Happy Fourth of July!
For the Fourth of July, I quote Collections: My Country Isn’t a Nation by Bret Devereaux:
So we have our definition of a nation: a people, historically connected geographically coherent territory, with a shared language, culture and myth of common birth-origin. The United States obviously fails this definition. It isn’t even remotely close.
To find a common ancestor or ancestral group - a national [Latin:] natio - that connects even a fairly modest majority of Americans, one would have to go back to proto-Indo-European-speakers living in tribes on the Pontic-Caspian Steppe around 5,000 BC or so - a place notably neither within the United States nor hearkened back to as a historical homeland by many Americans.
He goes on to describe that the United States has a shared history, with the Revolution figuring prominently, but that it is the history of the United States as a state, not as a nation (people), because a large majority of the people do not claim ancestries that were present at the Revolution:
That leaves us adding English + American + Scottish + Scotch-Irish to get people whose reported identity might cause them to hearken back to ancestors who were present and free at the founding and we get 17.7% (7.8+7.2+1.7+1), ... Or - with a generous upward rounding - about 20%. ... By raw numbers, none of these [other reported ancestries] has much of a claim to be the ‘main’ shared history. This is a striking difference between the United States and many (though not all) other countries which I think isn’t much appreciated; there is no core American ethnicity in the sense of raw numbers. This is often obscured because ethnic distinctions which would be broken out in other countries are collapsed into large categories (like ‘White’ or ‘Hispanic and Latino’) in census documents and discussions. But 76.4% of Germans are ethnic Germans; none of the constituent countries of the UK is below 75% its core ethnic identity. In that context, with the great majority of people having most (or in some cases all) of their ancestors having lived within the bounds of the modern state for generations (in the case of Germany, typically generations before the formation of that state) there really is a ‘shared history’ stretching back quite some distance.
(This reminds me of the case of Cheddar Man, a body found preserved in a bog near Cheddar, England. IIRC, the body was 6,000 years old. Genetic testing found a current resident of Cheddar who had a very similar Y chromosome. It's likely that the man's male ancestral lineage had lived near cheddar for all of those 6,000 years.)
Most nations claim to occupy a sacred, ancestral homeland; the United States is fairly open (if quite conflicted) about the fact that it occupies someone else’s sacred, ancestral homeland.
While there are some white nationalists who deny all this, most people understand it at some level. And I think that leads the more mystical type of conservative not to romanticizing the sacred bloodline and soil, but to Constitution-olatry. Because that's what is really the country's commonality, idealizing a particular set of principles. This can get really extreme, to the point that some consider the Constitution to be handed down by God in the manner of the Scriptures of the Abrahamic faiths. (Yes, there is a book Miracle at Philadelphia.)
This leads me to consider an important date in the formation of the United States which I've never seen given the emphasis it deserves: 1924 That was the year that the American Indians were granted citizenship, or so it was described. But what it really was was the enactment/recognition that the tribes, or native soveriegn nations, were constituent parts of the United States, and their members were thus citizens of the United States. The preceding theory, which was also factually true in practice from colonial times until the late 1800s, was that the tribes were external countries and their members foreigners to the United States.
The psychological problem with that is that the Indian Wars, which in their day had been straightforward grabbing of land from foreign nations (which has been universally practiced from the dawn of history), became acts of oppression against other Americans. And at least around New England, you can see historical markers retconning that the land of one town or another had been purchased from the Indians in a reasonably honest way, usually dating from the first decades of the 1900s.
Compare with the Mexican-American War, which was an overtly imperialist land-grab that obtained about one-quarter of the continental United States from Mexico (which had rebelled against colonial Spain, which had conquered it from various Native tribes, which had conquered it from various previous Native tribes ...). Nobody's ever thought to apologize for that.
So we have our definition of a nation: a people, historically connected geographically coherent territory, with a shared language, culture and myth of common birth-origin. The United States obviously fails this definition. It isn’t even remotely close.
To find a common ancestor or ancestral group - a national [Latin:] natio - that connects even a fairly modest majority of Americans, one would have to go back to proto-Indo-European-speakers living in tribes on the Pontic-Caspian Steppe around 5,000 BC or so - a place notably neither within the United States nor hearkened back to as a historical homeland by many Americans.
He goes on to describe that the United States has a shared history, with the Revolution figuring prominently, but that it is the history of the United States as a state, not as a nation (people), because a large majority of the people do not claim ancestries that were present at the Revolution:
That leaves us adding English + American + Scottish + Scotch-Irish to get people whose reported identity might cause them to hearken back to ancestors who were present and free at the founding and we get 17.7% (7.8+7.2+1.7+1), ... Or - with a generous upward rounding - about 20%. ... By raw numbers, none of these [other reported ancestries] has much of a claim to be the ‘main’ shared history. This is a striking difference between the United States and many (though not all) other countries which I think isn’t much appreciated; there is no core American ethnicity in the sense of raw numbers. This is often obscured because ethnic distinctions which would be broken out in other countries are collapsed into large categories (like ‘White’ or ‘Hispanic and Latino’) in census documents and discussions. But 76.4% of Germans are ethnic Germans; none of the constituent countries of the UK is below 75% its core ethnic identity. In that context, with the great majority of people having most (or in some cases all) of their ancestors having lived within the bounds of the modern state for generations (in the case of Germany, typically generations before the formation of that state) there really is a ‘shared history’ stretching back quite some distance.
(This reminds me of the case of Cheddar Man, a body found preserved in a bog near Cheddar, England. IIRC, the body was 6,000 years old. Genetic testing found a current resident of Cheddar who had a very similar Y chromosome. It's likely that the man's male ancestral lineage had lived near cheddar for all of those 6,000 years.)
Most nations claim to occupy a sacred, ancestral homeland; the United States is fairly open (if quite conflicted) about the fact that it occupies someone else’s sacred, ancestral homeland.
While there are some white nationalists who deny all this, most people understand it at some level. And I think that leads the more mystical type of conservative not to romanticizing the sacred bloodline and soil, but to Constitution-olatry. Because that's what is really the country's commonality, idealizing a particular set of principles. This can get really extreme, to the point that some consider the Constitution to be handed down by God in the manner of the Scriptures of the Abrahamic faiths. (Yes, there is a book Miracle at Philadelphia.)
This leads me to consider an important date in the formation of the United States which I've never seen given the emphasis it deserves: 1924 That was the year that the American Indians were granted citizenship, or so it was described. But what it really was was the enactment/recognition that the tribes, or native soveriegn nations, were constituent parts of the United States, and their members were thus citizens of the United States. The preceding theory, which was also factually true in practice from colonial times until the late 1800s, was that the tribes were external countries and their members foreigners to the United States.
The psychological problem with that is that the Indian Wars, which in their day had been straightforward grabbing of land from foreign nations (which has been universally practiced from the dawn of history), became acts of oppression against other Americans. And at least around New England, you can see historical markers retconning that the land of one town or another had been purchased from the Indians in a reasonably honest way, usually dating from the first decades of the 1900s.
Compare with the Mexican-American War, which was an overtly imperialist land-grab that obtained about one-quarter of the continental United States from Mexico (which had rebelled against colonial Spain, which had conquered it from various Native tribes, which had conquered it from various previous Native tribes ...). Nobody's ever thought to apologize for that.