American History Series: Cosmopolitanism and the Postwar Consensus

Conservatives must take a stand on Demographics @NickJFuentes pic.twitter.com/FMisovfV0q

— Zoomer Patriot (@PatriotZoomer) July 20, 2020

I see that Nick Fuentes is banging his fists against the postwar consensus.

Have you ever wondered why American conservatives are unable to defend themselves from the -isms and -phobias which are critiques and therapies which grew out of the Frankfurt School?

Why are they unable to defend the ethnocultural core of the United States? Why are they unable to even speak in terms of White identity or White interests like previous generations which before World War II believed that “America was a White Man’s Country”? Why are they unable to conceive of America as anything but an idea built on timeless abstractions? Why can’t they rise above an unbounded cosmopolitan civic nationalism in which potentially anyone can become an American?

How did that happen? Why did that happen? When did that happen? When did the cosmopolitan vision of the United States triumph in our culture and become institutionalized?

“Central to our argument is the notion that the pre-World War I New York avant-garde valued expressive individualism and cosmopolitanism above all else. After the war, and coming of age in the late 1930s, a new generation of New York thinkers emerged to carry their torch. This group sported a large Jewish contingent (owing to New York’s changing demographics), but its intellectual lineage came from the Young Intellectuals and carried forth their mantras (Aarons 1961; Wald 1987: 15, 27-45). In David Hollinger’s estimation, these new intellectuals were fused from an equal fusion of Jewish and Anglo-Saxon radicalism and should be considered a united community, if not a surrogate ethnie. Nor was their an asymmetry of influence: the two groups of ethnic exiles influenced each other in dialectical fashion (Hollinger 1985: 58, 63). Cardinal among their beliefs was the dictum that all attempts at collective representation, whether ethnonationalist or state-socialist, were to be shunned.

The nerve center of this new cosmopolitan enterprise was a congerie of literary journalists based in New York around the Nation, Partisan Review and the New Republic. Joined by their artistic fellow-travelers just before World War II, this group helped forge a hegemonic postwar intellectual culture. Emerging in the 1930s, these thinkers exercised increasing influence in American intellectual life and were simply referred to as the “New York Intellectuals.” As both David Hollinger and Terry Cooney remark, the group’s overriding goal was modernist cosmopolitanism, and their ideological somersaults from the 1930s to the 1950s was understandable only if one sees their various positions as a means to achieving this end (Cooney 1981: 598).” …

The new liberal value consensus, in which artists, writers, academics, and the U.S. government were united, was social democratic, cosmopolitan, and modernist, signifying to many the emergence of a “Vital Center” (Sclesinger 1949) or an “End of Ideology” (Bell 1960) (Doss 1991: 334-335). Consensus Americanism can thus be viewed as an intellectual earthquake that elevated the new avant-garde “ethnic group” to a position of cultural hegemony. Intellectual leadership, whether clerical or secular-romantic, has always been a mainstay of ethnic consciousness, and its withdrawal is devastating to the group involved (Smith 1986: 103-105). In capturing Anglo-America from the top down, the American avant-garde left American dominant ethnicity rudderless. It was now only a question of time before cosmopolitanism would achieve the institutional inertia necessary for it to triumph as a mass phenomenon.”