Waking Up From the American Dream 
Was America’s Decline Inevitable?

1,321 words

Jon McNaughton, “The Empowered Man”

Part 3 of 5

The present climate is the culmination of centuries of egalitarian momentum. This is not a particularly unique observation. With the rise of the Dark Enlightenment, the American Revolution has come under critical purview from the authentic North American New Right.

Many intellectuals conclude that the American experiment was destined to be a failure, grounded as it was in egalitarian, Enlightenment nonsense. Therefore, we should raise our glasses and give a hearty toast to His Britannic Majesty.

The historical truth is more complicated, as always. One of the driving forces of the Revolution in Virginia was the efforts of Lord Dunmore, the royal governor, to arm black slaves and white indentured servants against property owning white settlers.

In New England, theological motivations were at the forefront. Insofar as one person can be seen as being primarily responsible for launching the Revolution, it was Sam Adams. Sam Adams is sometimes called the last Puritan because he was Congregationalist true believer who thought he was doing the Lord’s will – and opposed British efforts because he thought they were trying to impose Anglicanism and eventually Catholicism on New England. He said he dreamed of Boston as a “Christian Sparta.” It is hard to think of an ideal more foreign to the contemporary United States than a “Christian Sparta” that banned plays and frivolous pursuits.

The Father of our Country, George Washington, was not primarily motivated by egalitarian rhetoric. He was infuriated by British attempts to restrict westward expansion and thought the British were holding the Americans back. His vision of the new nation was that of a “rising empire.”

Even Jefferson, the man who wrote that “all men are created equal,” went on to condemn in that same document the “merciless Indian savages.” Jefferson also while it was certain that black slavery would someday be brought to an end, it was “equally certain” that blacks and whites could not live together under the same government.

A compelling case can be made that the American Revolutionaries were more racially patriotic than the British Empire, especially in regards to Indian policy. But in the end, that doesn’t matter. In the long run, people ultimately believe their own propaganda.

When Sam Adams died, one of the people paying tribute to him was a Catholic bishop – this for a man who opposed Anglicanism because he thought it was a way to smuggle in popery. Today, Boston is the stereotypical center of New England secular liberalism.

George Washington no longer has a holiday in the county he bequeathed – that honor is reserved for Martin Luther King, Jr. The Father of His Country is remembered as a slaveowner, if at all, by non-European Americans.

Jefferson is hoisted by his own petard because “all men are created equal” and is today condemned as both a slaveowner and a rapist of black women.

In fact, all of American history before 1965 is largely dismissed as white supremacy. Andrew Sullivan, who occasionally calls himself a conservative, moans that early America was a “genocidal gulag for African-Americans” and questions how he can have a partnership with “proud, defiant and violent slave-holders?” However, he gloats, America will transform itself because “whites will be a minority in this country” and thus, presumably, the historic American nation can be eradicated in favor of the American egalitarian ideal. America will be saved, because the historic American people will be replaced.

What authentic American patriots remain respond to the attack on their history largely through protective ignorance or deliberate distortion. One young man I knew who spoke at Tea Party rallies would recite the Declaration of Independence from memory in colonial garb – with the part about the merciless Indian savages omitted. He justified it on the grounds that if Jefferson could see America today, it’s what he would have wanted. The American past is justified on the grounds that it led to multiculturalism and diversity – even if the heroes of the American past specifically condemned it, or even if today some conservatives think the multicultural rhetoric “goes too far.”

The specific grievances and actual motivations of America’s great patriots and heroes are eventually overwhelmed by their own simplistic slogans. The relationship is especially complicated because ideas are driven by identity. Kevin Phillips, in his studies of the various civil wars within the Anglosphere, from the English Civil War to the American, says that ethnicity and religion were the biggest determinants of which side you were on. Material interests are important but secondary. But in the end, ideas take on a terrible importance of their own.

Professor Kevin MacDonald has written how whites, even independent of Jewish power, would occasionally sabotage their own material interests in the service of an ideology, especially because of religious motivations. In the long run, identity can even be formed on ideological lines, as with religious sects who consider racially alien co-religionists to be their “brethren” but ignore their racial or ethnic kinsmen. The civic religion of Americanism is an attempt to do just that – and it just so happens that most of the true believers are white. The patriotic dedication of American whites to the nation of the past has led to an ideological devotion to the anti-white, egalitarian United States of the present.

It doesn’t start this way. Material interests, identity, and ideology are tied together, but ultimately, ideology is what endures and is carried along by the terrible process of history. Great men can set things in motion they never could have anticipated. I have no doubt Jefferson, Adams, or even Lincoln would slit their wrists if they saw what they unleashed – but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t inevitable.

A few examples. Years ago, I saw a libertarian Beltway operative tell a crowd of social conservatives he could convince them all to support gay marriage. He did, by simply telling them that America is about equality and individual liberty. The conservatives, lacking the vocabulary to challenge the desirability of equality and liberty, felt compelled to go along with this – lest they be un-American.

The point here is not to argue for or against gay marriage – the point is that this technique can be used on literally every egalitarian innovation to come, without exception. Give it a decade and we’ll be hearing how Jefferson and Lincoln would want to eliminate gender segregated bathrooms. Conservatives will mock it at first, then remain quiet, then surrender to it, and finally take credit for it, having never actually articulated a reason why this is wrong. After all, to question egalitarianism – no matter how extreme – is to question the American Creed and the American Dream of self-creation.

A similar process takes place when libertarians talk about immigration, even when they know mass immigration will destroy all the things they claim to believe in. Many Beltway libertarians know and understand that a Third World America will be a demonstrably less free America. However, they must remain true to their political faith and support open borders, even when it will destroy what they believe in. Other libertarians support open borders precisely because it will destroy the historic American nation, which they see as repressive and hypocritical, especially on sexual matters. What replaces it is less important than taking vengeance on the “Red State Fascists” of the present who have violated their own ideals of “liberty.”

This is now happening to the country at large. Rather than being a source of strength, the American Creed tells people what they are not allowed to say or do. American whites know something is wrong. They sense vaguely they are being dispossessed. Yet they simultaneously believe they are not allowed to do anything about it without somehow being anti-American.

The American Dream is being taken to its logical conclusion. And the result will be the end of America.

To this we say – So Be It.