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This whole debate between Elon and the rest of the right hinges upon what people understand the purpose of a state to be.
Is it an ideological organization like the Comintern, the Ummah or Christendom (or e/acc aerospace/digital foom)? Is it a commercial area, devoted to making the green line go up? Alternately, is the state a suit of political power-armour for a nation, devoted to advancing their national, ethnic interests?
https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1871978282289082585
Elon is in with the neocons, the fundamentalists and the woke on this one, he lacks a national concept for the state.
At the end of the day, I believe in the nation-state as the fundamental unit. Blood is thicker than ideology, you can see Chinese recruitment officers (who somehow got into the US military) say on Tiktok 'obviously I'm not going to fight against China' - maybe some other wars. Relying on foreign talent leaves you wide open to treachery and manipulation as the US has experienced and is experiencing. And it corrodes the necessary spirit of sacrifice. People are happy fighting wars to defend their nation, they are not so keen fighting for abstract causes. If migrants make a logical decision to migrate to a richer, more lucrative economic zone, they'll likely make the logical decision to leave when the going gets tough. On a collective level, logical individual decisions are no good. It makes more sense to evade duty and responsibility - but then you end up living in a poor, unsafe and weak state, you're worse off than before.
The US has mostly avoided these problems because the going never got tough. They were bigger and better than everyone in their region and enjoyed allies who did most of the hard fighting in the big wars. Even then, there have been significant political problems in America due to a lack of ethnic homogeneity. There can't be any race riots if there's only one race present.
Nobody wants to join the British Army today. Despite constant fearmongering and war propaganda it's actively shrinking. Turning a nation-state into an economic zone corrodes its integrity.
Sunni Islamists of all races appear to be very happy fighting together for an ideology.
Recruitment shortfalls for Anglo armies over the last 40 years correlate extremely strongly with periods of great economic prosperity. The 90s also saw recruitment struggles. The last time the British Army easily met its targets was 2010, long after the UK became an economic zone but at the trough of the unemployment wave caused by the financial crisis.
Nations are also abstract causes, come to that.
A dyed-in-the-wool ethnonationalist (which I assuredly am not) would argue that a nation is, literally, an extended family, i.e., the biological descendants of a specific group of human beings. There are many problems with this argument, but being abstract is not one of them—except, I suppose, insofar as any super-Dunbar group of people is an abstraction.
Subjective groups beyond your cognitive limits to maintain would certainly qualify as more conceptual than evidential in my book.
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