Boer Republicanism — The True Ideology Of White America
Tags: Colonialism, American History, Racism, White Supremacy, Christianity

For more than 250 years, there’s been a consensus in the world that the war that established the United States constituted a “revolution”. Although an increasing number of scholars now (correctly, I might add) believe that it was not a real revolution, but a controlled secession meant to benefit rich, white slaveowners, you will hardly find this narrative echoed too much abroad. At the time, the idea of an independent republic was quite novel, as the Divine Right of Kings was widely accepted and unquestioned for hundreds of years. To the Europeans, at least, the United States of America was already much freer than their own respective autocracies. Africans and Native Americans were not really considered to be full human beings in the worldview of Europe, especially not to the Catholic Church. But it didn’t really matter so long as at least any white man with property had suffrage — a very novel concept at the time.

Fast-forward to today and we have thousands of mouthbreathers claiming some kind of intimate and sacred knowledge of the “real Constitution” and who hurl venom and vitriol at their political opponents. Even daring to question this puritanical view of the US Constitution elicits accusations, snide humble-bragging, and ultranationalist chest-thumping. When Antonin Scalia correctly pointed out that the Soviet constitution was much better than ours, but didn’t matter due to lack of commitment, liberals overreacted and defied their own standards of logic by accusing Scalia of being pro-Soviet or not really revering the US Constitution like any true, red-blooded American should.

In short, there are vastly differing interpretations of the US Constitution, but only a handful of specific schools of thought are really that relevant as they dictate the true ideology of the Tea Party Movement, NRA, and alt-right in general.

This leaves many of us scratching our heads and asking “If these people believe so much in freedom, why do they insist so much on taking away other peoples’ freedoms?” This same question is asked by the far-right constituencies in question with respect to leftists and moderate reformists, which can easily gaslight and frustrate sane, normal people. Easy answers like “white supremacy” and “Christian fundamentalism” do not easily account for the ultra-reactionary views of rural white Americans. Overthinking this in terms of the US Constitution, racism, and religion don’t really get us anywhere. To uncover their true ideology, we have to go back to in time and look at our history more laterally, especially at a parallel example overlooked by most.

At the same time that North America was being settled by the English, French, Scottish, Dutch, Swedish, and other European settlers, there was also a colonization effort underway in South Africa. The first major colonizers of both the New World and Old World were the rival emerging empires of the Portuguese and the Dutch, a rivalry that would be subsumed by that of the Spanish and British. The Spanish and Portuguese relegated a lot of their colonial policies to the Catholic Church and had an unsophisticated and brute model of exploitation that benefited the nobility much more than common people, which hastened the eventual demise of their respective colonial empires. The Dutch and British, on the other hand, relegated colonial exploits to chartered West and East India Companies, basically turning colonization into a joint-stock enterprise that virtually any townsman could invest and participate in. The model that would come to dominate the world is that of Protestant European freemen who govern on the basis of a stock-owned corporation — a fact reflected in the first American flags being copied off the British East India Company’s flag.

Back to South Africa, though we commonly associate the Dutch with freedom and liberalism (a mode of thinking termed “pragmatisme” in their language), the people they sent to settle there were anything but. In fact, up to as many as half were not even ethnic Dutchmen, but rather French Hugenot refugees and Low German-speaking employees of the Dutch East India Company who could speak very crude and elementary Dutch at the very least. (In fact, the reason “Dutch” is the English word for people from the Netherlands is because the English could not easily tell the difference between Germans and the people in the area bordering them along the western coast; the concept of ethnic nationalism hadn’t yet settled in). This explains the incredibly guttural nature and unusual grammatical patterns of the language that would be come to be known as “Afrikaans”.

When the British took ownership of the Cape Colony to keep it out of the hands of Napoleon, the Boers (literally “farmers”), as they came to be known, began to migrate eastwards to get away from the discriminatory policies of the British colonial administrators and their European Dutch-speaking collaborators. Naturally, they picked fights with nearly every African tribe they came in contact with, though also traded and sometimes mixed with them. Absent any influence from the quickly-progressing Europeans, they decided to establish their own Boer Republics. These were strikingly similar to North American states (especially the southern ones) in many ways. To be a citizen of one of these Boer Republics, you had to be white, Dutch-speaking, and most importantly, a Reformed Calvinist Protestant Christian (no Catholics or other denominations were acceptable). These settlers even practiced slavery and used similar claims to a God-given right to own black people, coming up with their own biblical myths about their own people, plagiarizing Old Testament language that originally applied to the Jewish people without hardly any mention at all of anything from the New Testament.

Unfortunately for them, the party didn’t last long. The British found gold in South Africa and fought two wars with these fundamentalist Christian Dutch settlers over the rights to the gold and won. The second of these wars saw the British use concentration camps on white people for the first time ever, personally led and supervised by Winston Churchill.

Now as you’re reading all this, you are probably bored and confused, but nonetheless feel that this story seems awfully familiar. The patterns of settlement, war, slavery, and genocide were almost the exact same in the United States. However, as opposed to the Dutch, who sent out at the very least, two kinds of settlers, the British sent out several different kinds of “Amerikaners” who would go on to commit every atrocity imaginable against non-Europeans in the New World.

To keep things simple, I’m going to focus on the most populous and influential of the Amerikaners: New England Puritans, Scots-Irish, Barbadian Planters & Cavaliers, Mormons, and the “Germanics”.

The New England Puritans are generally seen as the perennial “good guys” in American history, despite their virulently racist worldviews and the initiation of and complicity in all of the nation’s worst atrocities. As entitled, they descended from English Puritan “pilgrims” and despite being ultraconservative and superstitious, would eventually temper themselves and become the first to industrialize parallel to the British, enabling them to accommodate more immigrants. This was due to the fact that the bankers in Boston and New York had intimate ties to the British economy, meaning that the United States basically tailrode the British Empire until the First World War.

The Scots-Irish came from the Plantation of Ulster, Britain’s first settler-colonial project, and came to North America to escape British “oppression” (If you fast forward to today and look up “The Troubles”, you can see how the ones who remained in Northern Ireland are effectively “proto-rednecks”). They settled mainly in the Appalachians and were infamously violent and initially had a poor grasp of what we would consider “proper English”. As they were a hunter-herdsman culture, they had a weak agricultural tradition and were inclined to live in crude shacks and hunt most of their food, hence America’s strong gun culture. Because of their tribalistic nature, they never had an established ethnic identity besides simply “American” or “Southern”.

The Barbadian Planter aristocracy and Cavaliers descended primarily from Episcopalian English nobility and migrated to North America when the southeast proved more lucrative for plantations and slave labor. Like the Scots-Irish and unlike the New English, they were averse to the concept of agricultural efficacy. Rather, they depended entirely on slaves to grow their crops.

The “Germanics” were immigrants from Germany, Holland, and other Nordic countries. Like the New English, they had a strong agricultural work ethic and were on average, more enlightened on the issue of slavery (with plenty of exceptions, of course). They settled mainly in the Midwest and West and their descendants still farm to this day. They can be best described as “Boers who still ‘boe’”.

What we know as “Southern Culture” is, in fact, a fusion of these three, with much stronger pulls into either of the three cultural corners depending on which part of the country you are in.

The Mormons are relevant because they are overwhelmingly of ethnic English ancestry. Though opposed to slavery, they were not above 19th Century obscurantism and notions of white supremacy that are blatantly obvious in their religion, even to this day. They were a distinct white “tribe”, whom like the Southerners and Afrikaners, created their own origin myths characterizing them as “God’s Chosen People” who “returned to Zion”. The Mormons even had their own independent theocratic state that was eventually forcibly incorporated into the United States.

After this long and boring read, you are probably asking “How is any of this relevant to white American conservatives today?” Simply put, the US Constitution is but a veneer for the far-right political beliefs and trends for these cultural living fossils. Though the US Constitution has no mention of “Christian nation”, such was mentioned in the Confederate constitution. To the most patriotic and ultranationalistic white Americans, even those enlisted in the military, their stated interpretation of the US Constitution is, in reality, a reading of the Confederate constitution. The Lost Cause myth that makes up Confederate apologetics is based on the rift between the leaders and instigators of the Civil War, who had readily conceded defeat, and the people who fought, who despite not necessarily believing in slavery, were more than willing to fight on behalf of slave-owners in order to preserve all and any aspects of what they considered to be “Southern culture”.

Even before the Civil War, there was already a figure in North American politics who openly despised democracy and started the trend to dismantle it within the new nation: John C. Calhoun. Calhoun wanted a “Republic without Democracy” with rigid social hierarchies and suffrage allowed only to those with property (slaves especially). Although the United States was known to Europe as a place where ordinary men could have a say in their government and choose representatives via elections, and this was openly celebrated and promoted by the government for over a century, there was already an embedded and extremely authoritarian faction within the government itself that with its own grandiose delusions of recreating Greco-Roman oligarchy and slavery fused with medieval European nobility and castes.

The 20th Century saw the advent of thinkers and ideologues who would further expand on reactionary “constitutionalism” and allow white supremacist patriots to perform even more mental gymnastics to reinforce their self-righteousness. Among these was Cleon Skousen, an infamous crank within the Church of Latter-Day Saints who was among the first to propagate the “New World Order” conspiracy theory. Though the LDS Church had already worked in the legends of the Founding Fathers and American government into their own religion, Skousen took this to grandiose and delusional lengths by claiming that the US Constitution was based off Mosaic Law and the Founding Fathers were, in fact, prophets sent by God. Though the LDS Church was forced to denounce Skousen as the lunatic that he was, his manifesto, the “Thousand-Year Leap”, remains in vogue in circles of ultraconservative Mormons and even other Christians.

The advent of the Cold War saw the emergence of the John Birch Society, Cardinal Mindszenty Society, Mises Society, and other reactionary ultraconservative organizations who would carry on John Calhoun’s legacy to interpret the US Constitution as an infallible covenant mandating specific “traditions” and very narrowly-defined “rights” that cannot ever be mitigated or extended. There are even far-right anarchists who believe this, as for them, the US Constitution is an “anti-government” covenant and not something that describes how to govern. 20th Century libertarians took things much further and propagated the idea of the gold standard as sacred and the only constitutional way to run an economy.

This toxic slew of ideologies and worldviews permeates the thoughts of Teabaggers, the alt-right, and many thousands of ordinary white Americans to this day, with some extensive support from even some ultraconservative minority cranks. To them, Rhodesia and South Africa are examples of what will happen if the whites are not brutal enough in suppressing “them uppidy colurd foke” and not respectful enough of the Constitution. The Constitutional is eternal and only enlightened white men have a claim to knowing what it really means. For them, the Red States are already their Boer Republics and Blue States are lands where fellow white conservatives are being oppressed and should be liberated.

Trump may very well succeed in granting their wishes to “southernize” the whole country, although not without a gruesome amount of bloodshed. Our Constitution is useless in guiding us anymore as it ceases to be relevant to what our government or the respective demographics desire (although black Americans have consistently and admirably asserted their rights through the principles of the post-Civil War Constitution this entire time without any gratitude), though to white rural America more than anyone else. They want to start over from 1776 and create their own colonial “constitutional” paradise either devoid of, or depending on the enslavement of, non-whites. “Colonialism”, “fascism”, “white supremacy”…call it what you will, but the conservative desire to create a male-dominated, Christian-only, white-only, Anglo-American Disneyland will never go away and it must be confronted and defeated at all costs.