The Myth of the Old Republic
And Anglo-Saxon Anglophobia
Pat Buchanan expresses the hope that "in the womb of white America" a "new people is gestating and fighting to be born." He is convinced that Middle America is already "beginning to assert its identity, unapologetically" as an ethno-nation alongside African-Americans, American Indians, native Hawaiians, Hispanics, etc.
In fact, what we are witnessing are the death throes of homo Americanus. Mr Buchanan recalls that another "new people ... the Americans" was born two hundred years ago in the colonial struggle to achieve independence from Great Britain. Then, the American Adam declared himself free of the excess historical baggage accumulated during the Dark Ages of Anglo-Saxon Christendom. Middle America is reaping the whirlwind sown in the revolutionary Enlightenment.
The Tea Parties are not symptoms of restored vigour in the body politic. Instead, middle-class white people, drawn mainly from the "founding race" of their senile, degenerate nation-state, are searching for a magic political elixir to bring the decrepit Constitutional Republic back to life. Glaringly there are few real leader or thinkers stepping into the public arena articulating alternatives in the realm of less miraculous possibilities. Even inspired opportunism is failing.
Pat Buchanan, having to the best of our knowledge retired from political campaigning does offer intriguing thoughts though many of those thoughts seem to be in the throes of their own promising gestation. Having first bruited the possibility that white is becoming the new black, he concludes by claiming that the "coming conflict is not so much racial as it is cultural, political and tribal."
Of one thing we can be sure: the rise of a new tribalism within Middle America must signal the imminent demise of homo Americanus. That "new people" created by the Declaration of Independence boasted of their own immaculate conception and effectively excommunicated any and all forms of ethno-nationalism from the civil religion of the Constitutional Republic.
Shedding his ancestral allegiance to throne and altar, the American Adam sundered the transatlantic, Greater British, community of, blood and faith, memory and tradition. All American citizens, whether of German or Huguenot, Dutch or Swedish ancestry, henceforth stood on an equal footing with the Anglo-Saxon Protestant majority population.
The American Republic did, indeed, create a new people but it was to be a people finding its poetry in the future not in the benighted past and outworn traditions of the Old World. The first new nation sneered at the "sectarian" ethno-patriotism characteristic of every "backward" province of Christendom born under the auspices of the early Church. Seeking a secular substitute for the age-old union of English blood and Christian faith, the American revolutionary regime invented a form of statist idolatry known as constitutional patriotism.
At first, of course, America's constitutional faith was a "white" thing from which Indians and Negroes, whether slave or free, were almost entirely excluded. But its most avid acolytes were -- and are -- Anglo-Saxon Protestants whose fanatical devotion to the sacred cause of liberty, equality, and fraternity fought their impulses of greed, acquisition and conquest placing them in eventual opposition, first, to genocide and racial slavery then to segregation and, finally, to exclusionary practices generally.
Anglo-Saxon Protestants in America ceased to be an ethno-nation; they found a novel civic identity anchored in the political theology of a federal republic. Although they enjoyed de facto political, economic, and cultural hegemony within the Constitutional Republic, people of British ancestry were never recognized de jure as members of America's founding race.
When, following the Civil War, Anglo-Saxon Protestant opinion leaders in the progressive North made a colour-blind Constitution the touchstone of political decency it was inevitable that, sooner or later, other racial, religious, and ethnic groups would be admitted, along with women, to full membership in the Constitutional Republic.
Buchanan and others still feels the need to wrap themselves in the foundation myth of the Old (White) Republic. Somehow, they hope, a return to a long-since superseded stage in the constitutional development of American civil religion will become possible.
At the same time, by linking the Tea Party movement with the rise of a new tribe, Buchanan implicitly recognizes that the Constitutional Republic is no longer the exclusive property even of white America. But he must understand as well that, if there are to be white tribes, they will have to constitute themselves as autonomous loci of legitimate authority within civil society, outside, apart from, and even against the trans-national structures of state and corporate power.
The USA is no longer an "Anglo-Saxon country." Inter-ethnic rivalry has become an inescapable fact of life for most Americans. But WASPs generally, and the Tea Partiers in particular, remain reluctant to play the postmodern game of identity politics, still preferring to think of themselves as the unhyphenated avatars of homo Americanus.
But WASPs, like other human groups, have distinctive biocultural interests. The refusal of contemporary American WASPs to recognize that obvious fact has transformed the complacent self-deception of their grandparents into outright ethno-masochism. Sooner or later, they will have to defend themselves not just against such obvious enemies but also against renegade kinsmen. It must never be forgotten that it was with the blessing of the Anglican and Episcopal Churches, that a spiritually enfeebled WASP governing class installed the worship of the Other at the core of America's constitutional faith.
WASPs resigned their stewardship of the Constitutional Republic, suffering from the peculiar ethno-pathology that I call "Anglo-Saxon Anglophobia." America's constitutional faith turned into a secular parody of religion; the founders' reign of civic virtue degenerated into a racial spoils system in which fraud and deception became the norm; the federal republic morphed into a corrupt confederation of mutually antagonistic interest groups.
For far too long, WASPs have treated their constitutional faith as a surrogate for their ancestral ethno-religious identity. But WASPs can no longer depend upon the nation-state either as the fons et origo of their collective identity or as the guarantor of individual and collective security.
Accordingly, heavily WASP Tea Partiers should aim not just to secure the survival of their widely-despised and resented ethny but to restore their former condition as a people of destiny. Faced with the accelerating decay of the nation-state, American WASPs can still reconstitute themselves as local, resilient communities whose deep-seated biocultural affinities fit them to participate in a global network of Anglo-Saxon Christian tribes, able to make alliances among and without but maintaining its identity and independence.
Less than a century ago Hilaire Belloc dared to describe The Jews as "an alien organism within the society they inhabit." He went on to propose that Jews should segregate themselves fully in their own communal institutions and their own public spaces -- for their own good as much as for that of the host culture. Needless to say, neither the Jews nor the English governing class took up his suggestion.
I am not suggesting the extreme it is apparent that this is necessary for the WASP, at at least in terms of communal institutions. Such behavior has always been the case and still is, except for the WASP. For a period he was able to claim the American space as his province exclusively and then with others in minor attendance. This is obviously no longer true.
The WASP cannot even achieve proportionate representation and influence and thus as much as anyone needs his own communal institutions, exclusive particularly of alien elements more powerful and influential than the WASP and those that are servile to more powerful interests; this in the same way Blacks needed institutions, whether it was churches or their own Masonic and Odd Fellows lodges and internal establishment organizations that were simply free of those that were stronger, more aggressive and dominating, even if the institutions followed WASP (or in these cases BASP) cultural ethos promoting of amity.
WASPs, collectively, are now the 98 pound weakling sitting alone on the beach while other groups kick sand in his face. In the aftermath of the soon-to-be failed American nation-state, it will be good both for the WASPs and for other peoples if they start to muscle up and show independence. If not the sizable WASP population as a weak-willed and manipulable mass will be used by opportunistic and cunning forces, against other groups and against itself.
The task of inspiring the regeneration of an Anglo-Saxon ethno-nation is one that must not be shirked by American WASP intellectuals and opinion leaders. Harold Cruse, easily one of the more incisive black-nationalist thinker of the Sixties, warned Anglo-Saxon intellectuals that their continued refusal to acknowledge openly the tribal identity of their group had "led this nation to the brink of self-destruction." The frantic spread of the Tea Party movement is but one more sign that homo Americanus finally fell off the cliff.
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