On America

Niccolo LARPs as a 21st Century de Tocqueville

---

“Don’t you know that you can’t go home again?” - Ella Winter to Thomas Wolfe

I write about America a lot because it’s impossible not to do so. The USA is the world’s most foremost power, and its presence is felt everywhere on our planet. To ignore America and its role in shaping the world’s politics, economics, and culture would be like trying to describe to someone what you see in front of your face after you poke both of your eyes out of your own head.

Every July 4th sees a flurry of think pieces that reflect on what it means to be American, and this year is no different. Some will focus on the founding of the USA (and the principles that the country was built on) in a celebratory manner, others will choose to highlight its darker aspects, with still many more pieces falling somewhere in between these two poles. The difference in their respective approaches will overlap with their partisan politics. They all share a common theme, though: something has gone horribly wrong with the USA, and that this is reflected in its increasingly divisive political culture. My contention is that this recognition of the catastrophic conditions of the present political climate is ironically what most brings together Americans today. The diagnosis of what is causing this malady will depend on who is being asked the question (and the answers will vary wildly), but the overwhelming majority are in agreement when it comes to the big picture.

With this is mind I want to turn to an essay that was written last month by Damir Marusic, a Senior Fellow with the Atlantic Council, an “NGO” that is very hawkish and seeks to extend US hegemony globally, as my readers will already know rather well thanks to the amount of attention I have given them since starting this Substack. Damir is a fellow ethnic Croat who it seems identifies as an American, so his trajectory is one that I am closely watching just to see how it develops. In this essay, Marusic rejects the notion that the right in the USA has a democracy deficit, and instead argues that there is a growing crisis of legitimacy in the system as a whole, leading to what centrists and liberals view as growing support for authoritarianism on the right side of the political aisle.

Damir is an institutional creature, so he relies on the most mainstream and acceptable voices in US media from which to draw his arguments. But he writes in a style that betrays a deeper and more robust (and therefore naughty) understanding of the actual state of affairs in his country. But before we turn to the meat and potatoes of his essay, let’s step back for a second and look at the bigger picture through my incredibly biased eyes.

The Promised Land and The American Dream

My mother was a little girl in the village when John F. Kennedy was assassinated. She remembers clearly that some of the old men in the village were openly weeping while illegally listening to Radio Free Europe (or whatever it was called back then) over their short wave receivers. JFK was the first Catholic President of the United States of America (and therefore “one of us”), a firm anti-communist, and a symbol of hope for those living under left-wing dictatorships. Some of the old men were convinced that Khruschev had him assassinated, and that World War 3 was imminent. The hopes of many, including those old men that day, were shattered in Dealey Plaza, Dallas, Texas.

My grandfather had three cousins from the village next to him who fled Communist Yugoslavia several years prior to JFK’s assassination, not too long before Tito opened up the borders to emigration. Their first choice was Paris, France where they stayed for a year and left because they found it dirty and “full of Arabs”. They then boarded an ocean liner and set sail for New York City. Typical of immigrants everywhere, they reached out to their narrow immigrant communities and found support upon arrival, moving on to doing odd jobs here and there until they were established. These brothers saw an opportunity in the world of auto repair. Having never owned nor driven cars themselves in the old country (they were far too poor), they used their ingenuity and strong work ethic to eventually open up several repair shops throughout the Tri-State area. They grew wealthy as their business and families prospered. They realized the American Dream.

One of my father’s older cousins arrived in Cleveland, Ohio in the late 1950s as well. He was not as business-minded as the above mentioned three were, but he found a job rather quickly working on the assembly line for one of the Big 3 automotive companies. Like many of his generation, he stayed with the company until he reached the age of retirement, never once changing his employer. He and his family became solidly middle class, with a big house in the suburbs and with sons who went on to succeed in their own lives. He too realized the American Dream.

Another of my grandfather’s cousins arrived in Chicago around 1960. In the Windy City, poor Croatian immigrant men would take jobs as superintendents in apartment buildings. They would set aside as much money as possible and begin to purchase apartment buildings that they would then run and manage on their own. My grandfather’s cousin did this and built himself up a nice portfolio of real estate over the decades. He barely knew his own father and was raised in grinding poverty. His children were brought up in the northwest suburbs of Chicago in a solidly middle class neighbourhood, and then went on to climb the social ladder even higher. My grandfather’s Chicago cousin realized the American Dream.

These are just three examples of what millions of Americans experienced over the centuries when they decided to make the move from Europe to the USA. America was the promised land where people who were denied social mobility in Old Europe could succeed and prosper in a new land so long as they worked hard. This was the promise that Uncle Sam held out to new arrivals. In turn, these immigrants would pledge allegiance to The Flag, forget about the Old World and its conflicts, adopt a new, American identity, take to heart its founding principles, and would participate in civic duty (read this brilliant 2020 essay by Christopher Caldwell for more on this). For those of European stock, this was more than a fair deal.

Unencumbered by rigid aristocracies holding on to vast tracts of land handed down through the generations that effectively squeezed the common man into filthy industrial cities or impoverished hamlets, earlier colonists and immigrants were instead free to settle the frontier, build homesteads, and develop communities that were largely self-governing, with no Kings and Queens in sight. Every man his own king and every home his castle. This was the promised land, the land of the free.

And it was good. The USA was a shining beacon to the poor, the downtrodden, but also to the industrious, adventurous and free-spirited. America absorbed these newcomers and turned them into Americans. To be an American was to better than the rest. No longer held hostage to Old World grudges and rigid class structures, the American was free to make of himself what he could: a New Man.

That American Dream is long dead.

Ask any GenXer from Ontario or Quebec (or most likely anywhere else in Canada) their memories of the first time that they crossed the border into the USA and you will hear a familiar refrain: “I couldn’t believe how run down it was!” My cohort grew up close enough to the Canadian-USA border that we were able to watch local TV stations from places like Buffalo, NY and Erie, Pennsylvania. We absorbed so much American culture growing up that it distorted our mental image of the country. In my little boy’s mind, the USA was either sunny California full of beautiful people, big cities like NYC that would look like The Jetsons in another decade or two, or were southern like The Dukes of Hazzard where towns were neat and the people spoke funny. America was this incredible country where everyone, except poor Blacks in big cities, was richer than us.

That illusion would be shattered for those who crossed the border for the first time and saw just how decayed much of the USA looked upon closer inspection. Driving through cities like Buffalo, Cleveland, Toledo, Gary, etc. left one wondering just what happened to these places. What I was witnessing was the hollowing out of US industry and Flyover America as a whole. The process was already underway, but the negative cultural and social effects were only going to get worse as we moved towards the present. It was then that I had my first inkling that The American Dream was really an American Mirage.

To Be An American

The history of the USA is one of successful and unsuccessful assimilation of newcomers, alongside those that were never targeted for assimilation at all (Black descendants of slavery).

The Colonists were almost exclusively of British and Dutch stock, with many (Benjamin Franklin being the best example) looking askance at newer arrivals from exotic places such as Hesse or Bavaria. These Germans were followed by the Irish, and then the flood of the Ellis Islanders from Central, Southern, and Eastern Europe. America managed to swallow them all, leaving them only with their funny surnames as they went on to pursue life, liberty, and happiness. This was helped in large part by the slamming shut of the border from the 1920s to 1965. Beyond that, cultural affinities between Europeans greased this process, helped even more so by the common Christian heritage of these peoples. To be an American was to be White, Christian (with the Jewish exception), and loyal to the USA, and all the principles that came with it either through the Constitution or the Bill of Rights.

Three fundamental changes happened beginning in 1965. First, the border was reopened to legal immigration. This was followed by the increasing flood of illegal migrants that continues to this day. Secondly, the income of the middle class began to stop tracking the rise in US productivity in the 1970s. Lastly, the deconstruction of, and the attacks on American identity and history gained mainstream and institutional acceptance.

Since 1965, the USA has gone from being a country that was 90% White to around 60% today. People have understandably streamed in from all corners of the globe to pursue the opportunity of a better life in the USA, but from cultures that lack affinity with those that were already present there. This lack of cultural affinity means that basic shared assumptions (towards things like governance, political philosophy, etc.) are upended, leading to suspicions and paranoia, forestalling assimilation and larger community formation. Different peoples bring different ways of life and views on how to organize society with them when they immigrate. This can be overcome provided that they are encouraged to forget their old ways and if they have the incentive to do so by way of participation in social mobility.

The erosion of the middle class makes the above prospect all but impossible. More and more Americans, whether New or Old, are fighting for a smaller pie. The introduction of new populations impacts not only those at the bottom and middle rungs of society, but also the elites as well. We’ve seen how Asian-Americans are being “cockblocked” in various universities, but we’re also seeing how many of them are replacing White elites in industries such as technology. This breeds resentment and naturally leads groups to identify more narrowly with the perceived oppressed group that they belong to, rather than the “overarching American”.

The new interpretation of US History as one that is “inherently evil” due to the “Original Sin of Slavery” has created what Steve Sailer coined “the flight from White”. To identify as White in the USA is to take those “sins” upon one’s self uncritically. By extension, the American identity is degraded as well. Why identify as an American and be viewed as “supporting evil” when you can be a Hyphenated-American, thus either removing yourself from the sins of the Founders, or even better, place yourself under the umbrella of a “victimized group” identity? What, therefore, is the incentive for newcomers to identify simply as American when the existing, successful elites encourage the tearing down of that identity?

The Impossibility of Civic Nationalism

This brings us back to Marusic’s essay.

Centrist liberals like Damir and the people described as the Intellectual Dark Web seek to push away two trends in America today: the progressives who seek to tear down the remnants of American identity to build a new one based around “equity”, and the hard right who want to end immigration and restore America to some semblance of what they deem is “normality” i.e. a return to the older, better days.

Marusic understands the concerns and fears of the right without sharing them himself, and clearly realizes that the progressives are overplaying their hand, which empowers these same rightists. This makes sense. What he proposes is a civic nationalism that is colour-blind and tied to certain “universal” American values, much like David French does.

The problem with this is that the genie has been let out of the bottle, specifically the genie of ethno-racial politics. Obama was characterized as the “first post-racial President”. His Presidency instead devolved into a hyper-racial America, witnessing both the rise of #BLM and White Nationalism. Despite efforts to suppress the latter, the progressive attacks on Whites as a hole only serves to increase primary identification as White by White Americans, in place of the default American identity. When you are attacked for a feature that you were born with, you will collectively rally with others who have the same feature to defend yourselves.

On the other side of the racial ledger, Blacks clearly identify as Blacks first, above that of being American. The same holds true for Indian-Americans (Subcontinental), Chinese-Americans, and so on. With this inflation of hyphenated identities comes a proliferation of different cultural assumptions that create a distance from that of the Default American pre-1965. Rallying around skin colour/blood, especially when it is viewed as being under attack, is much more natural than pledging allegiance to a shared set of values, especially when those values cannot be agreed upon. Add to this the increasing economic precariousness of the average American citizen and we see why blood always wins out.

The incentive in today’s America is to have a hybrid i.e. hyphenated identity (whether racial, ethnic, religious, sexual, gender-based, etc.), with the ones seen as being repressed the most valuable. Newer populations will mimic elite trends to climb up the ladder. To end this trend in order to elevate an overarching American identity would be attacked as “erasure”, “racist”, and “genocidal”, something that scares the fuck out of these centrists as they view themselves inherently good people.

Marusic’s desire for a civic nationalism is much like today’s Reagan conservatism, a relic of the past. America has changed too much these past several decades for it to work. That ship has sailed.