The American Disease
A Global Contagion
The United States of America is an economic, military, and cultural superpower. This is not in dispute. They impose their will on the global stage through acts of military intervention, economic warfare, and ubiquity of American mass cultural products, which interface with its explicit propaganda. They have been instrumental in setting the parameters for peace and global order after most major conflicts since 1914.
In this way, the USA has been instrumental in the shaping of the 20th Century and, since the fall of the Soviet Union, has gone unopposed as a global superpower—with the burgeoning global influence of China and re-emergence of Russia now threatening America’s hegemony for the first time in decades. This situation being seen as abnormal or abhorrent by US elites reveals their near total dominance on the global stage.
So why then does the USA, and the world at large, find itself in its current predicament? If the US has exerted such levels of control globally, and the federal government has exerted greater and greater influence domestically, then our current reality must in some way be a product of American will. Why then are so many aspects of domestic and geopolitical reality counter to the stated ideals of the US Constitution and other sacred American founding documents?
Modernity, it could be posited, is an American disease—or at the very least, that they are the principle culprit in shaping it. So why has an American-shaped reality ended up so unsatisfactory? What is the nature of “The American Disease?”
A Nation of Immigrants
The roots of this disease are embedded in American self-image, both as a “people” and as a nation state. The USA, being as it is a product of a multitude of peoples and not a single continuous culture that has developed over hundreds (or even thousands) of years, lacks the natural cohesive forces traditional human communities possess. By the statements of its own education system, America emerged, fully formed, as a “modern democratic liberal republic” without a unique history, mythology, language, or ethnicity to unite those within its borders. The ideas of “Americanism” and who is and isn’t “American” are merely abstractions in a far more pointed sense than in the “old world” from which its constituent peoples came. In order to be more than a collection of provincial towns and villages, America then must strip its citizens of many trappings of their old identity and inculcate them within this new—entirely fictional—American identity. The more centralized America became, the more necessary and extreme this process became.
Therefore, from an American point of view what is and isn’t a “nation state” is removed from tradition, culture, religion, or ethnicity and becomes purely a legal fiction. The very idea of “White Americans” is an attempt to collectivise those early settlers and remove from them identification with their specific origins and traditions. This carries the implicit assumption that “Americans” are not White, and you can see how the idea that “race and ethnicity are social constructs” naturally follows from this line of thinking.
Because of the necessary abstraction of identity needed in a newly created colonial nation state, the modern American suffers from a form of metaphysical damage. He cannot conceive of his people outside of the confines of modernity as anything more than a bureaucratic legal fiction or the sum of whoever happens to be within the country’s borders at the time. This leaves American identity up for constant debate and rife for subversion.
The leftists, in a very important sense, are right: the “White Americans'' who ride around their rascals in Walmart are not “Americans,” they are a mix of displaced Italians, Irish, Polish, Scottish, and English who would not recognise their own ancestral homelands. Their connections to the land go back a handful of generations at best; they are a deracinated people knitted into a mass identity. To describe yourself as “American” is to surrender to many of the precepts of civic nationalism & egalitarianism. Within the American framework, peoples are not made up of extended family groups who slowly coalesced long before the idea of the modern “sovereign nation” existed but are purely created and defined by the nation state itself and cannot exist apart from it. In their minds, if America as a “modern sovereign nation” ceased to exist, so would Americans—whereas in the rest of human history we see diasporas of displaced peoples with definable ethnic and cultural characteristics existing long after their nation state was absorbed, destroyed, or faced natural disaster. To put it more bluntly: unless you are a member of a native tribe with unbroken heritage, you cannot be “Ethnically American.”
Do not mistake this for a national socialist invocation of “blood and soil” towards some Aryan ideal; the very idea of “white identity” is itself an attempt to unify disparate nationalities. The ideal of a “white race” would seem nonsensical to those in Renaissance-era Europe. People thought of themselves as “Flemish people” or “Bavarian people” or even “Yorkshiremen,” if they thought of themselves in ways larger than an extended family unit at all. The idea they were somehow a homogenous “white” whole did not exist before modern national—and supranational—identity, especially with many of these groups being historic enemies. “Whiteness” is first and foremost a globalist affectation.
Let us not forget the utilization of “white identity” in mid-century Germany was an attempt to galvanize a nation state that was even younger than the USA at the time. Modern Federal Germany is an invention of the 19th century, being united in 1871 by Otto von Bismarck, from various historic kingdoms, principalities, and regions. “Greater Germany” as invoked by Hitler is just as false as the freedom fires, world police “Global American Democracy” invoked by George Bush Jr. They both exist for political expediency rather than being products of how ordinary people see themselves.
Much like the exact meaning of The Constitution—which we shall get to later—the meaning of “American Identity” seems to shift as often as the presidency itself. This extreme elasticity shows how rootless and amorphous American Identity is when faced with the realities of executive and legislative power. This is because, as we discussed previously, American identity is purely the product of the American power structure from its founding moment onwards. There is such tension between the core identities of competing American political factions because people’s identities are largely defined by the political power centre they give loyalty to; there are not the longstanding ties to bind the American people together that bind native populations together.
The Great American Export
This metaphysical plague has been exported to places like Britain and Europe in the post-war era as they have been battered by waves of immigration and social degeneration in the American model. Nations subjected to large amounts of American influence have begun to see themselves as fellow “nations of immigrants,” denying the very existence of the various indigenous cultural, religious, and ethnic groups that have made up their societies for hundreds of years. Indeed, the very idea of “indigenous Europeans” is scoffed at as some kind of “white supremacist” rhetoric—as if the Norman, Saxon, or Celtic peoples are figments of our imagination. There are now only “white people,” stripped of the finer points of their former identity and history, as deracinated as the Rascal Scooter-bound Walmart shopper.
It’s a simple point, but one lost on those who would toot the horn of “The White Race:” in order to be subjected to “Anti-white” policy you must first have a collectivized white identity. To play into this dialectic is to surrender the truly traditional idea of human community.
Policy that differentiated between “white” and “non-white” is something that did not come about federally in post-Reconstruction America until Woodrow Wilson. He was instrumental in codifying the idea of “American Whiteness” that covered ethnic groups that would normally see themselves as entirely distinct. He was also the first president to codify what we know as “Jim Crow” into federal policy, segregating federal employees into “white” and “non-white.” Wilson was also instrumental in the transformation of post-WW1 Europe into "Democratic nation states” of the American model, most disastrously advocating for the creation of “Yugoslavia” out of various bickering ethnic groups who each saw themselves as separate and distinct, deserving of their own nation made up of their own people.
Within the British Empire, the idea of “white global brotherhood” finds much of its root with Cecil Rhodes, spelled out in his 1902 will, but still with emphasis on the supremacy of a wider Britishness. These ideas are relatively modern, and stem from the globalized thinking required to knit together a people with no organic shared history and culture, be it within an empire or within a “nation of immigrants.”
From that point it's not much of a leap to the modern ideas of “multiculturalism” and attempts to knit humanity into a prototypical global state. After all, if you can create a “nation of immigrants” within the borders of a single state, why then can you not knit all peoples into a global brotherhood? A global American empire would be a global “Nation of immigrants” in which all are “equal” and the nasty ethno-centrism of the old world is done away with. The American “melting pot” offers no ideological resistance to the idea of a one-world government; the civic nationalism that underpins it is the prerequisite to one. If nations and peoples are nothing more than abstract legal distinctions, to be created and disbanded by governments at will, then the global state—of course led by the Liberal Democratic light of America—is an inevitability.
But legal fiction, in the end, is all the Federal American experiment has to offer. And there are no pieces of fiction that loom larger than the mythical founding documents of the American republic.
Some Men Are Created More Equal Than Others.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
The lofty words of Thomas Jefferson in justifying the secession from the British are some of the most appropriated in American politics. They’re also overwhelmingly interpreted into utopian nonsense in the post-WW2 era. The simple fact of reality is that all men are not created equal. In pulling on the fashionable Lockean liberalism of the time in their attempt to undermine the authority of what they saw as a distant autocrat, they sowed the seeds for America’s descent into the very mob rule they often spoke out against in the other founding documents of the republic. For when stripped of the sovereign authority of God, whom all the founding fathers saw as the underpinning force of “natural law,” you end up with utopian egalitarianism of the most repugnant kind. “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” functionally says nothing outside of invoking a utilitarian ideal. You might as well be reading Bentham.
The subjective faith implied in the words of the founders when viewed through a modern atheist lens, real or invented, creates uncertainty around the exact meaning of the rhetoric employed, and serves as the basis for most of U.S. political life—and the full-time occupation of the Supreme Court, who specialise in demonstrating that “he who is sovereign makes the exception.” Did Jefferson truly mean—in the modern egalitarian sense—that all mankind is equal? Or did he mean “all men are equal under God?” Did he mean “Americans as a people are equal to other peoples in their right to self-determination?” There are certainly arguments for each, but no definitive answers, therefore any and all interpretations are merely a packed court bench away.
The redefinition of words and concepts renders this apparently sacred, static document meaningless without the underpinnings of Biblical law and the unifying force of the Christian God. The meaning of The Constitution is so elastic that formal segregation of the Federal workforce by Woodrow Wilson in 1914 (for the first time since the Civil War) and the enacting of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 could happen within 50 years of each other and be overseen by the same political party for similar political ends—all supposedly whilst beholden to the same document. Martin Luther King very famously invoked the words of Jefferson in the pure egalitarian sense when providing support for the existing “Civil Rights” push of the Johnson administration, rather ironically replacing in totality the Lockean “natural rights'' framework these words are meant to invoke. The rights of Americans were henceforth purely defined by the current American administration and the protections afforded by the Constitution were superseded—and could be withheld and extended—based on the pursuit of racial equity.
The only situation in which I could see “The Constitution” actually protecting an American citizen would be if they had it printed on a Lexan shield—an idea I could probably make a bit of money from. Invocations of it and faith in it have led to the realities of power being obscured from the public under the idea that “This couldn’t happen in America,” even as both the 10th amendment and the 16th amendment exist in blatant disregard for one another.
The Constitution serves as a living reminder that civic legal fiction, no matter how grandiose its language, is no substitute for generations of strong tradition, long-standing communities, an organic sense of belonging, and the diffuse power that fosters.
“But whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain - that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case, it is unfit to exist.”
- Lysander Spooner
One Nation, Under God
When you have a culture composed of diasporas, there are no universal cultural values without a shared religion. America, for most of its history, has been an explicitly Christian (and explicitly protestant) nation, dating back to the Puritan pilgrim fathers and their attempt to create a Puritan land to call their own.
As previously discussed, the language of America’s founding documents is heavily underpinned by the assumption that everyone understood Biblical law and that those who read it saw ultimate sovereignty resting with the Christian God. The Civil Rights era also saw the removal of all religious symbolism, ceremony practice—voluntary or not—from public property. 1962 also represented a hard delineation point in the legality of religious activity in state institutions, with the Supreme Court sweeping away what was seen as standard, uncontroversial, and acceptable practice throughout the rest of US history. This was further strengthened in 1971, requiring the subjective “lemon test,” to ensure all activity in any state-funded setting had “secular” usage, and the stripping out of Biblical underpinning from the American state was complete. States, school boards, and local government couldn’t simply choose if a religious bent was permissible under their particular remit; the Federal government explicitly forbade it universally.
This of course is celebrated by secular liberals as the death of an archaic belief in the spiritual, but where does this leave the Constitution & two hundred years of US law and legal precedent predicated on the ultimate authority of God? Who then now is sovereign and where does the seat of moral authority lay? Well, the Supreme Court, in stripping Biblical underpinning from public life, assumed some of the mystical powers to settle debates that faith in Christian ideals had once held. Truly they could remake reality at will and make the sacred documents say whatever they wanted them to say, no longer bound by the backstop of Biblical law.
The other answer of course came from the Civil Rights era going on concurrently: the moral authority was now vested in “the people” through the sacrament of “universal democracy.” Gone was the protestant republic of old, the sacred now lay in the hands of one man, with one vote. As long as the wishes of a majority of “the people” are carried out by the elected (and unelected) political and technocratic class, and a majority of the Supreme Court held that an idea was true, then it was true—the letter of the Constitution, intent of the founders, and the moral content of the Bible be damned. America from the 1960s onward then was effectively a different nation than it had been before, its identity even more malleable and uncertain than before.
No matter what your views on the existence of God, transitioning a largely Christian nation to an explicitly atheist one in terms of policy comes with an immense philosophical and metaphysical crisis. The very meaning of the founding documents, and of law itself, changes once God is no longer present in readings of them. Those who pull the levers of power gain immense leeway to benefit themselves, as well as immense power by vesting ultimate sovereignty within the government apparatus they control. This view of a “sovereign secular government” with omnipotence bestowed by some conception of popular will is the underpinning of all forms of the totalising managerial state.
1776 as Year Zero
The founding myth of America, steeped as it is in the trappings of 18th century politics, functions as a Khmer Rouge-style “year zero” for world history in the American mind. There is the world before “American Liberty,” and a world after it. Pre-late-18th century concepts then are relegated to the B.A. or “Before America” dustbin of history—seen as outmoded or autocratic. Special hatred is reserved for the trappings of aristocracy or Kingship, functioning as the ultimate anti-freedom boogieman for the American mind.
This view of history allows the haggling over America’s “year zero” to give whoever can define the start point immense power over the narrative. Revisionist efforts like “The 1619 Project” attempt to portray the US as genetically guilty by defining its nationhood by the arrival of slaves, rather than the lofty political theatre of 1776. This naked act of revisionism simply would not be possible in a place like England, whose own history reaches back past 1066 into the mists of Albion and Roman Britain.
1776 functioning as the starting point for the American mind gives them a compressed view of history, having less than 250 years to use as a yardstick of permanence, and with no associated permanence of bourgeois aristocracy. This is a recipe for a society that breeds high time preference and cannot think on a time scale of previous monarchical and aristocratic civilisations. The best way I’ve seen it summed up:
“The opposition between modern civilisations and traditional ones may be summarised as follows: modern civilisations devour space, whereas traditional civilisations devoured time.”
-Julius Evola: The Bow and The Club
American modernism represents something diametrically opposite of the generational projects undertaken by the rooted communities of Europe. There are structures in Europe still standing that took over a century to complete—that would have been half of the entire lifespan of the USA in the 1970s.
The particularly American tendency to see ideas that predate late 18th Century “enlightenment thinking” as not only archaic but dangerous has deleterious effects: Americans are not only a people without a history, but a people openly hostile to other people’s history if it contradicts the ideals of their own. Traditions and identity are not living, breathing realities with transcendent meaning, they are viewed as a quaint theme-park curiosity—merely things to be worn like a coat.
Perhaps this is why every soul in Boston with skin lighter than a tar-pit claims to be “Irish.” There is an innate embarrassment at belonging to this rootless, culturally bereft infant society that needs supplementing by the better-defined identities of the “old world.” They are, of course, not Irish. The closest they’ve been to Ireland is getting in a drunken bar-fight at some god-awful ‘Irish Bar’ no Irishman has ever set foot in. Their surrogate identity is like a child clumsily putting on their parent’s clothes to feel more grown up; it is simply a game of pretend.
This is what makes American “White Nationalists” so repugnant: they do not understand their own identity or their own history, because they don’t have one. Yet they want to inject their Faustian ideas of global racial collectivism into cultures not yet degenerated enough to have abandoned the normal localism of pre-modern life. There are still places that think of themselves as a collection of extended families in a small geographic area. The “WigNats” should be scorned because they commit the sin of attempting to globalize the minds of others who have not yet submitted to the American disease.
Faustian Liberalism
The language of the founding documents of the United States, unmoored from the underpinnings of their original intent and the confines of Biblical law, have also been instrumental in justifying the interventionist policies that have emerged in the 20th and 21st centuries. A concept of global Faustian liberty under an American model can easily be justified by a modern reading of the founder’s words:
Human rights have gone through roughly three general developments. The first development was the 19th century application thereof, in which these rights were put forth as self-evident, as seen in the Declaration of Independence:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
These “self-evident” rights were used as a means to undermine monarchical authority and, in the case of the United States of America, states' rights in the name of the people.
—C.A. Bond, Nemesis P.56
In this way, the language of the Declaration of Independence forms the start of some sort of supranational social contract when seen as applying “universally.” Every ruler that does not follow specific ideas of “American Liberty” and “American Freedom” as interpreted by the current administration becomes a King Charles figure, a tyrant to be swept away by the liberating force of American might.
Where America goes so does civilisation and freedom, and the ever-present idea of “American Democracy.” It is taken for granted that “American Freedom” is the ultimate form of liberty and that inculcating people into “The American Way of Life” is the ultimate good. All they have to give up is their ethnic identity, traditional societal structure, and “illiberal” customs. The idea that an Afghani goat farmer might prefer sitting in a cave studying the Quran to working 40-hour weeks at Taco Bell, only to go home and watch videos of cats farting on YouTube, cannot cross over into the collective “American” mind.
With the lingering conflict in Ukraine once again becoming a headline issue, we saw Biden’s White House press secretary Jen Psaki describe Ukraine as one of America's “eastern flank countries.” This mirrors the language almost exactly of supposed Republican party right-wing radical Dan Crenshaw’s description of Afghanistan as “America’s Flank.” Both examples echo a quote attributed to Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1939, stating: “The frontier of America is on the Rhine.” FDR refuted the story, but policy within his government stated this belief loud and clear.
The supposedly politically disparate 1940s Dixie Democrats, Trump-era Republicans, and a current progressive White House mouthpiece all converge in the lockstep of Faustian American liberalism. It is one of the defining features of post-war American hegemony and the main vector by which the disease—with all its modern symptoms—is forcibly spread: dropping rainbow bombs on Yemeni children, mounting democracy-spreading invasions, and astroturfing “mostly peaceful” protests in far-flung lands.
Here we see the imposition of a “McWorld,” where the ever-shifting landscape of “American Values” are exported and enforced with a boundless frontier mentality, with no arm of the American political establishment—or even its supposed political fringe—mounting meaningful attempts to curtail it. The forever wars, child drag queens, dissident murders, mass surveillance, school anal sex lessons, election fraud, lionised race riots, elite pedophile rings, and adherence to globalist lockdowns are all the fruits of the hallowed republic and a supposedly intact “separation of powers” and a “system of checks and balances.” American reality as we find it is the result of an unbroken chain of “peaceful handovers of power” since the Reconstruction era.
A Terminal Patient?
Throughout history you can observe how incrementally, inch by inch, the demise of ideas that—through their adherence to the fashionable liberalism of the time—contained the seeds of their own subversion. Political pragmatism and the realities of power were obfuscated by the language of American liberty, eventually transforming a nation founded on despising foreign overlords into the ultimate economic imperialist and serial invader. You can see how ineffective at stemming the tide of this subversion a malleable people—who forget their ancestry, traditions, history, and languages to become simply a beige mass of “Americans”—truly are.
What then of America, or even the idea of America, can be salvaged? There is constant argument about when the American project went off the rails and at what point it was at its zenith. If we cannot find a single point at which the project was definitively derailed, then resetting it to an earlier form will result in it simply succumbing to the same sickness of which it currently suffers. There is also no outside example we can draw on as a model; all western nations and peoples, not merely America and Americans, have become riddled with this disease. The only way forward I can see is to let the current world die—in totality—and forge a new, more local world, with new founding myths to ground its various peoples within. A great balkanisation. The psychic damage of a global egalitarian ideal must be expunged from people’s minds, and the granular nature of stable human community recognised as paramount. The revolution of mass and scale so exemplified in the American project must be reversed, and the self-serving class who steer the modern machine of human misery that is the total state must be removed. The immovable and eternal must once again sit above utilitarian humanism, and sovereignty placed out of the reach of men.
Nothing short of a revolution—even more radical and wide-reaching than that of 1776—and a rebirth can prevent the malaise and slow death we can all sense in the American system and the western world at large. For without it, harsher peoples—absent any ideas of self-determination—are bound to write the next chapters of history; it will be they who exercise power over the bewildered remnants of the eventual collapse. With what a poor custodian Liberal America has been, I cannot imagine that eventuality will be pretty.
I will leave you with the last page of James Burnham’s The Struggle For The World:
A big thanks to PlasmaRob for helping edit this essay.
it takes 200 years for a people to form.. Hmm. maybe america, nay.. american identity is coalesing.
I agree with the plague coming to europe.. especially with the accelerating by: Sharing the same language. Still think certain laws, and civic stances Accelerate this problem though..
Global american empire always make me chuckle. (GAE)
Wow. I agree. The overarching view that Wignats have of America definitely should be removed and replaced with the realization that we need to focus on a smaller state that does not have the same founding corruption as America.