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PaperclipPerfector  6d ago (text post)   26219 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 14, 2025

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I'm a doomer on the U.S., and I want to know what you guys think, in general, will be the trend for the next decade or further on. Here's my theory for how all this ends:

  • Politically, conflict theory has totally won. Extremists from both parties keep trying to outdo each other. This can lead to outright civil war or government breakdown down the line. Democracies all around the globe host more and more unhappy populations that, no matter which politicians they vote in, never seem to get what they want, leading them to vote in more and more strange and radical candidates.
  • Government spending will never recede. Too many groups need to stay satisfied with their welfare, otherwise the party that cuts them will never win an election again. This will lead to an eventual collapse, someday, with more and more economic pain as time goes on and as less productive people exist to support the invalids and growing number of leeches.
  • Dating sucks and gender relations are likely going to get worse as the social media experiment continues, to South Korea levels. It can only get worse from here.
  • As someone mentioned downthread, I could easily see status becoming harder and harder to get, as the players in the game optimize towards the most awful way to live: constant striving in every arena. Anyone left playing the game is a tiger mom. This is the one I'm least sure about, but it could change rapidly as economic circumstances shift.
  • I have no idea if the country will fail slow or fast, but it will likely decline in the next decade by a noticeable amount.

My friend is more of an optimist. Here's his theory on the first one:

  • Eventually, one party is going to realize their extremists never win races. They elect a moderate. Things normalize, politically.

Unfortunately, I didn't quiz him on all the rest of it. But now, somehow, it is making me wonder about the outlook of most of the Mottizens. I certainly see the doomer take on things pretty often.

I see a factoid sometimes that says conservatives are happier with their lives than liberals. Maybe that's a factor of rural living, maybe that's a factor of less thinking about serious issues, and less reading. I am pretty sure that conservatives on this site, on average, do not live in rural areas and, on average, think a lot more about serious issues, and read more. So maybe some bad, anecdotal science testing on The Motte is in order.

Are you a doomer, or a "bloomer"? What are some factors that lead you to your conclusion that the country is trending downwards or upwards? Please explain yourself, and please fight it out with everyone who thinks you're wrong.

I’m a soft doomer about the US but much less so than I am about (Western) Europe.

Mass immigration has seen fit to proffer the United States a gentle decline toward a high-inequality, mid-tier country with Some Third World Characteristics but probably with semi-functioning politics and many centers of high economic and industrial development. What is coming for Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Sweden, Britain, and increasingly also Spain, Ireland and Italy is much, much worse than that.

And why much worse?

Because of the character of the immigration. Latinos are largely deracinated, with little shared identity (which is why ‘Latinx’ or la raza stuff is largely the preserve of PMC white-Hispanic academics and the working class Mexican equivalent of Hoteps). Many will vote for a conservative ‘strongman’ caudillo over the left. Many consider themselves ‘white’ regardless of reality, and intermarriage rates are quite high. Many essentially share an ‘American dream’ of being an atomized consoomer with a big pick up truck, a bimbo wife and a McMansion in the suburbs. This may be suboptimal but it is not immediately catastrophic. An America after mass Hispanic migration (now occurring) is a poorer, more corrupt, more violent, more dysfunctional America, but it can probably survive as a polity.

In Europe the same isn’t true with large scale immigration from Islamic societies that have old, deep cultural and religious identities, often with an undercurrent of resentment towards Europeans and European society and separate both particular identities (‘I’m Turkish, not German’) and universal ones (‘I’m Muslim, I’m part of the global Ummah with my brothers and sisters’) that fully supplant the previous civic identity. Intermarriage rates between those from Islamic backgrounds and the natives are so low that in most places they’re negligible (and when they happen almost always involves an indigenous usually-woman converting). Coupled with general dysfunctional migration (including from non-Islamic regions) and the extreme pace of demographic change - faster in most of Europe than the US even if America is at a more advanced stage - and you have a recipe for the complete breakdown of social order and full Lebanonization in the coming years.

Consider that in 1950 the Maronites could easily have carved out their own state. But by the mid-1970s they no longer possessed the demographic strength even though they had most of the money and the technical skills.

I mostly agree with you, but I think that the levels of integration mean that if it comes to it, European countries can simply expel their migrants, while any immigration-caused decline in America will be permanent because the migrants have assimilated.

AFAIK the reason the Maronites did not carve out their own state was because it would not have been economically self-sufficient, they even lobbied the French for the inclusion of Muslim-majority agricultural areas such as the Bekaa Valley into Lebanon in order to avoid a repeat of the famines that had occurred under Ottoman rule. That being said, Maronites and Lebanese Christians in general have a weird sort of self-conception as Lebanese, given that they were the ones who lobbied for their rapey Muslim Lebanese countrymen to come to Australia. I can't imagine Europeans feeling that kind of kinship to their foreign underclass.

if it comes to it, European countries can simply expel their migrants,

I'm not sure they can; as in, I'm not sure they have the capacity — particularly if you compare demographics of fighting-age men. And even if they do, that won't be for long — can you still "expel the migrants" when they outnumber you?

Yes. The migrants you see milling around aimlessly in the public squares of London, Berlin, Rome etc. are largely poor, sporadically criminal, disorganized and disconnected. Their numbers will not stop a sufficiently determined Western state. What will stop that state is the lack of political will. There's plenty of capacity, but in a democratic state that capacity is always going to be subject to the whims of elected officials who all have their reasons not to use it.

The migrants you see milling around aimlessly in the public squares of London, Berlin, Rome etc. are largely poor, sporadically criminal, disorganized and disconnected.

Yes, but for how long? Look at the changes in at least British politics — how long before Islamic parties emerge to start providing leadership and organization for those masses.

The largest single non-British ethnic group in the UK is Indians at 2.9%, and they are fairly well-behaved. The largest problematic group is Pakistanis at 2.5%. The idea that there is a single "Islamic" ethnic group that have any shared interest other than pretending to care about Palestine is obviously false if you are familiar with the politics of either the Islamic world or ethnic-minority communities in the UK.

If the UK had the political will to deal with difficult ethnic minorities, they would be easy to defeat in detail. The only people who lump non-whites together are establishment lefties, who while not all-white are noticeably whiter than the census.

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