The ninety-eight year-old speaker at the Republican National Convention, Sgt. William Pekrul, was born the same year as my mother, making him a teenager when he fought at the Battle of the Bulge, where my uncle Calvin fought and was wounded. He is one of the last of the great American warriors of WW2. I took particular note of his comments regarding America as not just an idea, but his homeland. Later, J.D. Vance, the nominee for vice president, echoed the same thought: that America is more than an idea. It is our home.
Sadly, not all Americans share the conviction that America is more than an idea, more than an abstraction. Were this contrary view of our country limited to ordinary people, it would be a harmless irritant, but it isn’t.
I recently went to the Minnesota Department of Public Services website to fill out a pre-application form for renewing my driver’s license. I was asked a series of questions, one of which was my ethnicity. When I typed in “American,” the form rejected it and instead printed “Declined.” Apparently, despite having ancestors in America dating back to the late 17th century — ancestors who settled near Jamestown, Virginia, where they farmed, fished, and grew tobacco; ancestors who over the centuries fought in all her wars, including the tragic War of Secession — I am, according to the omniscient Minnesota Department of Public Services, not permitted to claim “American” as my ethnicity!
For most of its history, America has been an ethno-state primarily composed of white European Christian emigrant-settlers. This racial and religious compatibility contributed to the country’s strong, dynamic physical and institutional development. Today there are forces at work, especially among more extreme liberal partisans, to create domestic strife by employing a putative multiculturalism against Americans of European heritage. The notion that America has always been a nation of immigrants is leftist casuistry to support their egalitarian, multiracial social doctrine currently in conflict with the historic American nation.
These radical liberals, who fancy themselves on progressivism’s cutting edge, were raised in the hydroponic, synthetic medium of tendentious political and sociological theories. These children of the metropole, many of whom are recently minted citizens, believe that because they are devoid of an American heritage rooted in four centuries of indigenous experience, all Americans should likewise be without a heritage. In the postmodern liberal’s mind, America remains a nation of immigrants, not settlers, and therefore an American ethnicity is an impossibility.
Postmodern liberals suffer from oikophobia, a condition that is inimical to the natural cohesion of the nation-state — a condition that repudiates both homeland and countrymen while embracing the alien, the unfamiliar and foreign. Oikophobia explains why postmodern liberalism holds those who possess American ancestry, in some cases going back hundreds of years, in contempt and why they enact policies that seek their deracination and demographic marginalization, all the while encouraging revanchist minoritism.
My connection to America is vestigial, spiritual, metaphysical, and vibrational. America and I are not two. My heritage here goes back twelve generations. I grew up in a New England harbor town that was bombed by British ships, looted by Redcoats, and later invaded by Hessian mercenaries. My understanding of America and its history is visceral. The house I lived in was built in 1698, and the Marquis de Lafayette was billeted there in 1778. This same town has for 238 years continuously celebrated America’s independence with a Fourth of July parade led by current members of its Ancient & Honorable Revolutionary Militia. Yet despite the length of my American ancestry, my heritage, and the nature of my lived experience, I am not allowed to claim on a Minnesota driver’s license application my ethnicity to be “American.”
Ethnicity implies a shared history, shared ancestry, culture, language, customs, traditions, beliefs, communality and kinship. Ethnicity means centuries, not decades of belonging to a place. To our globalist elites, these distinctions are obstacles in the ongoing “deconstruction” of what it means to be an American. Today the State believes it has the right to confer or withhold identity. I for one am not going to allow some committee of throttle-bottoms to dictate my identity. That prerogative is mine and mine alone. I refuse to become an American pied noir when I am in fact an “American de souche.”
Claiming one’s ethnicity and nationality to be the same is too monistic for the State to allow. Acceptance of the idea that there is an ethnic American violates the pervasive and entrenched dogma of egalitarianism and inclusion and suggests a hierarchy of Americanness. For the State, time has no relevance: 350 years of being an American is a grave rubbing, not an ethnicity.
My American ancestry predates our Republic, and that fact adds piquancy to my sense of being an American. It also contributes to my having a deep, robust, organic, and unapologetic connection to what I’ve come to call a “republican heritage.” Today’s cosmopolitan neo-American can’t be expected to understand this, so why should the Minnesota Department of Public Services be different?
Image: Pashi via Pixabay, Pixabay License.
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