Overwhelming majorities of Americans now approve of interracial marriage. Credit: Getty
After a generation in which globalisation was supposed to be the future, nationalism is back — including in its hideous forms that peg national belonging to arbitrary racial categories. Consider a recent rant from Tucker Carlson, in which the Former Fox News host mused: “Every other group in the world has the right to its own homeland, except white people? Like, what? Like, tell me, just explain to me how that makes sense. Either no group has the right, or every group has the right — it’s really that simple”.
No, in fact, it’s complicated. In conflating race and nation, white nationalists on the Right like Carlson make the same mistake as Left-wing multiculturalists who use “culture” as a synonym for “race.” But race, however defined, is a biological concept, while nationality is a matter of culture. Everyone is born with a particular combination of DNA, but nobody is born speaking Japanese or Slovenian and preprogrammed with a particular nation’s culture and customs and tastes in cuisine.
As more countries become melting pots, thanks to the combination of immigration with assimilation, more nations like the United States will be made up of people who share a common culture, but not common ancestors or a common resemblance.
“Nation” and “state” are sometimes used interchangeably. But they must be different things, otherwise the term “nation-state” would be redundant, like nation-nation or state-state. “State” refers to an organised, independent territorial political community. “Nation” refers to a social community, defined by nonpolitical markers of some kind.
In nation-states, the national community and the political citizenry overlap, though not completely. But in addition to nation-states, there are multinational states with two or more nationalities — Anglophones and Francophones in Canada, Flemings and Walloons in Belgium. And there are stateless nations, like the Kurds and the Palestinians.
Whether you belong to a particular state’s citizenry or a particular national community is an objective question. It is sometimes said that to be an American is to believe in liberal democracy. No “American-ness” (extra-political cultural identity) exists, we are told, only “Americanism” (devotion to a particular political creed). But this gets both the American state and the American nation wrong.
There are three ways to become a citizen of the American state: to be born to one or more parents who are citizens; to become a naturalised citizen after a lengthy process of legal immigration; or to be born on US territory (according to a contested Supreme Court decision). A foreign national who tells a US custom agent, “I believe in the principles of the Declaration of Independence” isn’t immediately granted citizenship.
Nor is there any ideological or credal test in the oath that immigrants must swear to become US citizens; it is a loyalty oath to the government, the state half of the nation-state compound, not a confession of a secular creed: “I hereby declare, on oath, that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty, of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen; that I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic…”
Is there an American “nationality”, a cultural majority, distinct from the US citizenry? For all of the talk about “American exceptionalism”, the relationship between state and nation in the United States isn’t different in kind from that in other modern countries.
Contemporary countries are shaped by what might be called the Three D’s: decolonisation, disestablishment, and desegregation. Most of the countries represented in the United Nations today, including the United States, were created from the partition of a few multinational empires — overseas colonial empires, like the British and French empires, and overland dynastic empires, like those ruled by the Hohenzollerns, the Hapsburgs, and the Romanovs, whose domains were held together under new communist management until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.
The newly independent fragments usually have been more ethnically homogeneous than the multinational empire from which they were carved. In most post-imperial states, the numerically largest community — European settlers in the Americas and Australia and New Zealand, the largest tribe in the former dynastic empire — has lent its language to the successor state, and sometimes its name. Poland is the land of the ethnic Poles.
All contemporary nation-states have ethnic minorities as well as ethnic majorities. Not all citizens of Poland are ethnic Poles. The disestablishment and privatisation of religion and the abolition of formal racial or ethnic segregation guarantee national minorities civil and political rights equal to those of members of the national cultural majority — in theory, if not always in practice.
The result in modern nation-states is the replacement of a “thick” conception of national identity — uniting language, culture, religion, and biological race — with a thinner but genuine national identity defined chiefly by a shared language and a few customs and cultural references that are shared by most citizens, notwithstanding their religious beliefs and ancestry.
This emphasis on language and customs in defining national identity is a return to the historic norm. For most of human history, settled populations were similar in appearance and ancestry to their nearest neighbors, who were sometimes their greatest enemies. You couldn’t tell which tribe people belonged to merely by looking at them. But whether they spoke your language, and whether they spoke it with an accent or not, could tell you whether they belonged to your community or were outsiders.
In the biblical Book of Judges, the Gileadites identified their enemies, the Ephraimites, by forcing suspects to pronounce the word “shibboleth” (an ear of wheat or rye), which the Ephraimites mispronounced as “siboleth”. Hence, the term “shibboleth” for a marker of group identity.
Membership in the cultural nation is defined not only by the language you speak, but also by the language in which you think, the Muttersprache (mother tongue), acquired in most cases in childhood. Most citizens in a nation-state are members of the linguistic and cultural majority, but belonging to it isn’t and shouldn’t be a condition of citizenship. It is no insult to say that the immigrants Francis Lieber, Carl Schurz, and Albert Einstein became great US citizens while remaining cultural Germans.
Of course, outsiders who look no different from insiders can learn to talk like insiders as well. For this reason, in the past, ethnic boundaries among tribes of similar appearance were sometimes reinforced by physical alterations like circumcision, in the case of Jewish men and boys, or by distinctive clothing, ornaments, or hairstyles.
In many premodern Muslim and Christian societies, Jews were forced to wear yellow stars or other badges, turbans or conical hats, or other distinguishing apparel. The Manchu conquerors of Qing China forced men who belonged to the subjugated Han Chinese majority to identify themselves by wearing “queues” or pigtails, on penalty of being beheaded if they refused. Among other things, the end of invidious religious and ethnic discrimination in modern nation-states means that all citizens are free to dress alike and wear the same hairstyles, if they choose.
The lands of European settlement, from the time of Columbus onward, have been exceptions to the historic rule that the cultural nations in a particular region tend to be similar in appearance and ancestry. The Americas from the beginning have been radically diverse, with European colonists living alongside Native Americans, African slaves and their descendants, and, in some places, Chinese, Indian, Japanese, and other non-European contract labourers.
The independence of former European colonies in the Western Hemisphere — beginning with the secession of the United States from the British empire in 1776, and followed by the independence of Latin-American countries from Spain and Portugal — initially produced Herrenvolk (master-race) regimes, majoritarian or authoritarian. The descendants of European settlers lorded it over Native Americans, people of African and Asian descent, and mixed-race populations.
In the New World, racial classifications have reflected ruling-class strategies, not anthropological realities. For example, where European settler populations were outnumbered, as in some Caribbean islands, settler elites sometimes pursued a divide-and-rule strategy in which non-European populations were split up into multiple categories, like “mulatto,” “octaroon,” and “quadroon,” which distinguished varying degrees of mixed European and African ancestry.
In the Old South, however, all states, save for South Carolina and Mississippi, had white majorities. For strategic reasons, the Southern planter class adopted a strict binary black-white binary based on the “one-drop” rule: anyone with any African ancestry, no matter how minor, was defined as “negro” or “black.”
This definition benefited the planter elite in two ways. First, the one-drop rule maximised the number of unfree workers defined as slaves and, later, as blacks under segregation, by including many people who wouldn’t otherwise have been considered black, and might even have been considered white, in other Western Hemisphere countries like Brazil. At the same time, the fear on the part of poor Southern whites of being defined as black, losing their status and even their freedom, gave them a vested interest in the maintenance of white supremacy, which the Southern ruling class invoked to avert populist uprisings and democratic agitation by non-elite whites.
To be consistent, the US government should have stopped classifying Americans using the arbitrary categories of 19th-century racists at the same time in the 1960s that racial discrimination was outlawed. Tragically, most though not all black American leaders since the 1960s have rejected the idea of colorblind law in favour of a system of “affirmative action” or racial preferences, which can’t work unless all Americans were assigned to one of a few arbitrary “races”: black, non-Hispanic white, Hispanic or Latino, Asian and Pacific Islander, Native American (the precise list has varied with each census since the 1970s).
Since the 1970s, the proponents of “race-conscious remedies” to the legacies of historic American racism have found allies among American corporations, which can use racial tokenism to divert attention from their mistreatment of all workers, and American universities, which similarly have used racial quotas to divert attention from favouritism in admission for “legacies” (children of alumni, particularly big donors).
The premise of the existing system of racial classifications in the United States is that the races, or pseudo-races, are permanent. But in reality, the white-only “melting pot” that blended Anglo-American Protestant settlers with later waves of European “white ethnics” into a single generic white population has become a transracial melting pot, creating a mixed-race American majority with a common language and culture.
Today, 94% of Americans approve of interracial marriage, up from 4% in 1958, and attitudes are now the same in the South as in the rest of the nation. Interracial marriage rose to 11% in 2020, from 3% five decades earlier, when the US Supreme Court struck down laws against it; among cohabiting (as opposed to married) couples, the figure is 1 in 5.
Among younger Americans, the ratio is greater. Nearly 1 in 3 “Asian” and “Hispanic” newlyweds, and 1 in 5 “black” newlyweds, has married someone of another “race.” The number is lowest among so-called non-Hispanic whites, around 15%, simply because this group remains the largest. One in 10 children born in the United States has parents of different officially defined “races.” Old-fashioned “race” thinkers like Ibram Kendi may insist that the “colorblind” ideal is itself a form of white supremacy. But for growing numbers of Americans, both native and immigrant, love is colorblind.
Progress, right? The problem is that the United States, like all other contemporary democratic nation-states, has below-replacement fertility, meaning its population will shrink without immigration. The combination of large-scale immigration with low native fertility means that in the United States, as in Europe, the share of the population made up of recent immigrants and their first- and second-generation descendants balloons rapidly.
This wouldn’t necessarily seem to threaten the cultural majority, if immigrants assimilated quickly and painlessly to the language and culture of their new country. But it is a problem if large numbers of immigrants choose not to assimilate, or if they are discouraged from doing so. Assimilation does take time. And as the 1990s US Commission on Immigration Reform led by civil-rights pioneer Barbara Jordan noted, America’s engine of assimilation begins to break down when newcomers are piled on too rapidly.
At the same time, too many on the American Right underestimate the power of assimilation. From the 18th century to the 21st, anxieties that immigrant groups would never assimilate to the mainstream in America have been overblown. Irish-Catholic immigrants didn’t overthrow American democracy on behalf of the Bishop of Rome and his Jesuits. Today’s Mexican-American immigrants are assimilating to the mainstream at the same rate over several generations as did the European immigrants of the past, making a mockery of fears that they will turn the American Southwest into a Spanish-speaking Quebec.
The only ethnic diasporas that have maintained their identities over time in the United States have been self-segregating sectarian communities, like the Amish and the Hasidim. Their numbers are so small that their self-segregation hasn’t caused significant problems, of the kind that would arise if a large share of the US citizenry formed a separatist religious enclave.
Then there are legal obstacles to assimilation. For most of American history, immigrants were assigned a race on coming to the United States. Scandinavian immigrants were assigned to white America; Haitian immigrants were assigned to black America. The combination of racial classifications with state laws against interracial marriage meant that “white” Italian Americans could marry “white” Polish Americans, but not black Americans.
The pan-racial categories of the US Census continue to be used to classify immigrants as well as natives. The results are frequently absurd. On arrival in the United States, immigrants from Denmark and Greece are assigned to the “non-Hispanic white” category, while immigrants from India, China, and the Philippines find themselves assigned to a fictitious “Asian and Pacific Islander” pseudo-race. Arab-Americans are treated as “non-Hispanic whites”, but some support the creation of a new, equally nonsensical category: Middle Eastern and North African, a fake official nationality that would include Arabs, Persians, and (to be consistent) Jews.
Proponents of affirmative action or “equity” or “DEI” want it to be legal to discriminate in college admissions and hiring against non-Hispanic whites, no matter how poor, in favour of “blacks” and “Hispanics”, no matter how rich. The beneficiaries of racial quotas, in addition to elite black and Hispanic Americans, include wealthy and well-educated immigrants — affluent professionals from West Africa, for example, or upper-class South Americans.
Unfortunately, the toxic interaction of America’s legacy racial categories with mass immigration promotes the idea that the important divide is not between Americans (of all races) and foreign nationals (of all races), but between so-called whites, blacks, so-called Hispanics, and so-called Asians. Like pan-Aryanism and pan-Africanism, these spurious racial categories never corresponded to any actual communities in the United States or anywhere else. Now that the American melting pot is creating a post-racial, post-ethnic cultural majority in the United States, it is time to abolish official racial classifications altogether.
The equation of race and nation by Right-wing racists and Left-wing multiculturalists is increasingly at odds with social reality. National identity in the future for the most part will be like national identity in the past — but with a post-racial twist. In the past, the members of a tribe usually sounded the same and looked alike. In today’s melting-pot nations, modified by waves of immigration, the members of the majority tribe will sound the same, even if they look different.
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Subscribe“In conflating race and nation, white nationalists on the Right make the same mistake as Left-wing multiculturalists, who use “culture” as a synonym for “race”. But race, however defined, is a biological concept, while nationality is a matter of culture. Everyone is born with a particular combination of DNA, but nobody is born speaking Japanese or Slovenian and preprogrammed with a particular nation’s culture and customs and taste in cuisine.”
Compare this quotation from the text with:
In conflating sex and gender, politicians on the Right and Left make the same mistake. But sex, however defined, is a biological concept, while gender is a matter of culture. Everyone is born with a particular combination of DNA but nobody is born believing they conform to a particular gender.
Politicians, commentators, UnHerd members (maybe), writers of articles, etc, seem to be very confused in their definitions. When convenient, it is possible to hop around from one definition to another in order to sell a piece of writing. The writer of the present article is making a very obvious point but one which is often missed. Compare, for example, the frequent agonising on this site about the definition of English. Who is English? What does English mean? Is being English a matter of DNA or an accident of birth. If my mother rushed to England to give birth, does that make me English?
People squished together by enforced segregation tend to band together. Thus both a shared culture and common ancestry can develop over time, making both concepts overlapping strongly. Which means people will often use them interchangeably, maybe even thinking that they are the same.
The same is true for strong sexual segregation creating a strong gender divide.
The other thing is that the “English” are considered a native people now, but were considered invaders of the British Isles 1,500 years ago.
Perhaps race is a cultural concept, imposed upon biology.
Perhaps nationality is a legal fiction, imposed upon culture.
Tucker is not a “white nationalist,” Mr. Lind, and the quote you highlight, if it is genuine, refers to the peculiar situation of South Africa.You should have researched it yourself rather than pile on Tucker.
On the one hand you fault the author for not researching the context of the quote; on the other hand you question whether the quote is genuine yet make no effort to ascertain if it is.
The quote is literal but completely disregards the context of the whole interview, which is that South Africa is regarded as a multi-national state in which constituent nations have the right to self-determination. The quote is taken out of context to assert falsely that Tucker is a “white nationalist.” effectively slandering him as a Nazi. Mr Lind should be more scrupulous.
Well said, Sir!
Run by people who keep money in sofas. But then don’t they all,now
Well, South Africa is undoubtedly being governed very badly at the moment. But you may recall that there was a previous major attempt to have such a white home land! But that is extremely difficult to justify or even fight for, if you insist on keeping all the best land. and all the major cities for yourself for a minority of 15 to 20 % of the population!.
Perhaps if the architects of apartheid had been less greedy (and even more genuinely spiritual) they could have successfully created a smaller self-contained white majority state based around the old Boer Republics.
The English speakers never supported in principal segregation of blacks and white so though they did sometimes a property qualification.
the average IQ of Black S Africans is 65. If you take into account common distribution, it means a lot are below that and some above it, their smartest people will be hovering as a very small Percentile, 90-100.
You cannot run a country in which the smartest people are of average intelligence. They cannot plan, build, create what is required to run a modern country
So S Africa, in fact all of Black africa is doomed. It only exists as is, because the West,China says we want what’s in your ground, we will build the roads, power plants for you, and we get the ore.
Black Africa has not built Technology that has existed for over 100 years, i’m sure you will cite an example of 1 person who built a plane, but this really is like the game of cilivilisation, your entering the future Age and Africa is stuck in the medieval period
So should we be surprised at the fall of S Africa, no , it was always gonna happen.Without white Governance , it had no option. Imagine if we turned over the running of the UK to the slowest kids in the class (some say we already have), well that’s S Africa’s ‘Elite’
intelligence determines everything, it’s why when the Europeans went to Africa and said hey why no wheels, and they said ?, we said erm Free real estate.
Despite Black run goverments, despite access to the world’s knowledge, those figures have barely moved since independance
As a planet we need to recognise Black Africa will always be poor , because of the culture, which is derived from it’s people
As they move to the Western World, then so will we become poor
It’s almost as if left wing identitarianism, swapping women and minority groups for Marx’s proletariat, created an ugly backlash.
Interracial and inter-ethnic relationships could ameliorate some of this, but one of the results of MeToo-ism is that an awful lot of people aren’t sleeping with anyone.
Well… that’s 10 minutes I won’t get back.
Meaning you wasted your time? No meaningful ideas were presented?
Ah, a sharp one
have you tried to get it back?
Maybe if you read the article again the time will be realloted to you
Good one!
A good approach….but the challenge is, you have to read it backwards for the time refund.
Without some ethnic, cultural, and religious solidarity, it’s not a nation. It’s an Empire, governing disparate people. Every state is not a nation, and every nation is not a state.
Rome wasn’t a nation, Austro-Hungary wasn’t a nation, the British Empire wasn’t a nation. Scotland and Tibet are nations.
Arguably Scotland is an Empire created through the battles of Ahelstane and Harlaw.
They just made a better fist of expelling their minorities, expunging their religion and proscribing their language than most other Empires have done.
Scotification made Russification look like a DEI campaign. Just ask a Pict or a Gael, if you can find one!
Scotland is a nation of which all the Citizens know the best thing in it is the road out of it.
“Every other group in the world has the right to its own homeland, except white people? Like, what? Like, tell me, just explain to me how that makes sense. Either no group has the right, or every group has the right — it’s really that simple”.
No, in fact, it’s complicated. In conflating race and nation, white nationalists on the Right like Carlson make the same mistake as Left-wing multiculturalists who use “culture” as a synonym for “race.”
Mr. Lind is making Tucker’s case. In the quote above Tucker was talking about the South African situation, and Africa and general where whites who have been their since the reformation are seen as “outsiders” interloping on an enclave that should be solely the domain of the “black” races. Perhaps Mr. Lind would care to listen to the whole interview with Emst Roets.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kqNHGXNp5m4
I stopped at.
‘White nationalists like Carlson…’
We signed up for a Benetton advert
But got Lebanon instead
This is wishful thinking, I’m afraid.
Ask any Malaysian if he can distinguish between a Achenese and a Bugis by sight. He will say it is simple. Ask any Nigerian if he can tell an Igbo from a Yoruba, ask any Indian if he can separate a Tamil from Gujarati. They will say the same. It is very easily done. Then ask an Englishman to say where in the country he thinks someone is from by sight – it’s almost impossible.
The ethnic component of nationality is a painful but inevitable part of life this side of Paradise.
The point about the ‘Shibboleth’ in the Book of Judges is precisely the opposite of the point that the writer is making above. The Gileadites and the Emphraimites were not near neighbours, they were of the same nation and thus could not be told apart by sight. That is the entire poignancy of the episode. Imagine a civil war in England where Englishmen were asking other Englishman to say ‘ bath’ or ‘grass’ to determine if their accent meant they would be killed. It is about ‘intra’ not ‘inter’ ethnic strife.
Hamiltonian Civic Nationalism of the sort this author promotes is one of the last great enduring utopian Enlightenment projects. It has only ever been succesfully incubated in the unique, black swan circumstances of American history, geography and economic development.
The American campaign to export ‘rainbow nation’ civic nationalism has done a great deal of lasting damage to the Old World.
Try it anywhere else and you will end up wih Yugoslavia, South Africa or Lebanon.
And as we’re seeing now, Syria.
Perhaps “The Old World” needed a thorough thrashing. The human experiment on this planet has taken on many cultural and civil formats but to say any of them were perfectly developed to deliver all people a decent living would be bald faced lie. It is a lie now to think there is any motive among the oligarchs and multinationals to generate such conditions. What if the experimental nature of humanity desires to be more than the labor laden fodder for the few?
If you look at pictures of youth partying frequently they are multi-cultural except if they are Zionists or some other hardcore ethnic expression frequently harvesting their hatred with their beer.
The “distinguish by sight” thing is very real. During the Rwanda genocide, the Hutu and the Tutsi would kill each other without compunction, whereas I (and probably most other Europeans) would have no hope of telling them apart by sight. That said, my own ancestors probably knew a Roman a Dane, a Viking or a Norman when they saw one (assuming my ancestors weren’t in fact Roman, Dane, Viking or Norman).
Excellent points, both explicit and implicit.
The reason you and I no longer know whether our ancestry makes us Roman, Dane, Viking, or Norman….or, for that matter, Goth, Saxon, Angle, Pict, or Carthaginian…(to name but a handful) is because over the hundreds, thousands of years in-between Then and Now, those distinctions have vanished as those worlds have vanished.
We have ‘melted’ together into an essentially seamless amalgam. Our DNA tests may point us to various points in that ancient world, but most of us really don’t care (though it does make for interesting conversations at cocktail parties).
There are no Pict Activists demonstrating & protesting for a return of their homeland (and we’d have to check Wikipedia to know just where that homeland was).
The Athenians don’t still hold a grudge against the Trojans. The Gauls do not now rage against the Romans.
As for the ‘tribes’ of today? Heck, give it another 2000 years (a blink of an eye in a cosmic timeframe) and no one will care because no one will know…in the same way we don’t know.
But, human beings all — I’m also sure they’ll find something else to fight about, even in 4025.
Race is not a social construct, but societies are racial constructs, because mixed race societies tend to have lower levels of trust…
Constructs or not, they have been important factors in human history and are likely to continue to be such. One might indeed suggest that the greater part of human experience is navigating and finding a place in a complex web of social constructs. The USA’S so called post racial society has by far the highest levels of crime and violence in the world and is to being low trust. One might consider whether the multiracial and multicultural nature of the USA is related to high crime and low trust, if not the direct cause.
“Highest levels of crime and violence in the world”. What utter piffle. Over the last 20 years the USA ranks anywhere from 90th to 110th in the world murder tables. Africa and Latin America have murder rates many multiples the murder rate of the USA.
Author makes the mistake of thinking that the rest of the world — many places with settled historic societies — is like the US, a nation of immigrants.
Heck, in a very real sense, the whole world IS a world of immigrants. As the Temptations put it, “People moving out; people moving in.”
We (homo sapiens) came upon the scene about 300,000 years ago. The earliest proto-urban settlements existed over 12,000 years ago.
Show me a ‘settled historic society’ and I guarantee you that it sits upon the bones of a a preceding ‘settled historic society’ even if it’s one we don’t know anything about.
Given a certain constancy to human nature, we can pretty much guarantee that human migration from Less to More was equally a constant, with the ‘newcomers’ either assimilating, destroying, or being destroyed by the populations they encountered in those seething migrations.
When it comes to stuff like this, indeed, there is nothing new under the sun.
Garbage Utopianism left over from the Enlightenment. Once transhumanists really speciate, meaning making themselves into something that cannot breed with Homo sapiens, then people will not be allowed in their off-world societies. I don’t think people will have any legal status in such societies unless they are kept as neutered pet.
You have to get off this diverse, idiot-filled planet where human beings are only too willing to commit genocide to have any persistent, prosperous societies. The two-legged rats are only too willing to destroy nice places by their very migration.
Human beings will be replaced.
A bit of mish mash article but I think what Michael is arguing for is a shift from primordialist conceptions of ethnicity to more constructivist ones. So to be ethnically American for example means sharing a language and some unspecified cultural customs rather than American ethnicity being rooted in ancestry and more specifically, white European ancestry.
The constructivist conception of ethnicity or thin ethnicity is almost indistinguishable from being a member of the political State granted as a result of citizenship. In this respect, nation and state are for all intents and purposes conflated into one as the Demos with citizenship determining ethnicity rather than ethnicity determining citizenship.
This ideal of thin ethnicity however meets obstacles because unlike Michael’s assertion, ethnicity or nationhood isn’t objective but subjective since some Indians for example who have emigrated to America and have gained citizenship might not necessarily identify as American but continue to consider themselves Indian hence classify themselves as Indian American or American Indian.
The same applies to multiethnic nation states like Britain. One is English British, Scottish British, Welsh British or can be Pakistani British or Indian British with the British synonymous with the state and English synonymous with the nation.
This is more difficult for America unless the 51 states are imagined as nations which does make America, like other ex British colonies like Australia and Canada, exceptional since most other nation states have ancestrally rooted populations which over time have often been demarcated by language and cultural differences which is often represented in Federal States.
I think the problematic that Michael isn’t quite addressing, whether accidentally or on purpose, is that multiethnic States whereby different people identify as different ethnicities with allegiances to different nations might delink loyalty to the State. For example a British Pakistani who identifies with Pakistani nationhood might be more loyal to the Pakistani state rather than the British state which could prove difficult in times of war or other instances of crisis.
The same of course could apply in America in times of crisis.
Racial identity is of course a more complex matter since in a country like America, any biological race could be ethnically American whether of the thin or thick variety so I think the race perspective is largely moot except in terms of discrimination so as Michael argues, in many ways race does not need to be classified at all.
The same doesn’t apply however with ethnicity, especially if people are choosing what ethnicity they want to be. I don’t think it applies because interethnic rivalries are very real and so it is important to be able to distinguish where different ethnicities are located and how they behave in relation to other ethnicities. Especially if ethnicity is rooted in the identification with foreign nations that might be hostile to the home nation as a result of different cultural mores as we often see in Britain.
51 states? Did I miss something? Or are you being waggish?
So are we to believe that the multitude of varied cultures and ethnic traditions spanning the globe are to each be respected and defended in their inherent right to exist on their own terms informed by their own traditions? Or should they all be blenderized into some post-modern, post-religious, post-ethnic cultural smoothie? If the former, then why exclude white Judeo-Christian groups from equivalent respect? If the latter, why demonize the countries (European & the U.S.) that are have become more blended than any other? I’m just not sensing that other parts of the world outside Europe and America are on board with the notion of multicultural blending within their nations. China, India, and the Islamic world dwarf the West in population and none of those places seem interested in the baloney espoused in this article.
Lind is a typical racist. Ask Lind if he think Israel should have open borders.
???
Why would anyone advocate for open borders? No one who believes their nation, their state, their country is different from (better than!) another’s would ever so advocate. It’s anti-human.
Even inside a single family home, each resident insists on ‘closed borders’ despite the fact that brothers and sisters continually violate said borders, to be greeted by war cries of “Mom….Sally’s messing up my room!”
Does such insistence upon a ‘private space’ make all of us racists?
It’s a pity that Lind’s article comes over as rather smug case of American exceptionalism. But the USA is a newish country based on immigration and it must fulfil its vocation, though it does look a very divided country. Britain and Europe are different however and we have seen our recent immigration, the context in which mixed marriages become normalised, in a demonstrably negative light. Turning England into Multiracial Land has destabilised our national community so that we can never really say ‘we’ anymore and diversity has undermined our ability to hold our elites accountable – it’s divide and rule. Immigration has also been unfair on the working class who had to deal with the brunt of it and cheap imported labour entrenches inequality. Then importing reactionary religions like Hinduism and Islam at a time of cultural decadence has been less than intelligent. Again mass immigration and the rainbow society never had a democratic mandate; what party ever had ‘more immigration’ etc as part of its manifesto? We never voted for it and haven’t trusted our delinquent political class ever since. Lastly the immigrants themselves must ask, what did their countries fight for to gain independence from colonialism? To abdicate their responsibility to make a success of their new freedom and instead come to Britain the former colonial ruler in a desperate desire to be in a first world, if declining, country? Something to be proud of? I sometimes think Kemi Badenoch, to take one example, might try and do something for all the people being killed on the Jos plateau instead swanning round with the ridiculous Tories.
So if immigration has been a negative context, how can the result of that, a racially beige society be a good future, and Eric Kaufman in White Shift argues the white British will disappear in the next century? Certainly, getting rid of race might seem a benefit and a fitting follow on to a liberal notion of Empire. But what will replace it? A country which cannot own or even recognize its past as its the past of funny white people. Won’t it find it very hard to give itself any thick identity – Lind admits this – and have anything anyone will want to defend or be grateful for? Won’t Britain just become an economic platform for global capitalism where we become obedient consumers rather than proud and critical citizens?
it will turn into place of Minority oppression by the new Dominant culture, Islam. It will be worse than what anyone can imagine,because there will be no ‘West’ to stop it.
It will be bankrupt, nothing will work and it will be Syria with Rain
forget Gay, Women’s rights, to an extent, western ideas imposed on them, if the West as it was no longer exists, who will stop them, China
In fact Europe becoming a Chinese managed colony would be the best option in that case
The end of the Western world for all it’s flaws, is still a disaster for not just the West, but the World.
The world will be at War, as there will be no brake on pre existing conflicts, be it the middle east, China/India, China/Japan
White people might have created the Nazi’s, but only White people could stop them. The spectres of Nazism is not restricted to White culture, we have the cultural revolution, Khmer Rouge, Rwanda, Uganda and without the Western world , no one will stop it.
If White Europe, White America ends, the world pretty much ends
All other democractic, tolerant societies will fall as well. Those countries will have to turn to ethno Nationalism to survive, seeing what happened in the west and the barbarians are at the gate
The difference there will be 9 billion people, nukes, drones, automatic weapons and not just swords. It will make WW2 look like a schoolyard fight. 1 group against another, because the expertise in large will be gone, to feed the world, to keep the world going.
Black Africa has an average IQ in the 60’s , and it will not change, and they will be the majority ethinicity on the planet
They cannot govern themselves , how will that work for them trying to govern the world
Coffee coloured people by the score. Who knew a 1970s pop song would be a political ideology? We all did. Even back then us teenagers watching Top of the Pops saw the underlying message and thought ….Hmmm?
A comparison between the USA and (say) Poland is both inappropriate and misleading – especially as there is no doubt about what is meant by Polish ethnicity (ditto Japanese, Malawian, Nepali, etc.).
The USA is an immigrant nation. Nobody would challenge that view (except, perhaps, the native American Indians who hardly feature in the political/social spectrum there). Poland is not an immigrant nation and its ethnic Polish identity is understood and accepted.
The author set out to discredit Tucker Carlson by quoting him out of context, and reveals his own bigoted worldview with his opening line:
“… nationalism is back — including in its hideous forms that peg national belonging to arbitrary racial categories.”
There will never be a post-racial American because there are too many interests served by perpetuating race as an issue. We’re the place exporting the DEI idea of reducing people to nothing more than their immutable characteristics.
Also, nations in the West have NOT become the melting pots America once was. Look across Europe; one demographic has created all sorts of problems precisely by refusing to assimilate. It’s like the author sees current events but either cannot understand them or chooses to ignore them.
The author’s apparent hope that at some point race will simply fade away is sweet-natured and no doubt well-intentioned. Let’s assume for the moment that it is true… it nevertheless reminds me of Keynes’ saying, ‘the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.’
Who knows what the future holds for racial differences? They have persisted for many centuries. And whether they are here to stay or not… they are here, now. And the author offers no helpful thoughts on how to deal with this reality, the one we live in now.
Not UnHerd’s finest essay.
Racial differences persisted in the past because of the difficulties of travelling long distances. Now that we can be most places in the world in 24 hours, and pretty much everywhere in the world in 48 hours, they may break down in the next century or two.
Classification does not in itself create barriers to assimilation. It’s elimination would not solve the problems for new comers. I think bilingual education, which prevents the next generation from joining the melting pot is more of a problem. Nigerians in the US are a good example of successful assimilation.
Same with the Irish, the Catholics, the Italians, the Germans, the Poles, etc.: all good examples of assimilation. Between 1820 and 1900m it’s estimated that somewhere between 14-28M immigrants entered the United States which — in 1820 — had a population of only about 10M.
Tucker is kind of silly sometimes in his boyish ideas but I would not categorize him as white nationalist.
Regardless, wait until people realize that AI is not creating new knowledge; it actually feeds on the language and ideas that we provide. Societies with many different languages will become far more advanced than those with fewer languages in the long run because language itself is the foundation of innovation, cultural evolution, and the generation of new ideas and concepts.
The production of language fuels creativity and progress, both from the individual body and the collective mind. As energy production improves and AI becomes more widely available, it will require even more languages to function effectively. Some dead languages might even need to be revived to enrich AI’s linguistic and cognitive capacity and against singularity!
It is crucial to understand that while the word *diversity* may be seen as a controversial or dirty today, neglecting its importance could have serious consequences in the future.
So whether you’re a white or black nationalist, you’re only cutting off the very pipeline needed for future survival!
More than anything Mr Lend needs an editor or an ai that will curtail his wandering and cause him to develop his point
America had an original sin: by 1776, 20% of the population was enslaved blacks. Short of remigrating the slaves (the failed Liberia plan), the best America could hope for was a colourblind society with Enlightenment values.
For better or worse, America chose to throw more races and cultures into the mix, and did quite a good job of assimilating them, until recently.
Britain had hardly any racial or cultural diversity until after World War 2. We could have stayed a coherent nation state, like Japan, but the ruling class forced mass migration onto an unwilling public. The same happened in France and Germany.
Ireland and Sweden avoided sabotage until recently. Now, coherent European nations can be found only in Eastern Europe.
If there’s one thing our ruling class can’t stand, it’s diversity.
No one really opposes immigration into the United States.
What they object to is immigration with no intention of assimilation.
People who immigrate legally, and earn citizenship, do not swear fealty to a nation, or a state, or a leadership. The swear to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution, the foundation upon which the United States is built. And defending that Constitution is something they swear to be prepared to do against all enemies, foreign or domestic.
Citizens of the United States must accept the responsibility to preserve, protect and defend, not a country, but an idea: embodied in words on paper, and periodically revised.
So, the Constitution they declare they are willing to defend may change at any time the citizens agree to those changes.
Here’s an English translation of the German citizenship oath:
“I solemnly declare that I will respect and observe the Basic Law and the laws of the Federal Republic of Germany, and that I will refrain from any activity which might cause it harm.”
The above is certainly a refined, and clear, oath. But, nowhere does it require a newly minted German citizen to declare to be willing to defend the laws and precepts under which the nation exists. I suspect you will find that most nations have oaths such as this one.
The French do not require any oath whatsoever.
All of this is not to declare the United States is in some way superior. Rather, it’s just to point out that people who wish to live, as citizens, within the United States are expected to do more than just abide by the laws. They are expected to do whatever is necessary to defend the ideas upon which their new nation exists.
And, note, this is not an oath natural born citizens are required to take.
Therein lies much of the challenge people in the United States are struggling to resolve.
All agree that assimilation is the key. Also it’s obvious that assimilation criteria are different across communities. To become an Amish is quite different from getting American passport. The threshold for becoming Canadian is virtually zero. Poland is not accepting Muslim immigrants ( they’ve got a tiny Tatar minority anyway). Germans are only politely asking to stop groping women in public, and you’re in. Japanese (and east Asians in general)don’t accept any immigrants at all. What if South African boers want to live in a closely knit segregated “white” community? Is it a problem ?
sadley Japan is becoming more diverse, with the usual uptick in Crime
No mention of those non-assimilationists, muslims, and the problems they.cause.
Race is tied to Culture whether this author cares to admit it or not.
We can have many theory’s into why development differences emerged, the reality they did. When 1 part of the world has an average IQ of 100+ and other parts are hovering around 70, and that persists even when they migrate to the West, then is that genetic, cultural , both
There can only be 1 dominant culture in a place, and the author thinks like Bill clinton that the future is all the races living Kumbaya in harmony
When in reality 1 dominant group is being replaced by another, most likely to be either Muslim or Sub saharian African.
When those groups become the majority, you won’t have European, American values you will have Islamic values. Why does that matter because everything is downstream from culture, Laws, Rights, Protections, views on Women, Minorities, the economy, the envirnoment
Anyone not in that group will suffer, be disavantaged
In reality the best outcome for minorities is to be governed by a Western dominant culture, i.e White,
It was that culture, that enforced many of the protections they benefits minorities , that are still absent in most parts of the Muslim world
Being a minority Muslim in a Western culture is preferable to being a Muslim majority Muslim culture, it’s why they come
If White western culture shrinks to the shadows, then the whole world suffers, because who will be there as a bulwark against the likes of the CCP or any future totalitarian regime
Sounds paternalistic, it is, as we see right know Black S Africans for example do not know how to govern, corrupt, violent, useless, because they are have no option, the average IQ for Black S Africans is 65. So even the most smart, enlightened ones are at best middle management
Tucker is right
The problem with the mass migrations and native population replacement is that they were/are not natural. They were/are paid for, promoted and defended through the NGO blob and globalist policies. It’s mankind messing with the world to reshape it. So, pointing out that it should not have been done, or should not be done is not racist. That’s more propiganda from the blob. The best thing would have been affordable (no-borderless deindustrialization policies, no radical green, no radical LGBT, but instead safe nations where couples could have children and have a future. Instead, since the early 2000’s we got globalism pushed.
Interesting, but misleading.
The question is not ‘Where did any particular Nation, Country, State, Race or Ethnicity came from?” (a fascinating but ultimately irrelevant exercise, save to historians), rather the question is, ‘How does any particular country, nation, state — regardless of origin — choose to handle questions of mass, mixed immigration today?”
The direction of that movement, of course, remains clear & consistent. People shift from conditions of Less to conditions of More. And time & again that means they move from poor, war torn, anarchic, violent, essentially ‘uncivilized’ nations, states, or countries to the more or less welcoming West.
And then what happens?
The American ideal used to be the ‘melting pot’: you may have come here from Anywhere…but what you became once you were here (what you were ‘required’ & expected to become’) was an American. “In grade school I was taught that the United States is a melting pot. People from all over the world come here for freedom and to pursue a better life. They arrive with next to nothing, work incredibly hard, learn a new language and new customs, and in a generation they become an integral part of our amazing nation.” (Jeff Hawkins)
But by the 70’s that began to change. “We become not a melting pot but a beautiful mosaic. Different people, different beliefs, different yearnings, different hopes, different dreams.’ (Jimmy Carter)
Assimilation became a bad word….melting pot an oppressive term…and soon it was all about the ‘salad bowl’ metaphor with each newcomer retaining his or her own ethnic/national/cultural identity in an unblending, unyielding heterogeneous mix. America became less a nation and more a Motel 6…in which the only real ‘shared identity’ was geographic.
The author seems to miss this salient fact.
He tells us, instead: “Now that the American melting pot is creating a post-racial, post-ethnic cultural majority in the United States, it is time to abolish official racial classifications altogether.” But the Left has fought that ‘melting’ with ferocity for decades. They depend absolutely upon the maintenance of the very racial/ethnic/cultural voting blocs that the author seems to somehow believe are vanishing. Their electoral success sits upon the continued Balkanization of the nation and the denigration of the particular socio-cultural-poltical-economic segment they identify as patriarchal oppressors. To move into any real kind of post-racial / post-ethnic world requires that they abandon the Victimization ethos that has served them well for decades.
Trump’s 2nd term victory may well signal a sea change in that struggle, on a nation/state level… we’ll see what happens. But demographically, the continued blending of racial/ethnic/national identities will only continue to accelerate, if only because the heart knows what the heart knows.
I think in essence what binds any successful society is set of common values and law as in which everybody is treated the same, irrespective of race. Multi cultural societies are struggling because there isn’t a commonality of values and as we see now, law and order. As soon as competing cultures, with different values, co exist under an established rule of law that then starts to be interpreted differently based upon ethnicity or gender and indeed sexuality, were in serious trouble. This is where woke meets the road and society becomes both disorientated, distrustful and most importantly, disenfranchised.
This is such a white centric view of the world.
Unfortunately due to the idiocy of long term mass third world immigration into the West it’s clear we are going back to some form of voluntary racial segregation which will obviously lead to far less mixing.
We are visual animals. How you look means something socially and culturally and humans make value judgements based on visual signals all day every day.
Sure it’ll be different this time but just look at the ever quickening Balkanisation of Europe for an idea of what’s coming.
We’ll be very lucky if we avoid low grade civil wars defined in many cases by race and religion.
We are NOT multicultural animals. We can be multiethnic but it has to be highly managed with very low numbers that are introduced slowly.
Doing it like the idiots today are doing it probably ensures an end in genocide or mass ethnic cleansing.
If ‘Hispanics’ are to be advantaged in college admissions, does that mean someone with parents from northern Spain will be advantaged over someone with parents from over the border in southern France? I’ve just checked a few authoritative U.S. sources and yes, the Federal Govt. definition of ‘hispanic’ does include Spain.
Coffee coloured people by the score. With no cultural heritage,no religious or ethical beliefs. No knowledge of their own ancestry. Of how the people who created them fit into the past times of the world except “they was Slaves”. No educational attainment thus wed to the drive to lower societal standards and the proliferation of streets strewn with discarded food wrappers from the only places of employment available to these coffee coloured people,fast food joints.
Nations aren’t nations anymore. People do not seem to have much attachment to them these days. They are more like apartments that you move out of when the whole neighborhood or just that apartment becomes run down.
I remember when I was old enough for the draft that I would have signed up and fought for my nation. It was decent back then and not explicitly Marxist like now. But now, I don’t want my kids to risk their lives, limbs or sanity fighting for what I consider to be a dying society. No one looks like me anymore, believes like me or even speaks the same language as I do. I would just switch “apartments.”
It is not race so much that is being abolished, as it is rooted in biology, but it is the nation state that is being abandoned by the people that live in it. Just look at all the economic migrants these days that abandoned their “homelands.”