Erasing America: Losing Our Future by Destroying Our Past

In the 1996 alien-invasion movie Independence Day, cities around the country, including Los Angeles, New York City, and Washington, DC, are destroyed by a surprise attack. A short time later, the president and the secretary of defense learn that Chicago, Atlanta, and Philadelphia were also struck. Urging retaliation, the secretary of defense exclaims, “If we don’t strike soon, there may not be much of an America left to defend!”

This scene came to mind while reading James S. Robbins’ book Erasing America: Losing Our Future by Destroying Our Past. In the book, published by Regnery in 2018, Dr. Robbins comes remarkably close to embracing racial reality, though he ultimately retreats to the same race-blind platitudes and talking points that define the mainstream conservative movement. He chronicles the left’s systematic destruction of American heritage and the conservative movement’s failure to resist. However, he also shies away from seeing the centrality of demographics to this process, even though leftists themselves (including Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center) track Americans’ dispossession in numerical terms.

In one of the book’s more interesting chapters, “Killing the Dead White Men,” Dr. Robbins notes that progressives have openly called for destroying both Mount Rushmore and the Confederate engraving of Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Jefferson Davis on Stone Mountain in Georgia. He compares such calls to the Taliban’s destruction of two massive sixth-century Buddhist statues in Afghanistan in 2001. The Taliban rendered these priceless artifacts into dust because they were “un-Islamic and blasphemous,” and Dr. Robbins argues that the Left operates in a similarly religious manner in America, destroying anything that does not fit into the progressive version of history. The city of Columbus, Ohio, spent $95 million to celebrate the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s voyage to the New World in 1992; in 2018, the city stopped observing the holiday altogether. The University of Notre Dame recently decided to cover up 12 murals by Luigi Gregori from the early 1880s because they depict Columbus in a heroic manner, but Brian Allen of National Review assured readers this was “not a hill to die on.” One retreat at a time, white America’s past is erased with the acquiescence of Conservatism, Inc.

The root of this process is white Americans’ demographic dispossession. Dr. Robbins barely mentions America’s sweeping demographic change. Whites were 88.5 percent of the US population in 1960; today, non-whites call for tearing down statues of white men and renaming cities in a country on the brink of majority non-white status.

Dr. Robbins does at least recognize that mass immigration is empowering the Left. In the chapter “Erasing the Border,” he observes that Democrats have no real interest in stopping illegal immigration:

[T]he objective is to quickly transform illegal immigrants into voters, since foreign-born voters give 80 percent of their votes to Democrats. It’s a reasonable strategy and it works. In Virginia, once reliably conservative, one in nine voters is now foreign-born, and Republican influence is evaporating. The ‘Turn Texas Blue’ movement is one of the more conspicuous Democratic drives to weaponize immigrant votes. To this end, Democratic politicians are doing everything in their power to protect undocumented aliens, from declaring sanctuary cities to impeding federal enforcement of immigration law. (p. 217)

This process is what Peter Brimelow (borrowing from Bertolt Brecht) calls “electing a new people.” The passage above shows that Dr. Robbins clearly understands this, but he doesn’t follow through on the consequences. This passage is the only time he even hints at what will happen once non-whites constitute the majority. This is typical of the Beltway Right. Even out of cynical self-interest, demographics should be urgently discussed within Conservatism, Inc., because “the movement” relies on elderly whites to keep sending the donations that fund its “nonprofit” foundations. Instead, the most important issue of the age goes all but unmentioned.

Today, most whites fear being called a “racist” more than they do losing their past and, inevitably, their future. Dr. Robbins chronicles the remarkably swift “nationwide purge of memorials to the Confederacy” that followed the disastrous 2017 Charlottesville “Unite the Right” rally:

Baltimore removed four Confederate monuments under the cover of night days after the incident. Over the next two weeks, memorials were removed from St. Petersburg to San Diego, from Brooklyn to Montana. Democratic congressmen introduced the No Federal Funding for Confederate Symbols bill to rename ten military installations named for Confederate generals, including Forts Benning, Bragg, Polk, and Hood.

The mayor of Birmingham, Alabama, ordered his town’s Confederate Soldiers and Sailors monument boarded up. In Memphis, the city council had already voted in 2015 to remove from city parks statues of Confederate President Jefferson Davis and rebel general and later Ku Klux Klan leader Nathan Bedford Forrest. The Tennessee Historical Commission had blocked their removal under the Tennessee Heritage Protection Act, which covers historical monuments on public property. But after the Charlottesville incident, Memphis sold the parks, valued at $4 million, for two thousand dollars to the nonprofit Memphis Greenspace, Inc., and the statues quickly came down.” (pp. 13-14)

Many of the Confederate monuments were built at a time when cities such as Baltimore were more than 80 percent white. Today, Baltimore is close to 70 percent black. The city has no constituency to fight for the memorials. With a black mayor and majority-black city council, these monuments stood no chance. The same scenario is playing out in Memphis and Birmingham.

However, though Dr. Robbins seems to recognize that demographics at least matter, he embraces defeat rather than risk accusations of racism. Dr. Robbins concludes the book with the saccharine sentence, “America cannot be erased so long as it lives in the hearts of its people.” Of course, it is the American people themselves who are being replaced, and when they are finally dispossessed, America itself won’t even be a memory. Dr. Robbins doesn’t even broach the idea of resisting the demographic changes that are extirpating the heritage he allegedly wants to defend.

Dr. Robbins’s book shows that the greatest threat to white America’s past, present, and future isn’t the attack on our monuments. It’s the white reliance on conservatives and the Beltway Right to organize resistance. Though Dr. Robbins recognizes the symptoms of the disease, he shies away from the main cause and thus doesn’t know the cure. The Beltway Right would rather lose graciously than touch racial issues. Conservatives within Conservatism, Inc. had decades to conserve America. In 2019, there isn’t much of an America left to defend.

Erasing America is further proof that white identitarians must build our own institutions. Otherwise, the war on our past will continue. If we lose that, we will also lose our future.