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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   35697 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.

Yes, organs of the left have produced voluminous analyses saying "what we want is good for you too". On trade, this is credible (not in the least because not all free traders are on the left). On immigration... it is clearly not their true reason, because the ones not toiling away in the bowels of the NBER producing such papers are making arguments based on how the US has an obligation to the poor foreigners, and leftist NGOs are busy helping get the poor foreigners to the US by hook or by crook.

This is gaslighting.

On immigration... it is clearly not their true reason, because the ones not toiling away in the bowels of the NBER producing such papers are making arguments based on how the US has an obligation to the poor foreigners

Surely that's consistent with the hypocrisy running the other way. They've come to believe high immigration is in their selfish interest, and spend a lot of time pretending they support it out of a deep moral conviction to make themselves look good. It's bad psychology to suppose that "it's in our economic self-interest" is the face-saving cover story, and "it's the ethical thing to do, however painful" is the dirty secret: in leftist spaces the latter is clearly the higher-status thing to say, whether you believe it or not, while coming out and admitting "we need more immigration because it'll make us wealthier" makes you sound like a deeply uncool capitalist.

I want more immigration for selfish reasons. Because in the modern times, countries which import people will have more robust economies than those who just peter out and invert their demographic pyramids.

And as opposed to the increasingly common right wing concerns, I don't care about living in a diverse place, I actually enjoy it. I like to eat different foods and I'm a big language learning nerd, so its cool to practice people's languages with them. I believe in importing highly skilled people from all over the planet as the way to build a powerful country. (Although I'm fine with mid level immigrants too, small business owners, chefs, whatever!).

America has benefitted enormously from stealing the top percentile of almost every other country on the planet and these fools in government currently want to do everything to end that system and turn us into a declining backwater former power like the UK. Cutting funding for science, ceding our position in the world we built, and tearing up the good will that we have from other countries is the icing on the cake.

I'm going to steal right wingers framing here but I seriously think this is the case. What right wingers want to do is profoundly dysgenic, they want us to stop siphoning talent from the world and instead close ourselves off. So instead of being, idk, a bubbling cauldron of human potential like a New York City or a Cambridge Massachusetts, they want us to become more like Appalachia. Closed off, greying, clinging to dying industries, old modes of life, lacking in dynamism in a competitive world, and with a bad reputation everywhere else.

It's not really in my interests, that one!

Hopefully more liberals learn to talk like me instead of only the bleeding heart thing, that would also be in our interest.

  • -10

Just to raise the obvious point, the UK's descent into decline pretty well matches our increase in immigration. Tony Blair's Labour and then the Conservatives made exactly the same argument as you and the effect has been catastrophic.

Now, you might be saying that you can just take the top percentile, but you don't know what will happen when all those millions and millions of foreigners you're welcoming decide they prefer the company of their countrymen and co-religionists to that of Americans, and vote accordingly. Do you think that a 40% muslim country is going to respect your liberal views?

I don't think the US would be in a position to have that many muslims, the world is a big place and most of the people in it aren't muslim.

I do dislike abrahamic religions that try to dominate politics so I see the rationale for being concerned about becoming eventually dominated by followers of one. However, that doesn't mean I want to close all immigration. Immigration policies can be tailored to who you do want to let in. It's not all or nothing.

And I think Europe has different problems regarding immigration than the US does, being right next to the middle east and in former colonial relationships with other muslim countries.

Immigration policies can be tailored to who you do want to let in. It's not all or nothing.

From my perspective, the mistake you're making is thinking that there is a continuous 'you' that makes decisions. Immigration is like steroids or heroin, it changes the decision-maker in ways that make their future decisions unforeseeable. It's also a ratchet, because once immigrants get citizenship and start having children you can't reverse the invitation.

In the UK we passed through about 70 years of post-war immigration policy, and the reasons given for doing it changed as they became obviously untenable:

  1. They're just here for a few years to make money and then they'll go home and live like kings
  2. Okay, they're staying, but there's only a few of them and anyway, they're all Commonwealth citizens, they look up to us, they're culturally British
  3. Okay, there's quite a lot of them now, and they all vote as a bloc for pro-immigration parties, but we need immigration for economic reasons and they're grateful to be here so it's basically fine
  4. Okay, they aren't integrated and are loudly hateful of Britain and British people, but maybe we deserve to be criticised! It's good for us! And besides, our economy will collapse without them.
  5. Huge numbers of low-wage immigrants are being brought in, at a significant net loss to the public purse. We have open ethnic warfare on the streets and ethnic political parties. The proportion of native British are dropping at an alarming rate. Services can't take the strain of the extra people, and neither can housing since they all want to live in the same areas. But talking about any of it would embolden the far-Right, and anyway we need low-wage immigration to care for the aging immigrants.
  6. ???

You can disregard all of this as scaremongering, or say that it will be different in America. It might! But it's like taking hard drugs - even if you think the risks are overblown, why would you mess with that stuff when you know how many people have wrecked their lives?

I can see the point in that changing the composition of a democracy will change change the composition of the decision making apparatus.

But there is one more difference I can say there is between the US and Europe. We are literally just definitionally immigrants. The country has always been a place that people immigrate to because it offers opportunities and advantages. I’d have to be convinced that there is some compelling reason that right now is the unique moment in time where it’s correct to stand up and yell stop.

And I don’t really see much unique about right now. People on this forum I suspect would be quick to jump out and say, but now they’re not Europeans that’s the problem! But that’s something that’s unique to now, we’ve had non-European immigration going on for many decades and they’ve integrated just fine. We have chinatowns and neighborhoods where you can get authentic tacos and not much that I see that’s genuinely bad to show for it.

Was there some severe problem that immigration caused in the past in the US? I don’t really think so and so I’m not one of the jump around and yell stop people.

most of the people in it aren't muslim.

They're working on fixing that.

Good luck! Again the US isn't Europe, our immigration problems tend to be pretty different. Most immigration here seems to be from Latam and India. If the question instead was like, what if your country was 40% latino? I mean... I don't really care. I'm from the southwest that's already the case, lol. One of my favorite parts of the US is walking around Miami and you have an Argentinian bakery next to a pupusa joint next to a Colombian restaurant and a Jamaican place, and when you walk into a store they greet you with a buenos dias.

These guys will likely have my back against this supposed muslim takeover anyway!

These guys will likely have my back against this supposed muslim takeover anyway!

what is more probable to happen is that the Latin kings will close off their neighborhoods (like they did during the summer of love) when the islamists begin to act up and you will be one of the first to appear in the local newspaper.

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Man, I want to be on your side (or at least against the ones against you), but this is such a lazy dodge.

I think your interlocutor is trying to get you to envision a world where the fires of the Atheism Wars are needed once more.

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