Epistemica

Bill Maher recently said that “if you want the American dream, you have to take the American values,” and went on to say that immigrants may keep their food, language, clothing, and religious holidays, but they must answer whether they “like Western civilization,” because “that’s not negotiable.” Most immigrants still assimilate, he conceded, but those who resist should be told, in his characteristically blunt formulation, to “melt.”

It was a cheap platitudinal ploy from Maher that is meant to sound self-evident but that really lacks much substance at all. Of course a political community needs some common rules, and of course no country must tolerate violence, coercion, or the destruction of its constitutional order. But Maher never supplies a defensible boundary between common law and cultural conformity but instead moves from constitutional commitments to personal preferences, from crimes to beliefs, and then even, implicitly, from universal rights to an undefined civilizational identity and perhaps cultural monolith. “American values” ends up being, here, a vacuous container into which he can place whatever he regards as enlightened and exclude whatever he regards as foreign. It is nothing but shallow rhetorical laundering where his private preferences are presented as shared “American values.”

Maher brings up honor killings, abduction disguised as marriage, female genital mutilation, unequal treatment of women (difficult to reconcile American values historically here), and hostility toward gay people (again, difficult to reconcile historically). There were certainly times when people stood up for “American values” in their attempts to keep women in domestic roles and preserve “traditional family values” through the rejection of gay marriage.  These examples, then, hardly reflect a consistent and unwavering, non-negotiable set of “American values.”

Further, an honor killing is punishable because it is murder. Abduction is punishable because it is illegal. By contrast, a person may hold a conservative theology, disapprove of same-sex marriage, wear a veil, reject secularism as a private philosophy, or criticize American culture. Such beliefs may be illiberal, mistaken, or offensive to many Americans but they are nevertheless beliefs, and the American answer to bad ideas and beliefs is argument, political competition, and legal protection against harmful action rather than a cultural catechism that Maher’s rule would invite the government to administer. Freedom of speech and conscience would be meaningless if they protected only beliefs already certified as acceptable. And, again, there isn’t a consistent history of “American values,” even among those few that Maher raised here.

If crime were Maher’s actual dividing line, he could say so plainly and propose to admit people under lawful criteria, screen for serious criminal and security risks, and require everyone present to obey the same laws. The formal naturalization oath itself is directed toward supporting and defending the Constitution and laws, not demonstrating affection for an amorphous “Western civilization.” Maher chooses the language of values because it reaches further than law and allows him to imply that lawful immigrants may still be unsuitable because their beliefs, customs, or identities fail his private test.

His reference to “Western civilization” makes his test even less coherent. Which West must an immigrant like: Athenian democracy, Enlightenment rationalism, evangelical Texas, secular California, French laïcité, or Scandinavian social democracy? Maher lists favored conclusions but failed to identify any principle for deciding what belongs in the canon, how much dissent is permitted, who measures compliance, or why native-born citizens are exempt. “It’s common sense” would not answer those questions and neither would the trite evasion that anyone who needs a definition has already failed the test.

A good faith account of American values likely begins with freedom, liberty, opportunity, equal civic standing, the rule of law, democratic self-government, pluralism, and social cooperation. Freedom protects domains of thought, speech, worship, association, and personal life. Liberty places limits on arbitrary power. Opportunity rejects the idea that inherited caste should determine a person’s future (although there is substantial disagreement on what opportunity means in the context of American values). Meanwhle, equal civic standing means that the government does not rank rights according to race, religion, ancestry, or cultural familiarity. Social cooperation is the ability of people with radically different convictions to maintain shared institutions, honor reciprocal obligations, and settle conflicts without domination.

Pluralism necessarily follows from these American values listed above. If freedom is actually available in a country, people will use it to reach different conclusions. If liberty belongs equally to everyone, the state cannot make sameness the condition of protection. Likewise, if opportunity is actually open in any real sense, newcomers will alter the society they enter just as that society will alter them. And if social cooperation is  a major goal, the relevant question is really whether they can live under common laws while recognizing one another as civic equals.

The constitutional architecture reflects a pluralistic  community. The Preamble speaks of justice, the general welfare, and the “Blessings of Liberty.” Article VI prohibits religious tests for public office. The First Amendment bars religious establishment while protecting free exercise, speech, press, assembly, and petition. The Fourteenth Amendment later constitutionalized due process and equal protection. Such provisions reinforce a nation whose central commitment is that government must not turn prevailing opinion into compulsory orthodoxy.

Founding-era thinkers often stated the point more directly than Maher does. In 1783, George Washington wrote that America’s “bosom” was open to the oppressed and persecuted “of all Nations & Religions,” provided they merited enjoyment of its rights by “decency & propriety of conduct.”  In his 1790 letter to Newport’s Jewish congregation, he celebrated a government that gives “to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance” and in which all possess liberty of conscience and the immunities of citizenship.

Thomas Jefferson argued that the legitimate power of government extends to acts harmful to others; a neighbor’s religious error “neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” James Madison maintained that religion must be left to each person’s “conviction and conscience” because opinions cannot simply follow another person’s dictates. In Federalist No. 10, Madison defended the extended republic partly because it would contain a “greater variety of parties and interests”; in Federalist No. 51, he argued that civil and religious security arose from a multiplicity of interests and sects. Diversity and pluralism were viewed as forms of protection against domination.

None of this requires romanticizing the founding. The original order betrayed its own universal language through slavery and unequal citizenship. But those failures strengthen the case against Maher’s logic. American moral progress has generally occurred when people excluded by the dominant culture used the country’s stated principles against the dominant culture’s narrow definition of who counted. The answer to hypocrisy was to extend liberty and equality, not to authorize a new gatekeeper to decide which cultures felt sufficiently American.

The Supreme Court eventually expressed this anti-orthodoxy principle in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, where the Court held that no official may prescribe what is orthodox in politics, nationalism, religion, or opinion, and noted that freedom to differ must include matters touching “the heart of the existing order”; otherwise, freedom is only a shadow. Maher’s implied values test makes agreement on contested matters the evidence of fitness for entry, which runs in direct contradiction to actual American values.

There is another contradiction from Maher in the same opening. He condemns Turkey and Egypt for refusing entry to a gay cruise ship, then praises those countries for confidently saying, in effect, “our culture, we just don’t do that here.” But what would he say about the progress made in women’s rights, abolition, and gay marriage? Those movements cut across the grain of “American values,” so it would seem that he would applaud efforts to stop such progress on the grounds of preserving “American values.” What nonsense.  

The empirical premise behind his anxiety is also contradicted. A 2024 study in PNAS Nexus, using historical census links and modern records, found that immigrants today assimilate at rates comparable to earlier eras, that their children frequently catch or exceed the economic outcomes of children of U.S.-born parents, and that immigrants as a group are no more likely to be incarcerated. The National Academies similarly describes integration as a two-way process where immigrants change after arrival, and native-born Americans change in response. That is a far more accurate account of the U.S. than Maher’s command that one side alone must melt.

Maher also contradicts his 2022 self where he said the U.S. was fortunate because immigrants “really want to be here,” “don’t want to really change our culture,” and want to work. Four years later, he declares that “something has changed,” but offers anecdotes rather than evidence of a broad transformation. His most recent position and double-down on the ambiguous “American values” is more consistent with another long-running tendency of his beginning with his noted 2014 exchange with Ben Affleck and Sam Harris, Maher has treated Islam as uniquely incompatible with liberal life and broad criticism of Muslims as an act of intellectual courage. His new formulation converts that old cultural suspicion into a proposed civic filter, and supports the means to reject immigrants who don’t meet his cultural standards.

And, of course, his position also contradicts his ridiculous, non-sensical “free-speech absolutist” position. Maher wants freedom from religious orthodoxy, but his immigration argument builds a secular orthodoxy of its own.

What exactly, then, does Maher believe should be non-negotiable? A reasonable account of American values would include possible non-negotiables as the supremacy of constitutional law over private coercion; equal legal rights; democratic government; due process; protection from violence; and freedom of conscience, speech, and worship.

At best, Maher’s position is intellectually empty, historically ignorant, and deeply misleading, and constantly contradicts itself and his prior positions. Had Maher meant that serious crime should be the primary disqualifier, he could have said so. But he chose a test of belonging administered through a vague idea of civilization.