Whose America? The ever pertinent question: who owns America. One view, is that the USA is the rightful patrimony of descendants of colonists from the British Isles. Spirit of 1776, her legacy of liberty. Everyone else is a guest if White, or a segregated semi-autonomous relic-race if legacy American Indian or black slave. That’s a view I give credence to. It has a strong mythical force, it feels fair. It offers a sense of destiny, with Liberty at its fullest flowering. The land of the free and the home of the brave that took man to the moon.
The opposite view is that America is the land of opportunity for all of the world. If you’re smart, industrious, a born risk-taker, you’ve got a place here. Most such mythology is propagated in bad faith, but not all of it. There is a grain of truth to this. The flaw with that model though, is that it is fundamentally a parasitic vision. It’s resource-consumption where resources are painfully and manifestly finite. The Frontier closed over a century ago and there aren’t enough Nice White People to go around. That, and as soon as the diversity of cultures becomes brown, it becomes depressingly ugly. And when that happens, the Nice White People who make it all work either culturally collapse (People of Walmart, opioid epidemic) or they begin to Hate.
A third view of America is also driven by a sense of destiny: America is Nova Europa. An aspirational forging of a new nation from a properly measured commingling of European blood and customs. It’s not ugly to see Italian heritage in urban New England, Slavic folkways in small town Pennsylvania and Ohio, with the Anglo-Germanic folk from coast to coast united in the English language, the Founding mythology, and Christianity.
The other pertinent question: how long will it hold together.