THE GREAT ST. PADDY'S DAY RUMBLE

by Dun Scotus

It started off innocently enough, with a Matt Damon quote used by Richard Spencer to extol the beauty and tragedy of America's former WASP elite in his article Kiss Me I'm WASP Why I Can't Stand St. Patrick's Day.

But, unfortunately, those of Irish descent – and other non-WASPs – in the Radix comment boards kicked off and started breaking the internet furniture over the tricky questions of White identity and whether St. Patrick’s Day was a celebration of the underdog and manifestation of the untermensch.

Disturbingly for Spencer, this little tiff, by showing the fractiousness of Whites over something as basic as identity, calls into question the vision of a grand White nationalism that Radix and NPI favours.

Acting WASP – i.e. "privileging" one version of White identity over others – is no longer the best way to build wider White solidarity. The power of partisan parochial nationalism – even in the relatively unfocused state in which it exists for most Americans – is one of the fundamental forces of the universe and, like quantum mechanics, will have to be awkwardly incorporated into any Grand Unified Theory of White nationalism.

My dog in this particular fight is to take issue with the notion that America is overwhelmingly a WASP creation, in which everyone else is "just a visitor," by playing up my own ethnic group's notable role in its creation. America was by no means a purely Anglo-Saxon project – even in the beginning. If it had been, it would have ended at the Appalachians and split into several micro states.

Expansion.

Yes, the WASP element was important in the history of America and hopefully will be again, but in the past almost as important a part was played by the Scots and the Scots-Irish (those Scots who settled temporarily in Ireland before going on to colonize the much bigger 'island' further West).

Like the WASPs they are just as guilty of dissolving "their ethnic and racial identity into a corporate entity, the United States of America," although in their case they also committed the double 'sin' of dissolving their ethnic identity into the WASP elite. This readily accessible but incomplete list should cast some light on this: Presidents of Scottish or Scotch-Irish descent.

As for Richard Spencer's theory that St. Patrick’s Day is a celebration of the untermensch, this is only partly plausible, as all festivals have an element of the Saturnalia about them.

What is more remarkable is that St. Patrick’s Day, from its humble beginnings, should have become such a noticeable and important date on the American calendar. Americans, with their multifarious roots, have countless possible festivals that they can choose to celebrate. Why, then, should the day of the patron saint of a particular minority ethnicity rise to such prominence?

I suspect that for the generic type of American – i.e. someone of European race with unclear or mixed ethnic lineages from several parts of Europe – St. Patrick’s Day has come to represent the idea of White Americans having specific ethnic and cultural ancestral roots. It is this impossible atavistic hankering that has made the festival widely popular. It has become an avatar for something that most Americans now lack.

The idea of a greater and wider identity is something that human beings have difficulty with. While such an identity may sometimes exist in a negative sense, as in Black-on-White crime or White Genocide, it is problematic in a positive sense, and tends to have few takers. "White" or "White American" identity is reduced to something of a contrast effect, a contrast effect that will suffer as the contrast is weakened by the increasing introduction of the transracial Hispanic group and the Brazilification of America.

Whiteness is something to write on.

As Spencer rightly points out, St. Patrick's Day lacks authenticity – it would probably give Heidegger nightmares! The sad fact is that it is no longer possible for most Americans to have authentic ethnic and cultural ancestral identity. Most of them are too ethnically mixed for that. The popularity of St. Patrick's Day, however, reveals that the hankering remains.

Unlike their racial opponents, all that White Americans have is the loose-fitting, emotionally unsatisfying substitute of being "American" or "White" or "Christian," or the possibility of perhaps privileging part of their ancestral lineage, which is itself an inauthentic strategy.

Being a White American is not so much an identity as an identity problem, and, until this problem is solved, America will be the last place to look to for the leadership that the wider White race needs.

What St. Patrick's Days represents is a chance to drink and forget this unpleasant fact, while also providing a good excuse for a punch-up and a chance to see your own blood again.