Interesting post.
The simple reason why it’s so hard to reverse large scale migration to the West is that it’s easy for people to arrive, and hard to make people leave.
We can describe this slightly more technically.
- Policy inertia, which includes things like the decades old international and domestic asylum systems being fixed in place while things like reversing jus soli or the immigration act of 1965 would require congressional supermajorities and or 60+ seat senate majorities respectively. In grandiose terms, this is a form of legislative anarcho-tyranny, in that it hampers the efforts of any conservative-on-immigration government.
- Affluent PMC liberals whose attitudes both implement and safeguard the above legal and related social order, “oh what you actually want to do something about that? Ew”.
Other groups have no real power. Salvadoran day laborers are not in power in America. This is important because it makes clear that ICE just raiding Texan farms is not enough. Yes, they should be doing more of it, and yes, they aren’t doing as much of it as they should because the Ag lobby is big and Republican.
But to win, maybe you have to bring the fight to middle class and upper middle class liberals in blue states. Maybe white progressive Democrats in Minnesota have to fear ICE. Maybe that’s what it takes.
2rafa
4d ago
The only question when it comes to redistribution is whether you are getting some of it. No country has ever substantially reduced welfare in relative terms. In the event of an extreme fiscal crisis (like in Greece) it might be reduced in absolute terms - long after everyone of working age has already started to suffer - but the share of the shrinking pie stays the same or grows. You may as well try to get as much as you can.
Sure, but it’s also ahistorical to suggest that these identities were fully invented recently, when they weren’t. Italy and Germany are only 150 years old (France is already 250, anyway), but bonds of language and culture are older in many cases. Even centuries ago, the gap between an Occitan and a Catalonian was obviously less than between either of them and a Pole or a Swede.
2rafa
5d ago
There are many possibilities here. Your record when it comes to geopolitical forecasting is poor, after all. (So is mine.)
Europe can’t unite against America because European unity is impossible after a millennium of conflict with no resolution (the Napoleonic Wars and WW1 would have each led to a - different - resolution absent British involvement, but alas, Perfidious Albion).
Europe was never united by force. Italy is still mostly run by Italians, Spain mostly by Spaniard, Poland (newly again) mostly by Poles. The French and Germans, the two pillars, can’t even build a fighter plane together because despite each’s economic and security situation deteriorating rapidly they would rather fight over who gets to make the engines or the wings or the control panel than just agree to whatever is fastest. The Spanish and Italians too will not die over Ukraine or Greenland.
Europe cannot unite because it has no master. Everybody and their mother has a veto. It was only able to impose itself on Greece because everybody else united against it and because even Varoufakis realized the alternative was absolute ruin and anarchy. But to unite against France? No, it can’t happen.
You can humiliate them as much as they want, they cannot agree enough to do anything. Europe is not a political entity, it can’t be negotiated with, it has no agency. America can take what it wants. Maybe it should.
2rafa
6d ago
There was literally a brief period between Pat Buchanan’s campaign in 1992 (or really Gingrich and the Evangelicals’ greatest triumph in 1994) and like 2017 when it was highly unfashionable. It lasted a little longer than peak woke but it was hardly a centuries long phenomenon.
2rafa
6d ago
A lot of that article was for a relatively thin slice of upper middle class men looking to make it in creative professions. So yes, if you were a straight while male who wanted to be a literature professor or TV writer over the last decade it was very unfair toward you. I don’t know that the average American, especially blue collar, saw the same pressure.
2rafa
6d ago
This is a viable criticism if someone is using a shitty ancient free model. The average paying ChatGPT customer on 5.2 or whatever it is is getting a decent model and so their criticisms can’t be as easily dismissed as a year ago.
2rafa
6d ago
The aesthetics of communism, all that block red, a disdain for ornamentation, those ugly 50s modernist busts of Marx and Lenin and Mao that still adorn so many state and party buildings, the straight-out-of-the-USSR party poster design that you still see everywhere in China, including increasingly in Hong Kong, is unaesthetic.
Nevertheless, the Chinese are remarkably capable civilization builders. In Hong Kong and Singapore, tempered by an appropriately small but sufficiently punchy Anglo Saxon influence and so freed from both the worst ancestral and communist impulses, they achieved true heights of civilization that stand to this day as some of the most pleasant and well-run places on earth.
The main problem with China is not China, it is that we cannot become Chinese. Perhaps that is a sadness in and of itself. To answer @DaseindustriesLtd ‘s question, Americans can see themselves as white Russians, and I think on some distant level we can even imagine ourselves in the Malthusian squalor that is India (I suppose Sonia Gandhi showed it was possible). But Chinese? No, this is a wholly foreign identity, unavailable to outsiders.
2rafa
7d ago
It makes sense for China to wait until Taiwan is no longer the nexus of global semiconductor production (something that has no impact on the chauvinistic / historical / nationalist / sentimental Chinese claim) and then take the island when nobody else cares anymore. If they go early it’s because the US baited them or because Xi perceives or experiences an internal loss of power or influence to more hardcore nationalists.
2rafa
7d ago
I really think fake jobs are increasingly inevitable, I’ve written about it a few times recently but just as we acknowledge that schools are mostly daycare, jobs are also mostly daycare.
2rafa
7d ago
No riots are necessary right now because whoever does it will be voted out and no party leader has a strong enough whip to even pass a parliamentary vote on it anyway, their own MPs would rather remove them than end the triple lock.
2rafa
8d ago
Unfortunately even in Britain polling consistently showed young and middle aged people in favor of the triple lock, winter fuel / cruise payment etc.
2rafa
8d ago
The radical left has always thought this. It’s why communist states are always democracies except that various groups of people can’t vote because they’re reactionaries and of course the party has to approve every candidate to make sure no counterrevolutionaries slip through against the will of the people, obviously.
2rafa
8d ago
The only way for Europe to truly challenge America right now is to drop Ukraine, make big overtures toward Russia, get closer to China (nuclear option would be lifting ASML export restrictions to the PRC, since no US company can compete with them). Then Trump is in an unenviable position. He can wield the might of the US financial system to try to destroy the European and Chinese economies but that’s an extremely high variance play that would unite the US’ main geopolitical competitors in a way that could destroy dollar hegemony.
If he wants Greenland, instead of the current fumbling, he can just threaten Novo exports until the Danes agree to a referendum, then bribe the natives. Alas, that would require a somewhat more intentional foreign policy.
Yes, but in an unusual and interesting way, since it would allow the Europeans to get concession from Russia on Ukraine to the extent that an American presence might no longer be necessary to achieve a ‘frozen line’ peace there, and because if done quickly and stealthily enough, the US would have to commit to a shooting and bombing war against Russian troops, not proxies, in a way that has never really happened absent a couple of edge cases since the 1950s.
2rafa
8d ago
The status quo is increasingly untenable, and I’d like to see the necessary changes happen before AI takes over everything and makes every single conflict potentially species-ending.
2rafa
9d ago
Denmark should offer Putin a base in Greenland next to America’s and see how Trump reacts.
2rafa
9d ago
The Europeans have the opportunity to do the funniest thing here and start negotiating a Russian presence in Greenland (since the only reason America would even want the island is to counter Russia).
Alas, at the behest of the neurotic Baltics, traumatized Poles, and what passes for British foreign policy, playing hardball is anathema to the Europeans for now.
2rafa
9d ago
Europeans will riot if you abolish the welfare state. It can only happen like Greece during the crisis (although there were still plenty of riots then) where there’s no money and the government says it’s this or we starve. Even the French aren’t there yet.
2rafa
9d ago
It’s a current trend on TikTok / Instagram to post pictures of yourself from 2016. Next month, in early February, we will celebrate our own 10th anniversary of the Culture War Thread. What are we doing to mark the occasion?
2rafa
9d ago
It’s the best his writing has been since the pandemic, but that’s because he’s writing on one of his favorite topics which is being mean to himself and his audience. The reason his writing declined elsewhere was that he was and hopefully is mostly happily and so didn’t really care to the same extent. Even a long past their best singer can put on a quality performance of their greatest hits.
2rafa
11d ago
It’s not that there are no cases of successful gunboat diplomacy; there are. But as the British found out when they tried it, in a lot of cases that road leads to boots on the ground, flag on a flagpole imperialism anyway, because the threat of intervention has to be backed up or because the people you put or keep in power need help.
2rafa
12d ago
There’s nothing I can add other than to reiterate @Corvos and @orthoxerox’s replies. Because classical systems still involve effective, consistent multigenerational meritocracy (ie social mobility), they effectively offer almost the same competence with a huge reduction in unnecessary make-work. Kids studying for 5 hours a day after school is worse for society than them spending that time digging ditches and filling them in; the latter at least involves exercise. Yes, you are impatient, but that is more about you than it is about society.
As for me, I have one correction to make. I’m not old money! I’ve said this before, but I was born upper middle class; my parents became truly rich only in my teens. My mother’s family were a mix of middle class for many decades. My father’s family were a mix of shtetl dwellers and Italian Jews who mostly arrived between the 1820s (early for Ashkenazim) and 1890s (with a few later outliers), and who went on to make and lose several fortunes, but who were at the time of his birth as middle class as you can get (think a small town accountant or government worker).
You’re mostly right. For the past decade a combination of central bank policy and inertia has artificially prolonged and further inflated the greatest asset pricing bubble in a century. Luxury hotel rooms in Bora Bora or the Maldives cost 8x per night than they did in 2010; everyone has more money, especially people with money. The current spike is froth with the vaguest geopolitical justification, but it doesn’t really matter. For a long time (since the end of 2017, really), if you were “smart” and conservative about the market, you lost out on immense gains as prices kept rising. So now nobody thinks they can stay out of the market, because even the bears have been burned so many times. So everyone’s in but, in the back of their mind, wants to hedge. Bitcoin will crash in a financial crisis, or at least is untested. Gold and silver did well in 2007-2008, we’ll pick that.
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