Selwyn Duke addresses the way in which the very concept of nation has been erased from American minds:
When hearing about invaders streaming across our border, often with a sense of entitlement, we should be filled with righteous anger motivating us to robustly defend the homeland. We’re not. Or not enough of us are. In fact, a good percentage of the country works against the common good, passionate about the wrong things and acting as traitors would. Too many of the rest are comfortably numb.
This is why invasion has been tolerated (and often encouraged), why we talk about amnesty for people who should be unceremoniously shipped south, and why there isn’t yet funding for a border wall despite a record Republican House majority.
The reason for this, sadly, is that we’re not a nation — properly understood. A nation is an extension of the tribe, which itself is an extension of the family; it’s defined by blood, faith, language and culture. For example, the Sioux Nation wasn’t a “country” or “state”; it was a very large family sharing the aforementioned elements.
This truth was once recognized and emphasized. It was mentioned among the Founding Fathers that we enjoyed the benefit of “consanguinity,” meaning, a relationship based on having the same remote ancestors. This became less of a reality after the waves of 19th-century immigration, yet emphasis was still placed on maintaining nationhood. For example, President Teddy Roosevelt said in 1907 that treating people with “equality” was not a given, but was “predicated upon the person’s becoming in every facet an American, and nothing but an American.”
He went on to say, “Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn’t an American at all.” Now consider how many people will describe themselves as a/an _________-American or, worse still, will say “I’m _________” (fill in, Polish, Irish, Greek, Italian, etc.). They may not be bad people; they may mean well. But they’re unwittingly strengthening the all-too-prevalent internationalist mentality and are acting contrary to the cause of nationhood.
Nationhood was defended legislatively in 1921 with the Emergency Quota Act and in 1924 with the enactment of the National Origins Act, which used immigration quotas to maintain our country’s demographic balance. This is called “racist” today, even though some Europeans had greater quotas than other Europeans (and they’re the same race), but demographic upheaval is precisely how you destroy a nation. Ask the Tibetans, American Indians or the Ainu in Japan (if you can find any) about that.
It is the conflation of “state” with “nation”, combined with the “proposition nation” nonsense that was created to sell “the melting pot” that has resulted in this state. Only aggressive and fairly ruthless nationalism has any chance of saving the American nation now, and the more time that passes, the less likely it becomes.
It’s understandable why Americans embraced civic nationalism after the horrors of the Civil War. But that doesn’t change the fact that they were wrong to do so, and that it has had consequences that have destroyed the Union far more thoroughly than the Confederacy ever could.