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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 1, 2025

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Sure. Basically I think the purpose of a state is to be a back-scratching club: designate an ingroup, and then work to benefit them.

Here you imply what is the main issue I have with the western liberal's version of this, and why they are unable to apply it in a way that actually functions; an ingroup implies the existence of outgroups, or at least of people not in the ingroup. If extremely illiberal Muslims are supposed to be in our ingroup, who isn't? If people are denied a coherent definition of their ingroup, they cannot believe it will scratch their back, so they fall back on base individualism and all the civilisational gains that were achieved by nationalism slowly decay.

Honestly, I truly believe that the only thing that could potentially unite humanity in the way globalists dream of is the discovery of alien intelligence advanced enough to exclude from our ingroup. Because there is never an us without a them.

If extremely illiberal Muslims are supposed to be in our ingroup

That's not what western progressive leftists believe, though. To them, the Muslims aren't actually illiberal themselves but simply conditioned to illiberal habits by the illiberal societies that oppressed them, and having escaped to the liberal West, they are sure to adopt liberal norms if not swiftly then at least certainly over enough time (and any failure to do so is because our own Western societies have too much residual illiberalism).

The temporarily embarassed liberal muslim is supposed to be our ingroup.

who isn't?

The Nazis.

Obviously.

(Where "The Nazis" is anyone who actively rejects the leftist agenda.)

The Nazis.

Hence the lack of coherency, as it doesn't escape the public that the average modern "Nazi" has more in common with them and with good western liberals than an average practicing Muslim, and that the practicing Muslim has more in common with the historical Nazi (including strong hatred of Jews, totalizing politics)

If extremely illiberal Muslims are supposed to be in our ingroup,

extremely illiberal muslims shouldn't be in our ingroup (by default; I'd make attempts to convert them and bring them in). I'm very pro-coherent-definition. I'm happy with making an us/them distinction. I just want to make it on the basis of adhering to a particular creed, rather than arbitrarily assigning it via ancestry.

Yes, I am too a civic nationalist, and would like for this to work. But I find few liberals are okay with enforcing the clear us/them distinction, because it doesn't "feel" liberal to do so.

Nah, they're 100% okay with it, they just use a distinction that's largely orthogonal to the conservative civic nationalist one. Look at the hysteria about "gentrifiers", for example.