By Wayne Allensworth
Our conscious memory is like a mist that covers the summit of a vast, awesome mountain. Brain scientists say that we retain memories of everything that ever happened to us. Under hypnosis, or during a near-death experience, a panorama of one’s life can be drawn out of the mist. And sometimes memories veiled by the unconscious mind can still, they say, affect our conscious actions. I’ve found that quiet, deep relaxation, and meditative prayer, can part the curtain. The images, experiences, and sensations can come back. They are always there. Memory is deeply connected to identity. It is one of the channels or blueprints that one’s body and brain, acting as filters and boundaries, vitalize to forge personality. And I believe that collective memories are passed along from generation to generation, something related to Rupert Sheldrake’s theory of morphic resonance. They are passed on not mechanistically, but consciously, in what Iain McGilchrist calls “The field of me.” Memories make us who we are, acting as a well of experience that one’s mind draws on in navigating the paths we walk in our lives.
A hallway in my home is lined with photographs that recharge the batteries of conscious memory. Pictures of my parents and brothers and friends and grandparents and distant ancestors. One is of a great-great grandfather and great-great grandmother at their homestead. He holds a shotgun. She is a portrait of the grit of frontier women. Another is my great-grandfather, one I’ve posted here previously, when he was a law man. He’s holding a lever-action, repeating rifle and wearing a high-crown Stetson. That’s my America.
Many of the adults in my childhood were very much in that mold. The men were sometimes prickly and temperamental. Any breach of the unspoken rules of respect could mean a fight. They valued and respected competence and were jealous of their prerogatives. Some of them were as gifted at telling tall tales as Davy Crockett. It was Khaki work clothes, pickups, hunting trips, and a sometimes blunt, but fair, attitude to others. Telling the boss to go to Hell. Working for yourself. That’s my America.
The women where we lived were mostly housewives. They helped each other with children and chores and helped at the schools. They cooked and took pride in it. They were the heart of our families and neighborhoods. They hung clean laundry on clothes lines and hand cranked ice cream. And you better not talk back. But we did, because we were their children. We took our whippings, then bragged about how tough our parents could be. That’s my America.
Their pathologies might be alcoholism, or tempestuous marriages, or hair-trigger tempers. They forgave each other for the most part. Sometimes they veered off course and landed in jail, but straightened up for the most part. Life could be rough around the edges, but I don’t mind. Theirs was a life of sin-and-salvation and a can-do attitude. A lot of warts, but very human ones. They were ornery, sometimes belligerent, but you loved them because of that. Nobody was going to tread on them. That’s my America.
What’s yours? If you weren’t from my neck of the woods, it was different, but it was yours. We didn’t think about it or rationalize anything. We didn’t think you could choose everything. A lot of the most important things in life are given. I can’t imagine, as some people do, disdaining my home state because the weather is better somewhere else. I doubt the coastal prairies and bayous of my youth or the plains in my home state seem striking to a lot of people. Maybe they even look ugly to other eyes. But Texas is my home. I saw quite a bit of the world when I was younger and realized that I had everything I needed at home. I always figured I’d come back. It’s a lot different nowadays, but pockets of my America remain.
There’s been a lot of water under the bridge in my lifetime, but the dam was leaking long before that. A few observations might help explain our dilemma. When I lived in the Washington D.C. area for a decade, I met people from all over. And I came to understand that an America of colonial stock like me had coexisted with, then was buried under, a mid-20th century America of industrialism and urbanization, of a culture that was different not only in degree, but also in kind. The waves of immigrants that preceded the immigration slowdown in the 1920s had brought people from eastern and southern Europe, shifting the demographic balance, and bringing in a different brand of politics as well. It was New York, New York and Sinatra, not Pecos Bill and blue grass. It was jazz, not the blues and gospel. That mid-Century America was like a layer of sediment on the American riverbed that covered us. True, WWII did a lot to strengthen bonds among an already quite diverse population — look at the polyglot platoons of WWII movies — but something was being weakened. That something, a folk memory of the American core, would soon be in peril of being lost once and for all.
“The Good War” birthed the Deep State and fostered a vast expansion of the federal bureaucracy that had already expanded during the New Deal. The temptation of empire had beckoned since we were lied into the Spanish-American War, then reluctantly entered the Great War, also under false pretenses. Our entry into WWII was the product of provocation and propaganda. FDR’s administration was penetrated by Stalin’s agents and sympathizers. The abstraction of American identity that was arguably already present in the Civil War era, was cemented in the Cold War. America wasn’t her people any longer, not even a real place, but an idea — “democracy” — that was pitted against another idea — “tyranny” — as in the fascism or naziism of WWII enemies and the communism of our Cold War rivals. And that meant that the European core of the country that had been much more difficult to meld than immigration enthusiasts let on, was expendable. The universalism of “democracy,” itself a product of a particular civilization, was assumed to be applicable globally, and the “blank slate” theory of human nature posited that all people were essentially the same. History, ethnicity, founding myths, and folk memory were cast as atavistic, retrograde, and anti-modern. Anybody could be an “American” if they subscribed to a set of precepts set out by the ideologues of “democracy.” Sam Francis once observed that if that were the case, then anyone who managed to cross the Rio Grande or secure a green card and superficially professed the right ideas was more of an American than those of us of older stock who had doubts about mass immigration, particularly from non-European sources. It was a preposterous notion — if that is, one still adhered to a commonsense notion of nations as founded by ethnic cores with particular cultural and civilizational attributes.
This country was founded as a liberal republic — a loosely-knit entity of states jealous of their own prerogatives and moored to European civilization. When that mooring was finally cut loose after a long period of weakening, liberalism and the ideational grounding of radical revolutionary egalitarianism became indistinguishable. Neoconservatives and neoliberals became practically indistinguishable. The universal nation Utopia was in theory realizable with global air travel, high speed communications, and most of all, the internet and computer technology. Globalism seized the imagination of elites right and left in the “unipolar moment” after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Its rejection of boundaries, traditional morality, and particular identities as brakes on universalism was the social solvent that sped along the fragmentation of society, even as the interstate highway system and easy “relocation” had uprooted our people. A nation without boundaries or a majority ethnic core isn’t a nation. It’s a polyglot empire. Again, the nation as it came to be in the mid-20th Century already stretched the limits of diversity. What’s more, as the Civil War demonstrated, even a far more homogeneous country was liable to break up over social, economic, and political differences. It was hard enough for an America I could recognize as such to maintain stability.
The fragmentation of society, hastened by technology, has made genuinely rebuking the ideological nation very difficult, including among MAGA supporters. Their America is something of an idea itself. It is a superpower, a guardian of “democracy,” a militaristic globo-cop. The messianism of the globalists is one step away from that. They retain a deeply held memory of another America, and some of its habits, but they are susceptible to easy manipulation. President Donald Trump forged a broad coalition against the excesses of globalist radicalism and elite disdain for the masses. Yet that coalition is fragile, and Trump’s MAGA agenda could run out of steam, as the man himself has betrayed and insulted his own base in the Epstein affair.
Any American reclamation project will be long-term. And the end result might not be what anyone expected. Focusing too much on narrow currents of the passing flow can distort the picture as much as ideology has and can engender despair as well as unfounded euphoria. We don’t know where all this is going to end, but the younger generation seems less wedded to the Baby Boomer world view that locked in universalism. I’ve commented before on some preliminary progress made by the administration and warned that it is just a start. But there is, I think, a thirst for rootedness, a longing for a claim to one’s heritage, as the boom in ethnic genetic testing attests.
The country as presently constituted is too big, far too diverse, and too complex, socially, ideologically, religiously, as well as racially and ethnically, to manage. To me, it seems that people of my background have more in common with the inhabitants of Canada’s prairie provinces than with “Blue-State” leftists, much less with Third World immigrants. As the collapse of empires teaches us, this is untenable. An uncontrollable bureaucratic Leviathan has swallowed us. It looks on us with cold indifference. Dismantling portions of it or restructuring it would be a start, hopefully as a prelude to something deeper. My America is largely lost but lives in us. Our deep memory of it is reinforced by its manifestations that occasionally rise to the surface. My home is a concrete reality — my family, my state, my friends, my children and grandchildren. They are not an “idea.” The only way to preserve any of what we love as a basis for building something new is to break up the country as presently constituted, to break the hold of the bureaucracy on us, and to break out of our somnambulant state. Sleepwalking, dreaming of what could be, and forgetting what was. We have progressed, I think, but have a long way to go. We will struggle to get there, and the technology that made this mess possible won’t go away. We must be on constant guard. The alternative is far worse.
Chronicles contributor Wayne Allensworth is the author of The Russian Question: Nationalism, Modernization, and Post-Communist Russia, and a novel, Field of Blood.
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