Vivek Ramaswamy vs. Nick Fuentes

Who should be let in? John von Neumann or Sirhan Sirhan?

From the opinion section of the New York Times:

Groyperism Isn’t Conservatism. It’s Anti-Americanism.

Dec. 17, 2025

By Vivek Ramaswamy

Mr. Ramaswamy was a Republican candidate for president in 2024 and is running for governor of Ohio in 2026.

There are two competing visions now emerging on the American right, and they are incompatible. One vision of American identity is based on lineage, blood and soil: Inherited attributes matter most. The purest form of an American is a so-called heritage American — one whose ancestry traces back to the founding of the United States or earlier.

Actually, rather than an emerging vision, that instead seem like the traditional bias in the U.S. — that while descendants of the Mayflower and the like don’t get more votes per capita than American citizens with shallower roots, they can have more influence in political and community life if they don’t waste their opportunity.

All else being equal, a Heritage American has more hope of being elected President than an Ellis Island American, much less a post-1965 American.

This is hardly unreasonable. Most human cultures put a lot of weight on ancestry, as can be seen, for example, in the Bible.

Granted, the U.S. is less obsessed than most with begats (certainly less than Hindu culture), but we’re hardly immune to boasting about how our “forefathers brought forth on this continent.”

For instance, Abraham Lincoln’s fourth-great-grandfather Samuel Lincoln arrived in Massachusetts in the late 1630s, about 225 years before the Gettysburg Address.

Indeed, to this day we see that Presidents, who play a large symbolic role as both head of state as well as head of government, tend to be Old Stock Americans. Here’s Wikipedia’s list of Presidents’ ancestry:

The most common ancestry of U.S. presidents is English, due to its origins as a group of former English colonies. With the exception of Martin Van Buren and possibly Dwight D. Eisenhower, every president has ancestors from the British Isles; Van Buren was of Dutch (New Netherlander) lineage and Eisenhower was of German (Pennsylvania Dutch) and Swiss heritage.

Note that the Roosevelts’ Dutch direct male line ancestor arrived in New Amsterdam around 1649, but most of their ancestry was WASP.

John F. Kennedy and Donald Trump are the only known presidents who did not have [any] ancestors who arrived during the colonial period. Barack Obama, the country’s first and so far only African American president, is the only president to have ancestry from outside of Europe

With the exception of Obama, the patrilineal lines of Presidential descent tend to be exceptionally old by modern American standards. For example, the Madison family got to Jamestown 418 years ago in 1608. That’s really a long time ago.

And the second most recent documented arrival of a direct male line ancestor (besides Obama Sr. in 1959) is Trump’s grandfather in 1885. One-hundred-and-forty-one years ago is a not a short time.

We don’t have reliable complete genealogies for Truman, LBJ, Nixon, or Clinton. But Truman’s male line ancestor is documented at least back to 1797, LBJ’s to 1764, Nixon’s to 1731, and Clinton’s to sometime in the 18th Century.

Other than those four, (Clinton is descended from a Blyth) whose roots in America presumably go back even further into the indefinite past than we can certify, the only President whose surname has ever changed over the generations is Gerald Ford (originally a King).

American Presidents tend to be exemplify legitimate British patriarchal culture.

Although a Catholic, Biden has a lot of old American ancestry (with William Biden, his third great-grandfather, arriving around 1820), as did Obama on his mother’s side, both Bushes, Clinton, and so forth.

Heck, the first Eisenhauer got here in 1741. JFK’s eight Irish great-grandparents migrated to Boston in 1846-1857 (i.e., before the Civil War), at least 60 years before JFK’s birth in 1917. (Trump is less of a heritage American than most Presidents, with no Anglo-Saxon ancestry. His mother was a Scottish Highlander immigrant, but the first Trump got here in 1885, which was a long time ago.)

Out of 45 different Presidents, we’ve had one Irish-Catholic pre-Civil War immigrant president (JFK), and two others who had some post-Reformation but pre-Civil War Catholic ethnicity: Biden and Reagan, the former of whom was raised Catholic, the latter of whom was raised Protestant. Like JFK, both Biden’s and Reagan’s namesake ancestors got here before the Civil War.

Italian-Americans have adorned the arts: Coppola, Scorsese, De Niro, DiCaprio, etc. Yet, no Italian-American has come close to the Presidency yet. Geraldine Ferraro was the losing VP nominee in 1984. Mario Cuomo might have gotten the Democratic nomination if he’d run in 1988. Still …

Gerald Ford is the only President with any Polish ancestry. And Ford’s distant Polish ancestor on his mother’s side, Antoni Sadowski, wasn’t an Ellis Island huddled mass, but instead was a glamorous upper class pioneering fur trader who arrived in America around 1704. It’s surmised that Sandusky, Ohio is named after him.

In other words, Presidents tend to be extremely Heritage American. As an example, the only Eastern European ancestor of a President got here about 320+ years ago and headed for the frontier to buy beaver pelts in trade for firewater.

Notably, we’ve never had a President raised outside of Western European Christianity (Protestant or Roman Catholic).

Among losers, Michael Dukakis was raised as Greek Orthodox. Kamala Harris sang in a black Protestant church’s choir and visited her Hindu relatives. (But note that her part-black Jamaican father was a snobby Anglophile.)

Barry Goldwater was half-Jewish but raised Episcopalian.

Update: commenter Another Dad points out John Forbes Kerry was half Jewish by ethnic background, his ancestors converted upon immigrating around 1900. His Forbes side is a famous old Boston Brahmin family.

Herbert Hoover’s vice president Charles Curtis was visibly part American Indian. But nobody seems to know whether he was 3/8ths or 1/8th Amerindian.

Barack Obama was of course half sub-Saharan, but was strikingly Yankee Jayhawk on his mother’s side. His American grandfather’s more successful big brother was named Dr. Ralph Waldo Emerson Dunham Jr., and he had a fair amount of influence on both his mother’s and Obama’s early career trajectories toward international relations. I read several long interviews of him in Janny Scott’s biography of Obama’s mom, and was quite impressed with his insights.

At this point, the frontrunners for 2028 appear to be …

Paywall here.