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Love it or leave it, but woke.
This weekend, The University of Texas played The Ohio State University in Austin, TX. A screen shot went viral on Twitter showing a crowd of Indian students celebrating the victory.
"Heritage Americans", the dissident right, the Woke Reich, or whatever you want to call them went crazy, pointing out the massive demographic changes in Texas that are happening. This is true. Anyone who has been to Texas knows whites are a minority here in any medium sized and larger city. The changes have been stunning and within 30 years, it is unrecognizable.
Critics rightfully pointed out that they were pretty much just being racist. You talk about integration, and here are immigrants and children of immigrants celebrating a victory in football wearing cowboy hats. What is more American than that? You clearly just don't like Indian people.
An Indian politician said that this is what Texas is. If you don't like it, LEAVE! There is some truth to this. This is what Texas is now, but historically the South Asian population has been tiny. This is a very recent development. Is 20 years all it takes for Texas to become something new? If you are 30 and above, you probably grew up with almost no Indians. Now this is what Texas is and you have to leave if you don't like the changes?
This reminds me of the UK. Pre-Windrush, the UK was 99.9% white. As recently as 1991, it was 95% white. Now though, if you complain, you are going against British values. For thousands of years, the UK was essentially 100% white. Within a few generations, it is a multi-cultural country and if you don't like that, LEAVE! We are not a white society, and actually never were. I could go on and on, but with the exception of Reform, that is the general consensus now.
Back to Texas. It's crazy how quickly this can happen. Mass migration can happen and within one generation, this is seen as the new default and any complaints about this are seen as against the new values. Of course, the biggest gatekeepers of this isn't the left. They really have no control over their outgroup other than canceling people and social pressure, but if you don't care what they think, what can they really do? The center-right has also rushed to condemn people criticizing the massive demographic replacement in Texas. People like Dan Crenshaw rushed to condemn the racism and call out this anti-Indian racism and essentially sided with the left, who hates them. They have essentially said the same thing as the left and that these aren't Texas values to be racist. So basically, love it or leave it, but woke. If you don't like the new Texas, leave.
But where will they go? You basically have to live in a state like Texas for access to the best jobs. schools, dating, etc. It's insane to me how fast we can accept something new that is unprecedented as the new normal without considering the consequences. Only weirdos and disagreeable people point this out, and by the time people start to see the consequences, it will be too late (assuming there are negative consequences, which should be obvious is my POV).
What's crazy is that Texas really isn't like this. Only 2.7% of people in Texas are South Asian. It's similar to the Somali thing in a lot of ways. It's a very small absolute number, but it's concentrated, so the changes seem huge.
It's basically this quote, but for ethnic spoil systems:
Now obviously its unfair to compare these Texas fans to Somalians. They are probably, individually, quite lovely people. And, when voting, they are going to fall somewhere between Dennis Kucinich and Mao.
Almost all recent immigrant groups have voting patterns which are far to the left of longtime populations. It doesn't matter how "good" Indian and Chinese immigrants are if they vote for open borders. Our institutions won't save us. Even low single digit numbers can tip the scales. If Texas goes blue, the Republic will fall.
Texas is a big state and there are generational differences that are going to concentrate the effect at universities. The 20-year difference in DFW schools is... interesting.
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Canada's different in this regard, or at least Ontario is (was?). IIRC, Indian immigrants were a big reason why Ford won again, voting for reasons that would be very legible to conservative voters.
That does raise the question of why Chinese and Indians are so far left in the United States. Naively, we might expect the opposite. India and China are far-right places. They are so far right they could fairly be called fascist or theocratic by western standards. I'll propose a couple possibilities.
Indians and Chinese assimilate well and correctly recognize that leftism is the high-status choice in the US
Indians and Chinese care more about racial solidarity than about other things like abortion, taxes, and crime
Perhaps it's because being far-right in China or India is the only way to achieve bare-minimum outcomes of civilization, kind of the way European governments tightened during both world wars. Those who managed to escape the bottom of the barrel wish to get what the Americans are getting in terms of social freedoms.
If they are able to be successful back home, and are well-adapted to the social expectations, there isn't really a reason to move. Servants are cheaper, the upper-crust are probably doing relatively well compared to other countries.
Without tight control of the population, these places literally start blowing up, trains derailing left and right, etc, then they just start eating each other by the thousands. Orgies and writing snarky articles about the government are not worth that risk.
In the US, the elites have been turning the dial on moral decay for decades for the fun of it, perhaps as a flex on other countries' elites as well, and yet, aside from a few hotspots of degeneracy and crime, there is a remarkable resilience of the economy, public safety...
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What? China is a communist nation and India was explicitly ruled by socialists for most of it's modern history.
Gay representation in media is illegal in China.
Films with gay characters are banned and don't play in Chinese theaters.
Phone app games can't have characters with ambiguous genders, or effeminate men or anyone gay.
China has illegal gay romance stories published on websites. This is hypothetically illegal but the laws weren't enforced. Then they were. The women who write these gay romances were arrested and held in prison for long periods of time awaiting trial.
Us Americans are culture waring about trans women in combat sports. China is on a completely different level.
Their leaders are billionaires. They're whatever form of communism is rule by billionaires.
They are nationalists in the way I wish Americans were. We have a tragic deficit of nationalism. It might be terminal.
I once saw a homeless beggar in China. Two Chinese cops were standing in front of him and very kindly asking him to go away. My main complaint about American urban decay is forbidden in China. They have the will to ban it and enforce the ban.
It is hard to shoehorn everything into a simple left-right dichotomy. They like abortion and dislike economic liberalism. They aren't "right wing" in that sense. They are culturally conservative in a way some Americans would consider far right. If Republicans endorsed a fraction of Chinese state policy, it would be loudly denounced as far-right extremism.
It was a problem in the USSR, too. It will probably become a problem in the West if actual leftists ever acquire real power.
I don't know if it is true, but supposedly gay Germans are very disproportionately supporters of AfD. The point being Western culture is fine with them being gay. Some other cultures not so much.
Alice Weidel is cringing thinking about what would happen to her and her domestic partner if Islamists ruled Europe. She wants her gay family to thrive. She's of course portrayed as a crazed right winger and a nazi for doing so.
This overrates the degree to which gays predict islamization. Most, as far as I know, are bog-standard mainstream progressives.
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China is a quasi-fascist state. They practice state capitalism, not communism. They put Uyghurs into camps and prevent them from spreading their culture to the next generation. They are a Han ethnostate that bans nearly all immigration. Speaking on certain topics is forbidden. They execute political prisoners and harvest their organs. Need we go on?
India is a patchwork of different tribal, ethnic, and religious groups with a variety of practices that are entirely foreign to westerners including honor killings. Women are generally required to dress modestly but still face harassment when traveling alone (as any woman who has ever been to India can attest). Women are raped as punishment for the transgressions of their kin. Widows are stigmatized. Caste discrimination is rampant. People are murdered for rumored offenses against cows.
Note: this is far from a complete picture of either country, don't @ me.
The government China is far to the right of any western government.
The people of India are culturally far to the right of any western culture.
All of which is perfectly within the bounds of the far-left.
India was straight up governed by socialists for something like 70 years post independence. They still have an intense and smothering web of racial carve-outs that would match to "DEI" in the West.
Calling National Ethno-Communists and the most racist socialists in the world "far-right" is terminology that is actively obfuscatory. Either group has far, far more in common with the Western far-left than the Western far-right.
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Indians and Chinese do seem to broadly believe in abortion and progressive tax rates, and have little to none of the cultural grievances that thé contemporary right uses to avoid talking about economics. India is a deeply socially conservative place, yes, but in a very different way from what a westerner would recognize.
Yeah, a lot of their culture doesn't map into a traditional left-right axis which places primacy on ideas and not on identity.
For example, in the West, a leftist might support redistribution from the rich to the poor. A rightist might be against redistribution. But there's another perfectly legible viewpoint which is to support redistribution from you to me, regardless of who is poor or rich. I think a lot of Indians land here.
The idea of couching policies in terms of universalism is WEIRD. "Why must a policy benefit all of society?", the Third Worldist asks. "I vote so the government will give me money"
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Indians and Chinese are mostly non-Christian in a group where the right-wing party's support base and agenda continues to correlate relatively heavily with Evangelical Christianity.
Agreed. I'd put that in bucket #2, I think. Identity >> policy.
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The actual history of minority groups in America is to tend to become voters for the most moderate democrats available eventually.
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