Lea Ypi offers a provocative argument that in the twenty-first century, “the democratic ideal” is no longer able to drive societies toward greater inclusion. She is entirely correct that immigration, in particular, poses a challenge to the idea that electoral democracy allows those affected by policy to have a voice in shaping it; instead, immigration politics has become a culture war, a symbolic space that only occasionally reflects the policies that continue to churn on shaping human lives.

But though Ypi attempts to reject efforts to divide migrants into groups (the “asylum seeker” versus “economic migrant,” say) in order to refuse to distinguish worthy from unworthy migrants, her essay reproduces one version of this distinction: between forced and voluntary migration. In Ypi’s reading, essentially all migration is forced by overdetermined economics.

That’s just not true. Most major migration flows in the twenty-first century have been “mixed migrations”: people leaving for a variety of reasons, out of a mixture of desperation and opportunism. After all, people don’t just choose to leave—they also choose somewhere else to go. Few migrants relish leaving their homes, but for many of them, the choice to settle somewhere else is symbolically important for allowing them to move on with their lives—to reclaim some agency in the face of the overwhelming power of market and state. By choosing to identify with the places they’ve landed, they are choosing a cultural identity that’s distinct from the place of their birth.

In fact, the claim that migrants would universally prefer not to be where they are—that they are only to be seen as expelled natives of their home countries—has had pernicious political effects. At best, it excuses a failure to welcome them and help them put down roots; at worst, it creates an incentive for countries to engage in motivated reasoning in foreign policy and other areas, deciding that a given place is safe or stable in order to tell migrants to go home.

As much as we may wish to be done with culture, then, culture is by no means done with us. But while the populist right is correct that culture is an important wellspring of meaning for individuals, it’s wrong about what culture actually is. Within a framework of universal rights, culture can be freed from deterministic or essentialist connotations and seen as a mix of plural loyalties, which shape a life but do not determine its outcome.

It is difficult to find an identity that is powerful enough to motivate this sort of loyalty but elastic enough to be chosen. Ypi takes inspiration from the social democratic tradition, which uses solidarity as the mechanism: the choice to be in collective struggle alongside others. But it is neither the only way to construct a welcoming politics, nor, historically, the most successful.

It is no accident that the “rare and fortunate historical episodes” Ypi identifies when liberal democratic states embraced cooperation happened in the period “immediately after World War II”—which is also the period when welcoming (at least some) migrants was first seen as a collective responsibility of states, and when the Refugee Convention establishing some such obligations was first drafted. Nor is it an accident that this period coincided with the rise to Western hegemony of a country that was explicitly founded on the Enlightenment’s universal ideals: the United States. The language of the Declaration of Independence is as powerful a statement of universal individual dignity as any that has been written. And founding a nation on universal ideals presented a striking alternative to blood-and-soil nationalisms throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Traditionally, the ideology of “American exceptionalism” as it’s taught to schoolchildren includes as one of its central pillars the idea that anyone can choose to be an American—that the United States is a nation that transcends accidents of birth.

Of course it’s a story, not reality. Of course paying lip service to ideals does not necessarily bind one to act upon them. But what we have seen in this century is that the alternative—not paying lip service at all—is far worse.

The current government of the United States insists on identifying people with the places where they were born. People are alleged to have an obligation to “make their countries great again” rather than attempting to move elsewhere to improve (or save) their own lives. The administration sees the Refugee Convention’s obligation of non-refoulement—not to return someone to a country where they will be persecuted—as an obstacle that can be cleverly surmounted, by deporting people to countries that will then refoul them and pretending that the United States didn’t know that would happen all along. The use of the soft power of “global leadership,” much less more coercive tactics, to set a standard for resettlement has been replaced by pressure on countries in Latin America to interdict and expel migrants from their own countries, lest they continue northward.

Furthermore, there is a larger America First effort underway to impose a blood-and-soil conception of national identity. In a September speech at the National Conservatism Conference, Senator Eric Schmitt of Missouri insisted that American soldiers and settlers of the past “would be astonished to hear that they were only fighting for a ‘proposition’”—a direct rebuke to the most famous war eulogy in U.S. history, the Gettysburg Address. “For decades,” Schmitt said,

the mainstream consensus on the left and the right alike seemed to be that America itself was just an “idea”—a vehicle for global liberalism. We were told that the entire meaning of America boiled down to a few lines in a poem on the Statue of Liberty, and five words about equality in the Declaration of Independence. Any other aspect of American identity was deemed to be illegitimate and immoral, poisoned by the evils of our ancestors. . . . That’s what set Donald Trump apart from the old conservatism and the old liberalism alike: He knows that America is not just an abstract “proposition,” but a nation and a people, with its own distinct history and heritage and interests. His movement is the revolt of the real American nation.

This summer Vice President J. D. Vance likewise insisted that people whose ancestors fought in the Revolutionary and Civil Wars and now subscribe to right-wing extremist views have “a hell of a lot more claim over America” than those who attempt to label such views un-American.

To be sure, the United States has never been the full-throated champion for welcoming newcomers that Vance depicts it as and that it has traditionally claimed to be. But when it no longer even attempts to make those claims, it’s an enormous setback for universal ideals. This is a culture war we have no choice but to take sides in, and Ypi is surely right that the Enlightenment provides intellectual weaponry for the side of the cosmopolitans. We only increase the power of universalism when we acknowledge that it, however imperfectly realized, is something we can lay claim to as a matter of national inheritance.