I randomly tuned into "Scarborough Country" last night which was in the middle of a hot debate about "white America." There was Pat Buchanan, who actually sounded pretty reasonable compared with
Jared Taylor of American Renaissance. Taylor said his position was analogous
to Rabin’s about Israel when Rabin said that at least 80% of Israel’s population
should always be Jewish. Taylor thought that 80% of the American population
should always be white. It’s a matter of keeping America America.
Buchanan was more moderate. He said that we should completely halt illegal
immigration and have a moratorium on legal immigration to give American society a chance to assimilate those who have already come into the country. He fears
that the U.S., especially in the states bordering Mexico, is in danger of becoming the Balkans or Canada with its Francophone separatists. He also suggested that
this was Mexico’s attempt to win back what it had lost back in the 1840s, and
that the southwest was reverting to the Third World.
The pro-immigration people in the debate said what might be expected, but
what struck me about Buchanan and Taylor was their assumption that American
cultural identity was no longer robust enough to transform immigrants into
Americans, that the immigrants were going to pull America down rather than
America pull the immigrants up. Buchanan kept saying that the country that
he grew up in was a good country, implying that the one he’s living in now is no longer good. He is clearly fearful that American identity is being lost in this massive invasion by the "Other" who he thinks are more resistant to assimilation than the European immigrants of the 19th and early 20th centuries.
What’s interesting about the immigration problem is how it’s not really a
clear-cut, right/left issue. Plenty of people on the right want open borders
because it’s an endless source of cheap labor. Plenty of people on the left,
concerned about raising the wages of the working poor, want to close the borders. So nothing’s likely to change.
But my interest in this subject isn’t primarily economic, but cultural. American
identity is interesting and unique because it isn’t primarily defined by its
premodern past. America was born out of a rejection of that past. And while
white English Protestants working with ideas from the European Enlightenment
created the basic framework that sets the rules for how American society works,
the basic content is dynamic and evolving.
I’m not a multi-culturalist, but a cultural fusionist. American identity is
not in some essential way linked to the America Pat Buchanan grew up in, nor
will it revert to a premodern culture in the way he fears. Once a culture upgrades
to modernity, it never reverts to earlier versions, even if there are reactionaries
in the culture who would like it to.
The Western Enlightenment framework has established what modernity means,
but the Modern Age expired around World War I. We’re in between "ages" now,
and for want of a better name we call our present transitional era the "postmodern." The
American and global postmodern future will be an evolving story that develops
primarily within the Western framework, but it will be a story of the emergence
within that framework of a global fusion culture.
This does not mean only the Americanizaton of the globe, but also the globalization of America. That’s what scares Buchanan and Taylor. As premodern cultures modernize, the already modern cultures are retrieving and assimilating premodern cultural forms. Already we’re seeing it in religion and spirituality, in the plastic arts, and in music. It’s a hodgepodge now, but in the long run some coherent synthesis is inevitable. The postmodern = modernity + premodernity. This means maintaining modern critical consciousness as we retrieve elements from the premodern that the modern rejected as irrational. That’s my working hypothesis anyway. The framework for the future was created by dead, white Europeans–and we are deeply in their debt–but the long-term future is not white and European. And that’s ok, so long as things keep moving forward.
An ongoing reflection on what "moving forward" means is the primary
purpose of this website. For better or worse, in the short run at least, American
culture, such as it is, leads the way.
(For those who maybe interested I’ve just uploaded the archives from
this blog posted in its pre-TypePad incarnation. This post from
11/13/03 struck me as relevant in relationship to the current brouhaha
about immigration.)
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