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In December 1991, as Pat Buchanan announced his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination, the Republic was edified by the reflections of columnist George Will. Mr. Will quoted from a column by Mr. Buchanan to the effect that “No one questions the right of the Arabs to have an Arab nation, of China to be a Chinese nation . . . Must we absorb all the people of the world into our society and submerge our historic character as a predominantly Caucasian Western society?” and then proceeded to explain what was wrong with the candidate’s reasoning. Mr. Buchanan, he wrote, “evidently does not understand what distinguishes American nationality — and should rescue our nationalism from nativism. Ours is, as the first Republican president said, a nation dedicated to a proposition. Becoming an American is an act of political assent, not a matter of membership in any inherently privileged group, Caucasian or otherwise. The ‘Euro-Americans’ who founded this nation did not want anything like China or Arabia — or any European nation, for that matter.”
Mr. Will’s bald assertion that America is a “nation” defined by no particular racial or ethnic identity and indeed by no particular content whatsoever is not unique. The best-known formulation of the same idea is the phrase popularized by Ben Wattenberg, that America is the “first universal nation,” and indeed only this year the new Washington editor of National Review, John J. Miller, has published a book, The Un-Making of Americans, in which he too asserts the universalist identity of the nation and uses that concept as the basis for endorsing virtually unlimited immigration. “The United States can welcome immigrants and transform them into Americans,” Mr. Miller writes, “because it is a ‘proposition country.’” The proposition by which the American nation defines itself, the sentence fragment from the Declaration of Independence that all men are created equal, means that the “very sense of peoplehood derives not from a common language but from their adherence to a set of core principles about equality, liberty, and self-government. These ideas [Mr. Miller writes] . . . are universal. They apply to all humankind. They know no racial or ethnic limits. They are not bound by time or history. And they lie at the center of American nationhood. Because of this, these ideas uphold an identity into which immigrants from all over the world can assimilate, so long as they, too, dedicate themselves to the proposition.”
Nor is the idea of America as a universal nation confined to the contemporary right. Historically, it is based on a core concept of the left, born in the salons of the Enlightenment and underlying the French Revolution’s commitment to a universal “liberty, equality, and fraternity” — which was sometimes imposed at the points of rather unfraternal bayonets. Today it continues to inform the American left as well as the right. Bill Clinton himself last year cited the projected racial transformation of the United States from a majority white to a majority non-white country in the next century as a change that “will arguably be the third great revolution in America . . . to prove that we literally can live without in effect having a dominant European culture. We want to become a multiracial, multiethnic society. We’re not going to disintegrate in the face of it.” More recently, in remarks at commencement exercises at Portland State University in Oregon in June, Mr. Clinton praised the prospect of virtually unlimited immigration as a “powerful reminder that our America is not so much a place as a promise, not a guarantee but a chance, not a particular race but an embrace of our common humanity.”
The idea of America as a universal nation, then, is an idea shared by and increasingly defining both sides of the political spectrum in the United States. The fact that the right, in such persons as Mr. Will, Mr. Wattenberg, and Mr. Miller, to name but a few, does share that idea with Mr. Clinton helps explain why the right today can think of nothing better to criticize the president for than his sex life and his aversion to telling the truth. Any substantial criticism of his globalist foreign policy, his defense of affirmative action, his policy of official normalization of homosexuality, his support for mass immigration, and in particular his “national dialogue on race” would involve a criticism and a rejection of the universalist assumptions on which those policies are based.
The common universalist assumptions of both left and right, then, are a major reason for the rapid convergence of left and right in our political life.
They are the reason why, to coin a phrase, there is not a dime’s worth of difference between them on so many issues and a major reason why we are seeing the emergence, not just of a One Party State in the United States, but also of a Single Ideology that informs the state and the culture. As I discovered myself, those who dissent from the Single Ideology of a Universal Nation or Proposition Country are not allowed to express their views even in self-proclaimed conservative newspapers [Dr. Francis was fired as staff columnist for the Washington Times because of his speech at the 1994 AR conference], and it is hardly an accident that Mr. Miller accuses me in his recent book of what he calls “racial paranoia.” Prior to his elevation to National Review, he admitted that he had “wanted to run [me] out of polite society for months, if not for years.” Nor am I the only journalist to discover that you get “run out of polite society” for departing from the Single Ideology of Universalism. Joe Sobran, the New York Post’s Scott McConnell, and National Review’s Peter Brimelow have all met the same fate for essentially the same reason, though all of them remain in circles rather more polite than the ones I travel in.
But the most casual acquaintance with the realities of American history shows that the idea that America is or has been a universal nation, that it defines itself through the proposition that “all men are created equal,” is a myth. Indeed, it is something less than a myth, it is a mere propaganda line invoked to justify not only mass immigration and the coming racial revolution but also the erosion of nationality itself in globalist free trade and a One World political architecture. It also justifies the total reconstruction and re-definition of the United States as a multiracial, multicultural, and transnational swamp. Nevertheless, the myth of the universal nation or proposition country is widely accepted, and today it represents probably the major ideological obstacle to recognizing the reality and importance of race as a social and political force.
In the first place, it is not true, as Miller writes, that the “Proposition” that “all men are created equal” and the ideas derived from it are universal and “not bound by time or history.” If that were true, there would never have been any dispute about them, let alone wars and revolutions fought over them. No one fights wars about the really self-evident axioms of Euclidean geometry. Mr. Miller’s propositions are very clearly the products of a very particular time and place — late 18th century Europe and America — and would have been almost inconceivable fifty years earlier or fifty years later. Nor have they ever appeared in any other political society at any other time absent their diffusion from Europe or America. They are based on concepts of anthropology and history, including an entirely fictitious “state of nature,” a “social contract,” and a view of human nature as a tabula rasa, that no student of human society or psychology took seriously after the mid-19th century.
Secondly, it is by no means clear what the proposition that “all men are created equal” does mean, either objectively or in the minds of those who drafted and adopted it in the Declaration. Assuming that “men” means women and children as well as men, does it mean that all humans are born equal, that they are equal, or that they are created equal by God? If they are born or created equal, do they remain equal? If they don’t remain equal, why do the rights with which they are supposedly endowed remain equal, or do those rights remain equal? If they are created equal by God, how do we know this, and what does it mean anyway? We certainly do not know from the Old Testament that God created all men equal, because most of it is about the history of a people “chosen” by God and favored by Him above others. Does it mean that God created humans equal in a spiritual sense, and if so, what does that spiritual equality have to do with political and social or even legal equality? Or does it mean that we were created equal in some material or physical sense, that we all have one head and two legs and two arms and so forth? If it means the latter, it is true but platitudinous.
In short, taken out of the context of the whole document of the Declaration and the historical context and circumstances of the document itself, the “equality clause” of the Declaration opens so many different doors of interpretation that it can mean virtually anything you want it to mean. It has been invoked by Christians and freethinkers, by capitalists and socialists, by conservatives and liberals, each of whom merely imports into it whatever his own ideology and agenda demand. Taken by itself, it is open to so many different interpretations that it has to be considered one of the most arcane — and one of the most dangerous — sentences ever written, one of the major blunders of American history.
Yet, if the sentence is taken to imply that race and other natural and social categories are without meaning or importance, it ought to be clear that America as a historic society has never been defined by that meaning. The existence of slavery at the time of the Declaration and well after, and the fact that no small number of the signers of the Declaration were slave-owners and that some parts of Jefferson’s original draft denouncing the slave trade were removed because they were objectionable to Southern slave-owners ought to make that plain on its face.
The particularism, racial and otherwise, that made the American people a nation was very clearly seen by John Jay, in a now famous passage of The Federalist Papers, No. 2, that:
Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people — a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs . . .
The racial unity of the nation is clear in Jay’s phrase about “the same ancestors,” and with respect to the U.S. Constitution, although the words “slave” and “slavery” did not appear in the text until the 13th Amendment, the Constitution is, as historian William Wiecek of Syracuse Law School writes, “permeated” with slavery:
So permeated was the Constitution with slavery that no less than nine of its clauses directly protected or referred to it. In addition to the three well-known clauses (three-fifths, slave trade, and fugitive slave), the Constitution embodied two clauses that redundantly required apportionment of direct taxes on the federal-number basis (the purpose being to prohibit Congress from levying an unapportioned capitation on slaves as an indirect means of encouraging their emancipation); two clauses empowering Congress to suppress domestic insurrections, which in the minds of the delegates included slave uprisings; a clause making two provisions (slave trade and apportionment of direct taxes) unamendable, the latter providing a perpetual security against some possible antislavery impulse; and two clauses forbidding the federal government and the states from taxing exports, the idea being to prohibit an indirect tax on slavery by the taxation of the products of slave labor.
Moreover, Professor Wiecek notes, with respect to the changes in the Constitution after the Civil War:
Only by recognizing the extent to which the constitutional vision of Lincoln and the Republicans was a departure from the original Constitution can we understand the long struggles through the war, Reconstruction, and after to incorporate black Americans into the constitutional regime. Freedom, civil rights, and equality for them were not the delayed but inevitable realization of some immanent ideal in the Constitution. On the contrary, black freedom and equality were, and are, a revolutionary change in the original constitutional system, truly a new order of the ages not foreseen, anticipated, or desired by the framers.
But even aside from slavery, the persistence of clear and widespread recognition of the reality and importance of race throughout American history shows that Americans never considered themselves a universal nation in the sense intended today. Historian David Potter writes:
The ‘free’ Negro of the northern states of course escaped chattel servitude, but he did not escape segregation, or discrimination, and he enjoyed few civil rights. North of Maryland, free Negroes were disfranchised in all of the free states except the four of upper New England; in no state before 1860 were they permitted to serve on juries; everywhere they were either segregated in separate public schools or excluded from public schools altogether, except in parts of Massachusetts after 1845; they were segregated in residence and in employment and occupied the bottom levels of income; and at least four states — Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Oregon — adopted laws to prohibit or exclude Negroes from coming within their borders.
Nor were blacks the only non-white racial group to be excluded from civic membership. The first naturalization act passed by Congress under the Constitution in 1790 limited citizenship to “white men,” and even after citizenship was granted to blacks through the 14th Amendment, naturalization continued to be forbidden to Asians: to Chinese until World War II, and to Japanese even later. Racial and ethnic restrictions on immigration remained in federal immigration law until 1965, when they were removed, as Larry Auster has shown, after sponsors of the reform assured opponents that removing them would not alter the ethnic and cultural composition of the nation — an assurance we now know to have been false.
The post Race and the American Identity, Part I appeared first on American Renaissance.
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