 Welcome back to Forty University. Today's class is in history. So when exactly did the Anglo begin to self-hate? And you can pretty much nail it to about 1912. All that and more coming up on today's show. And so I've been reading Eric Kaufman's book, White Shift, White Shift, Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Society. So Eric Kaufman is an Anglo-academic. He comes from a background that's partly Jewish, partly white, partly Chinese. He's an academic in England. I think believe he grew up in Canada and this book came out in 2018, White Shift, Population, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities. So he notes that at the time of the American Revolutionary War that America was 98% Protestant, 98% Protestant. So that's a, that's dramatic. At the time of the American independence in 1976, the free population of the United States was 98% Protestant, almost entirely white, apart from a small population of free blacks in the North. 80% of the colonists were of British descent, predominantly English. The remaining 20% were almost all of Northwest European background in German, Dutch, Swedish, French and Irish. So African Americans and American Indians comprised a fifth of the total. So the American founders viewed Americans as descendants of the Anglo-Saxons who had fled the Norman yoke in England. So they borrowed from British Whig historians who considered the British monarchy, which stemmed from the Norman conquest, to be a tyrannical institution which quashed the primitive liberties enjoyed by the Anglo-Saxon tribes. So American political nationhood as in Western Europe was constructed around an ethnic core. Yeah, welcome to Rikola nationalism. So good, so good, sugar-free yet absolutely delicious. So there are two aspects to ethnic groups. There's a time dimension which connects us to our ancestors and then there's a spatial dimension which connects us to a particular place. So blood and soil. This is Rikola, sugar-free and absolutely delicious cough drops, so good and so kosher. So blood and soil, those are the traditional components. Yes, I had my six capsules of beef organ supplement today. So Roman Catholicism in the early United States represented a counter-entropic trait. No caffeine in these. No caffeine, just delicious. So Catholicism meaning counter-entropic meaning it retained identity through generations and it resisted decomposition. So language and accent. No, I have never actually eaten any meat. All I've done is swallow some capsules. So language and accent tend to fade in the second generation but religion and phenotype tend to endure over generations. So in the 1820s, the founders, I've never eaten fish, the founders lofty pronouncements about Anglo-Saxon origins found a little echo in the population. So the population in America in the 1820s didn't think of themselves as Anglo. They didn't think of themselves as white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, they remained firmly attached to denominational state and regional identities. But they had this massive immigration from 1820 to 1860 of Catholics. And so this ignited ethno-nationalist sentiments in the Anglo-Americans that then felt threatened by the increase in Catholic population. So during the 19th century, the general attitudes towards Catholics is very similar to the widespread attitudes towards Muslims today in America. So as with perceptions of Islam in the West today, Catholicism was viewed as an alien faith and that it had no place in American civilization. So from the 1840s, anti-Catholic political movements began organizing, contesting elections. There was the Native American party known as the Know-Nothings because of their oath of secrecy. It was like the original fight club. And so this native moniker result in a new American term nativist, which is shorthand for Anglo-American ethnic nationalist. So the Know-Nothings, which came developed in 1854, they sought to reduce immigration and introduce a 21 year residency requirement for citizenship. The Know-Nothing party was the most successful third party movement in American history. Now we had a burst of Chinese immigration in the 1860s, 1870s and was this promoted by humanitarian liberals of the kind that champion open immigration today? No, it's not liberal progressivism. It was big business and the Protestant clergy establishment that supported the open borders coalition. So American openness to immigration was not an egalitarian project. It wasn't stemming from anti-racism. Americans welcomed immigrants to grow their country, but they welcomed immigrants overwhelmingly from Europe. So Ralph Waldo Emerson says something very naughty here and I totally disavow this, says it cannot be maintained that the African race have ever occupied or promised to occupy any very high place in the human family. Oi! The Irish cannot, the American Indian cannot, the Chinese cannot. Before the energy of the Caucasian race, all other races have quailed and done obeisance. Whoa, mega, mega, mega disavows. Ralph Waldo Emerson, so racist. Now, where did opposition to immigration primarily come from? The urban Protestant working class. So that's also where Donald Trump gets much of his support. So, urban Protestant working class wanted restrictions on immigration because it was in certain major urban areas that Anglo-Americans started finding themselves a minority. And increased immigration also meant reduced wages for the urban working class. So there was a substantial Irish Catholic participation in the anti-Chinese working men's party in California. This agitation created the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act. So, led by Irish born Dennis Kearney, this movement brought Protestants and Catholics together to create the most successful labor-based movement in American history and to slam the door on immigration from the Chinese. Now, the American Protestant clergy, however, they cherish the laissez-faire open borders ideology much like they do today. They say, God favors America, immigration is a sign of God's favor. And the in-gathering of the world's peoples into America is gonna be a prelude to the second coming. So, Protestant clergy in California generally opposed Chinese immigration, but the Protestant clerical elite on the East Coast were strongly open borders. So the open borders perspective by 1890, that was prevailing at all the national conventions of the mainline Protestant denominations. So business-oriented Christian support and clerical support for immigration, you can still see at the upper levels of both mainline and evangelical denominations and in parts of the country club wing of the Republican party. So the immigration restriction movement developed as the number of non-anglos poured into the country and threatened the supremacy of the Anglo-Protestant Corps. So when numbers of immigrants and cultural distance like more difference between the immigrants and the majority as that increases then the pressure for immigration restriction grows. Now, in the late 19th centuries, America grew into an urban nation. We had the social gospel movement arising in Protestant Christianity. And this movement united a concern for the working class and the ills of the industrial city with the belief that government should control immigration. So now we think of the social gospel movement and Christianity as being something that's quite left-wing but the last part of the 19th century, social gospel movement meant restricting immigration. So by 1924, whilst interests had prevailed, we had immigration restriction. So half of the country's immigration quota was now allocated to Britain. So the aim of the 1924 immigration act was to freeze the ethnic composition of the US population. So American national identity at this point by 1924 is best described as racial because the identity meant the exclusion of all non-whites and Anglo-Protestants remained a majority. So this is racial identity distinct from ethnic nationalism which would mean that only members of the WASP group could immigrate or become citizens. And that type of ethno-nationalism was not the basis of the 1924 act. So there's a new feature in the discussions around immigration in the 1910s and 1920s was a brand new moral concept called racism. So American intellectuals considered anti-Catholic bigotry a backward sentiment, but they hailed eugenics, science of improving the inherited characteristics of individuals, they thought that was very modern and scientific. So eugenics was connected with scientific racism which ranked different ethnic groups as more or less advanced. That meant that Catholic Irish and Germans were now considered Nordics, race scientists considered them on par with Anglo Protestants. So the intellectual foundation for open borders was classical liberalism, as well as the American tradition of asylum and the Christian theology of divine providence and its handmaidens were growth oriented politicians and big business. So pro-immigration liberals like Ralph Waldo Emerson still embody the same unquestioned racial assumptions as immigration opponents. Now, when did we start getting liberal progressives? The first modern left liberal open borders movement, right? So they combined individualism, anarchism, ecumenism and progressivism into a brand new synthesis. So two intellectual traditions created liberal progressivism at the turn of the century, Anglo-American anarchism and secularized reformed Judaism. So Anglo-American anarchism was represented by William James and secularized reformed Judaism was represented by Felix Adler. So William James developed the philosophy known as pluralism. So initially pluralism had nothing to say about ethnic diversity. It simply called for people to combine aspects of multiple ethical systems to arrive at truth. Now Felix Adler was a German-Jewish reform rabbi who took the cosmopolitan outlook to its logical conclusion. So reform Jewish theology called for Jews to work together to unite the world's peoples under ethical monotheism. But Rabbi Adler went further. He said that Jews themselves should dissolve once the task was finished. Then John Dewey got on board. He developed the notion that all groups should give and receive cultural influence in some kind of cosmopolitan interchange. And he was the first major intellectual to reject the Anglo-Protestant tradition of American nationhood. So these liberal progressives saw American diversity as an embryo of international cooperation and world peace. So instead of Americanizing and evangelizing they called for the humane assimilation of immigrants into a universal civilization. And so this became the dominant perspective among mainstream Protestant clergy. So these think it said American children should be taught foreign cultures to produce a cosmopolitan outlook in which no one ethnic group dominated America. So this movement is led by Protestants, Protestant elites, Protestant elites in business and in religion. So Presbyterian spokesman pivoted from anti-immigration to pro-immigration positions between 1904 and 1913. So now they started calling for universal brotherhood and effectively open borders. So in 1908 Christian Congregationalists first lauded the positive qualities of the new immigrants and now you get Methodists repudiating their previous positions in favor of immigration restriction and now they're favoring open borders. So the rationale for the Christian clergy pro-immigration views change from God's will prior to 1890 to a secular cosmopolitanism and a pacifism after 1910. Now many had previously endorsed immigration restriction because they thought that this helped urban workers and immigration restriction would ameliorate the social problems of the cities. So by 1910 elite Protestant clergy were steadily reaching out to Catholics to Orthodox Christians and to rabbis. So we had the Federal Council of Churches which welcomed Jewish and Catholic leaders as part of interfaith chaplaincy during World War I and these Christian clergy spearheaded a movement against the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. So the elite of mainstream Protestantism in both northern and southern states worked tirelessly against the Ku Klux Klan and Protestant denominations routinely fired pastors who backed the Klan. And in churches where parishioners sympathized with the Klan, liberal ministers often chose to be forced out by their flock rather than speak up for the Klan. And even when a city was Klan run such as in post-First World War in Indianapolis Protestant leaders, civic elites, local journalists showed their resistance by conducting war commemorations in which Catholic, Jewish and Protestant clergy gave joint addresses. Now for the first time, Protestants are giving up on missionizing. So Protestant missionaries lost their crusading zeal after the First World War. They began to question the entire rationale. So they began doubting the wisdom of displacing non-Christian faiths and they essentially abandoned Christian activity altogether. So there's a transformation in Protestant thinking in the 1920s that we no longer need Christianity to be the exclusive religion of the world. We can just say Christianity has some important contributions to make and we no longer have the obvious and inherent right to displace other religions. So by 1924, mainline Protestant clergy were unanimous in their opposition to immigration restriction. But just like now, their liberal activism was out of step with the views of their congregants. So between 1912 to 1917, we got the rise of the young intellectuals of Greenwich Village, New York. So these were Anglo-American Bohemians, artists and writers, who rebelled against their own Protestant culture. So this is the rise of the Anglo self-hatred. So they were inspired by Nietzsche, Henri Bergson, romantic individualism. They were inspired by modernism in art. So modernism in art, modernism in literature, essentially looks down on traditionalism. And this is when the Anglo began to self-hate. So it's the young intellectuals, they wanted to overthrow what they saw as suffocating Puritan inheritance. So they discovered the joys of Harlem's black jazz scene. They experimented with drugs. They exhibited modern art. They read poetry aloud. And the most important figure from this milieu is Randolph Born. So he was a spokesman for the New Youth Culture in upper middle class, New York. He burst onto the intellectual scene, an influential essay in the respected Atlantic Monthly in July, 1916, essays called Transnational America. So he was influenced by the Jewish-American philosopher Horace Kalin, who was both a Zionist and a multiculturalist. So Horace Kalin didn't speak of all groups giving and receiving cultural influence as in John Dewey's vision or in all groups fusing together as in the vision of Zionist Israel Zengel in his play The Melting Part. But Horace Kalin spoke of America as a federation of international colonies in which each group, including Anglo-Saxons, could maintain their corporate existence. So Kalin treated all groups consistently. He said all groups have the right to maintain their own culture. But Randolph Born and the young intellectuals of New York had a very different perspective. So they were filled with wasp self-loathing. So this is the rise of Anglo-self-hatred. So Born was a rebel against his own group. He combined liberal progressives' desire to transcend New Englandism and Protestantism, with Horace Kalin's call for minority groups to maintain their own ethnic boundaries. So the end product, Eric Hoffman calls asymmetrical multiculturalism, which is still the dominant perspective today. So this is whereby minorities identify with their groups while the majority morph into cosmopolisms. So Randolph Born, one of the young intellectuals, this is what he wrote in Atlantic. He congratulated Jews who stick proudly to their culture. At the same time, he encouraged Anglo-Saxons to breathe a larger air, to develop enthusiasm for outside cultures, for continental literature, for Russian depths, for French clarity of thought, for Tutan philosophies of power. Let the Anglo feel himself a citizen of a larger world. So he may be absurdly superficial, is out what reaching wonder may ignore the homilier virtues of his Anglo-Saxon home, but he has at least found the clue to that international mind which will be essential to all men and women of good will, if they are ever to save this Western world of ours from suicide. So this is the beginning of asymmetrical multiculturalism, which is a dominant cultural perspective today. So Randolph Born is really the founding father of today's multiculturalist list, because he combines rebellion against his own ethnicity and culture and religion with liberal progressive cosmopolitanism with an endorsement, but for minorities only of Horace Kalen's ethnic conservatism. So ethnic minorities should preserve themselves in his view, while the majority should dissolve itself. So cosmopolitan now manages the contradiction between its ethos of transcending ethnicity and its need for cultural diversity which requires ethnic attachment. So Born resolves this by splitting the world into two moral planes. So one moral plane is for the parental majority who are asked to shed their ethnicity and to oppose their own culture. And then the other moral plane is for the more childlike minorities who are urged to embrace their heritage in the strongest terms. So this crystallized a dual habit of mind which became entrenched in the anti-wasp ethos of the 1920s. So the Anglo began to self-hate about 1912 and this became dominant in the 1920s with authors like Sinclair Lewis and H. L. Mankin and the Bohemian last generation of American intellectuals such as F. Scott Fitzgerald. So they all associated the Anglo-Protestant majority with prohibition. They deemed wasp culture to be of no value. They accused the ethnic majority of suppressing more interesting and more expressive ethnic groups. So the last generation's anti-majority ethos continued to pervade the writings of 1950s beat generation left-modernist writers like Norman Mailer and Jack Kerouac who contrasted lively black jazz or Mexican culture with the square boring puritanical whiteness of middle America. So as white ethnic steadily assimilated the despised majority shifted from wasps to all whites. So the multiculturalism of the 1960s then fused the liberal progressivist pluralist movement with the anti-white ethos of the beat counterculture. Bye-bye.