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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 understand and mostly agree with what you’re saying in the first part, but blaming it on immigration in the second is a non sequitur. It seems like a multi-faceted problem and likely more of a “good times make weak men, weak men make…” more than anything else.
Also, when your country is run by 70+ year olds, all decisions are short-termist by definition. A 30 year cares about the future, a 70 year old is gonna be dead in the future!!
Everyone has their complaint and diagnosis tho. For libertarians it’s the switch off a gold standard #WhatHappenedIn1971. For progressives it’s the wealth gap and not enough gibs tearing apart the social fabric. For you, it’s brown skins ruining the inner city and tekkin jerbs.
Realistically, it’s a polycrisis and probably just what happens when an empire ages. Get a plan B and get out if things get too bad!
Seventy year olds are fully capable of caring about the generations to come. Indeed, financially secure seventy year olds (which presumably describes the elderly in the political class) are among those best suited to think in generational terms. If they don't, that's a deep cultural problem, and electing younger folks may mitigate it but will not solve it.
Talking to the boomer/elderly people I know, the thing that outrages them the most is either when their stock portfolio goes down rapidly, or any talk of cuts to social security/medicare.
Those doesn’t really seem like benefits to the younger generation who needs to pay for gibs, besides the obvious “when you’re my age, you’re gonna need some good healthcare”
Yeah, when you realize something like half the federal budget goes to elderly people who had a whole lifetime to save up it's kind of black pilling.
Yup. A functioning society might instead give these sort of social payments to women aged 25-35, which renew for 10 years if you have 2+ children.
But instead we give it to the oldest generation, who also has the most wealth of any generation on average…
I'll feel less bad about Social Security if ever convinced the only alternative is UBI For Women and Single Mothers.
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