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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   36040 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 3, 2025

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Do people prefer more Sunday top-level-comments, or more Monday-morning top-level-comments?

Anyway, Richard Hanania writes, Nationalists Already Have the World They Want but Need to Pretend Otherwise:

As JD Vance said in a recent interview, representing the nationalist perspective,

You love your family, and then you love your neighbor, and then you love your community, and then you love your fellow citizens in your own country, and then, after that, you can focus on and prioritize the rest of the world. A lot of the far left has completely inverted that.

Huge if true. We might ask what evidence there is that the left, or the “far left,” whoever that is, prioritizes foreigners over American citizens. The US spends about 1% of its federal budget on foreign aid. States and localities spend practically nothing on non-Americans, except in cases where there is a large number of immigrants, though they also pay taxes. Democrats feel pressure from the far left on trans, climate, and other issues, but raising the amount spent on foreign aid or otherwise expanding our circle of empathy seems to be a very low priority.

Sometimes you’ll hear “America First” types argue for restrictive immigration and trade policies, and maintain that in these areas our leaders have prioritized the interests of foreigners. Yet they ignore the fact that analysts have produced a great deal of research and economic analysis arguing that such policies are good for Americans. Nationalists may disagree, but practically nobody of any influence is saying that the goal of public policy is to make foreigners better off even if it comes at the expense of Americans. When the left criticizes Trump’s views on tariffs, they focus on Americans having to pay higher prices, not the possibility that Chinese workers might lose jobs.

This is what makes modern nationalism so incredibly bizarre. The world looks pretty much exactly as they want, which means they need to completely check out of reality in order to argue for their positions.

This... makes sense? It's too uncouth for many people to say "America should make x nominal sacrifice, because it's increases our soft power," but people rarely say "America should make x sacrifice, even though it's zero-sum, because altruism." That's not to say there's no international philanthropy lobby, but foreign policy seems to be mostly "mistake theory." So, in that sense, yes, nationalists already have the world they want. But do they need to pretend otherwise?

Nationalists claim to care about their own people, not to hate others. Yet such assertions are difficult to reconcile with their priorities. Whenever you hear someone is “America First,” it’s never that he wants to cure cancer or fix the housing supply issue. Instead, he talks about Ukraine or foreign aid. He’s relatively indifferent to most questions regarding how to make Americans’ lives better, but he’s certain that he doesn’t want to help outsiders.

Imagine a man who pays little attention to balancing his checkbook and doesn’t put much effort towards organizing his finances. At the same time, he lives in a state of absolute paranoia that his wife might occasionally give a dollar to a homeless person. When he finds out, he blows up at her. “Our family first! What kind of person puts others ahead of their own family? A strange inverted morality you have!” Then he goes back to keeping his money in a savings account instead of buying government bonds or mutual funds. It would be rational to conclude that when he complains about the dollar given to the homeless man, he’s driven by malice more than love of his family.

The final sentence in that quote reminded me of the down-thread discussion of sadism. The substack comments have more about tribalism.

Yet they ignore the fact that analysts have produced a great deal of research and economic analysis arguing that such policies are good for Americans.

The economic analysis I've seen (please share if you have counter-examples) looks only at impact on GDP or on American wages and prices. It ignores the fact that nationalists have a stake in their nation, and immigrants dilute and weaken that stake. Allowing immigrants is analogous to selling some shares in a corporation. If immigration is 3% per year, Americans are losing 3% of their stake in their country to foreigners every year. If the immigrants are like-minded (for civic nationalists) or co-ethnic (for ethno-nationalists) then it's not such a big deal; it's basically recruiting allies. But if the immigrants are opposed to Americans' culture or are of a different ethnicity then immigration is a hostile takeover.

You can’t be a nationalist and also stick to the facts, since even though most Americans are nationalists, few would think that 1% of the federal budget going abroad is worth worrying about.

What. That's a non-sequitur. To draw a crude analogy, if thieves are stealing your stuff at a rate of only 1% of your income every year, then security is not worth worrying about. Or if you only waste 1% of your time sitting in traffic or standing in line at the post office, then it's not worth making roads or post offices more efficient. Hanania has made a bad argument here.

The economic analysis I've seen (please share if you have counter-examples) looks only at impact on GDP or on American wages and prices (…)

I think this is besides Hanania's point. He is gesturing at something like Scott's conflict theory vs mistake theory. His point is: nationalists criticize the mainstream left for advocating for policies intended to help foreigners more than Americans. But, in fact, when you look at their actual policies and the arguments behind them, the left's policy are intended to help Americans first. They have a factual disagreement with right-wingers about whether those policies would work, and they're hypocritical about how they phrase their goals, but making America better off (at the expense of the rest of the world if need be) is in fact also their terminal goal, whether they admit it or not; their revealed preferences, granted their (perhaps erroneous!) beliefs about how economics work, align with right-wingers'.

Saying that the economic studies are bad is neither here nor there. The salient point for Hanania is the existence and prevalence of those studies (however flawed), as opposed to studies actually embracing the left's supposed belief that it would be morally necessary to enact such policies even if they harmed Americans, so long as they benefited foreigners.

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