As the post-national multi-cultural social-engineering experiment of the past 80 years reaches its ugly but inevitable chaotic conclusion and the world begins to take stock on how to rebuild the cultural fabric of our nations before things spiral into full-blown race wars and civil unrest (or worse), the urgent question arises: what does it take to glue a fractured nation back together and rebuild a cohesive “national identity”?
How do you get a fractured society that has lost its common cultural core (and has turned hostile to all the values and principles upon which these nations once stood) to set aside their divisions and rally together again around a new common vision of the future and a renewed sense of shared identity?
~ ~ ~
According to the Oxford dictionary, the dry clinical definition of a “nation” is a large body of people united by common descent, history, culture, or language, inhabiting a particular country or territory.
There’s so much that’s been left unsaid in that simplistic definition.
Why, for example, did America succeed in becoming a singular nation in the minds of its people despite the fact that, in defiance of that Oxford dictionary definition and in contrast with what defined the sense of nationhood back on the European continent (where ancestry, culture, and language defined everything), America’s sense of nationhood did not emerge from a single dominant religion, language, culture, or ancestral heritage, and has always included a huge multi-ethnic foreign-born population thanks to the never-ending waves of new immigrants washing up on its shores. And yet, a single patriotic nation emerged despite the wildly different cultural traditions of its constituent parts, which varied not just from colony to colony and town to town, but even from one house to the next.
Even the common language link that we take for granted today wasn’t nearly as clear at the time of America’s founding. A significant proportion of its early population only used English as their lingua franca out on the street but spoke a different language inside their homes. Ancestry estimates based on surnames in the 1790 census suggests that those of German and Dutch heritage comprised a full 29% of the population (!), and even those who spoke English were anything but cohesive — that same census shows that another 16% was comprised of Scottish, Irish, or Welch ancestry (all English speakers but hardly the best of friends with Englishmen back on the British Isles).
By the 1910 census, only around 25% of immigrants coming to America were still coming from one of the English-speaking countries. The rest were Germans, Italians, Jewish, Polish, Swedish, French, and Norwegians as the next most populous immigrant groups — there are a total of 27 other languages besides English listed as the first languages of immigrants on the 1910 census! You don’t have to scratch very deep below the surface to find the cultural patchwork of what makes up the “typical’ American.
No nation in history has ever been forged from raw ingredients with such a colossal diversity in ancestry, history, culture, language, or religion.
Another notable example which highlights the unlikelihood that America would ever have succeeded in forging itself into a single patriotic nation is that, during the colonial era before America’s War of Independence, both Virgina and Massachusetts were so hostile to Catholics that they prohibited Catholics from settling and even from setting foot inside their colonies — a 1647 law in the Massachusetts Bay Colony imposed banishment on Catholic priests for the first offense of entering the colony and death if they came back a second time! Meanwhile, the colony of Maryland was founded specifically to serve as a haven for Catholics fleeing persecution in Britain after the English Reformation. These states could not have been more ideologically different. And yet, instead of launching religious wars against each other in keeping with the long-established European tradition, they instead did the unthinkable by voluntarily joining the same Republic and signing on to the same Constitution!
Likewise, the tensions between the Quakers and their Puritan neighbors during the colonial era are legendary. Yet once again, all willingly signed on to that same Constitution!
Perhaps the only thing that all these raw ingredients had in common with each other is that they all had very little in common but wanted the freedom to keep it that way.
Partly because of the experience of fighting the Revolutionary War and partly because of the experience of having to look to one another to create a strong enough republic after that war to defend their newly won freedom from being extinguished by Britain during the peace that followed, these diverse peoples were willing to bind themselves together as a singular patriotic nation.
But there was one key difference between the glue that bound America together versus that has been used to glue all other countries together before or since — rather than sharing a single culture, America was founded on the idea of Liberty. By all accounts, these diverse states should never have been able to become “one people”. And yet, in both heart and mind, and not just in a legal sense, they defied the Oxford dictionary to become one large American family — frequently quarrelsome, full of warts and wrinkles, unbelievably diverse in all the ways that matter, yet one patriotic family nonetheless. The American “tribe” truly is unlike any other (or, at least it was, but I’m getting ahead of the story).
The American Constitution was the physical embodiment of that unwritten social contract to preserve one another’s liberty — that’s why, to this day, the American Pledge of Allegiance to acquire citizenship and the oaths taken by judges and politicians upon taking office are not pledged to any king, country, or government, only to their Constitution — it is the blueprint that was meant to safeguard their own and each other’s liberty.
Lots of other nations have inspirational-sounding constitutions (some even more eloquently written than America’s), and many of them were modelled upon some version of America’s Constitution. Yet many of those living under these other constitutions are nonetheless NOT a singular people despite having spent centuries confined together in one country. A parchment does not make a people.
The legal architecture to bind them together as a country is there, but the patriotic instinct to bind those people to one another is missing. Their constitutions failed to inspire — the words may be the same but those words have not lit the same spark in the hearts and minds of their people. And those other countries struggle to assimilate newcomers, whereas America does not.
Instead, these countries are plagued by long-simmering internal political dysfunction, secession movements, civil wars, and borders that are permanently in flux. As Belgian politician and cultural critic Jules Destrée famously wrote in 1912, “in Belgium there are only Walloons and Flemish people, but no Belgians.” And he wrote that long before the waves of recent mass migration and before the post-WWII European experiment with post-national multiculturalism had begun!
Culturally, there are two nations trapped within Belgium’s borders. And the dysfunction still hasn’t been resolved more than a century later — from 2018 until 2020, Belgium had NO government for a mindboggling 652 days because it was unable to form a government against the backdrop of these simmering tensions between the French-speaking Walloons and Dutch-speaking Flemish. And in 2024, Belgium went through another 7 month gap without a government as intense post-election negotiations resulted in yet another stalemate.
The divisions between these two cultural tribes are so entrenched that unsuccessful independence movements have also been simmering on both the Flemish and Walloonian sides for more than a century, with no resolution in sight. It would seem that, more than a century after Jules Destrée’s pithy observation, there are still no Belgians in Belgium. Nation-building is hard.
As we will soon see as this essay unfolds, America became a singular patriotic nation precisely because it was not composed of a single or even of similar cultures. It became a patriotic nation precisely because of what it took to inspire diverse peoples to voluntarily unite under a single Constitution in spite of all their differences — it is perhaps the only nation-building effort that has ever been able to achieve such a feat.
Other countries have tried but ultimately failed to overcome their historical, cultural, religious, and linguistic divisions. Newcomers simply create even more internal tribes. Even if things settle down for a while, sectarianism and factionalism ultimately keep breaking through because these top-down efforts at nation-building were never propelled by a bottom-up unifying desire for liberty.
But as liberty is throttled in America by the centralization of powers, legislative strangulation, and bureaucratic bloat, even America is gradually succumbing to internal factionalism and struggling to assimilate some of its newcomers — more on that in a moment.
This is one of the core lessons of this essay: if you put pressure on people from the top, they resist that pressure by taking refuge in tribal divisions. But the reverse happens if government offers liberty as the prize — immense tribal divisions can be overcome to create a single sense of nationhood in order to preserve that liberty — but only if that liberty requires everyone to look to one another to keep them free from big meddlesome government. Once liberty is replaced by a managerial state, tribalism thrives, and the national identity begins to fray.
America’s unique foundational focus on Liberty achieved the impossible by inspiring thirteen dissimilar and frequently quarrelling founding colonies to willingly bind themselves together as a republic. It also served as a magnet for many additional states, each with their own unique character, to nonetheless willingly apply to join that Republic at a later date (like Vermont, Tennessee, Ohio, Alabama, Oregon, etc.). And even after some territories were later added by annexation or conquest (like Texas, California, New Mexico, and Arizona), unlike other conquered territories elsewhere in the world that have spent centuries wallowing in resentment against their new masters, these new American states not only accepted their fate without further conflict but these newly annexed citizens even fully bought into the American national identity and rapidly became “American” in every sense. Even for those who had to be conquered first in order to bring them into the fold, the American Dream is irresistibly addictive because it is founded on the idea of liberty.
Contrast this with the Belgian experience — there is no Belgian Dream, only a Walloonian Dream and a Flemish Dream.
Or consider Quebec, which dreams of independence from Canadian Confederation — Quebec has remained an unhappy participant in the Canadian system ever since it was conquered by the British in 1763 — to them, the Canadian flag is not a symbol of liberty but rather a symbol of oppression despite the fact that French Canadians did, in the early decades after conquest, transfer their patriotic loyalty to the British Crown, only to lose that patriotic sentiment as soon as the British began their efforts to try to transform them into Englishmen. In the War of 1812, French Canadians voluntarily enlisted and fought valiantly alongside the British to fend of an American invasion, much to the surprise of the invading Americans who had convinced themselves that the French Canadians would greet them as liberators. Yet by 1837, Lower Canada (modern Quebec) was rioting in the streets in armed rebellion in protest of their English masters.
Everything about the American experience defies all the dictionary definitions of what it means to create and sustain a nation. Even after America’s Union was tested and temporarily split in two during the bitter and bloody U.S. Civil War (triggered by the growing centralization and expansion of federal powers which caused the southern states to feel like the Republic was betraying its commitment to preserve the liberty for each state to govern its own internal affairs), America nonetheless was able to come back together as one cohesive nation after the Civil War without the multi-decadal simmering violence that so often follows failed attempts at secession in so many other countries.
The South today is no less patriotic to the American flag than the North — by some measures even more so if you consider that the former states that were part of the Confederacy during the Civil War provide nearly as many recruits for today’s US military compared to former Union states despite the fact that these former Confederate states have less than half of the population of those former Union states. America has a unique ability to inspire, absorb, and assimilate people in defiance of all the criteria laid out in that Oxford dictionary definition.
In other words, the concept of “nation” is much more than the legal or geographic notion of a “country”. It is a shared bond towards one another as a people — a sense of bottom-up patriotism that emerges spontaneously from the hearts and minds of its people. It is the largest “family” that we identify with — our national tribe. And it is a two-way unwritten social contract; we identify with that tribe but the tribe equally has to accept us as one of its members.
Beyond nation, the next division up is at the species level — homo sapiens versus all the other animals — which inspires no loyalty or sense of kinship at all. That’s the United Nations vision for all of humanity, which seeks to coerce everyone into viewing themselves as belonging to a single tribe — the “Brotherhood of Man”. This abstract philosophical idea is promoted by academics and idealistic liberal politicians, but it simply doesn’t exist as a practical reality out on the street. The idea that we are all united as a singular “Brotherhood of Man” does not lead to patriotic feelings.
As the Covid experience proved, even when all of mankind comes under simultaneous attack from an enemy outside of our species, we don’t join as one — we retreat back into our tribal identities even as many seize that opportunity to exploit the “crisis” for power and money at the expense of their fellow humans. We are not, nor were we ever, nor will we ever be “all in this together.”
There is no universal kinship that can unite us all under a single umbrella. We are tribal by nature and no amount of top-down social engineering can refashion our sense of “tribe” to encompass our entire species. Why not? Because the bigger the political system gets, the more rules we impose to keep order, and the more resources that accumulate in the hands of the government, the more that natural divisions will begin to emerge as various factions begin to compete for preferential access to land, resources, redistributive taxes, regulatory privileges, and to make sure that even the well-intended one-size-fits-all legislation is tweaked to fit their unique circumstances and not someone else’s. Our tribe is comprised of those with whom we have something in common, whereas the sense of the “other” emerges in our minds to identify the other tribes that our tribe is forced to compete with based on geography, culture, history, language, religion, ideology, etc, etc.
And now, even our national identities are unravelling because we have lost pride in our common culture, forgotten our history, turned our backs on the shared principles that once united our countries, flooded our countries with millions of migrants, degrading our national sovereignty through countless international treaties, encouraged multi-culturalism as a policy, and not only removed the obligation to assimilate but even actively encouraged newcomers not to assimilate. In sum, we have quite a mess on our hands.
~ ~ ~
National Geographic provides an alternate definition of “nation”:
“A nation is a territory where its people are led by the same government. The word ‘nation’ can also refer to a group of people who share a history, traditions, culture and, often, language—even if the group does not have a country of its own.” [my emphasis]
The first half of that definition is rooted in the post-nationalism of our era as it deliberately confuses the difference between a nation and a country. A passport is not to be confused with patriotic feeling. America is a nation. Belgium is only country.
But the second half of National Geographic’s definition speaks to the more traditional path to nationhood — the ability of culture, history, tradition, and language to forge a familial bond within an in-group to the exclusion of other out-groups, and to maintain that unshakable bond across the span of time.
For example, the Basques are a nation — a distinct people — spread across two countries who have not had a country of their own for at least 3,000 years. Entire civilizations have come and gone, yet the Basques are still there, unfazed, unassimilated, and distinct. Genetically, linguistically, and culturally, the Basque nation reaches back in an unbroken line for at least 10,000 years!
By contrast, Spain (one of the two host countries in which the Basque nation is located) is a country, for a long time it was a kingdom, and for a while it even became an Empire, but despite all the efforts of the center to bring the periphery into the fold, it has never truly been a nation in a unified cultural sense because it is composed of many distinct smaller nations like the Basques and Catalonians who don’t actually want to be there — their allegiance is to their tribe, not to the larger artificial Spanish country or empire in which they are confined at the present time.
Spain is held together by the raw might of its institutional powers and the loyalty of the patronage network that Madrid has bought itself through the power of taxation and legislation, in contrast with the cultural, linguistic, and ancestral glue that has held the Basques together for millennia even without a government of their own to impose that bond by force. But the Basques will undoubtedly still be there long after Spain ceases to exist, just as they have outlived the Romans, the Visigoths, the Franks, the Umayyad Caliphate and Al-Andalus, the Kingdom of Navarre, the Kingdom of Aragon and Castile, and the Spanish Monarchy, all of which preceded the rise of the modern centralized Spanish state in their turns.
At best, Spain has merely achieved partial nation status, with some citizens (especially those belonging to groups that dominate national politics) buying into the artificial Spanish national identity, even as many peripheral “tribes” fail to share that enthusiasm for a national “family” that preys upon their resources and undermines their local autonomy— on the contrary, these rebellious hold-outs are alienated still further by federal efforts to impose that national identity onto its dissenting citizens by coercion and by force. Coercion has a way of heightening rather than healing national divisions.
Nationhood can only emerge if there is a bottom-up appetite for it. Top-down efforts at nation-building fail miserably as they drive a giant emotional wedge between a country and its dissidents. A country is a legal and geographic concept whereas nationhood isn’t about logic or law; it is deeply rooted in (and emerges from) our emotions — from our sense of belonging to and being respected by a larger family or tribe.
France was once a nation in addition to being both a country and an empire, with its people embracing their king as their nation’s “Great Father”. Even the indigenous tribes in New France came to refer to France’s kings by that moniker. Theirs was not a nation founded on liberty in the American sense, but on the sense that, in some way, all of the king’s subjects were the king’s children and he would, in some way, attempt to fairly adjudicate between them and look out for them as a kind of shepherd. The king was the gold-giver, law-maker, and shepherd at the heart of the vast patronage network from which France drew its support.
And after the inept monarchy was guillotined in the late 18th century after having lost its legitimacy in the eyes of too many of its subjects, that authority to act as the nation’s shepherd was transferred in turn to elected councils, dictators, legislatures and the presidency, but the core idea of a French nation centered around a powerful central shepherd remained at the core of the French national identity. And, whenever that shepherd is seen to fall short, the nation rises up to stage another revolution (three big ones so far since 1789, plus a bunch more near-revolutions).
But the French Empire has long since faded away, and the nation that remains is fast becoming just another country composed of fracturing people whose common bond is rapidly eroding away under the relentless assault on French culture by post-national social engineering — they are fast becoming a legal union of strangers as they cease to be a national family. It’s the same story in Britain, in Germany, in Sweden, and so many other places besides, which all thought they could tinker with their people’s sense of “tribe” by either transferring that patriotic national sentiment to a new multi-cultural identity or onto a new artificially-contrived pan-European identity, or both. Since the glue holding France together was a common cultural bond (rather than the American concept of individual and local liberty), as that cultural bond is eroded away by multi-cultural social engineering, the glue holding the nation together begins to dissolve. In America, the patriotic nation dissolves as liberty is eroded. In Europe, the patriotic nation dissolves as mono-cultural unity is diluted.
Like America, Canada did not truly emerge from a shared common culture, ancestry, history, language, or religion, but nor was it founded on American-style liberty, even if many of its immigrants did come to these shores in search of liberty, and found it in some measure compared to the suffocating nations that they left behind in the old country.
Canada emerged as a colonial remnant of the British Empire, cobbled together as a country by the ham-fisted historic center in order to exercise control over its peripheral geographic parts. But mostly, it was created to prevent the rest of British North America from being annexed by the expanding reach of that rebellious nation created by America’s thirteen rebel colonies. Canada takes pride in its “diversity” and the fact that it is not and never has been an American “melting pot”. And yet, unlike America, it can’t quite seem to get authentic bottom-up buy-in from all of its constituent parts, like Quebec and most of its indigenous nations, who by historic accident find themselves living inside that country. Their bodies belong to Canada, but their hearts and minds do not.
And then, after the Second World War, Canada threw itself upon the idea of post-national multiculturalism with an enthusiasm that is unparalleled by any other Western nation — it even ditched its earlier flag (the Red Ensign), which included symbols of its British and French heritage, to adopted a new generic flag in 1965 (the Maple Leaf) and made multi-culturalism its official policy in 1971 under Pierre Elliott Trudeau. By the time his son Justin Trudeau came to power, Trudeau Jr. proudly announced that Canada could be the world’s “first post-national state […] There is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada” — what better place for a post-national social-engineering experiment than a huge nation with immense geographic and cultural differences and rapid immigration, where even its most recent territorial acquisition (Newfoundland in 1949) only joined Confederation with great reluctance.
By contrast, Quebec, much like the Basques in Spain, is undeniably a distinct nation unto itself with a distinct history, culture, language, and religious heritage, which finds itself legally and geographically trapped within that larger artificially-concocted Canadian jurisdiction through no fault of their own.
Throughout most of its history since it was conquered by the British in 1763, Quebec has been on the blunt end of a relentless 250-year social engineering experiment to try to assimilate the French Canadian identity, erase the French language, dilute the French population via mass migration, and suppress French culture in order to forcibly assimilate the French Canadian identity into the larger British and then later the larger Canadian national family. And yet, with each poke and prod, the wedge between them only gets driven even deeper. Yves-Francois Blanchet, Quebec separatist and leader of Canada’s federal Bloc Quebecois political party, recently stated this in the most blunt terms when he said, “we are, whether we like it or not, part of an artificial country with very little meaning, called Canada. […] this nation [referring to Canada] is not mine. I don’t feel any more at ease in the Canadian Parliament than [Alberta Premier Danielle] Smith would feel at ease in the National Assembly of Quebec.”
When an outraged media called him out on dubbing Canada as an “artificial country”, he doubled down:
“Mr. Trudeau himself […] said that Canada is a post-national nation. It’s a non-nation, a country which denies its own identity and, ironically, with a central government which wants to control the jurisdictions of every province, slowly but surely, and with major parties who use mainly immigration as a tool to have a more fragile [I think he means easily exploitable] working force.
Within that presently, there’s a strong nation identifying itself as a nation, and a proud one [Quebec]. If everybody in this present country was to do like us [he means assert their provincial sovereignty], the dynamics of politics would be quite different in Ottawa. It has been pulled together through history with the hope of making Quebecers into Canadians just like any other Canadians. And it failed. So maybe this country is a bit artificial.”
Meanwhile, the growing separatist sentiment in Alberta is also driving that province to also sever its emotional ties towards Canada as it too evolves towards becoming a proto-nation in its own right. But casting off the yoke of an oppressive distant government that undermines local decision-making at every turn is not enough to automatically give Albertans a cohesive national cultural identity — something more must happen in the hearts and minds of Albertans to glue them together as an Albertan nation.
When Mr. Blanchet was recently asked if he has any tips for Alberta to help them in their quest, he pointed out that a nation “requires a culture of their own, and I am not certain that oil and gas qualify to define a culture.” Work still needs to be done to evolve a common vision and a unifying “patriotic” emotional bond that doesn’t include Ottawa, as either parent or villain, to help them define that identity. A culture that depends on a common enemy to sustain its relevance in the hearts and minds of its people is also artificial, even if the underlying grievances are real. Nationhood requires not just a definition of what you are not, but also a clear sense of the glue that binds you together as a tribe.
Meanwhile, Germans spent most of their history without a singular country to call their own — during the Middle Ages, German-speakers were divided into countless separate suffocating feudal micro-states despite their shared culture, language, folklore, and ancestral bonds. Indeed, uniting all these people under a single democratic umbrella became an obsession for German-speaking people as they yearned to create a political force capable of resisting and replacing feudal tyranny.
German speakers in Europe spent the late 18th and early 19th century clamouring to catch up with other European nations, like France and England, which were already far ahead in their quest to be united as a single culture within their own self-governing nation. This drive to dismantle empires in order to give distinct nations their own countries was the defining obsession of 19th century liberal movements throughout Europe — while American liberty was defined as freedom from government, the 19th century concept of liberty in Europe was focused on the struggle for cultural or ethnic groups (referred to as “nations”) to achieve self-governance — a subtle yet important difference. As surprising as it is for many people today, nationalism (and all the intolerance and discrimination that often accompanies ethno-states) emerged from 19th century liberalism as the reactionary antidote to imperial tyranny.
To return the favor of advice to Mr. Blanchet based on the bitter lessons drawn from German nationalism, Quebec should also take heed in that their own quest for independence is also struggling to gain support from all of its citizens who don’t share a Quebecois heritage because, like a European ethno-state, the evolution of Quebec’s culture rests firmly in the hands of the centralized provincial government in Quebec City.
Unlike the decentralized republic created by America’s Founding Fathers, Quebec’s centrally controlled system is quite oppressive towards many of its outlying regions and towards all the other subcultures that don’t come from a Quebecois heritage — the indigenous peoples, the English, Irish, Scottish, Germans, Italians, Jews, Portuguese, Eastern Europeans, Africans, Caribbeans, Asians, and Middle Easterners who were settled in Quebec by Canada in order to dilute the French Canadian grip over the province, yet who came in good faith and are now citizens like everyone else, and in some cases with cultural roots in the province that also extend back up to 260 years.
The central authority exercised by Quebec City is undoubtedly a necessary adaptation in order to keep Ottawa’s heavy hand at bay as long as Quebec remains a part of Canada. But if, after independence, liberty for some comes at the expense of eroding the liberty of others, that won’t glue Quebec together as a cohesive whole.
If Quebec wants to bring ALL its hearts and minds on board for a successful independence bid to get out from Ottawa’s thumb, while simultaneously preserving the cultural identity of its Quebecois heritage, it should consider refashioning itself as a French-speaking mirror of the early United States by pre-drafting a constitution modelled on the one created by America’s Founding Fathers (before it was corrupted by too much centralization) in order to transform Quebec into a decentralized, bottom-up French-speaking Republic immediately following independence, with almost all decision-making authority devolved from Quebec City to new regional governments upon achieving independence.
That, and probably only that, is what it would take to bring Quebec’s diverse population under a single patriotic and harmonious umbrella to achieve a successful separatist referendum. Don’t be another ham-fisted version of Ottawa — be the opposite. Be a French version of the American Republic to bring everyone on board. Liberty is contagious and inspires patriotism. Bloated central authority and ethno-nationalism does not.
~ ~ ~
But let’s turn back to the unique lessons offered by the German national experience… Once united as a single German Empire in 1866, Germany struggled to keep it together, not only because the nationalism went to their heads and extinguished individual liberty within their new ethno-nation, but also because its militant ethos led to two world wars that tore their country apart, twice, only a few decades after it was formed. Ironically, when Germans were finally reunited once again in 1990 (this time by peaceful reunification) after yet another 45-year outside-imposed partition, they flipped to the opposite cultural extreme as they completely abandoned any sense of national cultural self-preservation — undoubtedly in no small part out of shame and guilt for Germany’s crimes committed during the fever of national socialism.
Instead they launched themselves whole-heartedly into the newest pan-European neo-liberal social-engineering project (the European Union), this time to create a technocratic post-national empire that seeks though politics, through monetary policy, through mass migration, through institutional domination, and through cultural indoctrination, to erase, dilute, and undermine both the national sovereignty and the cultural identity that their 19th century ancestors had fought so hard to achieve — Germany is turning into yet another “multi-culti” country that’s at risk of becoming little more than a postal code without a cultural identity, like so many other liberal democracies in the West.
Germany isn’t the only one — they are reflective of a much broader trend that emerged since the Second World War as the West embarked on a giant collective experiment to try to stamp out the feverish ethno-nationalism that had turned Europe and Asia into a giant bloody horror show in the 1930s and 40s. The idea they latched onto as the solution to 19th century European liberalism (a.k.a. nationalism) was 20th century liberalism (a.k.a. multi-cultural internationalism). If everyone is from somewhere else, mixed together as rainbow nations with only the country name printed on the cover of our passports to differentiate us, and a detached scientifically-informed technocratic regime to watch over us, then perhaps our tribal human nature would be tamed once and for all, and a “Brotherhood of Man” would emerge at long last to let our shared human kinship shine through in all its theoretical glory.
It’s the great switcheroo — where once nations existed as distinct peoples even if they did not have their own countries because they were subordinate to the rules of centrally-controlled multi-ethnic empires, now countries exist but no longer with their own distinct peoples as the nations that once inhabited them are scattered far and wide. The pendulum has swung to the other extreme.
Sushi on Mondays, Italian pasta on Tuesdays, kebabs on Wednesdays, taco Thursdays, chicken masala on Fridays, schnitzel and burgers on Saturdays, bangers and mash on Sundays, and a big festive “Happy Holidays” to everyone every few weeks as each quaint cultural heritage is celebrated in turn. Stripped of the vice of tribalism, and with ethnic culture reduced to food, music, and tourist attractions, humanity is allegedly finally free to live out our individual human potential to the fullest. Peace. Harmony. And the human solidarity to bring everyone together as one big harmonious international family. Kumbaya.
Of course, it didn’t work out that way. Not even close. And the harder that their top-down thumb is pressed down on the people to achieve by force what migration and propaganda failed to achieve on their own, the more angry, divisive and hostile the pushback becomes.
~ ~ ~
As I discussed in greater detail in my recent 3-part essay about The Psychological Unravelling of the West, as national identity was stripped away by the post-national, multicultural experiment, what emerged was raw tribalism on steroids. The rainbow-colored woke movement is tribal and intolerant to the extreme, with countless sub-tribes both collaborating and competing for all the power, resources, and regulatory privileges that are concentrated in the hands of our increasingly powerful and increasingly centralized governments. And the more that the government tries to mold society, the greater the incentive for everyone to leverage their micro-tribal identities to opportunistically turn that social engineering to their own advantage, even if it comes at the expense of someone else.
Through this emergent woke tribal lens, every individual has been reduced to their ethnicity, religious affiliation, and skin color — it defines everything. And since they’re all mixed together and living under one governing authority instead of living separately by geography and region (as tribes once did when they were confined to larger multi-ethnic empires, each with their own provincial governor), these tribes are now locked in perpetual war over who gets to control those powerful centralized levers of government, including in America, which turned its back on decentralized, limited government to also increasingly turn itself into a vast bureaucratic managerial state.
As tribalism resurges, the Individual is wholly reduced to his tribal markers. Under this pressure, the entire Judeo-Christian architecture of Western civilization (in the legal, educational, and cultural sense), from which emerged concepts like meritocracy, individual rights, individual worth, equality before the law, property rights, and so much more, is now in full-scale collapse, under attack from all sides by all these tribal factions that are leaping into the void once filled by a cohesive national cultures. If all members of the tribe are essentially cut from the same cloth, meritocracy can thrive as competition happens at the individual level. But when society is composed of a thousand warring tribes, individual meritocracy gets pushed aside by that tribal power struggle that consumes everything. The incentives created by this fractured tribal competition for power and resources create a self-reinforcing belief system that’s hostile to building a cohesive national culture.
Compounding this toxic witches’ brew are outside forces, including state actors, that also smell opportunities to leverage this cultural implosion and take advantage of the rise of identity politics to pursue their own agendas within the West itself. For example, China’s hostile infiltration into Western political systems (especially in Canada) is well documented.
Likewise, the Muslim Brotherhood and its sponsors (like Qatar) are also having an increasingly potent influence on university campuses throughout the West, on mosques located inside the West, on activist movements on Western streets, and even on the political decisions made by Western governments — it’s an ironic and self-inflicted oversight considering that the Muslim Brotherhood is banned and even classified as a terrorist group in multiple Middle Eastern countries, including by Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Egypt, because of its radical interpretations of Islam, its hostility to both Western values and Arab nationalism, it’s overt resistance to assimilation into local and national cultures as it seeks to colonize any country or culture in which it gains a toehold, and its relentless efforts to turn radical Islam into a political force capable of challenging and even overthrowing long-established local political structures. And yet, within Western nations, it’s an influential organization whose networks are allowed to operate with impunity.
Money, voting blocks, political influence, and social pressure from these imported foreign actors are also re-shaping the evolution of our nation’s culture, laws, and social fabric, and are contributing to the chaos, anger, and unresolvable tensions that are consuming our Western nations. Against the backdrop of post-WWII multi-cultural internationalism that seeks to stamp out all remnants of the discredited European ethno-state, the concept of cultural assimilation between host and immigrant has been wholly inverted as the guilt-manipulated old stock of Western nations increasingly defers to the cultural sensitivities, values, and idiosyncrasies of the newcomers. The host is being assimilated by the guests.
Before I dive into the remainder of this essay — into the challenges and solutions to rebuilding the glue to heal our fractured nations — I want to thank all my paid subscribers for your support. It means the world to me!
If you are not already a paid subscriber, I’d like to ask for your support in the form of a paid subscription to my Substack. These kinds of essays require a colossal amount of time, effort, and research to produce. My freedom to explore ideas and think out-of-the-box comes from the fact that I am 100% reader-supported by people like you.
But if you’re not ready to sign up for a paid subscription, perhaps you’d consider leaving me a tip in the Tip Jar on my website to help support my writing.
