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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   30802 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 12, 2026

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I would like to spotlight this comment by @urquan in last week's thread because it touches upon something that I feel warrants it's own discussion seperate from all of the drama surrounding the death of Renee Good. Specifically this line here...

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.

Over the years I have often heard cosmopolitan liberals express a sentiment to the effect "the United States has no culture". I used to find this deeply frustrating, and even as a teenager it seemed obvious to me that there were clear cultural distinctions between the East Coast and West Coast, North and South, never mind between the US and UK or the US and France. We have an entire host of uniquely American, myths, stories, heroes, sports, holidays, figures of speech, etc... How could anyone be so blind as to think that the United States has no culture? It was as I got older that I came to understand that what they really meant was something more like "the United States has no culture worthy of consideration". The more I think about it, the more I think it is this distinction that the modern culture war is really being fought over.

In the blue corner we have liberals and post-modernists who seem to view the idea of nationalism and a national identity as something distinct from one's political, racial, and sexual identity as either "fake and gay" or something to be deconstructed and dismantled. To the extent that the existence of a distinct American national identity is acknowledged, it is as something to feel embarrassed about and apologize for.

...and in the red corner we have this guy. Yes I am aware the commercial itself is for an electric car, but let's be real, its a Cadillac, and I think we all know who that character would have voted for in 2024.

This ties into the rest of @urquan's post and what I see as the core appeal of Trump. I think that a large part of the reason that Trump evinces such strong reactions, both positive and negative, is that he gives off this vibe of being quintessentially capital-A AMERICAN in a way that I don't think any US President really has since the Cold War.

I have been accused of "trolling" and "rage-baiting" by users here for quoting Teddy Roosevelt's "Hyphenated-American" speech, but its something I stand by, and that I feel bears repeating.

There is no room in this country for hyphenated Americanism. When I refer to hyphenated Americans, I do not refer to naturalized Americans. Some of the very best Americans I have ever known were naturalized Americans, Americans born abroad. But a hyphenated American is not an American at all.
This is just as true of the man who puts "native" before the hyphen as of the man who puts German or Irish or English or French before the hyphen. Americanism is a matter of the spirit and of the soul. Our allegiance must be purely to the United States. We must unsparingly condemn any man who holds any other allegiance. But if he is heartily and singly loyal to this Republic, then no matter where he was born, he is just as good an American as anyone else.
The one absolutely certain way of bringing this nation to ruin, of preventing all possibility of its continuing to be a nation at all, would be to permit it to become a tangle of squabbling nationalities, an intricate knot of German-Americans, Irish-Americans, English-Americans, French-Americans, Scandinavian-Americans, or Italian-Americans, each preserving its separate nationality, each at heart feeling more sympathy with Europeans of that nationality than with the other citizens of the American Republic.
The men who do not become Americans and nothing else are hyphenated Americans; and there ought to be no room for them in this country. The man who calls himself an American citizen and who yet shows by his actions that he is primarily the citizen of a foreign land, plays a thoroughly mischievous part in the life of our body politic. He has no place here; and the sooner he returns to the land to which he feels his real heart-allegiance, the better it will be for every good American.

  • Theodore Roosevelt Addressing the Knights of Columbus, October 12th, 1915

It is that sense of one's real heart-allegiance that I feel is sorely missing from much of the modern immigration debate.

My opinion is that most immigrants, legal and illegal, to the US are people who view it as an economic resource

This is how immigrants have always viewed the USA, including Ellis Islanders that came in the 1800s. Do you think the Irish fleeing the potato famine primarily came to the US because they wanted its culture? Obviously not, which is why they cloistered up in corrupt groups like Tammany Hall.

The thing that made the USA unique was that it was pretty good at assimilating these people over 3ish generations. It made them care about America's civic institutions, and got people to slowly realize that the main reason why the US had so much $$$ was because of its culture, and so people should care about that culture.

Over the years I have often heard cosmopolitan liberals express a sentiment to the effect "the United States has no culture"

I've spent most of my life surrounded by cosmopolitan liberals and I've literally never heard an IRL person say this. The only time I've heard it was 4chan shitposting on /pol/ as clear bait.

This is how immigrants have always viewed the USA

IF I agreed with your supposition, my reply would be something to the effect of "something being the status quo does not make it desirable", but I don't agree with your supposition because in my mind there is a qualitative difference between the sort of person who crosses an ocean at great risk understanding that they are effectively cutting all ties with their previous life to start anew, and the sort of person who emigrates with the explicit goal of sending money "home".

Again, It is that sense of one's "real heart-allegiance" that I feel is sorely missing from much of the modern immigration debate.

I've spent most of my life surrounded by cosmopolitan liberals and I've literally never heard an IRL person say this. The only time I've heard it was 4chan shitposting on /pol/ as clear bait.

Europeans are more likely to say "America has no culture," while American liberals will specify "white people have no culture," but I've heard both IRL many times, though it was more common in the late 2010s.

I've spent most of my life surrounded by cosmopolitan liberals and I've literally never heard an IRL person say this.

I have. Mostly cosmopolitan liberal Americans, but occasionally Europeans.

Nationalism can't stand up long-term against urban-globalist atomization, because it's the creation of urban-globalist atomization. That stars-and-stripes/ apple-pie Americanism is a thoroughly artificial construct: it was cobbled together in the mid-1800s to overwrite more authentic "heart-allegiance" to local and state communities, just as the new mega-states in Europe propagandized fake mythologies of "Germany" (b. 1815) and "Italy" (b 1861) to undermine people's more authentic allegiance to the assimilated Hanover, Prussia, Venice, Florence, etc.

3-4 generations ago, the nationalists were themselves the high-culture hipster urbanites with more love for sociologists' utopian fantasies than for their real-life neighbors. The nationalists were the ones erasing boundaries and mixing culturally disparate populations; the nationalists were the ones preventing people from celebrating their own customs and speaking their own languages in their own lands. The nationalists were the ones replacing all the rich particularity of local culture with bland nationwide, state-enforced pap. (You yourself point out the "clear cultural distinctions between the East Coast and West Coast, North and South.") As a result, I think there's an inherently fake and cringe quality about the "nation," and it seems neither sad nor surprising that the same people who used the nation to kill the city-state would turn around and use the globe to kill the nation. Same playbook, same goals.

Nationalism can't stand up long-term against urban-globalist atomization...

...and Ukraine has been less than a week from collapse for over three (almost 4) years now. The great irony of claiming that nationalism can't stand up to "urban-globalist atomization" to an citizen of the US is that the founding of the United States was in many respects a rejection of globalism. A recognition in the wake of the Seven Years' War on the part of Anglo, Dutch, French, and Spanish colonists in North America that their interests as colonists were much more aligned with each other than they were with their respective global empires. That many years later the US would become of a global empire itself is neither here nor there. See the old line about how when fighting monsters, one must be careful not to become one.

But even if I take your claims at face value. A freight train is a thoroughly artificial construct cobbled together from a bunch of disparate and often unrelated pieces. Stopping to argue the point on a level-crossing is still an invitation to get smashed flat. You are free to assert that the idea of a national identity is fake and cringe, but that doesn't mean you're right and I'm wrong. It just means that you have chosen to stand in "the blue corner" with all the other liberals and post-modernists.

Ukraine is allowed to have nationalism because it’s a convenient meat shield against Russia, and can only maintain it in practice because it’s too inhospitable for anyone else to want to live there.

I do not believe that Ukraine is being "allowed" anything, I think they are taking what they can get and this is turning out to be awkward for a lot of people because because a lot of their core beliefs about the nature of power are getting falsified in real time.

That stars-and-stripes/ apple-pie Americanism is a thoroughly artificial construct

That may be so, but this thoroughly artificial construct has some pretty significant impacts. Maybe you have no interest in nationalism, but nationalism has interest in you as Jews, Armenians, Kurds and many other formerly or even currently stateless peoples can attest - including primitive tribes like american Indians who genocided each other before they adopted the wheel, not to even talk about nationalism as industrial CIV tech. As far as I can see, the situation did not change even today with wars in Ukraine, Sudan and many other places flaring up again based on ethnic and national lines. If English and French and other peoples will act with such a nonchalance in face of mass immigration, they can easily end up like Arabs in Palestine earlier in 20th century - replaced and displaced nation with no state to call as their homeland protecting their interests.

As a result, I think there's an inherently fake and cringe quality about the "nation," and it seems neither sad nor surprising that the same people who used the nation to kill the city-state would turn around and use the globe to kill the nation.

Oh, there were people like that even before. Trockyists and other lunatics believed in class division and socialist international movement - and it failed even domestically in face of Stalin's national communism. There were secular globalists who took world spanning empires such as the British Empire as given, and they saw themselves as first citizens of Earth, who were equally at home in London or Bombay or Cape Town - always having access to excellent tea, The Times and all those luxuries. Of course until they were driven out by one revolution or another.

Here's the thing. You can't go with wide eyed Alex Jones on speed style rant to a normie explaining to him the importance of ethnic/racial cohesion even if that's exactly what you want to do, so you go with a "nation" themed proxy. This goes on long enough that people start unironically believing the nationalist edifice. Now that internationalists have run the dog and ponny show for decades the only allowable position in the overtonwindow is to vaguely gesture towards nation states and high trust societies. So even if Nationalism is fake and gay, it's the least bad option to oppose globalizing forces interested in humanity as a fungible work-unit currency.

I am reminded of my neighborhood organization coming out against backyard cottages, partially because it messes with "neighborhood character". For reference, I live in a working-class neighborhood largely built between 1945 and 1970.

When I think of neighborhood character, I don't think of demographics. I think of actions & relationships. If someone rings my doorbell, do I expect someone I've met - or a door-to-door salesman? If someone walks down the sidewalk, do we - at bare minimum - exchange pleasantries?

I have not had many positive reactions with people who are concerned about neighborhood character. Their org had 50 years to build a character worth defending - and they haven't. They knew I was going to have a second child. They never thought to ask about the due date or congratulate me after the baby was born. They do not visit, text, or call except to advertise their official meeting. They live nearby, but they feel like anything but neighborly.

Perhaps my standards for "good culture" are alien from theirs. I wouldn't be surprised. And as above, so below. There are things I'm not fond of about American culture, epsecially building a necessity for driving. I can see how a simmering dissatisfaction can be re-interpreted as contempt.

Anyway, I'm partially the kind of person you're talking about. So I'm open to answer questions.

There are things I'm not fond of about American culture, epsecially building a necessity for driving. I can see how a simmering dissatisfaction can be re-interpreted as contempt.

One argument I heard is that it is a defensive measure against lowlife criminal element, it is deliberate act of segregation by car ownership. You won't have drug addicts or roaming homeless congregating around local subway station, if there is none around. Highly connected walkable city can work in culturally homogenous Scandinavian country of yesteryear, not as much with multicultural society with all its problems. So beware what you wish for.

That's a convenient story, but it's not really true. People started owning cars and moving to suburbs well before cities had crime and homelessness problems. (Certainly though cities having those problems doesn't make them appealing places to move to.) The truth is that it's just nice to live in a place where you have lots of space and have a mode of transportation that's quick, convenient, point-to-point and on-demand, and a lot of people have chosen to live that way. If you don't want to, then there are plenty of American cities you can move to where you can get by without a car.

True, but the original streetcar suburbs have largely been absorbed into the major metro areas they once sat outside of. The outer ring suburbs came after the construction of the freeways and the days of rage

"neighborhood character"

This doesn't mean anything, it's a proxy for:

"I hate change, but cannot say this as it's an unsympathetic argument"

"I dislike there may be marginally more traffic near me, or it'll take slightly longer to get a parking spot, but cannot say this as it makes me sound selfish"

"I am concerned that people with less money than my current neighbors may move here" (this is a really common YIMBY boogeyman but I actually doubt this one is common)

"I really fucking hate change"

backyard cottages

Usually known as ADUs (accessory dwelling units)

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.

Isn't doing things in your own financial self interest > doing things for the "common good" a part of traditional American customs and values? Capitalism > socialism, individualism > collectivism, libertarian hands off government > nanny state, and similar concepts are a strong part of the American cultural core historically in my eye. The "American Dream" is precisely this idea of an opportunity to work hard and be rewarded for your own success in a free market. So I'd contest that coming to the US "because they see dollar signs" is in opposition to American values, because I believe seeking personal economic success is an American value.

I think it's especially funny to see this coming from the "conservative" side of things now. Not so long dismissing people as "too greedy" or claiming companies are "exploiting immigrant labor" and other such concepts were a predominantly progressive view. Famous conservative voices like Reagan, Goldwater, Friedman, Thatcher, William F Buckley Jr, Ayn Rand etc etc (you can find tons of examples of old school conservatives with similar views) were supportive of immigrants coming to their countries and working for a better life for themselves. A lot of this stemmed from the capitalist views these voices had, that economic self interest is a good thing for society as a whole and that people who make money through business are not "exploiting" society and greedily stealing from everyone else, but contributing to society through providing goods and services. If they were to look at things today, many of those classic conservatives would focus their blame on the welfare state and big government handouts rather than immigration. As Friedman said “There is no doubt that free and open immigration is beneficial—so long as it’s not combined with a welfare state.”

One great example of this being Reagan's whole speech where he basically says that immigrants of the time are in some sense more American than actual native born citizens with the argument that the immigrants (especially the ones fleeing the communist countries) understood this and held a love for the US and our economic freedoms and embrace of working hard for yourself and your family.

It is bold men and women, yearning for freedom and opportunity, who leave their homelands and come to a new country to start their lives over. They believe in the American dream. And over and over, they make it come true for themselves, for their children, and for others. They give more than they receive. They labor and succeed. And often they are entrepreneurs. But their greatest contribution is more than economic, because they understand in a special way how glorious it is to be an American. They renew our pride and gratitude in the United States of America, the greatest, freest nation in the world -- the last, best hope of man on Earth.

Isn't doing things in your own financial self interest > doing things for the "common good" a part of traditional American customs and values? Capitalism > socialism, individualism > collectivism, libertarian hands off government > nanny state, and similar concepts are a strong part of the American cultural core historically in my eye. The "American Dream" is precisely this idea of an opportunity to work hard and be rewarded for your own success in a free market. So I'd contest that coming to the US "because they see dollar signs" is in opposition to American values, because I believe seeking personal economic success is an American value.

Within a social construct, yes. But when you steal bricks from your neighbor's brick road/driveway because you know you aren't going to be caught, or that you wont be punished, this breaks down.

When you make these kind of arguments, people dont simply understand that a civilization that can establish capitalism and can maintain it is the rarity. A lot of Alex Norwasteh types are like this, and as questions like, "if your culture is so good why wont it just win out?" And the answer is that it is good foor cooperation, and Cooperate-Cooperate wins out over Defect-Defect. And most places are Defect. But what happens when a lot of Defectors enter is they make a lot of local gains, enriching themselves and impoverishing the rest. And often they are able to jump from place to place so long as they are a minority. And realistically, over time they cause the place they defect in to become a defection economy, which just doesn't work.

What people who grew up in Cooperate societies want is Cooperate societies, they don't want to have to send police to every park to ensure there isn't shit and needles where their kids want to play. They don't want their son to compete against a guy using steroids in boxing or using meth during standardized tests. But the things they dont want are what they are getting.

One great example of this being Reagan's whole speech where he basically says that immigrants of the time are in some sense more American than actual native born citizens with the argument that the immigrants (especially the ones fleeing the communist countries) understood this and held a love for the US and our economic freedoms and embrace of working hard for yourself and your family.

This is eminently reasonable; immigrants ... embrace of working hard for yourself and your family are not really what most people are upset about.

Most people are upset with immigrants who:

  1. Break the law (or otherwise act in an antisocial manner).
  2. Absorb resources (see Somali daycares, but also like, food-bank Indians)
  3. Act in favour of their country of origin instead of their country of choice.
  4. Undercut local labour so that everyone (except big businesses) is poorer.

If you eliminate (or even harshly cut back on) the number of immigrants, legal or otherwise, exploiting the above, I bet you'd see a lot more positivity towards them.

1, 2 and 3 are obviously problematic, especially cause we shouldn't put up with anyone immigrant or native. Criminal behavior, welfare fraud or working with foreign.goverments isn't acceptable.

Undercut local labour so that everyone (except big businesses) is poorer

But this is just untrue. You're not just a worker selling your labor to a business, you're a customer buying other people's labor from a business too. Lower costs for businesses is lower costs for consumers, which you are one. This logic suggests that more people = poorer conditions, and yet it doesn't seem to pane out much in real life. In fact the opposite seems to be true and larger populations seem to be such an advantage that China, despite being ruined by socialism for decades, still manages to be a major economic and political player in the world. And despite the world population being 4x bigger than the 1920s we'll all significantly wealthier on average.

The same logic would also argue for cutting birthrates (after all, those children will want jobs in 18 years) and even eliminating fellow natives who also compete for your job. But in the same way you don't have to worry about it because each worker is a consumer and creates demand for new jobs.

To clarify more on what I mean; if you have a glut of people in a certain profession, then the wages for that profession will be lower (aka, it's a buyers marker). One thing that we saw here in Canada was that we had a lot of positions that were unable to be filled (at the current wage) shortly after the pandemic; this obviously leads to companies competing to get workers into them, which is good if you are a worker. I do acknowledge that increasing the size of industry will provide more jobs overall - the issue becomes when immigration is used as a "depress wages" button. I had the exceeding misfortune of doing job applications shortly after Canada got 5m+ new immigrants (as in, roughly 2.5% of our population); it was a nightmare as every position I applied for had 150+ applicants in the first 30 seconds. Eventually, the industry will be able to absorb them; but it won't be fast, and I only have these 80 odd years on earth. If the industry supports it in 5 years, I'll have lost 5 years where I could've been earning better wages (and as everyone knows, investing makes earlier money grow much more than later money).

The same logic would also argue for cutting birthrates (after all, those children will want jobs in 18 years) and even eliminating fellow natives who also compete for your job.

To be fair, in an ideal world (for me, personally) I'd be the only person providing the service that I'd do, and I'd be able to name my price. In reality, I have a lot of sympathy for not driving people out of their home because they can't get a job there. People who were born in a country don't really have the option to leave and go elsewhere - especially when they're middle class. What this ends up being is a situation where businesses hire from the immigrant pool, knowing that they are less willing to pursue labour and employment code violations (as that may get them kicked out), which saves them money. The people who lived there before can no longer do so because the businesses have done a form of gentrification to them, pricing them out of the market. And the wealth inequality grows worse and worse.

Specifically with regards to birth rates, there is an upper limit to how quickly women can produce children - and once a country has reached a place where children don't often die young, there are also resource constraints on them. I think it's unreasonable to assume that women would suddenly jump to producing 8 children per woman when our current TFR is around 1.5 or so; even if they did, this still behaves very differently than having a similar number of immigrants pumped into the system. Women can only produce 1 child every year or so (give or take); there is time to see the developing trend, and build more housing, add more jobs, etc. as the children reach maturity. By comparison, dropping the immigrants in at around 1m per year leaves no time to expand; there are physical limitations on how quickly a business can build a new factory, or new houses can be built. As we've seen up here in Canada, the government inviting the immigrants in took no care in making sure we had space for them.

Edit: Sorry, I wrote this while I was super tired, so a lot of the points blended into each other - if you want me to write it up a bit better, let me know and I'll re-do it.

People who make money through business are not "exploiting" society and greedily stealing from everyone else, but contributing to society through providing goods and services.

That is no longer true in the current world of extremely progressive taxation and extremely profligate social welfare spending.

That is no longer true in the current world of extremely progressive taxation and extremely profligate social welfare spending.

It would be the exact opposite for businessmen under your argument, as progressive taxation and social welfare spending hurts them more as they bear the cost of these programs.

Treating America as a store where you can “buy” jobs with your promise of labor, someplace where you can earn money to send home, may have some “capitalistic” feel to it, but even conservatives, libertarians, and capitalists like to have a Real Home For My People like anyone else. And to have the “customers” pushing us out is untenable.

Treating America as a store where you can “buy” jobs with your promise of labor,

I don't understand what you mean here, it doesn't matter how many jobs they work or how many jobs they "create". What matters is the utility actually being created. In a proper market, people get rewarded for providing goods/services that others want and you get more rewards by providing them in better quality and/or higher amounts than others do.

Take Jensen Huang for example. He's not rich because he created some number of jobs, he's rich because he's an intelligent CEO who created and runs a major tech company supplying excellent computer chips and other electronics to customers who want them. Or Sergey Brin, who cofounded Google which manages tons of different services from maps to YouTube to android OS. There's a good chance you've used many Google products today.

And to have the “customers” pushing us out is untenable.

You are a customer along with every other person in existence. You participate in the exchange of goods and services. You benefit when Jensen Huang or Elon Musk or Sergey Brin create awesome things for the world. While lesser, we also benefit in trade when a Santiago helps build a home or when an Isabella at a local cleaning business helps tidy it up.

No. There is a fellowship in an ethnos that goes deeper than economic relationships.

No. There is a fellowship in an ethnos that goes deeper than economic relationships.

Good news about a free market, it would also allow the people participating in them to properly weight their "ethnos fellowship" preferences against their "economic relationship" preferences. If the American people weighted heavily against immigrants to the point of sacrificing some economic wellbeing, then we would see it in the market activity, economic opportunities for migrants would decrease accordingly and there would be less immigration.

But in the same way that prediction markets help to reveal true beliefs, free economic markets reveal true preferences. Just like people who whine about big supermarkets like Walmart "taking over local businesses" still go there, because in actuality they prefer lower prices with higher variety over the inefficient highly local grocery stores, people generally prefer their economic wellbeing over racial collectivism. There's a reason why even Trump on this major anti migrant crusade won't actually prioritize (and has often exempted) the farms, construction sites, meatpacking plants and other similar major industries and instead focuses on high publicity acts like in Minnesota right now.

But in the same way that prediction markets help to reveal true beliefs, free economic markets reveal true preferences.

Would you agree that most poor people have a revealed true preference to invest most of the money they receive into credit card payments and similar fees, and that the people who receive those fees are benevolent actors working tirelessly to help such poor people live their very best life?

If not, I'm curious as to why you view the market as "revealing true preferences" in the one case and not the other.

Would you agree that most poor people have a revealed true preference to invest most of the money they receive into credit card payments and similar fees, and that the people who receive those fees are benevolent actors working tirelessly to help such poor people live their very best life?

Yes, they decided to borrow money under a preset agreement. If they fail to pay it back, it's their fault.

(Not OP, but I agree with their position)

Yeah, that’s obviously true? I wouldn’t call credit lenders “benevolent”, but yes, access to credit reveals a lot about how some people value deferring great cost for short-term benefit.

Do you oppose the use of public resources to subsidize their lifestyle? Can you actually prevent public resources from being used to subsidize their lifestyle? Or is this just policy arbitrage, where we appeal to atomic individualism or social unity, whichever is convenient at the moment?

Not what I observe. Currently it appears to be whites hating other whites most of all as long as they are of a different economic and political (but I repeat myself) persuasion, while accepting non-whites who are in the same political tribe.

Same appears to go for non-whites, despite all the fearmongering on how they're so much more tribal than whites (e.g. "if you're not with us you ain't black").

My conclusion is simply that "whites" are not an ethnos.

Even with WASPs you had to get more specific than skin color.

Are Californian-Americans and Texan-Americans different ethnicities, then? Still doesn't appear clear-cutting to me. You could take two white Americans who could have by all accounts come from the exact same English town and they'd be on opposite aisles.

I think Rural Americans and City Americans have split into different ethnic groups, yes. They usually acknowledge this by using words like "flyover" and "coastal", have various incompatible social rituals and socio-political beliefs that create ethnic tensions, see themselves as different enough that they don't owe each other any innate solidarity beyond explicit contracts.

It's very obvious which group you belong to even if you're in the same town because you dress different, drive different cars, pray different gods, eat different food, speak in different vocabularies, etc.

The only thing that unites these groups is living in the same country and speaking the same language. They're basically as different as Scottish and English. Which is, as we know, no coincidence.

More comments

Over the years I have often heard cosmopolitan liberals express a sentiment to the effect "the United States has no culture".

Define "cosmopolitan liberals", because I have also heard this over the years. Based on that experience, I think you are probably overreacting to a couple of oikophobes* (or, if you're on the internet, Europeans), who are themselves overreacting to some chest-thumping chauvinists with a highly exclusionary conception of American culture. In that sense, this is a perfect microcosm of the modern culture war in general: people getting worked up over minor or even imagined issues, often involving a fantasy strawmen (or, at the very least, cherry-picked weakmen) of their opponents.

The major difference between liberals and conservatives with respect to America is their willingness to adopt critical attitudes. Liberals are, in general, far more likely to become disappointed/critical if they perceive the US to be failing to live up to its ideals and are far less interested in performative patriotism. The latter in particular I think right-wingers tend to mistake for antipathy. Conservatives, by contrast, are much more adaptive in their principles while demanding uncritical loyalty ("love it or leave it") and deeply love patriotic pageantry.

he gives off this vibe of being quintessentially capital-A AMERICAN in a way that I don't think any US President really has since the Cold War.

"Our enemies hate us because we're too cool."

People hate Trump largely for the reasons they say they hate him: they see him as distinctively - almost uniquely - loathsome and stupid individual. He is distinctively American only insofar as we basically elected Florida Man as president, but that certainly doesn't set him above our other post-CW presidents in being AMERICAN. He is perhaps the most declasse president of the post-Cold War era, but to say that makes him more quintessentially American is an example of the exclusionary conception of American culture I mentioned earlier.

I broadly concur with @LiberalRetvrn here: Trump is a vulgar tribalist (at best) of the kind that can be under any rock in any corner of the Earth. For all the flag-waving and shallow patriotic verbiage exhibited by Trump and his supporters, I find that they are people who have contempt for the history and values of the United States, as well as outright hate for their countrymen.

quoting Teddy Roosevelt (I'm not bothering to quote the full passage)

With all respect to TR, he was just wrong with this one. The persistence of superficial identification and cultural elements was not and is not a problem. German Americans are one of the most prominent examples of this: German American culture endured until it was more or less forcibly suppressed during WWI (Chester Nimitz grew up in a German-speaking household, for example). However the problem there was not German immigrants, who were quite well-behaved, but fearful xenophobes. We can go through a list of immigrant groups and see again and again that the fears of immigrants being disloyal or not assimilating is largely unfounded.

Conversely, the most prominent expressions of disloyalty in US history came from the unhyphenated, and one of the ironies of the "a country is not an economic zone" shibboleth is that the people saying it are by far the worst about treating their country and countrymen as things to be exploited rather than a community of common interest.

As an aside, TR is making a common and understandable but nevertheless important error: divided loyalty is inherent in the human condition. You cannot be American and nothing else. It is not entirely without merit to note that immigrants often have interests other than pure loyalty to their new country, but the singling out of immigrants is a distinct double standard. The same concern could equally apply to, e.g. religious affiliation or personal loyalty (a very real risk, as we saw in 2021).

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*as an illustrative anecdote, when an acquaintance raised the idea in very progressive company, basically everyone scoffed and told him he was being an idiot. I think you are more likely to find liberally-minded people who don't like American culture than think it doesn't exist, though IME they are making a shared mistake with Southerners in conflating American culture with the culture of the South.

No our enemies do not hate us "because we're too cool", they hate us for geopolitical reasons that are completely outside the average American's control. Which just begs the question, why should the average American care what the haters think?

You say that TR was mistaken, I disagree, the idea that a man can not serve two masters, or have more than one "top priority" has held true since classical antiquity and remains relevant today.

You say that I am conflating American culture with the culture of the South, and I again I disagree because I don't see Public displays of Christianity or eating Turkey on the 4th Thursday of November each year as uniquely "southern" artifacts. Nor Football, Baseball, Basketball, Apple Pie, Hamburgers, Hot Dogs, Hot Wings, Cowboys, Cadillacs, pick-up trucks, SUVs, American Flags, John Wayne, Bruce Wayne, Bruce Lee, and so on...

That said, they do tend to code as "red"/Republican in the modern era. But that is not because of anything intrinsic that because for the last 50 years (since the late 70s or so) the American left has largely defined itself by through it's opposition to the shared symbols and mythos of the American identity. The Founding Fathers owned slaves and MLK was an Adulterer. The US was founded in 1619 on the principles of colonial exploitation. Not in 1776 on the principles espoused in the Declaration of Independence. The constitution is nothing more than a piece of paper. All heroes must be toppled, all myths busted, all boundaries removed, and all barriers knocked down. That is the quintessence of the modern American liberal.

I would posit that the reason Liberally-minded people find Trump to be so "Loathsome", "Stupid", and "Declassee" is that he talks like an average American, he thinks like an average American, he like the things that the average American likes, and that for a lot of people that is simply not acceptable coming from someone who is supposed to be "above them" in social station.

No our enemies do not hate us "because we're too cool", they hate us for geopolitical reasons that are completely outside the average American's control.

You've misread me. When I say "our enemies hate us because we're too cool" I am deriding the idea that Trump's domestic opponents dislike him because he is too American.

Regarding the TR quote:

If the observation is merely that you can only have one highest priority, it's not wrong, but that doesn't in any way resolve my point. Everyone has divided loyalties, and for relatively few of them is their highest loyalty to their country. Most people will prioritize personal connections over abstract group membership if push comes to shove. Many native-born people prioritize personal social/economic interests over the national interest or the well-being of their countrymen. Religious individuals will tend to prioritize their faith over their country. Despite this, not only does no one suggest you can't be a Christian and an American, but quite a few people think you must be a Christian to be a proper American. The special concern for hyphenated Americans is both historically unwarranted (both today and in TR's time) and a form of special pleading.

The idea of being a pure American is both incoherent and is itself quite un-American.

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You say that I am conflating American culture with the culture of the South

No, I specifically don't say that. I am saying that many oikophobes think that (and also IME many Southerners also think that, which feeds into the sense of cultural cringe).

However, you then go on to vindicate my other points, e.g. Red Tribers (and Red Tribe-fetishizing Blue Tribe conservatives) conflating American culture with Red Tribe culture* while making questionable claims about the American Left. "MLK was an adulterer", for example, is something far more likely to be brought up by a resentful reactionary trying to tarnish the civil rights movement than a liberal (for whom MLK is pretty much a secular saint). You are mistaking a willingness to challenge sacred cows for a wholesale rejection**. As I mentioned in my other response, there are a lot of things liberals like and admire about the United States. They're just not necessarily the things conservatives like.

The American Right has developed an incredible difficulty with digesting any sort of critical perspective. The kindest theory I can offer up is that while liberals tend to be idealists whose interest in the US relates to values and principles while conservatives engage in a kind of ancestor worship. This creates a huge point of contention when liberals look at the past and note that America often fell short of its stated ideals and participated atrocities. Generally speaking, this is meant as an exhortation to live up to those ideals, not a nihilistic rejection of them. However, conservatives construe this as an attack on the honored ancestors, who are pure and beyond reproach. They might grudging agree that, e.g., the Native Americans got kind of a raw deal if you press them, but it's a passive-voice acknowledgement that refuses to implicate the settlers and cowboys they valorize and bringing the subject up is seen as kind of suspect.

While we're quoting dead presidents, let me throw in a favorite quote of my own:

It may be argued that there are certain conditions that make necessities and impose them upon us, and to the extent that a necessity is imposed upon a man he must submit to it. I think that was the condition in which we found ourselves when we established this government. We had slavery among us, we could not get our constitution unless we permitted them to remain in slavery, we could not secure the good we did secure if we grasped for more, and having by necessity submitted to that much, it does not destroy the principle that is the charter of our liberties. Let that charter stand as our standard.

This encapsulates the attitude that undergirds liberal reformism in the US. Crucially, it does not reject the past, but it does not hold it as sacred either.

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for a lot of people that is simply not acceptable coming from someone who is supposed to be "above them" in social station.

In a sense you're right, but in another, more important sense, you're quite mistaken. Bill Clinton had/has a lot of the same superficially 'low-class' behavior but is pretty widely liked by liberals. To steal a quote from the internet:

I think the disconnect between Atlantic elites is that Americans think Donald Trump is a kid getting to drive a monster truck for Make A Wish and Europeans and Canadians think Donald Trump is the president of the United States.

You can strike out European and Canadians and insert "liberal Americans". You're ascribing it to classism*** when the central issue for Trump's critics is that Donald Trump is a bad person and really, really bad at being President. He is bad at the performance of leadership (and it is a colossal mistake to confuse this for simply being 'low class'). He is bad at long term planning. He refuses to accept reality and treats bad news as a conspiracy against him. He is comically dishonest. He is openly sadistic. He is openly corrupt. I could go on naming Trump's vices for a long time, but the underlying point is this: he's exactly the kind of man liberals think shouldn't be president. Many of his inadequacies in the realm of competency and intellect would be tolerable if he was a basically decent guy, but then he wouldn't be Trump.

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* Of the items you list, the only ones that are convincing red-coded are cowboys, pick-up trucks, and John Wayne.

**obviously, you can find people who engage in that sort of wholesale rejection, but they are on the margins of the movement. Republicans love to highlight them, both because it is politically useful to highlight weirdos in the opposition and because they make them genuinely furious, but you end up with a situation where you're comparing social media personalities to, like, the President of the United States and his senior advisors.

***it should probably be noted that Trump is not so much low-class as classless. Inasmuch as there is a socio-economic class angle to liberal antipathy for Trump, it is Brahmin vs Merchant, not rich versus poor. Trump is, himself, a very rich man

No our enemies do not hate us "because we're too cool", they hate us for geopolitical reasons that are completely outside the average American's control. Which just begs the question, why should the average American care what the haters think?

There's actually an extremely good reason for why the average American should care - the same actions that the US' enemies hate the US for are hurting average Americans as well. How much benefit did the average American see from the war in Vietnam? How much benefit did the average American get from the 20 year long occupation in Afghanistan? This is to say nothing of the vast sums of blood and treasure wasted in the Middle East to preserve Israel, a country which has sucked up vast sums of US taxpayer money while domestic infrastructure falls apart. The average American has seen almost no benefits whatsoever from the majority of the US empire's actions overseas, and in many cases they've been actively hurt by them. Sure, they got some cheaper fruit from the CIA's shenanigans in Latin America, but when you factor in the other consequences from destabilising and wrecking all those nations in service of the United Fruit Company I honestly don't know if the juice was worth the squeeze.

Liberals are, in general, far more likely to become disappointed/critical if they perceive the US to be failing to live up to its ideals and are far less interested in performative patriotism.

Those ideals being... what, exactly? Does it have any resemblance of a common culture, an actual community of common interest defined in some way other than GDP?

The problem with "far more likely to be critical" is that they seem to never find one godforsaken occasion to be positive.

I find that they are people who have contempt for the history and values of the United States, as well as outright hate for their countrymen.

I can't bring myself to entirely disagree, but you're hard pressed to find a group of similar scale that doesn't have such contempt and outright hate.

Edit:

The latter in particular I think right-wingers tend to mistake for antipathy.

On the topic of contempt and hate, there's a lot of wisdom in the old saw about the opposite of love being indifference, not hate, and I should've kept that in mind here. There is a corrosiveness to indifference and that may be one of the liberal's worst sins, that so many are unable to even recognize. It became too declassee to think that one's country and culture is something to be loved instead of apologized for.

Edit 2:

Ilhan Omar's infamous comments come to mind. And that is what people have in mind when they say liberals don't care about America.

I am not confident enough to define American in a way that I truly find acceptable, but in something of the spirit of Potter Stewart, I am not American in the way she is; if she has a definition at all, it is incompatible.

Those ideals being... what, exactly?

Liberty, Truth, Justice, the American Way, Human Rights, Democracy, Transgender For Everyone...

Does it have any resemblance of a common culture

This what Scott Alexander coined the phrase "Blue Tribe" to refer to. American culture is not the Red Tribe. Plus, to be honest, I think there's just a general failure to model their adversaries' preferences on the part of right-wingers, where the weirdest, most idiosyncratic are assumed to stand in for the whole. Libs also like football, cars, car commercials featuring George Washington running over the British, and so on.

you're hard pressed to find a group of similar scale that doesn't have such contempt and outright hate.

Most of them? The takeover of the American conservative movement by people who hate America and Americans is fairly recent. While they're playing on pre-existing sentiments, the severity of the rot comes from the top.

The problem with "far more likely to be critical" is that they seem to never find one godforsaken occasion to be positive... It became too declassee to think that one's country and culture is something to be loved instead of apologized for.

This is another failure to model liberals' beliefs/preferences, or why they have an issue with vulgar tribalism. It is not that there is nothing to be proud of - libs are happy to celebrate* the space program, WW2, the abolition of slavery, rock and roll, the civil rights movement, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the US Olympic team etc... The disconnect is that they feel conservatives want to be proud of things that are shameful or whitewash sordid elements of the past.

*this list is not meant to be exhaustive; it's just stuff that popped into my head

American culture is not the Red Tribe

Agreed.

a general failure to model their adversaries' preferences

It would be easier if they'd be honest about their preferences and the consequences thereof.

libs are happy to celebrate* the space program

In theory, perhaps, or historically. Libs are at the forefront of the anti-moon crew. If you want to argue Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and the New York Times aren't really libs, fine, but that's one of the flaws to the two-party system.

Being proud of WW2 is much more of a conservative dad or granddad thing; young libs don't even like Churchill.

The civil rights movement is the founding myth of modern liberal-progressives, yes; a magic they don't know how to recapture.

The primary example that comes to mind is, i repeat myself, Ilhan Omar. A hateful creep that has achieved wildly more success than she could have in her home country, and uses it primarily shit on the country that welcomed her and support the country she left. It is unfair to extend this to the whole of "the libs," of course; a lot of that is negativity bias. But "the libs" had years to come up with a good narrative about America already being great, and they fumbled it over and over because... I don't really know why. For the party that's supposed to be the smartest, most talented, chock full to the brim with marketers and storytellers, they really fell on their face against what shouldn't be that hard of a question.

Biden spent more time apologizing for calling a murderer the wrong euphemism than expressing sympathy for the victim! If that's what liberal tribalism and preferences get us, then I don't know what's worth redeeming there.

edited

The takeover of the American conservative movement by people who hate America and Americans is fairly recent.

The takeover of the American conservative movement by people who find the Confederacy and the Jim Crow South fundamentally sympathetic (not all of whom are white supremacists or white nationalists themselves - Buckley probably was but Goldwater and Reagan definitely weren't) never happened because the modern American conservative movement was founded by people who found the Confederacy and the Jim Crow South fundamentally sympathetic. (The American conservative movement is not the same thing as the GOP).

The sort of people who find the Confederacy sympathetic have never been particularly fond of "America" the actually-existing political entity between the Rio Grande and the 49th parallel, or its government, or its damnyankee ruling class, or its urban middle class with its dastardly (i.e. secular) booklarning. (Buckley, for instance, comes out against all of these things in the 1950s). What is fairly recent is that this has boiled over in a way which makes "hate" a plausible descriptor. Or, more correctly, boiled over again given the unfortunate incident in the 1860s.

Or, more correctly, boiled over again given the unfortunate incident in the 1860s.

Sure, but in this case the actors are both contradicting themselves.

Currently, the "conservatives" (as they call themselves- I call them traditionalists, as they have conserved nothing) might be sympathetic to the Confederacy as an axiom, but are acting like Unionists right now with all the anti-slavery stuff.

This is in stark contrast to the "progressives" (as I call them- they call themselves 'liberals', but that's just stolen valor), which are existentially hostile to the Confederacy, but are indistinguishable from Confederates right now with all the "don't take our slaves away"/"State's Rights [to keep slaves]" stuff.

So you have a situation where the founding myths are contradicted on both sides: that the Union was bad for doing what they did in 1860 on the Conservative side (on balance, probably wasn't), and that the Confederates [and the economic benefits of slavery they so desired] were the actual good guys on the Progressive side (on balance, probably wasn't).

The side that's forced to give will probably win... but they also won't be that side any more. They'll be something else.

The actual question is akin to the one in that HBO Show with the Dumb and Dumber guy. If you cant answer it while referencing people who have been here longer than your ancestors, they better have been here a long time ago and you better agree with them.

I've never seen the Newsroom, so I'm going to need you to clarify what you're trying to get across here.

If you want to claim to love America, it should be for reasons George Washington and Andrew Jackson would agree with you. That's the tldr

For years and years, saying positive things about the US in certain fora was almost guaranteed to get a reply with this link: https://youtube.com/watch?v=wTjMqda19wk?si=IUMfHBNYz1GPtRdn

For better or worse, this is what a lot of people think of when asked to imagine how liberals feel about the country.

ETA: This and Howard Zinn's People's History of the United States

Define "cosmopolitan liberals", because I have also heard this over the years. Based on that experience, I think you are probably overreacting to a couple of oikophobes* (or, if you're on the internet, Europeans), who are themselves overreacting to some chest-thumping chauvinists with a highly exclusionary conception of American culture.

In my experience, it is most likely encountered as an argument against the claim that too much indiscriminate immigration alters our culture in undesirable ways.

I largely agree with your points, and think integration is important. But also, living in the Twin Cities and watching how ICE is harassing a lot of our Hmong neighbors (my wife’s native-born coworker’s native-born children were detained) underscores just how stupid and racist the kind of Trump supporters that would seek to move through the get-50-days-of-training-and-join-ICE-on-street-rips-in-Minnesota are.

The Hmong fought with us in Vietnam and there was some danger posed to them after our withdrawal. Many got refugee status, but did so decades ago. A bunch settled here in Minnesota. A few are still anamist, but most have converted to Christianity. They like hunting and fishing. The growth of the local Hmong middle class has resulted in more Minnesotans, unhyphenated, owning bass boats. We’re on the third and fourth generations born here in the States. The previous generation owned pho and bahn mi restaurants. The current attend the U of M and have middle class corporate jobs.

There is no significant ongoing illegal immigration issue related to our Hmong community. But the ICE agents being bussed in to our metro from red tribe America genuinely have zero conception of any of this. If they’re at all representative of MAGA, I promise you they also believe in hyphenated Americans.

But the ICE agents being bussed in to our metro from red tribe America genuinely have zero conception of any of this

Which is the inherent risk when [your local political body, henceforth referred to as "you"] decide you either won't follow the existing law, or are unable or unwilling to spend the political capital to change it to something your community can accept.

This isn't a hard concept to understand[1], and all Imperial (or Federal, which is just Imperialism within a border) systems do this, for this exact reason- because they won't care about your local community standards and the nuances therein. The Soviets didn't use Hungarian or Czech soldiers to put down the uprisings in those countries; they chose people not from those areas specifically because painting the people in those areas of the Soviet Empire as a simple adversary is more effective that way.

It is not, and should not, be the Hmong's problem that they [and their representatives and other power-brokers in their local community] has decided to put themselves in opposition to these policies- and the fact they in particular are being burdened at outsized rates simply for looking more like the stereotype of the average trafficked human is most regrettable (and indeed, SE Asia really isn't where the human traffickers were canvassing for subjects anyway- but their skin color is somewhat comparable, which is what matters).

But much like the abortion question before this, you have systems for finalizing durable consensus, and I suggest you use them. "Deciding not to spare the power to do these things because we can just ram it through the branches of government that don't work on consensus" is what has caused your system to flip-flop so destructively in the first place.

Remember that whole "those who make peaceful revolution impossible make a violent one inevitable" thing? Media is soapbox, legislature is ballot box, executive/judicial is jury box, and direct paramilitary/military action is ammo box. And I believe you're solidly in "jury" now.

[1] Unless your socioeconomic standing requires you not understand it, which is the impulse that drives war more generally. Power exists, and is desirable, because fairness is fundamentally undecidable.

The Soviets didn't use Hungarian or Czech soldiers to put down the uprisings in those countries; they chose people not from those areas specifically because painting the people in those areas of the Soviet Empire as a simple adversary is more effective that way.

Although this is an issue largely unrelated to the one being discussed I'd like to mention that there was no such specific choice made. Deploying local units was Plan A from the beginning for the Soviets. See the period of martial law in Poland from 1981 as reference. When the situation escalated to the point where local units were insufficient or unsuited to repress the rebellion, Plan B was put into action.

So, your coworker. She was born in the US, right? But not her parents. So counting her, and her parents, she's 1/3 people born here? And then adding her grandparents she's 1/7? And great-grandparents she's 1/15? Presumably she is not included in the "ourselves and our posterity" that opens our constitution, since all of her ancestors were on the other side of the world, speaking foreign languages in a godless jungle at the time. In what world is that person, in any way, an American? That's a man born in a barn, not a horse.

What about her children? Did she intermarry with an American, or did she marry another foreigner in order to have foreign children? As if I even have to ask. Those kids, assuming they're 3/3 through parents, they're still 3/7 in grandparents and 3/15 with great-grandparents?

I don't care how polite and law-abiding they are. I've got my own model Asian minorities (they're always Asian, almost like biology dictates impulse control) in my neighborhoods. They're still foreign, they still change the character of the nation, and they should still only be allowed in small number and not allowed to form ethnic enclaves. They certainly should not be used as a shield for the abominable minorities (africans, muslims, and african muslims, I can't believe we let them in, my grandchildren will be cleaning up this mess), or as some example to be followed rather than an aberration that worked out.

There is no significant ongoing illegal immigration

Fifteen years ago the argument was legal vs illegal immigration. Now it's American vs Foreigner, and the paper citizenship of the foreigners don't carry any weight. I do not care where these people were born. They are not American, they are not native, and they do not belong here. If they are gracious guests, they may be allowed to stay, but they are guests and may be removed.

In what world is that person, in any way, an American?

This world. 14th Amendment, baby. You don’t get to pick one line from the Constitution and ignore the rest. Citizenship is more than a paper guest pass.

You can’t help but equivocate between counting ancestors and “character of the nation” bullshit. I think you’re just parroting any excuse you can find. There is no coherent threshold that keeps the people you like in America while driving out the nasty foreigners.

Maybe you’re far enough up your own ass to have your own Ariernachweis going back to 1788. Which of the 28,000 voters was your meal ticket? Who secured the blessing of liberty for you?

American culture is awesome. I don’t think you deserve it.

This world. 14th Amendment, baby. You don’t get to pick one line from the Constitution and ignore the rest. Citizenship is more than a paper guest pass.

Sure you do. The US does it all the time. So does the enemy. "The Constitution" is a piece of paper, the only people defending it are those whose social capital and influence stems from it as a flimsy pretext.

This world. 14th Amendment, baby. You don’t get to pick one line from the Constitution and ignore the rest.

Why not? Everyone else does, and whatever objections you and I might muster have clearly failed.

To be clear, I do not endorse the assessment described above. I do not believe that "American" is a boundary that can be effectively drawn on racial or ethnic lines. Unfortunately, that agreement is downstream from my assessment that "American" is not a boundary that can be effectively drawn at all.

American culture is awesome

Care to take a stab at defining it?

I kind of took half-hearted stab at it in my reply to @Skibboleth but lets go deeper.

Things that are particular to the culture of the United States:

Football, Baseball, Basketball, Apple Pie, Hamburgers, Hot Dogs, Hot Wings, Cowboys, Cadillacs, pick-up trucks, SUVs, the Stars and Stripes, John Wayne, Bruce Wayne, Bruce Lee, the Apollo Program, the Panama Canal, public displays of Christianity, being prudish about sex, being libertine about guns and drugs, eating Turkey on the 4th Friday of every November, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and the Declaration of Independence (not necessarily in that order)

Slightly more seriously, our core mythos is that of "the grand frontier." We are the children of explorers and pioneers who crossed oceans and deserts at great risk to escape the old world and find the land of opportunity. This mythos feeds something of an independent streak compared to a lot of other cultures. Ask three Americans a question and you'll get five different answers. We think we know better and are not shy about saying it. We also tend to prioritize being "friendly" over being "polite" which is the opposite of what you see in much of Europe and Asia.

https://www.zompist.com/amercult.html

Of course America has a culture. Both red and blue tribe Americans basically fit in the picture above, maybe one or two exceptions on each side.

Sure. I wasn’t fully satisfied with my ramblings during the user viewpoint post, anyway.

Tl;dr The American ethos is classical-liberal individualism by way of the marketplace of ideas. Everyone has certain rights, and if you play along with America’s rules, we’ll enforce them for you. And you should want to play along.

  1. Enumerate a clear set of individual rights.
  2. Credibly guarantee these rights to as many people as you practically can.
  3. Use collective action (military, welfare…) mainly to enforce those guarantees.
  4. Thrash competing cultures in the marketplace of ideas. Absorb anything that puts up a good fight.
  5. Maintain confidence in the superiority of the preceding points, no matter what you absorb.

Points 1-2 incentivize cooperation over defection. Point 3 hedges against some of the worst outcomes for subcultures, again incentivizing cooperation. Point 4 is just business, and Point 5 keeps the whole thing running.

Adopting point 2 is probably the hardest part, and it’s one that plenty of other states have fumbled. We really had to believe that there were other people deserving of those rights. Even then, we almost lost it all due to the economic incentives of denying those rights to some people.

I’m willing to believe that our start was only possible due to the combination of British law, Protestant religion, and our particular economic situation. But once the engine was going, we were able to stabilize and adapt when other cultures were collapsing. We handled the development of nationalism better than basically all of Europe. We won the Cold War right as we reassured ourselves of point 5. Our culture works, and I expect it will continue to work.

I like this answer. Thank you.

My concern is that we've had too many people chewing away at numbers 1 and 5 for decades, and that the confidence is really hard to regain. In trying to account for the past failure of Point 2, we ate away at Point 1 as well.

I'm not him, and culture is of course very slippery to define. But I'd like to try. (I'm also American, but I've lived abroad enough to see clear differences)

Language: Most of us speak English, but with a sizable minority who speak Spanish. There are isolated areas where people speak other languages, but there's usually strong pressure for the kids there to learn English, and most of us never make much effort to learn a second language other than English.

Geography: the US is a very large country, with people spread out all over it, and our cities are also fairly low density. This leads to a lot of detached single-family homes, car ownership, and driving. I'd say it also contributes to a culture that's fairly closed off, with most people only sharing their real feelings and thoughts with the people physically in their home.

Religion: Used to be overwhelmingly Christian, but that's changing rapidly. Still lots of cultural traditions inherited from Christianity though, like the Christmas holiday season and most businesses closed on Sundays. Most people are fairly accepting of others' religious beliefs, as long as it doesn't require us to actually do anything.

Fashion: Very casual. Most people wear something like jeans and t-shirts, or sportswear, almost everywhere. Exception: politicians, lawyers, and fancy offices still wear the traditional suit-and-tie. It's rare for people to dress in formalwear or any sort of traditional ethnic clothes. People also speak in a casual manner to almost everyone.

Food: Large portions of meat, cheese, salt, and sugar, with fairly simple presentations. Lots of soda and coffee, moderate alcohol. Smoking is increasingly rare. Not a lot of vegetables, and they're most often served raw in a side salad. Tap water is safe to drink, although many people buy a filter or bottled water anyway. Most people have a kitchen with a large oven that can bake pretty large sizes, so it's easy to prepare, say, an entire turkey at Thanksgiving. Not common to eat routinely eat street food or at communial dining places. Drive through fast food very common though. Obesity is quite common.

Politics: People tend to be pretty blunt and outspoken, and are happy to tell you their thoughts on whatever is in the news lately without much filter. They have a strong sense of "law and order", and are shocked when people don't follow the law. But also a lot of cynicism about governmeng in general, especially Congress, so they don't expect to be able to have much personal interaction with government. Liberals often like to do public protests, but this is mostly performative, not a serious attempt to topple the government.

Economy: Highly capitalistic culture. People trust the currency, and don't worry too much about things like counterfeiting or fraud in their normal life. "High inflation" means like 5%. There's a lot of talk about things like side hustles, startups, and the stock market. Almost everything is bought through market transactions. It's considered quite unusual for someone to go hitchhiking, couchsurfing, home farming, homemade clothes, etc- much easier to just get a job and then pay for all that stuff with money. People expect that infrastucture like water, power, sewage, etc will generally work but occasionally have issues.

Recreation: Traditionally centered around watching TV at home, now more often digital. Children do a lot of sports and hobby clubs, but those are increasingly rare for adults. Lots of time spent watching and talking about the "big 3" sports of American football, basketball, and baseball, plus smaller amounts for other sports, but not many people do them in real life. Media shows a lot of violence, some swearing, but sexuality makes people uncomfortable. Lots of self-deprecating humor about the faults of America.

What do you think of this list? Obviously a lot of generalities and exceptions here, but I think it works pretty well overall.

Ha. We went in completely different directions with our answers, but yeah, I’d endorse this one.

People tend to be pretty blunt and outspoken, and are happy to tell you their thoughts on whatever is in the news lately without much filter.

Was about to get a little chuffy on this one, being in the South and the "bless your heart" cliche coming to mind, before I caught it was under politics. And that point I was thinking of is under your 'Geography,' good catch on the closed-off-ness.

Yeah, I think this is a great broad-strokes; really, a lot more detail than I expected anyone to reply with! Thank you kindly.

Isn't "bless your heart" kind of an open insult in the South? I was thinking more of, like, the east Asian "face saving" culture" where, even if you say something stupid, other people will let it slide because they don't want to cause embarassment. And also, dictatorships where saying the wrong thing might cause you to get executed by the government.

It is now, but for a long time it was taken as (relatively) sincere.

I think this is a pretty good effort at defining "American culture", and do not believe that I could do better.

Suppose you are confronted by an angry and possibly violent mob of Americans. Which of these features you have listed would you appeal to in attempting to talk them down and convincing them to disperse? That is to say, which of these features provide serious, reliable traction on an interpersonal level?

Talking down angry mobs is something notable leaders have needed to do many times throughout history, and generally "culture" is what has allowed them to do it. Do you believe you are describing that sort of culture above?

I don’t believe any nation could quell revolt by appealing to food and fashion. Not without some clever metaphors!

You’re looking for something more civic-minded. Something like Washington’s Newburgh address. What an absolute legend.

Thing is, that’s not a speech to a mob. Rioters aren’t usually good listeners. Do you have any examples in mind?

The specific speech that brought the question to mind was Alexander's purported speech to his mutinous army at Opis. A neat parallel to your own choice, it seems.

I feel both these examples are quite distant, and that I have seen and heard many examples of leaders or prominent men being noted for addressing hostile audiences in circumstances of significant danger, and nonetheless persuading the audience by their appeal. Unfortunately, I can't recall them; as with our two examples here, it would be interesting to see what elements of shared culture people appeal to under duress, and assess whether those elements are meaningfully shared under current conditions.

Most of the time we just do nothing. Let them rant, they'll eventually get tired and go home. Trying to "talk them down" usualy just makes them madder, and if they're angry enough to do violence then it's kinda too late for talking. If it's a big mob then the police will show up, and maybe start arresting people if it really gets out of hand. But I think we've seen this week how that can easily go wrong.

bullshit

up your own ass

I don't think you deserve it

Aren't you a mod?

Leave the backseat moderation to heritage mottizens.

Amusingly, @LykovFamilyBand joined the Motte the same month you did. (S)he just has 4 comments to your 4700.

I'm not sure it really fit, but I couldn't resist the joke.

Of course. I was just amused by the massive discrepancy in posting - I originally assumed it was a new account.

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I mean, can you even be considered true aristocracy if you weren't around in the /r/SlateStarCodex culture war thread days?

Depends on the family. Does his wife's father have any AAQCs? What about his paternal cousins?

The list of moderators

Citizenship is more than a paper guest pass.

If there are no specific thresholds or expectations attached, then it may not be a paper guest pass, but it's certainly just a paper something. A renewable subscription? A season ticket? A no-show job?

Frankly it's incoherent for you to do all this harrumphing about how precious and sacred citizenship is, and how gauche and un-American it is to question the quality of someone else's citizenship, if you're going to then claim that it's perfectly fine and acceptable for someone to be culturally and socially alien while still retaining all the powers and privileges of American citizenship. If it's such a flimsy, ephemeral concept, no deeper than some words from a piece of paper somebody scribbled on a long time ago, why shouldn't it be subject to re-negotiation, attack, and even abnegation?

I did not make those claims. I don’t support illegal immigration, amnesty, opening the borders, any of that. Nor do I deny the expectations and responsibilities of citizenship. Immigrants should arrive and naturalize legally, then assimilate.

I rejected the claim that only “ourselves and our posterity” count as Americans, and I despise the idea that even “polite and law-abiding” “model” minorities are “an aberration which should be worked out.” It is gauche and unAmerican to cast legitimate, legal citizens as “guests”. Note that KMC did not argue that citizens who are socially alien were not Americans, but that minorities were inherently “not American, not native, and don’t belong here.”

Any serious definition of American citizenship must accommodate the 14th Amendment. Ignoring it in favor of one line from the preamble is chicanery.

This world. 14th Amendment, baby. You don’t get to pick one line from the Constitution and ignore the rest. Citizenship is more than a paper guest pass

As leftists are so fond of saying, the Constitution is not a suicide pact

Good thing letting in a few Hmong is not national suicide. The Republic will survive their presence.

The paper citizens are the problem. Reminding me they are citizens does not make them any more American, it just highlights the problem.

You have devalued US citizenship rather than transmogrifying foreigners into Americans.

You haven’t articulated at all why exactly where somebody’s grandparents grew up or what language they spoke has any connection whatsoever to how “American” that person is. In which chromosome is it recorded whether or not somebody’s great great grandfather was American?

Because thier family and bloodline built the country.

I'm not being hyperbolic, or trying to invoke some sort of higher power or ethos or shared culture, like everyone else. It's just being sensible; People whom have family in America that can trace thier linieage back decades, if not centuries, are looking at a line of people who's decisions and choices and goals have had a massive knock-on secondary effects that have effected the lives of hundreds, if not thousands of others, and so on, and they in-turn been affected by others.

The son who's great-grand father ran for mayor in a town can track down the laws and see what long-term effects they had on it's development. The daughter who's great-great-great grandmother rescued a dying man from the battlefield and hid him from Johnny Reb of the devils in blue and married him, or just nursed him back to health and he went on to kill others. The grandfather that pushed for the first major business in a town, thereby changing the lives of hundreds directly, or the grandmother that pushed for them to head out west on Route 66 to pursue for better fortune elsewhere. The northen carpet-bagger that came down to the South and is the direct reason why parts of the Atlas V rocket and Space Shuttle were built in New Orleans.

(That last one is completely true, by the by. The others are generalities.)

You are presumably sitting in the results of those actions, piled on and on and on by what I would charitably call a unique group of individuals. I doubt the Earth could handle a second America lurking in the wings. We'd probably explode. Possibly literally.

Put another way, looking at it from a business perspective, if you have a buisness with a public IPO and you then conclude 'And those with the smallest shares will have identical voting power as to those with the most', they'd look at you as if you'd lost your goddamn mind.

So that's one arguement.

'But Eyes,' you might reply. 'That's begining to look suspiciously akin to what alot of Europeans refer to Class and Nobility and Lineage and whatnot. Aren't Americans virulently allergic to that?'

And I would reply, 'Why, yes. Yes it is. So I think it would be wise to look at the circumstances and reasons for such a thought to arise and perhaps correct the reason for it.'

But perhaps you're not convinced. Understandable. As they say, you don't pin others medals on your chest.

Though I wonder, sometimes. That blood tells, more than often, that we really are the results of our forefathers than we care to admit.

So! Second arguement.

Let's look at context.

I think it's fair to say that the majority of immigrants to America, up to a certain point, were what we would call settlers. People who risked it all - quite literally - to establish a better life. People with a certain attitude and grit whom were willing to wrestle civilization out of a land that, quite charitably, wanted to kill them, populated by potentially hostile locals that also wanted to kill them and each other, if not both, depending on thier mood. That there was, if you will, a certain gate they had to pass through, be it either via travel or sheer survival or grit or luck or all of the above to become the successful American Experiment.

Nor should we ignore that alot of people - especially during the early 20th century, in the period between 1900-1920 - flooded into the country, and if they could not sucede one way or another, they actually went back. 'Give me your tired, your hungry, your poor' is just really good propaganda tacked on way after the fact, that even after a large amount of threat had been wrested from the North American continent, there was still challenges to overcome. Modern infrastructure still hadn't been built, and in some places I know of, cities that are now seperated by a mere hour or so could take days to reach, because even up to WW2 there were still portions of America that, yes, really were still wild.

Times have changed. The people coming in now are not coming in to settle. They are not coming in to travel by train or horse or car to remote places to find a quite nest to live out their lives away from everyone else. Why they are coming can be interpreted in as many ways as you like, from the charitable to the uncharitable to the actively hostile, but the idea that people coming now, today, are similar in any way to the people coming to America pre-WW2(and I'm being generous with that for a reason) is utterly ludicrous.

If you wanted me to nail down a cut-off date, if I were feeling cheeky, I'd say 1965 for the Hart Cellar Act. But, no. Realistically, I'd say January 3rd, 1959. Why?

Because that was when Alaska was incorporated as a state. The last of the great frontiers, finally civilized.

No more lands left to conquer.

Look. I'm not going to sit here and say that I agree with the idea of Heritage Americans unequivocally. Though lord knows the past ten years are so have been rather testing for some of my previously held beleifs, so who the hell knows by this point.

But I do think it's silly to completely ignore all the above. Times have changed. The world as a whole is different. We need to adapt to that. How we adapt to that is an open question, yes, but I think it's fair to say that we have a slight problem that needs to get resolved, hopefully in a peaceable manner.

Fair disclaimer: The above was written while sleep deprived, with no references, and primarily because my brain would not shut the ever-loving hell up and I finally gave up and decided to put all this to paper. Maybe now I can crawl off and get some goddamn sleep.

If the criterion is leaving a lasting historical impression, then I don’t think most early Americans qualify. If it’s merely contributing, just about everybody is going to clear the bar. Any intermediate threshold is going to filter out descendants faster than immigrants.

I’ll admit I’m thinking about my dad’s side of the family. Where does ~300 years of subsistence farming put us? Plenty of 1800s or 1900s immigrants have contributed more to American culture, not to mention the economy. The wealthiest American immigrated in 2002. Does he get precedence?

Personally, I have respect for the people in the past who risked their lives to settle. The modern-day descendants of those people deserve no special accolades. You didn't do shit except get popped out in the right place from the right hole. You're not special because of what they did.

And I can't help but notice that the Heritage Americans seem to have little to no problem with white people who have only recently migrated, or that they seem to have little interest in the contributions of people who are not white but have also been here a long time.

You say special treatment, I say the Hmong are obviously not American.

The Irish and Italians have done a remarkably poor job of integrating and this coming from someone with great grandparents born in both countries.

Why is the Boston NBA team Celtics? Because an Irishman, Curley, made the city Irish, instead of American. You'll notice the dates are contemporaneous to the Teddy remarks, and you'll notice who won that argument, and you'll notice that Boston is still more Irish than American.

And you'll look at Minneapolis. And you'll start noticing every African woman in a hijab in you neighborhoods.

And maybe, just maybe, you'll learn a lesson from the past instead of pretending none of the bad parts happened.

Personally, I have respect for the people in the past who risked their lives to settle. The modern-day descendants of those people deserve no special accolades. You didn't do shit except get popped out in the right place from the right hole. You're not special because of what they did.

This argument goes both ways. By all rights, what makes modern immigrants special, in that they should be allowed access to America? Access to America isn't some human right, after all.

And I can't help but notice that the Heritage Americans seem to have little to no problem with white people who have only recently migrated, or that they seem to have little interest in the contributions of people who are not white but have also been here a long time.

So?

That's a moral condemnation, not an argument.

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You can’t help but equivocate between counting ancestors and “character of the nation” bullshit.

'Culture is downstream of genetic personality traits' is the missing element that ties these together. Not stupid stuff like eating rice vs. potatoes, but 'in-group vs out-group preference', 'openness to experience', 'sensitivity to impurity', 'tendency towards religious experiences', 'collectivism vs. contrarianism' etc.

Red and black tribe americans are the closest cultural match to each other, and are genetically very very different.

I think this cuts both ways though. Cultural preferences will drive genetic personality traits.

It's a feedback loop, which if anything makes the effect more powerful. I think absent heavy coercion you will struggle to change it for immigrant populations, but the more important point is that even if you do, you are still dumping masses of new genes into the pool. The overall character of the pool will be changed no matter what you do.

I would argue that genetics is entirely downstream of culture because cultural circumstances determine what genes get passed to the next generation.

I largely agree with your points, and think integration is important. But also, living in the Twin Cities and watching how ICE is harassing a lot of our Hmong neighbors (my wife’s native-born coworker’s native-born children were detained)

I have a couple of problems with this claim.

The first is that there are a lot of people out there who will say literally anything (including lying) in order to make the Trump administration look bad. Presumably that includes concern-trolling -- "I mainly agree with you, I just have some concerns . . . "

Are you willing to give the names of these detainees and link to some news articles so people can scrutinize your claims? Do you even have firsthand knowledge or are you going by what your wife said that her co-worker said that her children said?

Over the past 10 years or so, almost every negative piece of information I have heard about Trump turned out, upon scrutiny, to fall somewhere between wild exaggeration and outright fabrication.

The other issue is that the process of enforcing any law necessarily entails some degree of false positives. Assuming for the sake of argument that once in a while ICE briefly detains a citizen or permanent resident and then releases them doesn't really mean much unless it becomes a big problem.

What were your "wife’s native-born coworker’s native-born children" doing when they were detained? Because in most of the cases I have seen where a US citizen is detained it's because they try to interfere with the arrest of someone else. Statistically only like .5% of people ICE detained this year were US Citizens, so it's not impossible that a mistake was made. But the framing that ICE is just arresting brown people and sorting them out later doesn't seem to hold up to data.

Went to Home Depot for some drywall. Have you even seen any Hmong involved in the protests, here? These aren’t postmodern woke progressives. Both of my wife’s kids coworkers were released the next morning. But still, it’s all exceedingly un-intelligent.

No, Hmong tend to be salt-of-the-earth people. But kids, especially college-aged kids, can get swept up in things even when they know better.

From what I can tell, their experience is not representative of ICE's activities. I am sorry they had a rough experience. I would like experiences like that minimized, but there are a certain number of false positives that will happen when enforcing any law and I would rather have those false positives than no law enforcement. I would say the same if it was myself caught in a sweep.

Are the Laotians here the Hmong you refer to?

No. They’re not. At All.

The Hmong have clan-based surnames. If the surname isn’t Vang, Yang, Xiong, Her, Thao, Lee, Moua, Lor, Hang, Khang, Kue, Vue, Fang, Chue, Cheng, Cha, Kong, and Pha, then you can pretty quickly rule out with almost total accuracy they’re not Hmong.

That perp’s name is Sriudorn Phaivan.

The first perp is Phaivan, but there's a Vang, a Vue, a Yang, a Xiong, and a Lor also. So possibly 5 Hmong and one non-Hmong Laotian. I suppose Yang and Xiong are common non-Hmong surnames as well, though.

So there’s five guys, but not the really nasty one, and we’ve got 3,000 ICE agents with more on the way and they’re shaking down Hmong citizens born here whose parents were born here who have never even been to Asia, for just being Hmong, for the reason they already knew about a specific half-dozen people they intended to rightfully arrest and deport and could have do so with just a few agents? A better test would be, “Are your street rips actually uncovering any previously-unknown illegal Hmong immigrants?” Given what’s being fed to the right wing press contains none of that: no.

It’s good they’re going after known offenders. It’s bad they’re harassing people because they’re Hmong. Which in my addressing OP’s point, it is not just the left that insists upon hyphenated Americans.

Five guys that we know about. Five guys that we caught.'

Hmong citizens

You can't help yourself. They aren't Americans, nobody is pretending they're Americans, because it's obvious they're Hmong, which is mutually exclusive with American. You can't even call them American Citizens, you call them Hmong Citizens like there's some Hmong nation that they are citizens of.

Any man who says he in an American but something else besides is no American at all. That goes double for the Hmong who are well integrated and mostly assimilated. If you're something else besides, you are foreign, and will always be foreign, and you will always carry with you that dual loyalty which precludes assimilation.

Not American. Never will be American. Never can be American.

Hmong. Different. Guests, at best, but native? Never.

So there’s five guys, but not the really nasty one

Vang: Sexual Assault, sodomy of a child under age 13, and procuring a child for prostitution

Vue: Strong-arm rape of a 12-year-old and kidnapping with intent to sexually assault

Yang: Strong-arm rape, aggravated assault with a weapon, and strangulation

Xiong: Rape and child fondling

Lor: Rape, rape with a weapon, and sexual assault

Oh, and another Lor: Two counts of homicide.

All of these seem quite nasty enough. ICE seems to be going after them because they had deportation orders against them, not because they're Hmong (they also went after Phaivan and some Mexicans and Somalis and others)

...and in the red corner we have this guy. Yes I am aware the commercial itself is for an electric car, but let's be real, its a Cadillac, and I think we all know who that character would have voted for in 2024.

That commercial is awful; I want to punch that asshole in the face.

Ah yes, when I think, new car, I'm thinking what do I want to be sold by Damien Darhk

When a genie turns a LinkedIn post into a car commercial.

“What the luxurious design and impressive fuel economy of the Cadillac ELR CoupeTM taught me about B2B sales…”

I like Neal as an actor but yeah, many of his characters are assholes you want to punch in the face, I associate that with him.

Him as the villain in the Rock's remake of Walking Tall is the version of him I have stuck in my brain, makes it hard to see him as anything else.

It feels like a political attack ad made by a rival car company.

No, that was the Ford response

That commercial is awful; I want to punch that asshole in the face.

Oh man this is great. I just came down here to comment how much I loved that commercial! Like it legitimately made me swell with pride to see someone talking up America.

I loved that commercial! Like it legitimately made me swell with pride to see someone talking up America.

It's iconic for a reason.

It's also important to remember that it came out in the middle of Obama's first term at the height of the "there's nothing exceptional about being American" push. Somebody in Cadillac's marketing department spotted a potential fault-line in the zeitgeist and shot their shot. I for one am glad that they did even if I was never going to buy an ELR.

I liked it too, but as a grinding programmer at a British startup I was thinking, “wait, you get two weeks off in August???”.

Nobody I know in the U.S. gets 2 weeks off in August. Two weeks around Christmas, IF you're lucky. (I am not lucky.)

You don't get a week for Labor Day? What about two weeks paid vacation?

I've worked for over 20 years in multiple states in the US. I've never gotten a week off for Labor Day. I get paid vacation.

Two weeks PTO(all paid time off) is pretty normal in America. Most of the private sector(banks are notorious for getting more) gets 6-10 holidays per year- typically Christmas, New Years, Thanksgiving, Fourth of July, and Memorial and Labor days. Good Friday, the days after Thanksgiving and Christmas, and Christmas eve are also common. Most workplaces will not allow all of their employees to take their PTO at the same time as each other, and time off in popular times of year may be first come first serve, seniority, or certain times might be blocked off altogether with separate procedures for time off.

Two weeks off around Christmas is extremely lucky in the American context, practically unique to schools. But offices shutting down Christmas eve to reopen January 2 is pretty normal, if not the norm.

You don't get a week for Labor Day?

Well, it’s not called Labor Week…

A WEEK??? Lmao. We get one day. What are you talking about?

Pretty much everywhere I've ever worked outside of California has treated Labor-Day as a 4 - 5 day weekend, EG Thursday or Friday through Monday and most people who have flexible PTO will take the rest of the preceding week off to give themselves an uninterrupted 10 days off.

Similar dynamic to that around Thanksgiving. If you know you're going to get Thursday and Friday "for free", you might as well spend some of your PTO to not come in Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday and make a week of it.

If you take PTO, that isn't "getting a week for labor day". Getting time off for a holiday is only what your employer gives by default, extra time you take doesn't count.

Sounds nice. It’s just one day in the US.

Nobody gets 2 weeks off specifically in August, but even new hires typically get 10 days of paid vacation, as counted separate from paid sick leave, per year; total PTO for all working Americans averages around 24 days per year. That includes Christmas vacation time, but pending a big chunk of the remainder for a summer vacation (though more often July than August) is pretty popular.

On the other hand, we don't use all our leave. The majority of Americans report unused PTO days in any given year, an average of 6+ per person. That kind of resonates with that commercial, as well as with my own experiences. I got a nice check for unused vacation days when leaving my last job, and these days my vacation planning is constrained by a rule preventing me from rolling over more than some maximum (7 weeks?) of leave days from year to year, so I end up "burning" some on 3-day weekends when I can't drop work for a week or more at a time.

this guy

Not only is he an arsehole. He can't dress himself. With a two button suit, only the top button should be fastened. Sartorially he looks like shit.

Firstly, it is the top button that should always be buttoned on a two-button suit unless one intends to leave the jacket open. This is because the bottom button tends to ride below the natural waist and will thus cause the jacket to "ride up" when sitting down or standing up.

Secondly, if you're feeling provoked or triggered I'd say the commercial did it's job.

Thankfully that was the first and only time I'd seen that stupid ad. I can't even recall what it was selling. If reminded I'd put it on my shit list of never buying like Gillette. So, given that its absolutely rubbbish advertising.

10 year old YT comment: “The commercial doesn't show the wife banging someone on the side”

It was as I got older that I came to understand that what they really meant was something more like "the United States has no culture worthy of consideration". The more I think about it, the more I think it is this distinction that the modern culture war is really being fought over.

This is yet another word that is lost in translation. Like James Lindsay said, progressives/wokies share your vocabulary, but not your dictionary. The words have different meanings for them, often in deliberate ways to confuse normies*. The same goes for the word culture. It is the usual grift: white and colonial culture is privileged and oppressive, and only through careful self-study and self-criticism can you awoke to these systemic power imbalances, and enrich yourself with other ways of knowing of oppressed cultures.

This is common word in these circles that masks agitation and indoctrination. This valence of the world culture is used when it comes to terms like cultural appropriation, LGBT culture, cultural competence etc. It is related to whole field of Cultural Studies pioneered by British Marxists in 50ies and 60ies, which only builds up on Gramscian theory of cultural hegemony.

*Note: some of these are on par with let's say 4Chan level of trolling. As and example of this, take the family friendly tag when it comes to trans and queer adjacent events like Drag Queen story hour etc. This is a wordplay on fact, that historically these people were estranged from their biological families and were adopted by their "community" a new queer group/family, like the ones described by Kath Weston and many others even in 80s and early 90s. So it is family friendly for queer family, not their biological family - great joke, isn't it? Other examples are now notorious ones such as Diversity and Equity or even "belonging" etc.

Over the years I have often heard cosmopolitan liberals express a sentiment to the effect "the United States has no culture".

And if you press them on this they'll probably go on to clarify that the US of A as a whole has no unified national culture transcending all class, racial and regional differences, which seems like a reasonable opinion. And they'll probably concede that Appalachians or Southern whites, Mormons, prairie ranchers, New Englanders etc. do have distinct cultures of their own, even if it carries the legacy of structural racism or something. This also has parallels in Europe. There's probably no leftist there who will deny that Bavarian identity exists or that the Bretons have a culture, for example. But this has the potential to open up further cans of forms. For example, can a Somali goat herder become a Southerner or an Appalachian hillbilly? Should he even? Can a Syrian farmer become a Saxon or a Swabian? Can a Senegalese become an Alsatian?

I've noticed immigrants and children of immigrants in Britain pick up regional accents. Americans rarely do. A Chinese-American's kids will maybe have a slight drawl if he's grown up in Tennessee, even if he's assimilated. An assimilated Chinese-Brit's kids will sound more or less the same as any other Yorkshireman or whatever.

Maybe that's more of an outsider's perspective and Brits think the same thing in reverse.

In my experience second generation immigrants don't pick up certain regional accents because they have strong negative connotations among elite circles e.g. Southern or Boston, but they are more likely to when people don't feel as strongly about them e.g. Chicago. New York is also full of people with strange half-regional and half-foreign accents.

American regional accents in general aren't that strong and have gotten substantially weaker.

Transatlantic perspective: Immigrants and Americans in general don't tend to pick up strong regional accents outside the Deep South/Minnesota/sometimes SoCal, whereas Brits and kids of immigrants in Britain pick up strong regional accents, but this is mostly due to TV/internet. Smaller American regional and city accents are dying fast, because kids are getting marinated in media from people who speak enough like them but without their accent, whereas in Britain they survive because the people around these kids speak very differently from the TV (and there isn't really a 'standard' British accent without heavy class connotations).

Can a Syrian farmer become a Swabian?

Yes, but probably not in the first generation, and certainly not if he manages to ghettoize and remain linked to his foreign culture.

There's a sense in which "culture" is an inherently otherizing concept. Culture is something for those barbarians over there, not for us civilized folk. We're not having a cultural festival, we're just having a good time. What we eat is not ethnic cuisine, but just normal everyday food. We're not imposing our values, we're just doing what's right.

So, for one to talk too much of "American culture" comes across like a concession that the hegemonic project has failed. It is a project wrapped up in an ostensibly universalistic ideology (in this case, something having to do with democracy, freedom, human rights, etc.) which is what justifies America's influence all over the world. If "Americans" are just another culture or ethnicity (spoken in the same breath as "Samoans", "Maltese", "Tutsis", etc.) then the whole ideology falls apart, and we become just so many decorative artifacts in a museum display case.

It's easier to see this pattern from the outside looking in. Every great empire-building people has to believe that they have transcended "mere culture" and have achieved some special calling that sets them apart from all the other peoples in the world - the Greeks with their philosophy, the Romans with republicanism and later Christianity, the British with their rule of law, the Russians with communism... But when the empire fails, what are they left with?

As a leftist myself I do think the American left has often been too quick to cede ground on patriotism to the right. My impression is that a lot of this is due to a kind of cultural weaponization of the idea to marshal support for the Iraq war in the wake of 9/11. Fortunately there are writers on the left, both old and new, who recognize that patriotism and leftism or liberalism are compatible notions.

History aside, the notion that Donald Trump is some uniquely American president post World War 2 is an idea I find insane. Maybe that can be sustained if your image of what it means to be an American comes from slop like Team America World Police. Or if you have fully bought into the post 9/11 propaganda. But any passing knowledge of America's founders, it's elder statesman, our civic religion more broadly and the virtues embodied therein puts lie to the notion Donald Trump could possible be some avatar of it.

If we're quoting American statesman about what it means to be an American I rather prefer Learned Hand's The Spirit of Liberty

We have gathered here to affirm a faith, a faith in a common purpose, a common conviction, a common devotion. Some of us have chosen America as the land of our adoption; the rest have come from those who did the same. For this reason we have some right to consider ourselves a picked group, a group of those who had the courage to break from the past and brave the dangers and the loneliness of a strange land. What was the object that nerved us, or those who went before us, to this choice? We sought liberty; freedoms from oppression, freedom from want, freedom to be ourselves. This we then sought; this we now believe that we are by way of winning. What do we mean when we say that first of all we seek liberty? I often wonder whether we do not rest our hopes too much upon constitutions, upon laws and upon courts. These are false hopes; believe me, these are false hopes. Liberty lies in the hearts of men and women; when it dies there, no constitution, no law, no court can even do much to help it. While it lies there it needs no constitution, no law, no court to save it. And what is this liberty which must lie in the hearts of men and women? It is not the ruthless, the unbridled will; it is not freedom to do as one likes. That is the denial of liberty, and leads straight to its overthrow. A society in which men recognize no check upon their freedom soon becomes a society where freedom is the possession of only a savage few; as we have learned to our sorrow.

What then is the spirit of liberty? I cannot define it; I can only tell you my own faith. The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which seeks to understand the mind of other men and women; the spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interests alongside its own without bias; the spirit of liberty remembers that not even a sparrow falls to earth unheeded; the spirit of liberty is the spirit of Him who, near two thousand years ago, taught mankind that lesson it has never learned but never quite forgotten; that there may be a kingdom where the least shall be heard and considered side by side with the greatest. And now in that spirit, that spirit of an America which has never been, and which may never be; nay, which never will be except as the conscience and courage of Americans create it; yet in the spirit of that America which lies hidden in some form in the aspirations of us all; in the spirit of that America for which our young men are at this moment fighting and dying; in that spirit of liberty and of America I ask you to rise and with me pledge our faith in the glorious destiny of our beloved country.

a group of those who had the courage to break from the past and brave the dangers and the loneliness of a strange land

So welfare-grabbers aren't American and never will be, since they refuse to break with the past, there are no dangers to brave, and at no point are they lonely due to jet travel and telecommunications., never mind the foreign ethnic enclaves that are being planted in my homeland.

the spirit of liberty is the spirit which weighs their interests alongside its own without bias

LOL. LMAO, even.

This man is simply describing Anglo-saxons in more words. Reading this has made me more chauvanist, because I honestly don't believe these qualities are even found in Germans or Italians, never mind Arabs, Africans, Hindus, or Orientals.

Other races are incapable of liberty, is that what he's saying? Is that what you wanted me to take away? Because I do not see that equal weighing in anyone other than Americans. Not blacks, not mexicans, not asians, not anybody else but Americans.

Learned makes a great ethnonationalist case for America. These other people simply don't have it in them, they don't have that fire in their belly, and they are incapable of participating in the American project.

To clarify, I said "since the Cold War", not since WWII. Also, you say "any passing knowledge of America's founders, it's elder statesman, our civic religion more broadly and the virtues embodied therein puts lie to the notion Donald Trump could possible be some avatar of it." but what specific knowledge would that be?

To clarify, I said "since the Cold War", not since WWII.

Mistake on my part, I still think it is not true.

Also, you say "any passing knowledge of America's founders, it's elder statesman, our civic religion more broadly and the virtues embodied therein puts lie to the notion Donald Trump could possible be some avatar of it." but what specific knowledge would that be?

What kinds of virtues did the founders of America hold in high regard? Civility. Integrity. Humility. Temperance. How does Trump embody any of these? What is it about Trump, his actions or mannerisms, that people should find aspirational?

On one hand, sure: Trump is certainly not the avatar of those virtues.

One the other hand, neither was Clinton or Reagan. Or LBJ constantly waving his huge penis at all sorts of people. Unzipping and whipping out "Jumbo" all the time.

I don't even mean things as criticism against all these Presidents. They fail a certain high minded test of virtues. If they happen to promotion policies I want that's fine. If not then my real issue with them is policy disagreement more than failure at temperance.

Tump fucked porn stars. Clinton raped multple women. Kennedy fucked anything with three holes. Jefferson fucked at least one teenaged slave. I don't like any of it, but I'm not uniquely concerned about Trump's lack of temperance.

Personally I am less concerned with the virtues that the founders of America were purported to hold in high regard, than I am with the virtues that they displayed. Humble, civil, temperate men would not have committed treason against the crown by fomenting a rebellion. Integrity? Yes I would agree that on the balance, the men who signed the Declaration of Independence were men of integrity though I imagine that many of their loyalist compatriots would have disagreed. As for honesty, Trump's unabashed honesty is arguably the single biggest reason people vote for him. If you ask a Trump voter what they like most about him, more often than not you will get an answer to the effect of "Because he tells it like it is"

A lot of the lists of virtues of the founders come from Ben Franklin, who was rather notoriously lacking in some of them.

Temperance

If you mean "temperance" as in "Women's Christian Temperance Union", I recall reading that Biden and Trump are both teetotalers, and that W. Bush stopped drinking before he ran for president.

Sadly, your conclusion about the other virtues seems well-founded.

Temperance can specifically refer to abstaining from alcohol, but it more generally means moderation in personal conduct.

Civility. Integrity. Humility. Temperance.

We haven't had a presidential hopeful that embodies those in 14 years, and the predicted hopefuls for the next round don't either. For the failed candidate that had a grain of any of those- well, hard to forget what one of the later shitbags said about him.

So no, I don't think Trump should be found aspirational. But damned if we're not starved for anyone else that can be, and that at least pretends to treat the country as something more than a paypig.

We haven't had a presidential hopeful that embodies those in 14 years, and the predicted hopefuls for the next round don't either. For the failed candidate that had a grain of any of those- well, hard to forget what one of the later shitbags said about him.

Romney sure put paid to the claim heard among some liberals that they'd be happy to vote for a moderate Republican, not a crazy one like [insert whichever one they're putting down at the moment].

But any passing knowledge of America's founders, it's elder statesman, our civic religion more broadly and the virtues embodied therein puts lie to the notion Donald Trump could possible be some avatar of it.

I don't see an argument in this post.

is that he gives off this vibe of being quintessentially capital-A AMERICAN

His appeal is that he's a billionaire who puts his name on everything, says whatever he wants, bangs hookers, and never apologizes for any of it. He's doing exactly what the average lower-class guy would if they were rich, and that makes him trustworthy and relatable. If anything, he talks about American values and culture much less than other politicians. He wants America to WIN because America is his team, and it's good when your team wins. Compare him to Reagan, who also used the "make America great again" slogan, but to him "America" meant specific things - the pilgrims, the free market, opportunity, conquering the west. We were the city on the hill. But Trump would work just as well in any country or time, there's nothing uniquely American about a strong man who make our country great and beat up other country.

He wants America to WIN because America is his team, and it's good when your team wins.

And us plebs eat it up. It's so much better than the alternative world, where some sensible Dem mouthpiece yammers a bunch of kindergarten-level pablum about how it's not really about winning and losing, it's about cooperating with our partners to blah blah blah, and oh by the way white man we still don't think you're doing enough for the groups we actually care about, etc.

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