The Elder Race and the English-Speaking Heat

As I write this from Dublin, waiting to board my connecting flight—I’d nearly missed it in Newark, too absorbed in writing to hear the gate call—I’m struck by how a Euro sign or EU flag can alter one’s sense of place. Technically, I’m still in the British Isles. But culturally—unmistakably—I’m on the Continent. A sensation I never quite feel in England.

It’s a strange feeling, this flicker of European belonging. In the early millennium, I was a passionate Brexiteer—young, angry, seeking change. By the time of the referendum, a decade later, I found myself morally conflicted. I knew the EU was not a good fit but as a Bahá’í, I knew I could never advocate for disunity, of any sort. I abstained. Ironically, Commonwealth citizens could vote, but EU nationals couldn’t—a bit of imperial gatekeeping that deeply irritated my liberal British-Irish friend. (“Why can Indians vote, but not the French?” he asked.)

Today, standing in Europe, I feel the contrast sharply. The Continent is genteel, even decadent, locked into postwar consensus. Meanwhile, the English-speaking world feels like it’s on fire—politically, culturally, psychologically. It’s not just the UK or the US. India, too, belongs to this hot zone of rhetoric and reinvention. Pakistan, by contrast, while elite-driven in English, remains emotionally and socially an Urdu republic.

This heat makes sense. These are frontier civilizations shaped historically by Protestant-Catholic-Puritan clashes, settler anxiety, and the demands of perpetual modernity. By contrast, continental Europe—however unstable electorally—feels post-heroic. Fatigued but calm.

On the flight, I read an article, kindly shared by sbarrkum, on Harvard and the New England ethos. It reminded me how even today, the long-declining WASP caste—what I call the “elder race”—still sets the tone for assimilation. Despite demographic collapse and political eclipse, their cultural grammar remains dominant. Their decline is real, but their afterlife is powerful. Razib has a fantastic article on this that I will link to eventually.

And in the US, assimilation always follows power. Immigrants—Jewish, Irish, Italian, Latino, Asian—are digested into whatever remains of this elite grammar. Even in majority-minority Newark, loud with otherness, you feel the gravitational pull of a decayed patriciate etched into its cityscape—architecture as frozen hierarchy, a silent grammar of power shaped by pale, male hands. Every white ethnic is now a kind of WASP. Harvard—once closed to Jews—is now shaped by them. Trump attacking it for antisemitism is rich with irony.

It raises a broader point: elder races rarely survive demographically. Power saps fertility. But they endure through catalyzation. They seed cultures others adopt. The paradox is this: what power cannot reproduce biologically, it sustains through influence, imitation, and institutional design.

Compare this to America’s artificial geography. States, with a few exceptions like Texas or Virginia, lack deep civilizational memory. The straight lines of US states speak to imperial abstraction, not lived regionalism. And that’s why independence movements thrive in places like Scotland or Catalonia but remain impossible in, say, Ohio.

Still, America remains a contest of cultural forms. The genius of African-American and Indigenous resistance lies in their refusal to be assimilated entirely. They offer alternative aesthetics, values, and histories. They complicate the elder race’s digestion machine.

So here’s the provocation: the English-speaking world is hot because it is reacting to the loss of monopoly—not just of capital or empire, but of meaning. Europe is cool because it already surrendered. But in that surrender lies peace.

And maybe that’s why I keep writing these posts. Because something about airports, borders, and in-between spaces triggers reflection. And because maybe, just maybe, Brown Pundits is less a blog than a drifting letter archive—channeling the ghosts of FitzGerald, Gibbon, and the nomads who wrote best on the move.

— X.T.M