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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   33047 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 24, 2023

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Well, at least two of the more prominent and intelligent voices in the online right (BAP & Yarvin) basically don’t see a path to power for the right until the current regime collapses on itself. I agree with you that I don’t think there’s much of a chance for the right to obtain power either. As academic agent says though, there’s many different factions with different goals and preferred destinations.

I think there’s 0% chance of establishing New Hyperborea, but I think there are at least a few avenues for the right to pursue that most factions would see as an improvement on the current regime, and have at least a slim but non-zero chance of working. You note that even the average red-blooded American, even those that are nominally conservative, find racism/sexism/etc. distasteful. But I think the left has shown that public opinion on a lot of these social issues is downstream of policy rather than vice versa.

So I think Richard Hanania’s idea of repealing the civil rights act, and (contrary to Hanania) actually enforcing immigration laws (deport illegal immigrants and don’t let any more in) would go a long way to accomplishing many of the online right’s shared goals. These ideas are obviously not very popular, and are opposed by basically every powerful institution in the country in addition to most normal people (which is why neither of these things will ever happen), but you could theoretically do them through underhanded but legal political lawfare, judicial rulings, executive orders and such, which the mainstream right has been able to successfully use in the case of 2A/abortion. To successfully do this I don’t think you’d actually need to “clear everyone out” down to the local librarian. You’d need republican majorities in both houses, and a president who is willing to fire the higher level heads of the federal agencies/military and install competent and loyal people in their place. Then use those agencies to actually aggressively enforce your ideology on non-governmental of sub-federal governmental entities. Over time, public opinion will follow.

Of course the problem is in getting the electoral mandate and a president who understands that it’s friend/enemy all the way down, and who is competent enough to get it done in the face of overwhelming resistance from our current regime. The only reasons to think this has more than a 0% chance to happen are that we are starting to see mainstream republican politicians who are at least trying to fight back, dissident-right political theory is seeping into the mainstream (Moldbug has been on Tucker), and as our institutions decline further maybe there’s some small chance that the stars will align and there will be an actual major conservative backlash in electoral politics.

Wouldn't deporting more than a certain fraction of illegal immigrants crash the US economy? US citizens are not going to want to do stuff like fruit picking, meat processing, restaurant kitchen work, and landscaping for the kind of money that illegal immigrants do it for.

Most developed countries don’t have 15 million+ illegal immigrants - what happens in those countries? I imagine the same would happen in America.

Groceries and restaurants cost dramatically more and there’s far fewer nicely landscaped grounds.

Nah, you have seasonal workers.

Yes, US citizens are not going to want to do that stuff for below minimum wage and without the workplace and labour protections that they have fought for over the years. If nobody is willing to do those jobs for even the minimum wage, then those jobs either don't need doing or deserve higher wages - I personally think that this would actually be a positive change in the long-run, even if there were a few growing pains early on.

I mean, the actual issue is, for some of those jobs, you actually have to pay more than other jobs that are actually more skilled. If you give somebody an option between making say, $15 at an Amazon warehouse, $13 working at a Starbucks, or $20 working doing fruit picking, a lot of people will pick option A, and some will still pick option B.

You could still have foreigners do it, just don't let them stay. Have a work visa where 75% of your pay is held in an account and gets paid out when you leave the country. If you over stay it's forfeit.

I’m not really trying to argue for the merits of these ideas- but that they are major issues the various factions of the online right care about, mostly agree on, and are theoretically possible through normal politics.

US citizens are not going to want to do stuff like fruit picking, meat processing, restaurant kitchen work, and landscaping for the kind of money that illegal immigrants do it for.

Other countries without substantial illegal immigrant populations seem to manage just fine. But yes, wages for those jobs would surely go up, and consumer prices along with it.

Robotics and AI would probably solve that problem within the next two decades

Fruit picking and meat processing seem extremely difficult to automate.

In the US due to economics. Meat processing in Europe is more automated.

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Lower labor costs in the US dissuade increased investment in automation.

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