Happy seventh day of Christmastide. This is by way of a postscript to yesterday's Clubland Q&A, which dealt mainly with issues of nationhood and identity. It was somewhat surprising, and a little dispiriting to me, the number of counter-arguments that - even at the website of a far-right madman - framed what is now an existential crisis for the entire west in sentimentalist and pseudo-mystical terms, if not explicitly left-wing ones - such as "nation of immigrants". As to the broader arguments about America as a "proposition nation", here is one response to Vivek Ramaswamy:
Everyone claiming America is a creedal nation should move to Liberia - a country with a Constitution broader and more protective of civil rights than our own. Best of luck. See you. 👋
— Cernovich (@Cernovich) December 23, 2025
Very true. And not just because, two or three Liberian "peaceful transfers of power" back, rebel warlord General Butt Naked (his nom de guerre) is said to have made outgoing president Samuel Doe eat his own ears, while the general himself chowed down on the late Mr Doe's genitalia in accordance with the widely held belief that that is how the old leader's powers are transferred to the new guy. Granted one would live in dread of being served the membrum virile of such legendary strongmen as Joe Biden, Rishi Sunak, Justin Trudeau or Brigitte Macron at one's inaugural lunch, it does underline the basic point that, while the American and Liberian constitutions might be similar, the people are not. I have made a repeated observation with regard to the 1848 Nova Scotia constitution, which Westminster has exported with minimal variations to over sixty countries in every corner of the earth: it has worked more or less where one would expect it to work, and likewise it has flopped where one would expect it to.
It's the people.
I remember enough of my long-ago classics classes to know that the ancient Greek (and, indeed, current Greek) word for nation is έθνος - ethnos. Because for thousands of years it was taken as read that a state is synonymous with its ethnicity. God agrees: if you listened to our Christmas Eve Lessons and Carols, you will have heard one of multiple Biblical references to "My people Israel". The people are the state; the state is the people. So, if you change the people, you make changes to the state inevitable. Once upon a time everyone used to understand that. And then Vivek Ramaswamy came along to thrill the Turning Point USA crowd with his "propositional nation" codswallop.
What has happened to the west since 1950?
a) abroad, America has exported its own "nation of immigrants" bollocks to the rest of the west;
b) at home, America has expanded the "nation of immigrants" bollocks to embrace the entire planet, from MS-13 gangbangers to Sudanese clitoridectomists.
So how's that going?
In the United Kingdom, Anglo-Celts are projected to become a minority in their own islands by 2063;
In New Zealand, the European population (without which the country would not exist) is predicted to fall below fifty per cent by 2048;
In Norway, the capital city, Oslo, will become minority Norwegian by 2040;
In Sweden, today, some forty per cent of residents have a foreign - ie, non-Swedish - background;
In Austria, right now:
In a sign of just how fast the demographic situation is developing in Austria, Vienna has hit a major new milestone, marking the first time that more than half the first-grade population do not understand German.
I did my Austrian demography gags twenty sod-bollocking years ago:
According to the Vienna Institute of Demography, by mid-century a majority of Austrians under 15 will be Muslim. This is a country that not so long ago was 90 percent Catholic. But 'not so long ago' is another country: Salzburg, 1938, singing nuns, Julie Andrews — 'How do you solve a problem like Maria?' Salzburg, 2038: How do you solve a problem like sharia?
But it's not really funny when you get two decades' warning and you still sit back and let it happen. Even if one were to accept the "nation of immigrants" shtick (which I don't), it would be - for very particular historical reasons - as an American exception to the general rule. So you can't make it the rule. Yet some of the oldest nations on earth meekly swallowed the export of the Ramaswamy crapola to their own not-so-magic soil and in doing so bollocksed their own futures in nothing flat. My 2038 gag is pretty much right on the money: that's when today's Viennese first-graders will be entering the voting booths.
How will those famous western "values" be holding up when there are no western peoples around? Chris Minns, the woeful Premier of New South Wales, gave the game away in his reaction to the Bondi Beach massacre. Muslims open fire on ten-year-old girls? Shut up, he explained:
I acknowledge that we don't have the same free speech rules that they have in the United States and I make no apologies for that. We have got a responsibility to knit together our community, that comes from different races and religions.
Or as the Daily Telegraph headline writer summarised it:
Free speech will have to go to preserve multiculturalism
Oh, well. That aside, however, what has America's fifty-year expansion of its "nation of immigrants" bollocks to the entire planet done for life on the home front? Plucked more or less at random from The Daily Mail:
FDA recalls snack foods and supplements across five states over rodent and bird contamination at Minnesota distributor
By 'contamination", they mean urine and faeces in a wide range of products from peanut butter and Pringles via Tylenol and Alka-Seltzer to condoms and tampons. Thank you, Gold Star Distribution of Humboldt Avenue North, Minneapolis. Owner: Bassam Abu Samrah. That sounds more Syrian than Somali, but maybe it's next to the Quality Leering Center.
On twenty-first-century numbers, migrants don't need to assimilate with America, because America is assimilating with them. As George W Bush said, we need immigrants to come here and do the jobs Americans won't do, like putting rat droppings in your condoms. When John Adams said the Constitution was fit only for a "moral" people, that's what he was worried about.
America is the broke-brokey-brokiest nation in history. As I used to say in 2011, it has to pay back fifteen trillion dollars just to get back to having nothing in its pocket. Which nobody in human history has ever done.
But that was the original version of my lame-o gag. A mere fourteen years later, it has to pay back forty sodding trillion just to get back to having nothing in its pocket. So I find it interesting that a third of Somalia's GDP is remittances totalling two billion bucks, mostly from America. That's to say, you - yes, you, Mrs Gladys Scroggins of 47b Maple Street, Dead Moose Junction - work all year to be able to write your cheque to the US Treasury so that the US Treasury can give it to Minnesota's famous child-free daycares so that Somali "carers" can endorse it over to al-Shabaab and other incendiary Mohammedans.
It has been disheartening to discover so many patrons of even this far-right website are still betting the future on the pseudo-mystical mumbo-jumbo of "ideals" and "dreams". As I have argued, absent profound course-correction from which apparently even supposed conservatives shrink, we are now in the last decade-and-a-half of anything remotely recognisable as "the western world". The madness of Ramaswamy has bollocksed the planet and delivered your children's future into the hands of enemy powers, all of whom are more or less conventional (to use the preferred if tautological formulation) ethno-states. As opposed to the west, which are becoming by design post-ethno states, which can only ever be a brief interregnum. And, if the entirety of western civilisation slides off the cliff on America's watch, that's all anybody's going to remember about it.
~Thank you to all those new members of The Mark Steyn Club in this our ninth year, and thank you to those old members who've signed up a chum for a Christmas Gift Certificate or a Steyn Club Gift Membership. Steyn Clubbers span the globe, from London, Ontario to London, England to London, Kiribati. We hope to welcome many more new members in the years ahead.
