Virginia Is America

Or at least it was once.

The United States of America as currently constituted is a limb of the tree of Anglophone Civilization. It shares this status with Great Britain, Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Cape South Africa. Yet the current borders of the United States contain several strains of Anglophone Civilization, which though they exist, do not exist in an independent capacity. Nor can one deny that the Federal Government of the United States grew out of a particular place which is unto itself a Civilization. That place is Virginia, the first name given to the modern borders of the United States.

Prior to explaining what the United States is, those parts of it which, while sharing Anglophone status, are of a separate character must be named and defined. New England, meant to include the states of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and (arguably) New York, is the most obvious. It is the most insular and well-defined region of the country, as well as the first to discuss the prospect of secession.

Texas is the second, also obvious and well-defined. Though a single state, Texas is large enough to be almost its own region, which often includes the bordering states of Oklahoma and New Mexico. Its people also possess a socially approved historical consciousness as a state and a people independent of the wider United States, demonstrated by being the cultural center of the “Cowboy.”

California is the third. Possessing a greater economic and cultural prowess than Texas, it also has the faint historical consciousness of a short-lived independence in the Bear Flag Revolt. It’s completely socially acceptable in California (and outside of it) to discuss California secession, often followed up with “They’d be the world’s fifth-largest economy.” More importantly, in the digital content-driven world, the California dialect of English has swamped nearly every other, as have Californian fashions, cuisines, and cultural mores.

Beyond those three, no other region of the United States demonstrates an independent historical consciousness (therefore excluding the Midwest) combined with economic prowess (therefore excluding Utah) to consider it seriously as separate. This leads me back to the idea of “American” Civilization, both national and regional, as represented by the Federal Government and opposition to it.

American Civilization is, in fact, culturally centered around the pole of the Federal Government and its constituent aesthetics, which is the city of Washington, D.C. The Federal Government gets its aesthetics from Virginia, which created it through James Madison’s Constitution of 1789; and the city built to house it was named after the Virginian elected as said Federal Government’s first President. Whatever monstrosity this America has devolved into, its origin remains unchanged.

Virginia was the first successful English-speaking settlement in North America. Its original borders included the entire modern contiguous continental United States (sans South Florida, South Texas, and most of the Northeast, including all of New England). It birthed both the South and the Midwest, the former adopting the Tidewater-style plantation system and culture, the latter being created from whole cloth out of claimed Virginia territory in the Ohio River Valley.

As time has gone on, Virginia has found itself reduced from the entire continent to a comparatively small sliver of land from the Alleghenies to the Chesapeake. There is even talk of reducing its size further, as the West feels unrepresented by the Federal Government-dominated East. It is no wonder why the impact of Virginia is relegated more and more to a dead past, to the detriment of Americans who are now searching for a new identity.

“America” itself cannot be separated from the Federal Government, which is weaker now than it was under the Tyler administration, though there does not exist any force strong enough to end it. And Virginia is only a past. There is no sufficient cultural force left here to correct the Civilization it birthed.

Yet the idea which Virginia carried and gave to the American Civilization it birthed can be replicated elsewhere with a new people, a new place, a new time, a new great struggle, and a new victory. That is the way of Anglo Civilization: if you don’t like the way things are going, you pack your bags, get in the boats, and see if you can do it better elsewhere.