Counter-Currents
1,202 words
Richard Spencer says he hates St. Patrick’s Day. He seems to view it as a negation of white American identity, which he says is WASP identity. We’ll address that in a bit, but let’s first look at just who WASPs are and whether they are an elite or not.
Among those earning over $100,000 in household income, we see 44% of Jews, 29.5% of WASPs, and 19% of Catholics. Among those earning a household income of $50,000 or more, are 68% of Jews, 61% of WASPs, and 45% of Catholics. WASPs are not an elite. They cluster more toward the upper-middle class. Jews are an elite. They are 15 times more likely to be on the Forbes billionaires list than the average American, and WASPs are probably not more than twice as likely.
The white Catholic figure is different from the overall Catholic figure because Hispanics are 38% of Catholics in the US and earn 71% of what whites do in terms of median income. Probably 23% of white Catholics are in the $100,000 group as compared with 29.5% of WASPs and 50% of them are in the over $50,000 group as compared with 61% of WASPs. Lutherans, who are a proxy for most people having German or Scandinavian ancestry, fall in between white Catholics and WASPs. There is a spectrum of wealth among white Americans, and some of this may be due to WASPs getting to America first, but the difference is not stark. WASPs are slightly more likely to be among the elite, but not by much. Jews being twice as likely to earn $100k+ and a third of American billionaires despite being 2% of the population is a stark difference.
If St. Patrick’s Day is anti-WASP, then it doesn’t mean that much, because WASPs don’t dominate Catholics or Irish-descended people like Jews dominate both groups. While the melting pot hasn’t entirely melded Catholics and Protestants together in terms of privilege, it has brought them close or at least much closer than they were a century ago.
In reality, most white Americans go to a St. Patrick’s Day parade because it is what their friends are doing. It isn’t about rebelling against WASPs. Okay, maybe a few people like to LARP as IRA operatives and listen to Irish rebel music (not that I would know) but they are a rare type.
Spencer has a point about St. Patrick’s Day being confusing, though. It doesn’t scream authenticity. The green beer and green river are gimmicky. The modern Irish-themed Dropkick Murphys and Flogging Molly are better than the average pop band, but that isn’t saying much. The Facebook photos of people wearing green are trite. The green t-shirts with cheeky slogans are okay, but only for the second you read them. The plastic leprechaun hats are party store throwaways. On the surface, it looks like a lot of hullabaloo.
But you have to be there. There’s a certain something in the air. The whole town is different. What used to be one thing is now another. Crowds reconfigure the landscape. The terrain is now partially human. An ordinary set of steps is now a forest of green-clad bodies. What used to be an ordinary street corner has a maze of green around it.
People do dangerous things. Someone nearly dies falling down steps drunk. Someone plummets to their death after falling off a balcony. Extroverts are playing a lottery to see who can win a Darwin Award, a designation given to people who die doing stupid things.
No one is themselves. They’re all going around to different frat houses, apartments, and of course, bars. Everyone talks to strangers more. People visit from faraway places. They’re all on a mission to do. . . I don’t know what, but it’s something. The key is that on that day things are not normal, and that’s a relief for everyone. It frees people up socially.
You can buy Greg Johnson’s The White Nationalist Manifesto here
It is not really about the beer, the inebriation, the green, or even the Irishness per se, although that is a nice theme. It’s the open-air mission, the journey, to transform an ordinary town and otherwise ordinary day into an otherworldly scene. An observer of white behavior, Frank Raymond, said that whites love to dress up and they love the idea of traveling to an otherworldly place. There’s some of that in St. Patrick’s Day. It’s all about the vibes, which can only be felt intuitively and up close.
Where do those vibes come from? White people. While whites are 60% of Americans, they are probably 90% of St. Patrick’s Day celebrators. The few non-whites who celebrate it are often high white admixture Hispanics. Asians and especially blacks stay away.
Maybe the high percentage of white people creates a more natural feeling among strangers, enabling people to talk to each other who normally wouldn’t. It seems everyone is your friend. (Except that guy in that pub who elbowed you and started a shouting match with you. What was that guy’s problem anyway?)
I can understand why WASPs wouldn’t like St. Patrick’s Day — especially Scotch-Irish, given the conflict between their Orangeman cousins and the Catholic Irish in Ireland. However, they, along with whites who LARP as Irish on St. Patrick’s Day, are underdogs — not to WASPs or the British Empire but to multiracial globalization. The difference is that the British Empire never changed the Irish people racially, but globalization threatens to flood white nations with non-whites who will absorb them and change their racial identity forever.
Put it this way: whites at a St. Patrick’s Day celebration will go home, vote Republican, and be your friend at work or school sooner than non-whites who don’t attend. Old feuds are fun to bring up, and a proud descendant of WASPs or Scotch-Irish people need not celebrate St. Patrick’s Day, but it’s important to keep it in context. A St. Patrick’s Day parade is better than Islamic Ramadan and Mexican Cinco de Mayo. Green-clad white normies are better than Puerto Ricans blasting Reggaeton from speeding cars, blacks playing loud rap music at odd hours, and quiet Asian students who aren’t much to talk to.
The sad thing is that St. Patrick’s Day celebrations may one day cease to exist. The people who organize them are white, and whites are rapidly declining due to capitalism discouraging procreation and non-whites being on pace to absorb them into a brown, multiracial mass. One shouldn’t, however, go to St. Patrick’s Day celebrations with the fatalist view that it is worth relishing while it lasts. That would be against the spirit of the holiday. One should go with the spirit of a people who take their own side — to use Michael Polignano’s phrase — and kicks out invaders. This seems to be best embodied in the Irish nationalist song Óró ‘Sé do bheatha ‘bhaile. You can hear the bubbling up of a strength which is sorely needed by whites in the West.
In the short run, the best thing about the day is the memories. The Facebook photos may be trite, but the memories are real, and most of these memories will be with fellow whites. It may seem stupid at the time, but the memory of it won’t be.
May the white spirit that inspires this day never die.
25 comments
It sure does beat Cinco de Mayo! I remember reading Spencer’s piece several years ago and thinking it captured how I felt about the occasion. All the times I went out to Irish places in south Florida there were bands playing anti-British songs. So it wasn’t just fluff, it was political, and I didn’t like it. I remember going to an English pub that I liked shortly after 9/11. An English chap I talked to said he sympathized with Americans about the terror attacks; however, the English had been going subjected to terrorism for many years perpetrated by the IRA that were funded out of New York and Boston. So maybe now we could understand their plight.
Actually I avoid going out on all amateur-drunk days.
This is one of the problems with Spencer and guys like Brett Stevens at his Amerika blog. They claim to support whites, but actually mean only a small band of Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Apparently the vast majority of non-Protestant, non-Anglo-Saxon people of European decent, despite being a majority of whites, don’t count as “real whites” or “real Americans” in their mindset. I’ll grant that America itself is largely Protestant and founded on Protestant ideas. That has always been one of America’s fundamental problems, from its founding on.
“[Richard Spencer] seems to view it as a negation of white American identity, which he says is WASP identity.” Gee, one more reason to dislike him.
I live in northern Virginia. From about 2003 – 2006 I went to the annual “Shamrock Fest” in Arlington. They would close down a few blocks to traffic and set up tents with bands and food trucks. The area is very multiracial but Shamrock Fest was about 90% white. I imagine the crowd was well over 2,000. It was packed every year I went. There were some non-whites but most were Asians and they were very white acting, often there with white friends.
Everyone was dressed in green but there was zero anti-English politics. These were young white kids there to party and have fun. It was an incredibly white vibe. I imagine the atmosphere was somewhat similar to Spring Break back when that was a nearly all white affair (up until the early 90s I am told). Much drinking, alt-rock music, 80s music, Irish music, and white kids having fun, laughing, dancing and (truth be told) hooking up with each other.
There was no political vibe but there was a very strong whiteness vibe. Good times.
Events like Saint Patrick’s day are an ancient custom among our peoples. The ‘hooking up’ part is a big part of it’s purpose, not in some decadent way, but by allowing men and women who would not normally meet one another to do so under festive circumstances. The neutrality of these gatherings was sacrosanct and allowed for tribes that were on the outs to meet and, sometimes, sort out their differences. We’re a good people and a wise people and we will overcome.
St Patrick’s Day > Richard Spencer.
I’m sorry, but his cult of personality and privileged, elitist attitude were a stain on an otherwise noble movement.
“An observer of white behavior, Frank Raymond, said that whites love to dress up and they love the idea of traveling to an otherworldly place.”
As I also observed in my piece on “Con-Tiki: Torchlight Reflections on an Aryan Archetype.”
https://counter-currents.com/2019/01/con-tiki/
Given his comments on St. Patrick’s Day, I suppose Spencer thought polo shirts and tiki torches were a bland, acceptable version suitable for bland WASP’s.
Although as you add “dressing up” it leads me to wonder how WASPy it really is. At Purim, which is around now I think, the Jews dress up and larp as their ancestors genociding Persians. Perhaps it’s simply a basic human trait?
I’ve decided my ‘dress-up’ outfits will be as ‘True American”, in jeans and plaids like our western ranchers or in my case, ‘Cowgirl-Up’; or just jeans and flannel shirts like loggers and farmers. And I am really tired of ‘skinny jeans’.
The thing is, what we we call St. Patrick’s Day–parades, green beer, etc.–is actually extremely American. In Ireland traditionally, it was largely a religious rather than a civic holiday. My Irish contacts tell me that only began to change a few short decades ago, when American tourists began showing up in large numbers in Irish cities demanding a proper piss-up, just like the holiday they knew back in the US!
The going theory on SPD in American is that it really took off in the 19th century as a way for East-Coast Irish political machines (Boss Tweed, etc.) to cement the loyalty of their ‘troops’. So I imagine that it had a much stronger political flavor in those days, when there was still bad blood between the Irish and the WASPs, than it does now. These days, it mostly just a bunch of public intoxication–nothing wrong with that, of course. (Although the Irish will remind you that you don’t really need any special holiday for that in their country. Over there, any day when you don’t have to work and you have money in your pocket, it’s a fine day for a bender!)
I cannot believe that any white nationalist groups divide us into Irish versus any other whites. Believe me, our enemies don’t make this distinction — white is white and they see us all as oppressors, racists, xenophobes, etc. They lump us all as privileged elites who enslaved and hanged blacks 150 years ago — or now, since 1619 — and who would ‘probably’ do it again given the chance. I haven’t looked into whether the ‘whiteness studies’ curriculum divides us into Catholics and WASPS, but I’ll spend the afternoon looking into it.
So, I cannot understand any rhetoric that divides Irish from other whites (truth alert: I’m 55% Irish by DNA, and 30% Anglo-Saxon, but was born an orphan and raised by a German-heritage couple), nor Catholics from Evangelical Protestants who dominate the U.S. today, nor from Northern European Pagans within the White Nationalist grouping as well (and who are under attack in Scandinavian countries today, I understand). I personally see that most of our young people are not attending any church at all, except within minority groups. So, good grief, people, we have to unite, our straggling Majority not squabble over old European differences. Evangelicals especially have to be turned around and brought on board. But thanks for this eye-opening essay.
I definitely agree, we’d better all stick together at this point.
I’ll concur with the basic thrust of this article that the holiday is a unifying force (though a small one). As for any divisiveness inspired by it, fortunately I’ve seen very little.
I’m an ulster scot or as you Americans call us scots Irish from Belfast northern Ireland and unfortunately over here there is still a lot of bad blood to the point where we will be fine with an African moving into our neighbourhood but if a dirty “taig” moves in we will burn him out meanwhile we are both becoming ethnic minorities in our homeland they are absolute morons but thankfully some of them are starting to wake up especially when we look across the water and see what is going on in England.
Fascinatingly enough, descendents (including myself) of Irish Catholic migrants tend to be more Republican when it comes to the monarchy compared to the rest of the country. A hundred years on and the influence of my sweet Irish great-grandmother is still felt.
First — can you translate ‘taig’ for us uneducated Americans? Thanks a heap. Secondly, believe me, you do not wish to have Africans in your midst — we are overwhelmed here in L.A. County where I live in the U.S. I visited Dublin briefly last summer, after staying in Sheffield, England with friends from way back, and I’d sure love to come see all of the country, Northern Ireland included, but it looks a little dim this summer due to travel restrictions. But we must all pull together to save the best genes the planet has to offer! I’m only 55% Irish by DNA, but I am certain it is the basis of my happy personality, though I can cry in my beer with the best of them. Happy St. Patrick’s Day, and I wish I were there to buy you a Guinness.
Taig is an anti Irish slur that the ulster scots use to describe the Irish Catholics in northern Ireland you will see KAT sprayed on the walls of the ulster scots neighbourhoods KAT means Kill all Taigs.
I’m surprised no one hear has repeated the old joke:
Q.: Do you know what the difference is between St. Patrick’s Day and Martin Luther King Day?
A.: On St. Patrick’s Day, everyone wants to be Irish!
As an actual Irish person living in Ireland, I’ve always had mixed feelings about Paddy’s Day. Its fun to go out drinking with friends and especially in smaller towns, the parade, although usually very cheesy, brings out a great sense of community spirit that one day might not exist.
Nevertheless, it still represents a kind of kitschy and inauthentic Americanised Irishness that was re-imported back here. St. Patrick’s Day was actually not such a major event traditionally. The parade was more of a religious procession, followed by some revelry, but the real major communal celebrations in Ireland were the traditional fairs that were held around Lughnasadh (Lammas) in every market town. Sadly, very few remain, due to modern agriculture no longer being community-focused activity, but the Puck Fair in Killorglin, Co. Kerry and the Ould Lammas Fair in Ballycastle, Co. Antrim are still going strong.
To me, these are a much more authentic representation of Irish communal celebration, having their roots in pre-Christian Celtic culture. Paddy’s Day in its modern incarnation is a pale stand-in for them at best. It wasn’t very long ago, maybe a few generations, that the ancient Celtic calendar of the cross-quarter festivals (Imbolc/St. Bridget’s Day, Bealtaine/May Day, Lughnasadh/Lammas and Samhain/Halloween) were still the most important to rural people.
Most parades are cancelled due to the Coronavirus. Just keep this article in mind for next year.
I’m Irish from Boston and never thought of myself as ‘white’ and certainly not a ‘white nationalist’ because the people who were/are seemed to love hating Catholics and non-WASPs. American first, but Irish and Catholic enough to regard the “Christian Zionists” as Protestant – just like the Klan and the Orangemen (who should fuck off back to England and the Lowlands of Scotland, btw.
But to the Anti-Whites, we are all just ‘white.’ And Irish nationalist desiring his nation to survive as an Irish one, is derided as a “white supremacist” – essentially, monolithizing all European nations is necessary to villify us.
I never ‘hated’ WASPs but know of their centuries of hate toward the Irish.
I gotta say, anti-Irish stuff from WASPs pisses me off a lot more than the anti-White stuff from Jews and POCs, not just because that it was WASPs that went *to* Ireland and oppressed us, but because it amounts to an absolutely stunning myopia and stupidity.
“The great Gaels of Ireland are the men that God made mad,
For all their wars are merry, and all their songs are sad.”
– G. K. Chesterton
Speaking of those marvellous people, has Mr. Lynch thought of reviewing John Huston’s adaptation of Joyce’s The Dead? He might get a lot out of it, though I know he does not enjoy the similar film, Age of Innocence.
I liked The Age of Innocence better when I gave it another try back in 2018.
Great quote. Some rebel songs have a sad-happy quality to them Sean South of Garyowen and The Valley of Knockanure. My favorite somber Irish songs are Danny Boy, May Morning Dew, The Valley of Knockanure, and The Pretty Maid Milking Her Cow. I also like the driving reels like Laverty’s and the gallant Star of the County Down. The folk music traditions of the British Isles generally are great. Should be right up there with the classical repertoire.
Richard Spencer says he hates St. Patrick’s Day. He seems to view it as a negation of white American identity, which he says is WASP identity.
I’m Irish but like most commentators I am for identifying as white, not white ethnic, But if WASP’s like Spencer are going to claim that American white identity is Anglo, I will have to remind them that Anglo’s have traditionally gotten society confused with markets and then handed over their markets to the world’s biggest parasites’ = the Ashkenazi Jews, Forget about Anglo, Anglo. We have to put a new WHITE thing together.
In one fell swoop Richard Spenser picks a fight with a large segment of white Americans. How is this a benefit to him or white Americans generally?
St. Patrick’s Day celebrations in New York and Savannah and elsewhere go back to Colonial times, and thus are a reminder of Early America. To find an older continuing tradition in the calendar, you’d have to go to Christmas and maybe New Year’s. In Revolutionary times, Patriots celebrated St. Patrick’s Day, Loyalists did, George Washington did, General O’Hara (who surrendered to Washington at Yorktown) did, and a lot of other Redcoats did as well.
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