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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   26251 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 9, 2026

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You're contradicting yourself and backtracking on every point that you initially used as evidence that America lacks civilization. I will just repeat: America didn't spring out of a vacuum. We had institutional depth from the beginning (albeit many new institutions had to be invented) because even the earliest colonists were not tribes wandering into the New World across the Bering Sea.

I agree that European institutions are under strain too, especially from the hard right and parties like AfD and Reform here in the UK but they're harder, the damage is slower and meeting more resistance at every level.

I sincerely doubt this. Maybe not about Europe resisting right-wing Trump-like movements, but that's not the only kind of change we observe.

Instead what we're seeing over there is that a single administration with a sufficiently bloody minded approach can hollow out norms that were supposedly two and a half centuries deep in what, a year and a half? The US has a proper full constitution and an extremely strong supreme court which could block all this with ease but it has folded like a marzipan deckchair. That's not what deep roots look like. That's what a brilliant structure built on shallow cultural soil looks like when someone finally decides to test the foundations. It sinks at the first real challenge.

Trump is not the first, nor the worst, challenge American norms and institutions have faced. The Civil War was not even the first time the government faced a severe challenge to its credibility and stability (nor was it the last). I have argued with other Motters because I think the probability of Trump actually destroying the Republic is low, but non-zero, and my lowball estimate is higher than they think is realistic. But it's not the first time there has been a non-zero chance of the American experiment ending.

Europe has not exactly been a continuous steady state of reliable governance for the past two and half centuries either.

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