“The United States’ British roots also have value because they provide a link to a history older than any homegrown alternative the United States possesses.”
University of Pennsylvania professor Amy Wax has been embroiled in controversy since at least 2017, facing frequent condemnations of her comments and points of view. In September of this year, the university took the unusual step of suspending Wax for one year, at half her normal salary and in spite of her tenure. (Other penalties were also imposed.) Last month, Wax made some bold comments about the makeup of the American population. In conversation with Glenn Loury, Wax argued that the United States should have “one dominant demographic,” which would ideally be “Anglo-Protestant” in nature. Wax has drawn fire with similar remarks in the past. In 2017, fellow scholar Jonathan Klick criticized her for “claims regarding the superiority of Anglo-Protestant norms.” Klick made some good points, and one can certainly argue over details. But on the whole, Wax, in my view, is right. As she suggested to Loury, Anglo-Americans did make the United States successful, and the country would be better off with a strong Anglo-American presence.
As Garett Jones observes in The Culture Transplant, “there’s at least some evidence that, based on patterns around the world, being a British colony was a net economic plus.” That is compared to colonization by other European powers. Jones also casts Britain as the birthplace of the “right to property,” which he says “goes back to Magna Carta.” For hundreds of years, there has been little danger of expropriation in Britain. In Jones’s view, “that low British risk has planted its Deep Roots in North America.” This was surely due in part to the British origin of many Americans. Jones explains that immigrants tend to bring their cultures with them, and such ancestral culture partly overrides that of the countries to which they move. To an extent, “people matter more than places.”
In “Why Anglos Lead,” Lawrence Mead similarly contends that American predominance in international affairs dates back at least to World War II and “continues a British primacy that dated back at least to 1815.” (However, I hasten to add that, as William Wohlforth has shown, American hegemony is greater than any Britain ever achieved.) For Mead, Anglo leadership stems from several causes. One is a friendliness to economic freedom that goes back to medieval Britain. Another is “good governance” and judicial independence, which, likewise, was already present in 12th-century England. Moreover, Anglo politics promotes freedom at home and abroad, which is why Anglo states are trusted by other countries.
Mead uses a later lecture to argue that the Anglo states “are, as a group, the richest of all countries” and “are also more or less running the world.” The United States is obviously more able to shape international affairs than its brethren, but this difference is merely one of “scale.” After all, “Australia led the force that pacified East Timor, while New Zealand has intervened in the Solomon Islands.” One might add that Australia played an important role in the Second World War along with its fellow Anglo states, and, more recently, Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States entered into the AUKUS security partnership to “promote a free and open Indo-Pacific that is secure and stable.” In this lecture, Mead reiterates some of the same points, noting also that capitalism in Anglo societies is aided by relatively high levels of trust, which facilitate commerce among strangers. Another major asset is the “responsible individualism,” which has been prevalent mainly in Europe, but especially in Britain.
In his 1998 book A Thread of Years, the Hungarian-American historian John Lukacs narrates American history during the 20th century as marked by a gradual dissolution of Anglo-Saxon dominance, accompanied by a gradual decline in standards of civilized conduct. By the late 1960s, he laments, “upper-class WASP predominance…was gone.” In conjunction with this shift, “civilization,” meaning civility and refinement, “had come to an end. But it lived on in the gardens of America and in the minds of ever more scattered, but perhaps still numerous, men and women.”
Speaking of refinement, a classic essay by Horace Kallen argues that New England has played an unrivaled part in the development of American literature: “eliminate from our roster Whittier, Longfellow, Lowell, Hawthorne, Emerson, Howells, and what have we left?” Even Mark Twain and Bret Harte “carry something of the tone and spirit of New England.” For Kallen, New England’s literary primacy arose from its homogenously Anglo-Saxon population. “Homogeneity,” he says, provided “like-mindedness and self-consciousness,” without which “art, literature―culture in any of its nobler forms―is impossible.”
The United States’ British roots also have value because they provide a link to a history older than any homegrown alternative the United States possesses. “Greatness,” writes Edward Shils in his 1981 book Tradition, “requires that it be traced to a great past; pastness is part of the legitimation of greatness.” Accordingly, some 19th-century Americans relocated to European countries including Britain out of “dismay at the desolate pastlessness of the United States.” As Shils explains, “they needed ‘a past’ to which to attach themselves.”
Speech can be seen as one area in which decoupling from Britain has weakened the underpinnings of high culture. As late as the mid-20th century, American politicians and intellectuals such as President Franklin D. Roosevelt and William F. Buckley, Jr. spoke with a transatlantic accent. This way of speaking had been developed partly in emulation of the British upper classes with their Received Pronunciation and promoted partly as a reaction against immigrants’ accents. It has also been suggested that the accent’s popularity was sustained by the norm of conforming to WASP culture. Over the last few decades, the transatlantic accent has almost completely vanished and so has any expectation that public figures speak in a dignified manner. The demotic has come to be preferred to the refined. For instance, Susan Jacoby laments the frequent use of the word “folks,” a word widely popular among politicians seeking to cast themselves as “just one of the boys or just one of the girls.” For Jacoby, this linguistic habit represents all “the dumbing down of our culture…over the past four decades” and “a ratification and exaltation of the quotidian that is one of the distinguishing marks of anti-intellectualism in any era.”
Those with conservative preferences should also appreciate Anglo-Saxons for their political views. An analysis by Noah Carl breaks Americans down according to ancestry and seeks to determine which groups lean more Republican or Democrat. The article finds that Americans whose ancestors were from “Scotland” and “England & Wales” have the third- and fourth-highest Republican share, respectively, out of a total of 35 groups. Carl’s evaluation is based on the General Social Survey.
Data like these indicate that culture tends to be quite durably connected to ancestry. This notion is supported by Jones’s book, which shows that ethnic groups living side by side typically do not become completely alike but rather retain much of their culture. Jones even speaks of “full immigrant assimilation” as “a myth.” Reviewing his conversation with Wax, Loury objects to her thesis, writing that
“Yet we’ve seen waves of immigration from Italy and Ireland and Asia and the Jewish diaspora, each of which provoked much panic about the ‘unassimilable’ nature of these groups. The children and grandchildren of these immigrants became as American as any sixth-generation Anglo-Protestant.”
But what exactly does “American” mean here? Are Italian and Jewish Americans today as culturally similar to the average American of Benjamin Franklin’s time “as any sixth-generation Anglo-Protestant”? Hardly. As Garett Jones puts it, “Italian Americans [and] German Americans” have been “treated with an American culture that never fully took.” Loury’s statement only seems superficially plausible because ideas of what “American” means have themselves been diluted.
In his article, Mead writes that “Anglo nations” are Britain and those countries whose “original settler population came mainly from Britain.” This includes the United States, even though most Americans today are not of British descent, because the country’s culture was formed by that original population. However, since culture and ethnicity tend to be closely linked, it stands to reason that having an Anglo majority would contribute to the preservation of said culture.
Far from being revolutionary, Wax’s comments are consonant with traditional notions of American identity. Azar Gat explains that “the United States began as a country of Englishmen who…felt that their liberties as Englishmen were being infringed upon.” Accordingly, the Declaration of Independence refers to “our British brethren” and “the ties of our common kindred” as well as the “consanguinity” between the two populations. Gat adds that “British rights and the ties of…descent…between the motherland and the colonies were inseparable in the Declaration.”
Re-emphasizing the value of Anglo culture could benefit the Anglos themselves, too. In their 2014 book The Triple Package, Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld maintain that successful ethnic and religious groups in America possess three traits: a collective “superiority complex,” a sense of “insecurity,” and a culture of “impulse control.” This combination has been lost in certain segments of the Anglo population, which have become victims of their own success. Thus, “a culture of lassitude, of nonstriving, seems to have set in at the upper echelons of WASP society.” “WASPs,” write the authors, “seem to accept their plight almost cheerfully.” In recent decades, the upper-class WASPs who used to dominate American politics have grown scarce among the nation’s elected officials—a development with significant downsides, as commentators of various ideological persuasions agree. Against the backdrop of President George H. W. Bush’s death, Ross Douthat praised the old ruling elite’s “spirit of noblesse oblige and personal austerity and piety” which “their successors have failed to inherit or revive,” while Michael Gross writes that “the sense of loss felt in the wake of the death of Bush 41 illuminated the yearning for the traditional, if long abandoned, notion of affirmative aristocratic leadership.”
Perhaps it would help if Anglos started taking more pride in their group’s heritage and accomplishments again. Wax’s ideas—while controversial—are correct and important, for the good of Anglo Americans and the country as a whole.
Simon Maass is a writer living in Germany. His work has previously appeared in publications such as Providence, VoegelinView, and Cultural Revue. He holds a degree in International Relations from the University of St Andrews and writes on various topics in politics, religion, and literature.
