The dirt is not magic.

Pioneer Day is the purest expression of the Heritage American paradox.

In a sense it is a conservative holiday, a celebration of roots and rootedness: we revere our ancestors who conquered and settled this land for us. It makes you want to plant your feet, thinking of all the blood and sweat that brought you here, and what it took to build. You feel that you have no right to surrender it.

But when you think of those pioneers’ example, it is (obviously, by definition) one of pulling up roots, either under duress or merely for greener pastures. In many cases, these pioneers were the first in their line to leave their village or parish — let alone their nation — in centuries.

The standard Old Right reflex is to nail this paradox to the Ellis Islanders’ door — “sure, maybe the Irish and Italians are rootless transients, but real Americans would never.”

I’ve got ancestors on both sides of this.

My dad’s family is basically 100% Irish — some Ellis Islanders, but also Scots-Irish who were in the Ohio River Valley before the Whiskey Rebellion.

On my mother’s side, I have a handful of English and Danish Mormon pioneers, but most of her lines are Anglo-American going back at least to the 18th century.

My earliest American ancestor came to Jamestown in 1610. I have ancestors in New York when it was Nieuw Amsterdam; one was among the first surveyors of the South Carolina backcountry; three served in the Virginia House of Burgesses, and one in the Culpeper Minutemen.

(One of my fuzzier Virginia lines extends back to John Rolfe and Pocahontas, so technically “we” have been here for millennia. I write to you from STOLEN LAND.)

Those Anglo-Norman Virginia lines are the easiest to follow back, because they were wealthy and literate and deeply concerned with bloodlines.

I can watch them bounce around the British Isles, fighting wars, claiming land and titles, all the way back to the Norman Conquest, and from there back to Odin and Aeneas and King David.

Of course, that’s a curated selection of thousands of ancestors — you don’t have to go very far back to reach a time where a democratic headcount of my ancestors would yield mostly permanent land-bound peasants.

But — maybe this should go without saying — being bound to the land was for peasants.

All my fun ancestors, as far back as you’d care to look, have been “rootless cosmopolitans” to the maximum extent permitted by their technology. They loved fast ships and sleek horses and distant correspondences.

Some were conquerors; some were what we might today call “refugees”, fleeing war or persecution. Often they were both at the same time.

They were of course more deeply rooted socially than any modern people — European aristocracies maintained an elaborate infrastructure of hospitality and hunting and feasting at great cost, in order to secure ties of friendship and marriage across long distances and years apart.

But Europeans — at least, the ones in the history books — have been radically mobile and individualistic by contemporary standards since Herodotus; and that vitality and dynamism was only sharpened by the Transatlantic crossing and the taming of the frontier.

(Modern Europeans are of course staid and communal in a way that makes this difficult to imagine — but they, too, were permanently shaped by the flight of this European type to the frontiers.)

I am deeply grateful that my ancestors, rich and poor, were seafarers and pioneers who did not romanticize stasis, so that I was not born in a mausoleum.

I recently heard this spirit described as the “tragic flaw” in the American character: our undoing in these frictionless times.

I’m not sure what I think about that — but there’s no question that it is our character.

Much discourse on the American Right is dedicated to distinguishing Heritage Americans from immigrants on the virtue of our Ancient Tenure Upon the Land, and the Graves of our Fathers — as if that’s what gives us the right to it — but of course that’s nonsense.

We live in the most beautiful and abundant land on the planet because our ancestors had the courage and ingenuity and will to claim it — very recently, in the scheme of things — and we will only keep it if we find the courage and ingenuity and will to claim it again.

Of course, this forecloses any moralistic argument against mass migration today — but how are those moralistic arguments working out for us so far?

“Indigeneity” is an enemy concept, invented specifically to argue for your expropriation. (The “indigenes” of any country are just “whichever tribe conquered or wandered into the land the day before Europeans showed up”.)

Playing into that framing will not persuade anyone. You’re not going to get leftists to Imagine If the Roles Were Reversed.

It only serves to alienate us from the heritage that actually built our nation: a restless, ranging, endlessly dynamic spirit that has been with us as long as there has been any “us” to talk about.

To my mind, the best way to honor my pioneer ancestors is to recognize that the dirt is not magic.

America is its people, and our ancient heritage is not a closed frontier — it is the Frontier itself.