A recent visit to St. Augustine, a stronghold of the good old days, made me ponder the Amerikaner. Amerikaners, also known as Core Americans, Traditional Americans, or Non-Hyphenated Americans, are the self-explanatory component of the American demos. In negative terms, these are Americans not belonging to the corrosive elites and their aspiring imitators, but also not to the twerking underclasses.

In positive terms, these are Americans mostly of European origins, mostly with a multi-generational presence in the country, and mostly with an existence independent of the Great Prestige Hierarchies of collegiate placement, corporate careers, and class-reinforcing ideologies such as BLM and LGBTQIA+.

Almost all Americans used to be Amerikaners. Post-civil war and during the great integration under Teddy Roosevelt and later on in the 1950s, the “Leave it to Beaver” American had reigned supreme. Even if you weren’t such an American yourself, just as many HR ladies today are not really members of the elites they admire, everybody would aspire to be one. Hence, the Amerikaner was both the spirit of America and its absolute demographic majority.

But there has always been the anti-Amerikaner as well. As Angelo Codevilla, and Michael Anton explain, an American elite hostile to the folkways of the demos is at least as old as the Progressive Movement of the late 19th century and early 20th century. That hostile elite’s creed was something we could easily identify today: core Americans are too stupid, silly, commercially driven, and religious to be taken seriously or to be relied upon in government. Hence various experts are required to fill the gap between America’s elected institutions, voted into existence by rubes and imbeciles, and the management of the country.

Such ideas, under Wilson and then more so under JFK, gave birth to our now omnipresent landscape of three-lettered agencies regulating the nation’s life through the directorship of permanent “experts.”

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