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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 1, 2023

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The problem is that

  1. people in different tribes do have legitimate object-level policy and deep value differences, which suffices for adversarial mechanics and strategic deceit even between non-extreme subgroups;

  2. the doctrine of «we should unite against our common enemy, moral aliens» is inherently dehumanizing, radicalizing and begs to be applied to singling out the outgroup's more effective members, so that your team wins «fairly» and «not extremely». And cautious or not, that's what you use it for, consistently.

the egalitarian ideal that people's fates should be mostly decided by their choices instead of their birth

Both sides need to police themselves and kick out the aliens with bad values even if these aliens might agree with them on object-level policy questions.

Reminder: the «people's» here applies to all people in the world who might fancy moving into the US; «egalitarian ideal» is getting the benefits of American citizen; «object-level policy» is limiting immigration; «aliens with bad values» are people who think that legacy citizens, as inheritors of people who have previously invested their lives into the polity, should have more control over the long-term trajectory of said polity and party to the intergenerational compact – irrespective of superfluous market-determined merit of international workforce.

It's blue-and-orange morality for some, no doubt, e.g. for some cosmopolitan coastal liberals, but it's the common-sensical morality of virtually all natural societies, especially of South Asian states, where our friend hails from, currently epitomized in Hindutva ideology but also obvious e.g. in loops foreigners jump through to be allowed to stay in Thailand. To my knowledge, he has never addressed the paradox of insisting that American nativism is so incomprehensibly evil and alien to his sensibilities.

Ahah! You are capable of replying with mostly arguments instead of mostly personal attacks, maybe there is hope for a productive response here.

Well, almost:

especially of South Asian states, where our friend hails from, currently epitomized in Hindutva ideology but also obvious e.g. in loops foreigners jump through to be allowed to stay in Thailand. To my knowledge, he has never addressed the paradox of insisting that American nativism is so incomprehensibly evil and alien to his sensibilities.

This is a pretty huge non-sequitur. Whatever other people you happen to associate me with may or may not do is completely irrelevant to this discussion. There's absolutely no paradox here any more than me saying that you talking about morality at all is a paradox because there are tribes in New Guinea that used to practice slavery and cannibalism. I'll also mention here that I'm 100% a patriotic American culturally, in the eyes of the law, and yes, even by birth if that matters so much to you, but this shouldn't really be necessary for the quoted argument to be total nonsense.

people in different tribes do have legitimate object-level policy and deep value differences, which suffices for adversarial mechanics and strategic deceit even between non-extreme subgroups;

I think there's a failure to fully understand American society that's tripping you up here. It might be educational to listen to Kevin McCarthy's acceptance speech when he was elected Speaker of the House. As far as an official, recent statement of what the mainstream right in the US believes, I think it's hard to do better than this. I find that the values he's emphasizing and glorifying align very strongly with my own even though his policy preferences might dramatically differ. As long as we're reminiscing about what happened years ago, I think even Kevin McCarthy would very much endorse my originally summary of American values.

Reminder: the «people's» here...

Similarly, this particular translation, even while being more a specialization to a non-central example than a translation, is not quite the convincing knockout argument you think. Sure, "immigrant" is a hopelessly corrupted word for the right, rather like "meritocracy" for the left that immediately brings to mind bad feelings due to associations with certain non-central examples. If you talk about specific immigrants however---let's say the properly assimilated doctor contributing to society---most Americans would be pretty happy giving them their "patrimony" or whatever. Similarly, "inheritance" is a much more toxic concept than you imagine. People are embarrassed here for getting things from inheritance instead of hard work and hide this as much as possible.

Of course a more fair translation would be "people" to American of all races, "egalitarian ideal" to the whole content-of-character instead of color-of-skin thing, "object-level policy" to something like desegregation, and "aliens with bad values" to white identitarians.