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Notes -
Do people prefer more Sunday top-level-comments, or more Monday-morning top-level-comments?
Anyway, Richard Hanania writes, Nationalists Already Have the World They Want but Need to Pretend Otherwise:
This... makes sense? It's too uncouth for many people to say "America should make x nominal sacrifice, because it's increases our soft power," but people rarely say "America should make x sacrifice, even though it's zero-sum, because altruism." That's not to say there's no international philanthropy lobby, but foreign policy seems to be mostly "mistake theory." So, in that sense, yes, nationalists already have the world they want. But do they need to pretend otherwise?
The final sentence in that quote reminded me of the down-thread discussion of sadism. The substack comments have more about tribalism.
Citation needed.
But irregardless of the enemy's self-reported attitude towards helping Americans, nationalists believe that the enemy's values are actually anti-American.
When the enemy says "who will do the jobs??!!1!!" they're making a blatant bad faith argument. It's interesting how everyone who says that also believes all the billions living in shithole countries around the world should be imported into America and given access to as many handouts as they want
Maybe it's better to say that the Overton window is nationalistic, so when the antis control the levers of power they need to present their preferred policy from the lens of nationalism. On the other hand Chinese aren't black/brown/minority/dei so they hold no value in the enemy's value stack. I'm pretty sure when Trump was threatening tariffs on Colombia, there were a fair share of fake news articles crying about the poor Columbians about to lose their jobs.
There is no such thing as a risk free investment, and that risk is priced in to the possible reward. What gives us the right to judge the man's risk preference as well as the value of his time in managing investments? Some people choose to keep hard currency at home to diversify the risk from the bank. While on the other hand the dollar given is a dollar lost for nothing in return. And how small are occasional donations really; it reminds me of this old tweet: https://x.com/CNBC/status/1076173906455810050
Anyways I think the idea the author is touching on is "penny wise, pound foolish." But nowhere is it implied that the penny-pinching miser hates the thing he's pinching pennies from.
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I don’t think that’s the case. It’s not that America First has no plans, it’s that most of them run on the premise of lowering taxes and regulations and reducing government involvement. The reason they don’t have a government plan (which is what most commentators mean when they say “what’s the plan?) is that they don’t think government should be doing those things. They aren’t communists, and therefore their housing plan is “lower the tax burden so people have money, remove the zoning laws and the environmental regulations that prevent homes from being built, and let Americans do their thing.” That’s not going to show up as a plan, because the plan is to get out of the way.
A big part of this is of course not blowing trillions of dollars a year doing silly unproductive things for everyone else with taxpayers money. Funding Ukraine is a marginal case at best, it’s a billion dollars a month to prop up the Nebraska of Eastern Europe until they inevitably run out of people to kidnap for the front lines. Funding kids shows in Iraq is a loss because Middle East TV simply pushes Islamic fundamentalism and jihad. Going down the list most of these “aid” programs are basically grifting— pay an NGO full of PMC kids to pretend they’re doing something important overseas, while doing nothing more than paddling their pockets from the three figure salary they get for pretending to help out. At this point, freeing up the public money wasted on these grifter programs and giving the money to average Americans who would build businesses and make things and cure diseases and so on.
I've seen television in the middle east...hours of it. You know who the big star was? Oprah Winfrey. After that there were tons of music video stations for each of the different leading countries. Sexy lebanese videos, super sappy Saudi Orchestras with lame poets, Emirate gun twirling and cane dancing...and Iraq? It was all blue jeans in night club dancing shows, like a very tame American Bandstand. I would not be surprised at all if Iraqi Sesame Street was popular. that's one of the USAID expenditures I find least offensive--even admitting that modern Sesame Street is peak Wokoso.
Anyway, it's not all fundamentalism. That's what's on the radio...
At the same time, though, Hamas made their own Mickey Mouse ripoff.
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The economic analysis I've seen (please share if you have counter-examples) looks only at impact on GDP or on American wages and prices. It ignores the fact that nationalists have a stake in their nation, and immigrants dilute and weaken that stake. Allowing immigrants is analogous to selling some shares in a corporation. If immigration is 3% per year, Americans are losing 3% of their stake in their country to foreigners every year. If the immigrants are like-minded (for civic nationalists) or co-ethnic (for ethno-nationalists) then it's not such a big deal; it's basically recruiting allies. But if the immigrants are opposed to Americans' culture or are of a different ethnicity then immigration is a hostile takeover.
What. That's a non-sequitur. To draw a crude analogy, if thieves are stealing your stuff at a rate of only 1% of your income every year, then security is not worth worrying about. Or if you only waste 1% of your time sitting in traffic or standing in line at the post office, then it's not worth making roads or post offices more efficient. Hanania has made a bad argument here.
It also ignores that it is still a massive number that could be used to really help your allies both abroad and in the states which the Dems seem to be doing.
Also it is purely debt financed. Wouldn’t it be nice if for the last twenty years that number would’ve been zero? That would represent a material decrease in the national debt.
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I think this is besides Hanania's point. He is gesturing at something like Scott's conflict theory vs mistake theory. His point is: nationalists criticize the mainstream left for advocating for policies intended to help foreigners more than Americans. But, in fact, when you look at their actual policies and the arguments behind them, the left's policy are intended to help Americans first. They have a factual disagreement with right-wingers about whether those policies would work, and they're hypocritical about how they phrase their goals, but making America better off (at the expense of the rest of the world if need be) is in fact also their terminal goal, whether they admit it or not; their revealed preferences, granted their (perhaps erroneous!) beliefs about how economics work, align with right-wingers'.
Saying that the economic studies are bad is neither here nor there. The salient point for Hanania is the existence and prevalence of those studies (however flawed), as opposed to studies actually embracing the left's supposed belief that it would be morally necessary to enact such policies even if they harmed Americans, so long as they benefited foreigners.
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Okay, let's grant that nationalists are being overly charitable when they assume their enemies are driven purely by altruism towards foreigners (though some clearly are driven by that to a substantial degree). The obvious reason they feel this way is that their enemies continually attack them for their lack of altruism but whatever.
Let's say that what's actually happening is that altruism is one factor but some of these policies are seen as good for Americans overall and some are especially good for certain Americans who benefit disproportionately from the cheaper labour of migrants without concern for any externalities they impose on the rest of the populace.
What's Hanania's point then? "Well, ackshually, it's the nobles who benefit from all of the slave labour, not the slaves!" is technically accurate but so what?
You can argue that anti-globalist positions are stupid, but the fact that they're fighting globalists who happen to be fellow citizens doesn't change that they're nationalists.
First of all: I've gained a lot of contempt for homeless people so I might actually feel this way. I've never felt more like a fool when I gave a former regular on our street money for "food" only to realize he was actively turning down free food from nearby restaurants. Even if I was making bad decisions with my money I'd still be annoyed at my wife for being a gull. I'd still be annoyed that said person gets to hang around stinking up the neighborhood even more, encouraged by our trusting folly.
But replace "homeless person" with "Christian or LGBT charity" and it becomes clear why someone might not want their money going to groups that may say nice things but are advancing causes they find troublesome.
Now replace voluntary donations with taxes.
That may be true! But if that is the husband's problem he ought to say so, not pretend that his concern is spending the household's money frivolously in general. It is perfectly sensible to say "I don't really care what you do with those $50 I gave you, just so long as you don't spend them on things I actively disapprove of; by all means buy a dress with it, or set fire to it on TikTok, just don't give it to that smelly nuisance over there". But you have to own up to it, not say "how dare you throw away those precious fifty bucks, we need them at home!".
Sure, but you could imagine a vindictive, manipulative wife who says, "Oh, so you hate the homeless and what them to die??" and then spreads that exaggeration around their shared friend circle so that everyone thinks the husband is a jerk and shuns him. The analogy breaks down a bit because marital and small-scale social dynamics are different than those between citizens of a nation, but you can see why the husband might obscure his true thoughts to avoid opening himself up to an attack that would ruin his social standing.
It's a lot like calling someone cowardly for not openly stating their thoughts on HBD, or UBI, or Marxist economics. In a society where, for normies at least , "free market" and "tolerance" and rounded up to "good," and "communism" and "racism" are rounded down to "pure evil," inviting your opponents to be frank about these beliefs is really just a disingenuous invitation to step into a trap.
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Yes, organs of the left have produced voluminous analyses saying "what we want is good for you too". On trade, this is credible (not in the least because not all free traders are on the left). On immigration... it is clearly not their true reason, because the ones not toiling away in the bowels of the NBER producing such papers are making arguments based on how the US has an obligation to the poor foreigners, and leftist NGOs are busy helping get the poor foreigners to the US by hook or by crook.
This is gaslighting.
Surely that's consistent with the hypocrisy running the other way. They've come to believe high immigration is in their selfish interest, and spend a lot of time pretending they support it out of a deep moral conviction to make themselves look good. It's bad psychology to suppose that "it's in our economic self-interest" is the face-saving cover story, and "it's the ethical thing to do, however painful" is the dirty secret: in leftist spaces the latter is clearly the higher-status thing to say, whether you believe it or not, while coming out and admitting "we need more immigration because it'll make us wealthier" makes you sound like a deeply uncool capitalist.
I want more immigration for selfish reasons. Because in the modern times, countries which import people will have more robust economies than those who just peter out and invert their demographic pyramids.
And as opposed to the increasingly common right wing concerns, I don't care about living in a diverse place, I actually enjoy it. I like to eat different foods and I'm a big language learning nerd, so its cool to practice people's languages with them. I believe in importing highly skilled people from all over the planet as the way to build a powerful country. (Although I'm fine with mid level immigrants too, small business owners, chefs, whatever!).
America has benefitted enormously from stealing the top percentile of almost every other country on the planet and these fools in government currently want to do everything to end that system and turn us into a declining backwater former power like the UK. Cutting funding for science, ceding our position in the world we built, and tearing up the good will that we have from other countries is the icing on the cake.
I'm going to steal right wingers framing here but I seriously think this is the case. What right wingers want to do is profoundly dysgenic, they want us to stop siphoning talent from the world and instead close ourselves off. So instead of being, idk, a bubbling cauldron of human potential like a New York City or a Cambridge Massachusetts, they want us to become more like Appalachia. Closed off, greying, clinging to dying industries, old modes of life, lacking in dynamism in a competitive world, and with a bad reputation everywhere else.
It's not really in my interests, that one!
Hopefully more liberals learn to talk like me instead of only the bleeding heart thing, that would also be in our interest.
I hate living in a diverse place. It often makes me feel like an alien living in my own land. And I don’t see it lasting (eg at a certain point ethnic strife often occurs in multicultural places especially when one race is blamed for societal ills)
Sorry it makes you feel that way.
I imagine there must have been people who felt the same in Rome at the height of its power. There were people from all over the empire living in the city. To me that’s just what comes from being the dominant country in the world and particularly one which formed by shouting “come migrate here, it’s great!” to the rest of the world.
Ethnic strife might happen but it’s not really new either. My grandpa grew up in an Italian neighborhood in Chicago, and as kids they would fight with the other kids from the Irish neighborhood and the Polish neighborhood. He hated Polacks as he would call them. Funny enough, he then married a half Polack girl and then his daughter married a full Polish dude and they now have the most Polish surname in existence. Now he just says the Polack thing as a joke, but he gets along really well with my Polish as fuck uncle.
This was all quite recent. But in time these identities just blended into the background of America and stopped mattering. Now you just see “Chinese” and “Mexican” and “Italian” and “Korean” people, and meanwhile they’re just undeniably culturally American because they’ve been here for generations. They’ll say stuff like “I’m Italian!” or “I’m Mexican!” while actual Europeans or Mexicans roll their eyes and laugh to themselves saying, bro, no you’re not. They’re right, they just became Americans. Same BS as the rest of us.
I live in a community that is probably 50% Indian, 30% East Asian, and balance white. The Indians celebrate Indian holidays but don’t really celebrate American ones (eg July 4th). They are nice to others but really only associate with other Indians. It severely limits the ability to form a cohesive community.
So I’m not sure you are right.
I feel like their kids will be just as American as for example 20th century Chinese immigrants offspring became.
I used to have 2 Nepali roommates and they loved getting out and enjoying American culture, watching football, celebrating thanksgiving, etc. First gen immigrants there, grew up in Nepal but honestly pretty indistinguishable from an American to me just after a few years other than the fact that they cook (damn spicy) Nepali food.
I got to know a lot of south asians from their friend group. I think they do often stick together when they're first generation but its really only being somewhat hesitant and nervous in a new place IMO. I never noticed any extreme loyalty to their own traditions and norms that would make me think these things wont just easily slip away like they did for all the previous immigrant groups.
For the most part they seemed to just enjoy the US and even before coming here I think have already been pretty Americanized in ways that surprise me, like knowing more pop cultural American stuff than even I do at times.
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Just to raise the obvious point, the UK's descent into decline pretty well matches our increase in immigration. Tony Blair's Labour and then the Conservatives made exactly the same argument as you and the effect has been catastrophic.
Now, you might be saying that you can just take the top percentile, but you don't know what will happen when all those millions and millions of foreigners you're welcoming decide they prefer the company of their countrymen and co-religionists to that of Americans, and vote accordingly. Do you think that a 40% muslim country is going to respect your liberal views?
I don't think the US would be in a position to have that many muslims, the world is a big place and most of the people in it aren't muslim.
I do dislike abrahamic religions that try to dominate politics so I see the rationale for being concerned about becoming eventually dominated by followers of one. However, that doesn't mean I want to close all immigration. Immigration policies can be tailored to who you do want to let in. It's not all or nothing.
And I think Europe has different problems regarding immigration than the US does, being right next to the middle east and in former colonial relationships with other muslim countries.
From my perspective, the mistake you're making is thinking that there is a continuous 'you' that makes decisions. Immigration is like steroids or heroin, it changes the decision-maker in ways that make their future decisions unforeseeable. It's also a ratchet, because once immigrants get citizenship and start having children you can't reverse the invitation.
In the UK we passed through about 70 years of post-war immigration policy, and the reasons given for doing it changed as they became obviously untenable:
You can disregard all of this as scaremongering, or say that it will be different in America. It might! But it's like taking hard drugs - even if you think the risks are overblown, why would you mess with that stuff when you know how many people have wrecked their lives?
I can see the point in that changing the composition of a democracy will change change the composition of the decision making apparatus.
But there is one more difference I can say there is between the US and Europe. We are literally just definitionally immigrants. The country has always been a place that people immigrate to because it offers opportunities and advantages. I’d have to be convinced that there is some compelling reason that right now is the unique moment in time where it’s correct to stand up and yell stop.
And I don’t really see much unique about right now. People on this forum I suspect would be quick to jump out and say, but now they’re not Europeans that’s the problem! But that’s something that’s unique to now, we’ve had non-European immigration going on for many decades and they’ve integrated just fine. We have chinatowns and neighborhoods where you can get authentic tacos and not much that I see that’s genuinely bad to show for it.
Was there some severe problem that immigration caused in the past in the US? I don’t really think so and so I’m not one of the jump around and yell stop people.
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They're working on fixing that.
Good luck! Again the US isn't Europe, our immigration problems tend to be pretty different. Most immigration here seems to be from Latam and India. If the question instead was like, what if your country was 40% latino? I mean... I don't really care. I'm from the southwest that's already the case, lol. One of my favorite parts of the US is walking around Miami and you have an Argentinian bakery next to a pupusa joint next to a Colombian restaurant and a Jamaican place, and when you walk into a store they greet you with a buenos dias.
These guys will likely have my back against this supposed muslim takeover anyway!
what is more probable to happen is that the Latin kings will close off their neighborhoods (like they did during the summer of love) when the islamists begin to act up and you will be one of the first to appear in the local newspaper.
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Man, I want to be on your side (or at least against the ones against you), but this is such a lazy dodge.
I think your interlocutor is trying to get you to envision a world where the fires of the Atheism Wars are needed once more.
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Yes. This infamous discussion between Bernie and Ezra Klein gives away the game. Not everyone is a Kleinian, but you would be a fool to believe that people like that are driven by purely pragmatic calculus about the benefits to Americans.
It also doesn't help that one side maintains a final card they can play: false consciousness.
Feminists do this all of the time: feminism is good for you too and, where you disagree, it's because you simply haven't had enough feminism.
I simply don't believe some of these claims. I've heard a few economists blithely write off the downsides of immigration as "an allocation problem", as if that makes it a matter of a couple of dials for some bureaucrat to fiddle with. Let's grant that immigration has been great for Canada. That doesn't change that the fundamentally political Gordian knot of increasing housing supply still exists so everyone feels squeezed. It's not going to be dissolved by an efficient market because it's a matter of geography,regulations and the interests of some groups over others. Hanania is a libertarian so he does get this, until he doesn't want to.
And, even if I did believe them, I know no nationalist has ever won the debate by saying "I'll take the tradeoff". They just get written off as ignorant.
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