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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   9289 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 14, 2026

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The steelman is that assimilation is not guaranteed. There are many instances of countries where assimilation hasn’t occurred over thousands of years. In America ADOS have not fully assimilated and right now we have zero signs assimilation will ever occur. India itself is not an assimilated country. Castes still exists. Brazil is an example of a country that is not assimilated. You end up with a result where different tribes in your society vote for group interests and not society interests. If assimilation fails then your end result is permanently worse politics.

This is bad for a lot of reason. High performers in unassimilated countries are less productive. Brazil had a lot of Italian and German immigrants and they are poorer and less productive than the groups that immigrated to America.

Once you have permanent groups that are not assimilating you can not unring that bell and will be stuck with poorer governance forever.

Also it seems weird to me to say that Hispanics will likely assimilate. Most Latin countries are not assimilated. And certainly to a far lesser extent than America had a dominant uniculture when I was a kid.

The steelman is that assimilation is not guaranteed. There are many instances of countries where assimilation hasn’t occurred over thousands of years. In America ADOS have not fully assimilated and right now we have zero signs assimilation will ever occur. India itself is not an assimilated country. Castes still exists. Brazil is an example of a country that is not assimilated. You end up with a result where different tribes in your society vote for group interests and not society interests. If assimilation fails then your end result is permanently worse politics.

Assimilation basically only happens by interbreeding that that obviously means the results thereof is a mixture not entirely like its sources.

How do you define assimilation? I can’t think of a single LatAm country that has the European mass conformity into a single mold model. Beyond that, almost all of Latin America has an assumption of patron-client relations rather than atomized citizens unified only by the state.

That's the point, right? LatAm politics is characterised by a heavy understanding that We Are (Not) All In It Together.

That’s a different thing than assimilation, though. A failure of assimilation is failing to join the society. In LatAm, all of those groups are part of society; their society just has a lot of people in different roles.

It’s the same with AADoS in the US; they have always been a part of US society. The question has always been their place in it, not if they were an alien presence in it.

The problem with words is they can have different relatively similar meanings.

Most of Latam accepts a shared culture. The elites, middle class, and lower class all have an acceptance of what is Mexican Food or Music and they have the same understanding that a taco is Mexican and Sushi is not Mexican. But there is a bigger assimilation of seeing yourself as truly one people. They likely mostly lack that. The English of the European countries bonded a few people together but today I think they mostly view themselves as “one people”. You can still at times notice physical traits and faces from the prior population groups. That I consider a stronger form of assimilation.

Most of the new world has the looser form of assimilation. Pre-mass migration the US for most of its population developed the stronger form of assimilation. I would say in 1980 Italians probably being the last large migration had nearly fully accomplished the strong form of assimilation.

That makes sense. The ideal of a nation as being “A commonwealth for the benefit of its people. Its people being equal citizens operating as individuals, rather than corporate entities like guilds or villages. And the citizens being culturally uniform.” Is the culmination of the 19th century liberal project, and really only stuck in northwest Europe and Anglo America. Latin America, despite the dreams of some of its people, never really got there. It was never “individual <-> state/nation”. You always had some form of clientelism or corporate identity in between.

I don't think that's what I would call assimilation; I would call it more Balkanisation-In-One-Country.

Assimilation is (in my opinion) about feeling genuine companionship with strangers, trusting strangers, feeling cultural unity with strangers. Being willing to plant trees for some random guy's kids to sit under. It's the opposite of ethnic politics, gibs, "communities". If you can talk about "the X community" then the Xs haven't assimilated.

There is a historical portrait on the wall nearby me. No idea who it's of. But one of the reasons that the ethnic composition of immigration into the UK concerns me is that any non-white immigrant can look at it and know that they have no relationship to this person.

The National Citizenship model where you had the nation essentially be an extended family of homogenized citizens with the state/commonwealth representing them and citizens being equal under the law and socially, while never fully realized, was/is a real thing. Britain and France are the classic examples. This was the end goal of the 18th/19th century liberal/progressive project, and they got most of what they wanted in northwest Europe. This is being undone, partly but not entirely by immigration, and you are right to notice that.

My point is more that LatAm never had that. Individual liberals wanted it as an ideal, and some nations like Argentina arguably got closer than others, but you never had anywhere near the social cohesion and unification Europe had. LatAm always had clientelism, corporate privileges for Indios, or integration into the state via corporatism or parties in the 20th century.

Talking about the breaking of the liberal nationalist societies you see in Europe and/or assimilation in a LatAm context is a category error.

And Argentina was more like the US in that the Native American population was small and they only did a small amount slavery. And then did some things like putting their ADOS in the front lines during war and Indian war to limit their population.

AADOS are assimilated fully. Not to the stratum you would like them to be, sûre, but they have nothing in common, culturally, with west Africans, and a lot in common, culturally, with poor southerners writ large. You don’t have to like that to note that it’s assimilation.

a key component of assimilation is the group being assimilated identifies with and becomes apart of the group they're assimilating to so there are no longer different groups with different interests who view themselves differently

there are no longer Scots-Irish, and English, and German, and Welsh, and Scottish, and others; there are simply Americans and they simply identify as Americans and see each other as the same group

American Blacks do not identify with or think of themselves as the same group as White Southerners or poor Southerners. In fact, for hundreds of years, they've explicitly and violently set themselves apart from White Southerners, poor or otherwise. They do this in every part of the country they go.

In such a context, claiming they've "assimilated fully," let alone assimilated meaningfully is just ridiculous. I really struggle to believe you would take more than a second to correctly identify which is which and so we're just left to speculate why you continue to smudge things enough and hope others squint enough they cannot also easily tell the difference and see them as different.

perhaps in the future when Americans have been so deracinated and so deconstructed and displaced by foreigners that no one has any identity outside of the most base forms of consumerism , you can claim everyone "assimilated"

but that's not assimilation, that is just the displacement and destruction of the old and creation of something new, except somehow more hollow and fake

but they have nothing in common, culturally, with west Africans

What?

You would be using a definition of assimilation that is borderline meaningless. Sure we have some shared memes. But for the most part the communities are segregated. Wildly different income, crime, life expectancy, and voting records. Far different polling on in-group biases.

Both sides do have a sense of being American. But we have polling on things like juries and ADOS show significant bias towards other ADOS. If tribal loyalties exists then assimilation has at best been partial.

Once you have permanent groups that are not assimilating you can not unring that bell and will be stuck with poorer governance forever.

The question is, didn't this already happen 100+ years ago with the aforementioned "Greeks, Italians, Slavs, Irishmen"? The Jeffersonian ideal gave way to Tammany Hall, the Mafia, union politics, etc. - so we see that that assimilation project was not successful either. Perhaps, the immigrants assimilated America to themselves, and not the other way around.

We used to insist on assimilation. That was why Greeks are now okay. I don’t know about the race angle, I don’t put much stock in that, but we have absolutely stopped even trying to assimilate all of these immigrants into Amerikaner culture. In 1900, leaving your homeland meant to give up all of that and become American. To give up dress and language and hygiene standards and traditions and to eventually absorb American culture— our language, culture, food, religion, sports, games, music, and so on. Now, it’s actually seen as a bad thing that a third generation Chinese or Nigerian kid acts mostly like an American. That they no longer speak the language or play the games or listen to the music. In fact, fashionable Americans were often insistent on practicing and celebrating those other cultures. They race to bring up pagan Hindu holidays, or Muslim holidays, or Indian, Korean or Japanese music. It’s partly that technology allows this. In 1950, you could not get those kinds of things in America.

We used to insist on assimilation.

Rep Peter King (IRA-NY) was fundraising, based on Old World ethnic grudges, for a private war against a US treaty ally on the streets of New York, and nobody in state or local politics had a problem with this until 9-11 - even after the Irish ambassador boycotted the St Patrick's Day parade over the issue.

I think people are misunderstanding my point. It's not clear to me that the 19th-century European immigrants ever did assimilate, at least in the way that matters. @Opt-out says we "will be stuck with poorer governance forever" - I consider the possibility that this has already happened, that we have been stuck with poorer governance for this whole time, and that it's far too late to do anything about it. The only reason why people assume that the Irish/Italians/etc. did successfully assimilate is because nobody alive today remembers a time before they showed up. Those of us who live in big cities have just come to accept a constant background noise of graft, corruption, and gangsterism which (I believe) would never have been accepted in a supermajority-Anglo society.

a constant background noise of graft, corruption, and gangsterism which (I believe) would never have been accepted in a supermajority-Anglo society

The problem I have with this (among many) is that if you know anything about English society in the 18th and 19th century, you'd know that it was already riddled with corruption and gangsterism, and governance in the American colonies (and subsequently the United States) had many of the same pathologies (not necessarily as bad, probably in large part due to the more expansive franchise). The idea that non-Anglo immigrants were introducing corruption into a basically honest Anglo-American political culture is highly questionable.

I think most people would agree with this as potentially the votes for FDR and The Great Society and the creation of the welfare state. Where this would break down is Europe and Canada do more of this. The ‘80s Revolution still occurred in America. Now perhaps the push back would have been bigger without the Catholic influence on culture.

We used to insist on assimilation

The claim that immigrants have stopped assimilating is not really in evidence. Language acquisition, intermarriage rates, even religious adoption to a not-insignificant degree all point to assimilation proceeding apace. Insofar as there is substance to this point, it seems to be a complaint that immigrants are assimilating to the "wrong" American subcultures (e.g. East/South Asian immigrants mostly assimilating into urban white liberal culture), but even that is pretty mixed. There was never as much daylight between Latino and Southern American culture as nativists pretend, and Latinos have been assimilating pretty well.

Conversely, the period of "insistence" on assimilation yielded a number of distinct white-ethnic subcultures (e.g. Irish, Italian, Polish) over the course of the 19th and early 20th century. Most are still present to this day in attenuated forms. The big standout in both its presence at the time and lack of presence now is German American culture, which didn't survive the world wars.

we have absolutely stopped even trying to assimilate all of these immigrants into Amerikaner culture.

What is "Amerikaner culture"? The only thing I can find is a group promoting white SA immigration to the US, but I'm guessing that's not what you're talking about.

There was never as much daylight between Latino and Southern American culture as nativists pretend, and Latinos have been assimilating pretty well.

Latinos however show no signs of stopping their support for government redistribution, speech restrictions or ending their apathy towards gun rights.

Conversely, the period of "insistence" on assimilation yielded a number of distinct white-ethnic subcultures (e.g. Irish, Italian, Polish) over the course of the 19th and early 20th century. Most are still present to this day in attenuated forms. The big standout in both its presence at the time and lack of presence now is German American culture, which didn't survive the world wars.

The surface attributes of these groups were annihilated or absorbed, true, but all of these and the other big European heritage groups show significant opinion differences on pretty foundational value questions to this day. In the GSS, it is an extremely consistent result that Anglo-Germanic-Americans tend towards small government, libertarian or classical liberal answers on political and cultural questions, whereas Ellis Islander prefer social democracy, redistribution and speech restriction. And of course, these inter-European differences are dwarfed by the distances newer migrant groups and African-Americans sit at relative to the European cluster.

Deep assimilation of socio-political sentiments never happened, despite the success in making immigrants speak English. One of the few examples I can think of is Asian-Americans loving meritocracy more than white Americans, but they're otherwise still fairly different in their attitudes on most other things and that particular preference is obviously not the result of American cultural influence. If your concern is football matches and the consumption of burgers, sure, migrants are assimilating perfectly well, if it's the long-term cultural and political trajectory of the nation in a holistic sense, it's not. And if you happen to be a libertarian or love low taxes etc., it's an absolute disaster.

We need a better word for Latinos. Or no word and revert to Indian, Black, White. With some obvious complexity.

Florida Latinos have higher educational achievement and far lower support for welfare. They are a completely different population group than Texas/California Latinos. And Texas Latinos do seem sometimes very similar and some times very different than Cali Latinos.

A better demographic classification system would improve people’s models of society and immigration a lot.

For what it's worth, I reran the GSS query split by US census regions (state-level detail needs a permit, a 6-month waiting time and a cool 1.5k dollars) and the consistent tendency is that Hispanics in the West (goes as far east as Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico) lean quite a bit more towards classic Republican policy positions than those elsewhere, but even they support the welfare state at much greater rates than North Eastern whites, who you'd expect to be the bluest of the blue (North Eastern Hispanics are also the most social democrat/leftist Hispanics).

The only area where Hispanics of any region get particularly close to whites is in their shared love of social security, which is the part of the welfare state that does by far the best in the "do you like the amount of spending" questions across all groups and ancestries. Otherwise, Hispanics fairly uniformly and with little apparent regional variation would like to see more social spending, more money spent on black people, less money on space, more on unemployment (here Hispanics from the West are a significant outlier, this is the only welfare-related question where they actually give a more right-leaning answer than whites nationwide, and they beat North Eastern whites by a significant margin) and higher taxes on the rich. EDIT: perhaps the best example of this: in the GSS Cubans are by far the most Republican non-European group, comparable in their party loyalty to Dutch- or Scottish-Americans, yet their attitudes on classical liberalism or the welfare state are more or less the same (and generally even more leftist!) as those of Mexicans or Puerto Ricans.

I suppose you’d think of it as midwestern evangelical Christian culture. Country culture, the kind of thing you’d find if you visited a small midwestern or southern town of about 20K people.

I feel obliged to point out that Midwestern and Southern culture are not particularly alike within the broader context of American culture and neither is or has been the dominant/"standard" form of American culture, inasmuch as such a thing even makes sense. This is a standard that would marginalize: New Englanders, Texans, Northwesterners, Californians, Appalachians... in short, most Americans.

(Midwestern culture is, itself, significantly product of post-independence immigration, particularly German, Scandinavian, and Irish immigration, whereas Southern culture is mostly derivative of Anglo-Scots heritage with some significant West African influences.)

Some would likely consider the ‘90s Affirmative Action push and some other programs as a strong attempt at getting full ADOS assimilation. When affirmative action failed then woke started since no interventions achieved the stated goal it must be that the other 85% have biases that holding back assimilation.

But now we are post-woke and genetic arguments are rising since the woke intervention also seems to have failed.

So maybe we actually have been trying assimilation and failed?

We aren’t trying. We don’t insist that immigrants learn English or anything at all about American culture. We don’t insist that they adapt to WASP ideals. For example, if we were to insist on Muslim assimilation, we would ban the hijab and other forms of Muslim dress. We would not allow for Muslim prayer times or build foot washes in public places to assist Muslims in praying. If we were insisting on Hispanic assimilation, then there wouldn’t be barios where several generations of Latinos have lived and barely any of them understand English.

I don’t disagree on those groups, but I do think 1990’s-2020’s we collectively did make a push to try and figure out how to assimilate ADOS more fully. That is partly why we elected Obama. Why we did affirmative action. Why we probably did things like have silly Air Traffic controller test for ADOS partly on some kind of reasoning if we just get them into whitish collar middle class seats that they will excel in the seat and assimilation occurs.

I think you could call it a priming the pump strategy of creating an ADOS middle class.

Perhaps, the immigrants assimilated America to themselves, and not the other way around.

I think that's a fair assessment. The gravity of each group pulls itself towards the other.

What people often get wrong about Italian immigration is the presumption that nothing was done about it and it all worked out in the end. That's not true at all. People were extremely upset about it and that's why we passed the National Origins Act in 1924 which all but banned further Italian immigration. We shut the border for 40 years. By 1970, the foreign born population of the US had fallen below 5% and most of the earlier groups were finally assimilated.

Even in 1965, when we opened the border again, it wasn't because people wanted more immigration. It was just assumed that is was no big deal and the overall composition of the immigrants wouldn't change much. And wow were they wrong about that.

Immigration advocates want to skip the step where we struggled for decades and move right to the part where everyone is assimilated. That's not going to happen with continuous waves of new migration.

This is if you have a good outcome. A slow painful assimilation. India has the highest genetic distance of its people. The solution they had to a lot of diversity was to create the caste system and just have the different groups legally and by custom live separately. The west seems like it might go down the path of India.

It's also a lot easier to keep a balkanized social fabric and cultural landscape in today's smartphone era. I can continue using my language and speaking to my friends and family essentially anywhere on Earth now

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