vorpa-glavo
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User ID: 674
vorpa-glavo
4mo ago
It was the universal radicalizing event of the generation
It simply cannot have been, because I was of that generation and I was mostly put off by how much people cared about the whole thing on either side.
New Atheism and BLM are dead and gone but people are still mad that they got rid of Tracer's ass wiggle.
If I had to pin a name on what it seemed like from the outside, it was like "Asking Disney Corporation for a handjob." The nature of top tier media (AAA video games, blockbuster movies, etc.) is that only a small number of companies are able to marshal the resources in order to make them, and they can only make a few such releases a year, so if your tastes aren't represented in what they produce, you are left out in the cold. So people complain about the big corporations, and their failure to deliver what they want. Woke feminists want ugly, disabled women in the top tier media, and anti-woke coomers want sexy eye candy. Those desires are mutually exclusive, and so one or the other of them will be disappointed.
Some people have really started to invest in the idea of symbolic victories that can be provided by this or that big corporation kowtowing to their desires, and I'm sure I won't be able to dissuade anyone in that camp. But I really think people need a Diogenes and Alexander moment. When Alexander the Great comes up to your wine tub in the middle of the agora and asks if you want anything, you should be prepared to answer, "Stand a little out of my sun."
Nobody needs Blizzard. Nobody needs EA. Nobody needs Disney, or a thousand other big media corporations.
Either create your own stuff, or engage with enduring cultural artifacts that are 30+ years old, or support the smaller creators who are making things closer to your tastes. Like, the ancient Greeks made commentary after commentary about the Homeric epics and engaged with those stories on a deep level for centuries. But our culture is so temporally parochial, so obsessed with novelty, that we enslave our imaginations to big corporations and lose our souls in the process. Human flourishing is not merely to consoom. And it's certainly not to win pointless little cultural victories in a product you paid $60 on Steam.
vorpa-glavo
4mo ago
Worth noting that today (Feb 15) is Lupercalia. If the tweet isn't testing the waters for Trump as king, it is god-tier trolling.
vorpa-glavo
20d ago
I'll concede that "I have to shop around for banks that will give me credit in my own name, and I might not get it in the end" is less oppression than, say, "Society is structured so that the entirety of my future is decided by another person", but I think it still qualifies as oppression.
The nature of this discussion is that there is going to be some point where the oppression falls below a threshold where it makes sense to draw attention to it, or where the benefits of paternalism and freedom outweigh the downsides of oppression.
I don't think it would be unreasonable to say that women were oppressed as late as 1974, and that things may have tipped over towards very slightly favoring women on net starting in 1979 (when women became a slight majority of people enrolled in college), but I wouldn't think a person was wrong for choosing slightly different dates for those things either, or for saying that there is rough equality of the sexes in the United States, because both sexes have problems and they mostly fall under the threshold of attention worthiness.
Your understanding of the bill and mine are the same, though I certainly see that I didn't word it correctly in the post you responded to.
But even reduced, uneven access to credit is a form of oppression.
Like, are we going to pretend that the moment Esso started serving gas to black motorists nationwide in the 1930's, that suddenly black motorists were completely unoppressed as a group? Having to navigate an environment in which you can get an essential good from some firms, and can't get an essential good from others limits your options and often mean you're left with a worse set of choices.
Edit: Typo
The United States was not meant to be a "democracy." Benjamin Franklin famously described the government created by the Constitutional Convention as "A republic, if you can keep it."
While there were certainly people in the founding generation who saw a place for a heavy democratic element in the United States, such as Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson, I think it is fair to say that most educated gentlemen around the time of the founding were steeped in a tradition going back to Aristotle and Plato where "democracy" was the term for a bad form of government by the many.
Despite Alexander Hamilton advocating for the current Constitution, his original hours-long presentation to the Congress had a much stronger executive, and Hamilton famously told Jefferson, "The greatest man who ever lived was Julius Caesar." There's many ways to interpret this statement, but I think it is obvious that Hamilton hadn't completely shaken off the monarchical thinking of an Englishman, and wanted a strong central authority as the best guarantee of liberty for the people.
Federalist Paper 51, written by Madison, describes how the checks and balances of the United States republic are meant to function. The whole letter is worth a read, but I will focus on one part:
A dependence on the people is, no doubt, the primary control on the government; but experience has taught mankind the necessity of auxiliary precautions. This policy of supplying, by opposite and rival interests, the defect of better motives, might be traced through the whole system of human affairs, private as well as public. We see it particularly displayed in all the subordinate distributions of power, where the constant aim is to divide and arrange the several offices in such a manner as that each may be a check on the other that the private interest of every individual may be a sentinel over the public rights. These inventions of prudence cannot be less requisite in the distribution of the supreme powers of the State. But it is not possible to give to each department an equal power of self-defense. In republican government, the legislative authority necessarily predominates. The remedy for this inconveniency is to divide the legislature into different branches; and to render them, by different modes of election and different principles of action, as little connected with each other as the nature of their common functions and their common dependence on the society will admit. It may even be necessary to guard against dangerous encroachments by still further precautions. As the weight of the legislative authority requires that it should be thus divided, the weakness of the executive may require, on the other hand, that it should be fortified.
An absolute negative on the legislature appears, at first view, to be the natural defense with which the executive magistrate should be armed. But perhaps it would be neither altogether safe nor alone sufficient. On ordinary occasions it might not be exerted with the requisite firmness, and on extraordinary occasions it might be perfidiously abused. May not this defect of an absolute negative be supplied by some qualified connection between this weaker department and the weaker branch of the stronger department, by which the latter may be led to support the constitutional rights of the former, without being too much detached from the rights of its own department? If the principles on which these observations are founded be just, as I persuade myself they are, and they be applied as a criterion to the several State constitutions, and to the federal Constitution it will be found that if the latter does not perfectly correspond with them, the former are infinitely less able to bear such a test.
(Emphasis mine.)
Schlessinger's The Imperial Presidency, and Higgs' Crisis and Leviathan both document how this vision failed from different angles. Schlessinger examines the history of the growth of executive power, and the various techniques presidents used to get their way - from operating secret naval wars without congressional approval and oversight, to the use of impoundment to appropriate funds earmarked by congress (which was eventually eliminated after the Nixon presidency, due to his perceived abuse of the power.) Higgs looks at the way that crises created opportunities for the federal government to seize ever greater power, and while it is not limited to the growth in presidential power, it is impossible to ignore all of the emergency powers Congress ceded to the President across the constant cycle of crises.
Higgs was writing in 1987, and Schlessinger in 1973, and the trends they described have only continued.
And so we come to the present day, where Donald Trump became President on January 20th, and began what some are calling an "autocoup." On a diverse forum like this one, I am sure that there are at least a few monarchists that would be thrilled if that was true. I'm sure I can't convince them that an autocoup would be a bad thing, if that is, in fact, what is happening. But for the classical liberals, libertarians, conservatives and centrist institutionalists, I want to make the case that the way things happen matters as much as what is actually happening.
Some are defending actions like Elon Musk's DOGE dismantling the Department of Education without any apparent legal backing, by saying that this is what Trump supporters voted for.
But this simply isn't true. Or more accurately, that's not how this works.
I repeat: America is not a "democracy." America is a republic with checks and balances and a rule of law.
To the extent that we have democratic elements in our republic, then I certainly think that Trump and his supporters should be able to do what they were elected to do. If they want to pass an actual law that gets rid of USAID or the Department of Education, then let them do it. If they want to pass a law to rename The United States Digital Service, and give it unlimited power to control federal funding, then they should pass a law to do so. And if they can't get the Congress they voted in to make it happen, too bad, that is how a Republic works. The same applies if federal judges or the supreme court strike down a law or action as unconstitutional. One person doesn't just get the power to do whatever they want, without any oversight or pushback from the legislative or judicial branches.
I think the United States seems to be heading for a form of democratic tyranny, with few checks and balances. I don't know if there has actually been an "autocoup", but I do think there are shades of it in what has been happening the last few weeks, and I think any lover of American liberty and prosperity should be a little bit worried as well, even if they like the effects of a lot of these unilateral actions by the Executive.
EDIT: Typos.
vorpa-glavo
5mo ago
Seventy years pro-life activists have called their opponents baby-killers and it did not swerve their opposition's resolve by one inch.
The crux of the abortion debate is the moral status of the fetus, and the moral permissibility of ending life support to the fetus. It's not that activism did not swerve the opposition's resolve - the opposition has a fundamental disagreement of fact with the pro-life activists.
The situation is more similar to animal rights activism (in that it is a debate over the moral status of a living being not everyone considers morally important/relevant) rather than the foreign aid debate (where almost nobody assigns literally zero moral value to foreigners, even if they assign less moral value to them than their fellow countrymen.)
It's fine on the object level if an election result means a federal program is gutted, even one that a lot of people like and which does a lot of good in the world. Even so, I think it would be better to advance the principled reasons for stopping such a program, instead of reveling in how much you're owning the libs or whatever.
vorpa-glavo
4mo ago
And scientists aren't ubermensch immune to political bias; they vote blue as a rule.
But won't this move only encourage them to vote blue in greater numbers? If one team says, "We're okay with burning down legitimate scientific research along with illegitimate politicized pseudo-science, as long as we're owning the outgroup while we're doing it," and the other says, "Yeah, science is important we'll throw a bunch of money at it," then the deal is always going to be that scientists will vote for the money-for-science team.
As a long term strategy, I think there's things the Trump administration could have done to either depoliticize publicly funded science or to increase the amount of legitimate scientific research that might come to anti-woke conclusions, and this probably would have been better for getting scientists on side. If scientists were able to look back in 4 years, and say, "Trump's presidency revolutionized America's approach to funding science, and improved it in a way that no one is likely to want to change" then wouldn't that be a lot better for the MAGA movement?
vorpa-glavo
4mo ago
Scott wrote Reactionary Philosophy In An Enormous, Planet-Sized Nutshell which built on the ideas of Mencius Moldbug, and then wrote the The Anti-Reactionary FAQ in order to refute it. Many in the dissident right and neo-reaction thought Scott's initial presentation was the better of the two.
vorpa-glavo
5mo ago
My instinct is that MFSP is just a form of the chinese robber fallacy. There are enough male feminists who also happen to be sex pests, that when presented one after the other and subject to the availability heuristic on recall, people erroneously conclude that it was because there's something up with male feminists.
This is similar to your "salience" bullet point, but I would consider it part of a more general phenomenon of "Good Guy Sex Pests." How many interviews are there with the next door neighbors of malefactors who say things like, "He always seemed like the nicest guy"? I don't think "male feminists" are particularly special, except insofar as it is one of many ways to earn some people's automatic trust. But I think there are many categories of "good guy" that this applies to: pastors, police officers, a wholesome actor, etc. Different communities have different roles that confer automatic trust, and so every community is going to have problems with malefactors who take advantage of such trust in some way.
vorpa-glavo
4mo ago
Yes. I think such sentiments are ugly in anyone's mouth, but I also don't think they merit firing. In general, I would prefer a social norm that people only get fired for their public political opinions (even ugly ones), if being a mass media face of the company is part of their job, and it would violate the company's fiduciary duty to their shareholders to keep the person onboard.
Saying, "I wish the assassin hadn't missed" is not the kind of thing that should prevent you from working a low stakes retail job. The right would have forgotten about her in a week, and Home Depot acted as cowardly as any firm during an internet firestorm.
It might be copium, but maybe Trump and Musk will pull a Cincinnatus, and step down after they've "fixed" the Republic. Regardless, I'm with you in being disappointed with the current timeline. Under different circumstances, I could have been okay with a lot of the cuts, but this really does seem to be all the worst aspects of the Imperial Presidency finally come to roost.
I've been so disappointed in partisans the last few years. I lost a lot of hope when the left-leaning home depot employee lost her job, and many in the anti-woke right proved in their gleeful reactions afterwards that they had never had a principled opposition to cancel culture - they were always just angry that it wasn't their power to wield. As someone who is opposed to woke tactics like deplatforming and cancel culture because I do actually support free speech and a broader free speech culture, it was a real blow to me.
vorpa-glavo
5mo ago
I'm actually a little happy to learn that America is still a republic with the rule of law.
As you say, Trump and Congress can work together to realize his goals with DOGE. I think there is a huge difference between Trump doing things entirely on his own, and doing them with the cooperation of Congress. Slash budgets if that's what the voters want, but do it the right way.
vorpa-glavo
7mo ago
I think this is why cultural products from the more feminists countries, such as the US, feature mannish-looking women, acting in a masculine manner.
I don't want to get too bogged down in the object level discussion of Aloy, but I think her having peach fuzz is a defensible choice. In our world, there are products to remove such hair. But Aloy is living in a post-apocalyptic world in 3040, isn't she? It's not hard to believe at all that grooming habits have changed, and women with peach fuzz just leave it as is.
Honestly, this kind of thing is something that takes me out of a lot of media. While we know that the Romans were big about hair removal, we also know plenty of ancient societies that weren't, and it's always strange to see "cave man" media where the women look like they stepped out of a modern Instagram photo, with shaved legs and armpits. I think a lot of creators across time have been cowards, unwilling to contend with the fact that humans are all, men and women, hairy apes.
vorpa-glavo
5mo ago
I mean, anglophone people used to call Marcus Tullius Cicero "Tully" - leading to his most famous book, De Officiis, being known as "Tully's Offices", so there's plenty of underwhelming exonyms to go around.
I mean, to be fair, the President isn't supposed to have as much power as Trump (or any other president of recent vintage) has exercised.
We're at the end of a long process where every crisis saw Congress adding emergency powers to the presidency, and that, combined with Congresses' current dysfunctions, created a situation where the only source of change is the Executive.
A system will always collapse at its weakest point. In the past that has been the Supreme Court (witness Obergefell), and at various points it has been the Imperial Presidency.
vorpa-glavo
4mo ago
I think pro- and anti-GamerGaters both tend to overestimate its impact. I tend to think GamerGate was just one instance of Toxoplasma of Rage that served as a political awakening for some people. I don't think it was more impactful than other Toxoplasma skirmishes, like New Atheism or BLM.
Though I must admit, GamerGate was also a conflict that almost entirely passed me by. I had one friend in college who I had one conversation about it with, and I was vaguely aware of Anita Sarkeesian, but neither side was salient to me (I play video games from time to time, but I'm not a "gamer", and I've never been an SJW or woke scold) and so I was never very invested in it. It would be like me trying to get involved in the "pro-shipper vs anti-shipper" debate in fan fiction communities. I have my principles, and they might align with one or the other side of that debate more than the other, but I'm also not fighting in that war because it seems dumb and fake to me.
vorpa-glavo
4mo ago
contrapoints
I wouldn't really consider Contrapoints to be within the rationalist sphere. She's just an ex-academic socialist who became a Youtuber, and who accidentally became a part of the "Breadtube" coalition of progressive content creators. Correct me if I'm wrong though - Google didn't turn up much connection between Contrapoints and the rationalist diaspora.
Point of order. LessWrong was banning people for "mis-gendering" and "dead-naming" as far back as 2012.
To be fair, I think this is consistent with the rationalist flirtation with transhumanism. If you believe people should have the right to experiment with their bodies and subject themselves to far more radical technological transformations, then someone coming to you saying, "I was born male, but I want to use science and technology to make my body as similar to a natal female's as possible, and then I want to be treated like a woman as far as possible", then you're more likely to just shrug and say, "Sure, why not?"
I'm pretty onboard with the idea that most liberal democracies massively overreacted to Covid, but where I was in the United States was never as bad as the worst stories I was hearing in Europe and Canada. Like, at any time during the lock down I was legally allowed to drive wherever I wanted (when I heard that the UK was pulling people over and ticketing them for driving during the pandemic), and I was always legally allowed to walk my dog (when I heard that some places in Canada were preventing people from walking outdoors, even after we knew transmission outside wasn't very strong.)
I'm sure many parts of the United States had much worse responses, but I hardly feel like our reaction to Covid was "totalitarian" even if it was a massive overreaction. Maybe liberalism was killed in countries like the UK, but not here. Certainly, our reaction was less totalitarian than the WWI and WWII era war economy, and almost all of the power taken during Covid was ceded back. (Though of course, every crisis in the United States makes the government just that little bit more powerful and unaccountable. Whether it was 9/11 turning the country into a surveillance state, or a thousand other little things.)
vorpa-glavo
5mo ago
That said, what is your current position on the Covid response?
Honestly, the Covid response was one of the big hurdles that caused me to take a step back and reconsider a lot of my views, though I was interested in philosophy and ethics before that.
I'm capable of being pragmatic, and acknowledging that something like a one or two week lockdown at the beginning of the pandemic to wait for information to emerge was probably inevitable, if not mostly justifiable. But as the weeks stretched into months, and a hodgepodge of interventions with only a loose relationship to the evidence began to emerge, I lost a lot of faith in the response.
If Covid had been the Antonine plague with a 1 in 3 death rate in healthy young people, I think more draconian interventions might have been justified if people weren't opting to take the precautions on their own. But it wasn't the Antonine plague, and most of the people who died were old and on death's door already, or unhealthy in some way.
I do think the United States, at least in my neck of the woods, never adopted policies as bad as some of the things happening the UK, Australia or China, but that is damning with faint praise.
I'm mostly positive on the vaccines themselves, but I think pure social pressure without state backing would have been enough to get most people vaccinated, and so we probably shouldn't have used vaccine mandates. (I'm still developing my ideas around the appropriate use of social pressure. I think there's a place for it in a functional, free society, but I think it can also go wrong, as has been seen in cancel culture.)
The Imperial Presidency is a bipartisan creation more than a hundred years old, not something created in 2008. Of course, point out all of the abuses of power by Democratic presidents - they're an important part of the story. But don't ignore the way Bush Jr. used signing statements to attempt line item vetos, or Reagan's actions in the Iran-Contra affair, or Nixon's abuse of the impoundment power, or if you want to reach back to the Civil War, all of the things Lincoln did that were clearly unconstitutional.
While I would characterize myself as broadly left-of-center, I still have a strong libertarian strain, and I've become increasingly convinced of the importance of Federalism over the last few years as I've turned more of my attention towards Renaissance and Classical political theory. I'm happy to condemn abuses of power whether they're Democratic or Republican, since I increasingly see myself as not being at home with either of them, even if I have my preferences.
I was mostly happy to nod along and agree with the far more able posters here, who condemned Biden for his abuses of the pardon power. I have no illusions that in the counterfactual world where Kamala Harris was elected president, many more able and interested critics would have taken the stage here and condemned her every abuse of power. But I would say that the forum has been strangely quiet about Trump - not that nothing has been said, but far less than I expected. And so, I felt the need to step forward and make my case, even though I know I am far less well-equipped than some of the posters here.
I'll be the first to say that the end of the American Republic doesn't have to be the end of America. Maybe we'll pull a Rome, and enjoy an empire that will last 300 years or more. (Or perhaps "Empire without end" if we believe Virgil.) I don't pretend to know. But in the moods where I was willing to put on my pragmatic hat, I actually felt like America was a largely functional society that got a number of "big questions" right. We're wealthy, powerful, and our institutions are mostly compatible with a life of flourishing, even if few people make choices that can actually result in flourishing. I was worried about some of the things Obama and Biden did, and wasn't thrilled at many of the things Kamala would likely have done, but I am genuinely worried from a little-c conservative point of view that Trump might actually kill the goose that lays the Golden Egg.
Many of Trump's actions I have no real issue with. Let him have silly symbolic victories like renaming the Gulf of America and Mt. McKinley. Of course, he should be able to use executive orders to dismantle DEI programs that were created with executive orders in the first place. But I would feel a lot better about him dismantling the Department of Education or USAID if he was doing it with Congress by his side, instead of by giving admin access to the spending system of the Treasury to a random citizen. He certainly had the votes and the momentum to create an actual DOGE and give Elon Musk power the right way.
Whether the quote is trolling or not, many in the X/Twitter replies were taking it at face value and affirming their support of the underlying sentiment. Someone in another thread said we need a "Kremlinology" of Trump that is attuned to knowing when to take what he says seriously or literally, and I agree in this case.
I would argue that if Trump is being literal with this tweet, then he is basically positioning himself as a "dictator" in the original Roman sense of the word. Someone imbued with emergency powers in order to save the republic in a crisis. The problem is that nobody actually appointed him to do that. Like, you could argue the American people did, but a 51/49 victory should not a Roman-style dictator make. 51/49 is "reform immigration, lower taxes, use the bully pulpit to get as much of your agenda through congress as possible" territory. It is not, "take all the power you need to save our republic, but please give it back when you're done" territory.
I simply do not share the belief that Trump couldn't have done most of what he wanted to do with the Republican majority congress and Supreme Court. He just chose to do it in a legally dubious method instead, and that's the main thing that concerns me.
EDIT: There's also the component where he's posting it on Lupercalia (Feb 15), the same day Mark Antony tried to crown Ceasar king. Even if it is god-tier trolling, then I've got to say I'm not amused. I actually care about my republic. (Thanks /u/SoonToBeBanned for reminding me of the Lupercalia connection.)
I think this is a good example of the difference between the Goddess of Cancer and the Goddess of Everything Else.
Evolution had one chance to program our values, but it is imperfect and hackish. So instead of optimizing us for "make lots of babies with your own genetic code", it optimized us for the intermediary, "have sex with an attractive member of the opposite sex." For most of human history, those two notions were connected, but then we invented birth control and contraceptives, and we switched from the rule of the Goddess of Cancer (who says "KILL CONSUME MULTIPLY CONQUER") to the rule of the Goddess of Everything Else.
While hanging out in rationalist and pronatalist spaces has helped me to appreciate the appeal of Bloodtopia more, I think my heart is still in Ideastan. I just can't commit to calling childless people like Sir Isaac Newton or George Washington "failures" in some ultimate sense. I think in spite of the fact that they didn't have biological offspring, they altered the future trajectory of humanity so radically that the contribution of some random breeder just can't compare.
I would rather give in to the excitement and mystery of where the Goddess of Everything Else takes us, than stick to the tried and true, but stale world of Bloodtopia.
The US doesn't work all that much like Rome; we have no dictator, and no consuls to appoint them.
I beg to differ. While we don't have the formal office, I would argue that both Abraham Lincoln and FDR both arguably fill the "dictator" role in American politics. Though of course, the American tradition is for the "dictator" to die or be killed in office, rather than to have them voluntarily cede power back to the republic.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying I think Trump is definitively a dictator in the Roman style. I'm saying that one reading of his Napoleon tweet is that he's positioning himself as a Roman-style dictator, thus justifying the extra-legal way in which he had been advancing his agenda these past few weeks.
While I have expressed my concerns on the Motte about the health of our republic as a result of Trump's actions, I don't think the republic is quite dead yet. Our republic was already sick from an Imperial Presidency, and a cycle of Crisis and Leviathan, but the way Trump has chosen to carry out his agenda is increasingly worrying, and I'm someone who mostly lurked on the Motte during the Trump I years and agreed with the consensus about Trump Derangement Syndrome.
If Trump had just used his Republican majority in Congress and the Supreme Court to push through a legislative agenda through the usual means, I would have mostly just rolled with the punches and shrugged my shoulders. Republics, what can you do? But he's bypassed congress, and seems to be hell bent on doing as much as he can on his own. Even if the administrative state needed a serious culling, I would have been much happier if it had been done via Congress and the Courts, instead of by another executive embodying the worst aspects of the Imperial Presidency.
What do you want my response to be to "American conservatism just doesn’t appeal to me because I’m not scared of everything"? Can you write us a sample response to that claim, if it's not a waste of time?
I mean, I could try. Something like:
While an American liberal or progressive might feel like an American conservative is coming from a place of fear, this is a misleading impression. First, it is worth pointing out that wanting things like lower immigration, more barriers to trans care for children and fewer government hand outs doesn't have to come from a place of 'fear.' Just as liberals/progressives believe that their policies come from a high-minded place of concern for their fellow man, so too a conservative can genuinely believe that the best thing for all peoples is to adopt those policies.
In the case of immigration, a conservative might believe that brain-draining poor countries is bad for the stability and well-being of those cultures, and that migration might serve as a release valve for pressure that would rightfully lead to successful rebellions that might actually make those countries better off in the long run.
In the case of trans care, it doesn't have to be fear of the "other" at all, but a genuine conviction that the evidence in favor was actually substantially weaker than often claimed, that it originated in a different country with different background information that doesn't seem to apply to the anglo-sphere. Add in the replication crisis (which also affects medicine), and the evidence that the WPATH is an activist organization that seems to go beyond the remit of evidence, and you have a recipe to truly believe that trans healthcare for minors is a net negative for most children, and society as a whole. This is not about "fear", but a genuine disagreement on the merits of the evidence and an approach to epistemology.
Even aside from all of this, it is worth pointing out that liberals and progressives seem to be afraid of their own side's bugbears, in a way that is out of proportion with the statistics. They fear hate crimes, rape, and discrimination to a far greater degree than the statistics would seem to justify. It is wrong-headed to think that what makes conservatism unique is "fear", as opposed to the positive values they do espouse.
Large, diverse empires often produce "multiple choice" origin stories. In Rome, depending on your tastes, you could tell the story of the Trojan Aeneas carving out a part of his ancestral homeland on Italy, or the story of Romulus and Remus creating a cultural melting pot first through offering safe haven to foreign criminals then through the kidnapping of women of the Sabine people, or the story of the last king of Rome, the Etruscan Tarquinius Priscus, whose overthrow marked the start of the Roman Republic. Each story emphasized different aspects of Romanitas, and each could be used to argue for Rome being more culturally open or closed, or more willing to embrace foreigners as fellow Roman citizens or to reject them.
While the United States isn't a central example of an old-fashioned empire (China and Russia are far closer to this model), it is big enough and diverse enough that it has started to develop a "multiple choice" origin story of its own. There are several possible "foundation myths" for America. There's the Founding Fathers and the Revolutionary War, the "second founding" after the Civil War (where the 13th-15th Amendments saw a massive increase in Federal power), or the "modern founding" of America as the global hegemon with the victory in WWII and the defeat of the Axis powers. There's the Mayflower and the Pilgrims vs. the idea of America as a nation of immigrants.
I'm not sure I'd buy the idea of "social justice politics" as a form of ethnogenesis. By and large, I do think the assimilated "white Americans" have largely displaced "anglo Americans" as a distinct cultural group, and that after two or three generations most white American immigrants are indistinguishable from any other white American. I suspect that most light-skinned Hispanics will probably be similarly absorbed into the white blob within a generation or two, thus strengthening the "white" coalition. At the same time, groups that are more visually distinct occupy a weird space. Asians kind of get treated as "honorary whites" or "model minorities", but I recently spoke to an Asian American man who felt threatened enough in the community he was living in (trucks of Trump supporters were driving through Asian ghettos and harassing the residents) that he went out and bought a gun. And of course, the hardest square to circle is the African American community, especially the ADOS subgroup which has never held power (note that Barrack Obama was not of ADOS descent.)
I think that social justice politics is just an attempt to form a non-"white men" coalition. College educated white women were xenophilic enough that they were happy to throw in with a variety of visible minorities in order to argue for shared interests in the spoils system of jobs, prestige and power. But with the election of Donald Trump there's been a vibe shift, and I'm not sure if the non-"white men" coalition can hold into the future. Heck, Kamala lost, but the coalition she tried to throw together was certainly some odd bedfellows, like Liz and Dick Cheney. I think we're about due for a political realignment, and I'm not sure where every group will end up in the new arrangement.
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