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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.
I think America is already dead. There are almost certainly other theories, but look at the utter collapse of our state capacity.
Sometimes I see people point to Vietnam as the point where America "lost the ability to win wars", the first Iraq War not withstanding. We can fight wars. We can fight wars for decades. But we haven't achieved our geopolitical goals after a war in decades.
But there is more to running a nation than adventurism over seas! Sadly since Obama basically the state has failed at every initiative it ever undertook, and fails harder, faster and more obviously as time goes on. And yet people connected to government keep getting fantastically wealthy!
The corruption and graft is so out of control, we've become like Africa where nothing gets built, but the people accepting the contracts all live in mansions. And it's hard to ignore that the multi-ethnic low trust society we've all been forced into seems to have paved the way for this.
I'm no longer confident the US will be around in my old age. I just wonder which ethnic group or coalition will be lead by some modern day Atilla or Clovis will seize control of large portions of the US under a forced "reorganization" of state and federal power because the feds no longer have the state capacity to stop them. After all, we've seen such a decline in state capacity everywhere else, why should we expect them to hold the country together, push comes to shove? You think the 20 million illegals that flooded the country, or the 60-100 million descendants they'll have in 50 years in their ethnic ghettos care about the continuity of the American project? They came here for a better life, and that doesn't necessarily include us.
I’ve always put this somewhat before that. Around the start of the 20th century the idea that the West as a civilization was good and right and its ideas were good and right we’re already declining. Vietnam was more unveiling than the change itself. You can look to almost any institution you care to name, and in the 19th century they were self-confident, willing to impose themselves, and seen as obviously right and good, and the way forward is to impose those values and ideas on the world. Western Christians in 1840 were trying to impose Christianity on colonies. Now those colonies are more orthodox than Western churches who now apologize for ever taking Christianity seriously. In the past, it was self evident that imposing western ideas on the rest of the world was making the world better. Today, we have teach-ins to make sure that no one thinks that democracy, human rights, free trade, or science are better than tribal authoritarian governments that put women in tents and refuse to let them speak.
I submit that Western civilization is old and has various serious philosophical illnesses. Most of them are not fatal if treated in time. But I don’t think they will be.
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