But is it true that White Americans are a “distinct people”? Do whites now constitute a race “in itself” which is capable of becoming a race “for itself” anytime in the foreseeable future? To answer that question, we must examine white identity along both the vertical and the horizontal dimension.
The Problem of Class
Along the vertical axis, white identity has always been comparatively shallow. White identity is relational rather than intrinsic or affective; it is, therefore, both flat and negative. Englishmen never thought of themselves as whites until they encountered the “black” races in the course of the African slave trade. When they did so, whiteness was not about who they were; it drew attention to who they were not. The more significance colonists in both the Caribbean and the American mainland attached to the blackness of the Negro, the more significant became the whiteness of Protestant Englishmen. According to historian Winthrop Jordan, “[f]rom time immemorial Englishmen had been born to a status, to a cultural role: now they were being born to an appearance, to a physical condition as well”.186
Caribbean slave-owners were the first to discover the political utility of building a common front against the threat of a Negro slave insurrection by sharing a “white” identity with other poor or landless colonists. According to Matthew Parker:
[P]lanters, who had recently lumped together African slaves and ‘dissolute English, Scotch and [particularly] Irish,’ came to realise the usefulness to their security of ‘whiteness’. A pamphleteer writing at the time felt it necessary to explain to his readers in England that ‘white’ was the general name for Europeans. And just as the 1661 Acts were copied throughout the English West Indies and in South Carolina, so this new ideology of whiteness was spread from Barbados and carried around the empire.187
On the North American mainland, in the course of the First (Federal) Republic (1787–1865), all whites were created equal. Of course, white skin privilege was especially important to the politics and culture of the Southern slave states. Privately, however, more than a few wealthy planters ridiculed the notion that the “mere animal man, because he happens to wear a white skin” should be entitled to full and exclusive privileges of citizenship”.188
Once the Confederacy lay in ruins, the Second (Bourgeois) Republic (1865–1933) enshrined the formal legal equality of Negroes in its newly-amended Constitution. At the same time, formal legal equality among whites was overshadowed by the bitter class struggles which became the hallmark of newly-industrialized American society. The rise of the big business corporation fatally undermined solidarity among white Americans. Shareholders and managers belong to the white race in body but not in soul. In the Gilded Age, the corporate bourgeoisie were conspicuously indifferent when not actively hostile to the collective needs and interests of working and middle class white Americans.
Under the stress of the Depression and the Second World War the tide of class struggle shifted significantly in favour of working class whites. But, as the post-war era wore on, corporate and political elites of the Third (Managerial) Republic (1933–2008) were drawn increasingly from upwardly-mobile Jews and other ethnic groups more or less hostile to the founding race of the American Republic.
As the WASP ascendancy faded away, the political or the managerial class outside the Deep South offered little or no resistance to the forced integration of working and middle class whites with blacks. White flight became the only option for both ordinary WASPs and the hitherto unmeltable ethnics.189
The Horizontal Dimension of “Whiteness”
In the golden age of the First Republic, all whites were equal in the eyes of the law. Nonetheless, Anglo-Saxon Protestants were still politically, culturally, and economically dominant. Only against both slave and free blacks was the founding race of British colonists united as whites with other European settler groups, such as Germans, Dutch, Swedes, and latterly, Irish Catholic. Otherwise, significant horizontal cleavages existed within the white population. Since then, ethno-religious divisions among white Americans have multiplied and deepened. Under the broad umbrella of white hegemony, a new ethnic hierarchy was established within which Anglo-Saxon Protestants lost their accustomed place at the top of the heap.
Symptomatic of that cultural revolution, British Studies are being closed down in American universities while the intellectual and cultural hegemony of Jewish writers and academics is ever-more deeply entrenched both in American universities and in the mainstream media. When I sought (in vain) to interest academic publishers in my manuscript on The WASP Question, I could but envy the lucky authors of the flood of books on Jewish Studies pouring out of virtually every university press. Taylor worries greatly over the negative impact that Negroes, Hispanics, and Asians have on American culture while devoting separate chapters to the racial consciousness of each of those groups. Nowhere, however, does he discuss the nature of Jewish racial consciousness or the enormously corrosive and degrading impact Jews have had upon the common culture of Anglo-Saxon Protestant America.
Of course, Jews were not the only sub-set of whites determined to deconstruct the WASP ascendancy. The Irish along with the ethnic alliance that Catholic writer Michael Novak dubbed the PIGS — Poles, Italians, Greeks, and Slovaks — also played supporting roles in “unwasping” homo americanus.190 Each of these groups (again, to varying degrees) has been able to enjoy the benefits of “whiteness” — without sharing equally in its burdens.
Taylor also worries about the negative impact of miscegenation — but only the racial mixing of whites with blacks, Hispanics, or Asians. He is not concerned that the Anglo-Saxon race is being “denatured” by mixing with other phenotypically white ethnic groups. He is not alone in this unconcern. Many other white nationalists in the USA are equally blasé, often celebrating the “blending” of once-distinctive European ethnicities into generic “white Americans.”
But for those concerned with the decline of the Anglo-Saxon race, the difference between “blending” and “mongrelisation” is not at all clear. Some suggest that the only permanent solution to deeply entrenched inter-European racial animosities requires the elimination of inter-European racial differences. There should be little doubt that a white/black couple violates the commandment to honour one’s father and mother by producing a mulatto child. But must that commandment be suspended when, say, a WASP man and a Jewish woman produce hybrid offspring?
I still vividly recall primary school teachers during my childhood in small town Ontario who warned us against the perils of mixed marriages. And they were not talking about white/black couplings but rather the social divide between (white) Protestants and (white) Catholics. Were they wrong to be concerned? What are the social costs of mixed marriages for the individuals concerned, for the children of such unions, and for the wider community?
Surely, homogenized “white” individuals who straddle and blur established ethno-religious boundaries should be objects of pity rather than models to be emulated. Are not such people detached, spiritually and genetically, from any really existing European race? Germans, Italians, and Englishmen: all can and should reproduce, each according to its own kind. Blending together different White racial groups in a quest to breed homogenized Europeans is to create a deracinated population of ethno-hermaphrodites. The thin, attenuated nature of such a rootless white identity reinforces its essentially negative character. To be white mostly means that one is not black, Asian, or Hispanic. Small wonder then that, as Taylor observes, many whites believe that their race has “no valid group interests, so it is illegitimate for them to attempt to organize as Whites”.191
Most of the allegedly white writers Taylor cites to establish the widespread currency of such ethno-masochistic views happen to be Jews. Taylor appears not to notice. Taylor treats Jews as fellow whites even when they stand outside his tent pissing inwards.192 One wonders: Why do Jews figure so prominently among those denouncing “white skin privilege”? Perhaps it is because (like Irishmen, Italian
s, Poles, and Greeks — only more so) Jews have a thick ethnic identity rooted in a powerful sense of affinity with their own kith and kin. Whiteness is a secondary, optional, identity for members of many white immigrant groups.
WASPs alone are discouraged from parading under their own colours. Accordingly, WASPs alone bear the unalloyed shame of the universally reviled white racial identity. Blended white “ethnics” remain free to wallow in the Ellis Island Syndrome as they identify with the motley crew of their immigrant forbears allegedly victimized by snobbish, arrogant WASPs. Having become the race that everyone, including its own children, loves to hate, Anglo-Saxon Protestants now find themselves in exile from the New World garden of earthly delights (implicitly) deeded to their Patriot ancestors by the revolutionary religion of the Republic.
The Sin of Americanism
The original sin of colonial republicans — rebellion against their lawful king and ancestral homeland — left an indelible upon the American Adam. Loyalist writers, many of whom were royal officials or Anglican clergymen, warned that such chronic rebelliousness was spawning an embryonic system of anarcho-tyranny.193 The revolutionary republic undermined deference for established leaders and institutions. By playing upon popular passions, radical leaders reduced the colonies to anarchy, ripe for a novel “democratic tyranny” controlled behind the scenes by an ambitious, avaricious, and utterly self-interested elite of so-called Patriots.
The Loyalists knew that such a regime was bound, eventually, to end in tears. Unfortunately, American white nationalists still invest their hopes for the future in the Patriot tradition of Constitutional Republicanism. Racial realists such as Jared Taylor also struggle to endow the cult of the Constitution with an explicitly White identity.
Indeed, almost all the many WASPs on the alternative Right — for example, Peter Brimelow, Richard Spencer, and Greg Johnson — hope “to salvage as much as possible from the shipwreck of their great republic”.194 But they owe it to their Anglo-Saxon ancestors to recognize at long last that the Loyalists were right to oppose rebel colonists while defending the unity of the British race.
It is now obvious that the perpetual American Revolution has been an ongoing catastrophe for the Anglo-Saxon race. More than twenty years ago, Brimelow warned English Canadians that the “patriot game” is up; that they should unite with their co-ethnics south of the 49th parallel.195 He would do well to adapt that advice to the parlous prospects now facing American WASPs, standing alone, unorganized, and leaderless, in a globalized, multi-racial Empire.196
Specifically, he should help to rejuvenate the British race patriotism that was second nature to the United Empire Loyalists. It was just such ancestral loyalty to throne and altar that led the Loyalists to settle in Canada after being driven, in their tens of thousands, out of the victorious and vengeful republic.
American patriotism, by contrast, was based not on race but on the American Creed, the Constitution and the Manifest Destiny of the aggressively expansionist Republic. Ironically, it was the founding race of Anglo-Saxon Protestants who embraced most fervently the constitutional faith that eventually dispossessed their posterity in favour of the teeming Others of the Third World.
Now that the Constitution has been turned into a mere thing of wax which the powers-that-be cynically shape in whatever form they please, American WASPs are bereft of a coherent and credible civic identity. Nor do they have even the residual constitutional ties to their kith and kin in other “Anglo-Saxon countries” — still symbolized by shared loyalty to the British monarchy — that bound the “old White Commonwealth” together.
The Necessity of Britishness
Jared Taylor visited Australia recently. While there, he toured several Anglo-Saxon sacred sites in Sydney and Parramatta. Taylor investigated modern Australia’s inauspicious origins in a British penal colony in New South Wales. He also witnessed the massive extent of recent Third World colonization in Australian cities. The ancestors of the Anglo-Australians that Taylor met in Sydney first came to this country just as the US Constitution was being ratified in the various States of the proposed Union. For over two centuries now, Anglo-Australians have been a constituent part of the now bowed but not beaten British race.
Taylor has just seen a magnificent city built on the other side of the world by many generations of his Anglo-Saxon Protestant kinfolk (with some help from Irish Catholics). The experience should help him to understand what one Australian historian has called “the necessity of Britishness”.197 American WASPs, generally, can rediscover an unexpected stock of spiritual and cultural capital in their ancestral links to the people of the old British dominions such as Australia, Canada, and New Zealand.
In the century to come, the resources available to the British diaspora will provide a fertile seed-bed for trade, commerce, and intercourse within a global network of Anglo-Saxon tribes. By comparison, the modern nation-state offers no more than a specious simulacrum of collective identity. In erstwhile “Anglo-Saxon countries,” the official cult of the Other poisons the organic union of nation and state. The rebirth of an Anglo-Saxon racial consciousness will be a transnational phenomenon. The global reach of the Anglo-Saxon diaspora will be an invaluable resource for otherwise isolated and ineffectual WASP communities. In particular, the survival of British institutions such as the monarchy and the Anglican church leaves Anglo-Saxon Protestants in Australia, Canada, and New Zealand with an advantage not available to their American cousins.
Unfortunately, Australia, like the USA, is being colonized by the Third World. But, arguably, Anglo-Australians are better equipped than American WASPs to resist that invasion. They still retain access to the repertoire of British myths and symbols that played such a crucial role in the creation of Australian nationality. It may yet be possible for Anglo-Australian patriots to regenerate the foundation myth of “a new Britannia” in the antipodes.198 In the federation era, “Australian nationalists did not choose British origins for their nation; that was an inescapable fact of history. They did choose to emphasise British ethnicity as a keystone of national cohesion.” According to Russell McGregor, they promoted an “essentialised, ethnicised” form of nationalism.199
In other words, the same blood that “congealed the Australian people into a single nation…also connected them to the British parent.” The Premier of Victoria insisted in 1899 that the Australasian colonies “were all cradled by the great Mother of the British Race.” At the turn of the twentieth century, references to “the crimson thread of kinship” binding Australians to the mother country were a staple of political rhetoric.200 But Australian ethnicity “was more than a matter of blood: Britishness was the source of the heritage, history, culture and symbols that made Australia heir to a glorious past”. McGregor shows that the “myths and symbols that resonated most deeply and meaningfully among the Australian people were Britannic myths and memories. These enabled Australians to transcend local or parochial loyalties, to conceive themselves as a national community with deep temporal roots”.201
It is indisputable, therefore, that the Britannic heritage was “an essential source of sustenance and strength to Australian nationalism”. Not surprisingly, therefore, the so-called White Australia Policy laid down in the very first Act of the Commonwealth parliament “was founded on the assumption that ethnic unity provided the foundation-stone of both national cohesion and political democracy”. And, as more than one Member of Parliament observed, White Australia “really means a British Australia”. Of course, White non-Britishers were admitted but only “on the understanding that they would readily assimilate, biologically as well as culturally, into the British-Australian nation”.202
The Decline of Britishness
As early as 1923, Myra Willard’s analysis of the White Australia Policy warned that the “continued immigration of certain European peoples very dissimilar to Australians would have the same effect” as immigration from Asia.203 Unfortunately, the “populate or peris
h” mentality that took hold among the political class after the Second World War was the thin edge of the wedge which eventually whittled away the British core of Australian national identity.
And so, it happened that the large-scale post-war influx of Italians and Greeks, for example, was the first step towards the decline of the Anglo-Saxon Protestant ascendancy in Australian politics and culture. Well into the Sixties, however, both the monarchy and the overwhelmingly Anglo-Saxon Anglican Church — still known in Australia as the Church of England — worked to reinforce the British roots of Australian national identity. Both institutions were joined at the hip. The British monarchy was integral to Anglican thought and practice in Australia. For centuries, the monarch had been supreme governor of the Church and on accession took an oath to preserve its doctrines.
According to church historian, Brian Fletcher, “Anglicans believed that the monarchy possessed divine attributes”. They “took pride in the fact that at the apex of government stood one of their own faith — a claim no other denomination could make”. From Federation in 1901 until 1962, therefore, the Anglican Church helped keep alive in Australia cultural and other values that derived from Britain. Indeed, “it endowed empire, monarchy, and race with a religious sanction”.204
By the Sixties, however, Anglicans responded to the radical nationalist intellectual movement that drove a wedge between the Britannic heritage and Australian identity, between ethnic and civic nationalism.205 The rise of “ocker nationalism” was assisted greatly by the Australia’s geopolitical shift from the British to the American sphere of influence. Some historians point to Britain’s entry into the Common Market as the decisive moment in such efforts to draw Australian national identity away from “the British embrace”.206 At the same time, successive waves of non-British European migration cleared the path for the gradual abolition of the White Australia Policy in the late Sixties and early Seventies.207 Within an astonishingly brief time, a multi-racial society was established in the nation’s largest cities.
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