Washington Post: The ‘American Dream’? ‘America First’ Eclipses It

Well, this is better than the stupid “fascism” meme.

Washington Post:

“The simple truth is that there have always been as many resisting American unity as advocating for it, from the fights in the Constitutional Congress to the Civil War, from supporters of regional sectionalism instead of post-bellum reconciliation, to immigration restrictionists and racial segregationists. From one perspective, the history of the United States is one long battle over the limits of unity, with fights over inclusion and exclusion. …

Nor were these ideas especially divisive a century ago. They were shared by the vast majority of native-born Americans. Even a phrase like the “melting pot” was just as likely to express restrictionism as inclusivity — and often joined forces with “America First” to do so. Anti-immigration sentiment in the late 19th and early 20th centuries was justified primarily by eugenicist ideas of racial purity and the ethnic superiority of White Europeans over everyone else. These ideas drove the hostility and fear of Americans like Tom Buchanan: not an animus against immigration per se but against inferior racial “stock” coming to the United States and diluting the character and quality of American society. …

The phrase “America First” fell rapidly into disrepute during World War II, largely because the America First Committee (whose most prominent spokesman was Charles Lindbergh) had urged non-intervention and appeasement and been accused of anti-semitism and fascist sympathies. It was then consigned to temporary obscurity, but not everyone forgot. The slogan was periodically recalled to articulate resurgent right-wing nationalism, often explicitly white nationalism, from Gerald L.K. Smith, once known as “America’s most notorious antisemite,” who founded the America First Party in the 1940s, to Barry Goldwater, hailed by his supporters as an “America First” politician and described by the conservative National Reviewin 1963 as standing for “States’ Rights, strict construction, limited government, private enterprise, and America first, last and always.” It was used to describe David Duke and George Wallace, before being resuscitated by Pat Buchanan (“We are not isolationists. We simply believe in America first, last and always,” he declared in 2000) in his presidential campaigns. A certain Donald Trump flirted with making his own run under Buchanan’s Reform Party banner, then brought the phrase triumphantly back a century after Wilson popularized it. …

Now the America First Policy Institute declares that its slogan is “America First, Always” and that its immigration policy will mean no longer putting “America last” — echoing the language of a March 1922 editorial from what was then the nation’s most popular weekly, the Saturday Evening Post,as it harangued its readers about the “immigration problem” caused by “our policy of putting the alien and his interests first, and America last.” …”

America has always had an ethnocultural core.

There have always been Americans who have defended that ethnocultural core. This isn’t “fascism.” This debate between liberals and conservatives was going on long before European fascism.

In the beginning, a Real American was a White Anglo-Saxon Protestant with liberal and republican principles. The Founders restricted naturalization to “free White persons” and this racial ideal of American citizenship wasn’t finally eliminated until the highwater mark of postwar progressive liberalism in the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 and the Immigration Act of 1965.

For most of American history, the immigration debate wasn’t over non-White and non-Christian immigration so much as it was over how much and what types of immigration from Europe should be permitted. Nordic Protestants from Northwestern Europe who could assimilate the easiest with the English founding stock were considered the ideal immigrants. Catholic immigrants were allowed to immigrate as well and were expected to learn English and assimilate to Anglo-Saxon cultural norms. Catholicism was tolerated because of the widespread belief that Catholics would convert to Protestantism.

In the wake of the Great Depression and World War II, progressive liberalism briefly became hegemonic in the United States when conservatism was at a weak point following the FDR presidency. Mid-20th century progressives embraced the fads of their times – antiracism, modernism, cosmopolitanism and globalism – and redefined American identity from the top down on that basis. They created the myth that America was a “Nation of Immigrants” and could function like a miniature version of the United Nations. Progressives imagined an America without a racial, ethnic, religious and cultural core that could be based solely on liberalism and the trends and fads which had been absorbed into liberalism.

Race was expunged from American national identity in the 1960s. Anglo-Saxon culture was abandoned for multiculturalism in the 1970s. Christianity was scrubbed from American national identity in the 1990s. Lately, progressives have been condemning the Constitution as an archaic anti-democratic document in their latest effort to read republicanism out of American national identity. As for the millions of Americans who remember the past and who bitterly cling to older traditions of American identity which have been abandoned by liberals, those people are “semi-fascists” and “extreme MAGA Republicans.”

Who are the “semi-fascists”? The “semi-fascists” are the people whose ancestors have been here the longest, who founded the country and have the most invested in it, who are traditionalists who have remained true to the values and beliefs of their forefathers and who reject all the fads and trends which define progressivism like antiracism, open borders, globalism and “trans.”

This is the way it works. Progressives wholeheartedly embrace some trend or fad with Wokeism and “trans” being the latest examples. Those who refuse to embrace the latest fad or trend being pushed by progressive activists and liberals on Twitter become fascist monsters who are enemies of Our Democracy. They don’t see themselves as the ones who are changing and becoming ever more detached from the rest of the country and indeed the world.