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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   7323 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 23, 2026

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National character is not merely the past. National character is not merely ethnicity. National character is not merely the line "nationality of father" in the birth certificate.

National character can be directly and plainly observed.

I don't see you building national character, for now I only see you advocating for no immigration. I'm afraid a certain Scottish Deutchman has you beat there.

You seem to be slipping between ‘national character’ in the sense of ‘at X we believe in building character in our students’ ie a chosen set of virtues, and ‘character’ as in ‘characteristic’ as a description of group traits.

You can simply go to countries and observe that different groups of people across the word have markedly different traits and that this is partially attributable to descent. Aggression, deference, conformism, stoicism, garrulousness, sensibility … these are not things taught purely in school. And what is taught in school bears a strong relationship to the traits of who decided the curriculums, who taught it, and who learned it.

Nobody is surprised when a child does something and people say fondly (or angrily), “he’s just like his father”. How can it be any different at scale? And why should people who liked their group, and the ‘character’ it had, not publicly lament its dissolution and call for reversing the damage?

I know that groups of people have different traits and they can be partially attributed to descent. I do not observe, and refuse to nakedly believe, that specific romanticized expressions of those traits magically pass through dozens of generations, intact, despite since then intermixing dozens of times and being subjected to environments that are unlike the one that brought out those expressions in the first place.

In other words, no one is actually just like their father.

If someone wants to instantiate a breeding program to make more people with as high percentage of 1776 American blood as possible, that's the motte to the "national character of pioneers and settlers" bailey.

Of course not, but IMO you have to remember:

  1. Modern heavy mixing is really very new. We’ve had mass movement of people for 130 years max. The Americans of 1890 were (I would think) overwhelmingly the Americans of 1776 or 1690. Similarly in the UK it’s the same: over time everybody’s English, still English, still English, still English, whoah holy fuck. Even the Irish and Welsh and so on didn’t immigrate that much and where the English emigrated to Northern Ireland you do see different ethnicity and bitter rivalry. I’m describing healing a recent massive discontinuity, which has vastly increased in scale only very recently.
  2. Of course nobody is exactly like their father, but even a grandson who moved abroad is going to be much more like them than somebody from god-knows-where. In America especially I observe a thought process that goes approximately: America is a land of pioneers -> everyone who comes to America is by definition a pioneer -> therefore they’re super-duper American and all is well. I think this is extremely superficial and surface-level. Creedal nations don’t work because everyone interprets and responds to the creed differently.

To put it more provocatively:

You can paint the Stars-and-Stripes on any number of substrates: wood, steel, plastic, paper. For a while they will all look the same. But in fifty years they’re going to look VERY different.

Personally, I just miss an ‘Englishness’ we used to have. It brings me immense comfort and joy to go back to the countryside, which is still majority British, and be amongst my own familiar people. Then for work I have to return to London which is just fundamentally alien. Not just in its languages but in the attitudes and looks and behaviour of everybody around me.

We imported vast numbers of non-British and it’s now completely impossible to defend any sort of right to our country, our government or our institutions without stepping on the toes of people who don’t all hate me now but will the moment I suggest that Englishness should be anything more than a historical relic. We (the native English) lost our country, and the only way to even begin getting it back is to be able to freely distinguish between what and who is English and what and who is not. So I appreciate @KMC for being forthright about it.

You could get it back if the English got united about it. Isn't England still 80% English? Now that won't happen because it seems the UK elites hate anything English but it could.

I feel like America is too much of a propositional nation for that to work. We've had mass immigration for a long long time. KMC's America was lot by the time of the civil war with all the Germans, Scandinavians and Catholics that were filling up Northern cities. In some ways the Confederacy was the last gasp of Anglo America but with it's fall it was well and truly dead. KMC is not totally wrong but his politics died with the Know Nothing party more than 100 years ago and even at their peak they weren't able to stop immigration. The idea of America's posterity died with the civil war and I don't know how you could revive it since the majority of white Americans aren't pure Anglos. And a significant portion of those who are, are extremely woke New Englanders.

In practice it’s more complicated than that. Immigration is disproportionately in the main cities and at the top and bottom of societies. For example, of the heads of the four main political parties, i.e. the people who might become PM, 50% are not English in the sense I describe.* In practice, you only need one non-English person in a committee before asserting English primacy turns into a massive interpersonal conflict.

I agree with you that KMC’s wishes are ultimately doomed thanks to prewar immigration, but I agree with his assertion that, ‘having massively diluted my people’s share in and influence over America in the 20th century doesn’t give you the right to then do it again much harder in the 21st’. And I appreciate his willingness to state clearly that nationhood and national character is about more than a passport or being able to recite the magic words in the right order.

*Labour+Reform / Tories+Greens. Lib Dem’s are as irrelevant as they have always been.

National character is not merely the past. National character is not merely ethnicity. National character is not merely the line "nationality of father" in the birth certificate.

National character can be directly and plainly observed.

I don't see you building national character, for now I only see you advocating for no immigration.

Yes, because continued migration at present levels will destroy the national character of many western countries, even if you add a bunch of things on top of the "merelies" you listed. What's more, not a single person pushing back on him will ever advocate for any measure for actually preserving national character. They will argue "cultures have, like, always changed, maaaan", instead.

I am in favor of limiting immigration to the level sustainable by assimilation in my country and I believe it would be sensible for USA.

What I'm pushing back on are the kind of people who go on redefining what "assimilated" means because they did a DNA test or dug up the family tree and found dead old things to be proud of instead of actual substance.

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