Iwannaplato wrote: ↑Fri Mar 01, 2024 12:21 pm
The US while European was founded on principles that went beyond ethnic identity, and in fact some of the ideas came out of Native forms of government, and they broke, clearly, consciously and expressly from European traditions forming a nation state, yes, that absorbed people from other nation states who had been enemies and distinct.
Honestly, the US was founded by men who had very strict views about who — what races and nations — should be allowed to immigrate. If one looks for a ‘principle’ that encompassed their belief it is found in their clear sense that the European man was a superior manifestation of humankind. These ideas were based in anthropological definitions.
Now, by making this clear I do not mean to say that I ally myself with this anthropological stance. And oddly enough, and in reference to the Dissident Right, they turn some of these notions around. For example some race theorists (who regard race as a genuine category) and who consider IQ as one significant determining factor within racial categories, came to understand •scientifically• that other racial groups have advantages over the average European.
Be that as it may, the issue for those who have issues with the reigning demographic ideology, refer to the fact — and it is a fact — that the US was conceived to be a nation composed of Europeans [“the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity”] and, importantly, this was held to for hundreds of years and legislated in the 1920s with strict immigration quotas. Only in 1965 were these legislations repealed and replaced. And, naturally, this has redetermined how the US defines itself. Simply put, prior to that date it operated with a general agreement about race composition. And after that date an entire new definition — of the US and its •principles• — arose. Jia Lynn Yang delves into this as a proponent of the new definition in
One Mighty and Irresistible Tide: The Epic Struggle Over American Immigration, 1924-1965.
A sweeping history of the twentieth-century battle to reform American immigration laws that set the stage for today’s roiling debates.
The idea of the United States as a nation of immigrants is at the core of the American narrative. But in 1924, Congress instituted a system of ethnic quotas so stringent that it choked off large-scale immigration for decades, sharply curtailing arrivals from southern and eastern Europe and outright banning those from nearly all of Asia.
The notion that •the US is a nation of immigrants• is undeniable, but as I say those immigrants were intended, by that defined anthropology, to be of European stock. And the fact is that up to 1965 the US was, and was perceived as, a European (“white” if you wish) nation.
So the interesting issue is to examine the •principles• that you mention but in light of the actual facts. The fundamental concept if the nation is under revision. And those who sense, paranoically or fairly and genuinely, that the very character of their nation is being transformed by policy-makers who determine such significant shifts in demography and who •have issues•, can only be condemned in the New Dispensation.
I’ve read Yang’s book (and numerous others in the same ultra-Progressive category) as well as many of the older titles that defined, generally, the American attitude in the first part of the 20the century such as the works of Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard (1920s) And then the work of Wilmot Robertson
The Dispossessed Majority (1972). Robertson and those who think and perceive like him, register and document “the beginning of decline” and, from their perspective, the loss of the Republic (as defined demographically and in many other senses) to this enormous policy shift.
The Right, the Radical Right, the Fringe Right and the Dissident Right, all trace their positions back to •original definitions• that have now become, or been made to seem, retrograde and immoral.
Yet if •principles• are fairly considered one sees — this is my view — that their opposition does have a sound ethical and moral base.
). 