As a minor ironic side thought, a guy using the name Roman Helmet Guy arguing for exclusionary blood-and-soilish nationalism (if not directly and not in such words but dancing up to it) is bizarrely wrong-headed on symbolism given the success of the Roman empire as compared to other classical ones was its integrationism - one could unlike other classical states 'become a Roman' (and climb up post first gen) - right up to Emperor see the Libyan Severans... (and equally Rome's quite promiscuous openess to coopting bits and pieces of cultures within the Roman sphere, religious, kit, etc)
That's something of a touch back to Noah's closing - to return to our integrationist unifying ideology.
During the rise of the Roman Empire auxiliaries would risk their blood and their lives for Roman law and Roman citizenship and their children would be considered true Romans. One generation. Romans were ethno-centric snobs, but if you shared values, cultural capital and language, you could be blond or black-skinned and still be a Roman.
Yes- of course first of all I would center a take-away on Roman approach as compared to their contemporaries - e.g. the Greek Polis where integration was de jure impossible and de facto quasi impossible.
Really key to long-term Roman success was that integrationism.
The fit to modern era can't be perfect but it makes a bozo using Roman Helmet as his moniker just even dumber given the strength of Roman system over time -and it's also a somewhat vaguely relevant point for modern Democracy - meltiing potism but with a large dollop of blending (promiscuous borrowing of any cutlural aspects within empire and just making it Roman)
(of course also not understood intellectually by themselves but turning the Med basin into a huge free trade zone comparatively safe for commerce was a great win too).
What the Roman system required was proven loyalty typically in the form of a) long-term military service, or b) literal slavery followed by manumission.
And both of those paths typically required a certain level of cultural integration and reciprocity on the would-be citizen.
I'm assuming that is what Helmet guy is implicitly relying on when he says you should be loyal to all Americans.
In America today, there really isn't any equivalent. How do you distinguish between a would-be immigrant that wants to integrate and embraces a reciprocal loyalty, versus one that doesn't? What about those that just want the economic opportunity that comes with being American?
My sense is that modern America is too culturally diffuse and ill-defined to even give immigrants a good target for integration. And to extent that it is not, it is either too thin to be compelling, or we are sharply divided.
Civic nationalism requires something of substance to latch on to, and we don't have it anymore. The Right's version relies at least somewhat on a type of blood and soil nationalism that is inherently limiting, and the Left's version is so watered down that the only thing we have in common is some mealy-mouthed platitudes and the fact that we're all under the same institutions and jurisdiction.
In the YouGov graph that is pictured above of what's more important for being an American, Repubs are 5 points ahead of Dems on "Being a US citizen," while Dems are 9 points ahead of Repubs on "Supporting the US Constitution." The exact statistics may not be useful but the trend revealed throughout the graph is interesting.
Note that the US Constitution does NOT define the DUTIES of citizenship (other than paying taxes, the right to vote, and do not commit treason).
Yet if we were to ask the polled Repubs, "What are the duties of the US citizen?" that YouGov graph suggests their response by every line where red overtakes blue: allegiance, patriotism, thinking the country is the best all the time, natural birth, cultural issues, etc.
If you want "liberal nationalism" in the U.S., if you want "integrationism," if you want to reduce frictions between Right and Left, you must address the increased salience of the Right's complaint in insisting upon attributes of citizenship which are NOT included in the Constitution.
There is a lot of social science research showing that the Right's resurgence (and its "horse-shoeing" with parts of the Left into resurgent populism) is at least partly due to an increased feeling of dispossession and being "left behind" by the world. And their natural response is to insist upon boundaries, figurative and literal boundaries: borders, religious identity, etc. So for example we hear the Right say that society is being cheated by new immigrants, and you can't tell if they are becoming good American citizens, etc. etc.
This is not to let the Left off the hook! The Left has a different problem, one that is barely noticed. It mostly believes that we don't need much guidance for the future, because individualism, science, and the rule of law will automatically lead us to the best outcomes. We could call this the promise of the "automaticity of modernism."
The Centrists add the market system to the list that makes the "automaticity of modernism." They assert that the market automatically leads to the best outcomes, if we add the "bourgeois virtues" and we can depend upon Hayek's assertion that the market transmits all relevant knowledge. (It does not.)
The Left does not promote nor really understand the market system. Increasing inequality and environmental risks are its big issues. It doesn't want pure socialism anymore, due to the historical evidence of police states and the lack of individual freedom. But of course it is evident to the Left, as it is to the resurgent Right, that some sort of social reckoning is due.
I propose to address these root problems by this scientific artwork. It teaches the market system better than anyone. It also shows that there is a separate general concept of nonmarket organization with its own efficiencies, knowledge functions, and freedoms. This must stand alongside the market, because we need BOTH.
This uses an animated diagram because that packs a lot more information, making a quicker way to first see the whole concept. It is preceded by a short video that explains the diagram symbols:
This is one of those posts that really states the obvious for anyone not in the constantly online activist shrieking wars. My wife is an immigrant, her whole family are immigrants, all of my friends are immigrants and even though they are all quite lefty coded progressives if I say something like “you know the great thing about America is that anyone can come here and bring their culture and their talents to the country and become a part of the whole community” they think it’s the most uncontroversial thing in the world. This is an ideology that I think is so deeply embedded in our culture that it seems odd to have to defend it. It’s certainly a perspective that I grew up with in a conservative Christian church going household. It’s always been the bedrock of my perspective on American culture and one of the things I am most proud about our civilization.
This was the biggest appeal to Obama 2008 for me, he talked in the tradition of liberal nationalism that people like me where (and still am) hungry to hear.
How quickly are you replacing components of the ship, and are they integrating into the main structure? That is what determines if the ship is a well-functioning coherent whole, or just a jerry-rigged mess that is barely staying afloat.
Modern America seems to be drifting closer to the latter. And it is worth contrasting that with what FDR had to work with.
By the time WW2 rolled around, America had ~15 years of effectively no immigration. The 1924 Immigration Act closed the doors and gave the USA about a generation to integrate the descendants of the prior waves into a cohesive whole. FDR's civic nationalism success relied on this as a foundation and then built upon it.
Modern America probably warrants strong border control, limiting abuse of the asylum and refugee systems, and a reduction of legal immigration levels and/or a tuning for high net positive immigrants with some meaningful selection for integratability — at least for a generation or so. Combine that with a collective push towards civic nationalism.
Belisarius, it's true that FDR had a better hand to play in this regard -- it included the succession of potentially unifying emergencies of the Depression and world war -- but that doesn't mean the way we play the hand we've been dealt requires us to wait and wait, hoping new draws will let us emulate FDR's winning hand. We can't afford to wait a generation. Without substantial immigration US population will begin to decrease after 2030 and a couple of decades on we will have no way to repair what will be a dysfunctional demographic profile and trajectory. (And there's absolutely no guarantee that closing our doors in 2026 will have the same results as closing our doors in 1924.)
The comment Nazem wrote below, which you indicate you appreciate, seems to me to present the most promising approach. National stories are politically and culturally powerful if they get traction and gain momentum. The stories that have mobilized political activism most recently are Christian Nationalist and Project 1619-style progressive products. The former is exclusionary and the latter accusatory, and neither can form the basis of broad-based liberal/civic nationalism, regardless of any points of validity either might have.
FDR didn't make up his themes: he relied on his talented "brain trust" to supply him with ideas, implementation strategies, and speeches that his own rhetorical talents could enhance -- he didn't have them in place in 1932: they grew through the emergencies his administrations faced. Given the situation we're in the optimal way to make a bad hand look like a new deal is to have generally popularist (in the Shor/Yglesias sense) activists devise a story or set of stories more electorally powerful than Christian Nationalism and CRT-based stories and recruit candidates willing to and capable of conveying the themes of the story in electorally and legislatively effective ways. It would be great if I could write that this could come via either major political party, but the GOP is now effectively reduced to the MAGOP, so it will either need to come via the Democratic Party (by 2028) or through a long-shot new party. (If the goal were 2032 or 2036 the latter might seem realistic, but I think we don't have time for that.)
Yes, there are alternatives to trying to replicate the path that FDR and pre-WW2 America took.
If there is a compelling new national story that could weave together and reinforce the threads of our tattered social fabric, I will support it.
But I am not very optimistic. There doesn't seem to be a strong enough core to reinforce anymore.
And, if that core still exists and some new national story ever started to gain traction, it would have to survive the inevitable attacks from both left- and right-wing activists trying to undermine a viable alternative.
Maybe there is a narrow path where immigration is restricted or retooled just enough, and just long enough, to prevent further damage to the core while the new reinforcing national story starts to repair the damage?
As a note on demographics...most of the developed world is going to be in the same boat, so I don't think this is going to be as catastrophic as is often claimed. Especially in a relative comparison or competitive sense, though it will be a significant absolute headwind. Resolving that at the cost of further damage to the social fabric and social trust may not be worth it.
I'm not sure a core of shared patriotism needs to exist as much as fury-fatigue and a sense of economic threat. For one thing, I believe you overestimate the sense of national unity that the 1924 hiatus produced over the course of the following decade. FDR's liberal nationalism theme was expressed early in the New Deal alphabet-agency era, abetted by visual art and song. The ethnic enclaves of the Ellis Island era were still intact, and although second-generation assimilation had been continuously underway, the lack of fully diffused national media meant that assimilation by those who had arrived in the years prior to 1924 were far slower to assimilate. (I think the story of diminishing rates of assimilation that the Far Right tells is essentially wrong.) In any case, the positive response to FDR's unifying story was probably fueled less by diminished difference and more by shared anger at the Hoover Administration (especially after the Bonus Army fiasco) and the slide from the Crash to the Depression. I think we are seeing significant resonances in broad public anger at the present administration (including MAGA infighting) and economic anxiety on both small scale (cost of living) and large scale (exploding debt, AI impact and market volatility) levels that are likely to grow running up to 2028.
I don't think we now know what new way to tell the "American story" would be compelling, but that's a challenge, not an obstacle. Of course it will be attacked, but while extremism is as shrill as ever I believe it is building increasing centrist fatigue that may produce its own form of backlash.
I do think we need to have a clear model of immigration reform that is a balance of national need and public suspicion. What we need is some trusted champions in the James Lankford mode on both sides of the aisle with the guts to stand their ground (and gut can feed off the diminishing popularity of the current administration, assuming it continues -- everything I'm writing is aimed at 2028, not 2026). I don't agree that the absolute impact of population decline will be perceived as less because it is worldwide -- anymore that Biden's inflation was perceived as less because inflation was global -- but in any event this issue is not part of the "story": it's a longer term and more catastrophic threat that urgently requires a good-government response. Moreover, every year the US hands back to other countries several million (largely aspirational) people we diminish the US comparative advantage in the population competition that appears to be in the global future, medium- to long-term.
I think the fury fatigue and any resulting backlash will primarily be a repulsor, when what we need seems to be an attractor. Maybe, hopefully, some suitable story will emerge that will serve that role.
We still take in ~0.3% of our population each year via legal immigration alone. Maybe if we can shape that more towards high-skill, high-net-positive-impact and simultaneously strictly limit the rest, the public will accept the status quo.
Anyways, thanks again for the polite and thoughtful conversation!
> or just a jerry-rigged mess that is barely staying afloat.
Well, from where I sit (retired computer programmer living in metro Boston), despite the *immense* griping coming from all directions (knowing lots of progressives, I can assure you it's not just the reactionaries that are moaning), the United States is doing quite well. We're still on top of the world economically. Unlike most large countries, it's pretty much inconceivable for the country to split territorially. We're still at the top of advancing basically all major technologies. Crime is at a low for my adult lifetime. The country is so rich that the VCs are putting trillions of dollars into AI R&D despite that *everybody* knows that a lot of that will be lost when the inevitable bubble bursts. We have to post armed guards to keep people from flooding in! The *news* and especially social media are a horror show but the day-to-day reality is very good.
ISTM that the difficulty with immigration is that we don't want too many poor immigrants to concentrate in any one small area. The difficulty is not with them pushing down wages (which doesn't happen) but they raise social services spending (especially education and medical care for their kids) more than they pay in taxes. And the taxes for those services are predominantly local and state. In the long run, that's an investment in the next generation of workers, but in the short run it causes very visible budget/tax problems.
It doesn't help that the rules for asylum applicants require that they can't work for the first six months. In practice, it doesn't dissuade asylum seekers, it just forces them to live on charity for half a year before they can get a job. (And they don't dare get an unauthorized job because that could jeopardize their asylum case.)
This is the clearest thing I've read on the question in a long while. You found the wall the whole house leans on — that nationalism cracks the moment it has to say who counts — and you pushed.
As someone who migrated with his family young, I read this from inside the question Balaji and RHG are fighting over, not above it.
We are the cautionary tale you name in passing. Worth a longer look.
The Levant held everyone once. Sunni and Shia. Alawite, Druze, the Christians who had been there since before the Arabs came, Jews in Aleppo whose families predated half of Europe. One cloth. The Ottomans kept it whole for four centuries — not from tolerance, nothing so modern as that, but because the story on offer was large enough to seat a stranger. Damascus did not ask your sect before it sold you bread.
Then it tore.
From the inside first, years before any foreign army bothered to cross a border. It started the day an ordinary man stood at the well and wondered whether the water was theirs or ours. That was all. That was enough.
You call it Middle-Easternization, and you borrow the word for America. Fair. But it was never a thing we caught from outside. It is just what a mixed country turns into when it stops telling itself a story wide enough to cover the people it hasn't learned to love yet.
The story is the whole of it. Roosevelt understood that. We mislaid ours somewhere, and the bill is still coming in — we are not done burying.
A nation is a sentence its people agree to go on saying. Stop saying it and see what fills the quiet.
What makes it AI? The flattery? Don't tell me it's the em dashes.
I like "Damascus did not ask your sect before it sold you bread," but you're probably right that it's AI. My favorite tell is that it makes different errors in reading comprehension than a human would, written in a different tone. The comment incorrectly says that Noah refers to a fracturing process in America as "Middle-Easternization," a phrase that appears nowhere in Noah's post (also, is it different from Balkanization?), but it's in the style of What Used To Be Taught As Good Writing, But With Certain Tics Overused. It even has AI quirks like strange metaphors that don't reflect embodied experience of the world ("A nation is a sentence its people agree to go on saying").
The Ottoman system was complex and we'd strongly object to its particular forms of inequality and integrative failures today, but the general point stands.
There are two Americas, and I don’t mean North and South. There is the America that is my neighborhood, my local community, and, in general, the area associated with where we go out to dinner, see a movie, or go to the beach.
The daily machinations of national politics, anti-Trumpers, and pro-Trumpers don’t really exist in my daily activities. The only place I see this play out daily is in Noah’s column, CNN or MS Now, on the pages of the NY Times or WAPO, at The Dispatch. Not at my local ACME, or liquor store, I go to buy my Vodka for my dirty martinis and wine for my wife.
Let’s be clear where the struggle Noah is talking about goes on. It is not in much of anybody’s daily life, except if you are involved in the daily struggle between our political parties. If you are a purveyor of a particular ideology, it is how to make money, part of the grift of the political industrial complex, you live the stupid argument I was forced to read between two idiots.
One is a grifter looking for approval and money, the other is looking for meaning in life after accomplishing something that turns out to be vapid. Making a fortune is great; you never have to worry about paying bills or finding food and shelter. So he likely feels that, since he made a fortune, his thoughts are worth the world's consideration. He is looking for meaning that money cannot provide. The other is a bomb-throwing grifter, a NASCAR crash; it is the latest form of empty rhetoric that will never make the pages of any history book.
It is said that only about 10% of the public follow politics at all. That very few people like me, read two papers, watch some 24-hour news in the background, and follow three newsletters. Listen to a couple of political podcasts.
Americans do not think about the world they exist in daily as liberal nationalism, or liberal capitalist democracy, or post-liberal nationalism. This doesn’t mean that our politics doesn’t infect their minds. Of it does.
Here is the crux of the problem. We Americans know who we are, it is the political industrial complex that no interest in what Americans think except in formulating the latest populist inclination. Our politics runs on hatred, both teams run their fundraising on hatred and fear. The other side is coming for you and your family. Danger, warnings, fear, hatred, bigotry, antisemitism, racism, nationalism, socialism...You can go down the list, and it is all being used to generate funds for the parties' quest for power.
It is about gaining power, but to no end. Both parties believe that at some point, they will win this war and will have all the power in the world and turn the country's economy into whatever “ism” they desire at the moment. All this while, America is asking the two parties to work together, to compromise, to fix what is broken.
That cannot happen in American politics today. Sadly, my neighbors and I could probably come up with a list of things we think are American ideals. Charity, helping your neighbor, and individual freedom to live your life as you pursue happiness. Americans understand freedom of speech, freedom of the press, they understand that racism is wrong, and they don’t like skin color to be anything other than melanin.
Largely speaking, conservatives have rejected the idea of victimology that has pervaded the politics of the left. Everybody in America largely understands that you have to work, that work is good. They understand that you have become educated. Whether it is how plumbing works or the physics required to run a nuclear reactor. We understand that there are people in the world who want to kill Americans. But the only person on the planet who thinks Canadians are a threat to America is the lunatic living in the White House.
FDR, is a problematic person to emulate. He was a good communicator, but all he did was to throw socialist ideas at the wall while trying to feed the country during the depression. Most of us would have tried many of the ideas with our economy broken but they all were about the Government becoming the great father to its citizens.
America has a large social safety net, much like Europe. It is what the citizens have asked for. The biggest difference is that we have the freedom to make money; we had a less structured class system that infected Europe. Fewer regulations initially. Today, the left is calling for a new economy. For FDRs vision of the government directing the economy. The problem for the left is the government is largely incapable of directing the economy.
It is pretty good at redistribution, and the Left is asking for more. The difference is, of course, taxes. Currently, the Left is serving up a lie: tax the rich, and you will be shown will money from the heavens. Our deficit and debt have reached a critical point. Everybody will have to pay more in taxes, and that will be only to pay the interest on our debt.
Corporate profits are inherently bad... while we don't have good healthcare and a decent social safety net.
It's a statement of prioritization.
In Amsterdam, a McDonald's burger flipper gets 20 paid vacation days a year, health insurance, and mandatory paid parental leave.
This wasn't the Dutch saying, "WE WANT TO BURN DOWN MCDONALD'S, BREAK UP THE GOLDEN ARCHES and DISTRIBUTE THAT GOLD TO THE DUTCH PROLETARIAT!"
It was the Dutch saying, "The priority is that Dutch workers anywhere in the Netherlands get to have health insurance, paid vacations, and parental leave.... THEN the priority is corporate profits."
The entrenched defense by groups like the Atlas foundation and the Chamber of Commerce against the idea that there is any obligation by rich people to the wider society of country of their existence has pushed people against the idea of stakeholder obligated capitalism.
Even Milton Friedman, that avowed Marxist, suggested that there needed to be a negative income tax and basic social services.
Respectfully, it seems that you are just asserting that the ends justify the means of it means getting to your your preferred state of X.
Where X in this case is a very specific type and scope of welfare state.
As Fallingknife states, we have a solid healthcare and social safety net. And our tax and redistribution system is arguably more progressive than many European countries, though the topic is complex.
They both miss the main point. What made America great in the aftermath of the New Deal, and throughout both Democratic and Republican administrations until this one, is that we at least tried to be good. As the wealthiest nation in the world, we believed that no child should go hungry or suffer or die from preventable diseases. And we believed that our responsibility to prevent hunger and suffering extended beyond our borders. Executing on that belief was a source of “soft power” that raised our esteem in the rest of the world and earned us allies.
The question of who gets the credit for building successful companies is more nuanced than even Obama’s assessment. “You didn’t build that” was the wrong way to frame it. Rather, “You were advantaged in ways that enabled you to build that” would be more accurate. The flip side is that vast swaths of Americans who grew up in abject poverty will never have the ability to create wealth. Starvation, disease, and exposure to lead, pollution, and other toxins, if they don’t kill you, cripple brain development and prevent upward mobility. Some children of poverty might escape the ravages of these conditions, but the majority will not, perpetuating the divide.
And our responsibility to the rest of the world, including the Global South, must be reframed in terms of a global community in which everyone’s survival depends upon protecting the vulnerable wherever they are. The pandemic should have taught us that. And in the aftermath of the demise of USAID at the hands of the richest man in the world, we will unfortunately learn that lesson sooner (Ebola?) or later.
In a nation and world of abundance and a growing capacity to solve problems that can prevent all children and adults from needless suffering, it’s past time to make America great again by making America good again.
It's also the most successful ideology of the 18th and 19th centuries. On July 4th I'm carrying an American flag with 13 stars, not the flag where the stars are replaced by 250.
I wonder what RHG would think about me. When I did my family tree on Ancestry I discovered that I had ancestors who were some of the first settlers at Jamestown in the early 1600’s and other ancestors who arrived at Plymouth in the 1620’s. In fact none of my ancestors on either side of my family arrived here after 1750, and I count several Revolutionary War veterans among them. So that makes me about as much of a “Heritage American” as one can be, yet I am a liberal and lifelong Democrat who never voted Republican in his life.
RHG is one of those people that thinks "all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."
I wish he were just honest about that belief instead of couching it behind the bad faith pseudo intellectual rhetoric... I give Noah props for taking his words at face value though.
While I agree with you that the Liberal Nationalism of FDR would be superior to what we have today, I think that you are seriously underestimating how different those policies were from the mainstream of the Democratic Party today:
Just a few examples:
1) a highly restrictionist immigration policy
2) a dramatically smaller social welfare state, particularly health care and programs for the poor.
3) zero Green energy policy
4) transportation policy based on rapidly constructing federal highways
5) an interventionist foreign policy
6) high levels of military spending
7) anti-abortion
8) no opposition to gun rights
9) no gay rights
Such a party would look far more like Trump Republicans than typical Democrats today.
The laundry list is not particularly coherent at all as much of it is on cultural topics which America broadly changed on (example gay rights). And to forestall knee-jerking, I am not a Dem, nor a proggy. Broad US culture on gay rights has excepting a small fringe moved on.
Green energy of course is simply not even a topic in existence then, so just completely incoherent to raise (rather like raising "no space policy" - also neither Ds nor Rs had policy on).
If one is going to have a coherent actually not-just-reaction look one needs to examine where Ds where on the issues of the day as compared to Median Voter and then where they are now (where one as far as I know the data has a real observation that the Ds have moved away on many up-front center issues of Median Voter).
This will actually tell your story more coheretly and not engage in non-analytical nonsensical "not even wrong" comparisons.
Although the highway building is Eisenhower rather than FDR as a program.
No, this is not a "laundry list." In most cases, this was literally the Democratic party platform during the FDR and post-war era. If you had read the linked article, you would have known that.
No, if someone makes a claim is that we need to go back to FDR National Liberalism, then you have to actually agree with what he and his party believed at the time.
At the very least, one needs to acknowledge the immigration policy (topic of the article) was extremely restrictive under the FDR administration and he was not the slightest bit interested in changing it.
Yes, both parties had a consensus against gay rights. That is exactly why it was not an issue in the period. Then the Democrats changed their beliefs and made it an issue. That is a clear illustration of how much the Democrats have changed their policy stances since the New Deal era.
Same with Green energy. If the Democrats had not changed energy policy so radically, then there would be a partisan consensus against it. That is exactly why the radical changes of the Democratic party since the New Deal era is so important.
To use your method of comparing to the party to median voter, then you are left with exactly what the Democratic party believes today (which Noah seems to be arguing against). That method radically understates how much the Democratic party has changed since the New Deal era.
Yes, you are correct that the most famous instance of federal highway building was under Eisenhower, but, federal highway building was a major part of the PWA, WPA, Rural Electrification plus the Federal Aid Highway Program was expanded under FDR.
You are correct that Green energy was not an issue, but massive construction of hydro-electric dams was. And current Democrats are more interested in tearing them down than constructing more.
Same with nuclear energy and fossil fuels, which had widespread support among Democrats after WWII.
I have no idea what "non-analytical nonsensical not even wrong comparisons." even means. My guess is that the reason that you think it is "non-analytical" is because you did not even bother to read the linked article.
Nor do I know what "a coherent actually not-just-reaction look" means either.
Okay amigo... It is a laundry list as IT IS NOT COHERENT TO TAKE SOMETHING FROM 1940S AND COMPARE WITH LIST OF NIGH CENTURY LATER - which is not in any way rationally analytically tied with what Noah was evoking - the economics, the technologies all have changed.
It's complete goony backwards looking nonsense.
(the weird deformed rant on energy is illustrative enough of backward archaisism - for all that there's a legit point that people like Noah and Yglesias have been making regarding abundance and energy but it's lost in your incoherence)
In any event it's clear you have obsessions and internet screeds. boring.
Insults do not bolster your case. Nor does WRITING IN ALL CAPS.
If you thought that my comment is "obsessions and internet screeds," then why are taking so much time to respond to them?
Since you seem to enjoy weird deformed rants, maybe you should subscribe to my Substack, which has 700 articl... excuse me, "wierd deformed rants."
But then again I can see from your other comments and your past behavior that this is your modus operendi, then you clearly fit the personality traits identified in these two studies:
Their conclusions are that online trolling was strongly associated with a sadistic personality profile, even after controlling for other antisocial traits.
I don't have any delusion that internet argument in comment boxes has any other utility than entertainment. Reading your self-publishing isn't entertaining.
One note though cultural assimilation takes time. Too much immigration slows down that cultural assimilation.
So like everything else, moderation is the key.
People of good faith can argue about what the ideal level of immigration should be
I submit, it should be a bit higher than our current level of legal immigration. But much much lower than the level of total immigration under biden legal + illegal
Yes, assimilation takes time. My father (born in 1930 in Chicago) said it was conventionally though to take 3 generations, that is, immigrants' grandchildren. I read of a study that said that to get to economic equality takes 4 generations.
But it's not at all clear that more immigration slows down assimilation. We do have more immigration now and more unassimilated people, but that's because the stock of people whose ancestors haven't been here 3 generations has risen quickly over the past few decades -- 1965 was a low point in unassimilated people because immigration was quite constricted for the preceding two generations.
Noah, 100% agree. I think the first person to acknowledge that America needed a civil religion to unite deeply disparate cultures was Abraham Lincoln, who fused the ideals of the Declaration with the flawed institutions that legalized slavery and caused the Civil War. The Second Inaugural and the Gettysburg address are key texts in that civil religion. Liberals need to embrace the flag, embrace American identity as a melting pot, and embrace the American founding as a way to unite the country around a hopeful shared vision with pride, not grievance politics. You can’t lead a country you don’t love and are always talking down. Both parties need to bring back civics in public schools. And I’m also coming around to mandatory public service (1-2 years, not just military, can be a bunch of things) that give us more shared touch points. And it would be great if some billionaire tech dudes (or ladies) started funding this. Make it happen.
There is a lot to unpack when it comes to "loyalty". It is a word with many meanings.
My preferred take on "loyalty" would be "have your countrymen's back, don't do treasonous dealings with a foreign country, don't support domestic enemies of the constitutional order, be it political/religious extremists or criminal gangs". I think this is the definition of loyalty that can be reasonably required from immigrants, in Europe or in America.
But there are other versions of loyalty, like Trumpian blind obedience requirement. I suspect a lot of more authoritarian types want this sort of loyalty from others - never questioning what is being done and why.
That is a fairly consistent road to hell. Every nation that tried that ended up making catastrophic mistakes, because self-correcting mechanisms withered and died.
I don't want to demand this sort of loyalty from anyone. It is destructive. But it is very attractive to shallow narcissistic personalities that get promoted on social networks, and we haven't yet understood that this is precisely the sort of personality that shouldn't win any election.
Noah, I wish you had not gone into all the stuff about the RHG etc. It detracted from your clear statement of what American nationalism was and should be. Please don't let that get lost. i will repeat it in my own little blog, if that is any help.
Excellent overall article
As a minor ironic side thought, a guy using the name Roman Helmet Guy arguing for exclusionary blood-and-soilish nationalism (if not directly and not in such words but dancing up to it) is bizarrely wrong-headed on symbolism given the success of the Roman empire as compared to other classical ones was its integrationism - one could unlike other classical states 'become a Roman' (and climb up post first gen) - right up to Emperor see the Libyan Severans... (and equally Rome's quite promiscuous openess to coopting bits and pieces of cultures within the Roman sphere, religious, kit, etc)
That's something of a touch back to Noah's closing - to return to our integrationist unifying ideology.
During the rise of the Roman Empire auxiliaries would risk their blood and their lives for Roman law and Roman citizenship and their children would be considered true Romans. One generation. Romans were ethno-centric snobs, but if you shared values, cultural capital and language, you could be blond or black-skinned and still be a Roman.
Yes- of course first of all I would center a take-away on Roman approach as compared to their contemporaries - e.g. the Greek Polis where integration was de jure impossible and de facto quasi impossible.
Really key to long-term Roman success was that integrationism.
The fit to modern era can't be perfect but it makes a bozo using Roman Helmet as his moniker just even dumber given the strength of Roman system over time -and it's also a somewhat vaguely relevant point for modern Democracy - meltiing potism but with a large dollop of blending (promiscuous borrowing of any cutlural aspects within empire and just making it Roman)
(of course also not understood intellectually by themselves but turning the Med basin into a huge free trade zone comparatively safe for commerce was a great win too).
What the Roman system required was proven loyalty typically in the form of a) long-term military service, or b) literal slavery followed by manumission.
And both of those paths typically required a certain level of cultural integration and reciprocity on the would-be citizen.
I'm assuming that is what Helmet guy is implicitly relying on when he says you should be loyal to all Americans.
In America today, there really isn't any equivalent. How do you distinguish between a would-be immigrant that wants to integrate and embraces a reciprocal loyalty, versus one that doesn't? What about those that just want the economic opportunity that comes with being American?
My sense is that modern America is too culturally diffuse and ill-defined to even give immigrants a good target for integration. And to extent that it is not, it is either too thin to be compelling, or we are sharply divided.
Civic nationalism requires something of substance to latch on to, and we don't have it anymore. The Right's version relies at least somewhat on a type of blood and soil nationalism that is inherently limiting, and the Left's version is so watered down that the only thing we have in common is some mealy-mouthed platitudes and the fact that we're all under the same institutions and jurisdiction.
In the YouGov graph that is pictured above of what's more important for being an American, Repubs are 5 points ahead of Dems on "Being a US citizen," while Dems are 9 points ahead of Repubs on "Supporting the US Constitution." The exact statistics may not be useful but the trend revealed throughout the graph is interesting.
Note that the US Constitution does NOT define the DUTIES of citizenship (other than paying taxes, the right to vote, and do not commit treason).
Yet if we were to ask the polled Repubs, "What are the duties of the US citizen?" that YouGov graph suggests their response by every line where red overtakes blue: allegiance, patriotism, thinking the country is the best all the time, natural birth, cultural issues, etc.
If you want "liberal nationalism" in the U.S., if you want "integrationism," if you want to reduce frictions between Right and Left, you must address the increased salience of the Right's complaint in insisting upon attributes of citizenship which are NOT included in the Constitution.
There is a lot of social science research showing that the Right's resurgence (and its "horse-shoeing" with parts of the Left into resurgent populism) is at least partly due to an increased feeling of dispossession and being "left behind" by the world. And their natural response is to insist upon boundaries, figurative and literal boundaries: borders, religious identity, etc. So for example we hear the Right say that society is being cheated by new immigrants, and you can't tell if they are becoming good American citizens, etc. etc.
This is not to let the Left off the hook! The Left has a different problem, one that is barely noticed. It mostly believes that we don't need much guidance for the future, because individualism, science, and the rule of law will automatically lead us to the best outcomes. We could call this the promise of the "automaticity of modernism."
The Centrists add the market system to the list that makes the "automaticity of modernism." They assert that the market automatically leads to the best outcomes, if we add the "bourgeois virtues" and we can depend upon Hayek's assertion that the market transmits all relevant knowledge. (It does not.)
The Left does not promote nor really understand the market system. Increasing inequality and environmental risks are its big issues. It doesn't want pure socialism anymore, due to the historical evidence of police states and the lack of individual freedom. But of course it is evident to the Left, as it is to the resurgent Right, that some sort of social reckoning is due.
I propose to address these root problems by this scientific artwork. It teaches the market system better than anyone. It also shows that there is a separate general concept of nonmarket organization with its own efficiencies, knowledge functions, and freedoms. This must stand alongside the market, because we need BOTH.
This uses an animated diagram because that packs a lot more information, making a quicker way to first see the whole concept. It is preceded by a short video that explains the diagram symbols:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLT-vY3f9uw3Dkgnj72Ydks7ExEiUrPcMD
This is one of those posts that really states the obvious for anyone not in the constantly online activist shrieking wars. My wife is an immigrant, her whole family are immigrants, all of my friends are immigrants and even though they are all quite lefty coded progressives if I say something like “you know the great thing about America is that anyone can come here and bring their culture and their talents to the country and become a part of the whole community” they think it’s the most uncontroversial thing in the world. This is an ideology that I think is so deeply embedded in our culture that it seems odd to have to defend it. It’s certainly a perspective that I grew up with in a conservative Christian church going household. It’s always been the bedrock of my perspective on American culture and one of the things I am most proud about our civilization.
The sad thing is it isnt just online tho, it does seem to be the policy of the Trump admin.
This was the biggest appeal to Obama 2008 for me, he talked in the tradition of liberal nationalism that people like me where (and still am) hungry to hear.
This is fundamentally a Ship of Theseus problem.
How quickly are you replacing components of the ship, and are they integrating into the main structure? That is what determines if the ship is a well-functioning coherent whole, or just a jerry-rigged mess that is barely staying afloat.
Modern America seems to be drifting closer to the latter. And it is worth contrasting that with what FDR had to work with.
By the time WW2 rolled around, America had ~15 years of effectively no immigration. The 1924 Immigration Act closed the doors and gave the USA about a generation to integrate the descendants of the prior waves into a cohesive whole. FDR's civic nationalism success relied on this as a foundation and then built upon it.
Modern America probably warrants strong border control, limiting abuse of the asylum and refugee systems, and a reduction of legal immigration levels and/or a tuning for high net positive immigrants with some meaningful selection for integratability — at least for a generation or so. Combine that with a collective push towards civic nationalism.
Belisarius, it's true that FDR had a better hand to play in this regard -- it included the succession of potentially unifying emergencies of the Depression and world war -- but that doesn't mean the way we play the hand we've been dealt requires us to wait and wait, hoping new draws will let us emulate FDR's winning hand. We can't afford to wait a generation. Without substantial immigration US population will begin to decrease after 2030 and a couple of decades on we will have no way to repair what will be a dysfunctional demographic profile and trajectory. (And there's absolutely no guarantee that closing our doors in 2026 will have the same results as closing our doors in 1924.)
The comment Nazem wrote below, which you indicate you appreciate, seems to me to present the most promising approach. National stories are politically and culturally powerful if they get traction and gain momentum. The stories that have mobilized political activism most recently are Christian Nationalist and Project 1619-style progressive products. The former is exclusionary and the latter accusatory, and neither can form the basis of broad-based liberal/civic nationalism, regardless of any points of validity either might have.
FDR didn't make up his themes: he relied on his talented "brain trust" to supply him with ideas, implementation strategies, and speeches that his own rhetorical talents could enhance -- he didn't have them in place in 1932: they grew through the emergencies his administrations faced. Given the situation we're in the optimal way to make a bad hand look like a new deal is to have generally popularist (in the Shor/Yglesias sense) activists devise a story or set of stories more electorally powerful than Christian Nationalism and CRT-based stories and recruit candidates willing to and capable of conveying the themes of the story in electorally and legislatively effective ways. It would be great if I could write that this could come via either major political party, but the GOP is now effectively reduced to the MAGOP, so it will either need to come via the Democratic Party (by 2028) or through a long-shot new party. (If the goal were 2032 or 2036 the latter might seem realistic, but I think we don't have time for that.)
Yes, there are alternatives to trying to replicate the path that FDR and pre-WW2 America took.
If there is a compelling new national story that could weave together and reinforce the threads of our tattered social fabric, I will support it.
But I am not very optimistic. There doesn't seem to be a strong enough core to reinforce anymore.
And, if that core still exists and some new national story ever started to gain traction, it would have to survive the inevitable attacks from both left- and right-wing activists trying to undermine a viable alternative.
Maybe there is a narrow path where immigration is restricted or retooled just enough, and just long enough, to prevent further damage to the core while the new reinforcing national story starts to repair the damage?
As a note on demographics...most of the developed world is going to be in the same boat, so I don't think this is going to be as catastrophic as is often claimed. Especially in a relative comparison or competitive sense, though it will be a significant absolute headwind. Resolving that at the cost of further damage to the social fabric and social trust may not be worth it.
I appreciate the thoughtful counter, Belasarius.
I'm not sure a core of shared patriotism needs to exist as much as fury-fatigue and a sense of economic threat. For one thing, I believe you overestimate the sense of national unity that the 1924 hiatus produced over the course of the following decade. FDR's liberal nationalism theme was expressed early in the New Deal alphabet-agency era, abetted by visual art and song. The ethnic enclaves of the Ellis Island era were still intact, and although second-generation assimilation had been continuously underway, the lack of fully diffused national media meant that assimilation by those who had arrived in the years prior to 1924 were far slower to assimilate. (I think the story of diminishing rates of assimilation that the Far Right tells is essentially wrong.) In any case, the positive response to FDR's unifying story was probably fueled less by diminished difference and more by shared anger at the Hoover Administration (especially after the Bonus Army fiasco) and the slide from the Crash to the Depression. I think we are seeing significant resonances in broad public anger at the present administration (including MAGA infighting) and economic anxiety on both small scale (cost of living) and large scale (exploding debt, AI impact and market volatility) levels that are likely to grow running up to 2028.
I don't think we now know what new way to tell the "American story" would be compelling, but that's a challenge, not an obstacle. Of course it will be attacked, but while extremism is as shrill as ever I believe it is building increasing centrist fatigue that may produce its own form of backlash.
I do think we need to have a clear model of immigration reform that is a balance of national need and public suspicion. What we need is some trusted champions in the James Lankford mode on both sides of the aisle with the guts to stand their ground (and gut can feed off the diminishing popularity of the current administration, assuming it continues -- everything I'm writing is aimed at 2028, not 2026). I don't agree that the absolute impact of population decline will be perceived as less because it is worldwide -- anymore that Biden's inflation was perceived as less because inflation was global -- but in any event this issue is not part of the "story": it's a longer term and more catastrophic threat that urgently requires a good-government response. Moreover, every year the US hands back to other countries several million (largely aspirational) people we diminish the US comparative advantage in the population competition that appears to be in the global future, medium- to long-term.
I have enjoyed the exchange as well.
I think the fury fatigue and any resulting backlash will primarily be a repulsor, when what we need seems to be an attractor. Maybe, hopefully, some suitable story will emerge that will serve that role.
We still take in ~0.3% of our population each year via legal immigration alone. Maybe if we can shape that more towards high-skill, high-net-positive-impact and simultaneously strictly limit the rest, the public will accept the status quo.
Anyways, thanks again for the polite and thoughtful conversation!
> or just a jerry-rigged mess that is barely staying afloat.
Well, from where I sit (retired computer programmer living in metro Boston), despite the *immense* griping coming from all directions (knowing lots of progressives, I can assure you it's not just the reactionaries that are moaning), the United States is doing quite well. We're still on top of the world economically. Unlike most large countries, it's pretty much inconceivable for the country to split territorially. We're still at the top of advancing basically all major technologies. Crime is at a low for my adult lifetime. The country is so rich that the VCs are putting trillions of dollars into AI R&D despite that *everybody* knows that a lot of that will be lost when the inevitable bubble bursts. We have to post armed guards to keep people from flooding in! The *news* and especially social media are a horror show but the day-to-day reality is very good.
ISTM that the difficulty with immigration is that we don't want too many poor immigrants to concentrate in any one small area. The difficulty is not with them pushing down wages (which doesn't happen) but they raise social services spending (especially education and medical care for their kids) more than they pay in taxes. And the taxes for those services are predominantly local and state. In the long run, that's an investment in the next generation of workers, but in the short run it causes very visible budget/tax problems.
It doesn't help that the rules for asylum applicants require that they can't work for the first six months. In practice, it doesn't dissuade asylum seekers, it just forces them to live on charity for half a year before they can get a job. (And they don't dare get an unauthorized job because that could jeopardize their asylum case.)
I think the current legal level of immigration is fine. If you exclude all the illegal immigration and bogus asylum claims
I agree. But that's a big and important "if".
This is the clearest thing I've read on the question in a long while. You found the wall the whole house leans on — that nationalism cracks the moment it has to say who counts — and you pushed.
As someone who migrated with his family young, I read this from inside the question Balaji and RHG are fighting over, not above it.
We are the cautionary tale you name in passing. Worth a longer look.
The Levant held everyone once. Sunni and Shia. Alawite, Druze, the Christians who had been there since before the Arabs came, Jews in Aleppo whose families predated half of Europe. One cloth. The Ottomans kept it whole for four centuries — not from tolerance, nothing so modern as that, but because the story on offer was large enough to seat a stranger. Damascus did not ask your sect before it sold you bread.
Then it tore.
From the inside first, years before any foreign army bothered to cross a border. It started the day an ordinary man stood at the well and wondered whether the water was theirs or ours. That was all. That was enough.
You call it Middle-Easternization, and you borrow the word for America. Fair. But it was never a thing we caught from outside. It is just what a mixed country turns into when it stops telling itself a story wide enough to cover the people it hasn't learned to love yet.
The story is the whole of it. Roosevelt understood that. We mislaid ours somewhere, and the bill is still coming in — we are not done burying.
A nation is a sentence its people agree to go on saying. Stop saying it and see what fills the quiet.
Keep saying yours.
Read the first sentence, realized this whole comment is AI, and stopped reading.
What makes it AI? The flattery? Don't tell me it's the em dashes.
I like "Damascus did not ask your sect before it sold you bread," but you're probably right that it's AI. My favorite tell is that it makes different errors in reading comprehension than a human would, written in a different tone. The comment incorrectly says that Noah refers to a fracturing process in America as "Middle-Easternization," a phrase that appears nowhere in Noah's post (also, is it different from Balkanization?), but it's in the style of What Used To Be Taught As Good Writing, But With Certain Tics Overused. It even has AI quirks like strange metaphors that don't reflect embodied experience of the world ("A nation is a sentence its people agree to go on saying").
Well said, almost to the point of being poetry.
The Ottoman system was complex and we'd strongly object to its particular forms of inequality and integrative failures today, but the general point stands.
The bots are getting seriously good at creative writing these days. Reminds me of this: stories apparently written by LLMs have been winning the Commonwealth Short Story Prize. https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/the-literary-world-is-sleepwalking
There are two Americas, and I don’t mean North and South. There is the America that is my neighborhood, my local community, and, in general, the area associated with where we go out to dinner, see a movie, or go to the beach.
The daily machinations of national politics, anti-Trumpers, and pro-Trumpers don’t really exist in my daily activities. The only place I see this play out daily is in Noah’s column, CNN or MS Now, on the pages of the NY Times or WAPO, at The Dispatch. Not at my local ACME, or liquor store, I go to buy my Vodka for my dirty martinis and wine for my wife.
Let’s be clear where the struggle Noah is talking about goes on. It is not in much of anybody’s daily life, except if you are involved in the daily struggle between our political parties. If you are a purveyor of a particular ideology, it is how to make money, part of the grift of the political industrial complex, you live the stupid argument I was forced to read between two idiots.
One is a grifter looking for approval and money, the other is looking for meaning in life after accomplishing something that turns out to be vapid. Making a fortune is great; you never have to worry about paying bills or finding food and shelter. So he likely feels that, since he made a fortune, his thoughts are worth the world's consideration. He is looking for meaning that money cannot provide. The other is a bomb-throwing grifter, a NASCAR crash; it is the latest form of empty rhetoric that will never make the pages of any history book.
It is said that only about 10% of the public follow politics at all. That very few people like me, read two papers, watch some 24-hour news in the background, and follow three newsletters. Listen to a couple of political podcasts.
Americans do not think about the world they exist in daily as liberal nationalism, or liberal capitalist democracy, or post-liberal nationalism. This doesn’t mean that our politics doesn’t infect their minds. Of it does.
Here is the crux of the problem. We Americans know who we are, it is the political industrial complex that no interest in what Americans think except in formulating the latest populist inclination. Our politics runs on hatred, both teams run their fundraising on hatred and fear. The other side is coming for you and your family. Danger, warnings, fear, hatred, bigotry, antisemitism, racism, nationalism, socialism...You can go down the list, and it is all being used to generate funds for the parties' quest for power.
It is about gaining power, but to no end. Both parties believe that at some point, they will win this war and will have all the power in the world and turn the country's economy into whatever “ism” they desire at the moment. All this while, America is asking the two parties to work together, to compromise, to fix what is broken.
That cannot happen in American politics today. Sadly, my neighbors and I could probably come up with a list of things we think are American ideals. Charity, helping your neighbor, and individual freedom to live your life as you pursue happiness. Americans understand freedom of speech, freedom of the press, they understand that racism is wrong, and they don’t like skin color to be anything other than melanin.
Largely speaking, conservatives have rejected the idea of victimology that has pervaded the politics of the left. Everybody in America largely understands that you have to work, that work is good. They understand that you have become educated. Whether it is how plumbing works or the physics required to run a nuclear reactor. We understand that there are people in the world who want to kill Americans. But the only person on the planet who thinks Canadians are a threat to America is the lunatic living in the White House.
FDR, is a problematic person to emulate. He was a good communicator, but all he did was to throw socialist ideas at the wall while trying to feed the country during the depression. Most of us would have tried many of the ideas with our economy broken but they all were about the Government becoming the great father to its citizens.
America has a large social safety net, much like Europe. It is what the citizens have asked for. The biggest difference is that we have the freedom to make money; we had a less structured class system that infected Europe. Fewer regulations initially. Today, the left is calling for a new economy. For FDRs vision of the government directing the economy. The problem for the left is the government is largely incapable of directing the economy.
It is pretty good at redistribution, and the Left is asking for more. The difference is, of course, taxes. Currently, the Left is serving up a lie: tax the rich, and you will be shown will money from the heavens. Our deficit and debt have reached a critical point. Everybody will have to pay more in taxes, and that will be only to pay the interest on our debt.
" corporate profits are inherently bad."
This is a reach.
Corporate profits are inherently bad... while we don't have good healthcare and a decent social safety net.
It's a statement of prioritization.
In Amsterdam, a McDonald's burger flipper gets 20 paid vacation days a year, health insurance, and mandatory paid parental leave.
This wasn't the Dutch saying, "WE WANT TO BURN DOWN MCDONALD'S, BREAK UP THE GOLDEN ARCHES and DISTRIBUTE THAT GOLD TO THE DUTCH PROLETARIAT!"
It was the Dutch saying, "The priority is that Dutch workers anywhere in the Netherlands get to have health insurance, paid vacations, and parental leave.... THEN the priority is corporate profits."
The entrenched defense by groups like the Atlas foundation and the Chamber of Commerce against the idea that there is any obligation by rich people to the wider society of country of their existence has pushed people against the idea of stakeholder obligated capitalism.
Even Milton Friedman, that avowed Marxist, suggested that there needed to be a negative income tax and basic social services.
We have excellent healthcare and social safety nets. Not perfect, but near the best in the world.
...As long as we don't count cost/access to health insurance, parental leave, and paid time off as part of "healthcare" or "the social safety net"
PTO and parental leave are not part of healthcare and social safety nets.
What about universal health coverage?' Decided to just not even mention that one?
"Not perfect, but near the best in the world"
Universal coverage is achieved by every other wealthy country and some of the not so wealthy ones.
It's like describing a car that lacks a steering wheel as merely "not perfect".
That is "seriously flawed".
Respectfully, it seems that you are just asserting that the ends justify the means of it means getting to your your preferred state of X.
Where X in this case is a very specific type and scope of welfare state.
As Fallingknife states, we have a solid healthcare and social safety net. And our tax and redistribution system is arguably more progressive than many European countries, though the topic is complex.
They both miss the main point. What made America great in the aftermath of the New Deal, and throughout both Democratic and Republican administrations until this one, is that we at least tried to be good. As the wealthiest nation in the world, we believed that no child should go hungry or suffer or die from preventable diseases. And we believed that our responsibility to prevent hunger and suffering extended beyond our borders. Executing on that belief was a source of “soft power” that raised our esteem in the rest of the world and earned us allies.
The question of who gets the credit for building successful companies is more nuanced than even Obama’s assessment. “You didn’t build that” was the wrong way to frame it. Rather, “You were advantaged in ways that enabled you to build that” would be more accurate. The flip side is that vast swaths of Americans who grew up in abject poverty will never have the ability to create wealth. Starvation, disease, and exposure to lead, pollution, and other toxins, if they don’t kill you, cripple brain development and prevent upward mobility. Some children of poverty might escape the ravages of these conditions, but the majority will not, perpetuating the divide.
And our responsibility to the rest of the world, including the Global South, must be reframed in terms of a global community in which everyone’s survival depends upon protecting the vulnerable wherever they are. The pandemic should have taught us that. And in the aftermath of the demise of USAID at the hands of the richest man in the world, we will unfortunately learn that lesson sooner (Ebola?) or later.
In a nation and world of abundance and a growing capacity to solve problems that can prevent all children and adults from needless suffering, it’s past time to make America great again by making America good again.
"
The flip side is that vast swaths of Americans who grew up in abject poverty will never have the ability to create wealth.
"
Baloney
My first house literally had no electricity or running water. I also spent time in jail
And yet now i'm doing just fine
And there are many, many, many millions of other americans with similar stories that came from nothing, And are doing just fine
When Obama said "You didn't build that", the "that" was explicitly public infrastructure such as roads and schools...
100%. Only ideologues trying to score political hits would ever claim otherwise. So, all of right-wing media. They thrive on blatant propaganda.
It's also the most successful ideology of the 18th and 19th centuries. On July 4th I'm carrying an American flag with 13 stars, not the flag where the stars are replaced by 250.
I wonder what RHG would think about me. When I did my family tree on Ancestry I discovered that I had ancestors who were some of the first settlers at Jamestown in the early 1600’s and other ancestors who arrived at Plymouth in the 1620’s. In fact none of my ancestors on either side of my family arrived here after 1750, and I count several Revolutionary War veterans among them. So that makes me about as much of a “Heritage American” as one can be, yet I am a liberal and lifelong Democrat who never voted Republican in his life.
RHG is one of those people that thinks "all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."
I wish he were just honest about that belief instead of couching it behind the bad faith pseudo intellectual rhetoric... I give Noah props for taking his words at face value though.
While I agree with you that the Liberal Nationalism of FDR would be superior to what we have today, I think that you are seriously underestimating how different those policies were from the mainstream of the Democratic Party today:
Just a few examples:
1) a highly restrictionist immigration policy
2) a dramatically smaller social welfare state, particularly health care and programs for the poor.
3) zero Green energy policy
4) transportation policy based on rapidly constructing federal highways
5) an interventionist foreign policy
6) high levels of military spending
7) anti-abortion
8) no opposition to gun rights
9) no gay rights
Such a party would look far more like Trump Republicans than typical Democrats today.
Plus many other examples:
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/how-the-democrats-have-changed-since
The laundry list is not particularly coherent at all as much of it is on cultural topics which America broadly changed on (example gay rights). And to forestall knee-jerking, I am not a Dem, nor a proggy. Broad US culture on gay rights has excepting a small fringe moved on.
Green energy of course is simply not even a topic in existence then, so just completely incoherent to raise (rather like raising "no space policy" - also neither Ds nor Rs had policy on).
If one is going to have a coherent actually not-just-reaction look one needs to examine where Ds where on the issues of the day as compared to Median Voter and then where they are now (where one as far as I know the data has a real observation that the Ds have moved away on many up-front center issues of Median Voter).
This will actually tell your story more coheretly and not engage in non-analytical nonsensical "not even wrong" comparisons.
Although the highway building is Eisenhower rather than FDR as a program.
No, this is not a "laundry list." In most cases, this was literally the Democratic party platform during the FDR and post-war era. If you had read the linked article, you would have known that.
No, if someone makes a claim is that we need to go back to FDR National Liberalism, then you have to actually agree with what he and his party believed at the time.
At the very least, one needs to acknowledge the immigration policy (topic of the article) was extremely restrictive under the FDR administration and he was not the slightest bit interested in changing it.
Yes, both parties had a consensus against gay rights. That is exactly why it was not an issue in the period. Then the Democrats changed their beliefs and made it an issue. That is a clear illustration of how much the Democrats have changed their policy stances since the New Deal era.
Same with Green energy. If the Democrats had not changed energy policy so radically, then there would be a partisan consensus against it. That is exactly why the radical changes of the Democratic party since the New Deal era is so important.
To use your method of comparing to the party to median voter, then you are left with exactly what the Democratic party believes today (which Noah seems to be arguing against). That method radically understates how much the Democratic party has changed since the New Deal era.
Yes, you are correct that the most famous instance of federal highway building was under Eisenhower, but, federal highway building was a major part of the PWA, WPA, Rural Electrification plus the Federal Aid Highway Program was expanded under FDR.
You are correct that Green energy was not an issue, but massive construction of hydro-electric dams was. And current Democrats are more interested in tearing them down than constructing more.
Same with nuclear energy and fossil fuels, which had widespread support among Democrats after WWII.
I have no idea what "non-analytical nonsensical not even wrong comparisons." even means. My guess is that the reason that you think it is "non-analytical" is because you did not even bother to read the linked article.
Nor do I know what "a coherent actually not-just-reaction look" means either.
Oh dear. Obsessives...
Okay amigo... It is a laundry list as IT IS NOT COHERENT TO TAKE SOMETHING FROM 1940S AND COMPARE WITH LIST OF NIGH CENTURY LATER - which is not in any way rationally analytically tied with what Noah was evoking - the economics, the technologies all have changed.
It's complete goony backwards looking nonsense.
(the weird deformed rant on energy is illustrative enough of backward archaisism - for all that there's a legit point that people like Noah and Yglesias have been making regarding abundance and energy but it's lost in your incoherence)
In any event it's clear you have obsessions and internet screeds. boring.
Insults do not bolster your case. Nor does WRITING IN ALL CAPS.
If you thought that my comment is "obsessions and internet screeds," then why are taking so much time to respond to them?
Since you seem to enjoy weird deformed rants, maybe you should subscribe to my Substack, which has 700 articl... excuse me, "wierd deformed rants."
But then again I can see from your other comments and your past behavior that this is your modus operendi, then you clearly fit the personality traits identified in these two studies:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191886914000324
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29663396/
Their conclusions are that online trolling was strongly associated with a sadistic personality profile, even after controlling for other antisocial traits.
Entertainment factor amigo.
I don't have any delusion that internet argument in comment boxes has any other utility than entertainment. Reading your self-publishing isn't entertaining.
Best thing you’ve written in a while in contrast to your recent ideological anti trump screeds.
Who among us hasn't launched a meme coin as a sitting president?
Let him who has not sued his own government and ordered it to settle with him for $1,776,000,000 cast the first stone.
Broadly agreed with all of this.
One note though cultural assimilation takes time. Too much immigration slows down that cultural assimilation.
So like everything else, moderation is the key.
People of good faith can argue about what the ideal level of immigration should be
I submit, it should be a bit higher than our current level of legal immigration. But much much lower than the level of total immigration under biden legal + illegal
Yes, assimilation takes time. My father (born in 1930 in Chicago) said it was conventionally though to take 3 generations, that is, immigrants' grandchildren. I read of a study that said that to get to economic equality takes 4 generations.
But it's not at all clear that more immigration slows down assimilation. We do have more immigration now and more unassimilated people, but that's because the stock of people whose ancestors haven't been here 3 generations has risen quickly over the past few decades -- 1965 was a low point in unassimilated people because immigration was quite constricted for the preceding two generations.
My grandparents also immigrated.
I would say the rate of assimilation is effected by how many immigrants are around (from your same country)
An easy example if everyone still speaks the home language its a lot easier to not learn the new one.
Noah, 100% agree. I think the first person to acknowledge that America needed a civil religion to unite deeply disparate cultures was Abraham Lincoln, who fused the ideals of the Declaration with the flawed institutions that legalized slavery and caused the Civil War. The Second Inaugural and the Gettysburg address are key texts in that civil religion. Liberals need to embrace the flag, embrace American identity as a melting pot, and embrace the American founding as a way to unite the country around a hopeful shared vision with pride, not grievance politics. You can’t lead a country you don’t love and are always talking down. Both parties need to bring back civics in public schools. And I’m also coming around to mandatory public service (1-2 years, not just military, can be a bunch of things) that give us more shared touch points. And it would be great if some billionaire tech dudes (or ladies) started funding this. Make it happen.
There is a lot to unpack when it comes to "loyalty". It is a word with many meanings.
My preferred take on "loyalty" would be "have your countrymen's back, don't do treasonous dealings with a foreign country, don't support domestic enemies of the constitutional order, be it political/religious extremists or criminal gangs". I think this is the definition of loyalty that can be reasonably required from immigrants, in Europe or in America.
But there are other versions of loyalty, like Trumpian blind obedience requirement. I suspect a lot of more authoritarian types want this sort of loyalty from others - never questioning what is being done and why.
That is a fairly consistent road to hell. Every nation that tried that ended up making catastrophic mistakes, because self-correcting mechanisms withered and died.
I don't want to demand this sort of loyalty from anyone. It is destructive. But it is very attractive to shallow narcissistic personalities that get promoted on social networks, and we haven't yet understood that this is precisely the sort of personality that shouldn't win any election.
Noah, I wish you had not gone into all the stuff about the RHG etc. It detracted from your clear statement of what American nationalism was and should be. Please don't let that get lost. i will repeat it in my own little blog, if that is any help.