Understanding Rockwellian America
Aspen
Sometimes I refer to it as America of the East or as “Atlantic America” but what is this vague America I refer to? To put it simply, this is the America the vast majority of the world knows. The extension of Europe which traces its heritage to the 13 Colonies. The lands east of the 100th Meridian. The America of extreme capitalism, dynamism, multiculturalism, and the general vices of the late Faustian West. The land of White Americans who spend an unhealthy amount of time focusing on black people. The land of the GIs who fought at Normandy. The land of wholesome Americana, jukebox dances and malts, disco, and flappers. One of the once bustling factories rotting away and bizarre racial and enlightenment contradictions. A place where skyscrapers were first born and spread to the entire world. This was the America that Spengler saw when he wrote Decline of the West; of which it was America’s overwhelmingly dominant face. Much is to be said about this place. This America that many hold dear to their hearts is in decline. In fact, the America of the 50s is still very much alive; but the soul of it has decayed to an immense degree leading to ruins. What is this place, and why do I differentiate it from the Aridoamerican Plane?
The legendary Americana artist Norman Rockwell captures this America quite well as well as the cultural and aesthetic traditions of this America and what this America stands for. Thus, I shall refer to this America as Rockwellian despite him being immersed in the culture rather than starting it. In truth, Rockwellianism is the child of George Washington and the Founding Fathers. It also will likely give future historians a sense of what to gauge when they look at the ruins of our current civilization. Rockwellian America can be described as hyper-Faustian, Atlanticist, pan-European, multiculturalist, pluralist, and liberal. It built its institutions originally as a means to govern multiple very culturally distant regions to centralize into a more central state gradually. Its identity is based on a mixture of progressive aestheticism and shallow civic nationalism leading to a slew of seemingly insane inter-ethnic alliances. Think about MAGA and its connection to Hinduism and Judaism for example.
This is the ‘Murica spectacle the world knows the country for. It’s true America started off as a “White” country, but part of the Rockwellian system has always been moving the goalpost to what it means to be white in order to attract more and more immigration. This “Nation of Immigrants” mentality stems directly from this. It also despises anything fundamentally indigenous or indigenized. Normally it used this mentality on the Amerindians during manifest destiny and the attempted forced assimilation of natives, however in the modern era it has been titled on all the much more land-connected Americans. When one sees institutions like the EU and modern Western European governments siding with immigrants against the natives, this is why. As will be mentioned shortly, Europe is now a Rockwellian continent and to be Rockwellian is to despise anything indigenous.
Its Mecca is New York City, with Ellis Island as a sort of sacred bastion to those of Rockwellian America. In a sheer sense of irony, many of the world's NGOs are also placed here. However, the heartland of Rockwellian America is the Boston-Washington Corridor. These Ellis Islanders that come from it lie in a bizarre spot. They refuse to let go of their European Heritage despite leaving Europe behind, and they refuse to be on North American soil. They spend all day talking of their European white Western heritage, unaware of the fact the entire world can see they bear the mark of North America. The Canadians, being champions of Rockwellianism; can hold their Western mask on better than many of these Ellis Island Americans. However, both refuse to let go and embrace the land. Certain groups such as the Angelines are both a spiteful rebellion against and the greatest triumph of Rockwellian logic, creating unsurprisingly a Rockwellian enclave that cannibalizes Aridoamerican culture and spreads it across the earth. One common trait of the Rockwellians is their African worship. While originally held as an immense scorn, today Rockwellians are terminally obsessed with their connections to African Americans (Who at this point warrant a separate ethnic group) despite de facto brutalizing them. This was a long process that started with slavery and ended with civil rights which holds an almost mythological significance, and this doesn’t even reference the music.
In popular perception, Rockwellian America is the older America. It started off as a loose confederation of British colonies formed by different factions of religious minorities which developed a governing structure meant to negotiate with the sheer diversity these cultures possessed at the time. Aspects of this older pre-Rockwellian America were extensions of Europe, however, the Southerners emulated the Caribbean. Contrary to current popular perception. This old post-revolutionary America was supposed to become a separate, specifically post-European civilization based on Masonic Tendencies and importations of the Enlightenment which held with it an instinctual hatred of many of the European social institutions. It, like the Aridoamerican Plane, also took a particular focus on various aspects of cultural indigenization even if there was bad blood with the natives. However, this Old Stock America was extinguished in large parts of the East due to the dominance of mass immigration of later Europeans, specifically Europeans with zero connection to the frontier who came via Ellis Island.
Rockwellian culture is objectively one of the most powerful and widespread cultures in human history, making the Caliphates, the Spanish, and the Romans weep at its sheer scale. Large swathes of the Modern World were built by Rockwellian institutions. All across the earth, buildings are built with the same sense of hyperverticality, and people are liberal ethnopluralism. The EU and modern Pan-Europeanism even among its far-right dissidents are fundamentally Rockwellian structures that are liberal and multicultural; with the central governing body acting as a chief negotiator of cultural regions. Anime is fundamentally a Rockwellian concept as well, being a localized originally bootlegged form of Rockwellian animation. While Rockwellian America has been spread all across the globe, in the Continental United States, it’s in decline. In many ways, places like Europe and Canada are becoming the new champions of Rockwellianism. Its ossification came both from the domination of baby boomers over the general society (Much like what happened in Europe too) and the death of its cultural inertia. Rockwellian America is in fact as old as anywhere in Europe demographically speaking. It’s now effectively trapped in its own 20th-century zeitgeists, clinging on to the recently lost nostalgia of this time. Places like the Midwest, Mid-Atlantic, and New England are effectively fellaheen, lacking vigor or kinetics. In the east, only the south remains to hold any sort of flame, but this was stomped out both by the civil war and 20th-century migrations of people from the former north.
Contrary to Rockwellian myth, America is neither a melting pot nor is it a pan-European Christian nationalist ideal. Not everybody can become an American. Learning English and doing a Roman Salute to the Star Spangled Banner, Neoliberalism, a supposed white Christian race, or the Constitution doesn’t make you American. The East was supposed to carry the torch of a new culture, but dropped it in favor of Atlanticism and finishing the story of the Faustian world. What it means to be American is to be landbound and a synthesis of Europeanism and Indigenization. Both, but simultaneously none and new. The true soul has been ripped apart in the east but lives on stronger in the Aridoamerican plane. In truth, this soul has as much in common with the Aztecs and Anasazi as it does Europe.
Those who reject the indigenous aren’t American and they never will be. When one questions why I hold such immense scorn for Ellis Islanders with much closer genetics to me but not the large number of Mexicans in the southwest, it’s actually quite simple. Mexicans, especially the Northern Ones, are precisely this Euro/Indigenous synthesis and are landbound to the same immediate land. They share a history with us, and we took many of our legitimate organic cultural developments from them. However, they physically carry indigenous blood unlike us Anglos, which contrary to Traditional Latin America is seen as much more enviable. They also are the only other people in the world who are distinctly aware of the Frontier and the Desert expanse. They know the legends of Apache and Comanche vigor as well as any of us.
When people around the world such as Europeans deny their Americanization, that is because they increasingly see us through the Aridoamerican Plane and not through the Rockwellian America that colonized them, due to the pervasiveness. In truth, Aridoamerican culture is legitimately foreign, unique, and cultured to the world. They also increasingly see the Mexicans through Aridoamerica as well. Both Rockwellian America and Aridoamerica stand, but there lies a question. Which one is the true America? Rockwellian America? The America of Alexis de Tocqueville and Mark Twain? The one set by Ellis Island and the European Metropole to finish the story of the Faustian Tradition and whose legacy lies in such? Or is it Aridoamerica, the America that Jean Baudrillard, Mable Dodge Luhan, and Reies Tijerina saw? The one that those few willing to push north and west found. The Frontier. The lands of where the Horizon leads one to. The near-timeless Hispano-Indigenized soul radiates alone in the great desert expanse like the Pueblos, Missions, and isolated towns of their construction. This answer in truth depends on one simple question, what does it mean to be an American? Are we the Rockwellian mold or are we the coming Aridoamerican culture? One cannot know for sure, but one thing is certain; America was born Rockwellian and will die Aridoamerican.
Endnote: MythoAmerica does a legendary job showing the tradition of Rockwellian America and its spiritual decline. Check them out [HERE]
My attempts at Twitter threads, helped give ideas. Hard piece to write because it pleases no one. As an Ellis Islander & Hart-Cellar in the Northeast. It's extremely difficult to not see the Rockwellian America as it is. The new foreign hordes are just like the old ones. Priced in, like the last ones. Rockwellian America grew ontop of the Old America. Like kudzu vines do on trees. It was inevitable due to mass immigration, global trade, and communication increases. The entire world has a bit of it in them even before Rockwellian America then took over that like a Colossus Octopus.
I can't despise what I have been raised in my entire life. But I can be frustrated by it. Rockwellian America was the truest height of human everything, and it's fall will be the lowest low of human everything. I am stuck in the East. At least for now.
How do see aridoamerica as the next high culture formatting itself as the national character for the USA? Would it be like the frontier mythos brought to fulfillment? Sound article as always.