In the film The Good Shepherd, about the formation of the Central Intelligence Agency, there’s an exchange between an Italian American and a patrician WASP.
Joseph Palmi: Let me ask you something… we Italians, we got our families, and we got the church; the Irish, they have the homeland, Jews their tradition… What about you people … what do you have?
Edward Wilson: The United States of America. The rest of you are just visiting.
Such is the view of all elites, disappearing only when they disappear, through the dynamism, or by contrast the decay, of their societies.
Note: There’s no implication to local society in this message; those who first settled Whitewater were not a patrician class. On the contrary, they were vulgar. It was only later that the descendants of those who settled here developed a false sense of class entitlement.