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EXIT man Hyrum is an academic studying American identity and continuity, and we invited him to share his research with us.
In addition to deliberate and hostile subversion, American identity is going through a classic imperial failure mode:
First, American culture has become so globally dominant that it is difficult for Americans to recognize themselves as having a particular culture at all; and second, mass migration and admixture within the empire have created a lot of edge cases and blurred lines.
But in this presentation, Hyrum makes the argument that Americans’ identity is no more complicated or discontinuous than any other national identity — and it goes back just as far.
Americans are essentially English, who are themselves essentially the product of wars, trade, and migrations between a handful of highly (and continuously) interrelated peoples from the shores of the North Sea.
To the extent that America was a “nation of immigrants” prior to 1900, the immigration and admixture was overwhelmingly a continuation of the economic, cultural, and genetic exchange that had gone on for millennia in Europe, between the Germanic peoples of the North Sea.
(This includes the Irish, who Hyrum argues are genetically much closer to other Northern European groups than the historical Celts.)
The similarities and differences between nations are inherently relative and fractal, of course.
It’s true that in the highly homogeneous, overwhelmingly English America of 1840, the Irish were received as dangerously foreign, with incompatible values and loyalties.
The Anglo-American settlers themselves were composed of ethnic subclades whose cultural and tribal differences were deeply felt, and still drive American political conflict today.
But that isn’t a lawgic trap that invalidates America’s coherent peoplehood, any more than Jurchen admixture invalidates Han Chinese identity. Northwest Europeans, like Northeast Asians, are highly related peoples who have been in continuous commerce for millennia — and the challenges of those pre-20th-century tides of assimilation and exchange cannot be compared, either in scope or in scale, with what we are asked to accept today.
(As Tony points out in the Q&A, these weapons of deconstruction are never deployed against any non-European people.)
Bottom line: the American people were not invented in 1789.
Various Founding Fathers wrote about the utility and risks of (presumptively European) immigration to their ideological project, but the American people are not that ideological project. The Constitution of the United States is a product of the American people, not the other way around.
Like every other nation on earth, the American people are an extended family —overwhelmingly a pioneer tribe of the British Isles — and their pedigree goes all the way back, just like everyone else’s does.
As part of the deconstruction game, nationalists are often challenged to pick the precise point at which the biological and cultural composition of the American people was “correct” — where do you “snap the line” to define who is and is not American.
But no matter where they snap the line, nationalists are set up for the impossible task of unscrambling the egg, putting forth some program for unwinding all the change between that date and the present — and whatever heuristic they choose inevitably produces conclusions at odds with most people’s (including most nationalists’) intuitive sense of who is in and who is out.
The point of all this is to get you to take the bait, and deny obvious reality.
Nations (by which we mean extended kin groups — biological phenomena) are, in fact, emergent, contingent, living things, with porous, blurry, and shifting boundaries. In other words, they are not abstract Platonic categories — they are real things that exist here on Planet Earth.
The only reason to deny that obvious fact is if you’ve subconsciously bought the implication that a category with those characteristics is meaningless. But all categories that map to any concrete reality have these characteristics — there are no perfect circles and no straight lines.
A better approach to this game of deconstruction is simply to shine a light on its underlying goal, which is to deny your right to your life and property, and justify your dispossession.
Leftists don’t bat an eye when American Indians act as if they were robbed of the entire North American continent, as if the Iroquois had any institutional continuity or shared claims with the Seminole or the Apache. Mexicans with 85% conquistador ancestry claim without irony that “their” victimization in Southern Mexico imputes some claim on the American West Coast.
(To say nothing of the absurd, ten-minutes-old construct of “Black and Brown Bodies”, which pretends that Zohran Mamdani and Rashida Tlaib have standing with respect to the ancestral grievances of inner-city American blacks.)
These identities are bundled as broadly (or sliced as thinly) as it takes — in whatever configuration, however incoherent, as long as it means that your claim on your country is illegitimate, and it actually rightfully belongs to them.
For better or worse, all of these claims are about to become irrelevant.
Moralistic arguments about the “rightful” possessors of this or that parcel of colonized land only made sense in the context of the unipolar American order, in which nationhood could be litigated and disbursed by a global sovereign.
In that order, America was a kind of supra-nation, the arbiter of nationhood — above and outside nationhood as a category. America’s postwar dismantling of the European colonial empires in Asia and Africa was (to its defenders) a setting of things to rights, a Rectification of Names.
(That’s why these moralistic arguments still work on certain white people: it is flattering to believe that you are still in control, that you still have a throne that you can gracefully abdicate.)
But the unipolar moment is over, and history is back.
It doesn’t matter if leftists’ program of replacement migration and expropriation is based on a delusional and immoral view of history: all that matters is whether they can pull it off.
Either way, America isn’t going to be the supra-nation anymore. It isn’t going to be any of its prior iterations. We aren’t going to revert America to an earlier save.
The only reason even to engage with these arguments (about who Americans have been historically) is to convince a few of your normie friends and family that they do, in fact, have a culture and a legitimate inheritance, and it’s OK to take their own side.
But even if we win (especially if we win), America will be radically redefined by the crises that are currently unfolding: your political rights, your property rights, the condition of your community, the character of your neighbors and their disposition toward you, who falls under your definition of “us”.
All of these things will change because they’re all currently in a very volatile disequilibrium — and if a thing can’t go on, it won’t.
EXIT is a fraternity dedicated to taking a short position in managerial systems, and building the human institutions that come next. Learn more at exitgroup.us.
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