Why do so many people (on Quora) get offended when Americans want to identify with the countries of their ancestors when it was not their own choice that their ancestors left their home country?

The Capitol, Washington D.C.

Identification by Americans with countries of ancestral origin can be a perfectly harmless eccentricity or it can be a menace.

I don’t see any problem with an American of Italian descent calling himself an Italian-American, running an Italian restaurant or singing Verdi for fun.

The problem arises when he not only calls himself an Italian but thinks this entitles him to some sort of status in respect of modern Italian social, cultural or particularly political questions. If he has any knowledge of Italy at all it is most likely to be a traditional family perspective or a romantic myth that may never have reflected reality, let alone have relevance to Italian reality today.

He may even go so far as to preserve inherited hostile attitudes towards those held responsible for pressuring his ancestors to emigrate, and apply these attitudes towards these people’s descendants even though the descendants bear no guilt for their ancestors’ behaviour and may never had any issues with the descendants of the long-ago emigrant’s neighbours who did not emigrate. You can’t sort out today problems that used to exist centuries ago, but you sure can create new ones.

For example, when we speak of expatriate Scots being ‘more Scottish than the the Scots’, we mean their perspective involves looking back through very rose-tinted spectacles at a largely fictional past. Yet they sometimes seem to think think this gives them a right to pontificate upon the present. If they are influential, they can make big waves in ‘the old country’ despite their ignorance of its current state.

So when, for example, a ‘Scottish’ POTUS is followed by an ‘Irish’ POTUS, it naturally worries those who have to live in or alongside the country claimed by these powerful, but misinformed, people. How great is the danger that, in seeking to confirm the support of some similarly misguided American voters’ lobby, a president may turn his inherited prejudice into current international policy?

If matters should reach that stage, being offended is going to be the least of our problems.