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