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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.
You’re eliding two very important questions:
For example, in Los Angeles, Latinos have totally replaced blacks in many neighborhoods. This process has not simply been a matter of numbers; there have been many instances of actual racial violence, in which Latino gangs have intimidated blacks into moving away. As David Cole has extensively documented, this has been an overwhelmingly positive development for the city. Even foreigners who speak broken English are, on the whole, preferable — in terms of their crime rates, their effect on civic life, their contributions to the economy — to native English-speaking black Americans.
Are Mexicans the population group I would ideally prefer to take over those parts of LA? No. Obviously I’d prefer a million white Danes, or a million Japanese. I don’t personally want to live in a heavily Mexican neighborhood and listen to awful Mexican music at 2 in the morning. But the Mexicans are undeniably a step up from what was there before, even though they were undoubtedly a foreign population replacing a “heritage American” ethnic group. The fact that blacks have some ineffable historical “claim” to be a long-standing part of the fabric of American culture is of very little importance compared to all of the observable material aspects of day-to-day life.
Similarly, if a million Vietnamese immigrants streamed into West Virginia and displaced the native hillbilly whites, West Virginia would be a better place to live for anyone who remained. There would be a short-term culture shock, as those immigrants’ English fluency would be low, their customs unfamiliar, etc. But within one generation, educational outcomes in the state would likely skyrocket as a result of the introduction of a conscientious and academically-diligent population, in comparison to the “founding stock” who had been there before.
Now, obviously, the outcome would be different if instead of a million Vietnamese it was a million Afghans. Appalachian white trash are a quite dysfunctional population, but they’re still way better than Afghanistan. (I am speaking, of course, in term of population averages; there are, of course, plenty of Appalachians who are good Americans, and plenty of Afghans who are good people.) I’d even rather live among ghetto blacks than among Afghans. Speaking about “replacement migration” as a pure negative is misguided.
Now, this is all separate from the question of whether or not it’s legitimate for elected political representatives to consciously think and act this way about their own people. It’s all well and good for me, a private citizen, to opine about how my black fellow citizens should get run out of town by Japanese foreigners. But if I had actual power to effect these changes, wouldn’t I owe some debt of care to the current constituents over which I serve? Can a purely elitist technocratic government, shorn of any sense of obligation to the people it rules (however imperfect and suboptimal those people may be) truly be said to have any legitimate mandate?
Ultimately that is the great political question of our time. To what degree is populism (however attenuated) simply a mandatory obligation of a government? How much do the elites owe to the least functional, least successful elements of their own society? (And how much can they realistically get away with, if they decide not to take the desires of their constituents into account, before it all comes crashing down?)
Mexican music is objectively better than the slop being pumped out in the US these days. I spend a lot of time around lower class mexicans at work, and it's mindblowing how many of them listen to melodically complex folk music played on real instruments.
I don't care how good it is, I don't want to hear it blaring through my windows. Or my walls (been there, done that).
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