American Supremacism

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Author’s Note:

The following short excerpt is from a forthcoming essay titled ‘How the Irish Became White’, which makes an ethnonationalist critique of the ‘whiteness historians’ (Ignatiev, Roedeger, Allen, etc.) and their treatment of Irish-America.

The God-given supremacy of America’s New World values (steeped in the Puritan heritage of New England and the Protestant dominion of Anglo-Saxonism) were at one time expressed in racial terms. But this was not always the case. Long before modern biology, the English colonists saw themselves as a chosen people, superior to those they encountered in North America. Thus it was that the 19th-century Indian doomed by the laws of evolution was the same Indian condemned in the 17th-century as a savage incapable of Protestant redemption. The American sense of superiority (its supremacism) has, as such, assumed different forms historically. It was initially expressed in civilizational, and especially Protestant religious terms, then later political/republican, then again, in the second half of the 19th century, Darwinian, and finally, today, military, financial, and hyperreal ideological ones. Supremacism is arguably inbuilt to the idea of America.

Since 1945, the older racial expressions of American supremacism have been systematically replaced by non-racial ones, whose color-blind market view of the world better serves the postwar Reign of Quantity that is America’s New World Order. Claiming ‘there is no alternative’ to it, this supremacist system now terrorizes the world with what Vladimir Putin calls its ‘bomb and rocket democracy’. It also terrorizes those whose ancestors created and settled the United States, for the cultural/genetic heritage of ‘the historic American nation’ no longer accords with the system’s one-world ambitions. As Herman Melville said of America, ‘we are not a nation, so much as a world’ – a world, beyond time and history, whose anti-traditional ‘empire of liberty’ resists all that is rooted and ordered. (See D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature [2] [1923]).

American supremacism is thus no longer about Anglo-Saxon racial pride (or arrogance or white superiority of any kind), but about the supremacy of its own self-interests – of its particular system, its Creed, and, above all, its geo-economic investments.

The aspirations of this world-destroying system, opposing  all historical or organic forms of community, hierarchy, and spirit, are especially apparent in its capitalist worldview – hostile to anything that might impede its globalist alienations – such as authority and sovereignty, and more specifically traditional (pre-Vatican II) Christianity, blood-based communities, and those racially-conscious Anglo-European identities that went into America’s creation.

What at one time, then, was a racially expressed supremacism (i.e., ‘white supremacy’) – bearing the mantle of ‘Anglo-Saxonism’ or ‘Americanism’ or ‘Manifest Destiny’ — has since been transformed by the system into a money-driven, anti-racist supremacism, buttressed by democratic and human rights opposing everything, high and low, that might impede the endless, senseless circulations of capital vital to its world-market empire. (See Colin Kidd, The Forging of Races: Race and Scripture in the Protestant Atlantic World, 1600-2000 [3] [2006]; Carla Pestana, Protestant Empire: Religion and the Making of the British Atlantic World [4] [2009]; William Engdahl, A Century of War: Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order [5] [2004].)

In contrast to the supremacists of ‘Calvin’s gang’, Ireland’s pre-modern exiles – ensconced in urban villages centered spiritually on the Catholic church, and, civilly, on the parallel societies (schools, hospitals, charities, saving banks, newspapers, etc.) constituting their counter-hegemony to the purely instrumentalist and relativist values of the WASPs’ pluralistic Gesellschaft – created another America in which family, parish, union, and flag, rather than wealth and self-realization, were the high marks of American citizenship. (See Lawrence McCaffrey, The Irish Catholic Diaspora in America [6] [1997]; Denis Clark, Erin’s Heirs: Irish Bonds of Community [7] [1991].)

Considered a ‘creeping fascism’, resistant to the state’s social-engineering schemes, Irish America has been a horror not just to ‘Marxists’ like Ignatiev, but to the Big State progressives who took the helm under Franklin Roosevelt. For this ethnic, urban America shared the Catholic corporatist traditions of interwar Europe: of de Valera’s Free State, Franco’s Spain, Mussolini’s Italy, Germany, and other continental, largely Catholic and Orthodox peoples rejecting the Anglo-Saxon model of liberal capitalist ‘civilization’. (See my introduction to the 2011 edition of F. P. Yockey’s The Proclamation of London [8].)

Thus it was that after 1945, the Authoritarian Personality, the Slaughter of the Cities, and suburbanization were introduced by American planners to break up and disperse the urban Catholic communities opposing the Judeo-WASP designs of the New Deal/War Deal state (whose coalition of interests had converged in opposition to America First). (See E. Michael Jones, The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal As Ethnic Cleansing [9] [2004]; Christopher Shannon, A World Made Safe for Differences [10] [2001].)