Anti-WASPism–From The Alt Right

Some right-wingers weirdly detest the Founding Stock

A few weeks ago, I stumbled upon a strange phenomenon on social media. The bizarre phenomenon were right-wing immigration restrictionists who hated the Immigration Act of 1924. That’s strange, as the act famously restricted immigration. But this is why these folks hated it: it discriminated against their favorite ethnic groups. In this telling, the ‘24 Act was an example of WASP perfidy against BASED white ethnics. This is part of a tendency in certain right-wing circles to see the Anglo-Protestants as bad and everything good about America came from other whites. 

This is a weird tendency that sometimes rears its head in right-wing circles. America was founded by white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants. Other groups assimilated into their culture and ways. This is what we now consider whiteness. Without the WASPs, we wouldn’t have conquered the frontier, declared independence, or been America at all. Other peoples have contributed greatly to our country, but the core of it came from the British settlers. This shouldn’t be controversial for identitarians. 

But there are many who insist on anachronistic ethnic particularities and maintain long-dead grudges toward the founding stock. They dismiss the WASP’s contributions and claim white ethnics are far superior. This was articulated by white nationalist Eric Striker in his arguments against the ‘24 Immigration Act. He claimed WASPs were the ones opposed to immigration restriction, but white ethnics–in labor unions, no less–were the ones who limited immigration. But Striker couldn’t decide if that was a bad thing, as he claimed mass immigration saved America from turning into Brazil. Left to their own devices, the WASPs would’ve mixed with the Indians and blacks and made everything a whole lot more diverse. 

While European immigration to America was largely good up until the astronomical waves of the 20th century, that’s not the reason the country didn’t turn into Brazil. The Anglo-Protestant culture is why. The settlers here didn’t mix with the natives and they created a white identity in opposition to the “merciless savages” of the frontier. There was never any risk of Brazilification–until mass Hispanic immigration. 

On the matter of who was responsible for immigration restriction, the answer is the historic American people. This was a very popular idea and was most forcefully advocated by WASP politicians. Henry Cabot Lodge, a Boston Brahmin, was the primary advocate for immigration restriction in the lead up to 1924. He died before the bill’s passage. The bill was primarily crafted by Washington congressman Albert Johnson, a staunch anti-union man who represented a very Anglo district. 

While Striker claims white ethnics were the ones demanding immigration restriction, the congressmen who voted against it primarily represented cities with large ethnic populations, such as Detroit, Milwaukee, Chicago, Cleveland, and New York City. If the ethnics were the ones who made it happen, it certainly wasn’t reflected in their lawmakers. Meanwhile, nearly every rural congressman representing WASPs voted for the Act. 

Needless to say, it’s a myth to claim white ethnic unions achieved immigration restriction against WASP opposition.

This isn’t just a few angry people in my mentions. It’s a common attitude within the Dissident Right circles. The most popular proponent of this attitude is Curtis Yarvin (otherwise known as Mencius Moldbug), who sees the WASPs as the source for the destructive liberalism that tore down the West’s traditional order. Many traditionalist Catholics share this attitude as well, which makes sense considering their desired order. Protestants who established separation between church and state are unlikely to be hit with integralists. European nationalists have long criticized the Anglo-Saxon for a variety of sins.

But the oddest group to hate them are American white nationalists. White identity in this country was formed by this group. America’s particular brand of whiteness allowed a variety of Europeans to assimilate and become one people here. WASPs deserve the credit for it. However, some white nationalists want to deny this and extol their own favored ethnicities instead. 

This sentiment was best articulated by one Michael O’Meara. O’Meara was a Counter-Currents contributor and former academic who disappeared from the scene a decade ago. His writings were influential in the pre-Trump Alt Right. He was an ardent Irish chauvinist and despised the WASP. This comes through in his lengthy essay: “How the Irish Became White.” The work was intended to critique the book with that title by left-wing historian Noel Ignatiev. Ignatiev was a pioneer in “whiteness studies,” which seeks to demonize and dismantle the core character of America. O’Meara did an admirable job of showing how stupid Ignatiev’s arguments are (such as showing the Irish were always considered white) and analyzing the insidiousness of this academic discipline.

But instead of celebrating the whiteness and race realism Ignatiev deplores, O’Meara spends much of his essay railing against whiteness while lionizing the Irish as the superior whites. 

O’Meara accepts the dubious accounts of anti-Irish discrimination and depicts his people as a victimized group in the same way blacks talk about themselves. To put it simply, it’s extremely cringe. In this telling, the WASPs are money-grubbing capitalists who seek to destroy tradition and organic community wherever they find it. They hated the Irish for being true traditionalists who proudly stuck to their heritage and organic communities. But the Irish resisted and developed, along with the “cavaliers” of the South, an “anti-liberal” white identity.

Here are some passages to give you an idea of this opinion:

Given their history and identity, though, they spurned the Anglo-Saxonist notion of whiteness, and instead defined themselves as ‘Celts’ – a branch of the white race spiritually opposed to the profanities of the ‘sourfaced Saxons’ and their North American cousins. For however dispossessed and cut off from the main sources of American social advancement and power, the Irish treated middle class Protestant morality with the cynicism ‘it deserved’.

…

As to race, the Irish needed no instruction from Americans, for their Gaelic racial consciousness had been forged in a thousand years fighting Vikings, Normans, Saxons, Lowlanders, and Britons (not to mention one another) – war, of course, being the preeminent shaper of destiny and identity. In any case the Irish were not going to be instructed, in matters of blood or anything else, by Protestant heretics. 

A lot of this is wrong and anachronistic. The unassimilated communities of the 19th century weren’t exactly pillars of radical tradition, as they were rife with crime, corruption, alcoholism, and other social maladies. But due to their shared racial identity with WASPs, they were able to move out of their troubled hoods.

In any case, it’s absurd to be angry about ethnic tensions from the mid-19th century in the 21st century. The Irish easily assimilated to America’s core character. They proudly identify as Americans and see themselves in the Founding Fathers. Many of them married Anglos and many self-proclaimed Irish-Americans are more English than Hibernian. 

These ethnic divisions are long-buried. It’s silly to imagine that they still exist in our country. 

Along with the anachronisms, there’s the wrong-headed anti-WASPism. It deprecates what the Anglo-Protestants achieved in founding the country and just sees them as either proto-campus leftists or cuckservatives. That’s just wrong. 

The WASPs weren’t perfect–but they’re at the root of our national culture.The Irish became white Americans, as did the Germans, Huguenots, Swedes, Poles, Dutch, and Italians. The origin of American whiteness lies not in the alleged rejection of Anglo perfidy, but on the frontier and the struggle against a common enemy. 

It’s tempting for some to subscribe to the liberal mainstream’s distaste for the WASP and adopt phony oppression narratives. Some want to take this same material and instead of claiming the WASPs were too discriminatory, they want to insist they were cucks. But this doesn’t help anyone’s cause. Most white Americans have at least some British ancestry. The WASP’s legacy lives on in our culture and (literally) in our blood. It’s stupid to re-appropriate anti-WASPism for the Right. It’s much smarter to celebrate who we truly are without all the liberal lies.