As the 2000 census resoundingly demonstrated, the Anglo-Protestant ethnic core of the United States has all but dissolved. In a country founded and settled by their ancestors, British Protestants now make up less than a fifth of the population. This demographic shift has spawned a "culture war" within white America. While liberals seek to diversify society toward a cosmopolitan endpoint, some conservatives strive to maintain an American ethno-national identity. Eric Kaufmann traces the roots of this culture war from the rise of WASP America after the Revolution to its fall in the 1960s, when social institutions finally began to reflect the nation's ethnic composition.

Kaufmann begins his account shortly after independence, when white Protestants with an Anglo-Saxon myth of descent established themselves as the dominant American ethnic group. But from the late 1890s to the 1930s, liberal and cosmopolitan ideological currents within white Anglo-Saxon Protestant America mounted a powerful challenge to WASP hegemony. This struggle against ethnic dominance was mounted not by subaltern immigrant groups but by Anglo-Saxon reformers, notably Jane Addams and John Dewey. It gathered social force by the 1920s, struggling against WASP dominance and achieving institutional breakthrough in the late 1960s, when America truly began to integrate ethnic minorities into mainstream culture.




Eric P. Kaufmann

I do buy the idea that America was (and should still be) essentially "Anglo-Saxon Protestant."


I do not buy the idea that race or ethnicity has necessarily anything to do with that laudable ethic. Anyone, regardless of their parents heritage, can learn, practice, and forward ASP cultural (the "W" is obviously less important). Culture is significantly voluntary, and not tied necessarily to ethnicity or race, though many cultures are particular to certain ethnies and races (and vice versa).


But when you couple mass immigration of a particular ethnic group with growing unwillingness to demand assimilation, it becomes hard to transmit the native cult and its customs, myths, and principles. Today, our foundational Anglo-Saxon Protestantism is being overrun, rejected, or not presented whatsoever. This widespread failure of cultural reproduction is assisted in different but equally important ways by conservatives and liberals, though the latter is considerably more guilty.


Cultural multiplicity is poison to a democratic polity that depends upon consensus with regards to social and political rights, liberties, and prerogatives. The Anglo-Saxon Protestant and Latin Catholic ethics, while not totally disparate, are wildly incongruous. This explains 19th and 20th century resistance to Mediterranean immigration (Italians are the second most lynched group in American history), as well as suspicion today of Hispanic newcomers.

This goes to show that immigration and border hawks are not racists, or even ethnicists, but culturalists, who judge not by skin pigment but by group practice. And what can be wrong with that? As Hillel asks, "If I am not for myself, who will be?"