68 Comments
Apr 1·edited Apr 1Liked by Noah Smith

During the Reagan years, I mostly tuned him out, because I found his message ordinarily boring and repetitive. Consequently, I missed the following speech the first time around. When the man was right, he was really, really right. Having lived the majority of my adult life in immigrant packed cities— New York and Houston— I have nothing but good to say about my personal experiences with immigrants.

"This, I believe, is one of the most important sources of America’s greatness. We lead the world because, unique among nations, we draw our people — our strength — from every country and every corner of the world. And by doing so we continuously renew and enrich our nation….Thanks to each wave of new arrivals to this land of opportunity, we’re a nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas, and always on the cutting edge, always leading the world to the next frontier. This quality is vital to our future as a nation. If we ever closed the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost. This, I believe, is one of the most important sources of America’s greatness. We lead the world because, unique among nations, we draw our people — our strength — from every country and every corner of the world. And by doing so we continuously renew and enrich our nation….Thanks to each wave of new arrivals to this land of opportunity, we’re a nation forever young, forever bursting with energy and new ideas, and always on the cutting edge, always leading the world to the next frontier. This quality is vital to our future as a nation. If we ever closed the door to new Americans, our leadership in the world would soon be lost."

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Apr 1Liked by Noah Smith

Reagan had good speech writers.

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Well, he also had final script approval.

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Apr 1Liked by Noah Smith

Hard to know for certain, but he probably did for some years, then Nancy took over. But, either way, good speech writers. One of my favorite moments:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLW7r4o2_Ow

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Apr 1Liked by Noah Smith

Now is the time for all good people to come to the aid of their country.

Vote Biden. Never Trump

Progressive me says - keep the message simple.

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Apr 1Liked by Noah Smith

This isn't new on the left. Orwell wrote about how the left shot itself in the foot by holding moronic ideas that disdained patriotism. Holdign such ideas guarantees that you will piss off a good chunk of the electorate - people don't want to think they live in a cishetropatriarchabelistsupremacist [insert buzzwords as necessary] dumpster. Instead, we get cosmopolitanism and minoritarianism taken to their moronic conclusions - open borders anti-patriotism for the former and the idea that minorities should create incessant agitation for the latter [1]. FDR and Attlee managed to be left wing and visibly patriotic - so are Starmer and Biden (though the former has to deal with numbskulls [2]).

What is new is the right wing version that sees America as a fallen nation corrupted by "wokeness". Usually, right wing parties try to claim patriotism because the left gets queasy around it but in this case they have abandoned it for their own stupid reasons.

For the left, the road to recovery starts by stomping the shit out of their black nationalist wing [3], which (in conjunction with the stupid white wokes who feel incessantly guilty) causes a huge chunk of the anti-patriotic sentiment because of the whole "400 years of oppression" narrative that smoothbrains parrot whenever one objects to their racial patronage programs. Race hustlers such as Hannah-Jones, Kendi, Blow etc shouldn't be platformed - the response should be "get lost, you are a cancer and it is your lot that brought on the GOP backlash in the 80s and 90s by constantly causing problems".

[1] https://madogiwazoku.substack.com/p/on-pet-victim-protection

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2024/mar/30/starmer-faces-discontent-as-labour-mps-criticise-election-flyers-union-jacks

[3] https://josephheath.substack.com/p/americans-need-to-find-some-way-to

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Find me a prominent Democratic in favor of open borders.

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Look at the deeds, not the words, of the politicians. We have a massive immigration crisis, and nothing, but words are given by the federal government.

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Apr 2·edited Apr 2

Isn't the "immigration crisis" just a case of people being desperate to enter the country illegally (because they can't provide for their families, or are fleeing from war or rampant criminal violence) and will thus keep trying and trying and trying until they either succeed or die in the attempt?

https://yaninamarkova.substack.com/p/what-price-a-secure-border

I've noticed that a lot of anti-immigration types now refer to illegal immigrants as "invaders", implicitly arguing that they should be killed. Although trying to stop illegal migrants is in some ways even harder that trying to stop literal military invaders, as the latter must move about in cohesive groups and carry heavy equipment with them.

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Just consider the increasing desperation of the Americans already suffering from unemployment, declining wages, union busting, and all the joys of economic oppression, real suppression, by the government and corporations. Adding millions of immigrants into the labor market guarantees that this will get worse. Indeed, this is the goal of the elites as cheaper labor via an oversupply of crushed mass of workers is good for their wealth and power.

Unless the goal is civil unrest complete with gunfire, I suggest that saying “more” is the wrong answer.

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Apr 1Liked by Noah Smith

Run for President already or, at a minimum, advise Biden. You are talking great sense. Especially on immigration. Thank you.

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In the spirit of good faith, it would be nice for folks to engage with why anti-patriotism exists on the left and on the right.

The left is not in fact just being petulant and childish; there is an actual critique of US imperial power and the nature of US society there. Why is that not worthy of engagement?

It is also worth it to think about the right-wing variety of anti-patriotism, which wishes for the US to fall so that that movement can better pursue white supremacy and its overall Gilead vision.

Why not take these viewpoints seriously?

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Speaking purely for myself in good faith as someone who leans left but doesn't identify with it. It often seems like the left isn't just hostile to American politics but to the very idea of the American identity and culture as a whole - that the country is irredeemably racist and shouldn't exist in the first place. They may have a point but that also contains elements of magical thinking. Like it or not the country does exist, the past happened and cannot be changed, and the majority of the 330 million people here primarily identify as American, aren't going anywhere, and have a right to feel proud of the progress the country has made even if there is work to be done and past mistakes to still rectify. Like I said, the left seems hostile with the very idea of being American and tends to identify with more of a trans national values movement and that is going to leave them out of step with 95% of the population

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Such a "Left" does exist; after all there are ~330 million people. But far fewer than one would think from watching Fox Opinion. Nevertheless Democrats should do more to give the lie to Fox misinformation.

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Apr 1·edited Apr 1

I would say this is mostly accurate, but the depth of the left's analysis of the roots of American dysfunction and malevolence seems to always be downplayed.

Writing off the left also seems to lead to "well this seems too harsh, so nothing big can actually happen, nothing should actually change at all" complacency. The US is going to change for real one way or the other -- mostly right now through change driven by the right, as has been true for 50 years. Yes, the left wants to fundamentally change the nature of the country, and in most cases wants to move past the existence of the country to something else for the midsection of North America, but, again, so does the right.

So I would recommend taking them both seriously.

The *irony*, of course, is that, Eisenhower, the guy that every centrist so admires and yearns for because he was such a source of stability, publicly claimed to take the critiques/threat of both the left and right seriously, and so that's why he supported (publicly) the New Deal consensus.

Maybe instead of wishing and hoping that another Eisenhower just appear and solve everything, current centrists could try to imitate his approach.

And the right is more actively pursuing that, with the

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Apr 1·edited Apr 1

Eisenhower? The man hasn't been president for over 60 years and I don't think he's a point of reference for most people anymore so I think it's a bit strange that you brought him up in the context of this conversation to make a point.

Biden's industrial policy is structured significantly around clean energy and supporting the middle class. It could transform the country if given support and god knows the right had nothing to do with that so it seems disingenuous to say change is only being driven by the right. That's not even touching the cultural movements regarding race, gay rights, and women's rights. Church attendance and religiosity in general is collapsing and much of the right is apocalyptic over this. A lot of that isn't going the way I'd like at the moment, especially reproductive rights, but to say that change is only or even primarily being driven by the right again feels very disingenuous.

I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I'd anticipate much of the left would react to this by dismissing Biden as a centrist hack and these changes as not going nearly far enough quick enough which basically ends the conversation. If nothing short of political revolution and the end of the constitution will satisfy the left and any progress is shrugged off then we have radically different visions of the best past forward for these 'middle latitudes of North America'. That is why I and many 'centrists' simply don't engage seriously with the left

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Apr 1·edited Apr 1

The point was that that he was a major political figure who actually in public arranged his mouth to say things that demonstrated awareness and appreciation that both the left and the right waited in the wings, and so the center needed to adapt.

Meanwhile, the center is the place where he is not only respected but yearned for. If you mean that that reverence has now finally ended, yeah, let's leave the 20th century in the dust.

What more recent figure in the US has had to take the left and the right as seriously?

What am I referring to when I say change in the US *has been* driven by the right? The civil rights movement was intended to do far far more than it did; the right stopped that. Feminism was supposed to achieve more than it did; the right stopped that.

Biden is a centrist, because that's how he'd likely self-identify if nothing else. That's why he was chosen by the primary voters of the Democratic party; they didn't want to scare the Republicans.

"If nothing short of political revolution and the end of the constitution will satisfy the left and any progress is shrugged off then we have radically different visions of the best past forward for these 'middle latitudes of North America'." -- Why do you (seem to) think I would disagree with this?

The left aren't actually liberals; we want something different for the world. We don't agree with you. And I say that as someone who much of the left wouldn't like because of how normie I am.

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I guess this is why most people chose to ignore the left; because most people do not want the Left’s vision for the world.

I have always found it odd that the left in the US, whose claim is to be for the proletariat, seems to be overwhelmingly white, educated, upper middle class and mostly disliked by the very people the claim to represent. And there is never any self reflection of *why* that is. Most Americans actually want a moderate president. Most Americans actually want to love their country. Most minorities rightly recognize that in an event of a revolution, they will be the first ones to be hurt. And yet there is almost no attempt by the left to grapple with that disconnect. They have almost no semblance of a credible theory of power and instead it seems to mostly exist as a fun exercise in theory and what ifs.

And listen, if that leftist want to spend their time in in theory land, by all means go for it. But other people will actually be in real world, working to make the life better for Americans and creating an America people actually want

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When contemporary far-leftists claim to be for "the proletariat" they usually mean "the people of the global South", not working-class people in America or any other rich country.

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Apr 1·edited Apr 1

I don't think you'd disagree with it. I'm well aware that's how you'd feel, but like I said I don't want to put words in your mouth. You asked a specific question 'Why not take these viewpoints seriously?' and we seemed to have answered it together - 'The left aren't actually liberals; we want something different for the world'

I am a liberal, proudly and unapologetically so. Liberals and the left are (barely) allies of convenience and have fundamentally conflicting visions for the world. I'm not trying to sway your opinion, I'm just answering the question

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Thus, you are saying that your answer (it isn't mine) to "Why aren't these views taken seriously?" is simply "liberals don't agree with them, so they won't take them seriously". If a leftist did the equivalent, what do you imagine the reaction would be?

Which was why I mentioned a historical figure who did not share the left's views, or most of the far-right's, but who did have a healthy respect for the influence they had on the discourse and life in the society. He was able to let this respect affect what he supported in public.

Yes, no one is willing to do something like that today. And merrily we roll along.

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author

Of course these are worthy of engagement. Who said that they're not?

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The question of engaging is actually exactly the problem. I don't think Noah is suggesting that the critique from the left is invalid. But it is definitely delivered in a way that is un-engageable, and the aggressively anti-patriotic rhetoric used by progressive activists is usually why.

We should be able to critique something that we love, and live with that cognitive dissonance. Most progressive activists can't, and so they have to contextualize issues like police reform as a symptom of a fundamental and institutional white supremacist state. This behavior disenfranchises and villifies, and it's a political loser, which has consequences in a democracy.

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Apr 1·edited Apr 1

And so the left makes itself irrelevant, willingly. Which raises the overall question of why centrist people care so much.

The field is theirs! They can and do have their ideal public policy. Public discourse champions capitalism, and the ruralophilia of US society and media is as strong as ever. Why devote any energy to a weak defeated opponent?

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The Democratic electorate has moved left on virtually every issue, so it doesn't exactly feel like winning. Yes, the centrists are maintaining control of the party, but the left wing is loud and makes it harder and harder to win elections. This realignment has lost reliable blue-collar union Democrats to the Right and the only thing keeping Dems in the game was Trump losing white collar Republicans to the Left. Once the Trump boogeyman is gone, the leftward ideological trend of the party is going to really hurt it.

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Mostly because the left is pretty dominate culturally, socially, in higher institutions and among the elites, in our major cities. Like the people who are mostly likely to be left are most upper middle highly educated people that work in white color professions and have an outsize roll on discourse - the elites!

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But to a fairly neutral observer, your comment proves Noah's point. There is no "spirit of good faith" to say the left just wants to critique the nature of US society while the right wants to tear down the country and replace it with Gilead. To bring this back to the flag, I'd estimate roughly 100% of American flags are flown by moderate to conservative households. They do that because they love their country despite its many problems from their viewpoint. Liberals can only appear that they hate the country so much they can't tolerate the flag. It's hard to square this with your depiction of the two sides.

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And why can't a patriot "engage" with a critique of US imperial power?" That sounds to me like a Right-wing canard.

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Not saying they can't, but on the left it comes from and produces anti-patriotism. The assumptions are different. So, patriotism isn't the left's basis.

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I think he does take these viewpoints seriously, it's not as though he is trying to deny that racism exists or that the nation has ever done anything bad. But an accurate framework would see both the good and the bad together.

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Apr 1·edited Apr 1

Thanks for the repost. I frequently bash the extremes of both parties, but for what it is worth, it is important to remember that many of the "Critical Schools" of thought can serve as a kind of canary in the coal mine. They may not be (frequently are not) correct in a larger sense, but they are great at highlighting inconsistencies and forcing some debates that can make us better as a nation.

I think it's important to have some of these extreme ideas like the critical schools, if only to keep the mainstream honest. However, it is essential to ensure they stay extremes and don't become mainstream (because they are so frequently incorrect and encourage extreme solutions that often cause more harm than good). I think patriotism, when defined as the set of values as articulated in the Declaration of Independence, can help keep us open to the important things we can learn from programs like DEI while framing them in the context of respecting individual agency and liberty. This in turn helps us mine the positive aspects, be less hypocritical but also avoid adopting the most counter-productive impulses of those groups.

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Generally I agree with you, but I am worried that the criticism has gone too far, to the extent that cynicism has become the national narrative.

"You may be deceived if you trust too much, but you will live in torment if you don't trust enough" -Frank Crane

We used to be a nation full of people who trusted our government too much and they built the greatest beacon of freedom in the world. Today we don't trust our government at all and the result seems to just be greater misery and the inability to solve even small problems.

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Apr 1Liked by Noah Smith

In re patriotism, Putin picked a fight with the wrong people:

https://theathletic.com/5375905/2024/03/31/ihor-verys-ultramarathon-ukraine-barkley/

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Apr 1Liked by Noah Smith

I am of the opposite mind from Noah on many things, but I enjoy his posts because he lays out his arguments well and without obvious malice to opposing views when he addresses them. I agree that love of our nation is getting harder to find, but for many I think we are just depressed to see where we are right now, and so many afraid to speak at all for fear of either the left or right mob will come for them - in some cases in person. I have always felt we can be at our loudest at the ballot box. I wouldn't give you a dime for either political party at the moment, so I will have to think long and hard about what my vote will say.

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If you want to accurately see where we are right now, compare it to where we have been, or to any realistic alternative in the world around us. I think the thing that makes people on the left and right so angry about America is a lack of perspective. The left needs to understand that America is both far less racist compared to it's history and to virtually all of the world around us. The right needs to understand that there is no anti-liberalism movement has achieved better living conditions than us. Our best critics would rather be here than anywhere else. That tells you everything that matters.

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Apr 1Liked by Noah Smith

Smart. I’ll work on it.

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"a majority of Americans are either “extremely proud” or “very proud” of their country"

Noah has figured it out without realizing it. The Right is proud of American history, but the Left is proud of secular liberalism. Each one's source of pride is dismissed as not only irrelevant but hateful by the other side. Essentially, we disagree about te most fundamental definitions of "good" and "evil", and that's a theological problem not a political one.

I have to be honest, considering the warmongering and export of cultural rot we have facilitated in the last 20 years, I could not answer the poll question "America has always been a force for good in the world" in the affirmative today.

Noah is also correct that the MAGA movement has "repudiated Ronald Reagan". Yes it has. Trump destroyed the GOP's 3-legged, fusionist stool (ménage à trois never really work for long) and thus dethroned the Reagan's libertarian sentiments. But the movement has rediscovered Burke's conservative ones at the same time.

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The force for good is always relative. The world has become better in the 70+ years. A force for good compared to our lofty ideals? Probably not. Force for good in comparison to any of the other options and past hegemonies? Yes

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Taking pride in being an American seems as silly as being proud to be a hominid. Americans, like hominids, do astonishingly brilliant things and appalling awful things, and much of what Americans and hominids do as groups is unexceptional. Can't we just like the things we like about being Americans, and dislike the things we dislike -- which are, in any event, completely subjective -- and focus our public lives on solving the problems that everyone agrees are problems -- like, say, the ridiculousness of our healthcare system, the lack of affordable housing, the baleful effects of income and wealth inequality, the epidemic of addiction and lifestyle diseases, the increasingly dire effects of climate change (which are quickly rendering large swathes of the country uninsurable and, more slowly, uninhabitable). No one needs to be patriotic or anti-patriotic to solve problems -- you only need to want to make the place where, by accident, you live, better.

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Apr 1·edited Apr 1

My family is normal and unexceptional, but it is the only one I'll get and I love them, even if objectively as people they are unremarkable. That's how I and many people feel about being American and patriotism in general. I don't think there is something uniquely special about the people, but they're my people in a way that a German, Japanese, or even Canadian will never be. It is the history and context by which I understand my place in the world and the only polity that I can have direct influence over. That is the nature of my patriotism, the love of family because it's mine, and it comes before we even begin to list the many accomplishments and failures of the country.

PS - I get many people have shitty families they want nothing to do with. This was just was a metaphor that obviously has its limits

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Yes, Reagan could deliver a speech; he was a pretty good actor, which paid dividends as a politician, but I never trusted or liked him. He seemed a total fraud with a winning smile and demeanor, and always telling pretty good jokes. Those helped his popularity.

Reagan, perhaps more than anyone else, attacked and crippled government; it became the sum of all evil during his administration. But check out Paul Krugman's 2007 take on him:

"There’s a campaign on to exonerate Ronald Reagan from the charge that he deliberately made use of Nixon’s Southern strategy. When he went to Philadelphia, Mississippi, in 1980, the town where the civil rights workers had been murdered, and declared that 'I believe in states’ rights,' he didn’t mean to signal support for white racists. It was all just an innocent mistake.

Indeed, you really do have to feel sorry for Reagan. He just kept making those innocent mistakes.

When he went on about the welfare queen driving her Cadillac, and kept repeating the story years after it had been debunked, some people thought he was engaging in race-baiting. But it was all just an innocent mistake.

When, in 1976, he talked about working people angry about the “strapping young buck” using food stamps to buy T-bone steaks at the grocery store, he didn’t mean to play into racial hostility. True, as The New York Times reported, The ex-Governor has used the grocery-line illustration before, but in states like New Hampshire where there is scant black population, he has never used the expression 'young buck,' which, to whites in the South, generally denotes a large black man.

But the appearance that Reagan was playing to Southern prejudice was just an innocent mistake.

Similarly, when Reagan declared in 1980 that the Voting Rights Act had been 'humiliating to the South,' he didn’t mean to signal sympathy with segregationists. It was all an innocent mistake.

In 1982, when Reagan intervened on the side of Bob Jones University, which was on the verge of losing its tax-exempt status because of its ban on interracial dating, he had no idea that the issue was so racially charged. It was all an innocent mistake.

And the next year, when Reagan fired three members of the Civil Rights Commission, it wasn’t intended as a gesture of support to Southern whites. It was all an innocent mistake.

Poor Reagan. He just kept on making those innocent mistakes, again and again and again.

PS: It has been pointed out to me that Reagan opposed making Martin Luther King Day a national holiday, giving in only when Congress passed a law creating the holiday by a veto-proof majority. But he really didn’t mean to disrespect the civil rights movement – it was just an innocent mistake."

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I don't think Noah is a giant Reagan fan, I just think he's pointing out the success of Reagans strategy, as well as the way that MAGA has moved away from those strategies.

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No, MAGA is using the same racist strategy as Reagan, kind of a camouflaged racism. It's not blatant, but it's there and part of the glue that holds them together. Both Reagan and Nixon were wolves in sheep's clothing.

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Your coda seems incoherent from what you’ve said before: You’ve consistently refuted the idea of the U.S. as a colonizer, yet you give space to this 1619 nonsense as one pole in a struggle for America’s soul?

This doesn’t even go into the sheer nonsense of some of the pieces that compose the project, to the point where one of its heavily quoted academics, Baptist, was rejoindered by academics who’s work he used extensively to “stop making stuff up”

This “broken” era we’re currently in was formed by levels of bullshit on the left that were met with open arms by historians who should know better, from 1619 to the Thirteenthers. And now you suggest we hold these untruths to be self-evident, with the paranoiac NHJ as prophet to warn us away from the phantasm she herself created?

Fuck that. Fuck. That. You had it right the first time, no need to walk any of it back.

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Or in different words Elie Mystal can say "The Constitution is trash" in one instant and in another instant write a book expressing faith in the ability of the people to change the Constitution. Patriotism/love of country doesn't mean that all the decisions were made in the sacred past.

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(My prediction to Elie Mystal that Iowa-LSU will be a sideshow when UConn wins the whole thing again is still somewhat true)

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To borrow someone else's lingo, how dare POC Beyonce engage in cultural appropriation! Country music is by and for white folks! We should've drawn the line at Ray Charles!

BTW my outrage is purely faux.

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Apr 2·edited Apr 2

This idea that an unusually positive or negative view of America should be central to one's identity is something that doesn't just click to me about normie politics, leftists politics, or conservative politics. For me my "love" for America is unconditional, the way you would feel love and responsibility for a family member whether they make you proud, or screw up deeply, or do both.

If I were to explain it further, let's say to someone European, I'd say that America is "The Big Time". Largest military, largest economy, largest foreign-born population, center of English-language internet, center of Academia, center of Western tech and AI, etc. It matters what happens in America, even if you don't have any fondness or familiarity with it.

Now someone could say something similar about the European Union, or China, or Future India, or any other geopolitical category they'd like to invent. But actually, this is why I have an obsession with China. Because to me, China is "The Other Big Time", and what happens in China matters, even if you don't have any fondness or familiarity with it.

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