only evidence for this is a study by Robert Putnam (2007).  Putnam wanted to study how the cultural diversity in the United States caused by immigration might affect "social capital" (defined as social networks and the associated norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness).  He collected survey data from interviews of people living in 41 very different communities ranging from large cities like Los Angeles and Boston to small towns and rural areas like Yakima, Washington, and rural South Dakota.  People were asked "Do you trust the people in your neighborhood?"  He found that people living in ethnically homogeneous communities (like Lewiston, Maine) were more trusting of their neighbors than were people living in ethnically heterogeneous communities (like San Francisco).  He also found that people in ethnically diverse communities were less likely to volunteer to work on community projects than were people in ethnically homogeneous communities.

Putnam summarized his conclusions in a passage quoted by Wade:

Inhabitants of diverse communities tend to withdraw from collective life, to distrust their neighbors, regardless of the color of their skin, to withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often, to register to vote less, to agitate for social reform more, but have less faith that they can actually make a difference, and to huddle unhappily in front of the television. . . . Diversity, at least in the short run, seems to bring out the turtle in all of us (Putnam 2007:150-151; Wade 2025:174).

But notice Putnam's qualification suggested by the phrase "at least in the short run."  In fact, much of Putnam's paper is devoted to arguing that in the long run, "successful immigrant societies have overcome . . . fragmentation by creating new, cross-cutting forms of social solidarity and more encompassing identities" (137).

Wade casually dismisses this side of Putnam's argument: "Though Putnam expressed the hope that in the long run the negative effects of diversity would disappear, his work provided a frank and rare description of the formidable problems raised by immigration" (174).  But Putnam didn't just express the "hope" that this could be done, because he surveyed some of the evidence from the history of American immigration during the period of almost open borders--from around 1820 to around 1920--that showed immigrants assimilating into American society.  Irish, Italian, and Polish Catholics, Russian Jews, and others were integrated into an American society that had once been a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP)-dominated society.  In the short run, the first generation of immigrants tended to "hunker down" in their own cultural enclaves, set apart from the dominant American culture.  But in the long run, the children and grandchildren of these first-generation immigrants assimilated into American culture or into a new more expansive American identity that could include Irish-Americans, Italian-Americans, Jewish Americans, and other hyphenated Americans.

Wade concedes that the many European immigrants--Irish, German, Southern, and Eastern Europeans--who arrived in America before World War I "assimilated, at least by the second generation, to their new community," and consequently there was "a high degree of cohesion" (179, 209).  "But cohesion has ebbed significantly over the last half century," Wade claims.  "Rising and more visible gaps in wealth, high fluxes of immigration with poor assimilation, and the advent of identity politics have stretched and torn the social fabric" (209).  Wade thus implies that over the past fifty years, the children of immigrants are no longer assimilating into American culture as they did a hundred years ago.

But Wade offers no evidence for this claim.  And in fact, there is lots of evidence against it.  For example, Ran Abramitzky and Leah Boustan (2022, 2024) have used historical US Census data to show that the socioeconomic assimilation of immigrants through upward mobility is just as possible for immigrants today as it was in the early 20th century.  In the late 19th and early 20th century, sons born to US-born parents in the 25th percentile of the income distribution (the income level below which 25 percent of individuals earn) rose to the 40th percentile as adults on average.  Most children of immigrants performed much better as adult earners--with children of immigrant Portuguese or Italian parents reaching the 60th percentile as adults.  A hundred years later, we see the same pattern.  Sons (or daughters) born in 1980 to US-born parents in the 25th percentile of the income distribution reach just above the 45th percentile (for sons) and 40th percentile (for daughters) as adults.  Children of immigrant parents do better than this.  Children of parents from Hong Kong, China, and India reach, on average, almost the 65th percentile as adults.  The second-generation of immigrants continue to assimilate into the American middle-class culture.

The most radical form of assimilation of immigrants is intermarriage across ethnic, racial, and religious boundaries (Drouhot and Nee 2019:181).  Intermarriage rates--immigrants marrying native Americans with different ethnic, racial, and religious identities--have been rising steadily since the 1980s in the United States.  Few Americans today remember the days in the 1950s when young men and women were expected to marry within their ethnic, racial, and religious groups.

Previously, I have written about the importance of assimilation through intermarriage for the Darwinian evolution of Indigenous Americans through genetic and cultural hybridization that has made America a multiethnic nation--or what Frederick Douglass called "the composite nation."

In his earlier book--A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race, and Human History--Wade argued that while "races are a way station on the path through which evolution generates new species. . . . the forces of differentiation seem now to have reversed course due to increased migration, travel, and intermarriage" (71).

But now there's another question at issue here: what exactly is motivating these immigrants to undertake the extraordinary sacrifices that come with their efforts to immigrate to the United States, Canada, and the European nation-states?  Wade's answer is that they are attracted by "Western culture," which can be a "common culture" for "people of all ethnicities and cultures" (210).  But he doesn't specify the meaning of that "Western culture" that attracts so many immigrants.

Wade does point, however, to what Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson have called the "inclusive institutions" achieved first in the British Glorious Revolution of 1688--overturning the "extractive institutions" of the oppressive regimes that had dominated human history for so long--as the highest development of Western culture (Wade 2014:148, 193-196; Wade 2025:98-100).  Those "inclusive institutions"--impartial rule of law, property rights, personal freedom, religious freedom, political freedom, and limited government--sound like Lockean liberalism to me.  

So when immigrants "vote with their feet" for Western culture, they're voting for the Lockean liberal social order.  That's what I would identify as evolutionary group selection for freedom through migration and assimilation.

REFERENCES

Abramitzky, Ran, and Leah Bouston. 2022. Streets of Gold: America's Untold Story of Immigrant Success. New York: PublicAffairs.

Abramitzky, Ran, and Leah Bouston. 2024. "Immigrants and Their Children Assimilate into U.S. Society and the U.S. Economy, Both in the Past and Today." PNAS Nexus, pgae344.

Acemoglu, Daron, and James A. Robinson. 2012. Why Nations Fail. New York: Crown Publishing Group.

Boyd, Robert, and Peter Richerson. 2009. "Voting With Your Feet: Payoff Biased Migration and the Evolution of Group Beneficial Behavior." Journal of Theoretical Biology 257:331-339.

Drouhot, Lucas, and Victor Nee. 2019. "Assimilation and the Second Generation in Europe and America: Blending and Segregating Social Dynamics Between Immigrants and Natives." Annual Review of Sociology 45:177-199.

Locke, John. 1997. Political Essays, ed. Mark Goldie. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Putnam, Robert. 2007.  " E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-First Century: The 2006 John Skytte Prize Lecture." Scandinavian Political Studies 30:137-174.

Richerson, Peter, and Robert Boyd. 2008. "The Evolution of Free Enterprise Values." In Paul Zak, ed, Moral Markets: The Critical Role of Values in the Economy, 107-141. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Wade, Nicholas. 2014. A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race, and Human History. New York: Penguin Press.

Wade, Nicholas. 2025. The Origin of Politics: How Evolution and Ideology Shape the Fate of Nations. New York: Harper.

The Fall of Orban's "Illiberal Democracy." Fukuyama Was Right.

 

        Viktor Orban with J. D. Vance and Rod Dreher in Washington, D.C., November 2025

     

                                                                        Peter Magyar

"It's nice to have a strong man running your country."  That's what Donald Trump once said about Viktor Orban, the Prime Minister of Hungary.  One indication of his political strength is that he has been Prime Minister since 2010, which makes him the longest serving Prime Minister in Europe.

But that could be ended by the parliamentary elections coming up on April 12, because polling shows that Peter Magyar is leading Orban in the race to become the next Prime Minister.  Magyar is a former Orban loyalist in Orban's Fidesz party who now leads the opposition party Tisza.

If Orban loses, that would signal the collapse of the international right-wing movement for populist nationalism because Orban's illiberal regime in Hungary has been the model for that movement.  That explains why Trump and Vance have endorsed Orban for reelection, and why Vance has been visiting Hungary to support Orban.  There are reports that Vance will appear with Orban at a campaign rally in Budapest a few days before the election.  Trump and Vance are desperately worried that Orban's defeat would be a crushing blow to the international MAGA movement.

But Magyar's victory would be just the final nail in the coffin for Orban's regime, which has been in decline for years now.  There are at least three signs of that decline.  Orban's policies for strengthening Hungary's families have failed to raise the female fertility rate.  Orban's promotion of a "Christian Hungary" has failed to revive Hungarian Christianity.  And, finally, huge numbers of Hungarians have been voting with their feet against Orban's regime by emigrating to Western European countries that offer them a better life than what they can have in Hungary.  The fact that these emigrants are going to those European nations that rank high on the Human Freedom Index confirms the argument of Francis Fukuyama that most human beings today regard the liberal social order that secures human freedom as the best regime.

THE ILLIBERAL STATE

As a young student and lawyer, Orban was originally a liberal anti-communist.  In 1988, he was one of the founders of the Alliance of Young Democrats (with the acronym FIDESZ), which challenged the Hungarian Young Communist League.  In 1989, Fidesz became a political party that supported the overthrow of the communist regime in 1990.

In 1989, Orban studied at Oxford University on a research fellowship funded by George Soros, the Hungarian-born philanthropist whom Orban now denounces as the conspiratorial funder of liberal causes in Eastern Europe.

In 1990, he left Oxford early so that he could return to Hungary to run in the first post-communist parliamentary elections.  He was elected a Member of Parliament, and he became a leader in Fidesz.

In 1994, after Fidesz lost the parliamentary elections badly, Orban decided that if he was to have any chance of becoming Prime Minister, he would have to move Fidesz away from its center-liberal position and towards the sort of right-wing populism that had propelled Silvio Berlusconi to become prime minister of Italy (Higgins 2025; Szelenyi 2022).  He was willing to change his political principles if he thought that would help him win votes and gain political power.  And, indeed, he became prime minister in 1998.  But he lost the general election in 2002.

In 2010, Orban returned as prime minister, and this time, he wanted to make sure that he would remain in power for many years.  He began silencing or taking over media outlets that he considered hostile to Fidesz.  He had the government fund an elaborate propaganda apparatus serving Fidesz.  He wrote a new constitution that would make it difficult for his opponents to win control of the parliament.  He removed the civil service protection for many government employees, and replaced them with his loyalists. He also took control of the courts so that he could appoint judges loyal to him.  

All of this supported what Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way (2002, 2010) have called "competitive authoritarianism."  Somewhere between a fully authoritarian regime and a fully democratic regime, a competitive authoritarian regime has multiparty elections, but they are not completely free and fair, because the incumbent's abuse of power tilts the electoral playing field against the opposition, and basic civil liberties are restricted to make it hard for the opposition to challenge the ruling party.

Under competitive authoritarianism, opposition forces can compete seriously for power.  And, occasionally, the opposition can win an election, and the incumbents lose.  But this regime is still not fully democratic, because the ruling party uses its power over the government to attack opponents and co-opt critics.

These three regime types are distinguished by the kind of countervailance--power checking power--that they allow.  A fully authoritarian regime allows little or no countervailance.  A fully democratic regime allows strong countervailance.  A competitive authoritarian regime allows weak countervailance.

In a speech in 2014 that attracted attention around the world, Orban explained that "the new state that we are constructing in Hungary is an illiberal state."  He said that this would break away from the principles of liberal democracy that had dominated the global regime (including Hungary) from 1990 to 2010.  Beginning with the global financial crisis of 2008, he argued, it had become clear that the Western liberal social, economic, and political order based on the principle of individual freedom had failed.  This created an opening for newly emerging global powers based on illiberal nationalism--nations like Singapore, China, India, Russia, and Turkey.

Previously, Orban observed, the liberal states in Western Europe had been organized around the liberal principle of individual freedom: "With regard to the relationship between two people, the starting point of the liberal organization of society is based on the idea that we have the right to do anything that does not infringe on the freedom of the other party."  Here Orban paraphrased the definition of freedom adopted by John Locke--freedom as not being constrained or coerced by others, so long as one does not infringe on the same freedom for others (see Locke, Second Treatise, para. 57).

Notably, Orban did not completely reject this liberal principle of freedom.  But he did insist that this would not be the central organizing principle of the illiberal state.

What is happening in Hungary today can accordingly be interpreted by stating that the prevailing political leadership has today attempted to ensure that people's personal work and interests, which must be acknowledged, are closely linked to the life of the community and the nation, and that this relationship is preserved and reinforced.  In other words, the Hungarian nation is not simply a group of individuals but a community that must be organized, reinforced and in fact constructed.  And so in this sense, the new state that we are constructing in Hungary is an illiberal state, a non-liberal state.  It does not reject the fundamental principles of liberalism such as freedom, and I could list a few more, but it does not make this ideology the central element of state organization, but instead includes a different, special, national approach.

So Orban's illiberal state would secure some individual freedom, but there must also be a "national approach," because "the Hungarian nation is not simply a group of individuals but a community."  Here you see why the conservative communitarian critics of liberal individualism--like Patrick Deneen, Roger Scruton, and Rod Dreher--have all made their pilgrimages to Budapest to honor Orban and receive his praises for their promotion of Orbanism in the United States and the UK (Szelenyi 2022).  Dreher moved to Budapest in 2022 so that he could be a part of Orban's propaganda operation--particularly, the Danube Institute, a state-backed think tank for disseminating Orban's ideology (Worth 2026).

I should say, however, that the Danube Institute does show some commitment to the liberal principle of open debate and freedom of thought.  Their mission statement includes this passage:

Our primary audience is the universe of centre-right intellectuals, political leaders, and public-spirited citizens. But we will also engage our counterparts on the democratic center-left in vigorous and principled public debate on as many occasions as possible and appropriate. We hope to draw upon the best minds of our day across national boundaries in international forums.

A recent example of their commitment to the liberal principle of intellectual freedom and debate is their event debating the question "Is Liberalism a Threat to Religious Liberty?"  One of the invited participants was Andrew Koppelman, a law professor at Northwestern University, who is best known for his philosophic and legal arguments for gay rights.  His response to the proposed question was to suggest that this was a weird question, because since religious liberty originated as a principle of Lockean liberalism, to suggest that liberalism could threaten religious liberty was nonsensical.

If you peruse the website of the Danube Institute, you can see their concern for thinking through all of the themes of Orban's illiberal state, two of the most prominent being Christianity and family life.

DECLINING CHRISTIANITY

In 2018, Orban declared that Hungary must be a "Christian democracy," and "a Christian democracy cannot be liberal" (Orban 2018).  A Christian democracy cannot be liberal because "it gives priority to Christian culture" over all other cultures, and therefore it denies the liberal principle of multiculturalism.

But Orban was vague about what exactly he meant by "Christian culture."  Most confusing was his claim that in affirming the importance of Christian culture, he was not affirming any Christian doctrines of faith.

Christian democracy is not about defending religious articles of faith--in this case Christian religious articles of faith.  Neither states nor governments have competence on questions of damnation or salvation.  Christian democratic politics means that the ways of life springing from Christian culture must be protected.  Our duty is not to defend the articles of faith, but the forms of being that have grown from them.  These include human dignity, the family, and the nation--because Christianity does not seek to attain universality through the abolition of nations, but through the preservation of nations.  Other forms which must be protected and strengthened include our faith communities.  This--and not the protection of religious articles of faith--is the duty of Christian democracy.

Orban's statement is incoherent.  On the one hand, he says that a Christian democracy must be illiberal.  On the other hand, he says that a Christian democracy must not enforce any religious articles of faith and must secure the freedom of all "faith communities," which sounds like the liberal principle of religious liberty and toleration.  

Christian democracy would be truly illiberal if it meant some form of Christian integralism or theocracy (like medieval Catholicism or 17th century Massachusetts Bay Colony).  But clearly Orban does not want that.  If he doesn't want the state to enforce any religious doctrines, that sounds like liberal democracy.  Indeed, Rod Dreher has said that authentic Christianity "can't exist if liberal democracy goes away" (Worth 2026, 36).  And as Koppelman pointed out, when the Danube Institute defends religious liberty, they're defending a fundamental principle of Lockean liberalism.

Moreover, if Christianity supports "the preservation of nations," as Orban says, does that mean the preservation of nations with diverse religious traditions?  Europe has some predominantly Muslim countries--such as Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, and Turkey--and in some cases, these Islamic traditions go back to the Middle Ages.  So it would seem that Orban's nationalism would have to allow for Islamic nationalism.  But then Orban's Christian democracy has been interpreted by many of his supporters as a defense of Christian Europe against Islam.

Another problem here is that by insisting that the state must not enforce any religious doctrines, Orban implies that religious freedom should include freedom of thought for atheists.  The fundamental religious doctrine of monotheism is "I believe in God the Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and Earth" (the Apostle's Creed), and if Orban does not think the state can enforce belief in that doctrine, then he must think that atheists are free from persecution.

So in saying that Christian democracy supports Christian culture but not Christian doctrines, Orban implicitly endorses the kind of atheistic religiosity promoted by conservatives like Roger Scruton, who want to enjoy the religious feelings that sacralize a national culture but without the religious belief in the real existence of God outside the human mind.  (The vacuousness of ritualized Christian culture without Christian belief was manifest three years ago in the coronation of King Charles III as the Christian King of Great Britain.)

But in the long run, believing in the importance of Christian culture without believing in the truth of Christian doctrines fails to slow the decline of that Christian culture.  We can see that in Orban's Hungary.

According to the Hungarian Central Statistical Office, the majority of Hungarians do not identify themselves as religious.  In the census of 2022, 42.5% identified themselves as Christians, 1.3% as non-Christian religious believers, 16.1% as not religious, and 40.1% refused to answer.  Since it's unlikely that religious believers would refuse to answer the question, those who did refuse are probably not religious.  That means, then, that 56.2% of Hungarians do not identify themselves as religious.  And since most of the houses of worship in Hungary reportedly have few people attending, we can assume that most of those who identify themselves as religious are not devout believers.

If creating a Christian democracy in Hungary means that at least a majority of Hungarians are serious Christians, then Orban has failed to achieve that.

But that doesn't mean that Christianity cannot rebound in Hungary.  The number of Catholics and Reformed Protestants has dropped by about one half in 20 years.  But Hungary's fastest growing Christian church is the Hungarian Faith Church, which is a charismatic Pentecostal form of Christianity.  With its headquarters in Budapest, it has over 150,000 members, of which over 70,000 are in Hungary.  In a nation of 9.8 million people, those are impressive numbers when you consider that this church was founded as recently as 1979 by seven Hungarians.  Notably, Orban's son Gaspar Orban converted in 2014 to the Faith Church, and he has even become a minister in the church who claims to have received revelations from God and witnessed miraculous healings.

As I have argued, Christianity originated as a charismatic or Pentecostal form of religion rooted in animistic shamanism.  Animism was the first religion, and shamans were its first practitioners.  The religious experience of animistic shamanism is the natural seed in the human mind from which all subsequent religions have evolved.

The defining feature of Pentecostal doctrine is the teaching that all true Christians can be filled with the Holy Spirit, and the most prominent gifts of the Holy Spirit include healing, praying, prophesying, and preaching through speaking in tongues.  Here we see, once again, Christians becoming shamans who, through extraordinary states of ecstasy, engage with divine entities and provide services like healing and divination.

                              A Fresco of the Pentecostal Dove, Symbolizing the Holy Spirit

As long as we have liberal social orders with religious liberty, we will have free markets in religion that will allow the more charismatic Pentecostal religions to gain a growing share of the market because they appeal to the natural human desire for religious transcendence in making contact with the spiritual world through shamanic practices.  Pentecostalism is the fastest growing religious movement in the world, with over 600 million adherents worldwide.  So while Christianity in general might be in decline today in Hungary and elsewhere, we can expect a continuing revival of charismatic Christianity.

DECLINING FAMILIES

One reason why Christian culture is so important for Orban is that he sees it as supporting the traditional family with lots of children.  And that's important because families having and rearing many children resolves what Orban has said (in a 2017 speech) is "the greatest existential question for European civilization"--Will the drastic decline in Europe's population continue until there are hardly any Europeans left?

In that 2017 speech, Orban lamented that the population of Hungary had declined from 10,709,000 in 1980 to 9,799,000 in 2017, so that in less than 40 years, Hungary had lost almost a million people, which was more than all the casualties that Hungary sustained in World War II.

Orban announced that "Making Families Strong Again" would be the motto for the Hungarian government's family policies directed to raising the birth rate.  He explained:

It is important to highlight that the restoration of natural reproduction is a national cause; and it is not just one national cause among many, but the national cause.  And it is also a European cause: not just one European cause among many, but the European cause.  The goal of the Government of Hungary is to raise our birth rate to 2.1 per cent by 2030, which would be a replacement rate for our society.  At present, this figure stands at 1.5 per cent.

The technical term for the birth rate is the "total fertility rate" (TFR), which is a measure of an imaginary woman who passes through her reproductive life subject to all the age-specific fertility rates for the ages 15-49 that were recorded for a given population in a given year.  So this rate is the number of children a woman would have if she was subject to prevailing fertility rates at all ages from a single given year, and if she survived throughout all her childbearing years. 

If there were no mortality until the end of a woman's childbearing years, the replacement level of TFR would be around 2.0.  The replacement fertility rate is close to this for most industrialized countries.  For the global average, the TFR at replacement is about 2.33.  Here "replacement" means maintaining the present level of population into the future.

The drop in fertility rates that has occurred in most of the wealthier nations over the past hundred years has been called "the demographic transition" by demographers.  In the most developed societies today, the rich and powerful tend to have low fertility rates, and it's the lower class people who have higher fertility rates.  So as societies become wealthier, the total fertility rate for the whole society tends to drop, and over the past 70 years, it has dropped below replacement levels.

I have argued that one can explain this in Darwinian terms through the "embodied capital theory of human life history."  In the developed societies, the economic and social success of children depends ever more on their acquired technical skills and educational training, so that as adults they can compete for jobs that require special talents and knowledge. Consequently, rearing successful children in such societies requires that parents make increasingly costlier investments in the education of their children.  And as the cost of children has thus increased, the quantity of children demanded by parents has decreased, because parents now express their natural desire for parenting successful children by investing more resources in fewer children, thereby choosing quality over quantity in their children.

Moreover, for human beings to be able to invest so much in their children, they must first invest time and energy in their own education and career development and in the search for suitable mates.  Consequently, successful people in modern developed societies must often delay their marriage and having children, and thus the average ages for getting married and having the first child have risen.  When women do this, they sometimes reach the end of their reproductive years, and so produce fewer children than they would have desired.  It's likely that one reason for the total fertility rate falling below replacement levels is that couples who desire two or three children delay marriage and reproduction for so long that the women reach the end of their physiological fertility sooner than they had expected.  Then couples must rely on fertility treatments or adoption to satisfy their parental desires.

Orban has been trying to reverse this tendency to lower fertility through governmental policies that promote marriage and large families.  Hungary has a large per-child tax deduction that gets progressively larger with the second and third child.  Mothers of two or more children are exempt from paying income taxes for the rest of their lives.  Women with three or more children can have all of their student loan debt cancelled.  Families with home mortgages can have a large portion of that debt paid by the government in proportion to the number of their children.  The government has built or renovated infant day care centers around the country, and day care costs are heavily subsidized by the government.  The government has also built "family-friendly" infrastructure in the cities, such as beautiful playgrounds and parks, where parents can take their children to play.

But as of now, it appears that all of these pro-family policies have failed to raise the fertility rate.  In 2011, when Orban first became prime minister, Hungary had Europe's lowest TFR at 1.23.  By 2021, it had risen to 1.61.  But in 2025, it was back down to 1.27--essentially, the same all-time low as in 2011.

It is possible that policies designed to incentivize having more children may have had the opposite effect.  For example, providing tax exemptions for mothers of two children might provide a work incentive for those mothers.  European women are career-minded, and giving them tax exemptions could be reinforcing the idea that they should be earning more money, which directs the mother to invest more time and energy in her career rather than in her children.

When it comes to housing, Hungary's policy of subsidizing mortgages could be increasing the demand for housing but not the supply, which creates bidding wars that make homes less affordable.

Now let's consider how Hungary compares with the United States with respect to population growth and the fertility rate.  Unlike Hungary, the population of the U.S. has been growing steadily for over a hundred years.  According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the population of the U.S. has grown every year since 1900, except for one year during the Spanish flu epidemic, growing at an average of 0.85% per year since 2000.  As of today, the population of the U.S. is 342,415,867, which makes it the third largest national population in the world, behind only India and China.

This is surprising since the TFR for the U.S. is only 1.79, which is substantially higher than Hungary's 1.23, but it's still below the replacement level of 2.1.  What explains the growing population despite the below-replacement TFR is immigration.  Consider these calculations for the U.S. from the U.S. Census Bureau:

One birth every 9 seconds

One death every 10 seconds

One international migrant (net) every 97 seconds

Net gain of one person every 45 seconds

This shows that the mistake make by Orban's Hungary has been in limiting immigration into Hungary.  If Hungary had allowed more freedom of movement of immigrants into Hungary, comparable to that allowed by the U.S., Hungary could have had an increasing population.

Now, of course, if Trump's policies for closing the U.S. borders and deporting immigrants continues, this could reverse the century-long trend towards increasing population and bring about the sort of depopulation crisis that has afflicted Hungary.

This supports my argument for open borders and freedom of movement.

DECLINING FREEDOM LEADS TO DECLINING POPULATION

I have pointed to two causes of Hungary's declining population--low fertility rates and low rates of immigration into Hungary.  But there's a third cause: the emigration of Hungarians out of Hungary.

According to Hungary's Central Statistical Office, a total of 367,515 Hungarians have officially left the country during the 15 years that Orban's Fidesz government has been in power.  This is actually an underestimation because foreign statistics often record nearly twice as many new arrivals from Hungary as Hungarian authorities do departures.  Another reason for this being an underestimation is that many Hungarians living abroad retain a Hungarian address.  Adjusting for these factors, there could be as many as 640,000 Hungarian emigrants who have left the country.  Notably, most of these emigrants are aged 25-49 years old--the prime age for people who could contribute to the economic and social life of Hungary.

What's most interesting about these emigrants is that prefer to emigrate to countries that rank high on the Human Freedom Index.  This should not be surprising if one recognizes, as I have argued, that countries ranking high in freedom tend to provide the best conditions for people to live good lives because they have wider opportunities for freely pursuing their happiness.

Here are the five most popular destinations for Hungarian emigrants, with their Human Freedom Index ranking in parentheses: Austria (22), Germany (17), UK (19), Netherlands (9), and Switzerland (1).

By comparison, Hungary ranks 67th out of 165 countries.  Previously, Hungary ranked much higher at 26th in 2009 the year before Orban's Fidesz came to power.  Hungary's rankings have dropped steadily during Orban's time as prime minister.

So Hungarians are voting with their feet against Orban's illiberalism and for freedom secured in a liberal social order.  Declining freedom thus leads to declining population.

LIBERAL DEMOCRACY AT THE END OF HISTORY?

This failure of Orban's illiberal Christian democracy confirms Francis Fukuyama's famous argument in 1989 for "the end of history," in which human beings show their natural desire for the freedom--both economic and personal freedom--that comes from liberal democracy.

Actually, the appeal of the liberal principle of individual freedom is so powerful that even Orban cannot reject it completely.  As we've seen, Orban accepts the importance of securing that Lockean liberal conception of freedom in any good regime, although this cannot be the central organizing principle of his "illiberal state."  Consequently, Orban's "illiberal state" is not absolutely illiberal.  Someone like Rod Dreher (2023) can even defend Orban as the "guardian of liberal freedoms"!

We can see this in Hungary's rankings in the Human Freedom Index.  Under the rule of Orban's Fidesz party from 2010 to the present, Hungary's freedom ranking has fallen from 26th to 67th out of 165 countries.  But notice that a 67th ranking puts Hungary well above the world average.  Most countries rank lower.  Here are some examples of the lower ranking countries:  Mexico (91), Indonesia (92), India (110), Kuwait (113), China (149), Russia (152), and Iran (164).

If you look at how Hungary ranks in the various categories of personal freedom and economic freedom, where 10 is the highest possible score, you will see that Hungary ranks low in "rule of law" (4.9), "expression and information" (5.4), and "size of government" (6.1).  But Hungary ranks high in "freedom of movement" (9.9), "security and safety" (9.6), and "freedom in relationships" (8.8).

Thus, Orban's illiberal democracy is really very liberal, but not liberal enough for those Hungarians who have voted with their feet against Orban by leaving the country, and for those who will vote against him in the coming election.

REFERENCES

Dreher, Rod. 2023. "Orban: Guardian of Liberal Freedoms." The Critic, November.

Higgins, Andrew. 2025. "Viktor Orban's 'Propaganda State' Is Starting to Show Cracks." New York Times, October 12.

Levitsky, Steven, and Lucan Way. 2002. "The Rise of Competitive Authoritarianism." Journal of Democracy 13 (April): 51-65.

Levitsky, Steven, and Lucan Way. 2010. Competitive Authoritarianism: Hybrid Regimes After the Cold War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Orban, Viktor. 2014. "Speech at the 25th Balvanyos Summer Free University." July 26. Tusnadfurdo (Baile Tusnad), Romania.

Orban, Viktor. 2017. "Speech at the 2nd Budapest Demographic Forum."  May 25.

Orban, Viktor. 2018. "Speech at the 29th Balvanyos Summer Free University." July 28.

Paul Gottfried's Esoteric Writing: He (Quietly) Scorns John Winthrop's Protestant Theocracy

Responding to those like Mark Brennan and Paul Gottfried who argue that America is defined by its Anglo-Protestant culture, I have asked: What kind of Protestant culture defines America?  Is it the illiberal Protestant theocracy first established in the Massachusetts Bay Colony by John Winthrop?  Or is it the liberal Protestantism of religious liberty and toleration first established in Rhode Island by Roger Williams?  Was Winthrop the First Founding Father?  Or was Williams?

I have written two long essays arguing that after a 200-year-long debate (1630-1833) between these two Protestant traditions, the tradition of Williams prevailed over Winthrop's.  At the national level, the turning point came with the adoption of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, which affirmed Williams' principles of "no religious test" for office, a "wall of separation" between church and state, and the religious liberty of all individuals.  At the state level, the turning point came as the states revoked their religious establishments and affirmed the individual right to religious liberty.  The last state to do this was Massachusetts in 1833, when people heard Winthrop rolling over in his grave and Williams cheering.

Gottfried has just written a second reply to my argument.  But it's hard to understand what he is saying because he continues to employ the rhetorical strategy of silence by ignoring most of what I have argued.

And yet, after three readings of his essay, I finally realized that he was engaging in the kind of esoteric writing that was once so well explained by Leo Strauss.  When an author wants to say something that he knows will anger many of his readers, he might cautiously choose to hide his true teaching from his many careless readers, while allowing his few careful readers to decipher his secret teaching.  As Editor-in-Chief of the paleoconservative magazine Chronicles, Gottfried knows that most of his readers would be angry if he openly said that Williams was right in arguing for religious liberty and toleration, and Winthrop was wrong in arguing for Protestant theocracy.  So, to avoid that provocation, he chose to write in such a way that only his very careful readers would see his agreement with Williams' liberal Protestantism.

The key to this secret teaching is a paragraph near the center of his essay:

Arnhart, in one of his commentaries, says he can't imagine how JD Vance could wish to restrict immigration to those who were culturally homogeneous when his wife is a Hindu.  Allow me to suggest some answers.  Our once-dominant Anglo-Protestant culture grew weaker over time, and what Vance wants to preserve are some of its residual characteristics: respect for constitutional law, a sense of individual responsibility, and the Protestant work ethic, but not necessarily the original religious doctrines.

Notice that he begins by directing his reader's attention to my "commentaries," which suggests to the careful reader that he needs to read my essays in order to understand what Gottfried is saying here.  The careful reader will then see that I frame the debate as a choice between Winthrop and Williams, and that America eventually moved to the side of Williams.  So now the reader is primed to ask, which side is Gottried taking?  Gottfried says nothing explicitly about either Winthrop or Williams.  But is he implicitly taking a position in this debate?

"Our once-dominant Anglo-Protestant culture grew weaker over time."  What is he implying here?  I argue that Winthrop's theocratic Protestant culture grew weaker over time as Williams' liberal Protestant culture grew stronger.  Is Gottfried agreeing with this?

What does he mean by "respect for constitutional law"?  Anyone who has read my "commentaries" will know that I show how the Constitution rejects the theocratic government of Winthrop and endorses the religious liberty and separation of church and state advocated by Williams.  Does "respect for constitutional law" require that we accept this?

What does Gottfried mean by "a sense of individual responsibility"?  Williams argued that the "individual responsibility" of every person in matters of faith required religious liberty and toleration of religious diversity.  Winthrop argued that the established church must coercively compel all individuals to believe the doctrines of the church.

So when Gottfried says that we should respect America's Protestant culture "but not necessarily the original religious doctrines," is he implying that we can rightly reject Winthrop's original theocratic doctrines?  That does seem to be what he is implying when he writes: "Since Vance is himself a convert to Catholicism and his wife is a Hindu, I don't think that either would argue that only those who are strictly Protestant should be allowed to reside here."  

Winthrop's theocratic Protestantism would have persecuted Vance for his Catholicism and Usha for her Hinduism.  But since America has long ago adopted Williams' liberal principles of religious liberty and toleration as part of the American Creed, Vance and his wife can enjoy the freedom that comes from living in an American Creedal Nation.

America as the Creedal Nation: A Response to Paul Gottfried

A few days ago, I wrote a response to Mark Brennan's essay in Chronicles Magazine arguing that the idea of America as a "Creedal Nation" is a "myth," because anyone who knows anything about American history knows that America has always been identified by its "Anglo-Protestant culture."  Yesterday, Paul Gottfried, the editor-in-chief of Chronicles, responded to my post by defending Brennan's claim as a "self-evident" truth about American history.

So what historical evidence does Gottfried cite to support his belief that, of course, America has always been culturally homogeneous in its identity as an "Anglo-Protestant" nation that does not depend on any affirmation of the Lockean liberal ideas of the Declaration of Independence?

PROTESTANT AMERICA?

To prove that "there was a long-time Protestant dominance over American religious and moral life," Gottfried cites this passage from Michael McClymond's chapter in The Cambridge History of Religions in America:

Statistics tell a story. The newly formed United States of America included roughly 300,000 Protestant Christians in the year 1800. Yet by the year 1950, this number had grown to 43 million. This is a 143-fold increase, or a growth of 14,300 percent. The figure becomes more striking when one considers that the population of the nation, according to the United States Census, increased during the same period by the order of 28.4 times, from 5.3 million to 150.7 million. The increase in Protestant Christian affiliation during this period was 5.0 times the rate of the general population increase. Roger Finke and Rodney Stark noted that “the most striking trend in the history of religion in America is growth.” The overall rate of religious adherence in the U.S. population steadily climbed from 17 percent in 1776, to 34 percent in 1850, 45 percent in 1890, 56 percent in 1926, 59 percent in 1952, and 62 percent in 1980.

There are three interesting points here that Gottfried doesn't notice.  First, I fail to see how "17 percent in 1776" shows "Protestant dominance."  Indeed, the conclusion that McClymond draws from this (in a passage not quoted by Gottfried) is that "it is a mistake to think that there was a Christian golden age in the United States during the colonial era," because "the period of lowest religious affiliation in American history occurred around 1800 when there were much lower levels of church membership than at the present."

Second, when we speak about the growing numbers of "Protestant Christians," what kind of Protestantism are we talking about?  Is it the illiberal Protestantism of John Winthrop or the liberal Protestantism of Roger Williams?  In my post, I argued the Protestant liberalism of Williams--based on the liberal principles of toleration and religious liberty--eventually prevailed over Winthrop's illiberal theocratic principles.  I also pointed to the Constitution of 1789 as manifesting William's liberalism: the "no religious test" clause, the "no establishment of religion clause," and the absence of any reference to God or Jesus Christ made it clear that the Constitution did not establish America as a Protestant Christian Nation.  Brennan and Gottfried are silent about all of this.

Third, notice the title of the book from which Gottfried quoted: The Cambridge History of Religions in America:  "religions" is plural because this three-volume book is all about the religious pluralism of American history.  There are chapters on over two dozen religious traditions:  native American religion, Catholicism (actually a half dozen different traditions of Catholicism), Eastern Orthodox, Judaism, African religions, Islam, and many more.  In the Introduction to the book, the editor states the conclusion that emerges from the book:  "The net result of this historical development in North America is a rich religious culture that includes representatives of most of the world's religions. . . . One result of the religious freedom mandated by the Constitution was the dramatic expansion of the religious diversity in the new nation."  Gottfried is silent about this.

BRITISH AMERICA?

First of all, let's remember that the American Revolution was to a large degree a civil war fought over the question of whether America's national identity was fundamentally British.  The American Patriots (or Whigs) said no.  The American Loyalists (or Tories) said yes.  That's why the Declaration of Independence was a declaration of the separation of the American People from the British People, and the statement of Lockean liberal principles in the Declaration was the justification for that separation.  By claiming that American national identity is necessarily British, Brennan and Gottfried take the losing side in the American Revolutionary War.  (They also take the losing side in America's second civil war--another war in which the Lockean Whigs defeated the Filmerian Tories.)

Like Brennan, Gottfried cites David Hackett Fischer's Albion's Seed as confirming America's British identity.  But like Brennan, Gottfried is silent about my reference to Fischer's African Founders as showing how African folkways were mixed with British folkways to create a new American culture. 

Brennan and Gottfried are also silent about this passage from Gordon Wood's essay:

Because of extensive immigration, America already [in 1790] had a diverse society.  In addition to 700,000 people of African descent and tens of thousands of native Indians, nearly all the peoples of Western Europe were present in the country.  In the census of 1790, only 60% of the white population of well over three million were English in ancestry.  Nearly 9% were German, more than 8% was Scottish, 6% Scots-Irish, nearly 4% Irish, and more than 3% Dutch.  The remainder were Frenchmen, Swedes, Spaniards, and people of unknown ethnicity.

And notice that this 60% English ancestry would be even lower if one counted the African Americans.

As I said in my post, this racial, ethnic, and religious diversity of America increased dramatically over the 19th century when the U.S. had a virtually open borders immigration policy.  Brennan and Gottfried say nothing about this.  Nor do they say anything about how this massive immigration favored the Union over the Confederacy in the Civil War.

In my post, I pointed out the hypocrisy of people like J D Vance and Stephen Miller who argue that America needs severe restrictions on immigration because immigration creates too much cultural diversity, which dissolves the social cohesion and homogeneity of American culture.  I wrote: Does JD really believe that by marrying the daughter of Telugu Indian immigrants and creating a multicultural and interfaith family with biracial children that he is helping to dissolve the social cohesion of America?  No, of course not.  He doesn't really believe what he has said about immigration being a threat to America's cultural identity.

Gottfried quotes this passage but he doesn't answer my charge of hypocrisy against Vance.  Gottfried does conclude his essay this way:

I agree with much of what I hear JD Vance say and would happily vote for him. I also think his wife is a much nicer person than the scowling Methodist Hillary Clinton or the goofball Lutheran Tim Walz. But we may be coming too late in trying to restrict immigration to those who embody “our culture,” which means the one that has been obsessively vilified by our ruling class. Unfortunately, whatever has taken its place seems far, far worse.  

So it's all right for the Hindu Usha to be an American citizen because she's "nicer" than the Methodist Clinton or the Lutheran Walz?

And notice what he says in that last sentence: "we may be coming too late in trying to restrict immigration to those who embody 'our culture.'"  So is he saying that we should not restrict immigration to those who embody our Anglo-Protestant culture, because it is "too late" to do that?

My other example of hypocrisy was Stephen Miller, whose grandparents were Russian Jews.  Brennan and Gottfried make no attempt to defend Miller on this point.  This is personal for Gottfried because he was born into a Hungarian Jewish family that immigrated to the U.S. in 1934.  Can Gottfried also be charged with hypocrisy?  He does say this: 

As everyone who knows me knows, my family came as refugees to this country long after the country was founded, and I was not born into its onetime dominant culture.  But I profoundly respect that culture and am glad to live in a country that once embraced it.

Now what is he saying here?  That America should open its borders to immigrants who do not belong to America's Anglo-Protestant culture as long as they "respect" that culture?  

And what does he mean by "onetime dominant culture"?  When did that "onetime dominant culture" cease to be dominant?  Sometime before 1934 when his parents came to America?  Sometime before the Civil War during the long period of open borders?  In 1789 with the ratification of the Constitution, which some of the Antifederalists denounced as "godless"?

Both Brennan and Gottfried are so obscure in their writing that I find it very hard to understand exactly what they are saying.

The History of America Makes It a Creedal Nation

Now that we are in the 250th anniversary year of the Declaration of Independence, there is debate over the significance of that document.  For Gordon Wood, the distinguished historian of the American Founding, writing in the Wall Street Journal, the Declaration helps Americans understand who they are, because it states those truths that Americans must hold to be self-evident--the truths of equal liberty--that make America a "creedal nation" rather than a nation defined by race, ethnicity, and religion.  But for Mark Brennan, writing in the January 2026 issue of Chronicles Magazine, Wood's creedal nation is a myth that contradicts the history of "America's Anglo-Protestant culture" as the real identity of the American nation (quoting from Samuel Huntington's Who We Are: The Challenges to America's National Identity).

Notice the contradiction in what people like Huntington and Brennan say.  They claim to be defending America's unique identity.  But the idea that national identity depends on race, ethnicity, and religion is a foreign idea imported from Europe and elsewhere outside America.  By contrast, America as a creedal nation as declared in the Declaration of Independence makes America uniquely American, unlike all the other nations.  Before 1776, no nation had ever had anything like the Declaration of Independence.

If you read Brennan's essay, you should notice that he arrogantly asserts that Wood is somehow ignorant of American history as showing that America has been always an Anglo-Protestant culture.  But he never presents even a brief summary of this history--as if it should be obvious.

Brennan does invoke David Hackett Fischer's Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America as showing that "the legacy of the four British folkways remains the most powerful determinant of a voluntary society in the United States today."  But Brennan is silent about Fischer's more recent book African Founders: How Enslaved People Expanded American Ideals, in which he shows how slaves from different regions of Africa interacted with European colonists to create new regional cultures in the United States.  The mixing of African folkways and British folkways created a new American culture.

PROTESTANT AMERICA?

So what about Brennan's insistence on America's Protestant culture?  Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christians cannot be real Americans?  And certainly Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and other religious traditions would have to be excluded.  Think about what that means.  

As I have indicated previously, it has become common for nationalist conservatives like J. D. Vance to say that America needs severe restrictions on immigration because immigration creates too much cultural diversity, which dissolves the social cohesion and homogeneity of American culture: if America had open borders, it would cease to exist as nation because it would have no distinctive social identity.

But remember that JD's wife Usha was born in 1986 in California to Lakshmi and Radhakrishna Chilukuri, who are both Telugu Indian immigrants, speaking the Telugu language, who immigrated to the U.S. in the 1980s from Andhra Pradesh, which is a state on the east coast of southern India.  Usha met JD at Yale Law School.  They married in 2014 in an interfaith marriage ceremony: Usha is a practicing Hindu, while JD was raised as an Evangelical Christian before converting to Catholicism in 2019.  They have three children.

Hmm.  Sounds like a heck of a lot of cultural diversity to me.  Does JD really believe that by marrying the daughter of Telugu Indian immigrants and creating a multicultural and interfaith family with biracial children that he is helping to dissolve the social cohesion of America?  No, of course not.  He doesn't really believe what he has said about immigration being a threat to America's cultural identity.

                                         This Doesn't Look Like an Anglo-Protestant Marriage

Similarly, consider the strange case of Trump adviser Stephen Miller, who wants to deport those immigrants who might threaten the cultural homogeneity of America.  As has been noted in a recent article in The New Republic, Miller's ancestors first arrived in the United States in 1903 when a man named Wolf Laib Glosser landed at Ellis Island, fleeing anti-Jewish pogroms in czarist Russia.  Glosser then began sending money back to relatives in Russia and helped them immigrate to the U.S.  But that was stopped by the Immigration Act of 1924 that shut down immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe, because so many Americans thought they had to protect the purity of white, Christian, and western European culture.  Miller says he wants to restore something like the 1924 Act.  Does that mean that he and his family should be deported?  After all, his ancestry is neither Protestant nor English.  Of course, like Vance, Miller doesn't really believe what he says.

But let's go back to the beginning--to the earliest European immigrant settlers in North America in the seventeenth century.  What do we see?  Brennan would say: they were almost all Protestants!  Well, but what kind of Protestantism?

From 1607, the Virginia Colony had established Anglican churches in each county with taxpayer support.  But the Anglican Church was weaker in the other colonies, particularly in Puritan New England. In 1779, the Anglican Church was disestablished in Virginia; and in 1786, the Virginia Statute of Religious Liberty separated church and state.  By 1833, all the states had abolished the state funding of established churches.

This vindicated Roger Williams in his defense of religious liberty against the Puritan theocracy that John Winthrop had established in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1630.  When Williams was banished from Massachusetts, he founded the city of Providence (later incorporated into Rhode Island) in 1637.  Williams thus became the first Founding Father of America by promoting the principles of religious liberty and separation of church and state that became a critical part of the American Creed of cultural pluralism.

Moreover, we should realize that Williams extended the principle of freedom of conscience to support toleration of not just all Protestants, but also Catholics, Muslims, pagans, and even atheists.  That broad principle of toleration is evident in the Constitution of 1789--particularly, in the "no religious test" clause, the no "establishment of religion" clause, and the Constitution's silence about God, which provoked some critics into denouncing the Constitution as "godless."  Thus, America's national identity was tied not to any particular religious tradition but to the creedal commitment to religious liberty and freedom of conscience, which protects Catholics like Vance and Jews like Miller from being persecuted.  This American history of toleration and pluralism denies Brennan's claim that the American nation must be Protestant.

ANGLO AMERICA?

Similarly, the American history of immigration denies Brennan's claim that American national identity depends on English ancestry.  Wood writes:

Because of extensive immigration, America already [in 1790] had a diverse society.  In addition to 700,000 people of African descent and tens of thousands of native Indians, nearly all the peoples of Western Europe were present in the country.  In the census of 1790, only 60% of the white population of well over three million were English in ancestry.  Nearly 9% were German, more than 8% was Scottish, 6% Scots-Irish, nearly 4% Irish, and more than 3% Dutch.  The remainder were Frenchmen, Swedes, Spaniards, and people of unknown ethnicity.

Brennan is silent about this.  He is also silent about the massive immigration into America during the long period of almost completely open borders from 1789 to 1921.  Between 1820 and 1924, 36 million people immigrated to the United States.  If their American-born descendants are added to this number, this would account for most of the growth in the U.S. population during this period--from 9.6 million in 1820 to 106 million in 1920.

This immigration altered the cultural and political history of the United States.  The most dramatic illustration of this is the American Civil War.  From 1830 to 1860, ten million foreign born people crossed America's open borders and settled in the United States.  This made them one-third of the total 30 million Americans in 1860.  That was a critical turning point in American history because this huge migration helped to decide the outcome of the Civil War.  

In response to Lincoln's election in 1860, the secessionist Southern States left the Union and started the Civil War a few weeks after Lincoln's inauguration because they saw this as the only way to preserve slavery.  As I have indicated in previous posts, the Civil War can be seen as a war over the interpretation of the Declaration of Independence--over whether the declaration that "all men are created equal" in their rights to "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" really includes all men of all races, or whether it includes only "the white race," or perhaps only the British people.

In a speech in Springfield, Illinois, on June 12, 1857, Stephen Douglas argued that the framers of the Declaration of Independence surely did not include the "African race" in its principle of equality.  Rather, what they meant was "that they referred to the white race alone, and not to the African, when they declared to have been created equal--that they were speaking of British subjects on this continent being equal to British subjects born and residing in Great Britain--that they were entitled to the same inalienable rights, and among them were enumerated life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" (Douglas 1857, 9).

Two weeks later, Lincoln spoke in Springfield.  He quoted the passage above from Douglas's speech, and he remarked: "Why, according to this, not only negroes but white people outside of Great Britain and America are not spoken of in that instrument.  The English, Irish, and Scotch, along with white Americans, were included to be sure, but the French, Germans, and other white people of the world are all gone to pot along with the Judge's inferior races."  Against this, Lincoln insisted that the Declaration of Independence really did extend its principle of equality to "all men" or "the whole human family," which would encompass all races, including all Europeans (Lincoln 1989, 1:398-99).

It should be noted, however, that one year later, Douglas began to speak of the "white basis" of government as "confining citizenship to white men, men of European birth and descent, instead of conferring it upon negroes, Indians, and other inferior races" (Lincoln 1989, 1:504).  So, this indicated that he was no longer confining the principle of equality of rights to the British people.

On July 10, 1858, Lincoln delivered a speech at Chicago that stated the arguments that he would develop in his debates with Douglas that would begin a month later; and his fundamental argument was about the principle of equality of rights in the Declaration as embracing all Americans and including both black Americans and foreign immigrants.  When we celebrate the Fourth of July, he said, we celebrate the men of 1776--"a race of men living in that day whom we claim as our fathers and grandfathers."  But we also realize that of the 30 million American people of today, many are not descended by blood from those first Americans.  We have

. . . perhaps half our people who are not descendants at all of these men, they are men who have come from Europe--German, Irish, French, and Scandinavian--men that have come from Europe themselves, or whose ancestors have come hither and settled here, finding themselves our equals in all things.  If they look back through this history to trace their connection with those days by blood, they find they have none, they cannot carry themselves back into that glorious epoch and make themselves feel that they are part of us, but when they look through that old Declaration of Independence they find that those old men say that "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal," and then they feel that that moral sentiment taught in that day evidences their relation to those men, that it is the father of all moral principle in them, and that they have a right to claim it as though they were blood of the blood, and flesh of the flesh of the men who wrote that Declaration, and so they are.  That is the electric cord in that Declaration that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together, that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world (Lincoln 1989, 1:456).

This leads him to the conclusion of his speech--that we should reject all talk about "inferior races": "let us discard all this quibbling about this man and the other man--this race and that race and the other race being inferior, and therefore they must be placed in an inferior position--discarding our standard that we have left us.  Let us discard all these things, and unite as one people throughout the land, until we shall once again stand up declaring that all men are created equal."

So, what unites the native-born Americans and the foreign-born Americans as "one people" is their patriotic love of America and their affirming the universal principle of the Declaration of Independence that all human beings are born free and equal.  What makes Americans Americans is their moral character as "patriotic and liberty-loving men."

In the Civil War, Lincoln made it clear that enforcing the Declaration's principle of equality of rights as the "standard maxim for free society" would require not only emancipating the black slaves but also promoting free immigration into the United States.  And once Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863, it became clear that a victory for the Union in that war would be a victory for this expansive interpretation of the Declaration of Independence.

Remarkably, the eventual Union victory depended in large degree on the millions of immigrants who had entered the United States under the open borders policy.  The key to Lincoln's strategy for defeating the Confederacy was exploiting the advantage of the Union in its greater numbers of soldiers--over twice as many as the Confederates.  This was due to the greater population of the Northern states, which gave them a greater pool of potential military recruits.  Not only was the Confederacy weakened by its small total population--about one-third that of the Union--but as a slave society, the Confederacy lacked access to 40 percent of its adult male military-age population, who were enslaved and thus not eligible for service.  This left about 965,000 free white men between the ages of 18 to 45 to draw on for military service.  But then, of course, not every adult white man could serve.  This meant that at most the Confederacy could put an army of no more than about five hundred thousand men in the field.

The greater population of the North can be explained as largely the consequence of the liberal social order in the North that had attracted millions of immigrants from overseas and many migrants from the South.  The comparatively open and free society of the North offered more opportunities for people seeking a better life than did the illiberal South where slaves did most of the work.  As Lincoln said, in the free states, an ambitious man "can better his condition" because "there is no such thing as a freeman being fatally fixed for life, in the condition of a hired laborer" (1989, 2:144).  Of the ten million overseas immigrants to the United States who entered from the 1830s to the 1850s, most of them (about seven-eighths) settled in the North.  Also, the migration of white Southerners to the North was three times greater than the migration from the North to the South.  Over 40 percent of the Union's armed forces were immigrants and the sons of immigrants--totaling about 600,000 out of 2.1 million.  The Confederacy had only a few thousand immigrants fighting for them.

As I have argued previously, global human migration shows what evolutionary scientists call cultural group selection through migration and assimilation, in which countries with cultural traditions of freedom have higher fitness than countries that are less free.  John Locke understood this, which is why he argued that free societies benefited from having open borders, so that they could attract migrants from less free societies.  The freer societies with a growing population of productive and inventive people become the more prosperous societies.  While countries like New Zealand have adopted the Lockean liberal immigration policy, the United States under the rule of Trump the Nationalist is raising barriers to immigration, which means that if the United States continues to move away from Lockean liberalism, it will become a loser in this evolutionary process of cultural group selection, in which people vote with their feet in favor of freedom.

But once Trump and the MAGA Republicans are out of power, we can work to restore the promise of America as a creedal nation dedicated to that "electric cord" in the Declaration of Independence "that links the hearts of patriotic and liberty-loving men together, that will link those patriotic hearts as long as the love of freedom exists in the minds of men throughout the world."