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PaperclipPerfector  11d ago (text post)   25800 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 23, 2026

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Let's discuss democracy, and the decay and potential recovery of two anglo-origin democracies.

South Africa is clearly having a rough time at the moment. Anemic growth, mass joblessness, the spread of slums, ultraviolence on the streets.

The party largely responsible for this the ANC has a declining vote share but still commands the loyalty of a plurality of the electorate. In addition, most of the parties opposing the ANC are not exactly free marketer reformers of the type that might rapidly turn some of these issues around. Since Apartheid ended more than 20 years ago and these trends are deepening, it seems that the decay has not swayed most voters away from the policies that caused the issues.

A friend of mine said that he has full faith in the UK (Great Britain) to recover fully from its current woes, because one day voters will wake up and see that governance is terrible and getting worse, and they will vote for the opposition who will fix things.

Certainly, some of the parties in the Yookay are trying to fix things through structural economic and social reforms (Reform, Restore), but the plurality of voters including young voters favor parties that would either deepen or continue the issues (Greens, Labour, Muslim Indie Bloc)

Note: from the perspective of this poaster the main issues facing the UK are: Low Skill Immigration, Economic Stagnation, Integration of Non-European Migrants, Crime

So I ask the Motte: Do you believe that in anglo origin democracies that enough decay will have voters seek out parties with effective fixes for the issues, or merely cause voters to slowly rebel against the incumbents?

Note: from the perspective of this poaster the main issues facing the UK are: Low Skill Immigration, Economic Stagnation, Integration of Non-European Migrants, Crime

Have you considered that the people voting Green or Labor simply have other issues they consider important?

Take crime, for example. Most crime statistics actually reflect what the police is doing, not what the criminals are doing. Murder rates are often taken as a proxy because most murderers are not competent enough to make it look like a natural death, so we can hope to get a numbers which are roughly independent to police efforts.

The rate of murders in England and Wales (1.148 in 2021 with 684, which has decreased since then) seems roughly comparable to other European nations. Even if a decent fraction of it was committed by immigrants, there is certainly no nationwide epidemic of murder.

Of course, there is also climate change (which the right should care about if for no other reason than that it will lead to more immigration, unless you like living in the kind of state which will shoot unarmed kids trying to get in), the rents being too damn high (effectively limiting upwards mobility for the bottom half of society), the stupid AI race which at best might lead to the median person becoming economically obsolete and at worst to paperclips, and lately an increasingly unhinged US which can no longer be relied upon to lead the free world, and relatedly energy insecurity resulting from their misadventures, to mention but a few.

I'm not sure South Africa is the best comparison point or example for "Anglo democracies", given the unique historical factors that drive its current malaise. South Africa's democratic situation is closer to a nation like Japan, where they are essentially a one-party democracy, never deviating even in the face of catastrophe.

Plenty will argue that South Africa represents the likely future for the UK and Canada as they increasingly fracture upon ethnic lines, but there is another anglo country with massive levels of low skill ethnic minorities that is an even closer comparison - the United States. The US, not long after its inception, imported a permanent underclass that still numbers around 15% of the population, and for the past 50 years, they've had a constant influx of illegal immigration. In comparison to the rest of the anglosphere, they have a much lower % of white Europeans. Nonetheless, the US is much, much richer.

While concerns around immigration, integration, and crime are not going to be solved by money alone, South Africa's issues are clearly heavily economic in nature. The breakdown of their society is heavily influenced by the rampant corruption, the collapse of their infrastructure, and, as you say, the anaemic growth and mass joblessness. For the UK, I'd go so far as to say that the combined vote % for Reform, Restore and the Greens would be <10% if they had even kept close to the US over the past 20 years.

Both the US and Apartheid South Africa demonstrate that the economic conditions of a country are largely detached from immigration/demographics. In right-wing UK circles, I see a lot of "cope" around the plans of Reform/Restore, in which the major factor for productivity collapse is entirely low skilled immigration, and once they are kicked out companies will be forced to pay much higher wages. It's an oddly left-wing viewpoint, one in which greedy companies are keeping all the money for themselves, and you just have to force them in order to get that money to the wider public.

The reality is that the UK's pathetic productivity has been decades in the making. Clamping down on immigration levels might collapse Deliveroo and numerous Turkish barbershops, but it will not suddenly unlock hidden growth.

Most of the replies below are skeptical of saving the UK via democracy, because, I assume, they don't think that [Reform will be elected/they will try to cut immigration/they will successfully cut immigration]. I think this is the wrong viewpoint when it comes to decay or recovery. What will push UK towards South African outcomes is their complete failure to build infrastructure. It's the dead cities and towns and villages outside of London. Its the unending growth of the housing market to the exclusion of all else. It's the most expensive business energy rates in the world. And its the wages and jobs that will soon pay less than even the former communist bloc in Eastern Europe, if they exist at all.

There's not a single party that even thinks about these issues. Sure, you can find MPs and advisors that at least understand the economic woes and can propose ideas - like Danny Kruger for Reform - but even Labour and the Tories have some individuals who get it. None of them are at the centre of power, and there is such structural rot that even if they were, it would take a Herculean effort to turn things around.

So no, I don't think the UK is going to recover.

Will it decay? I'm not sure this is the truth either, more like just stagnation. There are a few bright spots for the UK: the brain drain which smashed SA is restricted for the UK. Europe is just as fucked, and so the only escape route is America. But the US has its own immigration issues, and they make it very difficult for the ~top 20-2 percentile to move there. A US that threw open the borders to white Europeans could instantly decimate most of Europe.

More than anything though, I think timescales are long enough that AI is going to render this entire conversation moot, one way or the other

Both the US and Apartheid South Africa demonstrate that the economic conditions of a country are largely detached from immigration/demographics. In right-wing UK circles, I see a lot of "cope" around the plans of Reform/Restore, in which the major factor for productivity collapse is entirely low skilled immigration, and once they are kicked out companies will be forced to pay much higher wages. It's an oddly left-wing viewpoint, one in which greedy companies are keeping all the money for themselves, and you just have to force them in order to get that money to the wider public.

The argument, as expressed by Mark Carney below*, is that cheap labour functions as a good enough solution that doesn't force companies to become more productive and thus able to raise wages for those they do hire (and doesn't force the government to figure out how to create incentives towards this end). Why bother?

I don't know that this is particularly "leftist". It's about as stereotypically leftist as claiming that companies faced with higher goods prices they can't pass on will either shrink the item or stop selling it. The left wing answer (that we saw post-COVID/stimulus) would be to deny that the business' options are limited this way in the first place, and that the companies are using it as an excuse to be greedy.

It can totally be the rational decision for UK employers until something changes without it being pure greed.

*

Yes, that's absolutely right. There can be short-term, and you're familiar with it.... Mr. Macklem was just in Fort McMurray, and I'm from the area as well, so we're familiar with the kinds of gaps you get there. One doesn't want an over-reliance, certainly, on temporary foreign workers for lower-skilled jobs, which prevent the wage adjustment mechanism from making sure that Canadians are paid higher wages, but also so that firms improve their productivity as necessary. We don't want to mask it, and the intent of the government's review is to ensure that this is used for transition, for those higher-skilled gaps that exist and can hold our economy back.

I think the spirit of the program and the spirit of the government's review is to ensure that this program is concentrated on higher skills, number one, to fill gaps, and to recognize that those are temporary gaps, so that we are ensuring that Canadian businesses are providing Canadian solutions—the training—and that we're working together to ensure that Canadians can meet those gaps. For the lower-wage jobs, it is important over a reasonable time period to ensure that the market adjusts and that those market wages adjust; then there will be productivity and other adjustments that ensure that Canadians are paid more, but also that we're a more productive economy as a whole. Getting that balance right is what is necessary.

To be clear, I don't actually disagree that access to low skilled labour can suppress business investment. It's more the specific idea that this access is the biggest factor in low productivity or wage growth which I find absurd. I would be surprised if was even one of the top 5 most important factors.

The UK is careening toward authoritarianism, but it's hard to predict what flavor it will take, or whether it will quickly disintegrate into a failed state. Looking at the political, demographic, economic, and fiscal cliffs the UK is teetering upon, it's hard to imagine that this wasn't by design. The left won either way; they will have torn down the old order and replaced it with chaos. It's ironically not unlike the Wiemar Republic, though perhaps even worse. Imagine if the Jews were actually as bad as Hitler said they were, except the degenerate elites sided with the Jews and won. Accelerationism might be the least bad path forward, because it's too late for anything else. Whatever remains of the British peoples after this, I'm pretty sure they're going to find their religion again.

The UK is careening toward authoritarianism, but it's hard to predict what flavor it will take, or whether it will quickly disintegrate into a failed state.

I think the flavour is already clear: anarchy-tyranny, where certain demographics (i.e. Muslims) are essentially above the law, while everyone else is subject to ever increasing repression.

The UK is careening toward authoritarianism, but it's hard to predict what flavor it will take

Is it? Looks like authoritarian multiculturalism with none of the redeeming qualities Singapore has.

Looking at the political, demographic, economic, and fiscal cliffs the UK is teetering upon, it's hard to imagine that this wasn't by design.

Really? I suppose you can say this about Blair's changes but they legitimately seem to have sleepwalked into fiscal issues like the triple lock. Which sounds insane but if it was just expected that you could do nothing about the elderly's benefits Labour wouldn't have been forced into humiliating retreats on something much less essential like the winter fuel allowance. They would have just let the train run.

Like many people they just promised more than they could deliver.

Is it? Looks like authoritarian multiculturalism with none of the redeeming qualities Singapore has.

I think it's even worse than that, because authoritarian multiculturalism suggests to me some uniformity of enforcement. I think what we're seeing emerge in the UK is a unique form of caste system, where the favoured groups (Muslims and third-world migrants) aren't subject to the usual laws yet still perform overwhelmingly negatively in most outcomes due to their extreme dysfunction.

Is the concept of an economic underclass having considerably more freedom from the law than their supposed betters really that novel? "Only proles and animals are free".

It's not a question of a separate underclass. At the same socio-economic level, native Brits get the book thrown at them for stuff that's tolerated when done by Muslims. Hence our PM's nickname "Two Tier Keir".

No. Things can always get worse without resistance. Look at Cuba, the situation is much, much worse now than many people - even those hostile to communism - imagine. The country has, since 1991, slowly gone from a moderately poor but functioning socialist country like the former Eastern Bloc or China at the time, to the poorest country in the region after Haiti. The people are starving, there’s no electricity, no medicine, no fuel. The economy has been collapsing for 35 years. There is extensive reporting that even the Chinese have strongly recommended pursuing China or Vietnam style capitalist reforms, but the regime leadership are, moreso than the Chinese or Vietnamese, die hard communists loyal to central planning as an economic theory.

This is true historically, too. There were empires that took centuries to collapse. In my opinion, the institutional inertia around immigration for the Anglo countries is too high to solve. The public don’t have the stomach for what is required. Look at Minneapolis; ICE would probably have to kill hundreds of thousands of American citizens to outweigh even a small part of the damage caused by massive third world immigration. The only thing that could save it would be some kind of sudden, deeply unexpected overthrow of democracy in a Western country, but there’s a 90% chance that only makes it worse. You only get one LKY in a century, if that.

I think it's rather telling that apologists for the Cuban regime always point to the American blockade as the ultimate cause of Cuba's economic woes. It's hardly a ringing endorsement of communism that communist regimes can function perfectly well, provided they can freely trade with their capitalist neighbours. Communism isn't just parasitic at an individual or societal level: it's fractally parasitical, no matter at what resolution you examine it.

I don’t know much about Cuba. Having said that, I think it’s reasonable to argue that whatever shortages there are now are lighter or at least not worse than the ones they had there for many years after 1989. On the other hand, I imagine the situation is generally a lot worse than it was before COVID lockdowns.

Look at Cuba, the situation is much, much worse now

Damn its crazy what happens when the world's super power is constantly fucking with it and preventing it from interacting with the world's economy.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/01/addressing-threats-to-the-united-states-by-the-government-of-cuba/

Also I had a good laugh at the title "ADDRESSING THREATS TO THE UNITED STATES BY THE GOVERNMENT OF CUBA"

Further laughs can be had immediately after, with this gem

"The Government of Cuba has taken extraordinary actions that harm and threaten the United States. The regime aligns itself with — and provides support for — numerous hostile countries, transnational terrorist groups, and malign actors adverse to the United States, including the Government of the Russian Federation (Russia), the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the Government of Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah."

Ahh yes Cuba, the rich benefactor of Hamas. Their economy is so dynamic they also support the governments of Russia and China simultaneously!

I live in the fucking clown world universe. My government is not comprised of serious people who want to solve the issues my nation faces.

You are easily amused. There is no contradiction between a country being poor and being able to harm the United States. Especially if it has a command economy where the rulers can arbitrarily decide to spend the budget on the latter and not care about the poor people.

Care to share some of Cuba's nefarious plots against the USA? What have they actually done to harm the USA since the Cuban Missile Crisis?

"Nefarious plot" is a very apt way to describe "cooking the heads of US intelligence personnel with a sound cannon."

I'm reminded of Scott's article about rising crime rates, which fails to take into account that if crime rises, and you use costly anti-crime measures, that restores the status quo so that's "no increase in crime", even though the impact of crime has gone up.

Cuba hasn't been able to harm the US much because the US exerts effort to stop it from causing harm, but this effort has a cost, and being forced to pay the cost is itself harm. Where it still does harm the US is mostly on the diplomatic and propaganda front.

but this effort has a cost, and being forced to pay the cost is itself harm

The USA cries out in pain as it strikes you. What cost exactly has the USA paid for the most recent round of "if you trade with Cuba we'll tariff you" or any of the items I listed here

Tariffing countries for trading with Cuba has a huge political and diplomatic cost.

Which the USA has gladly been paying for practically 0 gain for the last 12 months (not even related to Cuba, basically just for love of the game) so clearly it's not that painful lol

I mean, Cuba has had decades to wreck itself before the US decided to embargo anyone trading with them just this year.

You will not find me carrying water for the Cuban government, who I understand to be ideological morons.

But its started earlier than January 2026.

1992 The Cuban Democracy Act barred foreign subsidiaries of U.S. companies from trading with Cuba, extending the sanctions beyond direct U.S.-Cuba commerce. It imposed the 180-day vessel rule, penalizing ships that traded with Cuba by barring them from U.S. ports for six months afterward. It also directed the U.S. government to pressure other countries to restrict trade and credit with Cuba.

1996 The Helms-Burton Act directed the U.S. to oppose Cuba’s entry into international financial institutions. It also created Title III lawsuits and Title IV visa penalties aimed at foreign companies and executives dealing in confiscated property in Cuba, explicitly raising the cost and legal risk of non-U.S. investment in Cuba.

2017 The U.S. created the Cuba Restricted List and barred direct financial transactions with listed entities tied to Cuba’s military, intelligence, and security services, deliberately steering outside money away from large parts of the Cuban economy.

2019 The U.S. activated Title III of Helms-Burton, after years of suspension, allowing lawsuits against foreign firms accused of trafficking in confiscated Cuban property. Increased legal risk of foreign investment in Cuba.

2019 The U.S. ended group “people-to-people” travel to Cuba and banned cruise ships, yachts, and many private aircraft from travelling there, directly cutting off tourism revenue.

2019 The U.S. sanctioned vessels and firms involved in Venezuelan oil shipments to Cuba, targeting Cuba’s outside energy supply.

Less serious, but general squeezing of remittance flows: 1994, 2019, 2020

With Cuba, it's (unfortunately?) really hard to make a convincing argument that its situation had nothing to do with enemy action. If it really were so intrinsically dysfunctional, the US would perhaps have done better to leave it alone and give it all the rope it needs to hang itself with, making it into a cautionary tale, but as it stands, no peoples trying to decide on what economic or political system to support will be taking away any lesson other than "don't piss off a superpower when you are stuck in its backyard with no allies that are willing and able to help" (a lesson I'm sure Ukraine will come around to eventually, and even Taiwan might learn if it doesn't drown in a sudden deluge of LCLpaperclips first).

While not being able to trade with the US is certainly detrimental to Cuba, it is hardly explanatory as to its utter dysfunction. Access to 1 market, even if it is a huge close market, is simply not capable of producing such negative results. Particularly because Cuba is free to trade with Europe, South America, its island neighbors, etc. Its a small island. Even if it was producing goods and services on a per capita basis rivaling a US state, those markets would be more than adequate to absorb all that output and more.

The only thing that the US opening its markets up to Cuba would really do, or would have done, is piss off a bunch of Floridians, who might storm Havanna in boats. Which would be good for Cuba long term of course, because obviously there are enough Cuban-decent former marines to take out the Castro regime if given a green light, but well there it is.

Particularly because Cuba is free to trade with Europe, South America, its island neighbors, etc.

Nope!

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/01/addressing-threats-to-the-united-states-by-the-government-of-cuba/

"(a) Beginning on the effective date of this order, an additional ad valorem rate of duty may be imposed on goods imported into the United States that are products of any other country that directly or indirectly sells or otherwise provides any oil to Cuba"

They still have plenty of trade partners and this particular subrule is generally not enforced!

n 2024, the top exports of Cuba were Rolled Tobacco ($418M), Zinc Ore ($107M), Nickel Mattes ($88.6M), Hard Liquor ($75.2M), and Precious Metal Ore ($55M). The top destinations were China ($270M), Spain ($109M), Germany ($68.2M), Macau ($57.1M), and Switzerland ($49.9M).

https://oec.world/en/profile/country/cub

Cuba is the 59th largest economy by total size, and the 90th largest by population size (out of roughly 200 on worldometer) but this site has it at 158 & 150 out of 226 on exports/imports.

188 & 180th in per capita trade too (84th GDP/capita).

Crazy it trades so much less than the size of the economy or population would predict.... I wonder why??

Given that anytime a non-Commie tankie goes to the country they consistently report crushing poverty, government corruption, and a bunch of street scams, the obvious answer is the real domestic GDP is quite low and the numbers are cooked by the regime.

Except that America is freakishly good at assimilating people and most of the migrants are from groups that aren't that different and also regard American white identity as aspirational. There's not a lot of Kazakhi yak herders and quite a lot of honduran construction workers- and even in the ethnostates of Europe, the latter assimilate OK, let alone in the US.

Yes, those honduran construction workers will probably not produce very many fields medalists, but modern wealthy societies have a lot of uses for low IQ individuals. Literally every billboard near my house is advertising blue collar jobs- in slaughterhouses, warehouses(and not just Amazon), factories, construction, etc. All no experience needed and all paying a living wage.

Except that America is freakishly good at assimilating people and most of the migrants are from groups that aren't that different and also regard American white identity as aspirational.

Doesn't the second part of this sentence undermine the first? It's easy to be good at assimilating people when the people are already co-operative. The recent Somali fraud scandal seems to illustrate that when America tries to assimilate the type of immigrants that European countries get, they get European outcomes.

America was freakishly good at assimilating people. I'm not sure that capacity survived wokeness, or the MAGA backlash. And even before that, blacks never assimilated, which shows that there must be a limit to this ability.

Blacks are American as all get out, assuming you mean AADOS. They're essentially stupider poor southerners(their crime rates are not actually higher than rural southern whites). Yeah they vote for democrats but they don't like anti-american socialists. Most of their cultural quirks are more 'America was like this in the fifties' or 'they're poor' than genuinely different from the American mainstream.

their crime rates are not actually higher than rural southern whites

Citation very much needed

their crime rates are not actually higher than rural southern whites

This is not true in any way. They not only have higher objective crime rates via stats like incarceration %, number of homicides per capita, etc, but they also are far less policed and report crime to authorities less often.

If you seriously think that third world immigration is doing the kind of damage you're suggesting then I have some swampland in New Jersey that's for sale. Maybe you should consider moving to Pittsburgh? Only 4% of the metro population is foreign-born, compared to 14% nationwide and over 30% in places like New York City. We're also about 85% white, almost all non-Hispanic. I love my hometown, and the cost of living is low, but the population has been flat for a while, and before that it was actively declining. If you had been here 20 years ago I could have showed you working-class neighborhoods with high crime rates filled with drugged-out white trash. One neighborhood that looked like it was on the brink of collapse only turned around after the area's modest Hispanic population decided to settle there and revitalize the business district. The other one got significantly better once Bhutanese refugees moved to the area, though that area is still bad, and still 70% white.

Of course, none of these areas are that bad, and everywhere is full of people with names that end in vowels. If you want to see some real shittiness we need to go just down the road to West Virginia. And no, I'm not going to take you to hillbilly country, which would be too easy. I'll instead show you actual industrialized areas full of white Anglos that are shittier than anything you'll find in the Pittsburgh region. Wheeling-Pittsburgh Steel ran 9 mills in the Ohio Valley—Follansbee, WV; Mingo Junction, OH; Steubenville, OH; Martin's Ferry, OH; Wheeling, WV; Beech Bottom, WV; LaBelle, WV; Yorkville, OH; and Benwood, WV. There was also a huge mill at Weirton, and several smaller facilities. Most of that is gone now, but the area is significantly shittier than Pittsburgh.

But that's the wealthier part of West Virginia. If we keep going south, I can show you Chemical Valley, which is even whiter and more Anglo than the Panhandle, and the chemical plants are still in production, though Kaiser Aluminum at Ravenswood closed a long time ago, and Ormet closed in 2013. Jamie Oliver filmed a show in Huntington after it was dubbed the fattest city in the US, and it also probably has more fentanyl addicts than any city in the US. Just remember that if you buy a house there not to leave anything in the yard, like grills or lawn furniture or even children's toys, because they'll steal anything that isn't under lock and key. I can assure you that this area is free from the negative influence of dirty third-world immigrants, though.

I’m assuming the rust belts of the USA and Britain are substantially different. Deindustrialization took place earlier in Britain, and the presence of Third World immigrants was already much larger. Most of the drug-addicted criminal underclass you’re describing, I guess, descended from low-IQ rural whites with high time preference from Appalachia who migrated to big Midwestern industrial centers back when industrial production was booming and large numbers of workers were needed.

Jamie Oliver filmed a show in Huntington after it was dubbed the fattest city in the US

Legendary show. I watched it on youtube while building a sky-island base in OG minecraft (Alpha? idk) on a ~13 inch macbook. I guess I had both windows side by side on the screen because we dind't have an external monitor. I am typing this on a 38 inch ultra-wide and I almost regret not getting a bigger monitor, as I still want for more screen real estate.

Simpler times...

I'm counting down the days until I can get a second ultrawide. This time a 5k2k one. It's supposed to launch soon.

No. Things can always get worse without resistance. Look at Cuba, the situation is much, much worse now than many people - even those hostile to communism - imagine. The country has, since 1991, slowly gone from a moderately poor but functioning socialist country like the former Eastern Bloc or China at the time, to the poorest country in the region after Haiti. The people are starving, there’s no electricity, no medicine, no fuel. The economy has been collapsing for 35 years. There is extensive reporting that even the Chinese have strongly recommended pursuing China or Vietnam style capitalist reforms, but the regime leadership are, moreso than the Chinese or Vietnamese, die hard communists loyal to central planning as an economic theory.

I've been to Cuba, and it really is shocking just how horrific it is. In Latin America, there are tons of mostly indigenous villages where there essentially is no modernity since anyone with the skills to maintain it, people like doctors and engineers for instance, decamp for the cities which are often first world/close to first world. The Mexico City gdp per capita is Spain tier, for instance. Many of these villages don't even have running water. I've used a bucket with a rat larger than my cat on the wall giving me moral support, for instance. Cuba is essentially one of those villages, just on the scale of a country and with a few exceptions in the hotel zones.

I'm not sure how Communist Cuba's government remains, though. At the low level, cops literally treat you better and reduce any requested bribe if you stay in a casa particular (small house owned by an individual cuban) vs. a state affiliated hotel. They view the first as you supporting the people, and the second as you supporting the state. The party/military essentially functions as a kleptocracy; they make deals with foreign companies to run the hotels, the hotels are incredibly capitalist where poor Cubans serve rich foreigners (and a few locals) where you call each other compañero/comrade as a costume. Even when I was there, most propaganda was more of the anti-imperialist/nationalist/third worldist variety than class based variety.

At this point, I think the party/military understands, even if subconsciously, they are just kleptocrats engaged in capitalism who ideologically justify themselves on anti-Americanism. They literally show MTV in the same hotel Castro used when he first became dictator. Additionally, the revealed preference of the government is to not invest in the rest of the country, which absolutely requires infrastructure improvement, and to solely partner with foreign companies to build up tourism. The hotels are set up so that as much as possible, they import all their necessities, such as food or toiletries, rather than buy it from Cuba itself. The government relaxed the emigration laws so more people can leave. Their actions to me suggest rather than viewing themselves as communists building up a country to a bright future, they view themselves as hotel magnates who unfortunately have an entire island of poor people attached to their properties. It also helps fuel their cope that if Cuba ever liberalized, they would be in penniless exile in Venezuela or Russia at best and languishing in a Cuban jail cell/lynched at worst.

This is true historically, too. There were empires that took centuries to collapse. In my opinion, the institutional inertia around immigration for the Anglo countries is too high to solve. The public don’t have the stomach for what is required. Look at Minneapolis; ICE would probably have to kill hundreds of thousands of American citizens to outweigh even a small part of the damage caused by massive third world immigration. The only thing that could save it would be some kind of sudden, deeply unexpected overthrow of democracy in a Western country, but there’s a 90% chance that only makes it worse. You only get one LKY in a century, if that.

Unless something radically changes, I don't think that the Anglosphere has the stomach for mass deportations, defined as millions deported, any time soon. At the same time, you can have meaningful differences in the rate of immigration: Biden vs. Trump, Trudeau vs Carney for instance. While I don't see any plausible path where, for instance, you get a Britain with absolute minimal immigration/restrictive guest worker programs like in Japan, I still think it's up in the air the degree and type of mass immigration Britain gets. A Britain with a diverse immigrant pool and most problematic groups, like poor Kashmiris, limited is a far different place than one where you get true open borders with, for instance, the entire third world. Britain in first scenario likely is still a pretty decent place to live, while in the second scenario I'm not sure Britain the state survives it.

I feel increasingly disillusioned with our ability to fix issues. Elite circles have successfully ideologically homogenized to such a degree that pretty much no smart & capable person would willingly, publicly go against the main tenets. It just fucks up your prospects too much.

It further has result that our systemic problems are increasingly caused specifically by ideological blindspots, because all problems that aren't can be fixed, while these are the only ones left to fester. Racism, for example, in the lower and middle classes can be a serious problem yet be fixable if the elite is clearly & openly against it. Racism in the elite is coup-complete.

So the opposing politicians are all clearly dysfunctional in one way or another, even when they're right on some core issues. You can find smart people arguing against ideological dead angles, but either only in a small scale that doesn't call into question the entire framework, or pseudonymously online.

Modern multiculturalist neoliberalism isn't the worst ideology, certainly better than, say, communism, but this also means again that as a smart person there is less pressure to change the system: You can make your own life good just fine, so why bother?

I expect it to be supplanted in the longterm, but most likely by an ideology I consider significantly worse.

no smart & capable person would willingly, publicly go against the main tenets

To the extent that this is true I think it because the words "smart & capable" are more often a short-hand for displaying behaviors and beliefs associated with the elite, rather than anything to do with intelligence or the capacity to solve problems.

As men like Donald Trump and Elon Musk aptly demonstrate, you can be hugely successful across multiple domains for decades and still get dismissed by affluent liberals as an idiot/incompetent for having the wrong aesthetics.

What the hell? You're grouping Trump together with Musk?

Trump was never hugely successful at anything. "The Apprentice" was perhaps the only real success.

What did he ever outperform at, given his ambition (which any idiot can be born with) combined with absolutely massive inherited wealth (400m usd or so)?

Trump parleyed his position as the middle child of a minor patrician family into being a top-level player in 3 distinct and notoriously exclusive and cut-throat fields. Urban Real-estate, Television, and Politics. Furthermore he did so without seeming to accrue the roster of enemies, the public baggage, nor the "Kompromat" that one might otherwise expect from a man in his position. (most of the nonsense about him being "a fascist", "an authoritarian", and "the most dangerous man in politics" only appeared after it was clear that he was about to become the 2016 GOP Nominee).

Similarly Musk has founded 3 companies in 3 distinct industries that are notoriously difficult to break into, Banking, Automobile Manufacturing, and Aerospace, and not only have those 3 companies survived in industries where the overwhelming majority of start-ups fail, they've grown to become major players in their own right.

The man leveraged a middling career in reality TV to go 2 for 3 against the entire political establishment of the most powerful nation on earth. I know he hasn't turned that into fulfilled promises, that he's running into hard walls and making bad decisions. But if he is a failure, he has failed to greater heights than most will ever dream of.

He's a success because of the failure of the system. It's not a novelty, it was always the criticism of democracy that it would allow charismatic demagogues to claim political power. The miracle was supposed to be figuring out a way to either keep them at bay or check them

Trump is clearly skilled at moving the public. He's not skilled in some sort of objective domain like someone like Musk who we can say is more impressive at that than the bulk of the elites.

(And I think that Musk also failed at government).

"Trump is a charismatic demagogue" is a very different complaint from "Trump is neither smart nor capable".

In fact, they are in no way equivalent.

Obviously he's achieved atypical things and is talented. The point is that they're not the same sort of achievement as Musk's.

The claim was "hugely successful across multiple domains for decades", implying pre-POTUS times.

“Everyone who inherits 400m is famous” - he’s famous for being rich but 99% of people who are rich are unknown. He had a tv show. He managed to build a lot of buildings.

If I can be 5% as successful as pre-potus Trump I’m taking that deal.

You might be able to legitimate bullets that his IRR on investments had no alpha.

No one smart and capable person would willingly and publicly go against the elites, that I agree with. But multiple smart and capable people could band together in a group and amass enough power over time to take a stand against the elites. The western societies still afford a good amount of agency in the personal life, and enough privacy that dissenting ideas need not be made public too early.

If people are too disillusioned to try that is certainly an issue though. But I do not believe anything is unsolvable yet.

over time

But it is already too late. Brexit was the last chance, and it was not just squandered but completely betrayed.

The party largely responsible for this the ANC has a declining vote share but still commands the loyalty of a plurality of the electorate. In addition, most of the parties opposing the ANC are not exactly free marketer reformers of the type that might rapidly turn some of these issues around. Since Apartheid ended more than 20 years ago and these trends are deepening, it seems that the decay has not swayed most voters away from the policies that caused the issues.

So it seems that democracy is working as intended.

Democracy means that the country belongs to the people, not some chosen elite, and it is up to the people alone what they will do with their country.

If South Africans really like their country the way it is, it is their right and their democratic choice.

No.

The decay of Anglosphere democracies will only be rectified when the still-civilized parts of the population do to them what mohammedans are slowly but surely doing to France, Sweden, etc. There is no hope for this in the UK and in South Africa this will only occur after balkanization.

This is a bit ironic, but Israel does seem to be the first modern state that I know of to actually go through, or be going through, de Maistre's counter revolution. Even with the Holocaust disproportionately targeting Orthodox and Ultra-Orthodox, those two groups gradually grew from being essentially charity cases of Secular Jews in Israel to being king makers with huge sway over the government and, assuming Israel is not destroyed in the meantime, on track to demographically dominate the country in the later half of the 21st century.

Israël and red China- thé CCP dynasty is now another Chinese empire, thé latest in a long line.

Funny. I was recently reading the scientist Frank Salter’s new book, and he lays out some interesting analyses in the chapters on profiles about “hostile elites,” and in democracies it essentially happens when the pyramid players at the top are no longer able to institutionally co-opt the broad mass of the population in line with their ideological aims. Basically a failure of the democratic project called “the consent of the governed.” It’s been happening in the Anglo sphere now for decades before I was even born.

In the UK, mainstream-approved protestors allied with the US "No Kings" "movement" are carrying Iranian flags. In the US they're carrying the hammer and sickle. These people are already in charge of the UK (despite the irony of them having a King), and seem set to win the 2026 midterm elections and are likely to gain House, Senate, and Presidency in 2028. I see no return from that.

In the UK, mainstream-approved protestors allied with the US "No Kings" "movement" [...] despite the irony of them having a King

It was my understanding that said demonstrations in countries with constitutional monarchies used the phrasing "No Tyrants". (Note that the plenary powers Mr Trump is claiming go well beyond those of the British Crown.)

This is why my hope is Trump to destroy the current system so hard that recovery to 2020 levels to be impossible.

destroy the current system so hard

Would that get rid of voting in federal elections entirely or have only show elections? Is that even possible as long as elections are managed by the individual states?

I meant the world order as a whole. Total breakdown of globalization and the elites it nurtured.

Ah, I see. So Trump destroying the post-WWII world order. Yeah, that's sounds like something I can get behind in principle. Though I'm worried about unintended consequences. There's no going back to simpler times.

You are right, but if the choice is between complicated times or the current trends that are favored by the Dems and Brussels - I choose complicated times any day.

The problems observably get worse faster than solutions can be coordinated. At some point, people might get desperate enough to get the solutions up to speed, but at some point solution power exceeds the binding force holding society together, and it's rather like trying to lift a one-ton block of jello with a forklift.

A LKY or Bukele type dictator might be able to cut through said coordination problems, of course that runs the risk of rolling a terrible dictator/their successor being trash. I'm not dogmatically anti-democratic, I simply want less democracy (net taxpayers only voting would be nice). Are you arguing that people are running to parties that arguably would make things worse (EFF in SA, Greens in UK) is also part of the coordination problem?

Op is filtered, for what it's worth.

I love that most of FC's participation these day seems likely spurred by his reading a comment and being surprised that there are no responses yet, and so he provides his own, all while not realizing it's a filtered comment.

I don't actually love it, but it's funny.

Do you mean filtered like a mod action, that the perspective in the OP is through a filter, or something else I'm missing? No animus, genuinely don't understand.

Your account is newly registered, which means your posts are filtered until a mod manually approves them. Mods, however, can see your posts and sometimes one of us will respond to a post without noticing that it's still filtered and thus invisible to other posters.

Ah that makes sense. Filters for new accounts seem prudent.

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