Authored by Ryan McMaken via The Mises Institute,
Patrick Buchanan is an informative and interesting writer. On foreign policy, especially, he’s long been one of the most reasonable voices among high-level American pundits.
When it comes to cultural matters, however, Buchanan has long held to a peculiar and empirically questionable version of American history in which the United States was once a mono-culture in which everyone was once happily united by “a common religion,” a “common language,” and a “common culture.”
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Now, he’s at it again with his most recent column in which he correctly points out that the United States is culturally fractured, and speculates as to whether or not Thomas Jefferson’s call to “dissolve political bands” in the Declaration of Independence might be sound advice today.
Buchanan is correct in noting that the US is culturally divided today.
But, he appears to have a selective view of history when he contends there was a time when this was not so. If there ever was such a period, it’s unclear as to when exactly it was.
Buchanan can’t be referring to the mid-19th century when Northern states and Southern states were becoming increasingly hostile toward each other. Many of these differences flared up over slavery, but larger cultural differences were there too, exemplified by a divide between agrarian and industrialized culture, and the hierarchical South versus the more populist North. The result was a civil war that killed more than 2 percent of the population. It was a literal bloodbath.
Was that version of the United States culturally united?
Nor can Buchanan possibly be referring to the US of the so-called Gilded Age. After all, during this period, the US was flooded with immigrants from a wide variety of backgrounds,
Historian Jon Grinspan notes:
American life transformed more radically during the 19th century than it ever had before. Between the 1830s and 1900, America’s population quintupled … at least 18 million immigrants arrived from Europe, more people than had lived in all of America in 1830.
This hardly led to a period of religious or linguistic unity.
Certainly Catholics of the 19th century in the United States — who were commonly denounced as being non-Christians by the majority Protestants — would be at a loss if asked to describe the way the United States was united by a common religion.
This alleged unity would be news to the Catholics whose schools were being closed by government edict — as happened in Oregon where the state government deliberately outlawed private schools in the hope of eradicating the Catholic education system. This unity was certainly absent for the Catholics who were victims in the Know-Nothing riots in Philadelphia in 1844.
The Mormons may have fared even worse, and fled to the wilds of Utah. Even there they couldn’t avoid the iron fist of the federal government. When disagreements flared over polygamy and territorial representation, James Buchanan sent 2,500 troops to Utah in 1857 as part of a shooting war with Mormons to force them into better compliance with federal law.
Nor were the foreign languages of immigrants immediately stamped out as many imagine in their nostalgia. Well into the 20th century, German continued to be a widely-spoken language, with Americans of German descent demanding their own German-language schools and government documents printed in German. Many Germans actively sought to avoid cultural integration with others by demanding more taxpayer-funded German-language-only schools.
According to historian Willi Paul Adams:
[S]ome states mandated English as the exclusive language of instruction in the public schools, while Pennsylvania and Ohio in 1839 were first in allowing German as an official alternative, even requiring it on parental demand. Some public and many private parochial schools taught exclusively in German throughout many decades, mostly in rural areas.
Nor was the German lobby confined to these two states. The original Colorado constitution, for example, mandates that all new laws be distributed in German, Spanish, and English, so as to cater to speakers the three most common languages in the area.
According to the census bureau, there were more than two-million German-speaking foreign-born United States residents in 1920, which means more than 2 percent of the population was speaking German. If the same proportions held up today, there’d be more than six million foreign-born German speakers in the US. Moreover, Germans weren’t even the largest foreign language group at the time. There were even more foreign-born speakers of “Slavic languages” including Russian, Czech, and Polish. Taken all together — out of a population of 100 million — there were more than ten million foreign-born Americans with a “mother tongue” other than English in 1920. It is likely that many of these people also knew and spoke English — some of the time. But the reality hardly paints a picture of linguistic and cultural unity as imagined by Buchanan.
And then, of course, there is the Spanish-speaking population. As noted above, the State of Colorado was tri-lingual from the day it became a state. And then there is New Mexico where Spanish speakers prior to statehood comprised at least half the state’s population. Not surprisingly, the New Mexico constitution has always stipulated that the Spanish language enjoys special status, and that no citizen of the state may be denied any state services or rights based on being only able to speak Spanish.
Much of this linguistic diversity was a legacy of the Mexican War in which the US annexed vast territories that included many Spanish speakers. Generally forgotten today is the fact that the Mexican border was once located a mere 100 miles south of Denver along the Arkansas River. The special status granted Spanish in the 19th century in these regions was not a result of an influx of new immigrants. It was the result of a linguistic reality imposed on the population of the American Southwest by an American war of conquest.
We might also mention ongoing ethnic tensions caused by the war, such as those caused by the notorious Land Act of 1851 which robbed the Californios of their property. And then there were decades of anti-Mexican policies in southern Texas that disenfranchised the Spanish-speaking minority there. In some cases, this led to outright violent rebellion as with Juan Cortina and his guerrilla fighters.
So, is the cultural disunity in the United States something novel and unprecedented as Buchanan imagines? It’s unlikely.
Any theory about unity in American history that just breezes over the American Civil War is questionable at best, and English is likely more widespread today than at any point in the last 150 years thanks to the dominance of American popular culture.
Nevertheless, Buchanan has a point.
There are very real divides in the US today, especially between the religious and the anti-religious, between the urban residents and suburbanites, and between leftists and conservatives. Recent data even suggests that communities are now segregating themselves along ideological lines.
So what is the answer?
As is so often the case, the answer simply lies in decentralization. As Buchanan seems to suggest, now may be the time to “dissolve the political bands which have connected” Californians with Texans and Vermonters with Indianans.
After all, as Buchanan notes, if unity were put up to a vote, would the confederation we call ‘the United States” even survive?
Could the Constitution, as currently interpreted, win the approval of two-thirds of our citizens and three-fourth of our states, if it were not already the supreme law of the land? How would a national referendum on the Constitution turn out, when many Americans are already seeking a new constitutional convention?
The answers to these questions are not obviously “yes.”
Buchanan also correctly points out that the US does not qualify as “a nation” – at least not according to the romantic definition he uses. Buchanan quotes the Frenchman Ernest Renan who identifies at least two criteria for status as a nation: “One is the possession in common of a rich legacy of memories; the other is present consent, the desire to live together, the desire to continue to invest in the heritage that we have jointly received.”
Buchanan suggests this description no longer applies to the US. He’s half right. It doesn’t apply to the US today. But unless we studiously ignore and gloss over the enduring religious, linguistic, cultural, and ideological differences that have always existed, we must admit it never really applied to the United States at all.
The author is only partially correct, just like old Pat. Generally, when Pat discusses “One Nation”, he is referring to one religion, one heritage, one language. 100% of any people anywhere have never spoken the same language nor practiced the same religion.
However, America was descended from Europe in general, and Britain more particularly. Moreover, the bulk of Europe was Christian. It was expected *for the most part* that immigrants conform and learn English. Does this mean that every town square and farmer’s market adhered to said philosophy throughout its history? No. But people WERE ostracized for lack of conformity, perhaps even persecuted.
This topic could generate volumes of examples and counter-examples. But the major takeaway in my view is that Catholics and Protestants, whatever their differences — and there are many, even in my house — are far more alike than Catholics and Sunni Muzzies. Chances are the Catholics and the Protestants speak a Romance language and share many of the same customs. Comparing the Billy Yank Industrialists vs. Johnny Reb Agrarians to what is going on with global Islamization is just…myopic.
I think McMaken misunderstands Buchanan. PB quoted Jay and Renan; he did not explicitly state that he adopted those definitions himself.
M.I. is generally worthless and have an obviously slant to everything and anything that comes out of there so dont look for anything akin to an actual treatise on the title topic, look for the slant that the author is attempting to perpetrate on the reader.
When we were “one nation” it was because virtually everyone in the United States, no matter their other differences, accepted the basic “Judeo-Christian” values and standards.
Even those of other religions or no religion at all held this in common with each other.
That was before the Supreme Court started outlawing them, one after another, and people started going in all sorts of opposing ways without them.
And even more importantly, the government has de facto endorsed two religions that are at odds with Christianity: Environmentalism and Socialism. I don’t remember Jesus saying that we needed to hold a gun to a person’s head in order to extract their Talents, nor to starve a farmer for a 2 inch fish.
Nothing is more divisive in a society — in a culture — than religion. And make no mistake about it, Environmentalism and Socialism are fanatical religions to far-leftists.
The most divisive element in society is politics and Islam is a political ideology.
All the differences presented in this article are true, but the America of today does show an alarming trend in specific groups rejecting assimilation in favor of imposing their own laws (sharia) or their own claims to land supposedly taken by force by an imperialistic America (La Raza).
The American ideal prior to this trend had a common core of one nation in the midst of all the differences except of course the civil war, where the differences between the north and the South were escalated to the point of the dividing of our country.
I can agree with Mr. Buchanan’s concept of one nation far more than the argument against it by the author of this article.
I’ve got a certain amount of respect for Buchanan but his greatest problem is that he’s got this old-peopleish idea that “if thangs wuz just like they wuz in the ’50s, then ever thang would be all right.” What a load a bullshit! In the first place, the trees that are bearing fruit today in my orchard come from the seeds I planted years ago. We are where we are today, because of where we were in the ’50s. A more self-satisfied, gluttonous time has not been seen in this country outside of perhaps the ’80s when we thought “okay, ‘Murkas great agin.” Now we can eat like hogs, fuck each others wives and in general live like hogs swilling from the consumer trough and above all, we never have to even think about it. It’ll always be this way. Well, we just can’t wake up from the American dream can we, except now it has turned into the American nightmare. Our people are fat, sick and deluded. Moslems as well as assorted others are flooding across our borders and nothing is done about it. In fact, nothing can be done about it. Not with the present mind-set of our people today, which for the majority of even the better ones seems to be confusion. Mark my words, in 20 years we will be a different people; either we will all be Moslem or we will not; either we will all be brown third-world shit-skins or we will not. At any rate, any of us who are still alive at that time will not be the same people. If we are to survive, we are going to have to become hard, ruthless men, not given to much eating or much resting and certainly different from the fat, self-satisfied “conservatives”, of which the likes of Buchanan, Bill O’Reilly are prime examples. By the way “Libertarianism” is also a nice Trojan horse through which to infiltrate societies with consumerism, greed and general hoggishness.
Liberal hypocrisy! http://www.breitbart.com/big-hollywood/2017/07/06/clooney-moving-twins-back-america-security-reasons/
If his kind in California get their way about borders and sanctuaries he may be moving to the United States soon for the same reasons he left Europe.
TPTB plan to reduce our diversity about 99% shortly but I hope it backfires on them big time.
What’s missing today is a mass lack of assimilation,both to blending in and accepting established cultural ideas,goals and taboos.
In the fifties, during the world series, grocery stores, hardware stores, and radios everywhere were tuned in to the broadcast. When Bob Hope had a TV special, it was an occasion. At the movie theaters you could see newsreels of the big events of the day. On Saturdays the theaters put on cartoon shows and kids crowded in to watch. Heavy weight boxing? Same thing, millions tuned in for championship fights. In that time seasonal activities and foods were commonly shared by whole communities across the country. There were apples in season, watermelon in season, peaches in season, asparagus in season, and on and on. During Christmas every store played traditional music for weeks ahead of the holiday. Thanksgiving was celebrated alike in most homes with turkey and all the trimmings with big families attending. There were lots of independent businesses and few of what now dominates the fast-food market. In other words it was a good time, and not one of runaway greed and so on as depicted by whatshisface.
Furthermore, blacks had their communities that prospered and that were in the sixties disrupted and became ghettos. You see, it was government interfering with the lives of citizens that screwed things up by favoring one class of citizens over another, by favoring big business over the independents, by meddling in other country’s politics and even going to war after war that had the effect of creating endless turmoil in the world.
At one time people wanted to come here for the opportunity to improve their lives through work. Now they often come to escape the turmoil this country has caused anywhere you can name. It is any wonder that newcomers have no intention of assimilating and who are not inclined even to learn English let alone customs? It is government that splits things up and in that conflict it prospers by offering protection, favors, and do-gooding solutions that look great but never ever work, but only make matters worse and incites people to further beseech government for new solutions. The only way out is small government and much smaller political districts so that competition between districts can occur.
I am posting the real history of mankind,as exemplified in modern America.
The two most important events in all of history were the invention of beer and the invention of the wheel. Beer required grain and that was the beginning of agriculture.
Neither the glass bottle nor aluminum can were invented yet, so while our early humans were sitting around waiting for them to be invented, they just stayed close to the brewery. That’s how villages were formed.
The wheel was invented to get man to the beer and vice versa. These two were the foundation of modern civilization and together were the catalyst for the splitting of humanity into two distinct subgroups:
1. Liberals.
2. Conservatives.
Some men spent their days tracking and killing animals to BBQ at night while they were drinking beer. This was the beginning of what is known as the Conservative movement.
Other men who were less skilled at hunting (called ‘vegetarians’ which was an early human word meaning ‘bad hunter’) learned to live off the Conservatives by showing up for the nightly BBQ’s and doing the sewing, fetching, and hairdressing.
This was the beginning of the liberal movement.
Some of these liberal men evolved into women. Others became known as “girlie-men.” Some noteworthy liberal achievements include the domestication of cats, the invention of group therapy, group hugs, and the concept of democratic voting to decide how to divide the meat and beer that Conservatives provided.
Over the years Conservatives came to be symbolized by the largest, most powerful land animal on earth, the elephant. Liberals are symbolized by the jackass for obvious reasons.
Modern Liberals like lite beer (with lime added), but most prefer white wine or imported bottled water. They eat raw fish but like their beef well done.
Sushi, tofu, and French food are standard liberal fare. Another interesting evolutionary side note: many liberal women have higher testosterone levels than their men.
Most college professors, social workers, personal injury attorneys, journalists, film makers in Hollywood, group therapists and community organizers are liberals. Liberals meddled in our national pastime and invented the designated hitter rule because it wasn’t fair to make the pitcher also bat.
Conservatives drink real beer. They eat red meat and still provide for their women. Conservatives are members of the military, big game hunters, rodeo cowboys, lumberjacks, construction workers, firemen, medical doctors, police officers, engineers, corporate executives, truck drivers, athletes, airline pilots, and generally anyone who works productively. Conservatives who own companies hire other Conservatives who want to work for a living.
Liberals produce little or nothing. They like to govern the producers and decide what to do with the production. Liberals believe Europeans are more enlightened than Americans. That is why most of the liberals remained in Europe when Conservatives were coming to America. They crept in after the Wild West was tamed and created a business of trying to get more for nothing.
Here ends today’s lesson in world history.
You forgot the third category, let’s call them “The Parasites”, who became the middlemen, bankers and gained control of the reins of power in groups of people until they were finally physically removed, only to go to another prosperous group to rinse, lather, repeat…
In the 18th century, and well into the 19th, the US was culturally pretty well homogeneous. When the Irish and other catholics were allowed in, to much rioting, the scene began to change…
I find it fascinating that so much ink has been spilled trying to convince everyone that a majority White nation of patriarchal Christians living in a safe and prosperous world is a myth, that such a time never existed and then follow this up by blaming the historically White Male Christian USA for every problem encountered by women, non-Whites and Islamists.
How can it possibly be both?
Farmer asked,”How can it possibly be both?”
Simple-cognitive insouciance.
And btw,Buchanan’s family was one of those immigrant families.He is Catholic and I believe he is also Irish.