Rep. Steve King walked back his remarks with ease. King had told Iowa radio host Jan Mickelson that “we can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.” The Republican congressman quickly reframed the comments. It was not race he was alluding to, but “our stock, our country, our culture, our civilization.” Those sound like proxies for race.
Nice try, congressman.
More instructive than what Rep. King said or meant to say are the lessons about what we’re not supposed to say.
We dare not suggest that a civilization created by a particular people with a particular religious and racial profile, may well perish once those people are replaced or have engineered their own replacement.
America’s historical majority may not entertain or express a natural affinity for its own. A connection to kith, kin and culture, when expressed by whites, is considered inauthentic, xenophobic, and certainly racist.
In other words, there’s a class of people for whom no identity is permitted. They’re the people of Europe and the Anglo-sphere: the English, the Americans, the Canadians, Australians and New Zealanders. The unspoken rule is that only non-Occidentals be allowed to express “civilizational consciousness,” Samuel P. Huntington’s synonym for “our stock, our country, our culture, our civilization.”
Conversely, blacks, browns and all the other, more exotic, more sympathetic peoples of the world are encouraged to strut their civilizational consciousness.
Africa, the Middle East, Near East, Far East: The people of these regions want to come and lay claim to countries built by the supremely kind, sanctimonious, gullible do-gooders of the West. Yet despite The West’s generosity to The Rest, whites are the only people to be shamed, ostracized, threatened and maligned if they dare hearken back to their forefathers, or cling to the beliefs, faith and folklore of their founding fathers.
Another thing: All peoples aside whites are allowed to claim and keep their corner under the sun. Dare to suggest that China, India, Saudi-Arabia, Yemen, Japan, or South-Korea open the floodgates to aliens who’ll disrupt the ancient rhythm of these societies—and you’ll get an earful. Yet this is what Anglo-Americans and Europeans are cheerily called on to do by a left-liberal, progressive ruling class.
To her governing elites, America is not a nation but a notion, as Patrick J. Buchanan put it. To someone like House Speaker Paul Ryan, who is admired by Democratic and Republican progressives alike, America is a community of disparate people coalescing around an abstract, highly manipulable, state-sanctioned ideology.
Speaker Ryan was quick to signal his displeasure with Congressman King by signaling his own “virtue.” Ryan sermonized that he disagreed with King, because “America’s long history of inclusiveness was one of its great strengths.”
A non sequitur, Sir. You can include The Other, without obliterating The Self.
Progressives like Ryan regularly disregard the fellow-feeling stirred among their countrymen by sentiments such as those expressed by Rep. Steve King. It’s this contempt that catapulted Donald Trump into the presidency.
Yet to Russell Kirk, the father of American conservatism, and an old-school conservative—as well as, arguably, to the founders of the nation themselves—society was a community of souls, joining the dead, the living, and those yet unborn. A society cohered through what Aristotle called friendship and what Christians call love of neighbor, facilitated by a shared language, literature, history, habits and heroes. These factors, taken together, constitute the glue that binds the nation. Once this glue is gone, the nation is gone.
By contrast, the idea of the American “creedal nation,” which is supposed to unite us all in “a common commitment to a set of ideas and ideals,” is abstract and inorganic. This creed comes from above, not from below. It’s a state religion reflexively developed to bring about compliance.
Westerners have the best countries in the world. The Rest of the world wants to come to The West. But Westerners themselves are too submissive and browbeaten to appreciate that their lovely countries are the way they are due to Western civilization’s human seed capital. At their inception, the core, founding populations in these countries possessed the innate abilities and philosophical sensibilities to flourish mightily. Now they’re being taught—on pain of punishment—that populations are interchangeable.
That’s likely what Rep. King was cautioning America about on Jan Mickelson’s Iowa radio station. It was certainly what this writer was warning about, on the same radio station, to the same broadcaster, in 2011, while discussing “Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons for America From Post-Apartheid South Africa.” Then as now, Mr. Mickelson and his guest were working to expose “the misdirected pursuit of a multicultural soup,” as he put it.
