1. Obama may not have been born in the United States (see the biography circulated by his literary agent which claims that he was born in Kenya); and
2. he does not have two citizen parents (see his autobiography166 which identifies his father as a British subject from Kenya); and
3. he may have lost his American citizenship (whether natural born or otherwise) as a consequence of his adoption by an Indonesian citizen married to his American mother.
Such concerns have been broadcast everywhere, both by birthers and those who ridicule their claims. Birthers have also mounted numerous legal challenges in several States to Obama’s eligibility to appear on the ballot. Once he has been re-elected, it may be said that States that allowed Obama to contest the election effectively ceded their higher lawmaking authority to the sovereign People. (See, for example, the decision by Arizona Secretary of State Ken Bennett to place Obama on the ballot after accepting Hawaii’s non-verification verification of Obama’s birth certificate.)
If neither the People nor the States care whether a re-elected President Obama is an American citizen, natural born or otherwise, the Supreme Court is unlikely to countenance any constitutional challenge to his political legitimacy.
The Sovereign People as Higher Law-Making Authority
For decades now, progressive constitutional scholars such as Professor Bruce Ackerman have long urged the Supreme Court to recognize the higher law-making voice of the sovereign People.167 Obama’s second term will provide the Court with the ideal opportunity to do just that; indeed, his entire life story reads as if it had been crafted as a hypothetical problem in a constitutional law examination on the natural born citizenship issue.
Now that the sovereign People have decided that issue in Obama’s favour, the already threadbare claim that American Republic is a historic nation grounded in the shared blood, language, and culture of a homogeneous people has lost its sole constitutional mooring.
If the citizenship status of the President no longer matters, it is difficult to see how immigration patriots can object to the future extension of the political and civil rights now associated with citizenship to all immigrants, legal or illegal.
Birthers fear that Obama’s successful re-election amounts to a constitutional amendment by stealth. Many portray Obama’s putative Presidency as a criminal conspiracy.
Indeed, a recent investigation by Maricopa County, Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s Cold Case Posse concluded that there is probable cause to suspect document fraud with respect to both the birth certificate uploaded last year onto the White House website and Obama’s selective service registration card.
But the campaign to re-elect Obama is much more than an undercover conspiracy to deceive the American People. In fact, there is good reason to suppose that Obama’s most important backers have chosen him as their standard-bearer not despite but because of his questionable citizenship status. The campaign to nullify the natural born citizenship requirement is not a covert conspiracy but an open revolutionary movement to erase the last constitutional vestige of blood and soil citizenship in the American Republic and, indeed, in the world at large.
From Republic to Empire
As the constitutional avatar of the diversity principle, President Obama will preside over a short-lived Fourth (Transnational) Republic designed to subordinate the historic American nation to the hegemony of a post-modern, global Empire.
The neo-communist manifesto of the Empire “materializing before our very eyes” was written by Michael Hardt (later one of the Group of 88 faculty members calling for the prosecution of the defendants in the notorious Duke lacrosse case) and Antonio Negri (then in an Italian prison on terrorism charges) and published by Harvard University Press. Hardt and Negri trace the roots of post-modern corporate neo-communism back to the founding fathers of the American Republic who sought to create “a new Empire with open, expanding frontiers,” an imperial idea which “has survived and matured throughout the history of the United States constitution and has emerged now on a global scale in its fully realized form”.168
Yet Hardt and Negri are careful to note “that this idea of American Empire as the redemption of utopia is completely illusory”. By its very nature, the neo-communist “Empire is not American and the United States is not its center”. They maintain that the power of Empire “has no actual and localizable terrain or center”. Instead, it “is distributed in networks, through mobile and articulated mechanisms of control”.169
Obama’s Fourth (Transnational) Republic is therefore fated to mutate into a province of globalized Empire. The first law of Empire was set out by the Wall Street Journal: “There shall be open border.” It follows that the old-fashioned republican “concept of the People no longer functions as the organized subject of the system of command, and consequently the idea of the People is replaced by the mobility, flexibility, and perpetual differentiation of the multitude”. The outworn political theology of the Constitutional Republic will be superseded by the religion of humanity in which “the desire of the multitude is not the cosmopolitical state but a common species”. The power of the multitude to circulate freely becomes the first fruit of “a secular Pentecost” in which “bodies are mixed and the nomads speak a common tongue”.170
The political project of Empire unites neo-communist theoreticians and corporate plutocrats in a common program for the global multitude. The first political demand of this movement is global citizenship. Over the past few decades, the bi-partisan campaign waged by politicians as well as corporate and academic lawyers to eliminate the natural born citizenship clause in Article II, section I has lent legitimacy to that demand.
This campaign pre-dates Obama’s political career, receiving a early boost from the celebrity status of Austrian-born Arnold Schwarzenegger. But there is little doubt that the current drive to nullify of the natural born citizen clause includes many people known to be supporters or associates of putative President Obama.
In 1995, for example, Professor Randall Kennedy, a prominent member of the Harvard Law School faculty, opined that the natural born citizen clause is the stupidest provision in the Constitution.171 Having since written a book in support of Obama’s Presidency, he continues to take the view that the natural born citizen clause “stigmatizes all immigrants”. Like Barack Obama, Kennedy believes that the right of the global multitude to “circulate” is an “essential American idea”. In his view, the belief that nativity, or place of birth conditions political loyalties is nothing more than a “rank superstition”. Allegiance should be seen as “a willed attachment to a nation, a polity, or a way of life”. Kennedy insists that the American people should be free “to decide whom they want as their President”. If they were, he says, “we would have been spared the depressing furor over his birth certificate because where he was born would be irrelevant to assessing his fitness for the presidency”.172
To give Kennedy his due, however, he has not yet suggested that the President need not even be a citizen. Others are not so hesitant. In a recent op-ed piece in the New York Times, Jacqueline Stevens, a political science professor at Northwestern University, openly preached the political theology of Empire, insisting that the linkage between citizenship and birthplace stems from an atavistic and irrational fear of death. Far from being part of a criminal conspiracy to hide Barack Obama’s birth certificate, neo-communist intellectuals such as Professor Stevens belong to a frankly revolutionary movement pledged to promote the free movement of capital, labour, and technology across national borders. All states, she believes, should simply open their borders and use residence, rather than birth certificates, to define citizenship.173
Conclusion
To defeat corporate neo-communism, birthers will have to do more than prove that Obama’s birth certificate is a forgery. Appeals to the rule of law or to the civic virtues of an independent republican citizenry now carry little weight within the interlocking transnational networks of corporate, governmental, and mass-med
iated “biopower”.
Hardt and Negri preach a revolutionary realism which recognizes that “corruption itself is the substance and totality of Empire”. In these the last days of the Constitutional Republic, birthers (whether they realize it or not) are counter-revolutionaries set in opposition to a system in which corruption has become “the pure exercise of command…over productive biopower”.174
The revolutionary ideals upon which the American Republic rests are now part of the problem — not the solution. Old-stock Americans, generally, need to develop viable alternatives to both the old Republic and the new Empire.
Die-hard patriots might object that because I am not an American citizen I do not have a dog in their fight. In fact, I share deep-rooted bonds of blood, language, and culture with American WASPs. The fate of WASPs everywhere is bound up with the deepening crisis of the American Republic symbolized by the putative Presidency of Barack Obama.
To my American co-ethnics, I therefore offer one piece of unsolicited advice from my ringside seat in Sydney, Australia. In doing so, I follow in Peter Brimelow’s footsteps. Decades ago, he advised English-Canadians that they can never win the increasingly pointless “patriot game” in a hopelessly divided multicultural society. He suggested that they identify instead with their co-ethnics below the 49th parallel.175
It is time for American WASPs to reflect on the implications of that message. Their own patriot game has been sidelined by the postmodern game of identity politics. From now on, any and all proposed solutions to the crisis of the Republic should be subjected to one acid test: Is it good for white Anglo-Saxon Protestants?
5: Vanishing Anglo-Saxons
Jared Taylor’s White Identity and the Crisis “We” Face
Introduction
Jared Taylor is a racial realist. He believes that racial differences are real and not merely a social construct. He has spent decades defending the white race, as distinct from the Negroes, Hispanics, and Asians who share his American citizenship.
But Taylor is not just a generic white man. He is also an Anglo-Saxon Protestant whose English ancestors arrived in America in the seventeenth century. Indeed, having married an Englishwoman, his children, too, are pure-bred WASPs, to use the snide acronym favoured if not invented by American Jews. Curiously, however, Taylor suffers from the pandemic WASP disease that I call Anglo-Saxon Anglophobia. Like most WASPs, he refuses to recognize his own people as a race with its own distinctive bioculture. Indeed, his recent book — White Identity: Racial Consciousness in the 21st Century — contains not a single reference to WASPs.176 Instead, he reduces America’s founding race to the lowest common denominator of whiteness allegedly shared with sundry ethno-religious groups as disparate as Germans, Italians, Lebanese, Armenians, and Jews.
The higgledy-piggledy category of whiteness sits oddly alongside Steve Sailer’s more finely-tuned definition of race as “a large, partly-inbred extended family”.177 Sailer’s approach is more sensitive to the socially-constructed element of racial identity. Accordingly, it is not just major, continental population groups such as black Africans, white Europeans, and yellow East Asians that count as “races;” even the Hutus and Tutsis in Rwanda or Loyalists and Republicans in Northern Ireland fit into Sailer’s concept of race.
Sailer’s definition reminds me — a Canadian, indeed a natural-born British subject — of the two solitudes, otherwise known once upon a time as “the two founding races” of the Dominion of Canada.178 The “British race” was the core population of English Canada. Moreover, until recently, tightly knit, wealthy WASP elites sat atop the ethnic and class hierarchies constituting Canada’s vertical mosaic.179 And, when applied to French Canadians, Sailer’s “partly-inbred” qualifier is a striking understatement. There were no more than sixty thousand colonists in New France at the time of the British conquest in 1759. This relatively small and isolated “founder population” has since produced about seven million descendants. Surely, the remarkably “thick” ethnic identity of the Québeçois nation deserves to be recognized as racial in character.
By comparison, white racial identity is a “thin” statistical abstraction. It masks real racial differences that distinguish (white) Anglo-Saxon Protestants from (white) Irish, Italian and Polish Catholics, (white) Orthodox Greeks, Serbians, and Russians, (white) Lebanese Maronites, (white) Bosnian Muslims, and, last but not least, (white) Jews.
Each of those large, partly-inbred European extended families still constitutes a lump of gristle in the American “melting pot.” By contrast, American WASPs have been “Whited-out;” they became the invisible race.180 As such, WASPs are the only ethno-racial group that refuses to take its own side in the inter-ethnic squabbles endemic to the American racial spoils system.
Albeit much more slowly than the reign of terror in Jacobin France or bloody Bolshevik purges in Russia, the extraordinarily long-lived and ever-escalating, radicalism of the American Revolution has devoured its own Anglo-Saxon Protestant children.
An Anglo-Saxon Century?
Two and a half centuries ago, the Anglo-Saxon civilization of Greater Britain was firmly established on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean; it was split asunder by the colonial rebellion in America. The American Adam, homo americanus, was born in 1776 rejecting his ancestral allegiance to the King of England; he also formally renounced the blood faith of his Anglo-Saxon ancestors, embracing instead the civil religion of the American Republic.
The genetic foundation of the newly-independent White Republic was based not on blood but on the legal and political legitimacy of the Federalist Constitution of 1787. Until the abolition of Negro slavery seventy-some years later, the ideal typical homo americanus was a white man. Even after Negroes were granted American citizenship by the Fourteenth Amendment, however, the implicitly Anglo-Saxon Protestant character of the Republic was taken for granted.
Following America’s rise to world power at the turn of the twentieth century, the Republic achieved geopolitical equality with the British Empire. Many American and English writers therefore advocated that the governments and peoples of the two English-speaking great powers should work to restore the unity of the Anglo-Saxon race. In 1903 a prominent American corporate lawyer (of Madeiran Portugese ancestry), John Randolph Dos Passos, wrote a book based on the premise that “in a preponderating degree the future of mankind” belongs to the Anglo-Saxon race. Accordingly, he proposed an alliance designed to unite the English-speaking peoples of the USA and the British Empire. To make such a deal attractive to American opinion, he held out the tantalizing prospect of the eventual annexation of Canada to the USA. In return, America would recognize a common citizenship and establish a free trade zone incorporating every Anglo-Saxon country.181
Another American author, Sinclair Kennedy, went one step further to advocate an outright political federation, or pan-Anglo-Saxon union, of all seven Anglo-Saxon countries, including Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, and Newfoundland alongside Great Britain and the USA.182 Today such grandiose visions seem absurdly out of reach. Awesome Anglo-Saxon roosters have become wimpy WASP feather dusters. During the 2012 election campaign, Republican Party Presidential candidate Mitt Romney had to rush into damage control mode when one of his advisors had the gall to suggest that the USA and the UK were well placed to cooperate given their common Anglo-Saxon heritage.
Clearly, Anglo-Saxon Protestants are now the race that dares not speak its name. Indeed, American universities have begun to flush the history of Great Britain and the British overseas diaspora down the memory hole. Just recently, Peter Sayles complained of “the closing-down of British Studies in the American mind”.183 He reports that it is becoming almost impossible for graduate students in British history to find jobs. Before long, it may be impossible to find graduate degree programs in the subject. However disappointing, it is not surprising, therefore, to find that when Jared Taylor examines “The Crisis We Face” in the concluding chapter of White Identity, he does no
t address, or even mention, the large, partly-inbred, extended family which should have first claim to his racial loyalties.
Whaddya Mean “We,” White Man?
To understand how and why White Anglo-Saxon Protestants have become the invisible race, we must unpack the “We” in the title of the concluding chapter of White Identity.
In Taylor’s usage, the meaning of the term is rather ambiguous. At times, his “we” seems to carry a civic connotation, as when he discusses the Hispanic gang problem exacerbated by “our proximity to Mexico, our porous southern border, and our burgeoning Hispanic population”.184 In that context, the collective “we” appears to include all American citizens, whatever their colour, creed, or national origin. Mostly, however, his use of “we” implicitly denotes those belonging to the white race, as distinct from Negroes, Asians, and Hispanics, whose growth in numbers and influence now threatens to displace the founding people of the Constitutional Republic. Taylor contends that white Americans are a distinct race with a biological character, needs, and interests of its own.
Unfortunately, he argues, most white Americans value individualism and the material comforts of the consumer culture more than racial solidarity. They now face fierce competition from the other, far more ethnocentric, racial groups streaming into their homeland. In these circumstances, the collective survival of white Americans depends upon their capacity to develop a racial consciousness of their own.
Taylor invokes the authority of science and his own considerable powers of rational argument to persuade fellow whites that race is a fundamental aspect of individual and collective identity — even for white folks who now “cheerfully contemplate their disappearance as a distinct people”.185
Dissident Dispatches Page 14
