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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 7, 2023

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Greg Johnson

I'm not familiar, so I clicked through, and kind of did a double-take at this quote:

“Blacks don’t find white civilization comfortable. It is like demanding they wear shoes that are two sizes too small when we impose our standards of punctuality and time preferences, demand that they follow our age-of-consent laws, or foist the bourgeois nuclear family upon them. These things don’t come naturally to Africans. White standards like walking on the sidewalk, not down the middle of the street, are oppressive to blacks. Such standards are imposed by the hated ‘white supremacy’ system. But if we don’t impose white standards upon them, we have chaos. We have great cities like Detroit transformed into wastelands.”

Prior to the last two concluding statements, this seems like a take that DEI people would largely nod along with (aside from the age-of-consent dig). Shades of the Ryan Long gag video.

Anyway, I agree, there isn't really any space for a true far-right in the United States. In your link, I think Johnson articulates the reason:

“We White Nationalists claim that the mixing of races inevitably causes hatred and conflict. So it is silly for us to pretend that we are immune to the effects of racial mixture. If White Nationalists who claim not to hate other races are honest, then they are living refutations of their own claim that multiracial societies breed hatred. ‘I am living proof that multiracial societies cause racial hatred.’” [emphasis mine]

Yes, exactly! This is largely self-refuting for most people. If you've actually spent time with people of other races, you probably wound up noticing that some of them are good, some of them are bad, and that group-level forced segregation isn't all that appealing of an ideological tenet. Of course, a few people will disagree, but I don't think they're going to do all that well as a political force. Despite the claims that all white Americans are racist, it sure seems like the stance held by most white Americans is that they don't hate other races.

Did north Ireland work? Is Syria a diverse paradise? Sri Lanka has terrorism from muslims who have lived there for 1300 years against "easter celebrators". Ukraine isn't having a good time and neither is every African country. The most peaceful places in the world are homogenous. The most dysfunctional and violent are multicultural. A giant Heathrow terminal of a society with intense security keeping people focused on shopping would be a bland world.

Diverse societies are low trust, fractured and easily divide. People naturally segregate. People's friends tend to be highly similar to themselves. Getting people to work together is hard and it works best with similar people.

Even monethnic societies are assimilating rapidly into the global homogenization of culture, that's driven more by the ubiquity of the internet than by population movements. And many of the most dysfunctional and violent societies are relatively monoethnic, while other multicultural, multiethnic, multireligious societies like Singapore and Switzerland are some of the most prosperous nations on earth. And by 1870 European-Americans were already vastly more diverse than citizens of any Northern European country, and yet they built a much more prosperous and successful society in many ways (and are still substantially richer than their European cousins today).

You are correct, though, that for diverse societies to be successful in the long term they generally need to have a majority core population (Chinese and Germans, respectively), limitations on popular democracy and, over time, a formidable police state. For these (among other) reasons, hesitation around mass immigration to the US is justified.

Diverse but isolated.

People try to claim America as a melting pot without looking at the mechanics(Nevermind that the phrase itself referred to New York City). That's the part that always sticks at me when I look at my very local history and see the various ethnic settlements that developed.

Certainly, you have diverse ethnic settlements that look from a modern standpoint to be very close to one another... but when you stop and take a step back, consider the time period they developed and the lack of coherent infrastructure, and you realize that these self-same settlements were in the middle of fucking nowhere and would take a good number of days to reach the nearest town or transportation hub, nevermind the nearest city.

Diverse, but isolated. Now, there is no isolation; we are all in the pot together, and it's slowly starting to boil.