In order to have a high trust society, we need social agreement on cultural norms, good manners, good & bad & neutral behavior. Also laws which apply to all. A similar “culture” for the people who deal with each other. The laws, enforced by coercion & violence, are the nationalist part. The cultural norms, if any, are the ethno part. The “melting pot” America was no single ethnicity, so is not and has never been an ethno state.
But it has been a Christian-capitalist society, with high trust due to Christian morals widely accepted, even by non-Christians, plus economic progress thanks to market capitalism. The “West” is a phrase many intellectuals like to avoid being honest about based on the Christian ideals and virtues, and they also often (usually?) denigrate capitalism.
The anti- Christian folk similarly hate the Jews, while many Christians do as well for different reasons.
Hating the Other often feels good, including hating Trump & his supporters.
The anti-capitalist folk often hate that lower IQ successful capitalists have far more money and status than they do. And while long term economics might be positive sum, status is always zero-sum. Such intellectuals seldom have much humility, which is especially the willingness to accept being wrong.
It speaks well of Arnold that previous bias against ethnostates is being reconsidered. I’ve been in Slovakia for 32 years, and could be a citizen, but will never be a Slovak. Most Slovaks in America become Americans within a few, 2-10, years.
The US was not an explicit ethno-state for most of its existence, because multiculturalism was central to its social contract. But that implies a willingness on the part of all subcultures living there to accept that contract. Most Muslims have never done so, and the central tenet of wokism is that people on the left, especially the BIPOCs and LGBTQs, should stop doing so. Those groups are now dedicated to destroying the US (defined as its melting-pot social contract), and as a result the right have been forced to pull together in a new social bond that excludes the left and Muslims. That is why if anything like the US continues to exist, even as a rump state, it will have to be an ethno-state.
This does not imply a notion that one race or even one social contract/ethnicity is superior to others, only that other groups get to have their own so we need one too, or we will go under -- and our social contract and its predecessors have produced the lion's share of the progress the world has ever known. I support this view.
I have more to say about all of these (and note my comment on Zohar's piece!) but as a general frame I would urge more people to think in terms of lesser evils and what makes them lesser. IMO it is a rich historical irony that Zionism is one of the world's less evil ethnonationalisms, and certainly less evil than the genocidal Palestinian nationalism of Hamas, precisely because so many of the original Zionists were Anywheres-- "rootless cosmopolitans" as Stalin would have it!-- and they brought with them the liberal democratic cosmopolitan ways of thinking that were growing in Europe in the 19th Century at the same time as various ethnonationalist movements grew.
Theodor Herzl, for one, was as assimilated a liberal cosmopolitan European as you could ever hope to find. Stefan Zweig, in _The World of Yesterday_, has a wonderful capsule portrait of him from the time when he was an editor at the Neue Freie Presse in Vienna. And IIRC his _Altneuland_ envisions a genuine multicultural and tolerant cooperation with the Arab population of Palestine. That intellectual aspiration has been sorely challenged by Israel's subsequent history, but it is not dead yet, and many of the most admirable things about Israel arise from the fact that it is not.
Second, I think there is a pretty straightforward explanation for both far-left and far-right anti-semitism in modern America: namely, they both combine the usual political axes with an intellectually corrupting obsession with the nonsense category of "whiteness".
To a far-leftist, white = oppressor and nonwhite = victim. Jews are seen as white people fraudulently claiming the prestigious status of victim (or of moral patient rather than moral agent). No amount of pointing to Mizrahis, Ethiopians, etc will dislodge them from this narrative's confirmation bias.
To a far-rightist, white = civilization and nonwhite = barbarism. Jews are seen as nonwhite people fraudulently claiming the prestigious status of civilized. Again, no amount of e.g. pointing to Jewish contributions to European culture will dislodge them.
Among the many reasons why a host of principled liberal commentators have pointed out that "whiteness" is a stupid concept and a stupid moral frame, we can now add this as one of the more urgent.
I'd like to agree with Tom Grey and RatMan29 with some elaboration. Is the USA an ethnonationalist state? At first blush the idea is impossible, given the diversity of even European ethnicities among our ancestors, not to mention all the non-European ones. But I think that a nuanced reading supports that characterization at least up to the 1960's. The reason is that in that era Americans of all backgrounds expected to assimilate into the broad national culture, contributing the occasional pizza, won ton, knish, or tortilla, but generally following the model of the founding English. My father, child of immigrants, was typical of that era, determined to be a non-hyphenated American. Need I mention that this pseudo-ethnonationalist state did pretty well over its history?
The plain truth is that people like living in countries where a significant majority share history, culture, language, and religion, and these are reflected in the national life: what language the laws are in and are taught in school, what prayers national leaders offer in public events, what holidays are celebrated, what social mores are accepted, and what heroes revered. The Germans like holding each other to high standards of fastidiousness and others are happy to be not so German. The Saudis are happy to be pious and their Lebanese co-religionists to be not so much. It is multiculturalism that's the historical anomaly, and it's not working out well in my view. Are Swedes better off for all the MENA's they've absorbed? The French? How did Yugoslavia work out? The USSR?
It seems to me that, contra Freddie DeBoer, the nation state (a polite word for ethnonationalism) is compatible with liberal democracy. A nation state can privilege the ethnicity it represents when choices have to be made (e.g. national holidays), all while treating its minorities tolerantly - and limiting their numbers out of respect for the core population. This was the essence of American immigration law until the 1960's and is, I believe, still the basis of Swiss immigration law. If I understand correctly, it's easy to take up residence in Switzerland but to become a citizen you have to convince the authorities that you've become truly Swiss. This isn't racism, just respect for the existence of distinct peoples. In this concept of the nation state, Israel belongs. They have every right to restrict the franchise - or even the right to live within their borders - to those they deem their people, without apology.
Will global elites convert to this way of thinking? As a baby boomer I say: Not in my lifetime. The ideas and moral sensibilities underlying muliculturalism have too much momentum. Dr. Kling is open to a new way of looking at things, and even to new allies perhaps. As he writes:
"But I have got to believe that some of the Anywhere elites who have championed multiculturalism will rethink their views. I imagine that seeing London streets filled with an estimated 100,000 anti-Israel demonstrators will add to the discomfort about immigration. In fact, Germany’s interior minister reportedly suggested that Hamas supporters be deported to Iran. I know that I personally am now more willing to listen to the ethnonationalists than I was a few weeks ago."
But while those elites may indeed become discomforted, will they reverse a lifetime of drinking the Kool-Aid? Not likely. Welcome to the team, Dr. Kling. But prepare to be disappointed.
I started to write "it seems to me" - that's how I always start. I think there is no reason to qualify this statement: Jews in the US are most associated with the left, and have been for decades the most powerful elements of the left, in the US. This - not them, the skew - imbalances our political life because it makes certain things difficult to discuss. Maybe that shouldn't be. Maybe if conservatives or "nat-cons" or the "alt-right" or whatever the latest feeble enterprise is called, were better at expressing themselves, they would make good arguments free of offense, and win the day occasionally.
Certainly I think the right could make much better arguments. IMO they only screw it up, almost invariably. But then I am a conservationist so they have nothing to offer me, so great is the hostility on the right to nature and the environment. So much for deference to tradition. Doubly, obviously, so much for deference to place.
The difficulty is not Israel and ethnonationalism but its antithesis, the cosmopolitan or universalizing impulse that one associates with the left - and thus, inevitably, with prominent Jews in the media and academia and politics in America. It is a wholly understandable impulse. It seems in a way churlish to oppose it. I know it's a narrow slice of the Jewish diaspora but a heartbreaking read is a history of the Jews in the German states in the 18th and 19th centuries - "The Pity of It All" by Amos Elon - about the desire to venture beyond external (and also tribal) limits, to be more German than the Germans, or more precisely to embody the idealistic (and ultimately misused) notion of German-ness that gained strength in the Romantic period - a little-known story to me lending if that is even possible even more pathos to the events of the 20th century. But also, less penetrable to understanding - the universalizing aim of international communism, and radicalism and the avant-garde generally.
I don't care about hypocrisy when it comes to Israel. Charges of hypocrisy are generally a misdirection, and the circumstances of Israel's origin are so singular that only a thoroughgoing ideologue or a lost soul thinks the tired oppressor/power script remains utterly unchanged (or rather - supercharged! - when it comes to Israel - there's your anti-Semitism). But "it seems to me" we have a perfect storm - where non-Jews may support Israel and many mostly "right-leaning" happily do - but are not freely permitted to criticize (or comfortable criticizing, because of the totalizing effect of the Holocaust on our thoughts) the liberal cosmopolitan, globalizing project that has been in no small part a Jewish project - because to do so sails too close to the wind of anti-Semitism.
Even writing this comment is giving me some trouble.
Meanwhile (which should be to no one's surprise - where have you all been?) certain groups among the left have a free pass to demonize whomever they like - because the intellectual wing of the left gave them that pass despite its being obvious to conservatives that this was always going to backfire.
(Again, the sensitivity of the subject compels me to add I am not trying to describe anything in Manichean terms; there are a dozen "most interesting peoples in the world", and to understand and be able to openly discuss the cultural roots of Jewish radicalism in the manner of Christopher Hill's "The World Turned Upside Down" (which I'd be lying if I said I got through that book) - after centuries of conservatism - is important, I think - much like these books about the cultural roots of economic success - "WEIRD", or those Gregory Clark books about the English. For instance, what is feminism - 2nd wave? I get those terms mixed up - but the experience of a few high-IQ, possibly neurotic women who chafed at their role in life and created a movement that is supposed to apply to women of the *whole world*?)
And finally as to the Somewheres, the provincial Somewheres - I will relate an anecdote about my hometown. After a visit a couple years ago, and a rare trip out in the car to find a distant shop - I seldom leave my parents' house when there - I described to my husband "how like a third-world bazaar" vast areas of the city are. I have not been to such a bazaar, or been much of anywhere - I am a true Somewhere - but I thought it sounded apt. He sharply disagreed: a country - 1st, 3rd, whatever - is a place first and foremost. A third world bazaar is often considered charming, is rooted in that place. It is not a jumble of every ethnicity in the world, often disaffected or told by college professors to be disaffected with where they've landed, selling mostly the junkiest of consumer goods, or drugs, or dreary looking ethnic eateries that only Tyler Cowen could really love, because their food trumps their effect on the civic atmosphere, and on the rule of law with respect to the vanloads of illegal immigrants who are dropped off in the morning to cook it - on mile after mile of treeless strip centers, designed to be as hideous as possible, amid giant badly-aging apartment complexes that have ghetto-ized into different ethnicities - yes, some are better than others, might even strike you as sweet how they've attempted to recreate the community they left behind, outsiders not welcome - which ethnicities have uncomfortable and occasionally fatal interactions in the public sphere, which is to say the parking lots and gas stations of the commercial strip. And it is all commercial strip. It is multi, indeed. It is not cultural.
None of this is American because none of it is *becoming American*. America is becoming this. None of it is nice - no one commenting here would ever live in it. You will live in a bubble. You will laugh at yourself and say, I live in a bubble. You know you are supposed to be ashamed of this. But the bubble is more to be sought than the foregoing. The bubble should be the goal, should never have stopped being the goal.
In a fight somewheres have no problem picking a side. On the other hand anywheres do. I think that anywheres have this problem because of, inter alia,their beliefs in multiculturalism. After listening to many arguments, I hear this. "Hamas's acts are horific and abhorent. I share many beliefs with Hamas and the people of Gaza. In particular, I and they sense their oppression. So given our shared beliefs something terrible must have happened to them to cause such repugnant acts. Tom Grey points out the anywheres in the world don't have these shared beliefs with Hamas and the Arabs and Persians in the middle east. In turn the anywheres' reasoning is faulty.
How one convinces the anywheres to change their understanding of "shared" beliefs is a problem for which I have no answer. I did see a line the other day and apologize for not giving credit for it heare. "The biggest barrier to seeing clearly is your belief that you already do."
I don't think the break-up of Austria-Hungary had anything to do with the elites of the day preference for ethnonationalism. It was just a convenient way to ensure the viability of Poland (surround Germany) and create another "little Poland" to the east of Germany in the form of Czechoslovakia (a relatively diverse country by the way). They even created Yugoslavia to make sure both Austria and Hungary were surrounded, just in case Austrians or Hungarians tried to recover some of their old territory.
I see the grow of ethnonationalism as a much slower and meandering process.
The US decided around the time when Europe was losing its grip on the colonies that encouraging integration and multiracial multiculturalism would stop the international and domestic revolts, contain communism, and continue to grow the global economy. However, now that this has been achieved in the west, it's proving tough to keep everyone happy without also forsaking core principles. Many core principles were already abandoned to make it possible in the early stages, but nothing will be left if we keep going down this road. The reason why no one has done this before might be because it was, in fact, a high-risk strategy that becomes more unstable as time goes on.
“I imagine that seeing London streets filled with an estimated 100,000 anti-Israel demonstrators will add to the discomfort about immigration.”
About discomfort with how poorly Europe has been at assimilating (yes I’m being provocative) immigrants.
“I see [ethno-nationalism] as an argument that pits mainstream elites on one side against populists and National Conservatives on the other. Libertarians probably would side with the elites.”
Leaving almost everyone else to pass the popcorn. 😊
Anywhere/Somewhere is fine for clarifying attitudes but terrible for actual politics. People with "anywhere" sympathies might still feel that their somewhere was doing a pretty good job at actualizing "anywhere" values. And people with "somewhere" sympathies coud still be appalled by Trump and think Brexit would be an economic disaster.
I don't know what is meant in practice by the Romanian court system being "inquisitorial" but I do like the sound of it, much more than the status quo here where a lawyer is successful the more he hides the truth, and common sense has no representation in the court room, because there's nobody to bill for that.
And there's just something grating about the figure of the judge, above it all, above any interest in establishing facts.
In order to have a high trust society, we need social agreement on cultural norms, good manners, good & bad & neutral behavior. Also laws which apply to all. A similar “culture” for the people who deal with each other. The laws, enforced by coercion & violence, are the nationalist part. The cultural norms, if any, are the ethno part. The “melting pot” America was no single ethnicity, so is not and has never been an ethno state.
But it has been a Christian-capitalist society, with high trust due to Christian morals widely accepted, even by non-Christians, plus economic progress thanks to market capitalism. The “West” is a phrase many intellectuals like to avoid being honest about based on the Christian ideals and virtues, and they also often (usually?) denigrate capitalism.
The anti- Christian folk similarly hate the Jews, while many Christians do as well for different reasons.
Hating the Other often feels good, including hating Trump & his supporters.
The anti-capitalist folk often hate that lower IQ successful capitalists have far more money and status than they do. And while long term economics might be positive sum, status is always zero-sum. Such intellectuals seldom have much humility, which is especially the willingness to accept being wrong.
It speaks well of Arnold that previous bias against ethnostates is being reconsidered. I’ve been in Slovakia for 32 years, and could be a citizen, but will never be a Slovak. Most Slovaks in America become Americans within a few, 2-10, years.
The US was not an explicit ethno-state for most of its existence, because multiculturalism was central to its social contract. But that implies a willingness on the part of all subcultures living there to accept that contract. Most Muslims have never done so, and the central tenet of wokism is that people on the left, especially the BIPOCs and LGBTQs, should stop doing so. Those groups are now dedicated to destroying the US (defined as its melting-pot social contract), and as a result the right have been forced to pull together in a new social bond that excludes the left and Muslims. That is why if anything like the US continues to exist, even as a rump state, it will have to be an ethno-state.
This does not imply a notion that one race or even one social contract/ethnicity is superior to others, only that other groups get to have their own so we need one too, or we will go under -- and our social contract and its predecessors have produced the lion's share of the progress the world has ever known. I support this view.
Well, you've done it: you've gotten me to upgrade to a paid subscription. :)
First of all, I would urge everyone interested in this topic not only to read Freddie deBoer's piece today:
https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/can-the-liberal-democratic-project
but also to read the Noah Millman "allyship" piece he links to:
https://gideons.substack.com/p/the-end-of-allyship
and to read Zohar Atkins' spiritual apologia for Zionism:
https://whatiscalledthinking.substack.com/p/the-metaphysics-of-antisemitism
I have more to say about all of these (and note my comment on Zohar's piece!) but as a general frame I would urge more people to think in terms of lesser evils and what makes them lesser. IMO it is a rich historical irony that Zionism is one of the world's less evil ethnonationalisms, and certainly less evil than the genocidal Palestinian nationalism of Hamas, precisely because so many of the original Zionists were Anywheres-- "rootless cosmopolitans" as Stalin would have it!-- and they brought with them the liberal democratic cosmopolitan ways of thinking that were growing in Europe in the 19th Century at the same time as various ethnonationalist movements grew.
Theodor Herzl, for one, was as assimilated a liberal cosmopolitan European as you could ever hope to find. Stefan Zweig, in _The World of Yesterday_, has a wonderful capsule portrait of him from the time when he was an editor at the Neue Freie Presse in Vienna. And IIRC his _Altneuland_ envisions a genuine multicultural and tolerant cooperation with the Arab population of Palestine. That intellectual aspiration has been sorely challenged by Israel's subsequent history, but it is not dead yet, and many of the most admirable things about Israel arise from the fact that it is not.
Second, I think there is a pretty straightforward explanation for both far-left and far-right anti-semitism in modern America: namely, they both combine the usual political axes with an intellectually corrupting obsession with the nonsense category of "whiteness".
To a far-leftist, white = oppressor and nonwhite = victim. Jews are seen as white people fraudulently claiming the prestigious status of victim (or of moral patient rather than moral agent). No amount of pointing to Mizrahis, Ethiopians, etc will dislodge them from this narrative's confirmation bias.
To a far-rightist, white = civilization and nonwhite = barbarism. Jews are seen as nonwhite people fraudulently claiming the prestigious status of civilized. Again, no amount of e.g. pointing to Jewish contributions to European culture will dislodge them.
Among the many reasons why a host of principled liberal commentators have pointed out that "whiteness" is a stupid concept and a stupid moral frame, we can now add this as one of the more urgent.
I'd like to agree with Tom Grey and RatMan29 with some elaboration. Is the USA an ethnonationalist state? At first blush the idea is impossible, given the diversity of even European ethnicities among our ancestors, not to mention all the non-European ones. But I think that a nuanced reading supports that characterization at least up to the 1960's. The reason is that in that era Americans of all backgrounds expected to assimilate into the broad national culture, contributing the occasional pizza, won ton, knish, or tortilla, but generally following the model of the founding English. My father, child of immigrants, was typical of that era, determined to be a non-hyphenated American. Need I mention that this pseudo-ethnonationalist state did pretty well over its history?
The plain truth is that people like living in countries where a significant majority share history, culture, language, and religion, and these are reflected in the national life: what language the laws are in and are taught in school, what prayers national leaders offer in public events, what holidays are celebrated, what social mores are accepted, and what heroes revered. The Germans like holding each other to high standards of fastidiousness and others are happy to be not so German. The Saudis are happy to be pious and their Lebanese co-religionists to be not so much. It is multiculturalism that's the historical anomaly, and it's not working out well in my view. Are Swedes better off for all the MENA's they've absorbed? The French? How did Yugoslavia work out? The USSR?
It seems to me that, contra Freddie DeBoer, the nation state (a polite word for ethnonationalism) is compatible with liberal democracy. A nation state can privilege the ethnicity it represents when choices have to be made (e.g. national holidays), all while treating its minorities tolerantly - and limiting their numbers out of respect for the core population. This was the essence of American immigration law until the 1960's and is, I believe, still the basis of Swiss immigration law. If I understand correctly, it's easy to take up residence in Switzerland but to become a citizen you have to convince the authorities that you've become truly Swiss. This isn't racism, just respect for the existence of distinct peoples. In this concept of the nation state, Israel belongs. They have every right to restrict the franchise - or even the right to live within their borders - to those they deem their people, without apology.
Will global elites convert to this way of thinking? As a baby boomer I say: Not in my lifetime. The ideas and moral sensibilities underlying muliculturalism have too much momentum. Dr. Kling is open to a new way of looking at things, and even to new allies perhaps. As he writes:
"But I have got to believe that some of the Anywhere elites who have championed multiculturalism will rethink their views. I imagine that seeing London streets filled with an estimated 100,000 anti-Israel demonstrators will add to the discomfort about immigration. In fact, Germany’s interior minister reportedly suggested that Hamas supporters be deported to Iran. I know that I personally am now more willing to listen to the ethnonationalists than I was a few weeks ago."
But while those elites may indeed become discomforted, will they reverse a lifetime of drinking the Kool-Aid? Not likely. Welcome to the team, Dr. Kling. But prepare to be disappointed.
Ken
I started to write "it seems to me" - that's how I always start. I think there is no reason to qualify this statement: Jews in the US are most associated with the left, and have been for decades the most powerful elements of the left, in the US. This - not them, the skew - imbalances our political life because it makes certain things difficult to discuss. Maybe that shouldn't be. Maybe if conservatives or "nat-cons" or the "alt-right" or whatever the latest feeble enterprise is called, were better at expressing themselves, they would make good arguments free of offense, and win the day occasionally.
Certainly I think the right could make much better arguments. IMO they only screw it up, almost invariably. But then I am a conservationist so they have nothing to offer me, so great is the hostility on the right to nature and the environment. So much for deference to tradition. Doubly, obviously, so much for deference to place.
The difficulty is not Israel and ethnonationalism but its antithesis, the cosmopolitan or universalizing impulse that one associates with the left - and thus, inevitably, with prominent Jews in the media and academia and politics in America. It is a wholly understandable impulse. It seems in a way churlish to oppose it. I know it's a narrow slice of the Jewish diaspora but a heartbreaking read is a history of the Jews in the German states in the 18th and 19th centuries - "The Pity of It All" by Amos Elon - about the desire to venture beyond external (and also tribal) limits, to be more German than the Germans, or more precisely to embody the idealistic (and ultimately misused) notion of German-ness that gained strength in the Romantic period - a little-known story to me lending if that is even possible even more pathos to the events of the 20th century. But also, less penetrable to understanding - the universalizing aim of international communism, and radicalism and the avant-garde generally.
I don't care about hypocrisy when it comes to Israel. Charges of hypocrisy are generally a misdirection, and the circumstances of Israel's origin are so singular that only a thoroughgoing ideologue or a lost soul thinks the tired oppressor/power script remains utterly unchanged (or rather - supercharged! - when it comes to Israel - there's your anti-Semitism). But "it seems to me" we have a perfect storm - where non-Jews may support Israel and many mostly "right-leaning" happily do - but are not freely permitted to criticize (or comfortable criticizing, because of the totalizing effect of the Holocaust on our thoughts) the liberal cosmopolitan, globalizing project that has been in no small part a Jewish project - because to do so sails too close to the wind of anti-Semitism.
Even writing this comment is giving me some trouble.
Meanwhile (which should be to no one's surprise - where have you all been?) certain groups among the left have a free pass to demonize whomever they like - because the intellectual wing of the left gave them that pass despite its being obvious to conservatives that this was always going to backfire.
(Again, the sensitivity of the subject compels me to add I am not trying to describe anything in Manichean terms; there are a dozen "most interesting peoples in the world", and to understand and be able to openly discuss the cultural roots of Jewish radicalism in the manner of Christopher Hill's "The World Turned Upside Down" (which I'd be lying if I said I got through that book) - after centuries of conservatism - is important, I think - much like these books about the cultural roots of economic success - "WEIRD", or those Gregory Clark books about the English. For instance, what is feminism - 2nd wave? I get those terms mixed up - but the experience of a few high-IQ, possibly neurotic women who chafed at their role in life and created a movement that is supposed to apply to women of the *whole world*?)
And finally as to the Somewheres, the provincial Somewheres - I will relate an anecdote about my hometown. After a visit a couple years ago, and a rare trip out in the car to find a distant shop - I seldom leave my parents' house when there - I described to my husband "how like a third-world bazaar" vast areas of the city are. I have not been to such a bazaar, or been much of anywhere - I am a true Somewhere - but I thought it sounded apt. He sharply disagreed: a country - 1st, 3rd, whatever - is a place first and foremost. A third world bazaar is often considered charming, is rooted in that place. It is not a jumble of every ethnicity in the world, often disaffected or told by college professors to be disaffected with where they've landed, selling mostly the junkiest of consumer goods, or drugs, or dreary looking ethnic eateries that only Tyler Cowen could really love, because their food trumps their effect on the civic atmosphere, and on the rule of law with respect to the vanloads of illegal immigrants who are dropped off in the morning to cook it - on mile after mile of treeless strip centers, designed to be as hideous as possible, amid giant badly-aging apartment complexes that have ghetto-ized into different ethnicities - yes, some are better than others, might even strike you as sweet how they've attempted to recreate the community they left behind, outsiders not welcome - which ethnicities have uncomfortable and occasionally fatal interactions in the public sphere, which is to say the parking lots and gas stations of the commercial strip. And it is all commercial strip. It is multi, indeed. It is not cultural.
None of this is American because none of it is *becoming American*. America is becoming this. None of it is nice - no one commenting here would ever live in it. You will live in a bubble. You will laugh at yourself and say, I live in a bubble. You know you are supposed to be ashamed of this. But the bubble is more to be sought than the foregoing. The bubble should be the goal, should never have stopped being the goal.
In a fight somewheres have no problem picking a side. On the other hand anywheres do. I think that anywheres have this problem because of, inter alia,their beliefs in multiculturalism. After listening to many arguments, I hear this. "Hamas's acts are horific and abhorent. I share many beliefs with Hamas and the people of Gaza. In particular, I and they sense their oppression. So given our shared beliefs something terrible must have happened to them to cause such repugnant acts. Tom Grey points out the anywheres in the world don't have these shared beliefs with Hamas and the Arabs and Persians in the middle east. In turn the anywheres' reasoning is faulty.
How one convinces the anywheres to change their understanding of "shared" beliefs is a problem for which I have no answer. I did see a line the other day and apologize for not giving credit for it heare. "The biggest barrier to seeing clearly is your belief that you already do."
I don't think the break-up of Austria-Hungary had anything to do with the elites of the day preference for ethnonationalism. It was just a convenient way to ensure the viability of Poland (surround Germany) and create another "little Poland" to the east of Germany in the form of Czechoslovakia (a relatively diverse country by the way). They even created Yugoslavia to make sure both Austria and Hungary were surrounded, just in case Austrians or Hungarians tried to recover some of their old territory.
I see the grow of ethnonationalism as a much slower and meandering process.
You and Freddie both today!
The US decided around the time when Europe was losing its grip on the colonies that encouraging integration and multiracial multiculturalism would stop the international and domestic revolts, contain communism, and continue to grow the global economy. However, now that this has been achieved in the west, it's proving tough to keep everyone happy without also forsaking core principles. Many core principles were already abandoned to make it possible in the early stages, but nothing will be left if we keep going down this road. The reason why no one has done this before might be because it was, in fact, a high-risk strategy that becomes more unstable as time goes on.
“I imagine that seeing London streets filled with an estimated 100,000 anti-Israel demonstrators will add to the discomfort about immigration.”
About discomfort with how poorly Europe has been at assimilating (yes I’m being provocative) immigrants.
“I see [ethno-nationalism] as an argument that pits mainstream elites on one side against populists and National Conservatives on the other. Libertarians probably would side with the elites.”
Leaving almost everyone else to pass the popcorn. 😊
Anywhere/Somewhere is fine for clarifying attitudes but terrible for actual politics. People with "anywhere" sympathies might still feel that their somewhere was doing a pretty good job at actualizing "anywhere" values. And people with "somewhere" sympathies coud still be appalled by Trump and think Brexit would be an economic disaster.
I don't know what is meant in practice by the Romanian court system being "inquisitorial" but I do like the sound of it, much more than the status quo here where a lawyer is successful the more he hides the truth, and common sense has no representation in the court room, because there's nobody to bill for that.
And there's just something grating about the figure of the judge, above it all, above any interest in establishing facts.