This is CBS, I On the World with Victor Davis Hansen of the Hoover Institution, a classical scholar,

but he is also the author of the new book, The Dying Citizen,

How Progressive Elites, Tribalism and Globalization are destroying the ideas of America.

We turn to The Melting Pot. The 20th century, my education, said America is

superior, exceptional because we are the great democratic experiment of the melting pot. What

did we mean by that, Victor, in the 20th century?

It was popularized by Teddy Roosevelt, who railed against hyphenated Americans.

What it meant was that anybody who came to America had made a previous choice,

whether it was harsh or not, to give up their prior loyalties and identities.

And then they would absorb a new one.

And they would all be different colors and different religions and from different locations in the world. You put them in a pot,

you mix them all up. And what would emerge was a new person on the planet, an American. And that

American would be of any race, it'd be of any religion, although predominantly that even though the country

was founded by white males from the Anglo-Saxon world, they created a system that pretty much

put themselves out of business, and by intent, they never intended that everybody in America

would come from England. The very purpose of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution

and much of the Federalist papers was to create this utopia of freedom and equality,

which the ultimate logic would be that everybody in the world wanted to come.

And so that was what the melting pot was.

And of course, any time one particular tribal group starts something,

human nature what it is, they tend to be exclusive,

and then they break down as more people who are not like them come.

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