Brion McClanahan: What is a Yankee?

February 3, 2022 Hunter Wallace Alt-Center, Culture, Yankee Question 22

As we approach our Second Civil War, it is worth discussing who in America was the cause of both conflicts. The first war wasn’t about slavery which was only a surface issue. It was about these overbearing people and their fanatical mentality and other people getting fed up with them.

A key part of the story which we need to work on clarifying is what happened to Yankees in the 20th century: how they infiltrated and took over the Democratic Party, how they lost their religion as mainline Protestantism crumbled, how woke progressivism became their new crusading religion, how the rise of public schools, higher education and the mass media were used as tools to brainwash the masses, how they survived the rise of meritocracy after World War II by clinging to power in the Ivy League, how their bizarre culture survived both mass immigration and intermarriage and is still going strong in the Acela Corridor, how they dispersed across the country and especially on the West Coast.

Today, I think of them as living in upper middle class neighborhoods in the Acela Corridor, working in professional class jobs, having multiple college degrees and N95 masks and being addicted to Rachel Maddow and Twitter. It is people like Mike Enoch’s parents (who aren’t even Anglos) who nevertheless live in communion with the New York Times. It is a sub-culture that is concentrated in the Acela Corridor.

To be crystal clear, it is not everyone or even most people who live in the region, but these people live there and dominate its culture. They control the church of progressivism.

Note: It goes without saying that the traditional sins have been replaced by all the made up the -isms and -phobias. There is also no room for forgiveness in their seculsr religion for committing a “racism” or a “transphobia.”

21 Comments

  2. Puritanism is the opposite of authoritarianism. It’s democratic. These are the people who beheaded Charles I. McClanahan gets all of the facts right but assembles them incorrectly.

    Reformed Christianity has always been rationalized capitalism. Henry VIII started the Protestant Reformation in England in part because he wanted to plunder the poor by looting the monastery system. Martin Luther believed in total depravity because he couldn’t control his food, his beer, his speech, and his lust, therefore anything goes — salvation by faith, by fees fees. Perfectionism is always disguised permissiveness, always. Protestantism had its beginnings as a giant looting operation, coupled with out of control iconoclasm, eerily similar to 2020. I say this as an atheist once raised as mainline Protestant.

    When fees fees rule the day, that eventually means the fees fees of the group, and the social pressuring that goes along with it. Puritanism is interwoven with status-seeking, social climbing, punishment, and hypocrisy. Again, Puritans are not principled people, they’re radically unprincipled, that is, radically democratic.

    Most Americans during the American Revolution were royalists. The Revolution succeeded anyway because a minority of Whiggish American PMCs got their way through cancel culture — tarring and feathering people, rioting, terrorism, sacking people’s houses, falsely imprisoning people and extracting bogus confessions. The Puritans were simply smugglers who didn’t want to obey the rules of the homeland. The United States was cancel culture from the very beginning, and has been so ever since. Cancel culture is what democracy looks like.

    Thomas Hobbes, a royalist, was the first and best counter-revolutionary. The royalists — rightwing authoritarians — were much more laid back, secular, live-and-let-live, and give-and-take than their opposition. Hobbes’ idea is that state takes care of stuff that the state needs to care of, and outside of that, everyone can go about their business unmolested. But under rule by what he called the “democraticals,” politics infects every aspect our lives, and that’s a recipe for nastiness, and much more disruption than you would experience under, well, authority. I’m more moderate than Hobbes, but I do agree that democracy isn’t an end in itself, but rests upon extra-democratic factors.

    • That was one of the lyingest screeds I have EVER read! Take your Roman Catholi-schism and go worship Pachamama at Bergoglio’s knees, because that’s the only religion you clearly possess.

      • Agree, Fr John, what a load of tosh masquerading as intellectualism. The protestants have always been the handmailds of the jews.

      • Sorry, John, but it’s as plain as a pikestaff to anyone who doesn’t have a dog in the religious fight that modern “SJW” and “woke” ideology, Antifa, all the rest, is just a direct extension of 19th century American Protestantism, specifically New England Protestantism or Northern Protestantism.

        Religious reformers in the North, and Negro-worshipping utopian Protestants like the Secret Six (who were also radical feminists), the Know-Nothings, the Republican Party — they were all radical leftists. Today’s radical leftism IS 19th century Protestantism, which is itself just updated Puritanism.

        When you look at their writings, their thought processes, they’re no different from the Woke. They are the Woke. The modern Woke have dispensed with the outward Christian ritual and are nominally atheist in many cases, but they have the same reforming zeal, the same cancel culture, the same aggressive, violent egalitarianism, the same sneering triumphalist holier-than-thou superiority, often essentially the same language, and definitely the same goal.

        From the Levelers to the Puritans to the Abolitionists to the Big Red Feminist and Antifa is a straight-line road. They’re the same people, slightly “reskinned” according to current fashion.

    • >fees fees
      >x3

      This should be fee fees. I blame the international conspiracy of computer gremlins for this.

  4. In many foreign countries “Yankee” (as in “Yankee go home!”) is a derisive term for ANY U.S. citizen. Gringo is a synonym for Yankee. “Pindo” is a derisive term for Yankee military personnel, and the U.S. is called Pindostan (where the Pindos come from).

    Re: “As we approach our Second Civil War, it is worth discussing who in America was the cause of both conflicts. The first war wasn’t about slavery which was only a surface issue. It was about these overbearing people and their fanatical mentality and other people getting fed up with them”:

    The Empire is still very strong so I doubt that a civil war is approaching, and I disagree that the conflict of chattel slavery-based economy versus wage-slavery (of early industrialisation) was only a minor, surface issue. African slavery was at least the main “handle” that the “Yankee” political faction could grip in the power struggle against southerners, and the main “value” that southerners would fight to preserve. Appalachian regions, where African slaves were very scarce, had a different economy, mostly agrarian or even hunter-gatherer subsistence, and no incentive to join the war on either side.

    • It was a sort of eye rolling tongue in cheek remark. Basically, the same people are polarizing the country again

    • I’m from the rustbelt and have no English, Irish, Pict, Welsh or Scottish ancestry. I don’t identify with “Yankee”. Don’t find sheep attractive either.

  5. Southerners associate Yankees with the hipster weirdos (Liberal Larry!) that they’re familiar with in places like Richmond, Nashville, Louisville, etc. The North is much different than this and has four distinct cultural types.

    Central Pennsylvania, most of Indiana, and downstate Ohio and Illinois are part of greater Appalachia and are culturally similar to the other side of the Ohio River.

    The New York tri-state area is like Wagner’s Nibelheim. The place feels like of swarms of dwarves scurrying around trying to get their gold. Every time I go there I feel like Goliath; there is no one with the same eye or hair color for miles. It’s an outgrowth of Dutch cosmopolitanism and is completely different from Yankeedom. The culture is loud and vulgar, not quiet and pious. This is where the globalism-or-else crap is coming from.

    The midlands, once represented by Baltimore and St. Louis, extend Quaker Phildadelphia culture with a heavy Germanic flavor. Chicago feels like impersonal machinery and has always attracted disciplined professionals. (Nietzsche once remarked that his country Germany lacked a genuine culture, and for the same reason.) The midlands produce people like No Drama Obama. Yankee moralism is out of place here; successful politicians sell themselves as tough-minded pragmatists who get things done.

    The pious Yankee stuff originated in Boston and spread out west through the North. California basically is Yankee + Appalachian culture, that is, Utopian individualism.

    Here’s a contrast and a good laugh. Below, Robert Smigel, a comedian from New York, makes fun of students in Vermont. These students are actual Yankees, the real deal, 100% certified fresh. It is hard to describe, but you know it when you see it.

    Triumph the Insult Comic Dog Talks to Young Voters • Triumph on Hulu

  6. During the 1st civil war, Yankees and Rebels were enemies, if another civil war kicks off both should be allies against our true enemies. I don’t think I have to list them. It’s pretty obvious.

  7. The Lincoln Republicans were from the mid-West, Illinois in particular. Does that make them Yankees, or just Northerners?

    I will go with my secondhand sources, The people who knew the people of the Civil War generation, and what they told me about them. Yankee was a slang term for Northerners, the people of the Northern States who were jealous, and wanted to steal the South’s property and possessions.

    It was all about jealousy.

    • @Krafty

      It was about power, too. And about the fact that the Puritans, and their ideological descendants, didn’t/don’t want to live as the legal and political equals of people whom they regard as subordinate subjects, at best, or as little more than talking animals, or dysgenic monsters. Not as fellow Americans deserving of respect, or the same legal and political rights as themselves.

      • I never heard anyone mention the “power” angle. Also, the Southern States were not without political allies among the Northern Congressional delegation at that time.

        It all came down to jealousy. The South had a longer growing season, and it could grow cash crops which could not be grown in the North. In the 1850’s Mississippi was the richest State in the US.

    • Mary Todd” family were a wealthy slave owners from Kentucky, which was also Lincoln’s birthplace.

      Both were WASPs btw.

  8. The way I see the modern using “yankee(s)” as an epithet is very similar to how jews call people and organizations they dislike “anti-semites.”

  9. Yankees made America. Wisconsin men like the ones I know damn sure ain’t faggots. The only reason my state is tough and real and pro-Trump is because of the Yankees from the Northeast who founded it. Germans came to a place already set up by real Americans. Any anti-Yankee stuff is fag-ass intellectualism on the level of soy boy.

  10. Anyone from Wisconsin knows Yankees made the state and it wasn’t made SJW. They are the reason the state loves Trump, manhood, hunting, fishing, and ain’t queer.

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