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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?
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.
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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.
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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."
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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.
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
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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
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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.
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!
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.
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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.
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.
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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.
Citation very much needed
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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