lancbyw719n
25d ago
I've been following this story closely, interesting article in the WSJ about the refugees: Trump Is Giving Refugee Status to White South Africans—but Many Don’t Want to Come.
Obviously the story of the week is Musk vs. Trump. Support seems to be coalescing in two camps: on Musk's side, people who think the national debt is the most important issue the US faces, and on the Trump/MAGA side, the idea that culture and national borders are more important. It's kinda like a proxy Stephen Miller vs. libertarians battle.
The question comes down to: can a country stay the same if the people are "replaced", so to speak.
Let’s take the SGV (San Gabriel Valley) in Los Angeles as a real-world example, where I'm from. Drive through certain areas there and you'll be hard-pressed to find a single sign in English. You’ll see Mandarin, Vietnamese, Korean—entire commercial districts where English isn’t the default, and where cultural references, aesthetics, and even holiday calendars operate on a different frequency than the rest of America. Is this good? Bad? That depends on your values. But is it a change? Unquestionably. Even after WW2 and the effective destruction of its entire country, Germany remained full of Germans and tts continuity wasn’t just institutional, it was cultural and demographic. America, by contrast, is attempting something unprecedented in history: to maintain national coherence while undergoing massive demographic transformation without any clear cultural center holding it all together. How much change can a country absorb before it becomes something else entirely? And does that change matter? It’s not that immigrants are bad or incapable. That’s not the point. The point is that America is trying to do something historically novel: become a post-ethnic, post-historical nation that binds together people with radically different origins, languages, and values using only a kind of civic glue—and lately, even that glue seems to be dissolving.
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