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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   8421 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 23, 2026

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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/propositional 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.

Thank you. I'm trying to be uncompromising about this. I'm trying to deny the assumptions that get slipped in, the defeatist attitude. Sure, I might lose, but I'm not going to quit, and I'm not going to shut up and lose quietly.

I am basing my attitude on what I see in England. I don't want that happening here, and where I see it starting, I speak out against it.

Calling Indians Americans is the start of it, and so I don't do it, and I call it out as false where I see it.

The Americans of 1890 were (I would think) overwhelmingly the Americans of 1776 or 1690.

This would be wildly incorrect, unless you have a specialized definition of overwhelmingly. Black 47 brought the Irish fleeing famine, 1848 brought waves of German immigration after failed revolutions. Local elementary schools near me taught in German until the 1900s. We got 2,000,000 Irish and 1,500,000 Germans dumped into an 1840 population of around 15,000,000 free men. The Civil War was fought, in significant part, by immigrants.

Immigration would break 1,000,000/decade in the 1840s, and crest at 5,000,000 in the 1880s.

If you want England to be English, that is fine, for you. One only has to turn back the clock a few decades, within living memory there were few immigrants in England. England is still 80% white English. The United States white population, broadly defined not even getting into the "heritage American" distinction, fell below 80% in the 80s.The colonial stock were a minority by 1900, at the latest, among the white population. And 1900 is the start of the American Century, not its end.

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.

Yet America remains the greatest nation on Earth, as a creedal nation, assimilating vast multitudes.

Yet America remains the greatest nation on Earth, as a creedal nation, assimilating vast multitudes.

We don't assimilate anyone any more. We've got world class athletes competing for China and Sweden because we can't assimilate them anymore.

Also, I think you're plain wrong. Wrong on the facts

Providence has been pleased to give this one connected country to one united people—a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs, and who, by their joint counsels, arms, and efforts, fighting side by side throughout a long and bloody war, have nobly established general liberty and independence.

The reason America is the greatest nation on Earth is because of this providence, and it is because of this providence that we were able to be a creedal nation in the first place. You have the order backwards, you've confused cause with effect. A bunch of not-that-different people got together and decided to put aside their differences. It was because they were not-that-different that it worked in the first place. And now, when the most different people on Earth are coming, and all of the mechanisms of assimilation have been left decrepit if not outright outlawed, now you say we are a creedal nation, when nobody believes the creed except for how much they can squeeze from 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 society. For example, of the heads of the four main UK 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 Englishness 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 Dems are as irrelevant as they have always been.

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