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Culture War Roundup for the week of August 5, 2024

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So what you are asserting is basically

  1. The Great Replacement is happening.
  2. That is a good thing.

From that, my priors would normally be that you are a right-wing troll, but given your elaborate post and knowledge of Brecht, I don't think that is the case.

I do not share your disdain of the 'native' poor population. In my view, the value of a human being is not given by how well they thrive in their place in capitalism. While capitalism is by far the most effective economic system, I don't believe it is the voice of a just God, but more like the voice of an alien Elder God, and the best thing we can do is to obey it in places where it can see (like wage levels) and then fix his shortcomings in other places (cash transfers to the poor). To declare "you could not survive on the wages Azatoth has seen fit to assign to you, hence you are worthless" seems utterly bizarre.

It is also unsurprising that the 'native' poor are generally not very happy with the current system which places them on the bottom with few prospects of moving upwards. All too often, they turn to far-right politics. To be fair, the main focal point of anger of anti-immigrant extremists are not academic immigrants, but unskilled workers. While I think their focus on immigrants is misguided and they should focus on demanding more redistribution of wealth instead, I can also see that they are likely affected more by immigrants than the liberal elites who live in the nice part of town and know they will not have to compete for their job with an immigrant from some third world country tomorrow who is happy to work at a fraction of their wage.

So, in practice, I have some disdain for some of the people in every group. The poor who vote Nazi because they think this time, it will fix things. The liberal elites who have adopted woke ideology where compassion is handed out to minorities but refused for the poor with the wrong skin color. Immigrants who come here and think they can raise their daughter according to traditional Islam.

The Great Replacement is happening.

That is a good thing.

This mask slipped off at the beginning of the Obama administration. Obama staffers liked The Emerging Democratic Majority. I haven't read it, but I've been told it claims that demographic trends will flip a few states such as Texas blue, then the Democrats will rule forever. It turns out this misunderstands how committed American Hispanics are to voting for progressives. "Now that we've imported enough Hispanics, we're done losing elections" was the misplaced hope those Obama staffers had. Or as you might rephrase it "yes it is happening and it is a good thing".

Yes. Those optimistic Obama staffers and the people who wrote that book may ultimately be correct. Though not on the timeline they imagined.

But also there's a weird trick in that as Hispanics increase in proportion of the population, they increasingly self-identify as white and vote accordingly. So the Democrats are (foolishly?) chasing an asymptotic function of Hispanic voters.

And that isn't even necessarily a losing strategy long-term. They could turn Texas blue with some amount of importing fresh voters and a lot of help from former Californians fleeing their bad governance but ironically importing it with them. But as of yet Texas is purple-red and Florida is even deeper red, so these types are wailing and gnashing their teeth about the missed expectations.

I think there is a real problem from the point of view of a typical lanyard Democrat in that, for seemingly no reason, around half the population votes against them. And that keeps being true despite large demographic changes.

Isn't this the forever-issue with importing votes as a left-wing party. Essentially everywhere outside the anglosphere is built on identity politics and culture that is far right compared to the prevailing Western Democracy. Any successful immigrant project will tend to pivot over time from 'I vote Democrat since they facilitate my immigration' to 'Got mine, now I'm culturally conservative'

Some culture war issues like abortion still pivot around ethnicity/religiosity even if they're nominally Democrat voters.