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Throughout American history, newcomers assimilated to this model, despite the doubts and hostility of their hosts. At the turn of the century, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge was worried that East European immigrants labored under a "Byzantine" inheritance that would make them inimical to republican rule. Sixty years earlier, Protestant mobs burned Irish Catholic churches. The Senator and the rioters were both mistaken in their fears. Even blacks, the oldest and most abused American minority group, bear the marks of Americanization. Martin Luther King Jr. may have written about the influence on him of the teachings of Gandhi, but when he spoke, the texts he cited were the King James Bible, the Declaration of Independence and My Country, 'Tis of Thee. Minorities assimilated, because assimilation allowed them to get ahead here, and because here seemed better than any available alternative -- especially their homelands.
One of the stumbling blocks to acknowledging and proclaiming such once obvious truths may be the figure of George Bush, who is the most visible Wasp in America right now. But Bush is more post-Wasp than genuine article. Thomas Jefferson didn't think in cliches and speak in mush. There is also a lot worse in Wasp history than George Bush's inarticulateness, with slavery standing at the top of the list. The best defense of Waspdom is that it always included people who saw that slavery was wrong, and when it came to a fight, they won the war and (thanks to Lincoln) the argument. The way of the Wasp contained the correctives for its vices. It is the matrix of most of the good that America has done as well as the good that needs to be done.
This is not an argument in favor of DWEMS (dead white European males) -- at least, not in favor of those recently dead. As an intellectual and social system, America is clearly superior to Europe, which for the past 200 years has been an assembly line for destructive ideas, and for destruction. We don't have to take second place to the continent of Robespierre and Enver Hoxha.
Americans should take pride, not in empty formulas of tolerance and diversity, but in the historic content of their culture, in forms as homely as Benjamin Franklin's how-to-get-rich maxims, or as sublime as Lincoln's second Inaugural Address. There is no need to say to those who demur, "Love it or leave it." They have already left, for internal exile. If there are Americans who feel as alienated as the Amish, let them live like the Amish -- without harassment, but without subsidized proselytizing for their rejectionist world views. America has business -- noble business -- to attend to.