The Insurgent Disposition
In 1976, sociologist Donald Warren published a little-known book with the title The Radical Center: Middle Americans and the Politics of Alienation. Among other things, this fascinating work described a developing class consciousness among the middle class wherein it was perceived that there was an institutional bias in American power centers toward both the coastal liberal elite, as well as the lower classes.
The upper-class economic elite—dominating the world of high finance, media, academia, and other institutions of influence (what James Burnham referred to as the Managerial Elite)—had teamed up with those on the economic margins of American life such that the top and bottom rungs of society were working in tandem. It was the middle classes that saw themselves as bearing the raw end of this new political dynamic in America.
Such a dynamic caused these Middle Americans to flock toward political figures like George Wallace, Ross Perot, Pat Buchanan, and most recently, Donald Trump. Frustrated by the increasing lack of political focus on their own interests, priorities, and struggles these Middle Americans began, in the post-Civil Rights era, to “radicalize’ against the establishment. These “Middle American Radicals,” (MARs) as Warren calls them, “are distinct in the depth of their feeling that the middle class has been seriously neglected. [Government is now] favoring both the rich and the poor simultaneously.”
It is important to note, however, that it was one of the great contributions of the paleoconservative student of power relations, Sam Francis, to understand the unique cultural element at play here. Drawing on the lessons of the Italian leftwing and Communist agitator Antonio Gramsci, Francis realized the extent to which a conspiracy between the “rich and the poor” against the financial middle class doesn’t really tell the whole story. After all, by the time the late 1980s came around and the Soviet Union’s Marxist experiment had completely collapsed, it was a full decade after the publication of Warren’s book; what was happening in America could not be construed in the limited framing of mere economic materialism.
Pat Buchanan was prescient when he spoke in 1992 of America’s tension being that of a full-fledged Culture War. The strategic partnership at play in American political life was such that the liberal elite could bolster their own power by appealing to the dynamic of an oppressor-oppressed relationship wherein the oppressed would be made up of groups like ethnic minorities, repressed women, practitioners of sexual abnormalities, and even the urban poor (though never the rural poor—emphasizing the cultural aspect of these victim groups).
This partnership in political upheaval was strengthened by a myopic legislative agenda that focused on righting alleged injustices by harnessing efforts toward immigration equalities, the expansionary bureaucratization of civil rights, and the submerging all of American cultural life in the ideology of victimhood, emancipation, and overcoming the past.
While it was obvious and explicit who the sanctioned oppressed groups were, what very few were able to grasp was the implicit fact that it was not the “elite” who would be the oppressors against whom political society would wage its weapons of social justice. Rather, it was these very “Middle Americans.”
It was for this reason, just as much as the economic factors, that the forgotten and betrayed Middle Americans have gone through ebbs and flows of what has been described as a “radicalization” process. In recent decades this has only become much more explicit. The radicalization of the Middle Americans has them now calling into question the very legitimacy of America’s Left-occupied institutions and therefore, in increasing ways, they advocate for any sustained action or demeanor that undermines the Regime. Francis therefore emphasized throughout the late eighties and early nineties that MARs are those best thought of not merely as the “Middle Class” with reference to a certain annual income, but as those citizens who made up the core of American cultural life in our once quite bourgeois-dominated society. It is for this reason that I constantly refer to these MARs as Heritage Americans.
Middle Americans are those who may or may not have gone to college, largely held regular blue-collar jobs, mostly represented the ethos of the American Heartland—away from the postwar radicalism of the West and East coasts. They are those whose roots in America extend back into the pre-Ellis Island era and they identify with traditional American social mores and regional customs and would assert the goodness of America’s historical experiences. They are fond of America’s folk history, cherish its heroes and legends, and largely see the post-Civil Rights cultural-entertainment apparatus as deeply subversive of the American spirit. They are not very ideological; they are unimpressed by Washington D.C.’s halls of power, suspicious of the rule of credentials and expertise, and disinterested in grand visions of the socially engineered remaking of American society.
They have a disposition that makes them cynical about the pursuit of universal human rights, and they would rather see the restoration of their own cultural patrimony than an American- facilitated liberal democracy bequeathed to some foreign people group (either in America through migration or elsewhere in the world by American expansionism). Middle Americans are the ones that prioritize the maintenance of their way of life, desire to be left alone by the coastal elites, and identify much more with memories of folk and kin than with postwar America as an ideological engine of world transformation. They understand instinctually that America was a place and a people, an inherited social order, not a propositional nation. As Michael Lind and Samuel Huntington have both rightly discerned, nations may possess aspirations and political propositions fitted to themselves, but the nation is not thereby synonymous with said propositions.
In the culture war, the Middle Americans would become the antagonists against the politically favored—they would become the new cultural proletariat. Thus, the Middle American Radicals who seek to express their frustrations do so not in terms of mere financial woes—though there is plenty of that too— but also in terms of the perceived liquidation and decimation of their heritage, folk symbols, and cultural artifacts (flags, dress, music, heroes, historical narratives, architecture, etc.). It was being liquidated by a liberal elite that despised Folk America, dismissing them with labels such as “Deplorables.”
This liberal elite fostered its culture war on the MARs by upholding and culturally encouraging the sexual degenerates, racial revolutionaries, radical feminists, anti-Western Third Wordlist’s, and various collections of those who operated politically in terms of their own group interests—interests, of course, that could not be synchronized with Heritage America and the sociological universe of America circa the 18th century through early 20th century.
In 2024, the tensions inherent in this meta-struggle between the MARs and the elite-victim partnership have exploded. Precisely what Warren anticipated, and what paleoconservatives like Sam Francis and Pat Buchanan identified early on, has now become a predominant aspect of our political dynamics. The trouble, of course, is that the Republican Party—so often a betrayer of the MARs whom they depend upon for electoral success—and the Democratic Party alike represent factions of the elite-victim partnership, and there are few (though certainly none with real, institutional power) whose instincts line up with the forgotten MARs.
The result of this is that America’s old popular majority, displaced by Left- radicalized, well-educated white liberals and tens of millions of third world immigrants, is becoming intensely agitated—even more so than they were in the 90s. The difference this time around seems to be that the younger, emergent right wing—fans of Buchanan and the ethos of Heritage American over against the postwar liberal consensus—are no longer interested in sustaining the American system as it presently exists. While the patriotic response to 9/11 was able to quell the nerves of the MARs in the early 2000s, it is quite clear that there are no longer any events that could convince the radical right that the true enemy is abroad and not here at home. The new MARs therefore operate in a state of complete spiritual severance from all representation in Washington. This is a significant historical moment.
Failure of the Conservative Movement
Among the Conservative Movement’s fiercest critics were those paleoconservatives who were adamant that what they call “Con Inc.” had failed in its most rudimentary political mandate: to defend the interests and way of life of the people it swore it existed to represent. Among these paleoconservatives, few are as controversial as Sam Francis. Yet whatever else may be said about Francis, it’s hard to think of a figure who so deeply understood the failure of conservatism in America in light of the Left’s decades-long march through all the Institutions. The Left was so successful in its total occupation of American cultural life by 1990, Francis would observe, that the entire multi-million-dollar Conservative enterprise was operating on the framing and moral universe of this Leftist political gestalt. Francis therefore had a much darker view of what was happening socio-politically than what could be found on tap at the conferences, conventions, rallies, and fundraising events of Conservative Inc. While Conservatism was selling a sort of cheap optimism on the premise that America’s institutions were robust, eternal, and unconquerable—despite some temporary setbacks due to Clinton’s successful bid for the White House—Francis and his fellow paleoconservatives were warning that the institutions were presently waging war against the very people that most passionately believed—and needed to believe— in their integrity. This sort of lie, Francis would viscously point out, was homicidal in nature: if the Left was intent on terminating Heritage America, it was the conservatives who functioned to prevent anyone from doing anything about it.
In the 1980s and 1990s, Francis and the paleoconservatives—among whom is my own primary influence Paul Gottfried—began to articulate a strategy against the Left that can be referred to as a Revolution from the Middle—directly referencing the disaffected MARs. Francis, along with Pat Buchanan, Paul Gottfried, and others (such as the eminent right-leaning libertarian Murray Rothbard) were ruthless against the neoconservatives who had ventured into the Republican Party from reformed Trotskyite and Liberal origins. They called them out not merely for being too soft against the Left, but for accepting the Left’s consolidation of the Managerial State, the expansion of the perilous logic of the Civil Rights revolution, and, importantly, for purging the conservative movement of its would be stalwarts such as Joe Sobran and Mel Bradford.
It is important to note that there were others who were indeed legitimate conservatives in the older, pre-neoconservative sense, such as Russell Kirk and Roger Scruton, who exemplified a superior outlook on socio-political affairs than the liberalized neoconservative establishment. These traditionalists were not neoconservatives, but neither were they paleoconservatives in the same sense as Francis and Gottfried and others—though in many contexts they worked and wrote together.
The difference had somewhat to do with political strategy and the tactics of political activism. But this difference in strategy was derivative of much more profound differences in interpretations as to the socio-cultural state of emergency that characterized America at the end of the twentieth century.
Whereas both the Traditionalists and the paleoconservatives completely dissented from the propositional nationhood and political universalism of the conservative establishment, dominated by neoconservatives, the traditionalists sought a strategy of reinvigorating our belief in the old ways, praising the permanent goodness of American institutions, and calling for electoral participation to reassert a conservative influence in Washington. It called for a return to the old Constitutional order, an embrace of the Bill of Rights, and an assertion of the goodness that remained in the American system.
The Franciscans (as Rothbard once called them), on the other hand, developed a much bleaker view of twentieth century developments; arguing that the institutions had been already captured, the Heritage American ethos and its memory was being liquidated purposefully, and that our moment called for a posture of political insurgency, rather than the mere reinvigoration of the Western imagination. In other words, the hour in America was far later than the traditionalists wanted to admit, we must face the dark prospects that the civilizational enemy already held the reins of power, and that they were intent on humiliating Middle America unto their socio-economic death. The solemn implication of this, completely unacceptable to the Conservative establishment (optimism is better for aggregating donations), was that our time called for a hard politics of friends vs. enemies, rather than a soft politics of universal principles and the marketplace of ideas.
One of the problems with the typical Conservative strategy that Francis was prescient to emphasize is that their defense of American procedures and institutional norms could only be meaningful if they controlled the institutions that they were seeking to sustain. But once the Left had affected its institutional capture, conservatism’s entire ideology limited their own activity to the very constitutional norms that the Left delighted in subverting and avoiding. In other words, Conservatism was so committed to its constitutional norms that it had no means of waging war against an enemy that could hardly be bothered to care about America’s old constitutional constraints. Conservatism therefore was at a dead end by the 1980s.
In Francis’ context of the Reagan and Bush years, Francis noted that already the Conservatives were
“[D]ashing onto the political playing fields designed by the architects of Leviathan… [P]olitical conservatives had to play by their rivals’ rules in their rivals’ game, so it shouldn’t be surprising that conservatives wound up with pretty much the same thoughts and values that the architects have and wanted them to have.”
Now, thirty years removed from the height of paleoconservative activity, it becomes increasingly clear that Sam Francis has been thoroughly vindicated in his sustained indictment of the Conservative Movement. Not only has the Conservative Movement failed in its mandate to preserve the ethos of Heritage America and the interests of Middle America, but it has joined the side of the cultural Jacobins within the Managerial State that seek to facilitate the completion of the Left-liberal extermination of old America.
Thus, the Conservative Movement has failed and, significantly, conservatism can henceforth no longer be the proper disposition for the Right. As Garet Garrett noted in 1938 about the post-New Deal world: “There are those who still think they are holding the pass against a revolution that may be coming up the road. But they are gazing in the wrong direction. The revolution is behind them. It went by in the Night of Depression, singing songs to freedom.” Today’s conservative defenders of a world that has already disappeared have no framework for the political world as it currently sits.
The Insurgent Mentality
What Middle Americans Radicals need now more than ever is something that continues to bother the leaders of Movement Conservatism; namely, the posture of an insurgent who operates at the margins of political society, and who has no actual representation within the Power Elite. That is to say, they should learn, as Sam Francis himself did, from prior examples of theorists who contemplated the path from a place of no power, to a place of political hegemony—such as Antonio Gramsci. If the American political structure caters to clusters of special interest groups, and if MARs or Heritage Americans are now largely left out of this dynamic, it makes no sense to operate with a conservative posture. If we are to demonstrate our fealty to the traditional American people and their way of life, we must refuse to treat those in power who seek our destruction as anything other than enemies against whom power should be wielded.
The most fundamental implication of this is that Heritage Americans need to adopt a sort of counter-revolutionary consciousness. This means we must treat the Regime as being made up of our enemies, rather than something we pledge allegiance to; after all, we do pledge allegiance to the very America that the present Regime daily repudiates. We must be deeply suspicious not of holding power, but of those who presently hold power. We must not pretend like the American Regime operates in the best interests of us Heritage Americans but rather seeks to fleece us on behalf of its clients. As Auron Macintyre has pointed out on numerous occasions, “Americans are not so much citizens of a country as tax cattle farmed for wealth to be retributed to the client classes of the ruling elite.”
Moreover, we must come to terms with the fact that the postwar ideological consensus is a delusion that veils the realities of identity politics: politics in 21st century America—once we look past the myths of individualism, merit, liberality, and democracy—consists in a clash of group interests organized along lines of who you are and the culture you represent. The classical liberals lambaste the Critical Theorists for their doctrine of intersectionality, but do not the media, the academic institutions, the entertainment outlets, the bureaucratic agencies, the billion-dollar non-profits, the massive banking conglomerates, and the technology corporations all operate on behalf of groups organized around cultural identity? Politics in America has already adopted the dynamics of Lenin’s “Who, Whom?” political framework—the great question of present-moment politics is “who will conquer whom?” What it means to adopt a counter- revolutionary consciousness is to become a realist about how power actually functions in America; to defend your family and your people against other groups agitating for domination. In this sense, “identity politics” is a matter of cultural and political survival, and universal individualism is a path toward cultural death.
Developing a demeanor of political insurgency also implies that much of our lives must be thought about in light of long term socio-political objectives—who you form group bonds with, who you do business with, the place you live, the communities you build, the spouses you marry, the children you raise, the careers and vocations you pursue, the investments you make, the churches you attend, the clubs you form, the media and cultural artifacts you consume, the political activists you organize with. All these things must be construed in terms of retrieving and rebuilding a way of life that upholds the goodness and nobility of Heritage America and the Middle Americans that want to honor it. Adopting a counter-revolutionary consciousness means that you need to structure your life in terms of future orientedness and in anticipation of the increased politicalization of our future.
That is to say, adopting a counter-revolutionary consciousness means that we refuse to submerge ourselves into the deracinated “Trash World” that is being constructed for us by both those in formal power, and also those in the so-called “market economy.” We henceforth engage in power and economy with the primary purpose of arranging for our people a better future—not a life of consumptionism. Everywhere we go, we must abandon the Boomer generation’s milieu of narcissism, immediate comfort, and cheap optimism based on material pleasures: we operate for our people, for our cultural inheritance, on behalf of “ourselves and our posterity,” to borrow a phrase from the Constitution. We have our own long road to march—and it is animated by our commitment not to some Utopian future, but to the reassertion and reaffirmation of our own past. The counter-revolutionary consciousness does not shrink back into the caves but pursues strategic engagement where all of life—as much is possible within our own constraints— is centered around the interests of reinvigorating Heritage America.
Finally, we should study the strategies and tactics of others who have come from a position outside political dominance. For Francis, one of the most important theorists happened to be the Italian activist Antonio Gramsci, among the pre-eminent post-Leninist theorists of Communist strategy in the Western world. Gramsci, imprisoned as a Marxist revolutionary in Mussolini’s fascist regime, spent his remaining years writing out his Prison Notes (yes, edited there by Pete Buttigieg’s father), much of which spent time engaging a complete restructuring of Marxist strategy, in light of the communist frustrations in the West.
Because of the particular nature of Western cultural life (as compared to Russia’s cultural life on the eve of the Bolshevik Revolution), Gramsci recognized that Western political power was not merely a matter of control of the state—but also rested on control of the cultural institutions. Gramsci offered up the strategy of the building of a parallel culture, parallel institutions, and parallel communities that would operate outside the Western hegemonic cultural apparatus. They would grow independently, be nourished by their own momentum and attractiveness, and eventually be in a position of strength as compared to the archaic culture of Western past. In Crane Brinton’s Anatomy of Revolution, he described this as the formation of an “illegal government” which would operate parallel to the legal one.
Brinton elaborates:
“The legal government finds opposed to it, not merely hostile individuals and parties…but a rival government, better organized, better staffed, better obeyed. […] At a given revolutionary crisis they step naturally and easily into the place of the defeated Government.”
In other words, the creation of parallels precedes the actual capture of power and then later, once the power has been seized, the revolutionaries would simply substitute their own parallel institutions in the place of the old.
The problem that ultimately undermined Gramsci’s application of his strategy was simple: the American Left in the 50s and 60s could not pull off such a strategy because the American core was still basically conservative, disinterested in the counterculture and frankly annoyed by the parallel communities they sought to construct. The Gramscian strategy would not be successful as above articulated. Thus, the next generation of Gramsci-inspired culture warriors went a different route: it took the “Long March Through the Institutions.” That is, rather than creating parallels, it sought the method of subversion, catching a sleepy and recently victorious postwar America passive and self-satisfied with its total Western domination. We now sit on the other side of that cultural revolution, with the Long March having substantially succeeded in every facet of American cultural life… except one: the MARs have not converted.
And in fact, they have become emboldened against this revolution; even if they don’t recognize it as a revolution, as something that had been planned and executed. If Gramsci’s strategy of parallels couldn’t work because Heritage America was too firmly impressed into the hearts and souls of Middle Americans, then our own Right-Wing counter insurgency—on behalf of this betrayed Heritage America—can leverage specifically this bastion of old America. It is precisely here that Sam Francis can help us understand the strategy of a Revolution from the Middle. Our greatest strength, as Heritage Americans seeking to reassert Heritage America, is that our counter-revolution can be built upon the continuously radicalizing Middle.
As Francis noted, “beneath the encrustation of the dominant cultural apparatus of the left in this country there still persists an enduring cultural core of traditional beliefs and institutions.” And yet, despite the fact that there still remains a core that has stayed committed to Heritage America, this core has at present basically no one representing it within the apparatus of the state. At every level of government—county, state, and nation—the machine works on behalf of the basic instincts of either Liberalism or Leftism.
Thus, the moment calls for the creation of parallels—networks of support, production, protection, employment, spiritual and physical development, and so on—all of which must be explicitly catered to the ethos, aesthetic, and spirit of Heritage America and self-consciously outside the debased and cratering Managerial system. It also calls for counterinsurgencies at attainable levels (rural counties being a predominant example) and the formation of blocks of self-conscious MARs fighting for space to operate fortresses that can be mobilized into bases for future attacks.
Conclusion
One of the most important domains for parallels is the integration of this concept with the very real and legitimate county level governments in rural America—primarily in the American Heartland—away from the Leftist-dominated perimeters of the United States—where Old America still has a heartbeat. Here, radicalized Middle Americans who are aware of the Franciscan model of political dynamics can help to bolster the strength of the Heritage American core by treating more central jurisdictions with the same socio-political disdain that the liberal elite treats the MARs.
The insurgent disposition thus must be coupled with the political will to banish at local levels the spirit and influence of the Managerial elite; tremendous opportunities will present themselves to the Middle American Radicals when they begin to think like counterrevolutionaries in politically driven cultural warfare, rather than citizens with an equal standing before a Constitutionally structured government. They must abandon the cheap optimism of Feel-Good political messaging that drove the post-Reagan conservative establishment; they must instead identify with each other as Friends, over against the Enemy that occupies the American Regime. Only by adopting this approach to socio-political life—from positions of independent fortitude—can they wage their own Long Counter-Revolution, a “Counter-Hegemony” in the words of Gramsci.
First, the Soviet Union was never a Marxist nation, though it has called itself one for social reasons. When Lenin came to power, he, as Chomsky has pointed out, destroyed the local soviets which is part and parcel to Marxism. As Luxembourg pointed out, the structure of the Soviet government under Lenin followed a bourgeoisie dictatorship model. And finally, the central committee for Lenin was not run by the proletariat. Remember that the basic tenet of Marxism was that the proletariat would overthrow the oppression of the bourgeoisie and establish a proletariat dictatorship, which is misnamed. None of that occurred in the Soviet Union.
Second, the article attempts to arouse MARs by employing f the 3 Fs that influencers and leaders employ: inciting fear, enflaming fury, and using flattery. All 3 are are used by the above article as MARs are called the holders of America’s heritage but are have a culture war imposed on them by more powerful entities. MARs don’t really buy into democracy with equality and want to be left alone by their fellow Americans. Such an attitude would hardly fit the definition of being patriotic. But the real problem here is that Engel paints a picture of MARs as being a sequel to the antebellum South.
Third, the article is correct by stating that the old establishment Republicans had failed Middle America. Then again, they have failed everyone. But they now seem to be the more principled ones compared to Engel’s MARs.
Fourth, yes, the working class has been radicalized over cultural war issues. But their enemies were obscured in the article. For their enemies are taking aim at the finances of the working class and reducing their political power, which was already decimated by the significant demise of labor unions.
Fifth, but the worst part of the above article is that it portrays democracy as a forever king-of-the-hill battle between different groups to see which group will get its own interests. Such is what could be called Free Market democracy, which is not democracy at all. Democracy comes with equality or it does’t come at all. And that is why the culture wars are perhaps the biggest threat to our democracy. That is because the culture wars seek to separate equality from democracy and so we will end up with either an ethnocracy or a classocracy. The latter uses culture war issues as a camouflage for its pursuit of power. MARs seem to favor an ethnocracy but are vulnerable to being used to create, or maintain in reality, a classocracy. That is what happens when we remove equality from democracy and embraces a Free Market version of democracy.
To your second point: It absolutely fits the definition of patriotism, inasmuch as they are loyal to the America that has been replaced rather than the New America that is being foisted on them–that is, they are the only patriots left.
To your third: They are principled unto their own destructive principles.
To your fifth: I’m an anti-Mass Democracy guy, standing up for our customs and traditions over against abstract concepts like Democracy. I hope “our democracy” is threatened, because as it turns out “our democracy” is just a label that rationalizes the liquidation of Heritage America. And finally, I’m describing the current political reality when I talking about the clash of group interests–I’m not describing some ideal. We currently live in a system of groups looting each other and seeking domination. We have to fight in light of this.
Clay,
Loyalty to America means distancing myself from Americans who are different? Or is such distancing a Pharisaical ( see the Pharisee from the parable of the 2 men praying) way of saying that one is a real American and those who are different are Americans in name only?
For the fifth point, do you feel that America must have a fixed definition based on selective demographics from the past? But doesn’t ‘land of the free and home of the brave‘ imply change or is the only freedom we have is the right to conform? How can America be the land of freedom if it is under a tyranny based on tradition?
Do freedom and diversity make you feel uneasy?
There is indeed a difference between Heritage Americans and the type of paper Americans that have nothing to do with the ethos and culture of America’s pre-1960s culture. Loyalty to which America? That is the great question.
I think demographic concerns are generalities, not absolutes; group politics is not about fixed and rationalistic definitions– it’s about generalities, extrapolations, and meta-categories. Land of the Free and Home of the Brave is a song lyric, not political analysis. I will not indulge discussions of tyranny; the fact of the matter is that we were more free, as a country, before the Managerial Revolution and the foisting upon MARs of systems and mechanisms and people groups that had nothing to do with our way of life.
In the name of freedom, multicultural managerialism has blanketed us–and I enthusiastically reject it and call for a counter-insurgency against it.
Clay,
Who are you to determine who is a Heritage (a.k.a., ‘real’) American and who is only a paper American? Go ahead and compare the first settlement of Jamestown with that of New England. While the Puritans were hardworking and everyone contributed, there was a good percentage of Aristocrats who were looking to profit off of the new land.
Heritage Americans and Paper Americans? The Constitution does not make that distinction. The Constitution stipulates who is an American and who isn’t. And the rights stipulated in The Constitution apply to all who are citizens by virtue of the requirements written into The Constitution. And it seems to me that those who are paper Americans, if there such people, are those who don’t acknowledge the full, Constitutionally defined citizenship of another American because that other American is different.
It is The Constitution that defines us, not the demographics from the past or some kind of idealistic or religious or regional standard. No one is forcing you to become different from who you are unless of course you insist on opposing the Constitutionally defined rights of fellow Americans who are different from you..
The comment system won’t let me directly reply to your last comment.
Paper Americans are those who have flooded America but who do not represent the older American spirit. The constitution doesn’t need to incorporate a concept for it to be politically useful. That’s why the Naturalization Act of 1790 came about: to help reinforce the political integrity of the political system.
The Constitution doesn’t define us, the closest it gets is the phrase “for ourselves and our posterity.” Which does indicate a cultural divide between Americans and the world.
Clay,
There are ways of posting a comment that will follow a comment that does not provide a ‘REPLY.’ You simply reply to the last comment that provides a ‘REPLY.’ I hope that helps.
What about those who have been born and who don’t represent the older American spirit? And, btw, what’s the older American spirit and how did you determine that?
As for the Naturalization Acts, you forget that it prevented free blacks who were already here from becoming citizens. And that says something about the kind of political systems whose integrity that was suppose to be protected. And that also says something about what you think of the people who are “flooding” our nation.
The term ‘Heritage American’s would seem to imply those who embrace all of our heritage. Guess what’s a part of our heritage. It includes the Declaration of Independence, The Constitution, and our National Anthem. But it seems that the people whom you designate as being Heritage Americans are rejecting equality, which was mentioned in the Declaration of Independence and describing the nation as the ‘land of the free‘ from the National Anthem, and the part of The Constitution that designates who can be a citizen all because they don’t embrace the “older American spirit.” And that doesn’t mention what was written on the Statue of Liberty.
And so again, what is this “older American spirit” and how did you arrive at that conclusion? And should that criteria you’ve chosen supersede what The Constitution allows?
Don’t engage with this guy. He’s only commenting here to demoralize you. He has absolutely nothing of value to say.
haha. Concur.
Ryan,
Nothing of value to say?
And so when I agreed with almost all of Dunson’s article that opposed the Bill in Congress on Anti-Semitism,, then I had nothing of value to say? Wouldn’t that mean that Dunson’s article had nothing of value to say too since I agreed with almost all of it?
I’ve used the MLK quote before, and I want to point it out to you for obvious reasons:
‘The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.‘
If you replace the word ‘Western’ with a fill-in-the-blank in which you can put in any name, where does that put you in relation to people like me?
I was going to say he needs to get a job, but troll is his job, and I’m sure he gets paid for it.
Such brittleness in the face of reasonable pushback is a strong tell that y’all can’t actually rebut Curt’s points. Hilarious! And weak.
“That wasn’t real communism!”
Many such cases.
Dylan,
It wasn’t real Marxism or Socialism for sure, that is if words and definitions are important. And I am not the only one who say. Quite a few Marxists and Socialists agree.
Again, Marxism requires a certain government structure and a certain demographics to those who are in government which was not followed by the Lenin and the Bolsheviks nor by Stalin and his successors. Below is a link that adds to that explanation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WsC0q3CO6lM
This was a well-written essay assessing what’s at stake and how we got here while delineating how we’ll get out of it. Naturally, CJay will incur the scrutiny of those who’ve bought into the liberal order and delusions of “equality”—those incapable of thinking or who refuse to think outside the prevailing paradigm. Those who’ve not seen an honest day’s work in their adult life, who strive for lives of mediocrity in the comfort of excessive gratification. But this article isn’t for them. It’s for me and people like me. The working-class, the blue-collar, the “Grill American,” the red neck, the hillbilly, the homesteader, the farmer, the man whose nose has been so steadily on the grindstone in blissful ignorance but has now become painfully aware of the times, the man with a growing family for whom he lives and dies and whose future matters more than his own. This article is for the man not represented by those in Washington, their State assemblies, nor their county seats. The man now demonized for having created such a glorious country and for carrying forward his legacy to the honor of his heritage and the wellbeing of his posterity, all now in peril.
Thank you sir! We must fight for these MARs indeed.
Terrence,
You now, others put in a real, full day’s work besides blue collar workers. This delineation between Heritage Americans and other Americans is one of self-righteousness and arrogance. The Constitution defines who is an American and it doesn’t distinguish between Heritage Americans and others. But if you wish to ignore those whom The Constitution declares as being an American, then perhaps you are not the Heritage American you think you are. After all, The Constitution is one of the most basic parts of American Heritage.
The Constitution doesn’t declare anyone an American. But if you want to think it did, what do you think “ourselves and our posterity” means? Honestly. The entire ethos of the founders distinguished between the Americans and the world; they saw themselves as inheriting a certain way of life, and acting in a way that preserve, protected, and affirmed that way of life… for themselves and their posterity.
Clay,
Yes it does,
Below is Section 1 of the 14th Amendment:
‘All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside. No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.‘
In addition, I think that you think that the Founders said more than they actually said.
Americans existed as a people prior to the Constitution. The Constitution is just a piece of paper. Americans are flesh and blood.
Dylan,
The Constitution is the law of the land and defines us as a people. It defines much, but not all, of what we believe, what our government is to be, and what we can expect from both our governments and each other.
On the other hand, Americans existed before any European settlers land here or “discovered” this land. But they were ethnically cleansed from the land by the founders and those who followed them.
It seems transforming heritage Americans to be self-conscious is one of the main challenges. We must learn who our friends and enemies are, but it will be messy and we will have to worry about getting attacked by those who should be our friends.
This essay would be far, far more persuasive with the inclusion of some examples. The “spirit, ethos, and aesthetics of pre 1960’s America” feels a lot like magical hand waving to me, largely because that includes an extremely wide range of time and Geography. The spirit and ethos of an American living in 1859 Pennsylvania would be significantly different to an American living in 1959 Hawaii.
I enjoyed this piece, but it would be terrific if the author could give us some examples, and paint a picture of what this ideal world he is trying to build would look like.
Francis Schaeffer, around 1970, declared that the Silent Majority – basically, an early form of these Middle American Radicals – a minority of them were either Christians or had a Christian memory, and the majority of them, he thought, had only two ultimate vale’s – affluence and personal peace.
When he got politicized it was manly about bioethical issues like abortion and euthanasia, not so much economics or even homosexuality! See his son’s book: Frank Schaeffer, Crazy for God.
The idea that a political state (politeia) and an ethnic group (ethnos) can be made congruent is one of the bad ideas of the early twentieth century.