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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 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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