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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 25, 2023

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The same reason you can't just send black people back to Africa today. Who's going to take them? No poor African country wants afew million more impovrished mouths to feed, you'd have to pay them massively for it, which is a huge short term cost, much more expedient to let them stay and only bear a small annual cost instead.

Whatever it cost in 1865 would have been worth it

You can say that with the benefit of hindsight, whether the people actually living in 1865 thought the same way is another matter entirely.

The Greeks and Romans used to exile people, there's no reason we can't do the same. "You don't have to go home but you can't stay here."

I have posted before about the difficulties with such a scheme. In short, prepare to piss off the entire rest of the world if you go that route. Of course, as a non-American bristling under the pax Americana I would actually welcome a development that would make my country look for the light at the end of Uncle Sam's anal passage again, but do you think that for the US and its citizens, the future you suggest would still be net beneficial if on top of everything its network of allies of ideology rather than convenience cools on it?

And what happens if the exilee can't find another country to take him in?

I don't see why that matters to the society that does the exiling. In fact, if it mattered, it wouldn't really be exile, would it?