Isn't the American identity defined by the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution?
Americans ideals -- the ideals summed up in such famous phrases as "all men are created equal" and "liberty and justice for all" -- have often had a problematic relation to American reality. It is true that the American system of government was founded on such ideals; but it is false to say that America is nothing but its system of government.
Our Founding Fathers did not create something out of nothing. They created the Union, but they did not create its constituent states, nor their common language, customs, institutions, and law, nor the generations of history predating their own. America is a nation, and any nation, whatever its weaknesses, is something stronger and more solid than any "proposition."
The American nation was constituted by the British colonists who founded it: white in race, Anglo-Saxon in culture, and Protestant in religion. It was also marked by a certain amount of inherited class-stratification, which was effaced, sooner or later, in the Revolution and its aftermath (to be replaced, of course, by new forms of class-stratification).
American ideals, on the other hand, are universal in scope, and thus inclusive of all classes, and of non-WASPs of all races, cultures, and religions. Indeed, American ideals might someday (maybe a thousand years from now) prevail throughout the world, and then America itself would be distinguished only by being their first and foremost exemplar -- if, that is, America is really nothing but an abstract, normative "proposition".
American nationality and American ideals are not irreconcilable as long as one recalls that the latter, with their formal expressions and embodiments in the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, are integral to the distinctive traditions of the American branch of Anglo-Saxondom. Ideals do not exist in any sort of Platonic realm separate from reality: they are both conceived and applied within pre-existent history. The Constitution is our own unique constitution, though it has been imitated many times -- the imitations were always failures.
The American political system is inconceivable without the traditions of parliamentarism, private enterprise, the common law, etc., inherited from England. But then the common experience of the War of Independence, and the common system of government established during and after the war, separated the American branch from the rest. It also made one nation out of thirteen colonies that had each been distinct, to some extent, from all other Anglo-Saxon peoples since their respective foundings.
Now, while Americanism is not sufficient to define America, it is certainly necessary. Struggles to realize American ideals -- the Revolution, the Civil War, the civil-rights movement -- have helped to make us who we are. Consider that the only true grassroots movements on the political Right are dedicated to the right to life and the right to keep and bear arms; both movements routinely invoke American precedents -- abolitionism and the Revolution, respectively. The political Left, on the other hand, has gotten so far mainly because it claims to champion equal rights. Of course this is only one of the big lies the Left has managed to make stick by sheer force of repetition; but conservatives are usually reluctant to challenge it.
Isn't America a nation of immigrants?
Taken literally, this question is obviously absurd: the vast majority of Americans were born and raised in this country. Neither is it true that all native Americans are ultimately descended from immigrants. One must distinguish between immigrants and the original settlers who founded this country in the first place.
The British colonists were the mold into which all latecomers were set. Over time, the original stock has been diluted by influxes of other peoples; but (until recently) the original Americans, the first-comers and nation-builders, maintained their cultural hegemony. The Anglo-Saxons are the solvent of the "melting pot": they provided the language, the system of law and government, and most of the manners and customs that continue to define America as a nation. The newcomers' additions to American culture are trivial in comparison to what they gave up.
It is ludicrous to pretend that Americans, whatever their ancestry, are anything but Anglo-Saxons. While there are still residual ethnic groups that have not yet become completely Americanized, these distinct ethnicities are ultimately bound to disappear through intermarriage (unless the process is impeded by anti-national public policies).
I, for example, am a typical American mongrel. My name may be German, but only 1/4 of my heredity is; the only German I know I learned in school, and I've forgotten most of it; I don't drink beer and wouldn't be caught dead in a pair of Lederhosen.
The idea of the "melting pot" and the conception of America as a "nation of immigrants" were conceived in response to the challenge of assimilating the great wave of immigration that began in the late nineteenth century. Their purpose was to promote the integration of these immigrants by redefining and expanding the American nationality to include them. The ideas worked reasonably well (in conjunction with other, less glamorous pressures -- social, economic, and political) in making the newcomers Americans in spirit as well as residence. It also helped that the inflow was finally cut down to a trickle, in the 1920s.
Even so, our experience with mass immigration was never an unmixed blessing: its side effects included slums, political corruption, and organized crime. Moreover, the "melting pot" was detrimental to the precise extent that it worked as advertised -- i.e., diluting American nationality and forming a debased and deracinated mass-culture.
Mass-immigration apologists try to reassure us of the power of this mass-culture as a solvent, both at home and abroad, and in a way they are right: the American culture-industry permeated the world throughout the twentieth century, because it was already aimed at the lowest common denominator of mankind. But universal appeal comes through the sacrifice of what is profound to what is superficial, of what is specifically ours to what is common to all mankind. If the whole world were merged into one Americanoid pop-culture, we would gain the world at the cost of our soul.
Nowadays, in the name of "multiculturalism," the "nation of immigrants" myth is being used deliberately to subvert American patriotism and unity: to prevent the assimilation of the new wave of immigrants and Balkanize our country into a "mosaic" of ethnic enclaves. These minority groups are the political clients of the liberal/Left political-cultural elite, whose aim is to destroy what's left of the native culture and nationality of America.
The idea is that if we're only a "nation of immigrants," then those who came before have no right to expect latecomers to accept our ways or even speak our language ... and moreover, we have to subsidize our own invasion by giving welfare to immigrants and providing them public services (education, ballots, census forms, etc.) in their own languages ... and we are even supposed to censor ourselves vigilantly, so as never to give offense to foreign ethnicities and "undocumented" (i.e., illegal) immigrants. To this, any self-respecting and patriotic American has to wonder why we don't just kick out all the immigrants, and the liberal/Left traitors with them.
What about the Indians?
The Indians have the problematic status of being in but not of the USA. They are not Americans, never have been, and should never be. They have their own tribes, customs, languages, and even territories -- severely reduced and attenuated, to be sure, but still holding on precariously. The best thing they could do for themselves, and that we could do for them, is to make their reservations completely and absolutely sovereign nations. Let them regain control of their own destinies.
There are, otherwise, only two alternatives. One, the more tragic, is for them to finally lose their last precarious existence as peoples, and disappear into the general American populace. The other, which is simply pathetic, is for them to remain the objects of liberal solicitude, poster-boys of oppression, dependent on the white man's government. But this alternative really is no alternative, for it reduces them to clients of white liberals, alongside all the other oppressed classes and grievance-mongers, living by the white liberals' standards and expectations. The façade of tribal existence will remain, but at the sacrifice of any meaningful tribal life and identity.
What about the blacks?
Black Americans, unlike the Indians, have not even a memory of any language other than English, nor any religion other than Christianity. Culturally, they are entirely American, distinguished only by regional and caste variations. How many "African Americans" would really want to become Africans? The experiment was tried: it produced the state of Liberia, which was not much of a success, any way you look at it. I suspect that blacks who play at being Africans -- assuming African names, wearing African garb, celebrating the pseudo-African holiday of "Kwanzaa" -- would change their tune very quickly if faced with the prospect of being deported to the "motherland."
Before 1964, the goal of the civil-rights movement was to repair a violation of American ideals; within ten years, this movement had repudiated American ideals, and continues to do so. There is no room here to discuss the whole sad story of how the movement changed course so abruptly. Suffice it to say that the second Reconstruction, which completed the work of the first, was regarded as an exercise in egalitarian levelling rather than nation-building.
In retrospect, it is astonishing how quickly the ideals of racial equality and integration were jettisoned. In their place, the system of "affirmative action" was set up, which replaced the Jeffersonian "all men are created equal" with the Orwellian "some are more equal than others." Blacks are supposed to remain a separate caste, just as they had been under segregation -- but now they are a specially-protected caste.
The proponents of this social-engineering project never noticed the absurdity of trying to achieve a society free of racism by re-institutionalizing legal discrimination. Supposedly, "affirmative action," with its whole apparatus of quotas and equality-police, would end as soon as blacks achieved statistical parity with whites: i.e., as soon as every neighborhood, school, and workplace in the nation was exactly 12% black (or whatever their exact proportion might be). Of course "affirmative action" could never reach this never-quite-stated goal; and even if it did, the whole coercive machinery would have to stay in place to make sure that no "imbalance" ever reappeared.
The result has been to preserve the distinctiveness of blacks as an ethnic group, indeed reaffirming it. If blacks ever ceased to be recognizably "black" (i.e., by intermarriage and cultural assimilation, which would inevitable accompany each other), then the game would be up.
The blacks (and especially their self-appointed spokesmen in the "civil rights" lobby) stood to gain political and economic advantages through the white-guilt racket. And of course, the white liberals would never dream of losing their most reliable voting bloc and their heartwarming sense of "anti-racist" sanctimony. So the tacit, unholy bargain was made: a separate black minority would be preserved, black "leaders" would benefit from political pull and immunity from public criticism, and white liberals would take black votes and use the bogeyman of "racism" to denounce all non-liberals -- forever and ever.
All this is monstrous, from the point of view of human decency and simple justice. From the nationalist point of view, it artificially separates one part of the nation from the rest, legitimating that separation with racist and anti-American propaganda.
Is the South a distinct nation?
The South's racial caste system was the essential difference, the "peculiar institution," which made it a distinct society. It was to defend and promote this system that the South attempted to secede from the Union. Now this system has been destroyed, and few (if any) Southerners will openly defend it; even apologists for the Confederacy pretend that secession was an end in itself.
Of course this is a lie: the states' declarations of secession made no secret that slavery was the issue, and the Confederate constitution explicitly forbade any "law denying or impairing the right of property in negro slaves." Moreover, that constitution established a "permanent federal government" -- echoing the "perpetual Union" formed by the Articles of Confederation -- and the Confederacy tried by force to keep the counties of western Virginia from seceding in turn.
The Old South was dedicated to the proposition that natural rights, and government with the consent of the governed, are principles that apply to some men and not others; it claimed the right to deny rights. Southernism was -- and is -- nothing but a perversion of Americanism.
Are the Northeast and the Left Coast still American in any real cultural sense?
America is becoming ever more polarized, both culturally and politically, between Left and Right. Liberals feel no loyalty to America, its traditions, its institutions; they are hostile and contemptuous towards anyone who does remain loyal to America; they are dishonest, dishonorable, and unscrupulous; they enjoy quasi-totalitarian control of most of our cultural institutions, and despite setbacks, they still cling to our political institutions with flagrant disregard for legal and constitutional propriety.
Opposition to liberalism has grown steadily over the past two generations, as more and more Americans have become aware of, and angry at, what the liberals are doing to our country. The rise of conservatism and the Christian Right, the gradual return of the GOP to majority-party status, the proliferation of neo-Nazi groupuscules, sporadic outbursts of domestic terrorism, the mushroom growth of the militia movement, all testify to a stiffening American resistance to liberalism and alienization.
To a large extent, this political and cultural schism is also geographical. But the New Yorkers had enough sanity to elect Rudy Giuliani -- a man who, though liberal to the core, has just enough brains and spine to enact one conservative policy and prove it spectacularly successful. The Californians voted overwhelmingly against illegal immigration, bilingualism, and racial discrimination. And it was Arkansas that gave us Bill "You Can Tell I'm Lying Because My Lips Are Moving" Clinton, and Tennessee that gave us Al "My Mind Is Unbalanced" Gore.
The relative un-Americanism of the Northeast and Left Coast is due to historical accident: our cultural institutions are more thickly clustered in these regions, and these institutions are the Petri dishes of the anti-culture. Here we cannot answer the question of why the educated classes are predominantly liberal; we can only wonder how long a country or civilization can last if its educated classes are as hostile to it as ours are. |
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