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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 17, 2023

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I won't rehash this too much, as I think it's practically inarguable that America is a nation founded on the principle of immigration, religious freedom, and has levered it's ability to assimilate masses of immigrants to become the greatest nation in the history of the world.

Not immigrants, pioneers and colonists. There's a difference, one that has been deliberately conflated because colonialism is bad and immigration is good these days, but the defining feature of America isn't immigration, it's pioneering exploration and settling of the frontier.

Unfortunately we ran out of frontier more than a century ago.

Waves of immigration to major cities continued apace throughout the 19th century as well. New York City, Chicago, Boston, Philly, and other large American cities relied heavily on immigrant labor and the new immigrants formed large ethnic enclaves in those cities. Irish, Italians, Poles, Germans, Jews - these people and their experiences building our major cities are certainly important parts of the formative story of the United States and many of them weren't headed for the frontier.

Sure, but those ethnic enclaves were also the people who powered the corrupt political machines of those cities. Which eventually engendered corruption on the federal level in the form of FDR and his successors.

It is true they are a part of the current American story...but it isn't necessarily a good part.

Yeah, like I said in my other post on the topic, I'm in favor of something fairly close to a total pause to provide for a period of assimilation. A generation or two of stabilization would do wonders for cultural cohesion, in my view.