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Apologetics for America
I'm a big fan of the United States. It's a big country. It's a safe country. The people are wealthy, kind, industrious, and have done more than their fair share of upholding the Pax Americana under which the majority of the world prospers, including those who would tear it down.
I would go so far as to say that I'd be significantly happier if I had been so lucky as to have been born in a counterfactual universe where my parents had emigrated there, even keeping all my myriad flaws like ADHD and depression.
It's a country that holds multitudes, and has had such a good track record of making good on its promise of embodying:
And then achieving the minor miracle of making the vast majority of them upstanding proud Americans regardless of caste and creed.
(To such an extent that it has lost the memetic immune system needed to assimilate some of the people who meet that criteria but are resilient to anything but force)
It is gorgeous. Even after the visiting the UK, a nation that even in its sclerosed and ailing state is significantly better than India, I found myself grossly disappointed at how small and dull the place was, compared to what I've seen of the States.
I count myself lucky to still have the memories of when I visited as a toddler, some of my earliest, a period I enjoyed so much that I came back home speaking English with an American accent when I hadn't even been conversant in the language when I left.
I stare at the reels and pictures posted on Insta by my friends studying there with ill-concealed envy. It looks so huge, so clean, so vibrant, so picturesque and unspoiled. Still a land where someone with innate talent, having landed with but a penny to his name, can ennoble himself through hard work, or at the very least his descendants.
If it were not for the fact that I'm currently ineligible to give the USMLE today, for no fault of my own, I'd bid adieu to my current aspirations for practising and settling in the UK. The latter is still better than India, but do you really need me to tell you how low a bar that is to beat?
I'm about as pro-American as it gets without driving a pickup truck with the stars-and-stripes hanging off it!
The people eat great food. They live in huge houses that appear outright intimidating to the rest of us. They can afford to waste gigaliters of water on a modestly appealing perennial grass and mostly not begrudge the expense.
They can travel visa free to most of the world, and act the fool there (can, not necessarily do, the worst I can say about most American tourists I've met is that they were rather underinformed about where they'd ended up), content in the knowledge that none but utter pariah states would dare raise a hand at them out of fear of Uncle Sam.
They earn salaries that make us all look like paupers. The median wage for a doctor in the US is $250k, fresh out of residency, whereas a senior consultant in the UK might be content to make half that. Indian doctors can only weep, especially lowly ones like me. Even my father, so talented in his surgical field that he'd be nationally famous if he was more fluent in English (instead just being regionally famous), makes only $50k PA at the very peak of his career, after a life of suffering and hustling so his sons would have to suffer and hustle just a bit less.
Even that seemingly colossal sum of money does not achieve the QOL a naive purchasing power calculation would suggest. Even billionaires here must be content to have their money only buy quick trips with their windows rolled up from only upper class enclave to the next.
The world, somewhat more multipolar than it once was, still wobbles unsteadily if you try and make it rotate around an axis not centered on America.
I'd give a lot to be there. I really would.
That is why it so severely vexes me that my girlfriend, a smart, intelligent and hard working woman who makes for an enviable partner to have at my side, holds a view of it so jaundiced you don't know whether to cry or laugh.
Like many Americans, she has had her perception of the States clouded by sheer propaganda that is more interested in cherrypicking out all of America's real problems, and when even all the real ones no longer suffice, concoct ones out of half-truths and whole-cloth to terrorize a broken primate brain that only notices the bad and becomes inured to the good, such that it no longer bears a resemblance to how fucking good they have it.
She stares at me like I'm mad when I tell her I've always wanted to live there, and the few warts on the face of the nation can't hide its timeless beauty.
She believes that abortion has been banned. When I protest otherwise and say that it's only a few states putting restrictions on it, and even then, just a few, she shakes in existential terror at the idea that there's a seething crowd coming for the rights of women, eager to snatch them all away. She thinks racism is a serious concern for hardworking and talented immigrants who speak fluent English, whereas you could put me in a room with a Confederate flag and I'd find a way to end up drinking beers and shooting AR-15s before dawn.
Did I mention she's terrified of gun violence, even if she could live a dozen lives in parallel and not get shot?
She categorically refuses to follow me if I wistfully make plans to find some route to make it there, be it fighting tooth and nail with my med school and the ECFMG to give me the right to at least try my luck, so that I can show them I meet even their high standards.
I'm at the point that I am seriously debating abandoning clinical medicine as a career, to upskill myself in medical ML, so that I have an easier route to the States that isn't gated behind a professional licensing exam I'm not allowed to give. I am still young. I am allowed to dream.
She's rather be middle class in the UK, unable to afford air-conditioning, living in a tiny house, watching our salaries erode into nothingness, and then, if Sunak successfully makes doctors into a thin wrapper for GPT-5, potentially resign ourselves to a life of mediocrity, or worse, come back to India with our tails between our legs where we'd have to settle for working shit jobs with longer hours and worse pay.
She's scared of paying the medical bills, when the kind of comprehensive coverage that two professionals making 500k together buys care beyond the dreams of the NHS. Perhaps not value for money, but value.
I criticize America all the time, but only because I love it. I want to gorge myself on cheeseburgers with ridiculous portion sizes, because even if I die fat, I die happy.
I cherish what the Founding Fathers built, a shining city built on a hill of negentropy and abundance, rising out of a swamp wherein dwell the majority of us, only a generation or two removed from near-Malthusian conditions. I would die to keep the barbarians away from the gates, if only because I want to cross them myself, as an esteemed guest if nothing else, hopefully to be one of their own.
I set out to write a post somewhat glorifying (fairly) America, and to invite others to submit arguments that would let my girlfriend see reason. It would seem I've inadvertently done all the heavy lifting, if not for the fact that I've marshaled all these arguments before her and still found them wanting.
I don't want to jump to the conclusion that the two of us are moral mutants who can never reconcile our preferences. I prefer to think that she's wrong about her fears, or weighs the wrong facts too heavily and the right ones not at all.
Help me convince her. I will find it hard to live with myself if I fail.
Oh, and Happy Fourth of July to you all, ye sons and daughters living several decades in the future, hailing from the nation from whose physical and mental toil most of the good things in the world come.
Wait, is it a bit late for that? Um, I blame timezones, pernicious and insidious things that they are.
Don't think I don't see the cracks in the pristine facade, the erosion of the meritocracy that made your country glorious. I simply think that if America wakes up and patches a few holes, it can earn the right to slumber again in peace for centuries hence.
I vacillated about whether or not to reply to this, but I think it would be almost cowardly not to. It’s a moment where the rubber of my ideology meets the road of actual interpersonal relations with a real human being.
I hope that you are unsuccessful in your attempts to make it to America. I wish that you’d been unsuccessful in making it to the UK, and barring some future event forcing you to go back to India entirely, I hope you’re stuck in the UK in perpetuity and find it less and less to your liking.
This has little-to-nothing to do with you personally. Every interaction I’ve had with you has suggested that you’re a genial, intelligent, and interesting guy, and I have no doubt that you and I could get along swimmingly in person. Still, you’re just one individual, and I’ve got an entire country - an entire civilization, really - to worry about rescuing. Your individual quest for self-actualization - which, sorry to say it, strikes me as overwhelmingly acquisitive and materialistic - doesn’t really mean much in the grand scheme of things.
If the demographic/cultural situation in America were different, I would be very happy to have you in my country, and even in my city specifically. Individual immigrants, when coming here in small and selective numbers, can be a wonderful addition to the social fabric. However, we live in a country with a sprawling racial spoils system, and in which highly-educated Indians such as yourself are being imported en masse to create a new synthetic overclass more compliant to the regime.
“But Hoffmeister, I won’t be compliant to the regime! I’m not like the other Indians!” Well, first off, I’m not actually convinced that this is true; your paean to America, much like that of so many other smart and materialistic immigrants before you, seems centered around how many opportunities it provides you to obtain large amount of material wealth and an obnoxiously large house. Am I to believe that you would represent a genuine ally in the struggle of people like me to take back our country, once doing so presents a significant opportunity obstacle to your ability to obtain wealth and status?
And even if you will be, it definitely doesn’t sound like your girlfriend will. No, she’ll fit right in with the class of vindictive America-hating South Asians who play the progressive politics game expertly in order to bolster their own status at the expense of shredding the sociocultural fabric of this country. And moreover, your children will almost undoubtedly do the same. I know plenty of second-generation Indian-Americans, and a lot of them have parents who are every bit as over-the-top enamored of the “American Dream” as you are, yet they’re happily joining the America Is Systemically Racist grift so that they can get ahead. And a lot of them actually believe in it! Indian-Americans are either the highest-income or second-highest-income (the numbers on Jewish-Americans are hard to nail down) ethnic group in America, the American government is doing everything in its power to bring them here and to set them up for success; and yet these ungrateful scumbags still want to lecture me about all of the evils my ancestors released on the world. And I don’t believe that you yourself have the genuine ideological foundation needed to prevent your children from becoming that way.
Now, assuming that you are dead-set on coming to the States and want to scope out cities to live in, someone below recommended San Diego and I would strongly second that recommendation. Since I’ve lived here my whole life I can’t help but fixate on all of the negatives, especially since it’s gotten so much worse upon particular metrics like homelessness and general disorder, but it stills blows pretty much every similarly-sized American city out of the water on nearly every other metric, and the weather is famously incredible. Come visit La Jolla if you want to see how wealthy people live here, and go to North Park for bars and restaurants. If your goal of emigrating here is successful, you could do worse than living here, and I’d rather you end up in a city that’s already so racially-diverse that it’s unsalvageable from a white-identitarian perspective, rather than that you end up in a city that hasn’t yet lost the demographic battle.
I hate to break it to you, but you can't take back the country because the call is coming from inside the house.
The whitest cities in America, like Portland and Seattle, are the wokest. It's the whites that voted for Chesa Boudin, and the Chinese that voted to recall him. The whites voted for De Blasio, the minorities voted for Eric Adams.
The HR department is far whiter than the factory floor.
Replacing the American PMC with Indians would be an improvement.
First off, even if I took seriously your contention that Indians will be less politically destructive than white PMC progressives, you’re still missing the heart of my argument, which is that white Americans are entitled to determine the political future of this country because we are direct descendants of the people who founded this nation, while Indians are not. White progressives are my people - when you insult them, you insult my mother, my sister, and nearly every person socially important to me. For all of the negative things I say about them, I am profoundly invested in their future and the eventual reconciliation of political tribes in this country, because they are my flesh and blood. That’s something they have which an Indian, no matter how congenial he may be as an individual, will never be able to lay claim to.
You should take my contention seriously, as I'm taking yours seriously.
The Indian PMC recites woke slogans not because they believe them at heart, but because they see it as the way up in America. That makes the Indian a practical man I can work with, unlike the emotionally-driven American PMC. I would rather work with or for the Indian.
And now, for the heart of your argument. You have stated it clearly, and it is satisfying to reach the core of a disagreement.
I don't think your sister or your mother sees me as "my people". Progressives who look like me have treated me far worse than proles who don't. To quote Muhammad Ali, "I ain't got no quarrel with the Viet Cong, no Viet Cong ever called me nigger".
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True, but as a practical matter, they vociferously oppose everything you say you believe in, and are actively working against it. They don’t feel any warm bonds of kinship, they see you as public enemy number 1, a demographic to be either cowed into silence or destroyed. At least good immigrants are not actively working against the values of the country and aren’t working to marginalize and disempower people like you.
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Look, I'm not mad at you for making this statement. I've received frankly overwhelming support from kind souls who have offered me their time and a place to stay should I ever need to crash at their place. Given that most of it was over DMs, I'll respect their privacy and not name them.
Unfortunately, neither their sheer kindness, nor your opposition makes any meaningful difference when it comes to me settling down in the US.
My girlfriend would probably vote Dem if she could, and so might I, to the extent that your accursed two party system means that I have no other way to vent my dissatisfaction with both sides. I make no promises about what my kids might do, but they're likely to be coastal born, so the odds are obvious.
Since we're all so powerless, oh well, you're entitled to your opinion.
The only actors that matter are me, the State Department and the ECFMG.
I've been there and even have a handful of memories of it. I'll certainly consider the recommendation should I be in a position to utilize it!
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I guess the problem is who are we taking the country back for?
The people most responsible for making America great in the first place are some of the wokest people on the planet. The backbone of the country, the people whose grandparents went to a mainline protestant church, are cheering on their own extinction.
White southerners and ruralites? While I appreciate their contributions in keeping our nation freer than most during Covid, and for their willingness to serve as cannon fodder during our many wars, they were not the ones who made America great.
The problem is not with foreigners, IMO. It is that the best and strongest of our people, my people, are so thoroughly corrupted with woke ideology that there's not much worth saving.
Clearly the woke people you are talking about are not the people who made America great, because they weren't born. So you must mean said grandparents, who weren't woke. These are not the same people.... stop making Hlynka have a point. No matter how many "Son also rises" type studies the left can gin up, America is the land of "shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations". Furthermore, failsons are known everywhere. People are not their parents.
I don't understand what a conservative America is supposed to look like.
Who are the backbone of this theoretical new nation? White evangelicals? Based Hispanics/Indians/African immigrants? Because that's not "taking our country back". That's moving in a new and different direction that will be a lot lower trust, lower IQ, and more racially balkanized than what we had in the past. Brazil is probably the best modern comparison.
I don't have any answers here either. I suppose I'd rather have Brazil than whatever we get if we let progressives run things for another 30 years, but there really is no going back. The golden age is dead. Immigration didn't kill it either. The rot came from within.
Edit: The comment below from Hoffmeister25 partially answers my question
I think this is a noble goal. With much lower immigration for a few decades (like we had from roughly 1920-1970) we could create a strong, singular culture. But first we need to fix our elite. Assimilation in the current context just means taking conservative immigrants and making them into wokists.
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Ya know, props for honesty and consistency and all that, but I'm confused - weren't you arguing a while ago that Chinese and other East Asians should be considered honorary whites? Is the difference here simply that Indians have lower average IQs? Because in the US East Asians certainly do work the racial spoils grift as hard as Indians do.
If it's just about IQ, wouldn't @self_made_human's demonstrably much higher IQ make him an exception? I mean, I get that you are not literally advocating we use IQ tests as an immigration qualification, but "We should welcome ethnic groups or not based on their average IQ" is a strange sort of white nationalism (as I've said before, I think you're going to have a hard time getting your fellow travelers to join you in welcoming Jews and Chinese and Koreans), and "We should welcome ethnic groups or not based on how progressive they turn once they hit our shores" would exclude pretty much all of them (including Canadians and Europeans), and "We should welcome individuals or not based on how much they align with my politics" is, frankly, as purely self-interested and devoid of higher principles as you accuse self_made_human of being.
Third San Diego, though. Almost a perfect city (aside from, y'know, all the homeless, etc.).
I know this is almost certainly true, but it's still nice that people notice haha.
Now, if only I wasn't a 99.999th percentile wordcel and only like 75th as a shape rotator. I know which team makes more money!
We're on themotte. Most who bother to interact with comparatively longform text are higher IQ than average, and people here obviously like thinking about ideas.
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What math courses have you completed, and how did the last few feel?
Hmm.. I was perfectly fine at math till 10th grade, where I fell off harshly.
I blame this on my (at the time undiagnosed) ADHD, since my eyes would glaze over.
I also severely fucked myself by not paying attention during early trigonometry lessons, something my tutors failed to address.
I think in a world where I was taking Ritalin at the time, I'd have done much better.
I do like math much more now that I'm not forced to study it, I watch channels like 3Blue1Brown on the regular, and I occasionally use GPT-4 to teach myself statistics.
I am under the impression that the tenets of ML aren't that complicated, and while I have no natural affinity for it, when my happiness is at stake I can pop pills and grind. I have to do that for medicine as is!
Edit: The Indian math curriculum is far more rigorous than the US one is, without going into things like AP courses. While my calculus is only middling and my trig terrible (beyond the very basics), I googled the 12th grade US maths curriculum and I think I have most of it handled.
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Yes, and if you recall, in the same post I explicitly named high-caste Indians as another group that could be easily slotted into the Castilian Futurist white-enough coalition in due time. India is, after all, one of the most important historical power centers of the Proto-Indo-European civilization, and Hinduism (especially the Vedic texts) contains a great degree of continuity with the religious and cultural outlook of that civilization.
The problem is that Western countries are not ready for a massive influx of Asian/Indian immigrants right now. We are far too culturally insecure, self-hating, weak, and committed to our own self-destruction. As it stands right now, Asians and Indians represent, as I said, a rapidly-expanding synthetic overclass, who are eager to obtain influence and positional goods by embracing anti-white identity politics. These are people of high human capital and good breeding, who can easily be inculcated into a resentful, vindictive, predatory ascendant elite at precisely the moment when white people are the most prey-like they’ve been in centuries.
If this were a confident civilization with a strong sense of pride and continuity with its past, high-quality immigrants who were eager to assimilate into that civilization would be an asset. And by assimilation, I’m talking about, among other things, marrying into the families who have ancestral ties to the founding of this nation, such that the children and especially grandchildren of these couplings would be visually near-indistinguishable from the historical population of the country, and would feel a genuine blood connection to the ancestral stock that built this nation. This could, in time, create a truly glorious race, syncretizing the best of the Asian world while remaining firmly rooted in, and continuous with, the greatest civilization of the last millennium. (It could even allow our civilization to reintegrate parts of its deep heritage - the forgotten Proto-Indo-European past I mentioned - that could prepare it for the spiritual conflicts of the 21st century.)
Does that describe the OP? No, it doesn’t seem like it. His girlfriend is Indian, their kids will be unmistakably Indian, and as I said, they will be acculturated into the social stratum that will not only allow them but strongly encourage them to wear their Indian-ness as a badge of weaponized otherness. Again, this is nothing against the OP as an individual. I don’t doubt his sincere appreciation for the aspects of this country that appeal to scrappy high-IQ outsiders, and that is, whether I like it or not, an important part of what America has always been. I simply think that this is not a good time to be inviting people like the OP into the West. We need a moratorium to figure out a lot of really complicated shit first, including dealing with the teeming hordes of immigrants that are already here, before we’ll be ready to talk about letting in more of them. In the meantime, I strongly encourage the OP to learn how to love and cherish India, and to try and make that country better; it certainly has a lot going for it, and it could really be incredibly if people like the OP were willing to stay and try to make it so.
Unfortunately it is hard for a minority of well-intentioned smart people to make a dent in an overall mediocrity. The Soviet Union had a huge number of extremely smart people including absolute geniuses of math and science and engineering, yet it was a backwards authoritarian shithole. Even modern Russia (despite a lot of brain drain these past 30 years) still has a lot of smart people, yet it is a shithole.
For the individual, the strategy of moving to a place that is already not a shithole usually makes a lot more sense than staying in a shithole and trying to improve it.
I've already given an entire year of my life, of my own volition, to working as an intern in a far larger and more active government hospital in lieu of my original, rural one.
It was just about the worst year of my life, I was working insane hours and not even getting paid for it (unlike those who stuck to wherever their med school was).
The worst of it was that I realized that if I went through the insane grind needed to get into a decent postgraduate specialization program, I could look forward to a similar lifestyle for another 3 or 4 years. If I hadn't already harbored aspirations of jumping ship, that alone would have made me.
If you want to read it, it's here. Probably one of the best things I've written.
If anybody tries to force me to go through that again, I'd punch them.
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