The Lost Soul of WASP America, Part 2
A Nation of Nations
The harsh reality that America is a “nation of nations” may at long last be sinking in. But, one cannot be confident; Tea Partiers remain steadfastly in denial as they demand “their” country back. As if the Constitutional Republic was ever “theirs” to have and to hold in fee simple! At best, they are now tenants at will on the demesne of the federal Leviathan. But Harold Cruse, the most incisive Black nationalist writer of the Sixties, remarked ruefully that “America is a nation that lies to itself about who and what it is.” WASPs were and are the worst offenders. For Cruse, America was “a nation of minorities…ruled by a minority of one” which “thinks and acts as if [the USA is simply] a nation of Anglo-Saxon Protestants.”
In the Sixties WASPs were still the dominant group among White Americans. It was the civic duty of the WASP intelligentsia, therefore, to produce its own “representative radical-intellectual trend.” Cruse warned that every racial, religious, and ethnic group needed “organic” intellectuals able to articulate its particular interests and shape its distinctive ethno-culture. That representative function must be performed to the best of its ability by the intelligentsia in each of America’s constituent ethno-nations; otherwise “social progress in America” would “be ethnically retarded, if not checkmated.”
Unfortunately American civil religion fosters the delusion that WASPs are not an ethnic group comme les autres. That is partly because previous generations of WASP intellectuals shirked “their creative and intellectual responsibilities to the internal American commonweal,” effectively dissuading, crippling, and smothering “the cultivation of a democratic cultural pluralism in America.” Read more











