A National Identity, If You Can Keep It

What's actually being replaced isn't a race. It's an inheritance.

Much ink has been spilled over Marco Rubio’s speech at the Munich Security Conference, including in Junto’s own digital pages, and deservedly so. In a detailed speech, the US Secretary of State laid out a vision for the future of the western world, a vision that simultaneously grounds us in the current reality of global politics while also binding us together as shared heirs of:

“the deepest bonds that nations [can] share, forged by centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry, and the sacrifices our forefathers made together for the common civilization”

The shared history and cultural identity that Secretary Rubio speaks of is an important point, and one that I think often gets framed incorrectly when we discuss the dangers of mass migration into Western countries. This conversation, often framed along racial lines, is better understood as a cultural and historical issue, and arguing from this vantage is the stronger position.

Generally, arguments against state-enabled mass-migration boil down to what would best be described as “racial essentialist” arguments. Purveyors of “Great Replacement Theory” put the issue as being an attempt to literally replace the White populations of Europe and The United States with people of other races, as a direct attack on White people as a racial entity.

This argument is unhelpful, as overtly racial arguments tend to be, because among other reasons, it assumes that races are a genetic monolith and that the “elites” (whose identity varies based on the preferred bugaboo of the conspiracy theorist telling the tale) are trying to wipe out the White folk because they hate them for being White and for their culture.

It is, I would argue, the cultural aspect of this theory that actually has some teeth to it… but not necessarily for the reasons that Great Replacement theorists believe.

Where a new population comes from and what race they are shouldn’t matter. What matters is that as a new population, they aren’t beholden to the formative historical or cultural molding that the traditional “native” populations were.

Rather than viewing themselves as heirs to a Spanish or a French or an English (etc…) identity, these immigrants arrive fully formed into the nation as a separate cultural group beholden only to the governing entities that gave them citizenship. In the EU this government is often the EU itself, and what better population could a supranational organization looking to consolidate centralized power in itself and away from its constituent parts wish for than a large and increasing population that’s beholden to the EU itself for their continued presence in these lands?

The EU even positions itself as the protectors of these people, standing between them and the frustrated native populations who increasingly favor policies of deportation and a return to national sovereignty over continued submission to the EU. In the EU’s constituent countries, and in America as well, the extreme left similarly positions themselves as the “voice” of these outsiders, winning their allegiance once again as their protectors and benefactors.

In America, the dynamic is structurally similar, even if its institutions differ. There is no singular body playing a role on the scale of the EU, but the net effect is replicated by an extensive latticework of NGOs, local sanctuary policies, and the broader Democratic coalition’s infrastructure. Immigrants arrive lacking tangible roots in the revolutionary tradition, constitutional inheritance, and the broader cultural negotiation that produced the American identity. They are immediately claimed by political actors whose power depends on an ever expanding mass of people whose allegiances lie not with that American inheritance but instead with the governing apparatus that brought them in and propped them up.

The welfare state, the asylum bureaucracy, the nonprofit resettlement complex and other NGO shenanigans, these become the connective tissue between the newcomer and our country. They replaced the old civic and cultural integration mechanisms that once molded immigrants into Americans. The result here is the same as in Europe: a population whose loyalty lies not with a nation as a cultural and historic symbol but instead with the administrative state that lords over it.

So a replacement has happened, but its ethnicity is immaterial to the project. What has been replaced is the ties of which Marco Rubio spoke, ties to shared history, culture, and language that root a people in the legacies of their forebears.

When we allow the mass migration argument to be one centered on race rather than on history and culture, we both miss the true concern with the migration and make it all the easier to bat away the arguments against it as the mere ravings of racists.

People of all races can be heirs to western cultural ideals. We’ve seen many groups and people over the years successfully embrace them as their own and integrate both into America, and yes, into Europe too. But not all can or will, and as stewards of our individual national cultural heritages we must be ever watchful for those whose loyalties lie with larger supranational projects whose collectivist existences are mortally threatened by individual national cultural identities.

It is better, morally and philosophically, to understand that the replacement of a common western culture isn’t a question of race. It is a question of pride in culture and of place and a willingness to consciously exclude those who would work to drown it in the ocean of “Internationalism.”

It’s time to leave in the dustbin of history the crises of confidence that have led so many to take shelter in “Internationalist” dead-ends as protection from ourselves after World War II. Be proud of who you are not because of the color of your skin or of your grandfather’s skin, be proud of who you are because of the society and culture you were born an heir to… and of the grandfather who helped to build and shape it, who worked and fought to pass it on. Just as in the past, embrace those who “yearn to breath free”, so long as that yearning comes with understanding of the sacrifices and duties that created and nourish that air.

Jealously guard it. The alternative is a population rooted only in the now of the political landscape, a population unmoored from the hard-won lessons of history, beholden only to the present governing bureaucracy… a population utterly available to anyone who promises to protect their place in a country whose history they have no knowledge of or interest in.