THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

This is a follow up to my May 15 article called "Wordism." The opposite of nationalism is Wordism. Wordists say that we should forget our race, our culture, and everything about our natural identity. Wordists say that the only important thing is their Final And Absolute truth. Communism is a form of Wordism. All the thousands of other philosophies that claim to Unite All Men in Universal Peace are forms of Wordism.

Nationalism, at its worst, cannot do as much harm as Wordism has done. Protestant and Catholic Wordists fought the religious wars that wiped out a major portion of the population of Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

In our century, Communism has killed at least a hundred million people directly and even more indirectly. Wordism routinely kills so many people and causes so much suffering that it makes Hitler look like a piker. In America today, all the talk is about racism and divisiveness. But here again, what is actually destroying America is Wordism.

To a Wordist, an American is not someone who was born in America. To a Wordist, a True American is someone who BELIEVES in the right WORDS.

To a liberal, a True American is anybody who believes in the Melting Pot and integration. Liberals would love to replace us with hundreds of millions of third world leftists who BELIEVE in leftism. To a liberal, THAT would be a True America made up of True Americans.

Many "Christian" conservatives would LOVE to replace any native born American with a fundamentalist Brazilian convert.

Libertarians want America to open up its borders completely to unlimited immigration.

Yes, Virginia, each of these groups BELIEVES this. I am NOT making this up. And these loons are not extreme examples. Wordist nutcases RUN this country.

According to Wordists, America did not become great because we are a special people. America is great, according to Wordists, only because of the WORDS. It is only the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence that make America a free country. The people who happen to be here are incidental.

According to Wordists, as long as we keep the right words, any people on earth would do just as well with this country as Americans do.

All any population needs to be America is THE RIGHT PIECES OF PAPER. A Wordist conservative will say that America is just the words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address.

For a Wordist liberal or a respectable conservative, America is even less than that. To liberals and respectable conservatives, as I explained on October 31, 1998, America is just "Five Words and Emma Lazarus."

Any liberal will look you straight in the eye and say that a True American is anyone on earth who believes in what he believes in. A Wordist conservative will tell you exactly the same thing.

This is the official doctrine of those people who are always telling us "What America Is All About." To the liberals and respectable conservatives, America is all about WORDS. As long as we have the words, the PEOPLE are interchangeable.

To Wordists, anyone who says America is in any way a special PEOPLE is Evil. If you say Americans are a special PEOPLE, you are a Nativist. If you say Americans are a special PEOPLE, you are a Racist.

You are a Nativist and a Racist unless you agree that Americans are simply interchangeable with any other people on earth.

I say that is nonsense.

I believe that the words of our nation's Founding Documents were a product of the PEOPLE who wrote them. I believe in a combination of heredity as well as environment, of genetics as well as culture. Our people are not interchangeable with any other on earth.

Most white Americans today are the descendants of people who came here before 1800. In The Wealth of Nations (1776), Adam Smith points out that the population of the American colonies was doubling NATURALLY about every twenty to twenty-five years. That means that for each couple that arrived in 1700, there would be an extra TWENTY people in America in 1775!

The earlier you got here, the more offspring you had. It is a simple geometric progression.

America had more German immigrants than British immigrants. But we have more British blood in our veins, because the British immigrants got here earlier, and multiplied more.

By the time Ellis Island opened up, the NATURAL INCREASE of Americans had slowed down enormously. Those who settled in the cities through Ellis Island did little more than replace their own numbers.

Even our big cities contain more descendants of earlier Americans than of recent immigrants! Even at the height of immigration in the late nineteenth century, more Americans came into the cities from the rapidly increasing population of the country and small towns of America than came in from Europe.

In other words, America keeps what freedom it has and its enterprising climate largely because we still have the genes that founded the whole thing. The genes that founded America, that opened the frontiers, also produced huge numbers of offspring in those frontier areas.

The Wordist has to claim that his words are everything, and genes are nothing. Unlike the Wordist, I don't have to claim that either genetics or environment is everything. I think America is the result of a combination of genes and culture. But the genes are indispensable.

Americans are not interchangeable.