Midwit Machiavellianism

And the Myth of Assimilation

I watched this debate between fellow Old Glory Club member “The Distributist” and some midwit named Counterpoints. I am not sure where to place Counterpoints politically other than as a centrist, though not the sensible kind.

The midwit’s actual political positions were virtually so indiscernible that the best I can do to summarize is to say that he is against “mass immigration,” in that he would reduce immigration by, say, 70 percent. I do not believe that his position actually constitutes being against mass immigration, as even 30 percent of the current immigration levels I still consider “mass” immigration. He also believes that the Hispanics of Central and South America have a culture similar enough to that of the United States that Hispanics and Americans will be able to blend their cultures together. Since this is not at all the case between Europe and Africa, he claims that the immigration problem in the U.S. is not as serious as that in Europe. He believes this because South America was also colonized by Europeans — so the Hispanics must more or less be the other side of the same coin. This is obviously wrong, because the Anglo-Saxon colonists in North American removed the native Indians from their spaces, and those Indians were little more than nomads; whereas the Iberian colonists in Central and South America contended with and ultimately mixed with the empires of the Aztecs and other civilizations. These are not the same people in any sense.

As far as what he thinks American culture is, the midwit more or less takes the typical shitlib route of saying that America does not have a culture; or, to be more fair, that America has an omni-culture, because it is a “liberal democracy.” So America’s culture is the All-culture, to which a person of any other culture can “assimilate” — tantamount to saying that America has no culture. In response to the “liberal democracy” formulation, The Distributist rephrased it as “Be nice, make money, and speak the language (English),” which was intended to point out that this basically describes every culture, and so is just another way of saying that America has no culture.

The midwit claimed that “liberal democracy” was somehow inherited from “republicanism” in ancient Rome, and that this is shown through the English “rule of law” as embodied in the Magna Carta and elsewhere. This broad-stroke historical Cliffs Notes approach is a common feature in midwit historiography, as are his references to food when describing the culture of England. The midwit always refers to “the food” when trying and failing to describe a culture.

(At this point, you may take “the midwit” to refer to any midwit generally.)

Natural slaves who do not “live in history” and merely live as solipsistic orphans always rationalize culture around superficial things like the food the people eat, their religions, their political systems, and their languages. This is basically the social studies version of culture taught to twelve-year-olds, unfit for adults to reference seriously in any context.

Any good reactionary should know that culture is a gestalt, not something that can be rationally described. It comes from a shared history and, in it, the blood and soil. Moreover, it is a deep inner world and a metaphysical world that can’t simply be explained as an idea or a feeling, because it is much more than either of these. The superficialities of a culture can be named, its historical reference points can be indicated, and its character can be described. The Distributist described American culture as “pioneering” — but American culture is not simply the behavior of “being a pioneer.” It’s not that anyone can just go pioneering and become an American. It’s not actually possible for a Hindu Indian to assimilate to American culture simply by “fitting in.” Even if he “follows the rules,” disturbs no one, and acts as a model citizen, that doesn’t make him an American. He cannot become an American because an American is more than just this superficial set of behaviors. Americans know that they have a European heritage, and this is not just a feeling that can be manufactured in an immigrant by “assimilation.” An immigrant cannot “assimilate” his ancestral history into that of an American. It will always be what it is. Even deeper than this, the midwit references the Romans because we all know that we are sons of Rome in some capacity, which is something an Indian immigrant can never say.

But the midwit believes that he is a Machiavellian master of politics. The midwit always spouts off some foolishness about how White and Hispanic conservatives can work together against the “woke,” as if no one had ever thought of this brilliant idea before. The fact that different racial groups cannot simply get along is well demonstrated by the fact that the phrase “black culture” still means something different from “American culture” (although the differences are narrowing, and not in a way that bodes well for heritage Americans). The idea that Hispanic and American culture can simply be blended together in a way that isn’t detrimental to Americans is quite literally retarded, as is the idea of assimilation. Assimilation does not exist in the way that it is bandied about in common parlance. By this I don’t mean that it is really hard to pull off, but that it is fundamentally impossible. We can show this again in another thought experiment. If Indians immigrated to America at whatever level the midwit would deem acceptable and not destructive to American culture because of low impact, and we then allowed that immigration to proceed until eventually America was nothing but Indians who had all “assimilated” into American culture — even over a period of, say, hundreds of years, if necessary, to convince the reader — would they produce and maintain the same culture that would have existed if heritage Americans had not been replaced? Of course not, and this is because assimilation is not real. It does not exist, it is not possible, and even to speak of “assimilation” or how this or that immigrant group are “good citizens” and don’t bother anyone is to think thoughts that are utterly delusional and culturally suicidal.

I’ll end with reference to this new BAP article:

If your position is “the poor and conservative many against the decadent and predatory Elite and rich,” why wouldn’t you come to see millions of foreign poor “decent family people” as your allies? Economic populists, even when they have open nationalist and ethnic rhetoric in their beginnings, will always abandon this in favor of importing new clients, and it is rational for them to do so. In many cases they don’t in fact have specifically racial, or national or ethnic-cultural language even by the way: many rightists are dumbly misled when a leftist starts to inveigh against “globalism,” the “IMF,” “international Anglo-Liberalism,” “the transnational elites,” and many such things, into thinking that such a person must surely want to preserve the demographic and cultural characteristics of a particular country or region. But that’s almost never the case: importing millions of Paraguayans, Peruvians, Bolivians in Argentina, or migrants in Basque Country or Ireland may actually come to be seen as “yes we are importing good family people who will stand with us in native solidarity against globalism, Capital, and Neoliberal atomization.” And that is in fact what happened.