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Good for you, but no he isn't. He's not an American nor is he my countryman. He's the son of Indians, he married an Indian, and he has Indian children. I will give his parents credit for the middle name, though (Reed).
I'm sure he's nice to have lunch with, that was never in question.
The most American of traits as I've mentioned before is looting the commons for your own benefit. Barely a month later someone told me on this forum in a conversation about doctors/market distortion around doctors that they want less competition for their own job and more competition for other jobs so they could pay less for goods and services, and pointed out that this is a value held by a majority of Americans (in a business sense), meaning that the immigration debate for sake of protectionism is essentially a non-starter.
People want in. Whether this is because they see more opportunities there (or suckers there), finding a new land to seek your fortunes in is as American as apple pie and processed cheese product. Socializing the losses and privatizing the gains is a game Americans play better than everyone else, as I've said before - so why are you at all surprised when those are your countrymen and there's a long line of potential NBA All-Stars chomping at the bit to get in so they can play that game?
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You are going to have to contend with every white racist's problem, which is that the majority of the people you would like to be in your ingroup feels more kinship with the urbane Indian-American guy than with you. If we were entering a new golden era of free association and vibes-based citizenship, they would sooner team up with him to send you to Madagascar than with you to expel him. I feel like the abstract schema, where A and B say "I consent" to each other while C is off to the side seething at B like "I don't, you should be with me instead", occurs fairly frequently in cuckoldry memes.
In fact, going deeper, it seems fair to hypothesise that extreme xenophilia and anti-tribalism is now a core "white" racial trait (unless perhaps you stick with some marginal groups like Albanians), no doubt aided by centuries of natural selection where those who didn't have them were more likely to go off to slaughter each other. Are you partisan for the whites that actually exist, or some fantasy version you wish existed?
The problem is that this is an extremely selected comparison, and it's kind of embarrassing that our elite capital folks are missing the point.
I've written posts complaining about personal experiences with Indian immigrants - let me give a different example. The professor I had most often (3 classes) in college was an older Indian guy who taught physics. One of my favorite memories of him was when he was covering a unit on optics, and he had projected on the board an illustrative image, which he off-handedly mentioned was the cover art to his favorite album.
Yes, it was exactly what everyone is thinking.
We teen white kids had a great moment of fun about it. "Holy shit, did you guys know Indians could be Boomers, too?"
I liked that professor. He was a good dude, and he was good to me. I'll bet the Yale professor on Con law is in a similar boat.
Cool.
So, what about the other 99.99%?
Because the average immigrant is absolutely not an urbane, 130+ IQ dude with excellent English and a witty command of prestige television references. That's actually about 4ish SD above average. The experience of the average American dealing with the average immigrant is more like spending 10 minutes struggling to explain the difference between a square and a circle to someone with English (and apparent reasoning, though the linguistic issue is likely severely amplifying that) skills on the level of a three year old, while they are acting like an entitled asshole.
There was a post on the old place, years ago, and I can't quite remember who it was. GeneralMcCusker, or McJuncket, or however those names were spelled, I think. Anyway, the post described the enlightening experience of working in a T-Mobile store in a
baddiverse part of town. And the post basically suggested that a similar life experience ought to be a requirement for having meaningful opinions about the communities of people involved.I think a lot of this discourse is driven by people who never see what everyone else is complaining about, not in spite of, but precisely because they are extremely high functioning individuals of means who have organized their lives so as to never have to deal with the downsides of their tolerant and high-minded policies.
I know several such people IRL. Friends and family. Great people. I truly love them.
But on this sort of topic, all I can ever think is "Your actions speak so loud, I can't hear a word you're saying."
For comparison, imagine if we dumped an entire American trailer park into a small town in a foreign country. And when the locals objected and complained, the entire upper class said "What are you losers talking about? The Americans are amazing. You're just jealous because they're better than you." And then the only American they've ever met is FiveHourMarathon. Just so when everyone here is acting like their mental model of an immigrant is self_made_human.
We could halt all immigration and fully denaturalize and deport the bottom 90% of immigrants, and it's likely that most Westerners who actually post to this forum would barely notice.
But the people dealing with them in parks and the subways and retail establishments and getting undercut by people's who market niche is ignoring labor laws most certainly would.
The poster I was responding to was specifically declaring to be unAmerican some Indian guys who wrote a blog post about SCOTUS minutiae in flawless English, and who another poster claimed to have met and argued about baseball with. The average immigrant is irrelevant to this argument, as he very specifically excluded a non-average one, implicitly asserting that this non-averageness does not matter to him.
(Incidentally, I think demanding +4SD for 130IQ etc. is excessive. The set of Indians who immigrate into the US is already biased towards the smarter, more looped-in with US culture set; the criteria you lay out are maybe +2.)
There's a broader point to make here that deserves a top level.
+2SD would get you to just the 130, with a 100 baseline, which is a fairly generous assumption AIUI. "Intelligible English" alone is another +2, and I'm sorry, but if you think otherwise then you are experiencing a powerful selection effect. Go try to have a five minute conversation with the kind of guys who own motels, or talk to random strangers in a grocery store.
Or take a summer job at a T-Mobile store in a diverse area.
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Lol, boo-this-man.gif
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Politely: quit it. "Americans" are not a race or ethnicity. They just aren't. On no serious theory are black Americans not Americans. You can claim to only recognize WASPs as your "countrymen" if you want, but "WASP" is not, nor will it ever be, the legal or the everyday, common-sense definition of the word "American"; insisting otherwise will only breed needless confusion. Like, dude, this isn't about political correctness. You'd have to search pretty far even among white supremacists for any significant numbers of people who think the sentence "Martin Luther King was an American activist" is somehow using the word "American" incorrectly.
I don't even know what you're trying to do here. I can understand some forms of insistence that Americanness is more than a piece of paper. There can be an actual, coherent political agenda behind that kind of linguistic warfare: for example, if you don't think paper citizens who barely speak English and don't meaningfully identify as American or participate in American culture should, in fact, be allowed to keep their paper citizenship, or to stay within the country's borders. That's a coherent, achievable political project, and the definition games make sense within that project.
But like. There's no constituency for expelling all non-WASPs or stripping them of citizenship. It's just not gonna happen. So what's the point of insisting, against all common usage, that you're only a real "American" if you're from the same ethnic group as the Founding Fathers? Literally what is the point? If you got your wish and everyone started using that as the definition, all you'd get would be a needlessly obnoxious situation where "Americans" are a hazily-defined plurality within the much, much broader cohort of "American citizens", and are one of several groups who participate in "American culture" and "American politics". That helps exactly no one. If what you want is just the dubious self-esteem buzz of getting to say "I'm a real American™" with the full blood-and-soil weight you give to the word, please just try to be happy with "I'm a Heritage American" or some other suitably complimentary turn of phrase, without trying to gerrymander what the bare word "American" means into uselessness.
I'd be happy to go with "no hyphenated Americans" but that died a miserable death long ago. Alas!
Feel free to disagree with them, but denying American as a race or ethnicity is exactly what generates people like that, who refuse to disbelieve their lying eyes about what groups get certain privileges.
Done been gerrymandered into meaninglessness anyways.
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The first step to destroying something is to deny its existence. Like it or not, there is a certain quality mix of ex-european immigrants that could be called American by ethnicity, I'm sure there would be a wide range of genetic mixes some more pure, some more mixed, but you can't just handwave them away. They fit all the criteria for an ethnos, a shared religion, founding myth and blood relation.
I don't dispute that; I dispute that this particular ethnos get to hog the word "American" all to themselves when at the very least black, slavery-descended Americans are equally distinctive, have been here for centuries too, and are equally laughable to imagine all sailing back to the shores of their forefathers one day.
Those are "black americans" and are a distinct group from eg. Somali Americans or Indians who have come to the US. Whether each group is part of McAmerica ™ is up to personal interpretation. In my opinion Japanese/Chinese/Korean americans get much more of a right to claim to be American than random Indians or Somalis. The US was not a proposition nation and it should not be in the future either.
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Trying to fix this:
Not yet. Not until you build it. Not until you say it out loud, and declare that it's what you want, and goal worth pursuing.
I'm happy to stake out, believe in, and defend the extreme stance of where I want to be in the knowledge that the only way to get what you want is to decide what you want, and then start going there. I want to break the assumption that American means "man of any race or none in particular." I want to regain my own national character.
I don't know how else to tell you that this is not going to happen. There's no constituency for a WASP ethnostate because it's just not a plausible thing to want. There are fifty million African-Americans and I'm sorry, but they aren't going anywhere. The Civil War was probably the last time a mass exodus back to Africa was remotely on the table, and even then it was kind of a laughable idea. They're centuries away from African soil being their land and African culture being their culture and African languages being their language. Talking about sending them all away as "foreigners" is like trying to get the Saxons of England to "regain their national character" and send the Normans home nine hundred years too late (except worse because there are fewer ethnic Normans and it'd be somewhat easier for them to reintegrate into French society if France were willing to take them back). It's just not happening, the boat has sailed.
Recognizing this sheer statement of fact does not necessarily entail that "American means 'man of any race or none in particular'"; you could plausibly argue the line that American means one of a bounded number of specific ethnicities, if you really want. You could say that eg WASPs, Black Americans, and Native Americans (1) are established, centuries-old, distinct subtypes of Americans like Han, Zhuang, Manchus and Miaos are distinct subtypes of Chinese - and that it's still possible to be ethnically non-American by not being part of any one of these groups. A multi-ethnic polity is not necessarily the same thing as a race-blind one. There could be a world where America moves in that direction, it's unlikely but it could happen.
What you're proposing, however, is simply impossible.
1: Please let us not go on a tangent about the term 'Native American'. I just thought it would be less confusing here than any variation on 'Indian'/'Amerindian' insofar as we started out talking about Indian immigrants in the Punjabi sense.
I, in fact, have said exactly this in the past, and it was my one and only AAQC nomination.
I didn't call them American, of course, but I considered those three groups the only ones who I would consider "native," that is, with no where else to go back to.
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National character is not merely the past. National character is not merely ethnicity. National character is not merely the line "nationality of father" in the birth certificate.
National character can be directly and plainly observed.
I don't see you building national character, for now I only see you advocating for no immigration. I'm afraid a certain Scottish Deutchman has you beat there.
You seem to be slipping between ‘national character’ in the sense of ‘at X we believe in building character in our students’ ie a chosen set of virtues, and ‘character’ as in ‘characteristic’ as a description of group traits.
You can simply go to countries and observe that different groups of people across the word have markedly different traits and that this is partially attributable to descent. Aggression, deference, conformism, stoicism, garrulousness, sensibility … these are not things taught purely in school. And what is taught in school bears a strong relationship to the traits of who decided the curriculums, who taught it, and who learned it.
Nobody is surprised when a child does something and people say fondly (or angrily), “he’s just like his father”. How can it be any different at scale? And why should people who liked their group, and the ‘character’ it had, not publicly lament its dissolution and call for reversing the damage?
I know that groups of people have different traits and they can be partially attributed to descent. I do not observe, and refuse to nakedly believe, that specific romanticized expressions of those traits magically pass through dozens of generations, intact, despite since then intermixing dozens of times and being subjected to environments that are unlike the one that brought out those expressions in the first place.
In other words, no one is actually just like their father.
If someone wants to instantiate a breeding program to make more people with as high percentage of 1776 American blood as possible, that's the motte to the "national character of pioneers and settlers" bailey.
Of course not, but IMO you have to remember:
To put it more provocatively:
You can paint the Stars-and-Stripes on any number of substrates: wood, steel, plastic, paper. For a while they will all look the same. But in fifty years they’re going to look VERY different.
Personally, I just miss an ‘Englishness’ we used to have. It brings me immense comfort and joy to go back to the countryside, which is still majority British, and be amongst my own familiar people. Then for work I have to return to London which is just fundamentally alien. Not just in its languages but in the attitudes and looks and behaviour of everybody around me.
We imported vast numbers of non-British and it’s now completely impossible to defend any sort of right to our country, our government or our institutions without stepping on the toes of people who don’t all hate me now but will the moment I suggest that Englishness should be anything more than a historical relic. We (the native English) lost our country, and the only way to even begin getting it back is to be able to freely distinguish between what and who is English and what and who is not. So I appreciate @KMC for being forthright about it.
Thank you. I'm trying to be uncompromising about this. I'm trying to deny the assumptions that get slipped in, the defeatist attitude. Sure, I might lose, but I'm not going to quit, and I'm not going to shut up and lose quietly.
I am basing my attitude on what I see in England. I don't want that happening here, and where I see it starting, I speak out against it.
Calling Indians Americans is the start of it, and so I don't do it, and I call it out as false where I see it.
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This would be wildly incorrect, unless you have a specialized definition of overwhelmingly. Black 47 brought the Irish fleeing famine, 1848 brought waves of German immigration after failed revolutions. Local elementary schools near me taught in German until the 1900s. We got 2,000,000 Irish and 1,500,000 Germans dumped into an 1840 population of around 15,000,000 free men. The Civil War was fought, in significant part, by immigrants.
Immigration would break 1,000,000/decade in the 1840s, and crest at 5,000,000 in the 1880s.
If you want England to be English, that is fine, for you. One only has to turn back the clock a few decades, within living memory there were few immigrants in England. England is still 80% white English. The United States white population, broadly defined not even getting into the "heritage American" distinction, fell below 80% in the 80s.The colonial stock were a minority by 1900, at the latest, among the white population. And 1900 is the start of the American Century, not its end.
Yet America remains the greatest nation on Earth, as a creedal nation, assimilating vast multitudes.
America is not a creedal nation, and I'm yet to see a person that utters the words "creedal nation" actually being a proponent of the idea. I'm largely sympathetic to it, if somewhat skeptical of whether it can work, but everyone I ever talked to, that brought it up, definitely is not in favor of excluding people and the basis of their creed.
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We don't assimilate anyone any more. We've got world class athletes competing for China and Sweden because we can't assimilate them anymore.
Also, I think you're plain wrong. Wrong on the facts
The reason America is the greatest nation on Earth is because of this providence, and it is because of this providence that we were able to be a creedal nation in the first place. You have the order backwards, you've confused cause with effect. A bunch of not-that-different people got together and decided to put aside their differences. It was because they were not-that-different that it worked in the first place. And now, when the most different people on Earth are coming, and all of the mechanisms of assimilation have been left decrepit if not outright outlawed, now you say we are a creedal nation, when nobody believes the creed except for how much they can squeeze from it.
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You could get it back if the English got united about it. Isn't England still 80% English? Now that won't happen because it seems the UK elites hate anything English but it could.
I feel like America is too much of a propositional nation for that to work. We've had mass immigration for a long long time. KMC's America was lot by the time of the civil war with all the Germans, Scandinavians and Catholics that were filling up Northern cities. In some ways the Confederacy was the last gasp of Anglo America but with it's fall it was well and truly dead. KMC is not totally wrong but his politics died with the Know Nothing party more than 100 years ago and even at their peak they weren't able to stop immigration. The idea of America's posterity died with the civil war and I don't know how you could revive it since the majority of white Americans aren't pure Anglos. And a significant portion of those who are, are extremely woke New Englanders.
In practice it’s more complicated than that. Immigration is disproportionately in the main cities and at the top and bottom of society. For example, of the heads of the four main UK political parties, i.e. the people who might become PM, 50% are not English in the sense I describe.* In practice, you only need one non-English person in a committee before asserting Englishness turns into a massive interpersonal conflict.
I agree with you that KMC’s wishes are ultimately doomed thanks to prewar immigration, but I agree with his assertion that, ‘having massively diluted my people’s share in and influence over America in the 20th century doesn’t give you the right to then do it again much harder in the 21st’. And I appreciate his willingness to state clearly that nationhood and national character is about more than a passport or being able to recite the magic words in the right order.
*Labour+Reform / Tories+Greens. Lib Dems are as irrelevant as they have always been.
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Yes, because continued migration at present levels will destroy the national character of many western countries, even if you add a bunch of things on top of the "merelies" you listed. What's more, not a single person pushing back on him will ever advocate for any measure for actually preserving national character. They will argue "cultures have, like, always changed, maaaan", instead.
I am in favor of limiting immigration to the level sustainable by assimilation in my country and I believe it would be sensible for USA.
What I'm pushing back on are the kind of people who go on redefining what "assimilated" means because they did a DNA test or dug up the family tree and found dead old things to be proud of instead of actual substance.
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