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The American Nationalism Debate

Friday, September 29, 2017 22:34
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Sen. Ben Sasse, the Star Spangled moron from Nebraska, unleashed a tweetstorm last night about Richard Spencer, the Alt-Right and the meaning of Americanism:

It was easy to pick apart in 140 characters:

The Ben Sasse version of American history is mainstream conservative orthodoxy. It is the notion that America is a proposition nation and that “racism” is un-American. This is particularly amusing in Ben Sasse’s case in light of the fact that the Kansas-Nebraska Act was a major historical event that polarized the country and led to the War Between the States. The immediate cause of that conflict was the status of blacks and whether slaves could be brought into the Western territories.

While all this has been going on, Andrew Anglin has been arguing at The Daily Stormer that we need to adopt American nationalism. As many of you have no doubt heard, the #TakeTheKnee protests in the NFL have led some on the Left to condemn the American flag and national anthem as “racist.” Anglin has argued that we need to “pick up the gun” and embrace the American flag, Americanism and American nationalism in response. At least this is the gist of what I remember reading this morning. The Daily Stormer is down again and I am unable to access the article.

A new organization called Patriot Front has launched which has a much more nuanced take on American nationalism. It draws a critical distinction between the American state and the American nation. We should all be able to agree than Americanism in 2017 isn’t what it was in 1790 or 1865 or 1965. It will suffice to say that it has come unglued over the past fifty years with a Jewish elite in the cultural cockpit. It would have shocked our ancestors that one day the NFL would be a pillar of our national identity.

How did we go from the Founding Fathers to Ben Sasse cucksplaining “white culture” and these insolent NFL players? The truth is that it was a long drawn out process of weakening and undermining our culture and national identity which began with the ideology of the American Revolution. In order to justify breaking with the Mother Country, the Founding Fathers seized on the fashionable Enlightenment theories of their times which elevated “liberty” and “equality” above all other goods.

Previously, John Locke had been unknown in the American colonies where “white supremacy” had long been established. His great work The Second Treatise on Civil Government, which was first published in 1690, had been ignored in the American colonies in the eighteenth century. It wasn’t until 1773 – the year of the Boston Tea Party – that his writings came to the attention of the colonists. Americans seized upon Locke’s Second Treatise because it provided a handy justification for their decision to resist imperial authority. This is a decision which had already been made for quite different reasons.

It is also worth noting exactly what in Locke’s work appealed most to the American colonists: it was his interpretation of the biblical story of Jephthah in the eleventh chapter of the Book of Judges. When the Israelites begged Jephthah to take up their cause against the Ammonites, he in turn asked God to decide the controversy. Jephthah made an “Appeal to Heaven.”

John Locke argued in the Second Treatise that in extreme cases when a ruler betrayed his people and the judges with the authority to hear their cause sided with the tyrant, the people could make an “Appeal to Heaven” when all other avenues had been exhausted. It was this “An Appeal To Heaven” flag with the green pine tree that was adopted as the symbol of the insurgency in New England in the heady days after Bunker Hill. The insurgents in New England were highly religious Yankee Puritans who came of age in the aftermath of the Great Awakening, not the Big Brain Nibbas we imagine today.

While it is true that Americans revolted in defense of their rights and liberties, these rights were the traditional safeguards of life, liberty, and property that were guaranteed under the British Constitution, which King George III was accused of subverting in a sinister Papist conspiracy. The Quebec Act had extended the boundaries of Quebec over what is now the Midwest. The American Revolution was fought in the name of the British Constitution which the American colonists had lived under for generations. The rights and liberties were also said to be derived from the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God and this is what stuck and has been the source of so much confusion.

This was the beginning of the tension between the ideology of the American Revolution and what had existed before it. The result of the American Revolution was the triumph of the Patriots, the demise of the Loyalists, the end of the monarchy and British rule, the triumph of liberal republicanism and the expulsion of “English” from the nascent American national identity. In the aftermath of the American Revolution, an American was someone who was White, Protestant and republican in politics.

By the 19th century, the ideology of the American Revolution was already spawning new cultural fissures. The doctrine of “liberty” and “equality” and the “rights of man” clashed strongly with slavery which was swiftly eliminated in New England. The hierarchy of master/slave replaced the old hierarchy of kings/subjects as a focal point of unrest and culminated in the dissolution of the Union and abolition. It also found other outlets in the opposition to Indian Removal, America’s westward expansion and “civil rights” of free blacks in Reconstruction.

The next great cause was the women’s suffrage movement which demanded that women have the same rights as men. After decades of agitation, the cause culminated in the Nineteenth Amendment. The ideology of the American Revolution also shed its isolationist cast when Woodrow Wilson plunged the United States into World War I to “Make The World Safe for Democracy.” The purpose of Wilson’s League of Nations was to export and impose American principles on the entire world.

This brings us to the Second World War. The ideology of American Revolution was central to that conflict and the creation of the postwar world that followed. The major result of that conflict was the triumph of the idea that “racism” is immoral, that racial differences do not exist and that blacks are equal to Whites. In the frenzy of wartime propaganda, American racial attitudes were completely transformed in the seven years between 1938 to 1945. Gunnar Myrdal’s 1944 book An American Dilemma emphasized the conflict between the American Creed and the pattern of American race relations. This message that Americanism was opposed to “racism” was driven home in Hollywood movies like The House I Live In.

The next great crusade was the Civil Rights Movement. The result of the Civil Rights Movement was the reimagination of America as a “global nation,” the elevation of “racism” and “anti-Semitism” as our greatest national sins, the decoupling of whiteness and American identity and the beginning of our marginalization in American culture. Henceforth, Whites would be stripped of moral legitimacy and “freedom” and “equality” would always be associated with the cause of negroes who around that time were elevated in the social scale to “African-Americans.”

By 1965, Americans had never been more free and equal but there were still more social hierarchies waiting to crumble, and after the triumph of the Civil Rights Movement we flung open our borders to Third World immigrants. We also had the triumph of feminism and the homosexual liberation movement in the Sexual Revolution. The spread of contraception, divorce and abortion swiftly began to undermine the family and church. It set the stage for the spread of atheism and the triumph of gay marriage and the transgender or gender dysphoria movement in the LGBTQ community.

Every single bit of this has been justified as the latest expansion of freedom, equality, tolerance, rights, individualism, and so on, and it has brought us to where we are today. As I mentioned earlier, “English” was the first marker to be expunged from American identity. Later, “whiteness” was expunged during the Civil Rights Movement. Since the end of Cold War, “Christianity” has been decoupled from American identity and multiculturalism has challenged the idea that we are united by a common language.

By the 2000s, Americanism had been reduced to sportsball, jingoism, commercialism and the decaying universalism of liberal ideology – these were the ties that bound our great nation. Gone were all the things that have traditionally bound a nation – race, religion, ethnicity, culture, common history and memory. In the aftermath of 9/11, George W. Bush told Americans to go shopping:



It seems like ages ago.

In the last eight years, we have witnessed the demise of jingoism and commercialism as unifying pillars of our national identity, and now we are witnessing the end of Joe Sixpack and sportsball. The only thing that is left of our present decompiled Americanism is the ideology of civic nationalism and we don’t even agree on that anymore. We’re down to nothing more than Ben Sasse’s cuckery and that isn’t a meaningful identity strong enough to hold together this American Babylon.

While I am sure everyone will pretty much agree on the diagnosis, the question before us is whether we should rebrand ourselves as American Nationalists, adopt the American flag and “pick up the gun” of Americanism. My honest answer is that Americanism is dissolving before our eyes, the process is dramatically accelerating under Trump and I wouldn’t be surprised if the whole damn thing didn’t just unravel over the course of the next few years. We’re closer to total cultural collapse than ever before and it is coming sooner than I anticipated.

If past is prologue, cultural collapse precedes a political collapse, and the result will be violence. We live in a time reminiscent of the 1850s when America’s two party system and Protestant denominations collapsed. We’re beginning to see low level political violence like Bleeding Kansas. During the War Between the States, Americanism was contested in the bloodiest war in our history.

I don’t see any reason to argue with anyone about American nationalism. It is clear to me that whatever this is approaching on the horizon is going to define the parameters of Americanism moving forward in the 21st century, not a few blogs on the internet. I can see the conflict being resolved in a number of ways – a national breakup along known ethnocultural fault lines, military dictatorship, some new ideology or religious movement that replaces our exhausted liberal tradition, a plunge into spiraling anarchy – but some new source of unity and cohesion will eventually be found.

In the meantime, we shouldn’t lose our own cohesion arguing over flags and symbols and labels while we are living through a turning point in American history. Maybe we should just watch.


Source: http://www.occidentaldissent.com/2017/09/30/the-american-nationalism-debate/


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