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I don't think this works, as there are also relatively right-leaning libertarians like Bryan Caplan who are also in favor of more immigration.
My highly tentative suspicion is that at least some of the political division over immigration is downstream of genetic differences related to the Big Five personality trait of Openness to Experience. I think this also explains a lot of the increasing urban-rural divide in American politics, with people often self-sorting based on their genetic predisposition to cosmopolitanism and tribalism.
Unfortunately for the tribalists, there are a lot of benefits to city living due to networking effects, and so, generally speaking, city folk enjoy a higher standard of living than rural folk in the modern day. Since rural folk will have a higher genetic predisposition towards tribalism, this leads to growing resentment at their "unfair" status compared to urban elites, in a cycle that just gets worse and worse as the genetic ability to be cosmopolitan leaves rural breeding stock with each generation, leaving those who are left behind less and less able to cut it in the city.
It's not that rural people are genetically inferior. They're well suited to a small, close-knit tribal environment that was the human norm for 2 million years, but in the last 10,000 years the equation has flipped and cosmopolitanism generally outcompetes tribalism over the long term, and so humans keep building cities, and rural folk keep losing out and being xenophobic about the cosmopolitan urban areas.
I actually think H.P. Lovecraft is a great example of this phenotype. He was undoubtedly a genius, but with many of his aliens I find myself wondering if there isn't some way we could team up with them in a vast, galactic civilization? For example, the starfish-headed elder things and the mi-go seem like species we could eventually reach some sort of understanding with. Similarly, the underground K'n-yan seem like people we could get along with, under the right circumstances. And honestly, learning fourth-dimensional math witchcraft from a rat-human hybrid that can move through walls seems kind of cool actually (though I could do without the ritual baby sacrifice.)
But Lovecraft's horror was so effective because he understood the danger the Other posed. One of his most racist stories, "The Horror at Red Hook", which is partially inspired by his time living in New York city, is all about the effect that immigrant populations have on a native-born population. And yet, I find myself living in an apartment in a city, surrounded by black and brown people, not far from a bunch of Korean and Japanese law firms and restaurants, and with a largely LGBT friend group, and I'm generally pretty happy with my life, and I feel safe and good about where I live most of the time. I'm reminded of Curtis Yarvin's famous statement that Cthulhu always swims left, and a part of me wants to say, "Iä! Iä! Cthulhu fhtagn!"
One thing I don't think you've considered is that a lot of right wingers are actually fairly willing to accept immigration; their sticking point is that it has to be of individuals who help the country.
So as a general rule, I'd consider all of the following to be places where immigration shouldn't be used:
A lot of right wingers have decided "no more immigration" because they believe (and I believe too) that the blue tribe isn't going to respect any of the above. In Canada, our left-wing appointed judges explicitly look at whether a criminal conviction would impact someone's immigration claims, and assign lower penalties if they would. The dreamers reform in the US was explicitly predicated on the ideal that immigration law would be enforced in exchange for amnesty for existing illegal immigrants. There have been numerous allegations that Walz and other senior members of Minnesota's government knew about the Somali fraud, but didn't do anything about it.
If you want the right wing to accept immigration, then you need to be willing to make the following sacrifices:
Another thing that doesn't help is the hypocrisy inherent in a lot of the left-wing positions. Most recently with Biden, but with Obama too, there was an opportunity for the left to reform the immigration laws in the way they want. Instead, they chose to just not enforce the rules. If they thought their position was defensible, they'd push to change the laws to reflect what they actually want to do. The fact that they didn't implies to me either that they don't actually believe that the position they're taking is popular enough to win an election, or that they prefer to keep the leverage they have over the illegal immigrants (so they can force them to work for less under threat of deportation). Both are indefensible, from my perspective - the government is elected to do the will of their constituents, so doing something that couldn't win an election should be strictly off the table. And of course, the other position is no better than slavery.
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“I live in a highly filtered wealthy city with rents and zoning that keeps the poor immigrants out” And diversity is great.
Have you lived in Brazil? Or Venezuela or even Birmingham, Alabama?
I like my multi-ethnic slop bowls as much as the next guy but I will gladly consist of English food if it means I don’t have to worry about a lot of low IQ third worlders rising up and confiscating all my wealth like in S Africa or Venezuela.
So yes we have had some success paths to limited multiculturalism I guess in NYC, San Fran, and arguably Miami - but we’ve seen huge failure paths of multiculturalism in Latam and Africa. Early signs of trouble in the Nordics.
A big problem for elitists blues is they interact with the highly filtered elites of ethnic groups and not the average dude. But the low class reds know the average dude and not the elite.
Also I've been to plenty of 95%-local ethnostates in the world where they're totally covered on all the latest global food trends. Tier 1s in China don't have a hell of a lot of foreigners but they've got a staggering array of European, Asian and American cuisines available for cheap and high quality. The whole 'but the food' argument is pretty absurd in the days of Youtube.
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Or Europe...
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If you're white, and if black and brown people give you warm and fuzzy feelings—those feelings are not only unreciprocated—but reciprocated in the inverse direction. And insofar as black and brown people tend to be net-tax consumers, that’s not a warm and fuzzy feeling for the wallets of white and white-adjacent people.
Individuals such as Bethany Magee and Ryan Carson found out the hard way, where the latter's friends would continue carrying water for blacks after his death:
Bonus quotes from an (also black) family friend of the killer, in hitting for the cycle when it comes to tropes, emphasizing the killer was just a teen and a good boy:
I enjoy how the family friend says the stabbing was a horrible tragedy because the black killer comes from a good family; the victim's family is just an afterthought (and the victim is a zero-thought). Additionally amusing is how he wonders what "triggered" the killer to stab, akin to pitbull defenders wondering what triggered a pibbie's reactivity.
Interesting that Hispanics and Asians also rate every other group above whites (although "Asian" as a category is so broad as to be almost useless)
For Asians the ratings of the three other groups likely aren't statistically significantly different from each other. It does appear there's some greater variance in the ratings of Asian respondents, hence the wider errors (may be related to greater Asian heterogeneity, as you noted). Could just be lower sample size, though.
What's also interesting is that blacks have the highest degree of ethno-narcissism. They have the largest 1 vs. 2, 1 vs. 3, and 1 vs. 4 deltas of each of the four panels, where 1-4 correspond to the highest to lowest rated of each panel.
The 1 vs. 2 delta of black respondents (black vs. Hispanic) appears to be larger than the Asian 1 vs. 4 delta (Asian vs. white) and of similar magnitude as the Hispanic 1 vs. 4 delta (Hispanic vs. white), although these three deltas likely aren't statistically significant from each other.
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Yeah. Because you feel like one of them.
Try being in a place where you think you're one of them, and then you say something like "You know, calling Curtis Yarvin a Nazi seems kinda dumb because he's Jewish" or "Uh, this story about a rape on campus is probably totally made up" or "I don't think there's anything wrong with the "Hide yo' wives" meme' and having everyone turn on you. You'll realize you were living in a fool's paradise.
Of course, YOU wouldn't ever say anything that would trigger such a reaction, right?
I always felt like Scott Alexander's Kolmogorov Complicity and the Parable of Lightning was at least in part a guide for people with controversial beliefs to go along to get along. See also Leo Strauss, and his idea that great thinkers of the past were often esoteric and hid their actual ideas for only the smartest to find and deal with.
I think our relatively free and open era has spoiled a lot of us. We chafe against any limits on our abilities to say whatever we want and not have the people around us react with social opprobrium. And yet, Plato, writing one generation after Socrates was executed for his open practice of philosophy, is supposed to have said in his seventh letter, 'I have never written down my true beliefs.'
I definitely have beliefs that would make me a pariah in some of the social circles I move around in. Who doesn't? But I am polite and politick enough to not make a big deal out of these beliefs in the circumstances where it could go bad for me.
Don't get me wrong, there's value in being a Socrates or a Helvidius Priscus, and being willing to die for your beliefs, while speaking truth to power. But there is also value in being a Plato or (as Strauss sees them) a Maimonides or a Machiavelli, and hiding your true views from all except a vanishingly small number of highly discerning readers. Luckily, the internet is still anonymous enough that I think we get a great compromise: able to be open about our beliefs in places like the Motte, and able to be Straussians/take the Kolmogorov option everywhere else in our lives.
[...]
You now find yourself advising people to act like they live in the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin, and implicitly criticizing those who do not.
Has there ever been a human society where there weren't taboos or ideas that were considered dangerous and wrong? Even relatively open societies have lines you're not supposed to cross.
I think there's a good chance that Classical Liberalism is dead in America. I had a little hope that the right might try to revive it, but Trump 2 has clearly not brought anything like a bedrock of Classical Liberalism back to our politics. If we're going to have to suffer under the rule of identity politics from the Right or the Left anyways, might as well start quietly building the foundations for a better society like Kolmogorov, and not worry about what we can't control.
Of course, this is all acting with some assumption that something like a normal human society exists in a few decades, and I don't rule out the possibility that AI may prove to be a total game changer in numerous hard to predict directions.
I'm just going to ignore this smokescreen, and again point out that you are not only comparing the social circles you are in with Stalinist Russia, but blaming anyone who doesn't keep silent for not getting along.
I've also implicitly compared them to Lovecraftian horrors and hive-minded vampires in this same thread. I'm not sure why you're hammering this point. It isn't a gotcha, it is built into what I am saying.
And I wouldn't say "blame" is the correct word here. I said it is noble to be Socrates or Helvidius Priscus and die for your beliefs. That isn't blame. I just personally think that there is more wisdom in being Plato or Maimonides. People are allowed to disagree with me, and turn themselves into Socrates or Helvidius Priscus.
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Oh, how nice that we can explain away opposition to illegal immigration by "the right-wingers are just mentally deficient".
Don't you feel it's somewhat slightly colonialist to have the attitude "foreigners exist to provide me with tasty food from their cultures"? More seriously, how much interaction do you have with those black and brown people, how much are they part of your life and not just the scenic backdrop to "my fun time in the Big City"? Though I guess congratulations on being the Token Straight in your friend group! You are providing them with the same validation as the Korean restauranteurs are providing for you: "Hey, I know an actual straight guy in real life!" "No way!" "It's true, we even hang out sometimes, just ask DeShawn and Chasten!"
I don't believe that right-wingers are just mentally deficient.
My belief is closer to "agonistic pluralism" or the idea that within society there's a tendency for the struggle between various personality phenotypes to result in better outcomes overall. You need a certain amount of openness in society, but too much can lead to bad outcomes. You need a certain amount of fear of the Other, but too much can lead to bad outcomes.
I think there are plenty of historical examples to learn from. Look at Rome conquering Greece militarily, and then being "conquered" by Greek philosophical thought. Would Cato the Elder, who famously spoke out against Greek philosophy as un-Roman, have been happy to learn that his grandson, Cato the Younger, was the poster boy for Stoic martyrdom two generations later? I think for us non-Romans looking back, we can see that it was a mixed bag. The Greeks had a lot of good ideas, and Rome importing them probably helped them transition from a Republic to an Empire, and maintain their new system for hundreds of years, but it did come at the cost of being "less Roman" than the generation of Cato the Elder in some sense.
Now, I'm not naive enough to think that we'll always get the perfect balance of struggle at all times. In fact, I'm worried that various trends of modernity might be killing the goose that lays the golden eggs for us.
For example, I suspect that men and women in heterosexual relationships had a tendency to "balance each other out" personality-wise in the past, and the increasing number of single men and women and the nightmare of the modern dating scene is leading to this balancing not happening. So we get women flying off into extremes of Progressivism and Leftism, and men flying off into extremes of Rightism. And honestly, I don't like either tendency. I was against Wokeism, and I'm against Trumpist identity politics as well.
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Openness to foreign cultures, in my experience, is generally a bell-curve meme, with "wow, so many kinds of food" in the middle. Part of my political awakening was traveling a lot and seeing different stages of the world's progress towards becoming substantively identical multi-culti slop (with a few chintzy tokens from a people's old way of life), everything tossed into the blending blades of Scott's Universal Culture. It was realizing that I wanted Turkey to be Turkish that helped me realize I want America to be American. (Sadly this is far more complex than the culture war political narrative, and is more technocapital acceleration than just bad policy, but such is life)
I hope my talking about "Korean and Japanese restaurants" didn't come off as my only exposure to other cultures. I've also gone through periods of curiosity about several cultural times and places, with most of my exposure being to the history and thought of Japan, India, the Roman Republic and Empire, Ancient Greece, Italian Renaissance Humanists, and the North American Southwest Indians, with a small sprinkling of Revolutionary American history and the era of Jacksonian Democracy.
I also tried to learn Indonesian, and did a language immersion class in Bali, and have taken trips to Slovakia and Scotland. I would honestly say the Bali trip is part of what helped me appreciate the value of tribalism, and take that back to some of my appreciation for rural people in the United States.
I think there are aspects I still admire about the Universal Culture.
The fact that anywhere you go Prussian Schooling is the norm for schools, and people are using Hindu-Arabic numerals, with standardized testing influenced by ancient China, and the effects of standardization and industrialism have shaped us all into similar cookie cutter shapes is kind of wonderful and terrible at the same time.
It's like the vampires in the movie Sinners. All you have to do is die as yourself, and be reborn as something not quite alive, not quite yourself but eternal and powerful and predatory.
Yeah, I think one can appreciate Universal Culture in a Landian sense, as part of the technocapital Elder God summoning itself from the future. But a lot is also lost, and, even if we side with the hyperstitional space tentacles, we have a human duty to preserve, remember, and mourn.
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People in cities are still viciously tribal, though. Tons of them can't get through a casual conversation without mentioning how much they hate Trump, ICE, tech bros, cops, billionaires, conservatives, white people (while being white), rich people, straightness (while being straight), or men, and give you weird looks if you don't join in. And that's if you can even get them to talk to you.
My friend group here, despite being very adjacent to the LGBT community, has no actual LGBT people in it. (At most, It has the occasional straight chick who talks about Queerness a lot). And this isn't because we keep the LGBTs out, it's because none of us are "cool" enough for them; we dont speak in reddit-isms, too much of our conversation isn't about politics, and when one of them does wander in, we dont relentlessly praise their LGBTness like I presume other straight people do, we keep playing D&D. Oh, and the system we use doesn't have Tieflings in it, that's a big barrier. This suits me just fine.
Despite being full of minorities and anti-racists, the neighborhoods are still racially sorted somehow. It can't be the fault of conservatives, since there's none of them here.
Tribalism is alive and well in cities. By comparison, people outside of cities don't quake in performative fear when someone they don't know exists in their general vicinity, they don't constantly screech about all the things they hate, and what LGBT and People of Color that do exist there seem far more willing to socialize with non-queer/non-of-color people without making the entire interaction about queerness or of-color-ness.
Also, HP did describe the Elder Things as Men of a different age, they were ultimately people and more a subject of awe and fascination than horror. He arguably hated them way less than black people.
Blue Tribers hating on Trump, tech bros, cops, billionaires, rich people, straightness and men are all hating on other blue tribers. (It's the local cops they object to, not random cops in small-town Iowa, and Trump is a renegade Blue Triber). "White people" is a corner case - white people performative hating on white people is mostly a weapon in intra-Blue status games, but can also be an expression of hatred for the Reds. But that is a quibble - more fundamentally, I think you are extrapolating from very online minorities. I have spent a lot of time professionally around PMC Blue Tribe Americans, and for most of them the only time they performatively hate on right-wing outgroups is for an hour a year as part of mandatory workplace diversity training. My more limited experience travelling in Red America is consistent - the minority of politically engaged Reds engage in performative hatred on the Blue target du jour (at the time it was Hilary Clinton) but the grill-pilled majority try not to talk about politics with otherwise-friendly strangers.
If stoking tribal hatred was popular with normies, American politics would not look the way it does. Poasters chasing clout online maximise tribal hatred, but both parties try to turn it down during general election campaigns (Trump with far more success than Harris, which is part of why he won) because it is a vote-loser.
All my examples come from IRL interactions in Chicago. It happens with randos, it happens with people I meet socially.
Three separate people said "ewww, there's a lot of white people around here" while wandering around the north side with me in 2020. Way back when I brushed it off, and went on to regret associating with them after how they behaved later.
I am so, so tired of the "it's just some loud weirdos online" argument that you're responding to. No, I am talking about real-life examples dealing with blue-triber whites where they can't go 5 minutes without making some kind of snide comment about rednecks/chuds/white trash/whatever the preferred term of the day is for the residents of Red America. Trying to discuss the weather leads to it. Trying to discuss local events leads to it. There is no escape.
It's not even Red America being shit on, it's White People in general or Men in general. Sometimes they complete the trifecta and complain about Straight people. Since I'm the person they're talking to, I honestly can't tell if they're telegraphing that I should go away, or they just think this is how people interact.
Regardless of who the target is, it's still a fucking unhealthy and unbecoming amount of open vitriol for the people who claim they're all about Empathy/Niceness/Inclusivity.
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Blacks with more red tribe adjacency(lots of them working in the trades, but bowhunting is the real reliable way to meet them) are real popular with the red tribe, generally. The tribalism in the US is about different kinds of white people hating each other, I don't see a massive difference between the two tribes in terms of actual dislike, and the fact of the matter is that we're too different to be friends easily so some tensions are always going to be there.
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Yeah, that's one thing I like about "At the Mountains of Madness". Narrator starts off with "these horrible alien things attacked us and maybe even ate some of our dead" and ends with "they're people like us, we have much more in common than with the true monstrosities".
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Caplans position is actually quite far from the left. He favors a UAE type model: let the world in and deport them instantly if they jaywalk or consume any welfare. Also they and their America-born children get no political representation or welfare ever.
Apart from the complete inability to politically maintain this situation, it's a good plan.
Sentences like this crack me up
"If you look passed the issues that make this plan fundamentally impossible to work, it would work so good"
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That's my beef with the left and with Caplan on this: let's import a permanent serf class to do the low-grade labour it would be too expensive to pay natives to do, forever!
The left is just less upfront about what this means in practice, and more self-deluding about 'and I guess we can let their kids go to college? just so long as there is a never-ending supply of replacement serf labour from their home countries so I get my tomatoes picked for cheap!'
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If you import a bunch of slaves you might be able to beat and select the criminality out of them. But you won't get rid of their low trust clannish mentality and backwards culture.
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I mean, that story ended with the rat bursting out of the main character's chest to claim the heart he had promised when he signed a contract with Yog Sothoth, so not terribly cool even without the baby sacrifice.
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I think this is basically correct, though there are other personality traits that are related as well. With Lovecraft, in particular, my impression is that he was a highly Open to Experience person who nonetheless was extremely conscientious and concerned about contamination. The highest predictor of political liberalism is Openness to Experience, but the second-most is sometimes called "orderliness," or concern about order, contamination, structure.
There are also people who are highly Open to Experience in an intellectual sense, but closed to experience in a social sense, and I'd probably put myself in that category. I'm happy to try all sorts of wild cuisines or explore all sorts of interesting cultures, so long as it doesn't impose on me all sorts of social tests that I might fail, to humiliation or sorting into a category of "ignorant American tourist."
So I guess you might argue I'm defensively xenophobic; I know what Europeans and LatAms and the Chinese and the Japanese say about Americans behind closed doors. Why would I want people who don't view themselves as natively part of my group subject to that derision to come here, potentially with their derisive attitudes towards me and the people I care about and the customs that are meaningful to me? I know, say, what my friend's French-American coworker says about America. There simply aren't a lot of people who are truly xenophilic towards America, despite the media representations from Los Angeles that falsify what's it's really like here and which we pump out to the rest of the world -- I'm not sure whether we should be sending our political news or our cultural products to Timbuktu, but no one in Hollywood consulted me.
My opinion is that most immigrants, legal and illegal, to the US are people who view it as an economic resource, not a country and a people with its own customs and values that should be respected. I want people to come to my country because they share my love for it and want to make it their home, not because they see dollar signs. I want assurance that the place I live, the customs I grew up with, and the people I care about are not being judged as stupid, corrupt, or contemptible by those joining them.
The feeling that Americans have about our relations to the rest of the world is that we're hated for geopolitical reasons that the average American has no control over -- I don't know who I have to vote for to stop my country from antagonizing foreign peoples like we do every five milliseconds -- and because of wealth that to us feels like poverty, because cost of living adjusts. Both the left and the right feel this, but the left tries to apologize for it or adopt what people say we should (we should be more like Europe, European governments do this, all other western nations do this, we're really just like a third world country, Obama's apology tour), and the right either lives in denial of it ("leader of the free world!," "USA, USA!"), or, more recently, leans into it.
Trump, enter stage left. I don't know if you can understand the Greenland stuff or the America First stuff or the Venezuela stuff without the sense that a lot of red Americans have that the world believes (in their estimation) that the US has no soft power and is a fat, ugly, overprivileged waste of resources that believes in ridiculous, outmoded forms of belief like Christianity, or freedom of speech, or patriotism. I suppose Trump's gut feeling is, "well, if that's how you see us, then I guess that's our only avenue to global influence without abjection and humiliation." To some degree, American xenophobia is directly related to the impression that our attempts at xenophilia aren't met with mutual respect, if not from politicians, then at least from ordinary people or cultural elites.
It's true that cosmopolitanism often correlates with wealth generation, but at the same time, almost no countries on earth are truly xenophilic -- they use cosmopolitanism as a tool, like China and Japan or hell, MBS style Saudi Arabia, while retaining an intense sense of nationalism and a commitment to national identity. So I'm not convinced that cosmopolitanism is useful without limits, and may even be destructive and non-competitive should forming a strong, coherent national identity serve as an adaptive strategy in the modern era after all, as I'd argue it's doing for countries like China.
The issue isn't whether cities are economic engines or whether cosmopolitanism is useful for global economic trade. It's what the limits are to cosmopolitanism's utility. At times, cosmopolitanism begins to feel less like benevolence and more like unreciprocated vulnerability. The US oscillates between generosity and defensiveness because we're desperate to be seen as good. The debate is the same one the country had in 2016: should America be great (again), even if it means being terrible, or should America try to convince the world that, in Hillary Clinton's words, "America is great because America is good." The fear is that it's not possible to be both.
Describing Lovecraft as “conscientious” without mentioning neuroticism feels like burying the lede. You can’t separate his outlook from the absolutely miserable time he was having with his family and his finances.
I think Americans are the same way. Xenophobia comes from uncertainty. When times are good and people are optimistic, we’re all more willing to be cosmopolitan. As times get harsher, more people hit their personal neuroticism thresholds. Those with high conscientiousness are squeezed towards authoritarianism. Their less conscientious counterparts favor anarchy.
This is why Trump populism has outcompeted Tea Party libertarians. It’s why he keeps embarrassing neoliberals, whose radicals despise them, too. He is rewarded for playing the strongman in a way that a progressive cannot.
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This is true for Euros and some foreign elites who have absorbed American blue-tribe memes. For the most part, people love meeting an American, with the same qualifiers as with any foreigner (respect/be interested in the culture, be friendly and funny, try to get off the tourist paths).
Coming here from the Quality Contribution thread, I have to concur. America still has a strong positive, but maybe not explicit halo for europeans, at least for working class europeans. My (Spanish) wife and I went to visit New-York in december and my in-laws wanted as souvenirs Statue of Liberty keychains and (more tellingly) american 1$ bills. They have put these bills in their wallets and phone cases as good luck charms. This is despite them also watching the news daily and absorbing all the anti-american signaling. I don't think a country's smallest denomination bill becomes a good luck charm for foreigners without at least unconscious good vibes being associated with it.
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The thing is that the US has crazy, overflowing amounts of soft power, it's just divided up between sides of a political scene pumping out content to to own the opposite side. So the half of Euros that buy into the Left side of the flood will of course be getting the message that America is basically Idiocracy, a country of cartoonish bigoted white supremacist cro-magnons. The growing share that is inundated more in the Right side of the slop will see America as the pink-haired jerks who are coming up with all this trans woke covid-lockdowns refugee rights stuff and exporting it here wholesale so we have to suffer it too. Pick either side of the stream and we get the crisp message that America is a sad, twisted, evil dystopia except for some plucky underdogs who barely matter.
IME though that feels halfway like an universal white-collar bonding ritual to assimilate and make friends most places in the world and be at home. US migrants elsewhere sure go for it. A surefire topic the cosmopolitan class of any country likes is how dumb and backwards the general populace is, how cringy the local folkways, and how surely other countries have it better.
And 80+% of it is on the Blue side, so Reds who think that Blue America is fake America see real America as consistently losing soft power battles. Foreign tourists visiting America come for the Blue cities, Disney World, and the scenery (which is in Red states, but doesn't express Red political values). Foreign media consumers consume Hollywood, prestige TV, (Blue) pop music, (mostly Blue-allied Black) rap/hip-hop, and the subset of country produced by Reds with atypical political views like Taylor Swift and Dolly Parton. Foreigners who learn American history see the White South as villains, losers, or both. Pro-American foreigners (ipse dixit) see the greatest achievements of American capitalism as Manhattan, Silicon Valley and Hollywood, not Walmart or Cargill. And we generally respect the output of elite American universities much more than the Reds do, partly because the worst DEI BS that your universities put out is optimised for local consumption whereas foreigners are more likely to see the excellent work they are doing in less-politicised areas like physics.
If I try to think of important sources of Red soft power, I would come up with:
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