Michael Novak’s The Rise of the Unmeltable Ethnics (1972) generated an ethnic pride movement in the 1970s. Americans of Eastern and Southern European ancestry, Latinos, and others came out of the WASP shadows to acknowledge that their heritage remained — and legitimately remained — part of their American identity. I am a Polish American.

Novak’s work inspired renewed interest in ethnicity at a critical moment, particularly among Americans with roots in European countries. For many in the third generation, i.e., the second generation born in America after the great immigration of 1880-1920, it was a last call to connect with elderly immigrant grandparents.

But, after an initial brightness, Novak’s flame sputtered.  White urban ethnics, for different reasons, were problems for both parties. Democrats, who had excelled in ethnic politics, were moving away from appealing to urban ethnics in favor of race and sex, way stations on their current trip to critical theory categories like “gender.” I could see that happening in New Jersey: By the late 1980s, Democrat politicians were less frequently showing up at Polish American community events. Perhaps a greater barometer was over in neighboring New York. After a final huzzah with Irish Americans over the startup “visa lottery” program (initially designed to deal with illegal Irish youth fleeing unemployment in Eire), Irish Americans were gradually sidelined (except for a small coterie that want Ireland to be just as woke as Berkeley). Just make sure you show up to parade on March 17.

Mainstream Republicans, however, always made ethnics feel inferior about their ethnic pride. The focus on “American” centrality tended to downplay GOP outreach to particular ethnic groups. In some sense, this was a holdover from early 20^th century days when “hyphenated Americans” were considered disloyal. In another sense, it was an overreaction to affirmative action (the forerunner of DEI). Their response to avoid picking people by race or sex was to pretend neither exists or, at best, are wholly private concerns.

Both parties’ approaches were incredibly shortsighted. Democrats who otherwise extol “diversity” conflate the amazing diversity of Europe — a continent that produced 55+ countries and almost as many languages — into one generic white “European” glob, the only “melting pot” they in practice accept. Republicans, who in 1968 had begun detaching urban ethnics (especially Catholic urban ethnics) from the Democratic Party, never carried that process through.  (I’d argue that process only began anew with  Donald Trump in 2016). In the process, they lost capturing those ethnics for the long-term in places like New Jersey and across the Rust Belt, allowing a “Blue Wall” to solidify to their electoral disadvantage. (It might also have buffered moderate Democrats from being wholly “melted” into the progressive trajectory of that party.)

That obtuseness was not unique to politics. It found its counterpart in the Church. Historically, there was always a certain animus among bishops in the United States to national parishes. In some dioceses, permission to establish them was only grudgingly given. And, in our present phase of ecclesiastical downsizing, it’s not unfair to note that the ethnic parishes that were often the last to be approved show up first on diocesan chopping blocks.

The explanation of such obtuseness is that these Americans usually had particular ethnic models of Americanism in mind. For the Republican country-club, Brahmin, and Yankee set, it was usually British (or, at best, Northern European) minus the accent. For the contemporary Democrat, it was everywhere except Europe. For the ecclesiastical set, it was the bishops who thundered, “sure and begorrah, we’re gonna make real Americuns out of all of ye!” Doubt it? Why are the tony streets in upscale communities “Westminster Street” or “Oxford Avenue,” not “Cappodano Street” or “Paderewski Avenue?” Why was the territorial parish that the bishop pushed his flock towards usually under the patronage of “St. Patrick,” not “St. Ladislaus?”

I hear something of the same mindset when I listened to reaction in more established Republican circles to the 2024 Republican National Convention and ticket. Instead of talking about the “regressive growth implications of too steep capital gains taxes,” we heard people talking about poor whites dying of fentanyl and black and Latino communities preyed on by domestic and imported criminals.  “My, how the neighborhood has changed!”  “Yes, Muffy, quite!”

I, for one, am glad unmeltable ethnicity has come to the Republican party. Yes, I am an American, born and raised in New Jersey. And, yes, I think there is a lot that my 1,000-year Polish heritage brings that enriches what it means to be an American in ways that the stereotypical “Americanism” of the GOP or Democratic party misses. An example: We Polish Americans always thought incredibly stupid the ideas that “history ended” in 1991 and that Russia was just a democratic butterfly waiting to burst from a Soviet cocoon when Jeffrey Sachs administered laissez-faire shock therapy. We thought also rather dumb the idea of banging together hostile nationalities into multiethnic states (think Woodrow Wilson’s Yugoslavia or Czechoslovakia) because their architects were making “the world safe for democracy” in faraway countries among people of whom they know nothing. And pardon us if we called “stupid” and “dumb” ideas that were stupid and dumb, rather than “naïve” or “ill-considered.”

Novak struck a healthy balance: the unity of Americanism with an awareness of roots (also a 1970s phenomenon with the eponymous film). America’s two major parties lost that balance by clinging to polar opposites: Democrats who emphasized “diversity” at the expense of a unifying Americanism, Republicans who stressed “Americanism” at the cost of personal historical amnesia. The latter was well captured by a “melting pot” poster that adorned Ford Motor Company in the early 20^th century: workers entering one door in their European ethnic garb to exit the other in uniform overalls. Well, no. One didn’t cease being a Croatian American to become a Consumer American.

This ethnic hostility is also a class hostility. One hears it in criticisms of J.D. Vance’s “hillbilly hokum” (in National Review, of course), as if the poverty and futility faced by working class Americans is largely the result of people choosing “to sacrifice their agency” and not pull themselves up by their bootstraps. How come few people told that to  Lehman Brothers back in 2008?