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Notes -
I've been chewing on an idea and wanted to try a steel-manning exercise.
The premise is this: If we grant that the cultural right is "winning" right now, what's the strongest possible argument that this is leading to some genuinely bad outcomes for the country?
I have a few specific angles in mind. How would you build the strongest case for these ideas?
A more "gloves-off" approach to online speech is a win for free expression, but its most visible result has been the normalization of unapologetic racism. The core of this argument isn't just that it's unpleasant, but that it's actively corroding social trust and making it harder to have a unified country. Not sure if you’ve seen this too, but I see tons of ‘black fatigue’ and explicitly white nationalist people in my feed and there’s not much I or anybody else can do about it. What does the most persuasive version of this argument look like?
It seems pretty clear that rhetoric from the top, especially from Trump, has pushed nativist ideas into the open. The strong version of this argument is that this has moved beyond simple policy disagreements (like border security) and has become a real cultural attitude of exclusion. How would you build the case that this isn't just a fringe phenomenon anymore, but a significant and growing force in American life?
This flows from the last point. For decades, our biggest strategic advantage has been that the smartest, most ambitious people from all over the world wanted to come here. The argument to be steel-manned is that we're actively squandering that. Between the nativist vibe and a chaotic immigration system, we're sending a signal that the best and brightest should maybe look elsewhere. What's the most solid case that we're causing a real "brain drain" that will kneecap us economically and technologically for years to come?
What makes me think about this point is all of the talk about Indian people online. Like them or not, they are STRONG contributors in the workplace. If the rhetoric gets to a point where legal immigrants and contributors to our society feel unwelcome, there could be real brain drain effects that we’ve never experienced before. The Vivek backlash a few months ago also is probably related.
Again, knowing that ideas like these are losing right now, how you would argue them to the best of your ability? I’ll admit I kind of want to hear them outside a setting like X where communities are isolated and you’re mostly preaching to the choir / your ingroup
For me, as much as I've been infuriated with progressive activism the past decade, the censorship rollback has revealed that the leftists were, in fact, right about many of the rightoids. Many actually are racist -- not in the "oh, there may be group differences" sense, but in the "I hate colored people and I want them out of the country" sense.
Why we can't have a single group that has stable, high-IQ people in charge advocating for basic civic decency, responsibility, and functional society is beyond me. Yes, we can and should imprison colored people for committing violent crime. No, this is not racist. No, that does not mean we ship all the colored people away at gunpoint. As Bukele has so clearly demonstrated, even in a country quite literally full of brown people with a globally chart-topping murder rate, all you have to do is put the violent criminals in prison and the crime magically drops to levels of western Europe. It is, in fact, that simple.
Alas, this is all clearly too much to ask of the Americans.
We really tried. Politicians were supposed to be that (that's the whole point of having representative republic instead of direct democracy). They are obviously nothing of the sort. Journalists were supposed to be that. They sold their mission for clicks and ideological peer adoration. Academia was supposed to be that. They sold their mission for grants and ideological power. We don't have it because - collectively, as a society - we tried it and we fucked it up. We don't have currently any institution that is interested in doing that.
That said, anti-immigrant sentiment is nothing new. It has been about the Irish, about the Germans, about the Chinese, about the Japanese (US people literally put them in camps!) and so on, and so forth. Cross-cultural encounters will always produce people that reject the other culture and hate everything and everybody that has to do with it. It can be worked through - provided that there's a working integration process. Multiculturalism broke that process though because it's ideological premise has been that integration is evil, demanding newcomers to adapt to the host culture is evil, the host culture is by default oppressive and guilty, and must go out of its way - including throwing out the rules that apply to the members of the host culture and hold it together - lest the newcomers feel inconvenienced or sad. The result has been a predictable disaster everywhere it has been tried. If the right wants to recover from this disaster, they need to formulate a coherent integration policy, and build a clear ideological wall of separation between anti-immigrant sentiment (which will not go anywhere, it is an inevitable consequence of culture heterogeneity) and enforcing integration policy. Which may piss off some loudmouths but there's no other way if there is to be an ideologically sound platform that does not cut ties with the centuries of American tradition.
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With violent crime it really is the same very small number of people doing it(yes, I’ve seen whatever Twitter thread you want to reference trying to prove mathematically that 13/52 means some notable percentage of the black male population will commit murder over the course of their lives- it’s all bupkiss because they don’t account for repeat offenders). With school performance and demands for a bailout because of it it is not.
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They've always been right that some people are racist. The steelmanned counter-argument is just that the cure is worse than the disease . Progressives themselves agree that pure racial animus alone is not that important, which is why they define it away via "racism= prejudice . Progressives can't be trusted not because racism doesn't exist, but because it's a blank cheque for a bunch of very stupid and/or illiberal policies.
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I think the logic largely goes like this:
Its the same way that most people are not immigration absolutists but if the left and center refuse to deal with them problem and indeed insist on making it worse then I guess I'll vote for the right, even though they will go much further than I'd prefer. Or if the right insists on full abortion bans then I'll vote for the left and their up to the moment of birth plans, even though I'd prefer reasonable limits.
If the left was open to fixing the actual problem then throwing the baby out with the bathwater would be less popular. Though the fact that in this case the non-problem population is also very loudly offended by the idea of solving the problem makes it worse.
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