I accept that argument to a degree. Appalachian isn't even descendent from the English, but Scotch-Irish or Ulster Scotts (Ulstermen / People of Ulster in Britain).
Even during the revolution one could argue that each state was effectively it's own ethnicity.
And to be clear, there seems to be much more self-identification by the people of the United States with America rather than with each state. Sure you get proud Texans, but not so many people show Texas loyalty to Wyoming.
The difference from our founding to where we are now is that we have a much more interconnected and homogenous American culture and value set based on the Civic National identity that we cultivated. There is unquestionably and an American Nation (in the same way a person is British), but the issue is whether or not you can call that an ethnos. I tend to lean that the American ethos is still developing (no thanks to mass migration), but there will inevitably be one, and after time it won't make sense to say that an American can really trace his lineage to anywhere back but the US, because of the integration of populations and peoples within it.
It'll take a thousand years for Americans' DNA to get so thoroughly mixed that it's a single ethnicity, and it will only happen if society doesn't collapse back into the stone age. Without modern transportation, a Minnesotan would almost never meet a Texan, and over a thousand years their language would diverge.
It's fascinating to think about how cultural evolution would develop if industrial civilization gradually declined back into an agrarian paradigm.
I say gradually, because if it collapsed overnight the vast majority of humans would be doomed to starve to death. And billions of people starving to death would proceed to utterly ravage the environment consuming anything edible, until there's nothing left.
We still have a very long way to go until peak oil of course, and I'm cautiously optimistic about nuclear, hydroelectric, and geothermal power eventually replacing fossil fuels. But if that fails to happen, and we end up un-developing slowly enough to avert the aforementioned nightmare scenario, the various cultures that develop in the former US are gonna be absolutely wild.
Has it taken a thousand years for the Anglos and Saxons to become English? Has it taken a thousand years for the Boer to stop being Dutch?
This is my issue, modern transportation isn't going anywhere, society isn't going to revert to the stone age (in fact such collapses almost never happen in all of human history, and typically only happen in highly isolated societies or societies that are already filled with people partly in the stone age. Even then, as you mentioned "modern transportation"; the roads themselves tend to remain.
Due to interconnectedness, and no regulation against ethnic intermarriage, I'd suspect a self-evident American ethnic group is likely in less than 200 years.
And again, ethnic groups are not just larger genetic groups, but cultural groups as well.
England and South Africa have tiny landmasses compared to America. Even the entire UK has a tiny landmass compared to America, and it's home to at least four distinct ethnicities (English, Welsh, Scottish, and Irish).
There has been no ethnostate of comparable inhabited landmass to the US in human history.
And technology does get lost, particularly when advanced societies collapse. The Greeks had analogue computers and Greek fire, unknown in the middle ages. By WW2, we had reinvented analogue computers, but the closest we've ever gotten to reinventing Greek fire was napalm, which wasn't invented until the Vietnam war. Modern concrete is still inferior to Roman concrete. The Romans had steam engines, didn't exploit them fully, and then they were lost and reinvented 1400 years later. The Egyptians could build giant pyramids that the Romans, Greeks, Chinese, and pre-industrial Europeans could not. We could just barely build them, but the cost would be extreme.
America is too big to have a single ethnicity. New Englander and Appalachian are separate ethnicities, for example.
I accept that argument to a degree. Appalachian isn't even descendent from the English, but Scotch-Irish or Ulster Scotts (Ulstermen / People of Ulster in Britain).
Even during the revolution one could argue that each state was effectively it's own ethnicity.
And to be clear, there seems to be much more self-identification by the people of the United States with America rather than with each state. Sure you get proud Texans, but not so many people show Texas loyalty to Wyoming.
The difference from our founding to where we are now is that we have a much more interconnected and homogenous American culture and value set based on the Civic National identity that we cultivated. There is unquestionably and an American Nation (in the same way a person is British), but the issue is whether or not you can call that an ethnos. I tend to lean that the American ethos is still developing (no thanks to mass migration), but there will inevitably be one, and after time it won't make sense to say that an American can really trace his lineage to anywhere back but the US, because of the integration of populations and peoples within it.
It'll take a thousand years for Americans' DNA to get so thoroughly mixed that it's a single ethnicity, and it will only happen if society doesn't collapse back into the stone age. Without modern transportation, a Minnesotan would almost never meet a Texan, and over a thousand years their language would diverge.
It's fascinating to think about how cultural evolution would develop if industrial civilization gradually declined back into an agrarian paradigm.
I say gradually, because if it collapsed overnight the vast majority of humans would be doomed to starve to death. And billions of people starving to death would proceed to utterly ravage the environment consuming anything edible, until there's nothing left.
We still have a very long way to go until peak oil of course, and I'm cautiously optimistic about nuclear, hydroelectric, and geothermal power eventually replacing fossil fuels. But if that fails to happen, and we end up un-developing slowly enough to avert the aforementioned nightmare scenario, the various cultures that develop in the former US are gonna be absolutely wild.
Has it taken a thousand years for the Anglos and Saxons to become English? Has it taken a thousand years for the Boer to stop being Dutch?
This is my issue, modern transportation isn't going anywhere, society isn't going to revert to the stone age (in fact such collapses almost never happen in all of human history, and typically only happen in highly isolated societies or societies that are already filled with people partly in the stone age. Even then, as you mentioned "modern transportation"; the roads themselves tend to remain.
Due to interconnectedness, and no regulation against ethnic intermarriage, I'd suspect a self-evident American ethnic group is likely in less than 200 years.
And again, ethnic groups are not just larger genetic groups, but cultural groups as well.
England and South Africa have tiny landmasses compared to America. Even the entire UK has a tiny landmass compared to America, and it's home to at least four distinct ethnicities (English, Welsh, Scottish, and Irish).
There has been no ethnostate of comparable inhabited landmass to the US in human history.
And technology does get lost, particularly when advanced societies collapse. The Greeks had analogue computers and Greek fire, unknown in the middle ages. By WW2, we had reinvented analogue computers, but the closest we've ever gotten to reinventing Greek fire was napalm, which wasn't invented until the Vietnam war. Modern concrete is still inferior to Roman concrete. The Romans had steam engines, didn't exploit them fully, and then they were lost and reinvented 1400 years later. The Egyptians could build giant pyramids that the Romans, Greeks, Chinese, and pre-industrial Europeans could not. We could just barely build them, but the cost would be extreme.