What Is America?

On moral communities and excommunication

What, exactly, is America?

That question seems to lie at the heart of the current troubles, this low-intensity warfare between two different groups, with different visions for the country, none of them very clearly articulated. On the institutionally dominant side, they don’t dare state their intentions openly, for they know that to maintain their power they must at least pay lip service to the old republican forms and ideals. On the dissident side – institutionally powerless but numerically superior – the loyalty is to the old republic, or at least what they imagine it stood for ... but here too there is much that is implicit and unstated, in large part because decades of cognitive warfare have left Americans unwilling to say what they really think and desire, even privately, in their own minds.

Perhaps we might better ask: what, exactly, is an American?

America is frequently referred to as a nation-state, but this is a misnomer. A nation is a people united by common descent, by common blood. The word has its root in birth – natal has the same origin. America is not the state of one nation, but a state encompassing many nations, most obviously those of white and black, but amongst the whites there are the English, the Irish, the Dutch, the Italians, the Germans, the Swedes, and so on, each in their characteristic part of the country in which the local culture is still, even now, recognizably similar to whichever part of the Old World housed the original motherland.

States are often divided according to whether citizenship is assigned by jus sanguinis – right of the blood – or jus solis – right of the soil. America allows both. Thus, a nine-month pregnant chicana can illegally cross the border, drop her baby on the dirt moments later, and her brat is automatically as American as George Washington. Thus also, two American citizens living in China can give birth to an American citizen.

Not all countries operate according to these principles. Japan, for instance, does not recognize jus solis. You can spend your entire life living in Japan, and, if you are not Japanese, and neither is your spouse, neither will your children be. Citizenship is inherited only if one of the parents is a Japanese citizen. Japan is a nation-state in the true sense of the word: a state whose purpose is to further the lives of the Japanese people, where the Japanese people are defined on an entirely biological basis. Ever since a certain German landscape artist gave this basis for political organization a bad name, it has fallen out of fashion in the West; however, the Japanese, not being white, are allowed to remain honorary members of the West and still get away with it ... and the Japanese, being very courteous, are discrete enough not to rub everyone’s face in it.

One may also become an American citizen by naturalization. The idea here is that if one is willing to adopt the core beliefs of America, one can join the American body politic, despite being connected neither by bonds of descent nor geography. This is at the origin of the idea that America is a ‘creedal nation’, as milquetoast conservative pundits such as Ben Shapiro would have it. You can come from anywhere in the world, and if you’re willing to adopt the American creed of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, you can be just as American as someone whose ancestors came over on the Mayflower and shed blood in the War of Independence, the Indian Wars, and the Civil War.

There’s something noble in such an ideal.

The problem is that it isn’t consistently applied.

Does anyone really imagine that most immigrants to the United States of America come because they yearn to breathe free, to speak their minds and take responsibility for their own defense? Some surely do, but it seems to me that most are drawn by the promise of wealth like blackbirds to a freshly planted field, neither knowing nor caring what went into the planting of the field in the first place.

A state that imagines itself to be a moral community, rather than an instrument meant to advance the interests of an identifiable and distinct people, is in many ways analogous to the great world religions. In principle, anyone can be a Christian – there is neither Jew nor Greek, all are one in Christ. Just so, say the simple formula of the shahadah, and become a Muslim – it does not matter if one is Arab, Persian, Indonesian, or Australian Aborigine.

To join a religious community, one must in fact practice the faith, or at the very least not openly flout it. Religions have mechanisms not just for the conversion and induction of new members, but for the expulsion of the overly wayward. One would have a hard time arguing that one is still Catholic while sacrificing babies on a blood-soaked altar under an effigy of Baphomet; a Church that shrugged at such crimes, and insisted that those who openly and without repentance blasphemed and profaned all that it professed to hold sacred, would be no Church at all. A Church worthy of the name ejects not just new converts, but those born into the faith, should they carry their sacrilege too far.

If America is to be a moral community, rather than a union of nationalities intended ‘for ourselves and our posterity’¹, this only makes sense if Americans can be excommunicated for flouting the tenets of the American faith.

Americanism, so far as I can tell, is fundamentally organized around reverence to the Constitution, and to the divine rights of man enshrined and acknowledged² therein. To be an American is to speak one’s mind, and to do so without consequences more severe than enduring speech in return. It is to be armed as heavily as one desires, and subject to the law only if those arms are employed in criminal activity. It is to have absolute privacy in one’s private dealings, possessions, and speech. It is to be able to make one’s own way in the world, to compete and cooperate as one sees fit and to the best of one’s abilities. It is to be sovereign in one’s being, rather than a subject of distant and unaccountable powers.

What, then, of those who reject this? Of those who flout the spirit of the Constitution, and often even its letter, whether by enforcing speech codes on social media, or demanding those who say things they dislike be disemployed, or agitating for banning firearms? What of those in power who have erected a vast network of digital surveillance that rifles through private communications like a burglar turning over one’s sock drawer? What of leftists who mock ‘freeze peach’, and openly clamour for the first amendment to be torn from the Constitution and protections against ‘hate speech’ written in its place?

If America is a moral community organized around sacred ideals, then these are all apostates. Clearly, they cannot be considered a part of the moral community. As apostates have left the faith of their own free will, by exommunicating them the Church merely recognizes their own decision.

In Medieval Europe, citizenship operated on a somewhat similar basis. Most people would by default reside in whatever land they were born in, but under the feudal system, in principle one could go more or less anywhere and become a citizen by swearing fealty to the local liege. In other words, the fundamental basis of these states was not geographical or ethnic (although of course these played an inevitable role), but moral. Break that oath by disobeying or betraying your lord, however, and the rights and privileges granted by the oath were rescinded.

Developing this line of thought, in which an American is defined as one who follows the creed of Americanism, it follows that one who rejects the creed, even if they were born into it, is logically no longer an American. Not being an American, they cannot count on the protections enshrined in the Constitution, any more than an apostate can demand to receive holy communion.

Thus, when a leftist says, “Guns should be banned, and free speech is hate speech!” the legal response could be to shut them up by punching them in the mouth. By mocking and abjuring the Constitution, they waive their rights under it as surely as does a perp who strikes up a conversation with the cops in the back of the police cruiser.

The same would apply to immigrants. Merely mouthing the correct slogans and regurgitating the correct answers on a test may be enough to win them citizenship, but this would always be in a sense provisional if, should their later actions consistently and flagrantly contradict their profession of faith, they could be summarily excommunicated. By working against the Constitution they have sworn an oath of loyalty to, they are oathbreakers; therefore the bargain struck between them and the polity they joined by swearing that oath is null and void. There’s a professor of my acquaintance, a naturalized American citizen, who is wholly opposed to the second amendment and, being a DIE cultist, is extraordinarily enthusiastic about limiting the first. She is, in essence, acting subversively against the ideological core of the country that she has made her home, as surely as if a Satanist taught Sunday School with the intention of promoting the works of Anton LaVey. Why is this allowed? Why is her citizenship not stripped?

This principle is similar to the ‘intolerant tolerance’ advocated by Karl Popper, and widely adopted by leftists. The argument goes that a tolerant society can tolerate everything except the intolerant, who would if given free rein destroy tolerance. Therefore, the intolerant cannot be tolerated, and the tolerant are justified in using any and all means to shut down intolerance. In exactly the same fashion it can be argued that a society organized around liberty can permit its citizens to do almost anything ... except to undermine liberty. Speak as you will, but speak against freedom itself, and you may speak no more.

As it stands, the definition of American is a muddle, and that murk is a strategic weakness. By mixing under the term patriots passionately committed to the land and ideals of their forefathers, with traitors animated by contempt and hatred for those ideals, the latter are able to LARP as the champions of a false America they substitute for the real America, while castigating the former as treasonous insurrectionary terrorists against the Amazon fulfillment centre that has been erected in the place of the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Excommunication would solve a lot of problems. The political class is full of activists who are quite openly contemptuous of the Constitution, both in word and deed; they would no longer be able to hold office. Similarly, the permanent bureaucracy of the deep state is largely staffed by such people; since one must be a citizen to work in sensitive parts of the government, these, too, would face the loss of their position and influence.

All of this might seem harsh, but it need not be. It isn’t exactly a high bar for a psychologically normal human being. All that is asked is that one respects the spirit of the rights recognized in the founding documents, both by not infringing on them, and by not advocating against them. Prospective citizens would simply be asked to demonstrate that they understand those rights as they apply to themselves, and their responsibilities under those rights as they apply to others. Just as the Catholic Church requires even the baptised children of those born into the faith to complete their catechism to obtain the right to receive the sacraments, so those born to American citizens would be required to demonstrate that they understand the fundamentals of Americanism before they be allowed to vote. And, just as the Church allows apostates to repent and rejoin the fold, so too could America allow those who rejected her to become full citizens again, should their actions subsequent to excommunication demonstrate that they had experienced a genuine change of heart.

Excommunication need not mean deportation. It would primarily mean that one no longer has the right to vote. Shutting up apostates by punching them in the mouth was a joke³; the Constitution, after all, does not grant but merely recognizes rights that emanate from the Creator. Just as a Christian is commanded to act with mercy and compassion even to those who are not of the faithful, an American must recognize the divine rights of other humans, even if they themselves do not. However, a priest need not provide communion to those who have not accepted Jesus into their hearts; just so, Americans should be under no obligation to allow those hostile to Americanism to vote, run for public office, or serve in the permanent bureaucracy.

It’s worth looking at the alternatives.

The first is to carry on as America is – its steady degeneration into an abandoned shopping mall, a deracinated economic zone managed from Davos, inhabited by an atomic gas of mutually suspicious strangers with nothing in common save their temporary co-location. This isn’t a stable solution in the long run, nor is it intended to be. Ultimately, the idea is to re-coagulate America into a moral community organized on an entirely different basis ... one with an explicit social credit system, that will automatically demote apostates from the globalist faith to second-class citizenship. Say the wrong thing, and see your employment lost, your housing removed, your movement restricted, your financial account deactivated. They intend the consequences of apostasy to be far worse than merely being deprived of voting rights; apostates will simply be deplatformed from society. It’s not hard to see such a future; we’re already living in its early stages. The globalists already have their own flag, their hideous banner rainbow banner striped with chevrons of pink and brown as though smeared in vomit and shit and epilepsy; and they already consider the stars and stripes to be a symbol of racism, hate, and oppression, fit only for burning.

The other possibility is the white nationalist route: America redefined as an explicit ethnocracy, a Japan for the descendants of the Mayflower. The racial contradictions of America – the ante-colonial presence of the American Indians, who surely have the right to reside in America’s borders; the long habitation of the negroes, who are as genetically different from a Eurasian as it is possible to be; to say nothing of the presence within the white population itself of numerous distinct European ethnoi – present obvious difficulties to such a path. It’s hard to see how American ethnostates could emerge without, at the very least, partition of the land into separate countries, accompanied by a vast sorting of the population, something unlikely to happen without oceans of blood being spilled.

Perhaps bloodshed is inevitable.

It probably is, no matter what happens.

The path I’m suggesting – to redefine America as an explicitly ideological state, and to take that seriously – would preserve the best of what America was meant to embody. It would draw an explicit contrast with the alternative (im)moral community being constructed by the globalists, and provide a means of insulating internal politics from all those who, whether native or foreign born, would work to dismantle the American Republic, erect an Our Democracy in its place, and extinguish for generations to come the guttering flame of liberty.

1. As in fact was the stated intention of the Founders.

2. Recognized, not granted, and the difference is important.

3. Hey, it made me laugh.