"I’m not one of these European right-wingers who wants to blame American exports for everything going wrong in the West today. The export in this case being propositional nationalism, because I don’t even view propositional nationalism as an authentic American tradition. It’s one that was basically invented in the 1960s, at the urging of people like, well, institutions like the ADL, and with people like John F. Kennedy acting as a figurehead. But it’s remarkable as a sort of— it’s remarkable how long this sort of congenital cowardice been afflicting the right, because I’m happy to wage— I mean, Calvin Coolidge, who I believe was a Republican president, who passed the 1924 Immigration Act; he would never in a million years have said that America is a nation of immigrants, or than anyone can be an American, or anything like this. Apart from anything else, he passed the 1924 Immigration Act, with its explicit national quota system, aimed not at making— not at being sort of absolute about according greater importance to certain ethnic groups over others, but it was more just saying “We like America as it is. We’re happy with its present demographic balance, and yearly immigration flows need to reflect that in terms of their ratios.” So it wasn’t even a complete shut door, but it was just, I think, a very pragmatic system. He would never have said that anyone can be an American, or that America is a nation of immigrants. But once JFK starts saying that in the 1960s, and the political left in America runs with that, all of a sudden, by the 1980s you’ve got Ronald Reagan faithfully reproducing these same slogans as if they go back to Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, and other iconic figures in the American founding. So I don’t view it as an authentically American progeny, either. And so if it isn’t authentically American progeny, then it’s definitely not authentically English or British progeny. But yes, people like Farage, they just sort of download that operating system, they run with it; because to do otherwise is believed to lead, by some circuitous route, to the Third Reich and Auschwitz. This is the rough calculation that is made. The rough calculation that is made is that unless you have a kind of impeccably artificial, values-based understanding of national identity, the only possible alternative is a sort of demented bio-mystical, blood-based form of national identity, of a kind that someone like, in my view, Himmler more than Hitler represents, in a pretty grotesque way. That is not logical, but nevertheless, that is where we find ourselves, and I think that partly explains the fact that many, not only the kind of liberal IDW centrist types, but also many self-described right-wingers, they are generally more afraid of experimenting with potential remedies to our problems than they are of the disease itself."
—Harrison Pitt
