Jared Taylor

The great South Carolina classicist and Confederate soldier Basil L. Gildersleeve once joked that the war was fought over a point of grammar: “ ‘United States are,’ said one, ‘United States is,’ said another.” The war did not settle the question, however, and as late as 1909, Ambrose Bierce was still defending the use of “the United States are.” As he put it, “Grammar has not a speaking acquaintance with politics, and patriotic pride is not schoolmaster to syntax.” I wait in vain for neo-Confederates to revive this charming usage.

There is a contemporary battle over language that again pits a political interest against the rules of grammar. In this case, the political interest is feminism which, in these emasculated times, has something like the force of Union sentiment in 1863, so the rules of grammar have crumpled like the Confederates at the Battle of Lookout Mountain.

Until perhaps the 1970s, civilized English-speakers said things like “everyone should try his best.” No one doubted that “his” included both men and women -- no one except feminists, that is, who insisted they felt left out. They beefed in their shrill, humorless way, and for a while, there was a clumsy concession to both grammar and politics, in which people said “everyone should do his or her best.” A few people still try to please both camps this way, but the vast majority has abandoned principle, and hardly anyone now winces at such barbarisms as: “A leader must inspire their followers.” “If you have a friend, tell them to come.” “No one did their homework.” And why not something like, “My good friend can help themself to my clothes if they like.”

On August 3, the Supreme Court of the state of California handed down a decision that was widely welcomed by conservatives. In Coral Construction v San Francisco the court found that California’s anti-affirmative-action Proposition 209 was constitutional. Passed at the time of the general election in 1996, ballot initiative 209 amended the state constitution to include a ban on race or sex preferences in "public employment, public education, or public contracting."

The ruling sailed through with a comfortable 6-1 majority, but the lone dissent—by Hispanic justice Carlos Moreno—was unsettling. He wrote that Prop 209 was unconstitutional because it established "a steep hurdle" for non-whites seeking race preferences.

This sounded like special pleading of the most outrageous kind. Why shouldn’t non-whites face "a steep hurdle" if they want to discriminate against whites?

In fact, however, Justice Moreno’s dissent [PDF, P. 35] is a carefully reasoned argument that may actually be right—given the peculiar anti-white premises that are increasingly pervasive in American racial jurisprudence.

This is the first in a series of articles on the question, raised most publicly by Patrick Buchanan, whether the Tea Party movement nurtures white consciousness and unity and will become the political basis for whites as a people.

Unlike Pat Buchanan, I do not think the Tea Party movement marks the emergence of a new, white ethnonationalism. At the end of his recent article on the subject, Buchanan himself backs away from this prediction, conceding that the conflict that gave rise to the movement “is not so much racial as it is cultural, political and tribal.” The politicians Tea Partiers admire most are Sarah Palin, who has the racial consciousness of a fried egg, and Ron Paul, who flirted with heterodoxy years ago, but now claims to have put all that behind him.

The racial significance of attending a Tea Party is not much different from going to the opera or a Renaissance festival: Virtually everyone there is white, and most like it that way but would never admit it -- not even to themselves. Tea parties, just like opera companies, fret over their whiteness and claim to want to cure it.