In the 19th century, individualism resulted in assimilation rather than maintaining impermeable boundaries with other Whites.
By Kevin MacDonald
Eric P. Kaufmann’s The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America presents the case that Anglo-America committed what one might call “suicide by idea”: White, Anglo-Saxon Protestants were motivated to give up ethnic hegemony by their attachment to Enlightenment ideals of individualism and liberty. Anglo-Americans simply followed these ideals of the Enlightenment to their logical conclusion. The result: immigration was opened up to all peoples of the world, multiculturalism became the cultural ideal, and WASPS willingly allowed themselves to be displaced from their preeminent position among the elites of business, media, politics, and the academic world.
Kaufmann, who is Reader in Politics and Sociology at London University’s Birkbeck College, explicitly rejects the proposal that the decline of Anglo-America occurred as a result of an attack by some external force. His concept is therefore a direct contrast to my view, argued at length in my book The Culture of Critique, that the rise of Jews to elite status in the United States and the influence of particular Jewish intellectual and political movements, especially the push for mass and indiscriminate immigration, were key contributions–necessary conditions–to the demise of WASP America. [snip]
As Kaufman notes, it was not very long ago that America strongly asserted that it was a nation of Northwestern Europeans — and intended to stay that way. The 1924 Johnson-Reed Act was carefully designed to preserve the ethnic status quo as of 1890, thereby ensuring the dominance of Anglo-Americans. In 1952, the McCarran-Walter Act reiterated the preference for Northwestern Europe and was passed over President Truman’s veto.
But only a decade later, in the 1960s, White America began the process of ethnic and cultural suicide: