“One has to put aside the popular notion that language and culture are endlessly passed on from generation to generation, rather as if ‘Scottishness’ or ‘Englishness’ were essential constituents of some national genetic code. If this were so, it would never be possible to forge new nations – like the United States of America or Australia – from diverse ethnic elements. The capacity of human societies both to absorb and to discard cultures is much underestimated. In reality, just as individuals can go abroad and merge into a foreign community, so a stationary population, if subjected to a changed linguistic and cultural environment, can quite easily be persuaded to follow suit. Dominant cultures are closely connected to dominant power groups. As the balance of power shifts, the balance of cultures shifts as well.”
– Vanished Kingdoms, Norman Davies
This is exactly why I consider it to be so significant that the racial, ethnic, and cultural mix of the USA has been transformed so dramatically since the two major immigration “reforms” in 1965 and 1986. In the course of half a single lifetime, the USA has gone from a white, Christian nation-state to a multi-ethnic, multi-religious, multi-national state. While many people celebrate this, they do so foolishly because they wrongly believe that such transformations are possible without changing all of the aspects of the dominant culture. It’s not that the American people will vanish altogether, but they will become something that can no longer be reasonably considered American, just as the Brythonic Celts of the kingdom of Alt Clud first became “Scottish”, then “British” despite having been ethnically and linguistically distinct.
This is why the USA is now wracked by the same sort of corruption, crime, and legal inequality that occurs in most non-WASP cultures. And this is why we can safely assume that as long as the population mix continues to move towards the polyglot, basic aspects of WASP culture that are assumed to be intrinsic to the geographical location will continue to disappear. In Europe, the nationalism is stronger and the minority populations are smaller, which is why ethnic cleansing of the sort advocated by Greece’s Golden Dawn is the likely outcome, but in the USA, where there is already three, and arguably four, distinct nations, a breakup of the political entity is more probable.
Some are expecting war as a consequence of the failure of the Euro and the coming dissolution of the European Union, but I think it is much more likely to take place in the United States when the people of Aztlan demand their right to self-determination and all the Wilsonian neocons are hoist upon their own petard.
On a related note, the Obama administration is taking the law into its own hands by bypassing Congress and granting amnesty and legal residence to around one million young illegal infiltrators, to use the Israeli term:
The Obama administration will stop deporting and begin granting work permits to younger illegal immigrants who came to the U.S. as children and have since led law-abiding lives. The election-year initiative addresses a top priority of an influential Latino electorate that has been vocal in its opposition to administration deportation policies. The policy change, described to The Associated Press by two senior administration officials, will affect as many as 800,000 immigrants who have lived in fear of deportation…. It tracks closely to a proposal offered by Republican Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida as an alternative to the DREAM Act.