Cause otherwise midterms discussion will be scattered around a bunch of separate Culture War thread posts. And it's nice to have more off-the-cuff rapid reactions in a dedicated megathread.
The first thing I've noticed so far: if the exit polls are correct, Americans are very pessimistic about AI.
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Notes -
There is a difference between Americans tolerating racial preferences dressed up in the language of remedying historical discrimination and Americans embracing racial hierarchy as a positive political principle. The white racist has occupied the role of a stock cultural villain in American public consciousness for several generations now. From the civil rights movement onward, opposition to racial discrimination and fascism have become deeply embedded in the country's civic mythology, educational institutions, popular entertainment, and understanding of its own moral progress.
Whatever the inconsistencies of its application, antiracism is not some recent progressive affectation that can simply be discarded once people grow tired of DEI seminars. It is part of the moral grammar that mainstream America uses to understand its national identity. Now you can argue that anti-white racism should be included in that vocabulary, and I bet many people will agree, that doesn't mean the underlying taboo against anti-minority racism has evaporated. The initial rhetoric made sense, constantly injecting grievance literature will never allow black Americans to move on from racial consciousness and even unravel the social fabric. This is not what Bo French and the groyper right believe though.
Are we discussing citizenship, cultural assimilation, shared historical identity, ancestry, or racial membership? These are different propositions with different implications. Simply insisting that the question is legitimate doesn't establish that every proposed answer will be equally acceptable to the public. Vivek's conduct can be criticised without establishing anything about whether Indian-Americans (those born and raised in America, not H1Bs) can be legitimate members of the national community. That question draws so much ire because it is quickly pattern matched to white nationalists who are too shy to admit they believe in racial membership, and they're not at all a minority of right wingers.
Is there? Than explain to me what difference there is. As in, actually is, not just what people tell themselves to feel better about it.
I'm sorry but what does that even mean? If there are inconsistencies in "antiracism" than how is it antiracism, rather than just racism targeted at someone else? It can't just be discarded? How is that different from "no, you don't understand, making the darkies pick our cotton is our way of life!"?
Yes.
The point of the question is to establish which one of these makes you an American (/insert nationality), and who's interests the American government and the American institutions are supposed to serve. And just because some of the possible answers are less palatable than others, doesn't mean that the conversation as a whole is not valid, and even essential to have.
It can, however, be used as an argument that a person who scammed their way to the top, and somehow came away with the idea that being molested is something you can publicly shame the victim with, may not have fully assimilated, despite being born in a given country. From there it can at least be used to put forward the question if being born on a plot of land is enough to determine nationality.
I doubt it. SocJus ideas are quickly pattern matched to all sorts of unpalatable ideas, including racism, which so many people supposedly oppose, and no one bats an eye.
What I believe is happening here is closer to the "what is a woman?" question, where some people get angry simply because they don't have a good answer, because any one they come up with will damn them in some way:
And it's not like there aren't ways out, but getting there also involves things unpalatable to liberals of all kinds (including those calling themselves "classical"), so now the whole conversation is haram.
The difference is between the justification of a policy and the principle it purports to establish. Affirmative action is defended as a corrective to slavery and Jim Crow, not as an affirmation of permanent racial hierarchy. You can reject that justification as incoherent or discriminatory, but it doesn't follow that the public perceives the two propositions as morally equivalent. That distinction matters because my argument concerns cultural legitimacy, not whether progressive racial politics can survive a philosophical consistency test.
It is not, and I already addressed this:
Okay, so what should the criteria be, in your opinion? A civic idea of nationality, a cultural idea, and an explicitly racial one entail very different political arrangements. Americans can disagree about the first two, and they will overwhelmingly reject the latter, so if that's what you're going for, you'll have to readjust your expectations.
If objectionable behaviour is enough to question someone's belonging, why shouldn't we subject Donald Trump to the same scrutiny? Americans gave him a historic victory, despite relentless attacks on his character and legitimacy from the left, and how did he repay them? An economy in tatters and a war that nobody wanted. We can apply your principle, but it will engulf a lot of people in your putative ingroup as well.
Well duh. That doesn't answer whether the association is warranted in particular cases. Sometimes the accusation is lazy pattern matching, other times the speaker really does believe that ancestry should determine membership in the country. When was the last time you raised these concerns with someone who is 100% European and whether they should belong? You're not the only one doing the "noticing".
Closing the borders, and treating your citizens equally independent of their heritage are not mutually exclusive positions.
What do you want, exactly? What rituals should they participate in to prove their belonging? What are the practical policies that will ensure that 350 million people are conforming to the culture, without severely (understatement) impeding on civil liberties? Does this apply to everyone or just non-white people?
There is that minor problem of ~150 million non-white Americans who are not going anywhere.
I believe I explicitly asked "not just what people tell themselves to feel better about it".
I mean, it does? I suppose you're trying to rescue it with "anti-minority", as if it was some magically different from racism-without-qualifiers (which is what we were talking about), but even if I granted that premise (I don't), it only lasts as long as the targeted group remains a demographic majority, which won't be for very much longer, and in certain localities, already isn't.
From what I understand his family was here for a tad longer than Vivek's. If you asked about Elon Musk, I'd say deport his ass.
My point isn't so much that my opinions could be falsely pattern-matched into something I don't believe, but it's not the pattern-matching that's driving the response. If it did "liberals" would have the same response to all things that pattern match to opposing principles, but they only have this issue with the right-wing view on identity.
Now is perhaps a good time to mention I'm a European living in Europe, so I'll naturally not be following all the goings-on of America and might be short on examples, but in the spirit of the question - other than Elon Musk, which I just mentioned - the last time was a bit over a year ago when I ran into a Californian lady in a coworking office space, who's very sound of voice made me want to call our equivalent of ICE. Joke's on me, it turned out she only grew up in California, and came back to the motherland to take care of her sick elderly parents, so lineage - 1 : 0 - me.
No, but the point is that if someone does airdrop 100K Haitian voodoo priests on your home town, and hands out passports to them, you'll have zero recourse. Blood magic is now as American as apple pie.
I'd go with a couple of criteria:
As to what to do, it depends on the country. There are places that are still very homogenous. For them no further action is necessary, other than resisting mass-migration. High-diversity areas would probably require going full Lee Kuan Yew: "you will mix, and you will be happy" + "obey the laws, or skulls will crack" (where laws are expanded to cover basic manners in public spaces) + some sort of mandatory civil service. Hopefully something like an FDResque infrastructure program will be enough, rather than a World War, like the last time Hyphenated Americans were a problem.
By the way, why are you asking so many questions and providing precisely zero of your own? Can't say I like the "I'm an angel flowing through the aether, casting judgment at everything, but never being judged myself" bit.
First of all civil rights are a lie, they can be and have been, freely suspended to push throughva social agenda, as long as it's one liberals desire. And like I said "And it's not like there aren't ways out, but getting there also involves things unpalatable to liberals of all kinds (including those calling themselves "classical"), so now the whole conversation is haram.".
There's also the even more minor problem that if you do nothing your country is over.
We've wandered so far from my original point that the right has a large constituency quite comfortable with open racism that it's becoming difficult to remember what we're even disputing. You grudgingly concede that "fuck the darkies" is contemptible, but apparently I'm not permitted to acknowledge its existence without first performing an elaborate ritual of throat-clearing about how antiracism has also been used to justify discrimination against whites. A point I've conceded repeatedly, by the way. How many more disclaimers am I expected to append before I'm allowed to discuss the actual subject?
You don't get to dismiss a distinction as merely "what people tell themselves to feel better about it" and pretend you've refuted it. You're trying to settle a descriptive question about what Americans find acceptable by repeatedly announcing what you personally find indefensible.
Is there any qualifier for racism against non-whites you'd be willing to acknowledge without immediately pivoting to institutional discrimination against whites? Can we not hold both observations to be true simultaneously, or must every discussion of one be derailed by an obligatory disclaimer about the other?
Let me reiterate, yet again, that I'm talking about the credibility of these accusations among normie voters, not their moral consistency. You keep returning to some liberal double standards, when did I deny this? You may be entirely correct about the hypocrisy, but that goes in both directions. If I were a woke activist constantly railing against "MAGA Nazis", would you generously assume I might unironically agree that affirmative action is discrimination against whites and therefore should be unconstitutional? Of course not. The online discourse has gone on for way too long that people can recognise the rhetorical scripts and the ideological commitments they usually signal. Sure, the "noticing" is not infallible, but neither is it arbitrary. It's literally how the woke left squandered so much of their credibility, and I suspect you'd have no difficulty recognising the phenomenon if I were criticising them instead.
See, your nativist argument has a much stronger historical foundation in the European context, where your identities often predate the modern state and are more closely intertwined with ancestry, language, and ethnicity. But America is a rather different proposition.
If your concern is mass immigration overwhelming a community, we can tighten the rules governing admission. Nothing about legally recognising existing citizens as equally American prevents that. You're inventing a failure of immigration policy and presenting it as an indictment of civic nationality, when the former can be addressed without abandoning the latter.
Suppose we actually attempt this. How exactly do you propose administering it? What is The Assimilator supposed to do? I suppose you can make everyone undergo periodic CRT-style racial attitude tests. And if we're applying this consistently, does a naturalised Polish American expressing hostility toward blacks also fail your ingroup identification test and become eligible for deportation? Meanwhile, a black American with sufficient lineage can presumably express contempt for every other group with impunity. Even the author of your linked study cautions against drawing sweeping conclusions from these responses. We can just lie on surveys, though I suppose that's good enough.
You also invoke Singapore, but Lee Kuan Yew's government pursued an explicitly multiracial national identity, with policies designed to integrate different ethnic communities rather than establish hereditary grades of citizenship. You seem to want Singaporean social discipline combined with an ethnonational conception of belonging that Singapore's official ideology explicitly rejected. Just two months ago, a Singaporean minister condemned racist comments against Indians and called for solidarity. Which brings me back to my original point: can you acknowledge and condemn racism of this sort unequivocally, when it comes from the contemporary right, without first performing a dozen obligatory rituals to denounce liberal double standards?
I believe restrictive immigration policies, demanding naturalisation requirements, and integration through common civic institutions are adequate. We can demand for more rigorous enforcement. I'm asking questions because your proposals entail an extraordinarily expensive and intrusive administrative apparatus that will have a strong impact on ordinary people's livelihoods. There is a hard limit to what can be achieved through democratic politics, especially with modern day population counts.
Once again, can we please dispense with the "but Suzy did it, so why shouldn't I?" Whatever the liberals did, what you're proposing is something considerably more sweeping and intrusive, and not practicable at all. Let alone marketable to the general electorate.
Anything that involves impeding on the rights and livelihoods of 150 million people is a non-starter. So I'd think of better solutions if you don't want a repeat of the midterms.
Please show me where and how my concession is grudging.
It's because you keep misunderstanding my point, so I keep feeling the need of correcting it. I'm not saying that antiracism can / has been used to justify discrimination, I'm saying it is racism, so your point about "open racism" not being palatable to normie voters is just plain false. They're perfectly fine with it.
It's all a tad autistic, I'll grant, but is it really surprising given where we're posting?
Why not? Would you do anything else if someone who defended slavery on the grounds that it was some galaxy brained scheme to bring about racial equality?
Yes, any one really, but what I'm pointing out is that there should be no reason to qualify, if "racism" is what offfends you.
Ok, if it's just about credibility among normie voters, that's a different and a lot more boring conversation. You might be right, but just because talking about an issue is offensive to normies, doesn't mean the issue shouldn't be talked about.
You say that, but they're already picking away at Europe too. Algerians are French, Moroccans are Spanish, and Pakistanis are English (and I do mean English specifically, not British) these days. I also disagree about America being all that different. One of the egregious thing Affirmitive Action does, is filling slots meant for African Americans with literal African aristocracy. There's already a lineage (several, in fact) in the US, and I find it egregious when someone who just got off the proverbial boat acts like they can claim it.
No, the issue I was pointing at was the lack of recourse, not the scale of the problem. Like, sure, if it's only one Haitian voodoo priest, it's not going to be much of an issue, but that doesn't make him an American any more than there being only one dude in women's restroom would make him a woman, vs. when there are 10.
Yeah, a boiled it down to a joke, because the topic is so broad. It's going to depend on how big the integration issues are, because this can range from anything as mundane as mandatory public school, to fines and corporal punishment for being a public nuisance like Singapore, to possibly the El Salvador Solution.
Yes? That's why I phrased it the way I did?
What do you mean "even"? Academia is completely devoted to anti-whiteness, so of course any finding that makes other groups look worse will have to be accompanied with paragraphs of throat-clearing.
I don't understand how liberals can use "but Singapore is multicultural" as some sort of comeback. I brought up the example, I know how they work. My entire point is that, and this is the third time I'm writing this: " it's not like there aren't ways out, but getting there also involves things unpalatable to liberals of all kinds (including those calling themselves "classical"), so now the whole conversation is haram.".
Also the way you're portraying them is self-contradictory. You can't explicitly pursue a multicultural identity, and also integrate the different groups. The whole point was that multiculturalism is what they were stuck with, and they want to dispense with it through integration.
I mean... I guess we don't disagree that much...
The whole point of government is to impede on rights. And the "pander to minorities or you'll keep losing elections" argument is vacuous, even if it's correct. Making Social Security financially sustainable is also unpalatable, and would result in a blow out, but it's deranged to insist that the solution is therefore to just hand out more gibs until the entire system collapses.
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