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I feel like I’m a broken record- whites are not a monolithic group. I don’t have much in common with the blue tribe, I have less in common with Finns or Greeks.
My own kind of white people have positive stories. It matters not to me that my outgroup whites don’t.
It doesn’t bother you that your children and great grandchildren will face a worsened quality of life as a result? They will be confronted with their “character” written in the stories of others and, consciously or unconsciously, lose motivation. Their social and career outcomes will be worse. Other groups have perceived the vast benefit of monolithizing related tribes into one single group, and there are no signs of this slowing down.
I would also say: it’s dubious that humans can even replace a positive tribal story with something else. This seems ingrained in the same way that belonging to a tribe is ingrained. “Being really good at math” is not a sufficient plotline to make up for an empowering origin and destiny.
Blue tribers(or damnyankees) shooting themselves in the foot out of neurosis doesn’t matter very much to me. I don’t like them very much.
And I would posit that the red tribe is undergoing that process of monolithizing. My children and grandchildren will have positive and empowering tribal stories, some of them made up and some of them true- c’est la vie. Some of those stories will come from me, or directly from their maternal grandparents; others will be in the red tribe water. But I have no desire for them to go the way of damyankees and carpetbaggers; those are my enemies, not minorities(who are, after all, just perfectly sensibly trying to take care of them and theirs). Seeing them hang themselves is schadenfreudelicious(it is to a word, I just invented it).
I see where you come from, but how can you devise a captivating and holistic identity which specifically excludes red tribe? And while you may not like them now, perhaps you would like red tribe if they stopped behaving self-destructively?
You perhaps misunderstand me. I don't like the blue tribe and am perfectly happy to require at least some assimilation to red norms for a captivating and holistic identity. The blue tribe behaves self destructively from a group cohesion perspective, and this does not move me to pity or frustration. They are my enemies. I feel bad for some of the innocents caught up in it(trans kids most especially), but there's not a lot to be done about it.
When Jonah was commanded to preach at Nineveh to achieve the conversion of the Assyrians, lest they be destroyed in God's wrath, he refused until swallowed by a whale for the reason that he did not actually want the Assyrians to avoid destruction. I find this highly relatable.
Alright, but what I am trying to get at is what you intend your story to be. Is this a single-family story? Do you intend to somehow keep your ethnic-specific identity eg as an Irishman?
The red tribe seems to be broadly coalescing into a big tent story about heartlanders in the same boat. This narrative takes strong historical liberties- my ancestors would not have gotten along with midwestern Germans, for example- but it is a narrative and doesn't overtax the assimilative capacity of anyone like me.
I am a Cajun and Cajuns are historically quite good at keeping a distinctive identity even when part of a broader whole. I also have many family stories of overcoming hardship. None of this places me or mine outside of a heartlander identity but cements the state of belonging within it.
As is probably well known, I have a strong religious identity and strong religious identity can often partially substitute for lack of ethnic ties. I don't expect this latter property to be necessary in twenty years, but it is another reason why me and mine will do OK.
I understand why dissident blue tribers consider it a crisis that there is a lack of positive stories about white people as a class. The solution for them is to join the red tribe, which regards its own ancestors positively. Honestly I'm not sure why people like me would want to establish an overarching 'white' identity in coalition with the mainstream blue tribe; as far as I can tell, deep reds can manage our own relations with the blacks and hispanics just fine, the mainstream blues won't stop trying to make our lives harder for no reason and bailing them out from their self inflicted wounds is just stupid.
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.
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