The Scourge of Passport-Americans
The loss of Anglo hegemony in America spells disaster for the world.
I think I’ve sat on this long enough to be confident that I’ve figured out the character of a big political stinker that has been chaffing my American ass for all of my adult life so far, and until now has been filed under various inaccurate labels such as “leftism”, “communism”, “statism”, “neoliberalism/neoconservatism”, and so on. The news here is that it is indeed the character, as in human beings, not ideology that anyone could dodge or parlay like Noam Chomsky and Kampuchea. That character is that of the Passport-American.
I’m sure most of my readers are aware I am not a boomer, and am relatively young demographically at the moment. I have a general disdain for Zionism in American politics that doesn’t have any dimension about race or religion for me. Previously, this was disconnected from other political concerns I have, like illegal immigration, or corporate corruption of government, or illegal spying, or whathaveyou. But now I think they’re all symptomatic of a special kind of demographic change that I’ve not seen anyone talk about accurately before, and that change is the change away from Anglo-Saxon cultural hegemony.
In the past, the children of Ellis Islanders, despite however hyphenated and ethnic they were, were nonetheless demanded to assimilate by their Anglo-Saxon overlords, who still completely controlled the country both literally and culturally at the time. So they did, and this served as a model for non-Anglo Americanisation. Unfortunately, since the unfortunate events of the 1960s (there are many implicated here), that expectation of assimilation has been eroded away and replaced with a progressive ethos that expects nothing in return for the privilege of participating in American society. We have taken that to its most extreme logical endpoint now in 2024 with the mass illegal migration happening at the southern border. Being American has been eroded away to near-meaninglessness by the changes in public policy and cultural steering done through mass media. Everybody’s doing it for a quick buck.
But let’s back up so this doesn’t get confusing. I’m not really talking about immigrants here per sé, although I’m sure many of the culprits of decline are. The truth is, there are many Passport-Americans who were likely born here, or immigrated when they were about to enter kindergarten. They are still Passport-Americans, and it is very clear that they do not give a single fuck about the stock Americans (both white and black I might add) that made this country worth immigrating to in the first place.
Besides having no respect for the host culture, I suspect they are the root cause of the degradation of our national politics. There has been a massive rise in ethnonarcissism in our political discourse, and I can’t think of anything so characteristically un-American. For fuck’s sake, all of our group squabbling was based on race, not ethnicity! This change is obviously coming from people who still uphold their birth countries, or at least their cultures, as equal to or even superior to the Anglo-American culture they live under today. This dissonance is undermining everything in the economy and the public commons, because even respectful, law-abiding people put up no collateral to protect the culture that makes America so safe, rich and beautiful. They are content to let it passively degrade into at least the same quality as the places they are from, and that’s in the optimistic case, assuming they’re not criminally minded to start a money laundering operation or something. We’ve had a seamless transition from well-meaning Americans not reporting on demography out of politeness to bad-faith ethnonarcissists not doing it to protect themselves as a group.
I also speculate that these people had a more diffuse but still massive influence on the gradual degeneration of politics in the Obama era, where things seemed to get stupid to an extent nobody was anticipating. There’s probably a lot of blame to share with dumb liberal Americans drunk on First Black President Kool-Aid too, but still.
I grew up alongside the younger generations of these Passport-Americans, and I think what really changed it all was that they were never told or expected to conform to the dominate culture. All the rhetoric and policy they ever saw was everyone holding hands and singing Kumbaya for world peace, and so they naturally concluded an in-group preference for whatever their own ethnicity was. A Chinese girl had every licence to uphold and celebrate Chinese culture, despite not being in China, not living or working with Chinese people, and therefore having no actual common basis to do so. We’re all in our 20s now, and predictably this has devolved into a hundred different ethnic enclaves that rule the universities and actively conspire to profit themselves at the expense of other groups. Their current perception is that Black and White Americans are foolish at worst and extraneous at best, and they don’t care about what we think at all, even though we built this place and made it worth what it was when they decided to immigrate.
A common leftist refrain about anti-immigration sentiment is that “America is a nation of immigrants.” I would gladly agree if there was a nation to speak of, because I’m increasingly not seeing one. It feels more reminiscent of the Gilded Age where everything was divided and factionalised, but with a centralised government stamping out the autonomy needed for flourishing in spite of that.
The other reason I find Passport-Americans to be so pernicious is they will reflexively deny being so when pressed. I’ve seen this kind of performance out of South Asian podcasters who wax poetic about coming to America and enjoying the fruit of our values and practises, but at the end of the day, there’s no substitute for practises, and they’re still living their lives the way they would back home – different chessboard, same game. That’s not going to cut it anymore.
One more thing: I’m also getting sick of the new kinds of right wing politics taking hold in matters today, inasmuch as it betrays common threads of American cultural memory that both liberals and conservatives share. I’m all about being a realist, but I’m very wary of the normalisation of racism of the phenotype normally found in countries like Poland, China or Nigeria. The whole idea of fascism is also clearly foreign in nature to me, and it, too, needs to go. And come to think of it, the whole dotcom mafia isn’t very American either now that I think of it. I’m sure their influence is a net negative as well, and that’s to say nothing of the menagerie of lobbyists in Washington.
We’re really losing our grip on our own society here. It’s not hopeless, but we need to understand the nature of the problem here, break out of the fake feuds about partisan issues, and insist on Americanism again. Anglos are the ones to do it, and the rest of the trash will take itself out when pressed. That’s what I think.