Whose Americanism?

Once again, I can’t help but smirk while reading Adam Gopnik’s Trump’s Radical Anti-Americanism in The New Yorker:

“Beate and Serge Klarsfeld, the couple who did so much to bear witness to the terrible truths of the Second World War, came to town last week to introduce their new memoir to an American audience. In it, there is a photograph that can only be called heartbreaking in its happiness, unbearable in its ordinariness. It shows an eight-year-old Serge with his sister and their Romanian-Jewish parents walking along a promenade in Nice, in 1943, still smiling, still feeling confident, even at that late date, that they are safe in their new French home. Within a few months, the children and their mother were hiding in a false closet, as Gestapo agents took their father to Auschwitz, and his death.

What the photograph teaches is not that every tear in the fabric of civility opens a path to Auschwitz but that civilization is immeasurably fragile, and is easily turned to brutality and barbarism. The human capacity for hatred is terrifying in its volatility. (The same promenade in Nice was the site of the terrorist truck attack last year.) Americans have a hard time internalizing that truth, but the first days of the Trump Administration have helped bring it home. …

This is radical anti-Americanism—not simply illiberalism or anti-cosmopolitanism—because America is not only a nation but also an idea, cleanly if not tightly defined. …”

Whose Americanism?

Is it not obvious that Adam Gopnik is writing from a New York Jewish perspective? Since when is that perspective synonymous with Americanism? What sense does it make in light of American history? Even the most cursory reading of American history calls into question the value of “pluralism.”

If we are talking about the history of American immigration, then shouldn’t we note that whiteness was a requirement to become a naturalized American citizen from the Naturalization Act of 1790 until the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952? What about the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 which remained in force until we needed Chiang Kai-shek’s China to defeat the Japanese during the Second World War? What about TR’s Gentleman’s Agreement with Japan?

Do you think President Trump’s mild executive orders on refugees are outrageous? How about the Asiatic Barred Zone which banned immigration from all of South Asia in 1917? How about the Immigration Act of 1917 which banned all “idiots, feeble-minded persons, criminals, epileptics, insane persons, alcoholics, professional beggars” and all persons “mentally or physically defective, polygamists, and anarchists”? What do you think of the Immigration Act of 1924 which restricted immigration to preserve America’s Northwestern European White majority?

Here’s an example that ought to hit close to home with Adam Gopnik: in 1939, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt turned away the MS St. Louis which was carrying 900 Jewish refugees from the Third Reich. If Americanism is simply “pluralism” or “cosmopolitanism,” why was the MS St. Louis turned away from our shores by FDR? Shouldn’t that have violated “our values”? Maybe it was because we didn’t get the Refugee Act of 1980 until it was signed into law by President Jimmy Carter.

There’s no such thing as an inalienable right of refugees or foreign aliens to enter the United States. We didn’t even have a refugee resettlement program until the Carter administration. The vast majority of Third World immigration to the United States from Asia, Africa and Latin America dates back to President Lyndon Johnson’s disastrous Immigration Act of 1965. What’s more, there is ample precedent for the mass deportation of illegal aliens in American history. President Herbert Hoover deported millions of Mexicans during the Great Depression. President Eisenhower removed millions of illegal aliens from the Southwest during Operation Wetback in the 1950s.

Adam Gopnik invokes President James Madison writing about “pluralism” who served as the president of the American Colonization Society. The United States sponsored the creation of Liberia in West Africa as an outlet for free blacks who were then considered an undesirable element in our society. Monrovia, the capital of Liberia, was named after President James Monroe. Under President Andrew Jackson, we removed the Southeastern Indians to Oklahoma.

Do you want to get really offensive? Let’s do it.

Once upon a time, we had a vision of national greatness that was known as Manifest Destiny, which was the idea that it was the destiny of the Anglo-Saxon race to conquer and spread our institutions across North America and that this was the work of divine providence. This was the spirit that led the pioneers into Oregon, White settlers into Texas where they launched the Texas Revolution, soldiers from the South into Mexico where our ancestors won the Southwest. There were even filibusters like William Walker who conquered Nicaragua while others tried and failed to conquer Cuba and Baja California.

“The Texas Revolution was from its beginnings interpreted in the United States and among Americans in Texas as a racial clash, not simply a revolt against unjust government or tyranny. Thomas Hart Benton said that the Texas revolt “has illustrated the Anglo-Saxon character, and given it new titles to the respect and admiration of the world. It shows that liberty, justice, valour – moral, physical, and intellectual power – discriminate that race wherever it goes.” Benton asked “old England” to rejoice that distant Texas streams had seen the exploits of “a people sprung from their loins, and carrying their language, laws and customs, their magna charta and all its glorious privileges, into new regions and far distant climes.”

In his two terms as president of Texas, Sam Houston consistently thought of the struggle in his region as one between a glorious Anglo-Saxon race and an inferior Mexican rabble. Victory for the Texans and the Americans in the Southwest would mean that large areas of the world were to be brought under the rule of a race that could make best use of them. Houston was less imbued with the harsh scientific racial theories that carried most Americans before them in the 1840s than with the romantic exaltation of the Saxons given by Sir Walter Scott and his followers.

Houston’s inaugural address in 1836 contrasted the harsh, uncivilized warfare of the Mexicans with the more human conduct of the Texans. He conjured up a vision of the civilized world proudly contemplating “conduct which reflected so much glory on the Anglo-Saxon race.” The idea of the Anglo-Saxons as the living embodiment of the chivalric ideal always fascinated Houston; the Mexicans were “the base invader” fleeing from “Anglo-Saxon chivalry.” In fighting Mexico the Texans were struggling to disarm tyranny, to overthrow oppression, and create representative government: “With these principles we will march across the Rio Grande, and … ere the banner of Mexico shall triumphantly float upon the banks of the Sabine, the Texian standard of the single star, borne by the Anglo-Saxon race, shall display its bright folds in Liberty’s triumph, on the isthmus of Darien.”

While conceiving of the Texas Revolution as that of a freedom-loving Anglo-Saxon race rising up to throw off the bonds of tyranny imposed by a foreign despot, Houston was also fully convinced of the inevitability of the general American Anglo-Saxon expansion. To him “the genius as well as the excitability” of the American people impelled them to war. “Their love of dominion,” he said, “and the extension of their territorial limits, also, is equal to that of Rome in the last ages of the Commonwealth and the first of the Caesars.” The people of the United States, he argued, were convinced that the North American continent had been bestowed on them, and if necessary they would take it by force. He told one correspondent in 1844 that there was no need to be concerned about the population said to occupy the vast area from the 29th to the 46th latitude on the Pacific: “They will, like the Indian race yield to the advance of the North American population …”

Wow. Just wow.

You can read about the true history of the Texas Revolution and much more in Reginald Horseman’s excellent book Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism. The worldview of Sam Houston was a million miles away from that of Adam Gopnik.

Gopnik continues:

“There is an alternative view, one long available and articulated, that America is not an idea but an ethnicity, that of the white Christian men who have dominated it, granting a grudging or probationary acceptance to women, or blacks, or immigrants. This was the view of Huck Finn’s pap, as he drank himself to death; of General Custer, as he approached Little Big Horn; of Major General Pickett, as he led the charge at Gettysburg. Until now, it has been the vision of those whom Trump would call the losers …”

By “there is an alternative view,” Gopnik means the worldview of the White people who founded and created the United States, whose ancestors were here long before the New York Intellectuals redefined Americanism in the 1930s:

“Central to our argument is the notion that the pre-World War I New York avant-garde valued expressive individualism and cosmopolitanism above all else. After the war, and coming of age in the late 1930s, a new generation of New York thinkers emerged to carry their torch. This group sported a larger Jewish contingent (owing to New York’s changing demographics), but its intellectual lineage came from the Young Intellectuals and carried forth their mantras. In David Hollinger’s estimation, these new intellectuals were formed from an equal fusion of Jewish and Anglo-Saxon radicalism and should be considered a united community, if not a surrogate ethnie. Nor was there an asymmetry of influence: the two groups of ethnic exiles influenced each other in dialectical fashion. Cardinal among their beliefs was the dictum that all attempts at collective representation, whether ethnonationalist or state-socialist, were to be shunned. …”

This is a really fascinating story.

If you want to learn more about how the New York Intellectuals redefined Americanism to mean cosmopolitanism, you should check out Eric Kaufmann’s The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America. We’ve already explored how they changed the symbolic meaning of the Statue of Liberty.

The Alt-Right represents an emerging consciousness and rejection of this alien elite. We’re rejecting their redefinition of Americanism which was the Jewish radicalism they brought to this country in the early 20th century from the ghettos of Central and Eastern Europe. There’s a reason why these people are so at odds with our ancestors and their symbols and it is because they only rose to power in the mid-20th century. Their false secular morality – the various -isms and -phobias, which they have imposed on the country through their control of the mass media – date back to their ascension to power.

President Donald Trump is only the first symptom of their waning power and loss of legitimacy.