Andrew Fraser writes in his 2011 book The WASP Question:
This book seeks to explain why WASPs (a subtly, perhaps deservedly
derogatory acronym coined sometime in the late Fifties to
denote White Anglo-Saxon Protestants) rarely rise to the conscious,
principled defence of their collective biocultural interests, even in the
face of obvious aggression from their racial, ethnic, and religious rivals.
One expects to find Anglophobia among other ethnic groups,
most notably perhaps the Irish and Jews; such antagonism is the natural
and ordinary consequence of inter-ethnic competition. WASPs,
however, simply absorb such hostility; they, too, hold their ancestors
responsible for uniquely monstrous crimes against humanity. Accordingly,
self-loathing WASPs no longer look to an ethnoreligious community
of memory as the indispensable source of collective meaning,
value, and purpose.
Indeed, the few proudly Anglo-Saxon patriots scattered around the
world are now political pariahs. By contrast, the thoroughly deracinated
WASPs who eschew atavistic tribal loyalties are generally welladjusted,
other-directed characters eager to go with the flow. Few
such ^organization men_ and even fewer ^liberated_ women possess
the psychological independence necessary to flout convention and
think for themselves, much less to express genuine solidarity with
their co-ethnics, past and present. Denouncing and despising every
explicit expression of in-group solidarity among their own kith and
kin, WASPs have lost their collective soul. In an age of diversity, they
are the invisible race. But their fate is not foreclosed; neither the gene
pool nor the spirit of the Anglo-Saxon race is doomed to extinction.
Over the next century, a saving remnant of Anglo-Saxon Protestant
ethnopatriots, outcasts from a society in which the normal has become
abnormal, will become a highly visible minority. Sooner or later, they
will step out of the shadows to speak for a people reborn, an ethnonation
like any other, requiring its own place in the sun.
Admittedly, such a prophecy is counter-intuitive. In present circumstances,
any WASP who tries to revive older traditions of ^British
race patriotism_ immediately breaches the bounds of acceptable political
discourse. Paradoxically, pariah status is now an essential precondition
to the rediscovery of collective identity among people of
British ancestry. Useful comparisons can be made between the newly
emancipated Jewish parvenu in Europe during the nineteenth century
and the novel situation facing WASPs who have become strangers in
their own lands. Upwardly-mobile Jews such as Karl Marxws father in
Germany often foreswore open solidarity with their own race and religion
so as to gain admission to polite society and the professions.
Only a few isolated individuals insisted that the emancipation of the
Jews must amount to more ^than an opportunity to ape the gentiles;_
they sought instead the ^admission of Jews as Jews to the ranks of humanity._
In rejecting the ^opportunity to play the parvenu,_ such men
became ^conscious pariahs._ Today only a small minority of WASPs
dare to become conscious pariahs by refusing to renounce their racial
particularity. According to the Jewish scholar Hannah Arendt, this is
an intolerable state of affairs. In her view, it is a fundamental truth of
the human condition that an individual of any nation or race can enter
the ^world history of humanity only by remaining and clinging stubbornly
to what he is._ The systematic denial of that truth reveals the
spiritual emptiness at the heart of modernity: The ^normal,_ welladjusted
and utterly deracinated liberal WASP passing in polite society
as a cosmopolitan and enlightened ^citizen of the world_ is actually
^no less a monster than a hermaphrodite._1 The question arises: Why
are so few WASPs willing to cling any longer to who they are. The answer
lies in the Anglo-American tradition of constitutional patriotism,
a civil religion that transformed the abnormal renunciation of in-
group solidarity among Anglo-Saxon Protestants into the touchstone
of political normality.
In her private and social life, Hannah Arendt clung stubbornly to
the particularistic bioculture and historic folkways of the Jewish people
even as she publicly prescribed a thoroughly secular and cosmopolitan
tradition of civic republicanism for her adopted country. She
dismissed as fanciful the notion that America is or ever was a Christian
republic. She claimed that the religious roots of the American republic
are to be found not in ^the Christian faith in a revealed God_
nor in ^Hebrew obedience to the Creator who was also the Legislator
of the universe._ If the founders ^can be called religious at all,_ Arendt
argued, it was only in ^the original Roman sense_ of the word
^religion._ According to Arendt, Roman religion had little to do with
participation in the divine; it was more concerned with a pious respect
for the halo of time shrouding the origins of the republic. One wonders,
however, whether Arendt ever made the conscious calculation
that the ethnic interests of her fellow Jews are best served by detaching
the American republican tradition from the Anglo-Saxon blood
and Christian faith of the nationws founding people.
Arendt, of course, is far from being the only political theorist to
draw a bright line between the Christian faith and classical republicanism.
JGA Pocock, a New Zealand-born WASP, is perhaps the most
accomplished historian of the Atlantic republican tradition. He, too,
distinguished between Christians who include the whole of humanity
in their quest for eternal life and civic humanists. For the latter, the
republic was universal only in that ^it existed to realize for its citizens
all the values which men were capable of realizing in this life;_ it remained
^particular in the sense that it is located in space and time._
Both Arendt and Pocock presented the classical republic as a secular
association of persons ^formed with a view to some good purpose._
Race and religion play little or no role in the work of either writer. Arendt
concentrated on the abstract categories of work, labor, and action
in her analysis of the constitution of the public and private realms in
the Athenian polis.2 In effect, she discovered the prototype of the
^proposition nation_ in the city states of pagan antiquity. In fact, she
offered her modernist rendition of civic humanism as an antidote to
the primeval urge to discover the divine in the blood and spirit of a
particular people. She found a ready market for that prescription
within the WASP intelligentsia. Certainly, both Arendt and Pocock
exercised a profound influence on my own intellectual development.3
Having fallen under the sway of their purely political civic humanism,
I was ill-prepared to comprehend the scale of the immigration disaster
unfolding before my eyes in Australia, Canada, and the United
States.4
Arendt sought to liberate political theory from the biological imperatives
of natural necessity while providing a secular alternative to
the alleged ^wordlessness_ of apolitical ethnoreligious communities
grounded in Christian charity. Accordingly, she rejected the ^Germaninspired
nationalism_ that regarded ^a nation to be an eternal organic
body, the product of inevitable natural growth of inherent qualities,_
and explained ^peoples, not in terms of political organizations, but in
terms of biological superhuman personalities._ Renouncing ^all neoromantic
appeals to the volk,_ Arendt ^maintained that onews ethnic,
religious, or racial identity was irrelevant to onews identity as a citizen,
and that it should never be made the basis of membership in a political
community._ Arendt was no less hostile to the theological image of
the nation as ^the incarnation of a divine absolute on earth,_ observing
that ^America was spared the cheapest and most dangerous disguise
the absolute ever assumed in the political realm, the disguise of
the nation._ She recognized, of course, that the price homo Americanus
paid for that release was severance from the blood and faith he shared
with his kinfolk in the Old World.5
As a callow legal scholar steeped in both the chronic ethno-anaemia
characteristic of the Canadian WASP and the civic culture of the
American Republic south of the border, I, too, was proof against romantic
appeals to the Volk. Indeed, in the earnestly bilingual and bi-
cultural atmosphere of Canada in the late 1960s and early 1970s, I was
simply bewildered by the ethnic grievance-mongering of newly empowered
Québécois activists billing themselves as ^the White niggers
of America._ It was perhaps natural to seek succor in Arendtws irenic
vision of a political religion brought down to earth, one capable of
creating public spaces in which the civic virtues of a self-selecting aristocracy
would transmute the raw facts of social plurality into a common
world transcending ^the life-span of mortal men._6
My first encounter with Arendtws civic humanism came through
two books, The Human Condition and On Revolution. I was only dimly
aware of Arendtws Jewish identity; she barely mentions Jews or Judaism
in either work. In retrospect, however, her political philosophy
was inseparable from her identity as one of many German Jewish intellectuals
transplanted to America as political refugees. It was easy
for Arendt to conclude that a pariah people such as the Jews were safer
in a pluralistic republic founded upon universal principles of constitutional
law than in an organic nation grounded in the racial identity
of a gentile majority.
To her credit, Arendt sought to hold Jews to the same standards she
set for the American republic. She criticized Zionists repeatedly, both
because they accepted the idea of ^the Jew in general_ as a biological
creature and because they tied the goal of a Jewish homeland to an
absolutist political theology of sovereignty. She insisted that ^The real
goal of the Jews in Palestine is the building up of a Jewish homeland.
This goal must never be sacrificed to the pseudo-sovereignty of a Jewish
state._ Zionists, she believed, ought to recognize the rights of the
Arabs already living in Palestine; turning the Palestinians into another
pariah people in their own country could never be justified. Indeed,
she held up America as a model for the sort of polity that should be
created in Palestine.7 It now seems clear that we were both doomed to
disappointment; modern political and social life is utterly resistant to
a revival of classical republicanism for reasons that are both biological
and theological.
For those prepared to heed its lessons, the last fifty years have
taught us a great deal about the intractable biocultural reality of racial
differences and the consequent limits on pluralism in a modern republican
polity. Certainly, the bloody and interminable conflict between
Zionists and Palestinians suggests a certain naiveté in Arendtws
view that ^the very category zJeww is a human convention masquerading
as a biological fact._8 On the other hand, she had good reason to
fear that the political theology of sovereignty would exacerbate racial,
religious, and ethnic conflict in a self-proclaimed Jewish state ruling a
multi-ethnic society. Meanwhile, experience in the ^Anglo-Saxon
countries_ strongly suggests that European man alone bears the spirit
of civic republicanism, a tradition still largely alien to other races and
peoples.
The civil rights revolution combined with the reverse colonization
of the West by the Third World has undermined the very possibility
of a common world presumptively shared by the citizens of a republican
polity. The corporate welfare state celebrates diversity, and thereby
fosters, deepens, and strengthens the myriad biocultural divisions
between men and women, homosexuals and heterosexuals, blacks and
Whites, Jews and Christians, Muslims and the entire Western world. It
has become an axiom of postmodern politics that the perspective of
any one group is incommensurable with that of others. Representation
of individuals must give way therefore to the representation of
groups. The common good has been deconstructed as an illusion conjured
up by powerful and privileged groups to protect their own particular
interests.
Between-group competition is now an inescapable and ubiquitous
feature of life for WASPs in a multiracial society. Unfortunately, even
as racial and ethnoreligious tensions spill over into a low-intensity
civil war, well-meaning but ineffectual WASPs remain resolutely
blind to both the biological and the theological dimensions of their
collective identity.
NATION OF NATIONS
The major premise underlying this book was best articulated by
Harold Cruse, easily the most incisive black nationalist thinker of the
Sixties. Cruse recognized what most Americans of Anglo-Saxon ances-
try are still loath to admit; namely that America is ^a nation of nations,_
(an observation now equally applicable to Australia, Canada,
New Zealand, and the United Kingdom.)9 He identified AngloSaxons,
Negroes, and Jews as the main players in the inter-ethnic
struggles shaping the (re)distribution of prestige, power, and resources
in American society and politics.
For my purposes, Crusews most important insight is the following
deceptively innocuous but explosively unorthodox proposition:
American WASPs require and deserve explicit recognition as an ethnocultural
group comme les autresfas an ethnonation in itself, if not
yet for itself.10 Unfortunately, as Cruse knew all too well, America is a
nation that habitually lies to itself. Moreover, WASPs are the worst
offenders. America is indeed a polyethnic nation of nations but AngloSaxon
Protestants havefever since the foundation of the Republicf
refused to incorporate that patently obvious reality into their political,
constitutional and theological discourse. The myth of the proposition
nation has a long history.
In the well-ordered multinational America of Crusews dreams, each
of the major ethnic groups would ^produce a native radicalintellectual
trend, which trends should complement one another._11 In
effect, intellectuals provide each ethnonation republic with a corporate
identity; every people acquires its own legal personality empowered
to invoke as it is bound to respect three fundamental constitutional
conventions of the multiracial republic: mutual recognition,
consent, and continuity.12 On Crusews theory, it is the civic duty of
every Anglo-Saxon, Negro, and Jewish intellectual to participate in
the collective consciousness of his ethnonation. In practice, members
of the Jewish intelligentsia alone volunteeredfeagerly and oftenfto
serve as the common (if rarely contrite) conscience of their proudly
ethnocentric people. Highly educated Jews take their communal responsibilities
seriously, ceaselessly working to promote a powerful
spirit of in-group solidarity among their co-ethnics. As a consequence,
the American Jewish community is not just a nation in itself; it is also
an ethnic group famously ready, willing, and able to act for itself. In
pursuit of their self-proclaimed mission to heal the world, Jewish activists
moved quickly and decisively to forge an alliance with black
Americans against an allegedly common foe, Americaws hegemonic
WASP elites.13
The vast majority of American Negroes followed Jewish advice to
forswear black nationalist strategies, as advocated, inter alia, by Booker
T Washington, Marcus Garvey, and Harold Cruse. Such counsel
may have been ^good for the Jews_ but Cruse was convinced that it
poisoned the well-springs of political, cultural, and economic autonomy
in black America. Negroes are now an ethnonation for itself only
in the degraded sense that their leaders clamour incessantly to increase
their entitlements under the federal Leviathanws racial spoils
system. A race so (dare one say, slavishly) dependent upon governmental
largesse hardly counts as a nation in itself.
Those enjoying the WASP lifestyle, on the other hand, represent a
national group only in itself. Americans of British ancestry have never
constituted an organic whole prepared to act for itself. Cruse predicted
that the USA would pay a heavy price for the failure of WASP intellectuals
(and their Negro counterparts) to recognize, promote, and defend
their distinctive ethnonational identity. Cruse took it for granted
that, in a multinational republic, every self-respecting, morally upright
racial, religious, and ethnic group will shoulder its collective responsibilities
in the process of identity politics.
Jews were quick to grasp the proffered opportunity vigorously to
defend their distinctive ethnocultural, economic, and political interests.
Jewish leaders demanded and received public recognition of their
right to a front row pew in the sacramental shrine of the Constitutional
Republic. Accordingly, a triumvirate of Protestant, Catholic, and
Jewish worthies now typically presides over the ceremonial expression
of Americaws constitutional faith. And because corporate membership
in the religion of the Republic carries certain privileges, it became
axiomatic that Jews must consent to social and economic policy
decisions affecting their group interests. Finally, Jewish intellectuals
enlisted private, corporate, and governmental support to ensure their
continuity as a self-governing ethnonation. Unfortunately, they have
not always accorded reciprocal recognition to the biocultural interests
and constitutional claims of other ethnic groups. On the other hand,
neither Anglo-Protestant nor Catholic Americans have been particularly
adept, much less highly principled players in the game of interethnic
competition.
In The Slaughter of Cities E Michael Jones describes the successful
campaign by WASP and Jewish elites to cleanse American cities of
Catholic ethnic enclaves.14 Relocated to the suburbs, Polish, Irish, Italian
and other Catholic ethnic identities were flattened into a homogeneous
Whiteness supposedly shared with Protestants and Jews. Like
Cruse, Jones believes that America would be a better place today if
Catholic ethnic intellectualsfnot least of all those in the Churchfhad
done their job, thereby enabling each of those distinctive ethnic
groups to survive in and for itself. Instead, Catholic ethnics like
WASPs and Negroes before them fell lock, stock, and barrel for utopian
promises of health, wealth, and personal power marketed by the
corporate welfare state as the American Dream. That Faustian bargain
exacted a heavy price, spiritually if not materially, from Americaws
constituent ethnonations.
This book is not, therefore, a narrowly ethnocentric piece of proWASP
advocacy. On the contrary, it mounts an attack on my coethnics;
namely the American WASPs who for over two centuries now
have waged a reckless, revolutionary, and relentless cultural war on
the ethnoreligious traditions which once inspired the Anglo-Saxon
province of Christendom to greatness. American WASPs and their unruly
ancestors have done much for which they ought to fear the wrath
of God. Their salvation may depend upon their willingness to renounce
not just the statist idolatry rampant in the religion of the Republic
but also the enchantments of Mammon for which they have
sold their collective soul. It is well past time for WASPs to accept the
responsibilities and burdens of ethnonationhood. In return, they will
earn the right to bear, once again, the ethnonym of their illustrious
Anglo-Saxon ancestors.
Americaws constitutional faith has been not good for the WASPsf
or any other population group. In the medium- to long-term, even
highly successful Jews will suffer if the WASP disease goes untreated.
Anglo-Saxon Anglophobia is a spiritual disorder whose morally debilitating
symptoms are highly contagious. Should WASPs fail to regenerate
their historic ethnonation, such morbid ethnomasochism is sure
to bring out the worst in other racial, religious, and ethnic groups.
Already Americaws rainbow republic exhibits dangerously high
levels of Jewish hubris, Negro criminality, and Hispanic/Mexican aggression,
as well as chronic moral decay within a rootless Catholic
^faith community_ desperately searching for its lowest common denominator
in the mobile mass of the global multitude. The ethnopathology
which laid homo Americanus low has spread to Anglo-Saxon
Protestants outside the United States. Whether they realize it or not,
the mental and physical well-being of WASPs in Australia, Canada,
New Zealand, and even in England, is inextricably bound up with the
fate of their co-ethnics in America.
Educated WASPs everywhere are remarkably resistant to suggestions
that they, too, are an ethnic group. They prefer to imagine themselves
as autonomous individuals. Sometimes f if the thorny issue of
race comes upfthey will, reluctantly, self-identify as ^Whites;_ but
mostly WASPs regard themselves as ^plain vanilla_ Americans, Australians,
Canadians, and Britons. WASPs around the world disapprove
of ethnonationalism f especially when it rears its ugly head
among their own kith and kin. This book offers intellectual support to
recovering WASPs in their inner spiritual struggle to overcome their
ethnologically peculiar but politically correct and etymologically
sound strain of homophobia.
ANGLO-SAXON ANGLOPHOBIA AND THE NEW TRIBALISM
WASPs are the canary in a multiracial mineshaft. Cracks and fissures
snake around them as the transnational corporate welfare state
digs ever-deeper into the precious stocks of social capital accumulated
over centuries in the ^Anglo-Saxon countries._ Predictions of global
anarchy are rife as nations break down into warring races and tribes.
Ironically, bereft of a powerful sense of collective identity, WASPs
face a future of individual isolation even as ^the quest for the memory
and spirit of the specific ethnic past has once again been renewed._ It
seems likely, according to Kotkin, that a new ^tribalismvforged by
globally dispersed ethnic groups_ will shape the twenty-first centu-
ry.15 This book comes to a similar conclusion: Adapting themselves to
the chaotic challenges of the twenty-first century, prudent WASPs will
re-invent themselves as a global network of Anglo-Saxon tribes.
The only alternative to the self-conscious reconstruction of AngloSaxon
ethnohistory, indeed of an Anglo-Saxon ethnotheology, is everdeepening
demoralization. The secular-minded WASP is now a tragicomic
figure, the object of both pity and contempt. Unless WASPs
somehow recover the tribal spirit of early Anglo-Saxon Christians
they will sink still further into ignominious impotence. A once-proud
people will have been swept aside without a fight, just another sad
story of defeat and dispossession ending not with a bang but with a
whimper. But they may yet find their way back to an alternative future.
During the first Dark Age, the Church served as the seedbed of
the English nation; in our New Dark Age WASPs may discover that
their salvation, on earth as in heaven, lies in a return to the Old Faith
of medieval Christendom.
In Deuteronomy 26: 16s19, God recognized Old Covenant Israel as
his ^special possession._ Biblical prophecies of a New Covenant creation
were fulfilled in AD 70 when Christ came ^on the clouds of heaven
with great power and glory_ (Matthew 24:30) to oversee the destruction
of the Jerusalem Temple. The covenant world of the rebellious
and stiff-necked Jews who had rejected Christ perished along
with the physical structure of the Temple. A new heavens and a new
earth appeared in which every nation (ethnos) was invited to enter into
the Kingdom of God. The rulers of the pagan tribes of Anglo-Saxon
England jumped at the chance. Alfred the Great and other AngloSaxon
kings gladly recognized Jesus the Christ as their Lord. Their
subjects soon conformed to the ways of the King of Kings.
By keeping his commandments, England became the Christian prototype
of a holy nation; indeed the nascent English nation aspired to
be a new Israel. In return, God raised England ^high above all the nations
which he has made,_ if only for a time. Contemporary WASPs
must follow the example set by their remote ancestors in bringing
^praise and fame_ to God. By so doing, they can be reborn as ^a people
holy to the Lord._ Unfortunately, most WASPs today remain
wedded to secular humanism, the civil religion which underpins the
political economy of the modern state. So long as that bloodless faith
survives, the lost souls of the invisible race fall under a collective life
sentence of spiritual servitude.
WASPs are dead not just to their ancestral Christian faith but to the
civic virtues essential to the constitutional health of the body politic.
Forty years ago, Cruse charged that the then ^dominant and representative_
White ethnic group, ^the Anglo-Saxons and their Protestant
ethic_ had abdicated ^their creative and intellectual responsibilities to
the internal American commonweal._ Nothing since then has overcome
the spiritual bankruptcy and ideological hubris, the ^threadbare
cultural heritage,_ associated with the steady hollowing out of AngloSaxon
prestige, power, and influence.16 The three-cornered ethnic
competition between Negroes, Jews, and old-stock Anglo-Americans
continues unabated, but with the addition of many new protected minorities
an ever-expanding diversity industry now honeycombs the
structures of state and corporate power.
In the business of inter-ethnic competition, there must be winners
and losers. Cruse was not surprised when upwardly mobile Jews
quickly stepped into the gaping intellectual vacuum left unattended
by feckless WASPs; before long, he predicted, Jews would ^dominate
scholarship, history, social research, etc._ WASP weakness was a critical
factor in the vector of forces generated within the ^fateful triangular
tension_ between Anglo-Saxons, Negroes, and Jews. Cruse was
right to warn Anglo-Saxons that their ^group must produce its representative
radical-intellectual trend; or else social progress in America
will be ethnically retarded, if not checkmated._17 Well ahead of his
time, he stressed that in at least one crucially important dimension the
biocultural phenomenon of race is, indeed, a ^social construct._
Race is a biological reality but not every racial difference represents
the automatic, physical expression of particular gene pools. In fact, the
social construction of race is always a work in progress, a job that can
be done well or badly. A people can use its God-given genetic capital
for good or for ill. WASP intellectuals deserve to be chastised severely;
they refuse to pay attention to the peerless skill with which American
Jews crafted a collective identity solidly anchored in the ancient moral
imperatives of tribal loyalty. Well-schooled WASPs also turn a blind
eye to shortfalls in the performance of non-European peoples. Con-
spicuous displays of altruism directed toward out-groups are valuable
status markers for educated WASPs indifferent to the claims of ingroup
solidarity. The ^selfish gene_ has become incarnate in WASP
intellectuals who routinely defect to the other side(s) in the game of
identity politics.
Over the past century, the sheer ubiquity of such opportunistic behavior
produced the terminal crisis of the Anglo-Saxon intellectual.
Anglo-Saxon Protestants were on the ropes by the mid-Sixties. The
collapse was not confined to the USA. Cruse probably never took
much notice of Canada where Anglo-Saxons did manage, for a time,
to create a native, conservative intellectual trend, under the aegis of
the British monarchy. But, there too, Anglo-Saxonism had taken several
body blows by 1965. That year marked the publication of George
Grantws Lament for a Nation, a book mourning the defeat of an EnglishCanadian
nationalist movement grounded in ancestral loyalty to British
institutions rejected by the American Revolution. Around the same
time, Britainws entry into the European Common Market broke the
grip of ^British race patriotism_ on the politico-cultural imagination of
opinion leaders in Australia and New Zealand, as well as on the English
themselves.18
Anglo-Saxon Anglophobia is a mysterious affliction, becoming
pandemic among WASPs in tandem with the rise of managerial multiculturalism.
Official multiculturalism destroyed the common civic
culture that WASPs absorb with their motherws milk. Apart from
WASPs, it is now normal for virtually every significant social group to
conceive its racial, religious, ethnic, gender, or lifestyle interests in accordance
with the tribal logic of identity politics. WASPs stand outside
the new tribalism. They cling instead to the scrupulously secular,
color-blind, and gender-neutral norms of civic nationalism. WASPs
donwt ^do_ identity politics; their sense of belonging is based not on
blood but on citizenship. Nor, needless to say, do they regard ingroup
solidarity as a sacred obligation. Unsurprisingly, therefore, in
the second half of the twentieth century, Australia, Canada, New Zea-
land, the UK, and the USA ceased to be Anglo-Saxon countries, spiritually
if not demographically.
IN SEARCH OF AN ANGLO-SAXON VOLKSGEIST
What is at work here is arguably a collective not an individual neurosis.
In search of the deeply repressed Volksgeist of a disappearing
people, we traverse the mundane domain of sociobiologyfto establish
that religion has secular utilityfbefore ascending into the headier
realm of Christian ethnotheologyfto establish that a religion of secular
utility is bad for the Anglo-Saxons.
Our story begins with the emergence of the English people as a socially
cohesive ethnoreligious community; it also tells of their overseas
expansion. The entire narrative recounts an ongoing historical process
in which genes and culture co-evolve; throughout, the biocultural evolution
of the Anglo-Saxon peoples, ^at home_ and in the diaspora, is
evaluated in accordance with the orthodox Christian doctrine of nations.
In other words, we look for the spirit animating the laws of God
and man as it shines through or recedes from Anglo-Saxon biocultures
widely separated in space and time.
The spirit of Anglo-Saxon Christendom manifested itself most publicly
in laws and constitutions. This book rests upon a historiographical
axiom laid down by Walter Ullman: ^The history of jurisprudence
is the history of civilization._ Medieval Europe created a legal civilization,
nowhere more obviously or successfully than in its Anglo-Saxon
province. The English, like other Christian peoples, ^were given their
religion, their faith, their dogma in the shape of the law._19 Accordingly,
this book assumes that there is no better introduction to any period
in Anglo-Saxon history and no more reliable mirror of their character
than a study of the law enacted and practiced, first, in their island
homeland and, now, throughout what remains of the civilization established
by the British diaspora.
Another overarching theme revolves around the quest for the tragic
flaw in the Anglo-Saxon character. How did a once-heroic people
bring about their own downfall? Was the fatal flaw somehow encoded
in their genes or their culture, or even both at once? My thesis is the
social psychology of the Anglo-Saxons evolved in three stages, in a
process of ^punctuated equilibrium._ The primitive, magicoreligious
influences on the social character of the early Anglo-Saxon tribes were
suppressed, first, by formal institutions (embryonic states and the
Church) that fostered the dominant ^tradition-directed_ character
type of medieval England; second, by the development of an ^innerdirected_
character adapted to the early modern bourgeois market
economy; and, third, by the emergence of the ^other-directed_ character
type among WASPs in the service of the modern corporate welfare
state.
As we enter a period of deepening economic crisis, hitherto suppressed
social and political tensions generated by the deliberate demographic
transformation of the Anglo-Saxon countries seem certain
to become more acute. Unmistakeable symptoms of acute racial polarization
are already evident under the Obama administration in the
USA. In this threatening atmosphere of political instability and economic
insecurity, old-stock Americans, along with their co-ethnics in
England, Canada, and Australasia, will be compelled, sooner or later,
to join in the high-stakes game of identity politics. This book provides
them with a game plan; it points, as well, to their greatest weaknessf
the disgraceful absence of the team spirit so central to the old-time religion
of the fabled ^island race._
Ten years ago, John Higham, a prominent WASP historian, observed
that the full story of the ^shattering defeat_ of his own ethnic
group in the mid-twentieth century ^has never been told._ Shortly afterwards,
Eric Kaufmann set out single-handedly to fill that void with
a masterful book on the rise and fall of Anglo-America. One reason for
the previous absence of academic interest in the decline of American
WASPs, Kaufmann remarked, is the unexamined presumption that it
was ^a demographic inevitability of only limited relevance to todayws
debates about Whiteness and multiculturalism._20 The conventional
wisdom holds that WASPs were bound to be overthrown, sooner or
later, by subaltern ethnic groups. In rejecting the dominant interpretation,
Kaufmann took a giant step forward. This book builds upon his
approach.
In several important ways, however, it represents a radical departure
from Kaufmannws work. The most obvious difference between the
two books is in their respective historical and geographic scope.
Kaufmann confines his narrative and analysis to the rise and fall of
homo Americanus. This book examines the ethnogenesis of the English
nation; it also discusses the growth of the state and the companion
system of political economy that powered English colonial expansion
around the world.
Kaufmann and I agree that ^the primary engine of dominant ethnic
decline_ is to be found in ^cultural and ideological changes originating
from within the Anglo-Protestant community._21 But when Kaufmann
celebrates the decline of the WASP, I decline to follow suit. Instead,
this book laments the fall of Anglo-America (along with AngloAustralia,
Anglo-Canada, etc). Kaufmann sees in the ^expressive individualism_
of ^the New York Intellectuals_ positive signs that WASPs
were reforming themselves over the course of the twentieth century.
In my view, the rise of that cultural revolutionary movement signalled
the onset phase of a malignant ethnopathology decked out in the rituals
and trappings of a false religion. On my analysis, the cosmopolitan
creed embraced by Kaufmann is a clear and present danger to the inclusive
fitness of WASPs everywhere, not least of all because it severs
them from their ethnoreligious roots in the ancestral homeland of Anglo-Saxon
Christianity.
My interpretation of world-wide WASP decline, therefore, reflects
what might be termed an ^insiderws_ perspective on Anglo-Saxon ethnohistory.
Kaufmann, on the other hand, remains an ^outsider_ sympathetic
to the demographic weight and biocultural interests of the
Other, an interpretative stance explicitly linked to his ultracosmopolitan
hybridity. He describes himself as ^entirely secular and
zneww immigrant in origin: part postwar Jewish, part Chinese, part
Hispanic._ Born in Hong Kong, Kaufmann holds Canadian citizenship
and apparently passes for a White, North American ^Anglo._ Wearing
the latter hat, Kaufmann rejects the explicitly anti-WASP attitudes of
the radical left; instead he upholds ^the validity of both WASP and
zAmericanw as important ethnic options,_ open in principle to anyone.
Significantly, however, he denies Anglo-Saxon Christians an exclusive
proprietary claim to the WASP brand.22
In advanced societies, Kaufmann believes, WASPs will become an
upper-class status group in which Whites and Asians (as well as
mixed Eurasians) remain overrepresented. Ancestral ties to the British
Isles will matter little: ^In terms of authenticity, light skin and Anglo
cultural characteristics might serve to dignify WASP ancestryf
however partial and distant._ In fact, he declares, ^increasingly race
and ethnicity is being superseded by transethnic cleavages based on
status and ideology._ He predicts ^that racial boundaries, as with ethnic
boundaries, will continue to weaken, thereby generating a symbolically
fluid, highly privatized, post-ethnic social environment._23
Kaufmannws optimistic take on the future of managerial multiculturalism
is a dangerous illusion. WASP identity is more than the leading
lifestyle preference of the rich and famous; it is the biocultural expression
of a deep-seated ethnopathology. We need to take sociobiology
seriously. Contemporary WASP behavior is profoundly dysfunctional
in circumstances of economic scarcity, social disorder, and political
instability. If they are to survive and prosper, Anglo-Saxon ethnoreligious
communities must refuse to reward individuals engaging
in conspicuous public displays of out-group altruism. No longer can
they afford to impose a high social price on the practice of ethnic nepotism
within their own tribal networks. Moral vanity of that sort is a
sin; it is also a maladaptive mistake threatening the survival of an entire
race.
Kaufmann believes that Anglo-Protestant culture can survive even
if Anglo-Protestants cease to exist as a people. Of course, he is neither
an Anglo-Saxon nor a Christian; nobody expects him to be moved either
by the mystic moral magnetism of an ancestral faith or by the biological
bonds of blood brotherhood to mourn the passing of a oncegreat
people. It is quite another matter when prominent WASPs coolly
contemplate the socially engineered extraction of the spiritual essence
incarnate in the flesh and bone of their co-ethnics and its professionally
managed transplantation into the dead heart of an ever-more alien
nation. In such men, we see textbook examples of Anglo-Saxon Anglophobia.
A case in point: a recent, best-selling book by the late Samuel
P Huntington.24
Unlike Kaufmann who is, at most, an honorary ^Anglo_ by virtue
of his Canadian childhood, Huntington was an über-WASP directly
descended from early New England colonists. Despite his antecedents,
Professor Huntington appeared unconcerned for the future of his
people, expressing confidence that enlightened public policies can en-
sure the ideological hegemony of Anglo-Protestant culture in America
even as those carrying the genes of the first English settlers shrink to
an insignificant and voiceless minority. The thesis of this book is clear
and unambiguous: In the absence of a really existing Anglo-Saxon
Christian people, the civilizing influence of Anglo-Saxon Christian
culture will be extinguished. Anglo-Saxon Christians are already an
endangered species; their ethnoreligious community may simply
wither away, leaving behind only a few scattered remnants of the
faithful.
In its blindness, the rest of mankind will barely notice the cosmic
tragedy implicit in the death and destruction of a unique bioculture
born in the sacred light of faith, hope, and charity. In recalling the
birth of Old Englandws Volksgeist, tracing its life cycle to its apparent
end in modern America, and imagining its regeneration many decades
hence, this book resurrects the long-since buried and forgotten
corpus of orthodox Christian ethnotheology.
The novus ordo seclorum proclaimed at the creation of the American
Republic was a major turning point in Anglo-American political and
constitutional history; it also sealed the sorry fate of Anglo-Saxon
Christendom. Until then, colonial Americans formed the vanguard of
the Anglo-Saxon diaspora, thereby laying the biocultural foundation
for a trans-Atlantic ethnonation. My argument, following in the footsteps
of George Grant and his Loyalist forefathers, is that by renouncing
their ancestral allegiance to throne and altar, American revolutionaries
committed something worse than a political or constitutional
blunder. It was a mortal sin to deny and disown sacred bonds of faith,
blood, and honour. (I do not mean to imply that King and Parliament
were as pure as the driven snow. Readers will find ample evidence
below to discourage any such inference.)
This book reminds contemporary WASPs that their advanced state
of decay is visible proof that the wages of sin is deathfa theological
truth that applies to bodies politic no less than to bodies natural. But
the death of the WASP is not the predestined end of this story. Like
the risen Christ, the Anglo-Saxon people will be born anew as they
shed the desiccated skin of the worn-out WASP. The final part of this
book suggests that such a miracle may come to pass through the
twenty-first century revival of Anglo-Saxon identity politics.
Writing in 1992 when the prospect of a ^progressively more integrated
worldwide economic system_ seemed unstoppable, Joel Kotkin
was convinced that ^dispersed groups such as global tribes,_ along
with ^their worldwide business and cultural networks_ were ^particularly
well adapted_ for success. Today, as we ponder the impending
collapse of our ever more unsustainably complex socio-economic systems,
tribal networks offer an even more attractive bolt-hole. Tribesf
the ^organizational cockroach of human history_fhave shown themselves
to be highly adaptive collective survival mechanisms.25 If only
for such pragmatic reasons, WASPs might recall yet another age-old
adage; charity begins at home. In the final analysis, however, home is
where the heart is. Not so very long ago, the heart of the British diaspora
remained ^at home_ in Old England. The natal narrative of that
blessed realm can still provide much-needed inspiration to the postmodern
rebirth of Anglo-Saxon tribalism.
