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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 7, 2026

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That's pretty straightforward to me. The main point is that given a Northern victory in the civil war, America was overdetermined to become the cultural and economic pole of the Anglosphere and the West in general, simply due to geography.

America's institutions, however, were designed for Anglos. American schools, communities, politics, etc. simply go to pieces when blacks are admitted en masse as presumed equal members.

I think there were four options:

  1. Send them back
  2. Keep them separate and establish separate legal codes
  3. Treat everyone equally under the law and be prepared for disparities. Like the Irish, I expect that within a few generations they'd have mostly failed to reproduce, and the few (plus hybrids) able to participate in our society would have remained but generally lost their separate identity.
  4. Try so hard to hammer Western society into a shape that generates equal results that it breaks

I think 1 would have been best. 2 was tried, but long-term untenable due to inevitable social forces. 3 would have been my preference given the failure of 1 and 2, but also proved untenable due to social forces.

That leaves 4, and I think 4 is both unrecoverable and must inevitably metastasize given US cultural and economic hegemony.

Obviously the 'social forces' I'm talking about here are key to this, so I'll take a swing at what I mean.

Perhaps it starts with the strain of Puritan idealism that led to so much popular support for fighting the Civil War to 'end slavery' in the first place. Whatever the elites actually thought they were doing there, this was the popular justification for the war, and it didn't go away once the war was won. Blank slatism/egalitarianism became firmly embedded in polite American society. This continued to serve as a guiding principle throughout the decades and, once the US had won WW2, became a perennial casus belli for justifying intervention across the globe. Needless to say this was only massively amplified by setting Hitler up as the polar opposite of American values.

I just don't think it could have gone any other way.