The Natural Born Citizenship Clause Should Be Magnified

Dave Archbold has sent me a copy of an article by Sarah P. Herlihy that appeared in the Kent Law Review in which Ms. Herlihy argues that the natural born citizenship clause should be repealed.

I disagree for three reasons. First, the Founding Fathers correctly perceived that divided loyalties would threaten the impartiality of the chief executive. Second, although many debate the notion of American exceptionalism that goes back to John Winthrop's "City on a Hill" speech and Michel Guillaume Jean de Crèvecœur's (John Hector St. John's) Letters from an American Farmer, the framers were well aware that few in the world shared their liberal values. That continues to be the case. I do not think many born in Europe, Africa, South America or Asia understand liberalism, and consequently it would be an error to permit them to assume the role of chief executive.

Third, I would go further than Article II does. I think the Constitution needs to be revised, not to globalize America, but to separate the deviant, anti-American viewpoint in which many Americans have been inculcated. In other words, there needs to be a second liberal revolution that would involve either federalizing or completely separating the United States to free the liberal, American portion of the nation from the Progressive and anti-liberal. America is not one nation any more, and Herlihy's article illustrates why.

The American identity is unique because of ideology, not place of birth. Crèvecœur and Winthrop were both born overseas, yet they realized that the Colonies had a unique identity. This identity was in part related to the frontier and in part to the Lockean laisser faire philosophy of the Founders, which cannot be extricated from the Constitution or from the definition of the United States.

No one can be called an American who does not subscribe to the individualism of John Locke. Hence, I do not consider most academics, Progressives, nor most people born abroad to be legitimate Americans. They are to America as I would be to communist Cuba were I to be living there. Because of the sharp separation of ideological identity, America, which is an ideologically rooted nation, cannot continue to survive as a single entity.

I do not believe that Lockean liberalism is imparted to the majority of people in the world, and I do not believe that most Europeans, Asians or South Americans intuitively grasp those principles. Hence, they are not Americans. Nor do I believe that most members of the American "elite", educated in northeastern universities, are Americans. They are Progressive internationalists who do not share in the American vision and are ignorant of liberalism and the Founders' philosophy of freedom. Brainwashed in American progressive education-based schools, they have more likely read Communist Manifesto than Second Treatise on Government.

There needs to be a new federalism that wrenches power from the European-inspired Progressives and separates Americans from Progressives, permitting states to opt out of the declining Progressive anti-America.

In other words, I would prefer to separate this country into two or more confederations, leaving the Progressives to their own declining world and enabling Americans, those who believe in Lockean individualism, to establish a new Lockean society that will be dynamic, free and will dispense with the idiocies of northeastern universities.