Last week, the White House announced that it would review the 55 million resident visas issued to foreigners living in the US. When I saw that figure, my jaw dropped.
A full 16% of the total US population (~340 million) is there on a visa. That doesn’t even include the illegals. Rough estimates of the illegal population in the US range from 20 million to 100 million. Adding these together, about 40-45% of the US population could be a foreign national of some kind. Those are astounding numbers, if accurate.
Many of those people will call themselves “Mexican-American,” “Chinese-American,” “African-American”, or some other ambidextrous identity. They are comfortable using a combination of their true nationality, connected with a hyphen to the term “American.” By casting this magic spell, they believe they can be transformed into Americans. After all, America is an idea, and anyone can believe in an idea.
Not so, say the so-called “Heritage-Americans.” These people with white skin (usually) don’t agree that America is an idea. To Heritage-Americans, the country was built for and by “white people.” They will point to sentences in the founding documents that limited naturalisation to “any alien being a free white person of good character.” To them, the millions of non-whites in America should be deported, because they aren’t “American.”
So, who is correct? What does it mean to be an American? Is there some core racial stock to which the signifier “American” can be attached? Would this group be justified in claiming America as the private property of their ethnic nation (a nation being simply an extended family group)? All good questions.
And the answer to these questions is in the clue of the hyphen.
I don’t think the “Heritage-Americans” have any idea how screwed they are. They can’t see that when you add a prefix adjective to a noun by using a hyphen, you rob all concrete meaning from that noun. A thing cannot be two things at the same time. A person cannot have two identities simultaneously. They are either Mexican or American, but no one in the long history of the universe has ever been a “Mexican-American.” One of those identities is intrinsic, the other is chosen. Belief is not a real identity. Your blood decides who you are.
The question of identity is a political IQ test: Do you think a person can undergo ethnic transmutation once they touch different soil? When the subject is “Mexican-Americans”, the answer is clearly no. But when the subject is “Heritage-Americans,” the magic soil theory suddenly works again! These are the true Americans; everyone else is just visiting. And yet, they still need to refer to themselves with a hyphen.
The term “American” is not enough for “Heritage-Americans” because they know, deep down, that being an American is an “I believe” identity – a propositional identity. This means their identity is based on affirming a set of beliefs. If you are an American, it means you believe in freedom, individualism and equality before the law, regardless of your race or life history. A propositional identity implies that the belief defines a community, not race or ethnicity.
Said differently, being “American” is not, and never will be, a race or ethnicity because there is no such thing as magic soil. When you’re born a dog, you can’t die as a cat.
The Europeans who claim to be “Heritage-Americans” today tried desperately to become cats. But all they ended up doing was robbing themselves of their ethnic identities. The Founding Fathers were English. They declared themselves petty kings and justified their new political concept with the vague idea of “democracy,” and then forced everyone else to surrender thousands of years of European ethnic history to become a uniform mass of "Americans."
1776 was Year Zero.
The concept of America was born from treason. It's a club, an organisation that anyone can join with the proper paperwork. A nation it is not. When Americans severed ties with their king, their people and their home, perhaps it was a necessary transition. But it left the colony without proper grounding or a clear identity.
The problem with saying citizenship in America should only be available to “white persons of good character” is that there is no such thing as a “white person” either. Even in 1776, the Irish and the British were seen as distinct from the Germans and the Poles. By saying “white people” as a way of including all Europeans of “good character,” the American system implicitly agrees that races do exist, but this doesn’t matter so long as they all stay at the imaginary meta level of “white.”
It’s not too much of a jump from that to say that an American is anyone who assimilates to “white culture,” which is a vague mix of the different European cultures. And since the British, German and Scandinavian were all considered “white” in America, the system was admitting that being an American was always just a belief, a proposition.
From the very founding of the country, all Americans were hyphenated Americans.
I know this hurts Americans to hear, but if your national identity can be hyphenated, then you don’t have a country. All you have is a corporation. There will never be an American ethnostate. I would argue that there never was.
It is true that some regions of America have produced a unique folk who live in a certain way and have specific values related to those who settled and established it. There is great diversity across the US. However, if one were to include, say, Italian-Americans as part of this folk alongside Anglo-Americans, this throws a wrench into the works. Being American requires Italians and Anglos to give up their racial identities to become “American.” But no one can give up their race. You don’t get to choose who you are.
The closest America got to ethnogenesis (the creation of a new ethnicity) was in the WWII era. Talk with any US WWII veteran. They broadly share a distinct set of mannerisms, values and even a certain look. What caused this? Forced integration of the European ethnic communities during WWI, the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924, shared struggle in the Depression, new methods of rapid travel (train, car) and communication (radio) and a standardised diet (cereals, etc). The country entered the 1950s with a mostly distinct “American” ethnic identity.
Of course, this all fell apart because the Founders believed that ethnic competition was the root cause of conflict, and their express political goal was to avoid the creation of a new ethnic identity in the New World.
Today’s “Heritage-Americans'' are simply a mix of displaced Italians, Irish, Polish, Scottish and English who would not recognise their own ancestral homelands. Their connections to the land in America go back a handful of generations, at best. They are a lost people knitted into a mass identity. Every European living in America comes from immigrants who consciously deracinated themselves from their true nation. Their skin colour is all they have left. That’s why they call themselves “white.”
Most nations define nationality in terms of shared history, culture and values. In the old world, each person belonging to one nation, one ethnicity and one culture was overwhelmingly the norm. That’s what Americans lack, and they don't even realise it.
No man has ever been as vindicated as Julius Evola as regards his essays on America.
He correctly pointed out that America is liberalism manifest, a corrosive acid that destroys history and culture. America’s inability to face racial reality, Evola said, would be the downfall of the West. Evola would not have been surprised to see the US exporting transgender children, pride flags and twerking fat-arsed women around the world because, as he argued, the American character is formless, devoid of genuine caste, anti-Tradition and as such, made up of pariahs.
Evola, too, would not have been surprised to see Americans replacing European characters in movies (such as the Little Mermaid, the dwarves from Lord of the Rings, or the Fairy Godmother from Pinocchio) with blacks because, he contended, this is an indivisible part of the American mentality. The only true definition of America is “not-Europe”. Thus, to become truer to itself, America must negate and eliminate the “Europe” within itself. Evola is vindicated more and more every day.
Edmund Fürholzers 1943 book, Menschen wie wir? - Ein Amerika-Buch für Europäer (People Like Us? - A Book On The US For Europeans), deemed the US to no longer be "a European country, neither spiritually nor racially", while the Anglo colonists of Australia and New Zealand were of a more "resilient racial type of the English". He also prophesied that, if the Allies were to be victorious in WWII, the “white” man of the US would be destroyed much like the European.
That is precisely what the “Heritage-Americans” of today are trying so desperately to stop from happening. But they are about 249 years too late. The project of the propositional country they call home was built with the express goal of destroying all culture, ethnicity and identity. 1776 was Year Zero.
America’s great contribution is that it offers immigrants a way to leave their roots and past behind. But America’s great evil is that it propagandises to every other country to forget its roots and past as well. America is where culture goes to die. But since America has already conquered the world, we are all Americans now.
If you doubt this, try asking: What is a New Zealander? The feeling you get after asking that question is vertigo. American vertigo.