Yes, we are many nations, something that is probably true of other countries as well, but I don’t live there, so I can’t comment on them. But I can comment on the U.S.
Nation 1: The American Indians
The American Indians are the first, smallest (about 1%), and saddest of the nations. They were here first and didn’t want “us” to come. But we did, bringing “the future”, not to mention smallpox. The myriad of New Stone Age cultures that developed in what has become the U.S. are fascinating, but the world in which they could thrive has disappeared forever. I recall during the Clinton administration that the government had opened up some river to allow salmon spawning and the head of some tribe said “Now we can live as our ancestors lived,” and I felt sad for him, because of course he didn’t want to live as his ancestors lived, without the aid of modern medicine and a thousand other conveniences. Life among the “savages” might not have been “nasty, brutish, and short”, but it certainly was short and lived at the mercy of the elements—and, often, other tribes. The Indians’ cultural heritage has been romanticized and sentimentalized, often as much by Europeans as Indians, as the opposite of today’s supposedly wicked world, a hippie paradise where everyone is laid back and mellow, a never-never land that never existed.
Nation 2: The African Americans
The Indians didn’t want us to come. The Africans didn’t want to come. These two form the outliers. Since African Americans constitute 15% of the population rather than 1%, their estrangement from the norm has far more political significance. For several hundred years, white Americans systematically destroyed whatever cultural structure existed among the Africans they enslaved, and after slavery was formally abolished, instituted a less explicit though scarcely less obtrusive system of social oppression. The great “liberal” reforms of the New Deal were explicitly designed to exclude as many black Americans as possible, something that most liberals are deeply reluctant to admit. The Civil Rights revolution of the sixties freed black Americans to express the hatred they felt for their oppressors, who were shocked at the “ingratitude”. “Why aren’t you more grateful?” the whites demanded. The problem for blacks is that defining yourself as “not white” is a trap, as the ludicrous “white culture” poster put out by the National Museum of African American History inadvertently demonstrated. Picking a fight with western civilization serves Africans no better than it does the Indians.
Nation 3: The White South
Americans are spoiled, other nations tell us, because we don’t know what it’s like to suffer defeat. Well, for most of us white folks it’s true, but there are white folks who knew defeat, utter and complete defeat, and they lived down South. During the Civil War, 20% or more of Southern white men were either killed or wounded. Almost all of the fighting was done on southern soil; significant areas were subject to deliberate destruction; the south as a whole was subject to a stringent northern blockade, particularly after the battle of Antietam, in September 1862, after which Great Britain decided the south probably wasn’t going to make it. After the war, with no more slaves to exploit, and cotton prices falling through the floor thanks to the emergence of alternative sources during the war, the south lapsed into an economic decline that lasted essentially for a century. Back in 1953, southern historian C. Vann Woodward wrote a famous article, The Irony of Southern History, dated now in many ways but still worth reading, pointing out how different “history” seemed to the beaten south versus the triumphant north. The sad fact is, however, that the real irony of southern history is that there is no irony—that defeat did not teach the south humility but a tedious reactionary bluster. Prior to the sixties it was considered “polite” by Yankees to ignore all this southern nonsense—“molasses and magnolias”, Duke Ellington used to call it. Now, of course, the tide has turned, with much of the south growing ever more belligerent, though fortunately incapable of outright racism—most of the time.
Nation 4: the White North
Ever since the Civil War, white northerners, principally from the Northeast, ran the U.S., and defined it. There were many divisions, of course, based on religion and national origin,1 with the Protestants on top. This is optimistic America, used to winning. Well, until recently. A large chunk of both Protestant and Catholic northerners have rejected the elite northern ethos to join with the white south in opposition to “modern times”, largely as a result of the decision of the Democratic Party to support full racial integration and, more recently, to embrace an aggressively secular sexual morality. Many, though I haven’t the slightest idea how many, of these northern reactionaries, if I may speak rudely,2 are ultimately of German ancestry, the minority that dare not speak its name, so to speak.3 The Germans were once a highly visible minority in the U.S., like the Irish, but were hammered by the hysterical culture war waged against them in the First World War, something that seems almost entirely forgotten now (but not by the Germans). The rise of Hitler, and ultimately America’s triumphant conquest of the Nazis in World War II, forced the Germans to take an even lower profile, but it left many Germans with a grudge against the Democrats as a result of both world wars.4
This leaves out the Hispanics, the largest “minority” of all, still in the process of definition/assimilation. On the one hand, Hispanics often face some form of racial prejudice. On the other, they are willing rather than unwilling immigrants. And then there are the Asians, particularly significant on the West Coast—California is about 15% Asian. Both “Hispanic” and “Asian” are categories so general as to be almost meaningless, though not quite. So, yeah, life isn’t as simple as it used to be.
1. When I lived in Chicago in 1967, immediately after graduating from college, when you met someone at a party they would ask “What are you?” (Only asked of white people, of course.) If you were Catholic, you would most likely give your national origin. If Protestant, your denomination. If Jewish, well, kind of “awkward”.
2. And who’s to stop me?
3. When I was a boy, growing up in northern Virginia, I had a friend who came from a German family. His two older brothers were passionate Civil War buffs, both enamored of the “Lost Cause”—the “other” Lost Cause.
4. Samuel Lubell, in his once-famous book The Future of American Politics, discussed the political plight of the Germans while explaining how Wisconsin, generally regarded as the most progressive state in the country prior to World War II, ended up electing Joe McCarthy to the Senate. In both cases, Lubell argued, German voters were voting against the Democratic “war mongers”. It’s just that the anti-war movement in the World War I era was “progressive”, but reactionary during and after World War II. Lubell’s book was written in the 1950s, and he was old enough to have lived through most of what he was writing about. I have seen no discussion whatsoever of the “German vote” since then.
