Murray Rothbard is also cited in the piece, so he has apparently been grinding the same axe previously. But I simply wanted to know why this theme has suddenly become so all-important and has been written on so extensively on a few blogs.
Also apparently a source for this idea is Colin Woodward, with his recent book 'American Nations'.
As I said before in another blog entry, I am still baffled by how 'Yankees', in the currently trendy sense of New England utopian radicals, are still exerting some kind of hypnotic influence on the people who now inhabit what was formerly Yankee territory. Apparently the present residents of New England, though majority non-Anglo Saxon and non-Protestant, are possessed by the spirits of the departed Yankee Puritans. Maybe there was some kind of voodoo witchcraft going on in old Salem after all, since the ghosts of those Puritans are still casting spells on people.
Who could have guessed that the old-line Yankees, who have long since spread out across the country, or been absorbed by the Ellis Island wave of immigrants to the Northeast, would still be exerting such an influence in the 21st century?
Could it not be that the later waves of European immigrants exerted considerable influence themselves, and that their influence was greater than is now being admitted? Remember the events that were taking place in Europe in the mid-1800s; many of the immigrants of that era and later brought considerable utopian/revolutionary ideas, and yet somehow they are absolved of wielding any influence on the progressive/utopian ideas that flourished in the Northeast and the Northern states generally.
It makes more sense to me to look for influence by living people, rather than trying to blame the ghosts of Puritan Yankees, or to attribute to their descendants some kind of genetic predisposition to wild utopian ideas. I believe in genetics to a great extent, but I don't believe people become utopian fanatics by heredity.
But again, the label 'Puritan' or 'Yankee' has been applied so carelessly in these debates that it isn't clear just who is being discussed. The original Yankee Puritan Anglo-Saxons have been scattered across this country. They no longer dominate the Northeast. I've cited statistics on demographics, and I am not going to keep repeating those stats; they can easily be looked up by doubters.
And those 'Yankees' who did not go West in the 19th century remained to intermarry with the later waves of immigrants and hence to lose their identity. I have New England-born distant cousins with French-Canadian, Irish, and Italian surnames, though they share a few English Puritan ancestors with me.
Those who wish to blame the Anglo-Saxon Puritans and their descendants for all of our current ills are fighting against ghosts; there is no 'there' there.Those descendants who have not been melted down in the melting pot wield no special political power; there is no cabal of 'Boston Brahmins' who are controlling the world behind the scenes. The Kennedys, the John Kerry Ellis Islander types, those are the 'elites' of Massachusetts now. The Bushes? They are a mixed-European family who have Hispanicized themselves. There are no WASP elites, though it seems people really, really want there to be. You know the old saying that if so-and-so did not exist, they would have to be invented? Well, the Boston Brahmin/New England Yankee/Puritan/WASP elites are more or less extinct for all intents and purposes, but why rob people of a favorite whipping boy by pointing that out?
I am sure the old WASP Puritans will continue to be exhumed from their figurative graves for a posthumous 'execution', as arch-Puritan villain Oliver Cromwell was.
On 30th January, 1661, the twelfth anniversary of the execution of Charles I, the body of Oliver Cromwell was exhumed from Westminster and posthumously executed. His corpse was hanged in chains at Tyburn. The body was eventually thrown into a pit, while Cromwell's severed head was exhibited on a pole outside Westminster Abbey until 1685.''
I could declare the 'Puritan Yankee WASP' extinct as an identifiable group, but no doubt they will be given the Cromwell treatment again and again; it's so satisfying to beat up on a scapegoat who is no longer alive to object.
