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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
I think your premise is dubious, but assuming it's true, mostly what I see is a victory for accelerationists.
Everything Trump is doing now means when Democrats come back into power, they are going to try to reverse everything he did and then set the dial at eleventy and make sure no MAGA ever again. The MAGAs currently in power, of course, know this is what will happen, so they're doing their best to make their changes difficult or impossible to reverse, while hitting eleventy themselves.
I think Trump and Desantis and Abbot have demonstrated that the accelerationists were already in charge on immigration. There really was basically no control of the border and no attempt to remove obvious criminals once they got here. That's why Trump was able to get at all that low-hanging fruit, and why there haven't been really compelling immigration atrocity stories. The best they could do was Abrego Garcia... and he certainly seems like a bad hombre, even if his case was screwed up procedurally.
Immigration is one of the issues where I tend to be more in agreement than not with the "anti" side.
Which is why I think your fist-pumping for "fuck yeah faster harder" accelerationism is ill-considered.
Because if you think future Democratic administrations cannot open the borders more than previous ones did, I think you're in for a world of disappointment. And that is frankly what I expect to happen.
Skipping the NGO middlemen of bus passes and providing guidance by running direct flights instead, or what?
No, they were already doing that also. The AP confirms this in the process of denying it.
Ha, I was thinking of the recent brouhaha in the UK with the Afghans, this one had already slipped my mind. Thank you for the reminder.
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