Generic Americans

The best way to describe the nation’s core demographic

The American Right is obsessed with defining the nation’s core demographic. It’s a problem unique to our country.

Most of the world doesn’t have this issue. Everyone knows what makes someone Chinese, Polish, or Indian. America is different as there is no accompanying “American” ethnic group. For the vast majority of Americans, “American” simply means you have U.S. citizenship and has nothing to do with ancestry.

That’s not satisfying for much of the New Right. They would prefer a thicker American identity, as well as a term that distinguishes the founding population from everyone else. As I’ve explained in past articles, we used to have terms to describe this population. Both “Native American” and “Anglo-Saxon” were previously used by this demographic. But Native American now applies to Indians and no one uses Anglo-Saxon anymore. Rightists could use “white,” but that makes most people queasy.

Thus, there’s a demand for a new term. As most readers know, the favored term is “Heritage American.” It’s become common parlance in political commentary, but it hasn’t taken off offline. While Heritage American hasn’t become something normies identify with, it can still be a useful way to classify white Americans whose ancestry traces back to colonial days.

There’s a better term to describe the core national population: Generic American.

Heritage American implies that the core demographic deeply cares about their colonial ancestry. As someone from this cohort, I can report that they don’t really care. They strongly identify with America, but they lack any sense of ethno-cultural identity. Generic American is also a broader category that would include the white ethnics and some recent arrivals who assimilated to basic America.

Generic Americans are the mainstream standard for the country. They were once universally white and culturally Anglo-Protestant. Thanks to mass immigration, that’s beginning to change. There’s still a general understanding of what a Generic American is, but the standards for entry are increasingly low. It just means speaking English, participating in our consumer culture, and having some level of respect for our political values. It’s uninspiring, which is why so many on the Right yearn for a not-so generic Americanism.

Generic, according to Merriam-Webster, means “having no particularly distinctive quality or application.” This is an appropriate way to describe average Americans as a group. Obviously, as individuals, Americans have distinctive qualities. We’ve got many characters in our country. But as a group, Generic Americans are known for their lack of distinguishing qualities. The average citizen doesn’t have particular folk customs, specific traditions, or much of an ancestral past they fall back on. They simply speak English, shop, watch sports, and celebrate the big holidays in the usual American fashion. That makes them Americans to the rest of the world, but it doesn’t come with the distinctive identity that, say, Irish or Italian gives an individual. It’s rather generic.

The low standard for entry allows plenty of people to become Generic Americans. It’s not about ancestry; it’s about cultural assimilation, and it doesn’t take much effort to enjoy hamburgers, football, and pop music. People don’t treat this as a specific ethno-cultural thing. It’s just what normal Americans are supposed to be into.

There’s always been a basic American identity, and, as previously mentioned, it was tied more to Anglo ancestry, Protestantism, and whiteness in the past. There were also strong local identities tied to hometowns, regions, and states. Most of these identities fit in with the Anglo mainstream; others did not. There were ethnic enclaves that, for a time, resisted Anglification. Southerners, while being Anglo-Protestant, also had a distinct identity from the mainstream. The emphasis on whiteness excluded non-whites from the mainstream. Blacks developed a thick ethno-cultural identity partially in response to this exclusion.

We’re in a different situation today as we’ve become more homogenized. Many of those local identities were hollowed out alongside the towns and regions that gave them life. Americans have always been a nomadic people, but it’s even truer in our era and makes them even less likely to be tied to a specific locale. We all moved to the suburbs and became like our nondescript neighbors. There are fewer enclaves where particularist identities (at least for whites) can flourish. These identities, such as “Southerner” and “Italian,” have largely been submerged by generification. We still speak English and we prefer it without an accent, but Anglo-Protestantism and whiteness aren’t as emphasized anymore. They were de-emphasized to make the basic national identity more inclusive. That’s made it much thinner in quality.

One could call this deracination. Without roots, without tradition, and without heritage, Americans are able to see themselves as mere individuals. Leftists often call this a privilege of whiteness, but the Generic Americans would bitterly contest that race has anything to do with it.

Many Generic Americans are fine with this. They want to be seen as individuals, not as part of some group. Most under 60 can’t even remember when there was an alternative to being a Generic American. They didn’t grow up in the old neighborhood and their suburb didn’t have a strong sense of self. An identity centered on sports and consumer products is all they’ve known.

This explains the curious nostalgia propaganda that proliferates on social media. While right-wingers do make memes about the frontier and the Founding Fathers, what really inspires people are older examples of our consumer culture. Both right-wingers and normies will lament the disappearance of Blockbuster, malls, and McDonald’s playgrounds. A short clip of high schoolers from the 2000s would elicit overwrought reactions on all that we’ve lost and how 2007 was a time when America had a rooted folk culture.

Nostalgia is common, especially among conservatives. The Right usually believes the past is better than the present. But the rhetoric around the recent past is strange. Many aspects of the 90s and 2000s were better, but it was hardly a conservative paradise. Conservatives at the time thought they were living in Gomorrah. They bemoaned pop culture and the decline in social values. Malls were denounced by culture critics of the past as soulless husks that destroy local businesses. Now they’re remembered as our ancestral villages, which private equity took away from us. Other things we lament have been replaced by better alternatives. We now have infinite streaming choices at a lower price than Blockbuster. You can now avoid the hassle of mall shopping with Amazon Prime. And so on and so forth.

It’s silly to think the “regime” took away our Toys ‘R’ Us, but it’s a genuine feeling. That’s because this is the only heritage many Generic Americans have. When thinking about their own past, it’s the malls and popular movies of their childhood. The frontier and their settler ancestors are an abstraction to Generic Americans. In contrast, they have vivid memories of going to Blockbuster as a kid and then a certain pop song coming on as they drove home. Our history and traditions don’t hold nearly the kind of sway over the Generic American mind as the memories of a supposedly better consumer culture.

There are legitimate reasons to fondly look back on the 90s. It was a whiter America with a better popular culture and more optimism. But that translated to End of History liberalism rather than anything right-wing. The mainstream consensus touted a multicultural future with even more immigration. That same period also had more violent crime, which undermines claims you can’t shop safely today. You were more likely to be robbed and murdered on your way to the mall than you are today.

What’s true is that the good life is now more expensive than it was in the 90s and the demographics are worse. Seeing a mall filled with nice white people naturally produces a sense of loss. But we can’t return to the End of History. A better ideal is needed, even if this rhetoric can be useful to persuade ordinary people of how diversity degrades American life.

The vast majority of people will remain Generic Americans for the foreseeable future. That’s not a horrible thing. These people can still be convinced to want law-and-order, immigration restriction, and other good policies. They’re just not going to get into the völkisch nationalism the Right would prefer. They’re not that into their heritage or rediscovering their roots. They’re mostly fine with being mere individuals.

But it will be a challenge for right-wing partisans. A Generic American identity isn’t sufficient for them. This deracinated norm is what drove the old Alt Right to try to create a white identity independent of America. As I write about in Whitepill, this white identity avoided obvious American trappings and relied on various traits and traditions from Europe. It was an artificial creation of an extremely online movement. It was appealing to a certain kind of internet denizen, but unappealing to most of the country.

The Online Right of today prefers Americana over pan-Europeanism. That may explain some of its greater popularity than the Alt Right. But it can distort perceptions of what actual Americans are like. The American identity preferred by the Online Right is not the same as what ordinary citizens want. That’s okay, but it should be kept in mind when prognosticating on the Silent Majority and what it believes. It must always be remembered that these people are Generic Americans.

A country that knows itself doesn’t endlessly ask itself “What is an American?” The identity battle will continue to rage on in political commentary. But for many Americans, they will continue living their lives as deracinated individuals. They’ll only be shaken from their blissful existence when they discover that everyone else at the Costco doesn’t look like their image of a Generic American.

Order Scott Greer’s new book, “Whitepill: The Online Right and the Making of Trump’s America,” from this link.