monetizeyourcat:

the “american” identity (i.e. white southerners whose “heritage” is primarily with white southernness) is “scots-irish” which is a sort of grabbag for everyone in the british isles in 1800 who was neither (a) english nor (b) catholic. romantic scots nationalist nostalgia was a huge part of the ideology of the antebellum south. unless you’re talking about pennsylvania dutch, germans didn’t even arrive until after the völkerfrühling and they settled way more heavily out west than back east, in large part because there was already an established white american identity hostile towards them - a distinction the ascendancy of the white petit bourgeoisie post civil war made largely irrelevant

this is american history 101 how can you not know this and call yourself some kind of hardcore realist

I was around and paying attention when “Scots-Irish” as a self-conscious identity was really being pushed in the ’90s, when you live through these things it’s always funny watching people read them as an “always known”.

It mostly came out of the publication of Albion’s Seed in 1989, and represented an effort to ennoble “hillbilly” as an innocent, even victimized, yet politically conscious and inherently right-individualist prototype of American whiteness. (After all, “Dixie” southernness was both tainted and increasingly worn out as generic whiteness, and New England “Puritan” or Scando-Midwesternness were both unusably leftist.) The whole thing’s easy to read as part of the post-Cold War intraconservative civil war over what to do next, as a volley on the Buchananite/paleocon side that wanted to pivot back to inward-looking Americanism.