The United States has two founding peoples. One is the people of English-Scots-Welsh-Irish descent, also found in many parts of the world, and predominating in the United Kingdom, the Irish Republic, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. The other is the English-speaking people of West African slave descent, predominating in the Commonwealth countries of the Caribbean.
These two peoples are bound to each other by a vast common heritage, including the English language and endless blood ties, and fundamentally Christian. But one people has provided every President of the United States (even the odd Dutch or German name having been borne by someone overwhelmingly of such descent), while the other has provided none, and is not proposing to this year.
So, which English-Scots-Welsh-Irish candidate will name, at this stage and before Super Tuesday, a West African slave-descended running mate and heir apparent? One hopes that it will be one or both of the candidates best placed to re-create the economically populist, morally and socially conservative, geopolitically realist coalition of Americans black and white, English-speaking and Christian, across that country’s cities, suburbs and countryside: Mike Huckabee and John Edwards.
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One thing about US Presidents - all except JFK have been Protestant, despite the large Catholic populations in the country i.e Latins, Irish and Italians for a start.
ReplyDeleteIt's at least as much about class as about ethnicity.
ReplyDeleteBut Americans insist that they have no class system, despite having a saying among themselves that a Methodist is Baptist with shoes, a Presbyterian is a Methodist with a degree, and an Episcopalian is a Presbyterian with an investment portfolio. All WASPS, of course.
Friends of mine who have ministered both initially in the Church of England and then in the American Episcopal Church say that they were aghast at the absence of even the slightest social mix in the latter context.
Yet that church, never very large and now under one per cent of the population, has produced more Presidents than everybody else put together. Those investment portfolios clearly go a very long way indeed.