Ethnogenesis and American Breakup

Like strangers living under the same roof

A hot topic in the infosphere and on social media over the past year has been the idea of a “coming national divorce.” The concept is getting so mainstream that many normies have started to recognise that it could happen. Congresscritters have discussed it. Most importantly, I’ve even written about it a couple of times.

But why is this the case? Why does a potential breakup of the American union into individual states or confederacies of states seem as likely as it does? What is it that, at an instinctual level, is driving the understanding that this could be a very viable result of our current civil strife? I’ve written a lot in the past about demographic-structural cycles and secular collapse, and while decentralisation is often a result of secular collapse, it doesn’t have to be, and in many historical cases has not been. So while it seems likely, it’s not actually inevitable.

Yet what it is that seems to be driving our society in that direction?

I would argue that the widening rift in American civil society that seems to be heading toward open rupture is due to America’s ethnic diversity - but not the kind that many readers are probably thinking of right now. To explain what I mean, I’m going to back up a little bit and discuss what is rightly meant by the term “ethnic.”

This term is an import into English from the Greek ethnos, which describes a group of people who are bound together by language, custom, mores, culture, and so forth. This is more or less the classical and scriptural sense of the word “nation,” as well, and is also the meaning of the Hebrew term goyim, as found in its original, non-pejorative and non-antigentilic sense.

As such, this general definition is the biblical definition, and thus is the one that I always use. An ethnos, a nation, is not synonymous with a political entity or state. Nor is it synonymous with a “race” as the term is meant in modern parlance. Indeed, as I’ve pointed out elsewhere, ethnonationalism (which involves the ethnos as its fundamental unit) is not the same thing as “racial” nationalism (White nationalism, black nationalism, etc.), though it should be obvious that people who belong to the same ethnos will nearly always share the same, or at least similar, genetic heritage.

So back to what I meant about America’s ethnic diversity. What I’m referring to is the fact that, via an ongoing process of ethnogenesis, there exist in America two broad and increasingly incompatible White ethnies that have developed over the past century or more. These are familiar to us; one ethnie is constituted by the cultural and political Left, the other is made up of normal, everyday Americans, who I often refer to as Amerikaners. These two groups display very different cultures, religious traditions, mores, and even their use of language. The fundamental cultural incompatibilities between these two ethnies have reached the point where peaceful coexistence is now no longer an option. Either they go their separate ways or there is going to be a war across the metaethnic faultline to see which one dominates the American union.

It’s really not surprising that this should be the case, and indeed this has been an ongoing state of affairs going back to before the Civil War, which was the first great outbreak of White American ethnic conflict. Afterwards, it was only the extremely high social cohesion enjoyed by the political American Empire that kept things from coming to a head again until the rise of cultural Marxism and other overt forms of progressivism in the late 20th century. However, as we’ve progressed into the collapse phase of our secular cycle, that social cohesion decayed rapidly as both White ethnies began to assert themselves.

Ethnogenesis is a process which occurs naturally, especially across large and socially decentralised areas such as the American portion of the North America. In a post I wrote several years ago, I discussed this same issue with White ethnogenesis, but approached it more from an explicitly political angle. However, I noted that American ethnogenesis has deep roots on this continent. Despite the political and economic rhetoric surrounding it, the American revolution and our departure from the British Empire were driven in large part by the fact that Americans had simply evolved into a different type of people than the British were. We were a frontier/settler type of society, while Britain was basically a core system, which explained our drift towards a broader representative form of government.

In colonial times, America was settled by immigrants from four general regions in the United Kingdom, each bringing with them their own somewhat different folkways and cultural patterns. As an independent political entity, the United States gradually saw these cultural groups begin to coalesce into two principal coalitions, the Cavaliers and Scots-Irish Borderers forming a “southern” bloc and the Puritans and Quaker-derived cultures forming a “northern” bloc. Hence, the Civil War.

Since that war, and especially in the past eighty years or so, that division has come to take on a more general urban vs. rural/suburban/exurban charactre. This is likely due to the massive amounts of interstate movement and increasingly rootless nature of American society that began with the migrations that occurred during the Great Depression. As a result, we now find that people living in the country in Iowa have more in common with people living in rural Alabama or Idaho - in terms of cultural and social patterns - than they do with people who live in progressive Gotham-wannabe neighbourhoods in Des Moines.

Even in an age of mass consumer culture and media, people who live with you locally are usually going to exert more cultural influence on each other than people who live far away from you. This is why there is an increasing polarisation in the United States as people in culturally conservative areas reinforce each other and people in culturally progressive areas do the same. People think that the division is driven by politics - Trump vs. Biden, Red vs. Blue, Republican vs. Democrat - but it’s not. Politics is just an exoteric, downstream effect of the fundamentally ethnic division between the two White Americas. Lefties vote stupidly, wear masks as a purity symbol, get their boosters, and all the rest because these are ultimately cultural totems indicating that they belong to their own in-group.

So you have two White ethnies here in the USA. The problem is that one of them - the progressive one - is in the minority, yet because of its socially and politically totalitarian nature has managed to come to ascendancy in the American Union and has been using its position to engage in cultural imperialism against the larger majority of normal, regular everyday Americans living in “flyover country.”

Now, are there other ethnicities in the United States? Obviously there are. Boy howdy are there. There’s more than the average non-mathematician can count. And a lot of them are contributing to the destabilisation of American society. Yet, I’d argue that this is the case primarily because the culturally imperialistic progressive Whites are using them as pawns for power politics purposes. If we had a unified White population in this country, I would argue that this vast multiplicity of foreign ethnies would basically not have the numbers even now to substantially impact American society, at least for the time being (and let’s be honest, a unified White population wouldn’t be tolerating mass third world immigration anywise).

The problem with all of this is that this ethnic situation in America - and I mean the dynamics between the two White ethnies - cannot last forever. Even though both may think of themselves as White Americans and thus above all of that tawdry ethnic conflict that strange little foreign peoples always seem to have elsewhere in the world, the fact remains that we’re no less susceptible to socioethnic dynamics than anyone else in history ever has been. For all of the pious chirruping about “national unity” and whatnot, the formula remains true that “diversity + proximity = war.” This is even the case for two seemingly closely related ethnies that have shared a country for 250 years. As they continue to diverge culturally and psychologically, there’s only going to be more ill will and conflict between them. Essentially, the only options will be more-or-less peaceable separation or civil war and subjugation. The choice Americans make on “national divorce” will decide which of these it is to be.