Ameriphobes

Kit Brewer writes at VDARE:

I’d like to introduce a new word into the American conversation: ”Ameriphobe.”

I would define “Ameriphobe” as a person who would act in the best interests of foreigners at the expense of his fellow Americans. Ameriphobes can be conservative or liberal, Republican or Democrat.

I introduce this word to counteract the word “xenophobe” which the multiculturalists use so effectively against us. The “phobe” or “phobic” at the end brands us as not just wrong, but unreasonable to the point of being psychotic. Never mind the the rational arguments of avoiding economic, environmental and cultural ruin, the term “xenophobe” makes us seem clinically deviant. It’s easy to dismiss the arguments of a clinically deviant person.

We’ve been using the word “traitor” to counterattack, but I think the term “Ameriphobe” would cause some people (at least the literate) to pause and think about the word’s meaning and cast the multiculturalists, not patriots, as being the clinically ill deviants that should be locked up after the coming cultural revolution.

An example of what Steve Sailer calls liberals' leapfrogging loyalty. Conservatives naturally put kin and community first (the Chinese love being Chinese, the French being French, whites being white, etc.), loving their neighbors (charity begins at home); liberals profess a Christian-sounding universality loving humanity in the abstract while hating their own people as hopelessly backward, disguised as Christian humility about your own country. It's really a form of showing off: "See how learned and cosmopolitan I am, not like you flag-waving prole trash" (such as Trump's base). "I thank thee, O Lord, that I am not as other men..." (Cf. "The Third World is our playground/zoo." Why lefties used to pillage non-Western cultures' trappings before 180ing about "cultural appropriation" to try to boss us around yet again. Decent people such as pre-Sixties "squares" weren't rude about that to begin with.) There are variations: neoconservatives are patriotic leftists, Jewish liberals (good Cold Warriors who rightly hated the Sixties) who want to spread that liberalism around the world like a gospel (changing from awaiting a messiah to ushering in a messianic age); "nation-building." Also, for our elite there really are no more countries; they serve themselves, not you or me either individually or collectively.

And yes, truth being objective, some cultures and thus countries are better. Other cultures have their treasures we can learn from, but Western civilization is the greatest.

Easter 1964 ;)

'64 because that's what's on Miss Edsel's registration sticker ('58 plate that really is registered in Pennsylvania). I'm holding my Maryknoll Latin/English hand missal.

Mass: Resurrexi, et adhuc tecum sum, alleluia.

The church's two Easters

Seeing "Christ is risen!" "Indeed he is risen!" online now, I understand the bind American Eastern Catholics are in; the push and pull of being in sync with most Christians vs. with most other Eastern Christians, part of the unnecessary pain of schism. Before the '50s, all Eastern Catholics used the traditional Eastern dates. Ruthenians in America changed about 10 years before Vatican II. Most born Greek Catholics I've known don't give it a second thought; they love mother church and do what she says. (Remembering the 70th anniversary of the pseudo-council of L'viv with which the Soviets outlawed the Ukrainian Catholic Church; ordered to leave the church, all of Eastern Europe's Greek Catholic bishops and many of the priests and laity refused. With the Prague Spring in 1968, almost all of eastern Slovakia returned to the church. The Ukrainian Catholic Church in its homeland resurfaced from the underground with the collapse of the USSR.) The only people who fret are the converts understandably in love with the Byzantine Rite (its beauty being the result of the Roman Empire becoming entirely Catholic). The calendar is not de fide (also, a big minority of Orthodox use the Gregorian calendar for fixed-date feasts such as Christmas) so the church says two Easters and two fixed-date calendars are fine! But the only reason for the different Orthodox date for Easter is the same reason England didn't adopt the Gregorian calendar at first: spite Rome! They use the old, increasingly inaccurate Julian charts to get their Easter date while the rest of Christendom uses accurate astronomy. In person I use those greetings after the Orthodox date, in Slavonic, which I somewhat know ("Христосъ воскресе!" "Воистинну воскресе!"), with a parishioner who grew up Ukrainian Catholic (another was born Greek Orthodox but culturally is entirely Roman Rite), and in Greek ("Χριστός ἀνέστη!") with the Greek immigrants in my town who make the best spaghetti sauce here, Christos and his crew; also the good folks at the Olympic Diner in Clifton Heights and the Olympic Flame boardwalk diner in Wildwood if I'm there in the spring (classic-car show). Nothing beats a whole diner kitchen yelling back "Ἀληθῶς ἀνέστη!" My little part in someday bringing these often maligned estranged Catholics home.

Paleo-Democrats and Republicans

I like Jim Webb and understand he'd vote for Trump, not Hillary Clinton. Why on earth is he a Democrat?

Webb was a Republican who switched sides in protest of the Iraq War.

In his good book Born Fighting which is about the folkways and political history of the American Scots-Irish, he talks about the tectonic shift in voting habits from Democrat to Republican between 1964 and 1980.

It's clear he is a natural Blue Dog who can't figure out which party to be in since the Yankees took over the Democrats. I.e., a Paleo-Democrat, part of the same (sometimes uneasy) Democrat coalition my northern, ghetto-dwelling Irish Catholic grandparents were part of.

Right; most Americans don't remember that the Democrats and Republicans weren't always America's liberal and conservative parties, our Labour and Tories, respectively. Some remember that Southern Democrats like Webb were socially conservative before the Sixties. And a '50s liberal isn't the same as a Sixties and post-Sixties one. Blue Dogs, Reagan Democrats, and Philly Rizzocrats (when the great man died I went to the viewing and shook hands with his brother and son) were SOCIAL conservatives, such as religious Catholics before Vatican II, and ECONOMICALLY slightly left-wing (the story of immigrants and unions, built on Catholic communitarianism), patriotic, grateful that this country was a great new home, and very anti-Communist. The kind of person the Sixties turned on with a vengeance, creating the Archie Bunker character to make fun of him. (Actually Archie sounds like a worldly-wise folk hero; the show's hippiefied young people sound naive and dated.) Think of a civic-minded guy like Jack Webb (a Catholic) and his cop character. Also, Vietnam was actually an anti-Communist cause for establishment liberals.

Fulton Sheen never voted Republican.

A lot of Catholics today would have a hard time letting that thought sink in.

A lot of religious Catholics; sure. Since the Sixties the GOP's been the default of religious Americans.

Also, the Jews who invented Archie Bunker got him all wrong.

"Mister, we could use a man like Herbert Hoover again..."

What bullshit. An Al Smith Democrat never voted for Hoover.

Joke from America's golden era last century:

"I heard that Joe's become a Republican!"
"Impossible! I saw him at Mass last Sunday."

There were always exceptions. In Hollywood, Pat O'Brien, for example. Because of Irish hegemony of the Northern Democrats, there were Italian GOP enclaves, and my Pennsylvania county, Delaware, has an Irish GOP tradition.

You're dead right about Norman Lear and Archie Bunker. He is amusingly tone-deaf about his gentile targets. For example, making the blue-collar, Queens-accented Bunkers Episcopalians.

Before the Sixties, the Republicans were a weird mix mostly of the social opposite of the paleo-Democrats: admirably pro-market (laissez-faire) and pro-liberty (strictly constructionist about the Constitution) but socially and religiously LIBERAL rich WASPs (the Bushes, the Romneys), the bosses who provoked the Catholic workers to unionize and go on strike and generally looked down on the ethnics, maybe being nice enough to be patronizing.

Being a Republican was not unusual among German Catholics, who resented Irish Catholic mores and folkways, and who got on better with their fellow German Lutherans who they sang and drank beers with at the Maennerchor.

The Rodhams were Republicans.

What Republicans today call RINOs... those are the traditional Republicans.

Right; don't forget the Germans, a livelier strain of American Catholicism than the Irish, and the Lutherans are our close cousins.

Yeah but I understand that the elder Rodhams weren't phonies; real conservatives. They weren't rich. The Sixties flipped Hillary. That this cultural movement won her fervent conversion is enough reason for me not to want her to run the country.

I'm afraid I don't even know what the word "conservative" means.

Given the fluidity of politics I guess we do need a definition. Conserving as much of the past as possible, because it's that way for a good reason and only preserving the best, as Edmund Burke believed?

Everyone who cares about his family and his local community does his best to conserve their folkways, and balance what he was taught against the problems of his time.

I come from Taft Republicans (my dad) and Irish Democrats (my mom).

So I conserve both.

Robert Taft and Barry Goldwater should have been president. My Catholic-turned-Episcopal dad (he married a WASP but came back to the church two years before he passed away) was a civilian Cold Warrior in aerospace and a Goldwater man. The GOP stole the nomination from Taft, plain and simple, drafting Ike (a shadowy New World Order pick?), and Goldwater of course was the victim of the Kennedy publicity machine supercharged by President Kennedy's "martyrdom," JFK being good-looking after his cortisone treatment and thus a media darling. Most American Catholics (but not Cardinal Spellman) had the mistaken notion that Jack and his family were "one of them," which the Kennedys exploited well, also being careful to distance themselves from the church enough to get Protestant votes.

Appreciating Pugin

From Watts & Co.:

Earlier this week [March 1] was A.W.N. Pugin's birthday, and so a Requiem Mass was celebrated for him at the altar in the Pugin family chantry chapel at the church he built: St. Augustine's, Ramsgate.

Pugin's medievalism (which I mean as a compliment) is a high-church option most Catholics don't know about, from the Gothic Revival in England, a reaction against the Industrial Revolution and thus arguably part of Romanticism. The same cause started Anglo-Catholicism (also a continuation of old high churchmanship; at its best a Romantic conservatism), which met up with this revival a little later. This chantry altar reminds me of the Lady Chapel of a formative place for me, Good Shepherd, Rosemont. Finding Contrasts at a library at the same time was educational too. Pugin was Catholic, as only made sense, but you're more likely to find this style with the Anglicans such as Watts. (Confusing for people new to this.) He was unappreciated by Catholics as many traditionalists are now, and arguably still is. His way was a compromise: headed where the later Sarumophile Anglicans wanted to go but of course accommodating the Tridentine use normative in the Roman Rite in his day. As I like to say, the church isn't tied down to one culture (Pugin's idealizing the Middle Ages threatens to err from that), but Pugin had a point about Renaissance through "Enlightenment" Catholics being too attached to pagan Greece and Rome, whether baroque and rococo (which run the risk of being sexualized or just tacky) or, at the other extreme, the Georgian and Greek Revival looks (which can be cold) the rationalists such as many Anglicans liked before the neo-Gothic fad, and yes, there were Catholics like that then. (Bare churches reflected the Anglican framers' Reformed faith; medieval English churches were colorful inside.) Anyway, rest in peace, good and faithful servant.

N.B. It isn't Pugin's tomb. He is interred in the vault beneath.