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In order to do that, I have to voluntarily embrace yet another vision of the world in which my ancestors were the bad guys. One of the core tenets of the “heartlanders of the world, unite” narrative is that the residents of large cities have always been snooty, effete, degenerate bullies, using their unfair control of media and industry to push never-ending cycles of hateful ideas and corrupting technology on the honest and hard-working people of the hinterlands. The immense scientific, cultural, and industrial achievements of the major urban centers? Yeah, those were bad actually.
The hallmarks of the urban elite’s artistic output - say, classical music, or Renaissance painting and sculpture - are actually just hoity-toity status-grubbing frivolities that snobs pretend to like in order to impress their college classmates. Science and technology promised to uplift humanity, but actually just divorced us from our natural God-given productive capacities and started our perilous descent toward transhuman abominations.
I understand that you specifically might not believe all of these things, or at least not fully. However, these are all claims I see made explicitly all the time, even by people whose entire lives and livelihoods are only possible because of the products of urbanite intellectual genius. Hell, much of the South’s financial life during its antebellum heyday was entirely dependent on the inventions of Yankees like Eli Whitney and Robert Fulton. (And much of its later financial life has depended on the inventions of different Yankees, like Henry Ford.) Heartlanders like to see themselves as the ones who actually make stuff, without whom the whole operation of society would crash down because urban degenerates are incapable of producing anything worthwhile. This narrative bears little resemblance to real life, either historically or currently.
I don’t say any of this to double down on the other extreme - the sneering, self-absorbed contempt that people such as yourself correctly perceive as emanating from some parts of “Blue Tribe” culture. (I’ve put “Blue Tribe” in quotations because, like “Red Tribe”, it’s a largely illusory, Frankesteinesque conglomeration of disparate elements; in other words, fake and gay.)
I’m in that rapidly-shrinking category of Americans who can legitimately trace their ancestry to all of David Hackett Fisher’s “founding American ethnicities”. My dad’s bloodline includes Mayflower Yankees and Cavalier potentates, including several notable early slave-owning politicians. My mom’s ancestry is deep Borderer through her maternal line - my maternal great-grandmother and her husband were hicks through-and-through, from a podunk Arkansas town. I have family in the heartland, and they’re great people; I wouldn’t want to disrupt their way of life, and I find there’s a lot to be said for it.
However, what you’re asking me to do is to relinquish my sense of pride in the very impressive accomplishments of the parts of my heritage that, in my opinion, truly made America great - the Yankee industrialists and inventors and thinkers - and to embrace an identity of defiance and resentment toward them, in favor of throwing my lot in with the Americans who have, for one reason or another, contributed arguably the least to America’s greatness, with the exception of the military sphere. This is quite a tall ask, and I would like to see Southern/Midwestern whites exercise some level of empathy and grace toward it, rather than the scorn and derision you’ve consistently demonstrated. There is still the possibility of a reconstituted White American identity that recognizes in equal parts the contributions of America’s various white ancestral groups, but I fear that people such as yourself are actually one of the largest obstacles to that project.
I largely agree with the sentiment in this comment, but you're overlooking the Midwest. Without the Midwest and Midwesterners in the latter half of the 19th century and beginning half of the 20th century, there is no American greatness. For every Yankee elite, there is at least one Midwestern elite who contributed equal or more to American greatness.
The Midwestern elites were, in my cases, just the direct descendants of Yankees who moved westward as the country expanded. That’s true of my dad’s ancestors, who came from Massachusetts and New Jersey, then spread through Kansas and Ohio and Illinois, before ending up in California. You can trace the Yankee diaspora easily through things like place names, as Colin Woodard did in his American Nations, a sort of companion piece/expansion of Albion’s Seed.
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