RISE AND FALL OF ANGLO-AMERICA – IMPORTANCE OF CHANGING DEMOGRAPHICS IN POLITICAL AND SOCIAL DEVELOPMENTS
I was recently reading a review of Professor Eric Kaufmann’s important book about why the White Anglo Saxon Protestant ascendancy in the United States has been displaced.
The theories about this usually focus on the numbers of immigrants, in particular of Hispanics, coming into the United States across their southern border and the consequential cultural overwhelming of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestants (“WASP”) and also of their traditions which founded America.
Professor Kaufmann has however an interesting point to make, which is that something within “WASP” liberal culture which was fatal to its continuing dominance. You can see his theory below.
It seems to me that you can see something similar happening in
earlier times, for instance in Ireland. The Anglo-Irish Ascendancy of English origin families, by the late 18th Century, owned most of the land of Ireland and held most of the political power. This dominant position was then frittered away by members of the Ascendancy themselves.
Consider the following:-
1. The 1798 rebellion of the “United Irishmen” led by Wolfe Tone who was a “WASP”.
2. The consensual handing over of the Irish Parliament to incorporation into the UK Parliament under the Act of Union 1801 was led by the Ascendancy itself.
3. The subsequent granting of voting rights to Irish Catholics was spearheaded by the leading Anglo Irish ascendancy figure, the Duke of Wellington in 1829.
4. The vigorous campaign for land rights and Home Rule by the Home Rule League and Irish Parliamentary Party led by Charles Parnell.
5. There were also significant numbers of the Ascendancy who supported Irish Independence.
All these moves were opposed on the other side by Empire Loyalists, but the fact remains that there was an enduring strain of liberal thinking amongst the English in Ireland and indeed liberal English thinking in England which was against the interests of continuing the dominance of Ireland by English families.
This made me wonder what might have given rise to this type of thinking, which I do not think is found amongst other peoples around the world.
It seems that English people don’t like injustice and unfairness to other groups, perhaps thinking that if such treatment is removed the people concerned will want to become part of the English way of doing things. As history has repeatedly shown this is delusional but it keeps recurring and is now happening in England.
One possible explanation is that the English were particularly prone to the idea that everyone else wants to become English. This may be due to our unusually long period of Nationhood from England’s unification of 927 under King Athelstan. By contrast many European nation states only came into existence in the 19th Century.
It could also be part of the unique form of Reformation that we had under Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell led by the Crown, or it could be a consequence of the division within English society traditionally caused by class consciousness.
There is also the impact of Traditional English moral conformity around sexuality. In this regard it is interesting that the English traitors of the pre-war Cambridge spy network were mostly young men who were gay and therefore felt themselves in rebellion against the prevailing moral and legal codes even before they were recruited by Soviet Spy Masters to the cause of communism and worldwide revolution.
All of these were fractures in the English Nation’s sense of itself as a unified body which may be the root of what is certainly an interesting phenomena.
Here is the review of Professor Kaufmann’s book:-
Rise and Fall of Anglo-America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2004. ISBN 978-0674013032.
Here, Kaufmann offers his views on how the Anglo-Protestants, the founding stock and once dominant ethnocultural group of the United States of America, lost its status of dominance. He rejects the conventional view that this is due primarily to comparatively low fertility rates, large-scale international migration, and the growth in cultural prominence of ethnically diverse newcomers. Nor have the Anglo-Protestants maintained their dominant status by incorporating other groups of European descent into their midst, Kaufmann argues. Rather, the fall of Anglo-America is a consequence of the characteristics that have come to define this group, namely expressive individualism and egalitarianism, which are antithetical to maintaining dominance.
Historically, the early Anglo-Protestant settlers in the seventeenth century were the most successful, creating numerous surviving written records and political institutions that last till this day. For this reason, they became the dominant group, culturally, economically, and politically, and they maintained their dominance till the early twentieth century. Commitment to the ideals of the Enlightenment meant that they sought to assimilate newcomers from outside of the British Isles, but few were interested in adopting a pan-European identity for the nation, much less turning it into a global melting pot. But in the early 1900s, liberal progressives and modernists began promoting more inclusive ideals for what the national identity of the United States should be. While the more traditionalist segments of society continued to maintain their Anglo-Protestant ethnocultural traditions, universalism and cosmopolitanism started gaining favor among the elites. These ideals became institutionalized after the Second World War, and ethnic minorities started to gain rough institutional parity with the once dominant Anglo-Protestants.
What do you think?
Here is the link >>> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Kaufmann
