Ross Douthat
1,484 words
A fierce battle is being waged over American history, pitting liberals against conservatives over how to present our past to children. Conservatives argue American history should inspire a civic nationalism within children, regardless of color, and our history should present the Founding Fathers as colorblind liberals. Liberals believe there should be more criticism made against the Founders and a greater emphasis on our nation’s racism, but they ultimately present America as a noble experiment. The Leftists share the liberal’s desire to criticize the founders and highlight racism, but they see America as fundamentally flawed and only redeemed by non-whites. The nationalist view of American history, which sees the Founders as ethnonationalists and stresses America’s founding population over its supposed ideals, doesn’t feature in the debate.
One of the most prominent figures to wrestle with this debate is the New York Times’ conservative columnist Ross Douthat. He grappled with the issues raised in this fight over history over a series of columns and came up with a compromise. Douthat’s compromise is nothing more than a conservative surrendering to the new paradigm. He quibbles about some of the excesses, but it’s only a meek protest. Douthat comes to terms with the 1619 Project and tries to direct in a slightly more “conservative” direction.
His series first begins with a neutral overview. He defines the sides in the historiographical war pretty accurately. He says liberals “finally exorcise the ghost of Lost Cause historiography, the romanticization of the Confederacy that still haunts textbooks in some corners of the South” and “broaden the narrative of race beyond the Civil War and the civil rights era.” Leftists want to “to weave these revisions into a more radical narrative of U.S. history as a whole — one that casts a colder eye on the founders and Lincoln’s halting path to abolition, depicts slavery as the foundation of white American prosperity, and portrays the Republic’s ideals as just prettying up systems of racist and settler-colonialist oppression.”
Douthat also captures the patheticness of the conservative side in this war.
[C]onservatives often see themselves as objecting to the most radical parts of progressive revisionism, not the entire project. . . compared with just a generation ago the position of many conservatives has shifted, becoming explicitly anti-Lost Cause, anti-Confederate flag — and, in the recent congressional voting, mostly pro-Juneteenth as well. In its contest with the new progressivism, the right is abandoning Lee and rallying to Lincoln.
He also notes that many Republican lawmakers seeking to ban Critical Race Theory readily accept liberal precepts that we need to teach more about racism. The conservative side really just wants to get us back to the supposedly colorblind liberalism of the pre-Obama period. It is “conservative” by the fact it wants to conserve something, but it’s not something nationalists should want to conserve at all.
Douthat hopes that the sides can agree to a synthesis where the “progressive desire for a deeper reckoning with slavery and segregation gets embedded in a basically patriotic narrative of what the founding established, what Lincoln achieved, what America meant to people of many races, even with our sins.”
You can buy Greg Johnson’s It’s Okay to Be White here.
The synthesis sounds worse than the radicals’ vision. It’s neoconservatism that checks its white privilege. Douthat develops this horrid patriotism in further articles.
In his second column in the series, he urges conservatives to accept the concept of “systemic racism.” “The basic claim that structural racism exists has strong evidence behind it, and the idea that schools should teach about it in some way is probably a winning argument for progressives,” he argued. Douthat even claims systemic racism can support “conservative” arguments when it comes to abortion and school choice. The chance to own the libs with arguments that abortion and teachers unions are racist tempts conservatives to teach that America is racist.
Douthat tries to distinguish between his sensible systemic racism teaching and the radical version. He doesn’t like Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi for being racial essentialists and making whites feel bad for racism as individuals. He only wants whites to feel bad for benefiting from a white supremacist country. This is another compromise the columnist wants to make.
He carries on this work in his next column on patriotic education. Here, Douthat hints at his autistic Catholic conservatism. He notes that he raises his kids with a standard patriotic understanding of America and holds back his “Catholic critiques of liberal individualism.” Douthat says he teaches his kids about slavery and other sins of the past, but the education he imparts is one intended to instill love for country. He offers the perfect patriotic course for kids: the history of blacks.
From Harriet Tubman to Martin Luther King Jr., the story of the African-American experience is the most straightforwardly heroic American narrative, the natural core of liberal patriotism — something liberalism understood at the time of Barack Obama’s election, but in its revolutionary and pessimistic mood seems in danger of forgetting.
This is the 1619 Project in brighter shades of red, white, and blue. The 1619 Project pedestals blacks as the heroes in America’s story while whites are cast as the villains. Douthat’s “patriotic education” is just more optimistic about the nation’s founding values and less hostile to its whites.
Douthat’s latest column on American history, however, upends his patriotic education. Writing on the French-Indian War, he admits that he favors the French over the British. America’s Anglo settlers of course fought with the British and America came to be in large part due to the French-Indian War. And why does Douthat prefer the French over the British? Because they were Catholic and nicer to the Indians. He fantasizes about “a world where the French somehow held on to their territories might have been more Catholic (obviously a good thing) while offering more possibilities for Indigenous influence, power, and survival than the world where England simply won the continent.”
Douthat has pined for a Catholic America in the past. In one 2019 column, he wrote that his ideal polity spans from Quebec to Chile and is ruled by a multiracial Catholic aristocracy. He’s certainly not an American nationalist.
LARPing is a common phenomenon on the Right, so we shouldn’t be too hard on Douthat for engaging in this stereotypical vice. What’s worse about it isn’t the apparent disloyalty or cringe Catholic fantasy, but that he praises this LARP as more progressive than Anglo America. If only the Catholics had won, we would’ve had a tolerant and diverse empire dedicated to the Virgin Mary. . .
Douthat writes for the New York Times and he wants to keep his job so he can keep buying patriotic books for his kids. This is the easiest explanation for his cuckery. But Douthat often delves into topics forbidden, such as matters of race, immigration, and modern degeneracy. This often makes him a target for social media mobs, even though he ends all of his columns with an argument within the narrow limits of liberal discourse. He’s not going to say anything too radical.
His column series offers conservatives a way to accept the new order in George Floyd America. They can complain about the excesses of Critical Race Theory so long as they accept its core tenet of “systemic racism.” They can teach their kids to love their country so long as they make blacks the central characters. And they can even imagine an alternative Catholic imperium so long as its chief virtue is diversity. The respectable conservative will never risk anything to challenge the prevailing order, no matter how sick its new dictates are. They will always find a reason to surrender.
Whether other conservatives will follow their path remains to be seen. The critics of Critical Race Theory offer little in the way of a serious alternative and they may find Douthat’s black-centric, systemic racism-believing patriotism appealing. This has already occurred to a certain extent. Donald Trump’s 1776 Commission essentially made Martin Luther King, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Tubman the true founders — and this is conservatives’ only proposed alternative to the 1619 Project.
If conservatives want to not have their kids learn about systemic racism, even in a “patriotic” way, they have to articulate a nationalist alternative to anti-white insanity. There’s no need to sugarcoat how America was made. We should not feel shame for conquering a continent and making a nation for us and our posterity.
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15 comments
Muh noble slaves, MLK, gentle giants, Thomas Sowell, Candice Owens, Diamond and Silk… Tokens, all; cash them in for prizes at the cheap-goods counter.
These people just make one sick.
That’s not fair to Sowell or Owens, esp Sowell. Unlike all but a handful of black “scholars”, Sowell is a real scholar who is black. He has done a lot of good work, even if he is too much of a racial culturalist as opposed to biological essentialist. His serious tomes – Say’s Law and Knowledge and Decisions – are rare real works of scholarship not about race written by a black. I liked his trilogy on race and culture, even if it’s less insightful than it could have been with a greater biological emphasis. Ethnic America is solid historical sociology. He’s done great empirical work on the deleterious effects of affirmative action.
As for Owens, I only know her through a few videos a conservative mainstreamer emailed me. But she seems to be trying to be honest and fair and moderately conservative, which takes courage and integrity for a young black. I suspect she did bring a few votes over to Trump. Should we be ungrateful because she’s not 100% white nationalist? What more can be expected?
Just because we recognize racial reality, and demand our evolutionary right to live and be governed exclusively with and by our own race, doesn’t give us a moral license to mischaracterize or slander (or abuse) others. There’s a difference between good white preservationism – truthfulness about racial discrepancies and their genetico-cultural origins, opposition to miscegenation and nonwhite immigration invasions, support for higher white natality, promotion of the ethnostate, and a defensive white activist politics to protect our people from POC political depredations and street criminality – and genuine racism. We should stick to the former, for tactical as well as ethical reasons. We have real justice on our side, in fact if not yet in the public hive-mind. Indeed, for the moment, the ethically superior position is all we do have. I don’t think we should risk that by appearing boorish, small-minded, or, well, (genuinely) bigoted. Our target audience is not our racial enemies, but well-meaning but deluded members of our own tribe – the one group that really does care about justice and bigotry. This modal higher ethicality of whites is a fact of racial history and sociology which can be decried but never ignored.
As for Douthat, however, he’s a real POS. A man smart enough to know the truth, but without the integrity to speak it. He is also a bad Catholic. Aquinas is the Angelic Doctor of the Roman Church, and in the Summa Theologiae, he places tremendous emphasis on the evil of mendacity and the morality of truthfulness. I am sure Douthat realizes that CRT/1619 is a platter of lies, and that America was founded, settled and built exclusively by white men, who, moreover, did not remotely think they were building a future multiracial (let alone antiracist {trans. antiwhite}) country, but rather a free republic for endless generations of their own genetic posterity. But he has sacrificed truth in preference for the emoluments of this world. As a Catholic, he believes in God, the soul and its immortality, and divine judgment. He will pay for his sins in the next world, but I’d like to see him suffer some censure for them in this world, too.
I agree with your points, especially about Owens and Sowell. And I appreciate your developed reply.
To be clear, the people who “make one sick” that I’ve referred to are deracinated white conservatives, like this Douthat guy I hadn’t heard of.
Mentioning Sowell and Owens with those others wasn’t meant to malign them two; they were included because they usually make the conservatives’ black pantheon. But I can see how, as stated, I gave that impression.
White conservatives with their “black exceptions make the rule” and desperate showcasing of any old black whom they can tenuously construe as as an ally just gets so old.
That was the point I’d hoped to make.
Douthat needs to be flogged. Nothing else will do.
I am continually astounded that Whites can self-betray(themselves and their race/heritage) so easily and without existential guilt.
Just unbelievable!
I truly wonder what kind of self-image this implies. Can’t be good.
In a sense, I welcomed the idea of 1619. I dislike the common myth that we were nothing until 1776, and only then does American history begin. This is very shallow and seems to be a real drumbeat for conservatives.
David Hackett Fischer, in his Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (1989), argued we neglect our history starting in 1619. He used this to detail the various English groups that settled America: the puritans, southern englanders, welsh, northerners (mistakenly called the Scots-Irish). Each group had its own mores and culture it brought to America. Sectionalism in America, Fischer argued, was from settlers who brought their own regional culture to America.
He very strongly disagreed with the ‘nation of immigrants’ idea, and thought it very misleading and again ignores the cultural workings of our ancestors from 1619 to 1776.
But of course the ‘nation of immigrants’ neatly fits the Jewish ideal of America as less a real nation than an ‘idea.’
Fischer would be very hostile the precedence given to blacks in all this recent 1619 propaganda. In his book, they don’t even count, except to say blacks were imported as slaves mostly because the southern englanders, who settled in Virginia (also called ‘the distressed cavaliers’) were upper class and needed a servant class, and blacks seemed the best way to replicate it, as apart from indentured servants, there was no chance of imposing a white peasantry as there was n England.
Shame Fischer’s fascinating book isn’t studied. I daresay it would be blacklisted now.
Sounds like a good study by Fischer. I’ll check it out. I have a copy of Russell Kirk’s “America’s British Culture”. Maybe along the same lines. Thanks for the suggested reading.
<blockquote>We should not feel shame for conquering a continent and making a nation for us and our posterity.</blockquote>
But the Anglos didn’t do that, did they? The Powdered Wig Gang (a.k.a. the Founding Fathers) gave Jews citizenship right off the bat, even though no other country at the time did so. They did that because they were fools who imagined themselves morally and intellectually superior to all previous generations. They thought they could discard the wisdom of the ages and ignore the fact Jews were (and, of course, are) the worst enemies of White Christians. Then as nearly always happens in life, those who play dirty beat those who don’t, resulting in our current situation.
The fact Protestantism is fundamentally liberal is the real reason Douthat the cuck is right to think a French victory was preferable. Of course, France became Europe’s bastion of liberalism a few years after the US won its independence, but would that have happened without the nascent United States providing an example of triumphant liberalism to the French radicals? It’s doubtful.
The grotesque nightmare that is the US of today didn’t come about by accident. Once the Powdered Wig Gang adopted a republican form of government and gave citizenship to Jews, which made a gathering of most of the world’s Jews on these unhappy shores inevitable, we were set on our current path to hell.
There is something really wierd about the Founding Father’s relationship to Jews and Jewry. They did hit the monarchs and aristocrats below the belt by dangling emancipation to Israel as they waged war on the Blue Bloods. Fash the Nation did a deep dive on the subject. The only excuse is that George Hanover had a Rothschild banker providing mercenary troops from Hesse. But at the time Amshel Rothschild was obscure enough to merit little attention. There were much more famous Jewish merchants in Rhode Island and Charlston already. Not to mention Curaçao. Why did they get the franchise there and no where else in Christendom?
“Why did they get the franchise there and no where else in Christendom?”
Most places in Christendom didn’t have “the franchise” at the time, so it obviously couldn’t be given to Jews in most other places. But Jews were certainly far more influential in some other polities, for instance in Catholic oligarchical Poland where they were a privileged minority possessing far more rights than the peasant masses, Polish townsmen, or even non-Catholic nobles. There was no American equivalent to the massive behind-the-scenes influence possessed by Samson Gideon in Britain or Rothschild in Hesse. Saint George Tucker, the virulently anti-American English controversialist in the orbit of the Duke of Bedford (influential Whig turn-coat who enabled the Tories to progressively dominate British politics in the reign of George III), inveighed against the 1754 repeal of the Jew Act with the same passion he would subsequently denounce the 1766 repeal of the Stamp Act. It isn’t hard to understand (((Namier’s))) motivations for his attempt to rehabilitate the reputation of George III, the Tories and the Bedford faction, in his influential “The State of the Parties at the Ascension of George III”. What the Whig’s had failed to give to the British Jews de jure in 1753-1754, George III and the Tories gave to them defacto. By 1792 the British were on the verge of joining with the Ottoman Empire in a war against Russia – a sure sign of massive behind-the-scenes Jewish influence, the Ottoman Empire being the traditional favorite of Jews and Russia being their traditional bugbear.
Why were the American Jews given equal rights during the American Revolution?
They formed an utterly minuscule minority at the time, 1000 out of a total population of 3,000,000 if I remember correctly from “The Colonial American Jew”, so they probably seemed like too small of a group to ever be a threat to the majority.
In their effort to get as many people on their side as possible against the richer, better organized and more numerous British, the American underdogs were prepared to shed traditional antipathies in their search for domestic allies – Maryland Catholics were freed from legal disabilities, Jefferson was forced to amend his 1st draft of the Declaration of Independence to avoid offending ultra-royalist Highland Scots, appeals were made to the French Canadians to join the American side in 1775 even though Congress had denounced them as blood-stained monsters as recently as 1774, and John Laurens even toyed with a plan to free and arm the Black slaves. Giving the franchise to Jews was part of this pattern.
There was also a desire to make a positive impression on foreign Jews and liberals.
Jewish merchants formed a very high percentage of the population of the Dutch West Indies, a crucial hub for smuggling weapons to the Americans, and Jewish financiers were influential in Amsterdam, where the Americans hoped to secure loans. Also, tolerance for various minorities helped make the Americans appear the “good guys” in the eyes of fashionably Enlightened French aristocrats, increasing the chances of a Bourbon intervention in America’s favor.
Americans are not somehow uniquely responsible for Jewish influence or the rise of the Left. Jews were a malignantly influential minority in every country where the resided in the 18th century, which was most countries, and proto-Leftism was making its appearance wherever the Enlightenment could gain an audience.
Far from being the origins of Jewish supremacy and Cultural Leftism, the American nation’s essential characteristics – Northwest European race, Protestant religion, Anglo-Saxon constitutional government, and widely distributed prosperity – are all GOOD things. I do not tamely allow my nation, the greatest nation that ever existed, to be insulted by powerful enemies such as Jews or the Left. Why should I allow it to be defamed by weak enemies such as Catholic Monarchists or Esoteric Fascists.
My apologies, in the comment above I wrote “Saint George Tucker”, but I was thinking of Josiah Tucker:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josiah_Tucker
What would Douthat think about the excavations in Jamestown, Virginia that have discovered various Catholic reliquaries found in the graves of colonists? Virginia was settled largely by Anglicans and Royalists in the eary years. The state of the Church in England since Henry VIII was not a happy one for practitioners of the old religion. Many had to attend mass secretly while nominally calling themselves Anglican and attending those services by law. This gave rise to generations of English crypto-Catholics. Of course, Catholicism did have some influence at the round table of the Founders. The Carroll family contributed a signer of the Declaration of Independence and the Archbishop’s prayer for George Washington (who had great sympathies for Catholicism, one story claims he converted before his death). The French were fundamental in the founding of the United States. Louisville, Kentucky had a nice statue of Louis XVI downtown before black rioters destroyed it last year. Louis Phillipe, heir apparent, denounced the destruction.
Not sure how Douthat has come up with the idea that Catholicism would’ve been more tolerant. The Catholicism that came to New Spain or anywhere South of the border was perhaps harsher than the Protestants and Catholics that settled in the British Colonies, where many treaties were made and much land was legally purchased from the Indians. And I am saying this as a Catholic. I believe that Douthat is confusing the modern, liberal Catholicism with the historic Catholicism of the 17th century. As one commenter inferred, he is being historically disingenuous. The biological record of like procreating with like will continue, unless met with undue influence and pressure from outside forces, man made against natural law. The area I live in is the second oldest Catholic settlement in the United States and the counties retain 94% white populations. I made this observation that it mirrors neighboring Protestant counties. Without undue influence, pressure and propaganda, regardless of religion, biological reproductive forces remain intact.
*Louis Alphonse, not Phillipe
I hate to be the one saying this, but people like Douthat are exactly the reason white nationalists, dissident rightists, and even Klansmen hate Catholics. Just as the ever-prescient and brilliant Samuel Todd Francis had once stated:
The institutional Christianity that flourishes today is no longer the same
religion as that practiced by Charlemagne and his successors, and it can no longer support the civilization they formed. Indeed, organized Christianity today is the enemy of the West and the race that created it.
Speaking of jews in America, you should read Harold Covington’s Bonnie Blue Murder, an historical whodunit taking place in Charleston just after Ft. Sumter, where the police have to solve a murder in a slave owning Jewish family who were big slave traders. A lot of fun, and gives some unique perspectives on the Chosen and their financial dealings in the South…and, yes, the Confederates are the good guys.
Covington said he had troubles publishing it because no publisher would accept a Confederate as a hero.
Interesting too is the Belmost family. They were Jews, and Belmont an agent of Rothschild. Belmont, I believe, was the first Jew elected to Congress in America, and also was a big supporter of the anti-immigrant ‘Know-Nothing’ party. jews seemed to prefer the anti-immigrant platform then, since it suited their interests.
As Disreali predicted the future of post-Civil War America, he said it would an America ‘of armies, of diplomacy, of rival states and maneuvering cabinets, of frequent turbulence and and probably of frequent wars.’
As for hidden Catholics in England, many have made the claim that Shakespeare was a secret Catholic. Certainly his plays aren’t very happy with protestants. Twelfth Night makes the puritan Malvolio an ass in need of duping.
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