When The Anglo Began To Self-Hate (8-24-21)

Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration, and the Future of White Majorities, https://lukeford.net/blog/?p=141443

* In 1924, mainline Protestant clergy were almost unanimous in their opposition to immigration restriction. However, their liberal activism was out of step with the views of their parishioners.

* The Young Intellectuals [of Greenwich Village 1912-1917] were Anglo-American bohemian artists and writers rebelling against their own Protestant culture. Inspired by Nietzsche and Bergson’s romantic individualism and modernism in art, they sought to overthrow what they perceived as a suffocating Puritan inheritance. The Young Intellectuals discovered the joys of Harlem’s black jazz scene, experimented with drugs, exhibited modern art at Alfred Stieglitz’s ‘291’ studio or read poetry aloud in Mabel Dodge Luhan’s salon.

* [Randolph] Bourne, on the other hand, infused Kallen’s structure with WASP self-loathing. As a rebel against his own group, Bourne combined the Liberal Progressives’ desire to transcend ‘New Englandism’ and Protestantism with Kallen’s call for minority groups to maintain their ethnic boundaries. The end product was what I term asymmetrical multiculturalism , whereby minorities identify with their groups while Anglo-Protestants morph into cosmopolites. Thus Bourne at once congratulates the Jew ‘who sticks proudly to the faith of his fathers and boasts of that venerable culture of his’, while encouraging his fellow Anglo-Saxons to:
“Breathe a larger air … [for] in his [young Anglo-Saxon’s] new enthusiasms for continental literature, for unplumbed Russian depths, for French clarity of thought, for Teuton philosophies of power, he feels himself a citizen of a larger world. He may be absurdly superficial, his outward-reaching wonder may ignore all the stiller and homelier virtues of his Anglo-Saxon home, but he has at least found the clue to that international mind which will be essential to all men and women of good-will if they are ever to save this Western world of ours from suicide.”

Bourne, not Kallen, is the founding father of today’s multiculturalist left because he combines rebellion against his own culture and Liberal Progressive cosmopolitanism with an endorsement – for minorities only – of Kallen’s ethnic conservatism. In other words, ethnic minorities should preserve themselves while the majority should dissolve itself.

* [Bourne split] the world into two moral planes, one for a ‘parental’ majority who would be asked to shed their ethnicity and oppose their own culture, and the other for childlike minorities, who would be urged to embrace their heritage in the strongest terms. This crystallized a dualistic habit of mind, entrenched in the anti-WASP ethos of 1920s authors like Sinclair Lewis and H. L. Mencken and the bohemian ‘Lost Generation’ of American intellectuals such as F. Scott Fitzgerald. All associated the Anglo-Protestant majority with Prohibition, deemed WASP culture to be of no value, and accused the ethnic majority of suppressing more interesting and expressive ethnic groups. The Lost Generation’s anti-majority ethos pervaded the writing of 1950s ‘Beat Generation’ left-modernist writers like Norman Mailer and Jack Kerouac – who contrasted lively black jazz or Mexican culture with the ‘square’ puritanical whiteness of Middle America. As white ethnics assimilated, the despised majority shifted from WASPs to all whites. The multiculturalism of the 1960s fused the Liberal Progressive pluralist movement with the anti-white ethos of the Beat counterculture.

* FDR told Catholic adviser Leo Crowley in January 1942, ‘Leo, you know this is a Protestant country, and the Catholics and Jews are here on sufferance.’