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I'm starting a new top-level regarding trigger happy Iceman meets wine mom in Minneapolis because, rather than debating the videos, I'd like to focus more on a compare and contrast to get a true culture war angle. People have made an analogy to the woman who died on Jan 6th but I don't think it lands strongly enough. Permit me to cut closer to the bone, friends.
The only fatality on Jan 6th was an unarmed woman being shot by a federal agent[1] because she was opposing what she considered an illegitimate government action. Liberals tearlessly argued this is what happens when you Fuck Around while conservatives argued she was righteously Resisting (TM).
Today the players are the same but the jerseys are flipped. Liberals cry with so, so many tears of empathy for the dead woman in the car while conservatives argue they were obstructing a legitimate state function and put the officer in danger and this is what happens when you Fuck Around.
In broad strokes it's clear neither side cares about democracy or rule of law per se. Conservative faith in rule of law evaporates when it says no to Trump and liberal empathy for the scrappy civil disobedients dries up when it's a Chud. Both sides are happy with mob violence when it's their side doing it and cry tyranny whenever they Find Out.
In exceptionally simplistic terms, the people on the left who are against ICE and pro Somali or whoever immigration don’t love Somalis, they just hate their fellow countrymen.
If a country is a home and all citizens are roommates, the left is the roommate that insists any stranger or bum off the street can live in the house regardless of what the other paying roommates want.
It’s important to realize that as an American you don’t have to justify why Somalis, Mexicans, Romanians, or any other foreigners should not live in the US. You can just not want them here and that’s ok. This is your home. You have that right and the majority of Americans agree with you.
The Bangladeshi can be a world class physicist, innovative neurosurgeon, or the greatest writer in the world. It doesn’t matter. You have the right to not want him in your house, in your land, in your space. That’s sovereignty.
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!"
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.
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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