I actually think it is a very worthwhile project to inject patriotism into progressive discourse. I personally get my fix from reading good Lincoln, imagining the big Confederate tears whenever daddy Grant told them no terms except unconditional surrender, and jamming out to Woody Guthrie's anti-fascist folk tunes. We need more of that. I'm a progressive liberal and I fucking love this country and we need more of us.
Are people here familiar with Richard Rorty's "Achieving Our Country"? Part of the message of that book is that liberals need to get more comfortable with embracing national pride... written over 20 years ago and yet we're still struggling with this issue.
I’d love to play an isometric detective RTS where you start right after Lincoln was shot and the events move in real time as you try and catch the assassin. I am a nerd.
I wouldn't participate in civil war re-enactments as it seems pretty goofy to me. But to the extent that real people from the North and South went out and bonded in some way, I'm not against it. But to the extent, it's people trying to vent for past wrong doings, I would think it was a good idea.
But I think people need to come to that conclusion themselves and if I had the power, I'm not sure I would shut it down.
I think it's your fantasy of killing that's would be the disturbing part. I'm sure most Union soldiers thought the war was necessary but most didn't relish killing. Many slaves didn't hope for violent retribution.
I don't know, I guess I think righting wrongs and freeing people from bondage are nice things to dream of, and there are times that could require violence. But fantasizing, focusing on or relishing the violence is kind of disturbed and not something to be proud of.
There's a quote from the Gandhi movie (and I assume the real life Gandhi), something to the effect of "I want to change their minds, not punish them for weaknesses we all possess" that's nice to aspire to.
It just seems like a bad idea to me to get enjoyment from killing other Americans. Even if it’s imaginary. I think it’s a bad idea to go back as nazis and kill Americans. I think it’s bad to go back as southerners and kill northern Americans. Clearly, I don’t think FPS is a good idea in general.
I have bad news for you because Far Cry 5 has been out for years and it has made hundreds of millions of dollars and people love it. The game is about shooting militia crazies in Montana.
1. The current mainstream of American “conservatism” does not give a damn about economic performance, occasional attempts to pretend Reagan’s legacy works well aside. Trump’s version of the GOP is defined by a single concept: own the libs. There is no policy discussion because no one cares about policy.
2. Few progressives spend enough time abroad or study foreign societies deeply enough to realize how rare the US is to be as, well, progressive on race as it is.
Virtually everywhere else in the world it is more common and less stigmatized to be bigoted against various groups and openly talk about it. Civil society groups are less effective at highlighting the issues surrounding race, statistical data is never gathered or analyzed, and the governments don’t even attempt policy fixes.
There are few places that do better by multi-racial citizens than the US (including Canada, from which we could learn quite a bit) and many that do worse (including traditional progressive idols Sweden, France, Germany, and Denmark).
It would be helpful to the progressive movement, in support of a healthy sense of patriotism, to have views more rooted in history and balance on the matter. It would also mean that my older black neighbors don’t find young white progressives completely nuts.
I think “own the libs” is a bit of a facade. I think the right actually does have values but they are illiberal values. They haven’t quite figured out how to talk about them on the public stage. Therefore, you get performative “own the libs” theater. Tucker going to Hungary is at least more authentic than this.
"Own the libs" is a lowbrow rhetorical substitute for the word "reaction". So yes, it's a façade, but it's also a very good summary of the substance of the "conservative" program here.
As much as some people, like Dreher, would like to pretend otherwise, very few of the GOP's current illiberal values and stances are rooted in tradition. They're rooted, quite simply, in opposition to whatever the other side is doing or places value on at this moment in time. They are reactionary in the original, most basic sense of the word.
There are elites on the right with an agenda, sure. But for the vast majority of the right-wing electorate, what binds them and motivates them is culture war.
I think the point of the conservative elites in question is that the culture war *is* their agenda. Thus why they distain the chamber-of-commerce/neocon Republicans of years past and why they'd sacrifice so much of what makes America American for cultural dominance.
The culture war isn't substantive in policy or societal terms - it's mostly just complaint about things that make you uncomfortable - but it's very substantive in political or audience terms. If your goal is to win votes or get people to watch your show, culture war stuff works very well
I think they’re wrong, but they sincerely think it’s the inverse, policy and society downstream of culture, so the culture war is the *most* substantive thing — it’s the war for the future.
That would be true if the "culture war" was in fact a war fought to control future American culture. Instead, it's a political war over the conclusions to be drawn from current American culture...which is not at all the same thing.
I would suggest if the left (such as it is, mostly an anti-free speech commissariat) wants to get more votes they drop, not only 'culture war issues' and their 'anti-racism/woke bona fides' but words that set teeth on edge, like 'normie' and 'middle class narcissism'.
The conservative elite wants low taxes and transfer of wealth up. That's been consistent, see "The Big Con" and other works. Culture war is how you reach power with an unpopular economic agenda. True also for Orban.
Absolutely the case. What I find fascinating and hilarious is how little the sort of Potemkin Village of conservative intellectuals understand about the nature of their movement.
I’m sure many rich elites are riding the populist wave in hopes that keeps giving them tax cuts, but don’t underestimate the number of True Believers who would happily disregard financial conservatism in pursuit of cultural power.
As another point, the liberal elite is more disparate and harder to pin down, but seems much more motivated by social issues than economic ones, which explains why the Democratic party isn't as good at exploiting Republican weakness on economic issues.
Agreed, I think the framing of "both sides" is a critical fallacy when thinking about american politics. One "side" is a loose multiracial coalition with a million different competing small-bore interests, many of which are at serious odds with one another. The other "side" is an anti-democratic white identity party that, for a very long time, has been effectively harnessed to a plutocratic agenda. Right now the latter side has been oriented around the GOP, but at different times that's not been the case.
Conservative elites are absolutely driven by maintenance of hierarchy and a belief that having wealth makes one more moral. That doesn't necessarily translate to the "side". If you look at what the conservative elite goes to the mat for, despite its unpopularity, it is always tax cuts, eliminating minimum wage, destroying Social Security/Medicare, cutting benefits, etc. I don't think the conservative base believes this, which is part of the reason Trump is popular. This is the distinction between the base and the elites.
I don't know what "civil liberalism" is but law and order are certainly possible in urban places. In fact we have pretty good law and order in most urban places, though it could be improved by policing reform.
Objection #1: Japan is very diverse.[1] In fact, Singapore is too: "Education in Singapore is bilingual whereby English is the main medium of instruction and students are also taught a second language which may be Malay, Mandarin, or Tamil."[2] is unthinkably cosmopolitan relative to American conservatism.[3]
Objection #2: On the scale of Mogadishu to Tokyo, most American cities are much closer to Tokyo than Mogadishu. But Somalia is 85% Somali[4] — more homogenous than Singapore![2] If you examine all cities, and not just relatively-crime free ones, I think you'll find that the trend is not nearly so pronounced.
Objection #3: Inasmuch as a trend exists, it is because of a confounder. Nations (in the sense of ethnicity) are imaginary,[5] and produced by a strong central state to ensure a populace's loyalty. So strong states tend to assimilate minorities. They also tend to be good at suppressing crime. So a larger proportion of people in low-crime cities will tend to imagine themselves native.
Reading this makes me wish American politicians or commentators weren’t considered ready for the job until they had spent a couple of years living in another country. So many takes about how country x is THE model to follow, or country y is a shithole nation, strike me as hopelessly naive, and the type of thing one would never say if one had actual experience living somewhere else. (This is not a criticism of Matt Y, this is a criticism of those on the left who worship the social democracies of Europe, and those on the right who elevate dictators.)
Spending five years in Germany and Austria in the mid-2000s — a fresh graduate of an ultra liberal university, on Fulbright, then staying on as a PhD student — was some of the best political education I ever had. There’s the initial shine: public transportation is so good here! People take care of each other! I don’t have to worry about healthcare benefits! And then eventually some skepticism: why is there this sense that the best achievement is to work as little as possible until you get your pension from the government? Does the strength of this social safety net result in a lack of urgency, or is it something else? Why does this feel different? And is that urgency I feel once more as soon as I land in London good, actually?
The absence of nuance in these sorts of discussions are a good indicator of an embarrassing absence of experience. There’s a lot to learn from other countries, and a lot that’s good about this one. Once you live abroad for awhile, you know!
That’s true of almost every country you could go live in, I think, if you’re at all adventurous. Sure, there are examples with no redeeming features, but most folks won’t end up there in the first place.
China had a similar sheen for years 1-2 of my 6-year stint:
“Wow, it’s so dynamic”
“The culture take care of family”
“Mass transit is awesome here”
“The government seems to be loosening up, maybe their politics will liberalize”
“Damn, that’s an impressive public project”
“The people really do work harder than Americans”
Only once you’ve been somewhere a while do you know the place well enough to understand the ugly underbelly. And there always is one.
Sometimes it goes the other way. My first experiences with LA were mostly negative—the cars, the mostly-ugly architecture, the lack of an attractive city center—but the longer I’ve lived here the more I’ve come to appreciate what runs beneath it all.
Although I was primed for an interest in urban planning/development issues from various things earlier on (including reading early Matt Yglesias), my biggest impetus to get into it was my first six months in LA, discovering that it wasn't what I had heard in all the stories when I lived in the Bay Area, but was actually a great thing of its own (yes with lots of dysfunction, but also with many advantages over the Bay Area, even in some aspects in terms of walkability and transit).
I was raised in the Bay Area too! The amount of looking down our nose we did about LA was shameful. Now, well, LA has its problems but the Bay Area is in a full blown crisis that it seems incapable of pulling out of.
I wasn't raised in the Bay Area, but I did do undergrad and grad school there. (I think we discovered in a previous comment thread that we were in Berkeley in different years though?) I do remember a bit after 2010 starting to feel like the Bay Area was sliding towards some sort of disaster that LA was avoiding, though I think my image of how bad it was about to get in the Bay Area, and how much LA was avoiding it, were both overblown.
I didn't know what planning was when I was in college reading literature and philosophy. After I had been working in policy for a while, I did a stint in London. Living without a car was a revelation--I had always hated driving (despite growing up in the super-auto-centric Detroit suburbs). My interest in walkability/transit/physical planning grew from there, and now it's what I do professionally.
In that respect, a lot of other countries have us beat (in my opinion, in large part because of historical development patterns), but the time abroad was instructive in other ways. Random example: I found my British colleagues' willingness to be considered "subjects" as opposed to "citizens" incredible.
I think it is valuable to travel/live abroad and if that is not possible try to read widely about other countries. That said a couple caveats:
1. People want to be good hosts and want to show off the best of their home. That is natural!
2. It is important not to just assume that the relevant political issues in another country are the same as they are in the USA. For example Germany has been slowing its own growth and impoverishing its neighbors for the last two decades by insisting on maintaining a positive trade balance! This is not something that US policy makers are considering doing that much about, we are generally fine with the trade deficit as it is.
3. I think it is wise to use other countries to question things you assume to be true about politics and economics. For example in the United States it is taken for granted that culturally liberal big cities are the most successful. But in Germany the richest part of the country (the South) is the most culturally conservative.
Ultimately I don't think saying "Denmark is better than the USA because of universal health insurance" is a very useful point. All you are expressing are domestic political preferences but using a foreign example. Looking at foreign countries off the typical "left/right" scale of US politics allows you to see there are a lot more possibilities in the world...
I didn't read the comment as purporting that it would make people "more leftist," just that she suggests that living abroad is a mind-opening experience that enables one to view one's own country with a broader perspective and a bit of detachment.
That's too bad. This is my first time really noticing scf0101, and it just seems so obvious that he is some flavor of self-aware authoritarian. And I just don't think there is anything to gain interacting with a person like that.
Also seems like lowkey trolling. Matt attracts a wide range of viewpoints, but I’m not really here for “lol, immigrants are dirty and gay rights are woke overreach.” And that person is an incredibly prolific commenter.
You seem convinced that conservatives are in favor of institutionalizing the mentally ill homeless and drug addicted. And I just don't see that they are. I certainly favor it and I'm on the left.
Can you point me to a politician that's campaigning on a promise of reinsitionalizatio?
Those on the right don't want to spend the money to reopen the state hospitals. And I disagree about being destroyed. I think it has become obvious that as bad as the state hospitals were letting their patients out to rot on the street is worse.
A politician, with a decent amount of charisma and some good marketing, could make a strong case. For example - don't call it "reopening the state hospitals." Do some "death tax" rhetorical magic and call it "mandatory supportive housing."
A parenthetical comment on this side issue. If memory serves, many mentally ill people were released because of costly and inhumane conditions inside the large state-run facilities. The thought was that it would be easier to care for people closer to home. I guess this has proven incorrect or have we simply not tried to support this idea with sufficient resources?
As far as I know the issue was new drugs were developed that really seemed to help. So the thought was, obviously these folks would much rather live out in the world and as such would religiously take their medication. But as any of us who take a statin or blood pressure medication can attest, sometimes you miss a doss, forget to pick up your refill, etc. But with severe mental illness, this can often send someone into a downward spiral.
That, plus old-fashioned psychiatric institutions became obsolete with the development of modern antipsychotic pharmaceuticals that allow more people to live more normal lives. But as good as the drugs are, they do have side effects and not everyone wants to take them.
RE Ethnic homogeny in Central and Eastern Europe. Its very modern. I don't know if you've read Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War by Keith Lowe, but you should, it really highlights how historically odd the present ethnostates of central/eastern europe are. The years immediately following World War II saw continued violence and what we'd today call ethnic cleansing. Ukraine had big Hungarian and Polish minorities, and vice versa. Hungary had Roma, Germans, Serbs, Poles etc, because of course it did, it was the heart of one of Europe's great empires. But in the immediate post-war world a narrow ethnic nationalism won out. These countries had been at war with one another and with themselves for six years.
So the ethnic homogeneity and cultural purity of Hungary or wherever which the modern right lauds is actually a historical anomaly. During the pre-communist heyday of all these nations they were multi-cultural and were home to significant national minorities. So its not only dumb its fake.
(I don't think its mentioned in the book but its also interesting that Israel was founded in the same period where ethnostates just weren't odd. The Poles got a state and had to kick out Ukrainians and Ukraine got an SSR but had to kick out poles, and so on. Jews getting a state just makes way more sense viewed from the late 1940s than it does from today.)
While how it happened was indeed sad, the effect of what has happened is not that sad. Pre-1918 (or pre-1945 in case of Poland) multi-ethnic states were fragile and dysfunctional for the same reasons America becomes dysfunctional (you can't do X because it "disproportionally" affects population Y, even if X is badly needed). Austria-Hungary was dirty poor, and the only developed part of it (Bohemia) was also the only one with a clear ethnic majorities (Germans in Sudetes, Czechs elsewhere). The contrast to states which were either ethnostates (like France or UK), or had a strong ethnic majority dominating the country (like Prussia) was stark.
But I notice that here in the US the most diverse (in the sense of multiple ethnicities present, not just “% nonwhite”) cities and states tend to be the really successful ones. Am I wrong?
First, these places are diverse since relatively not long ago; 50 years or so. Austria-Hungary was diverse for more than a century. Second, and I think this is more complicated, Austria-Hungary was diverse mostly through conquest while the US is diverse mostly through immigration.
If you've asked me 10 years ago, I'd be very optimistic of the US future because of that. However, since a few years, and especially since last year, we've seen a major change in how the US thinks of diversity. Instead of "we're diverse and that contributes to create a one common American identity (that's blurred on the edges but has a defined core)", the US switched to "we're diverse and we must fight integration because integrating is partaking in the white supremacist culture of the US" or something along these lines. This second version comes with all sorts of ethnic/racial quotas, vehement opposition to the thought that broad social groups can have different outcomes coming from something else than discrimination etc. It's a Lebanization or South Africanization of the US in a sense, and these are not countries on the path to success.
I think you're also overlooking a truly enormous amount of diversity that existed in the big American cities of 100 years ago. Eastern European Jews, Southern Italian Catholics and unassimilated Germain-Americans rubbed shoulders with WASPS and Blacks everywhere you looked.
Nowadays we view most of those people as "White" but they certainly didn't consider themselves as all the same ethnicity back then. Diversity was very real 100 years ago in urban America, it's just been forgotten.
"White" began as a concept that meant only "not black or Chinese", back when the overwhelming majority of immigrants were ethnic whites.
That didn't mean that the to be "white" was to be equal. Far from it.
But the US, even when it's trying to be exclusionary, still manages to botch the job and assimilate people, and eventually "white" meant something very different, and the old rules mattered very little.
I have no doubt that the same thing will happen for Hispanic immigrants today, and probably Asian as well.
I lived briefly in a majority-Hispanic neighborhood before moving to my current majority-black one. From experience, I can tell you that the average African-American community is far more similar to white Americans than any group of immigrants.
To our shame, we've never quite managed to be open to that notion long enough to allow them to join the big tent with the rest of us. They've always been "othered" in some way.
That's true, but there are some very significant difference between those minorities and current minorities:
- they all named their children with generic American first names, and many changed their last names to American-sounding ones too (there are 10 million Polish Americans, twice as many as Chinese Americans; how many Polish last names do you hear daily?). By comparison, we all know the Kamala pronunciation debate
- when they moved to the suburbs, they all blended in because they were all white. Sure, recent immigrants from Europe could probably tell someone is looking very Slavic or very Germanic but most people couldn't. Newer minorities are what Canada calls a visible minority - they cannot blend that easily
"we're diverse and we must fight integration because integrating is partaking in the white supremacist culture of the US"
This is basically a strawman. It's an extremely narrowly-held view that would destroy any politician that embraced it.
The only place it exists in any meaningful way is on Twitter, among a small group of very loud people, and that mostly as a backlash to the bitch-fit that "conservatives" are throwing about being replaced.
I mean, I obviously exaggerated here a bit but you cannot be serious in saying that this is an extremely narrowly-held view. This is exactly the view of the Squad, it's a view that's being replicated nationwide through teacher's unions (remember, showing up on time is white supremacy), and especially in California, city councils are actively working to stop racial integration if it means white people moving into Latino or black neighborhoods.
I’m not knowledgeable about A-H but it’s obviously not true that these places in America have only been diverse for decades. New York was diverse early in the 19th century or even before; LA since the time it joined the US; San Francisco has one of the world’s oldest Chinatowns; etc.
I have my problems with the current approaches to diversity but our multiethnic polity is very well established and I think it would take a lot to turn us into South Africa, to put it mildly.
The question is how much of an impact Chinatown had on SF ca. 1950 for example. I would argue it was extremely limited. Chinatown is a bad example maybe, because as the Asian population grew in SF they actually integrated very well into the broader society (to the point that Asian neighborhoods - mostly on the West side, where Asian Americans moved - are the most Republican in SF) but if you look at the Mission (Latino), that's a very different story: actively fighting integration.
As for South Africanization, I agree that's not here yet but Lebanization is here already: you had the Democratic party nominee outright saying that his running mate will be a black woman (even though they haven't chosen one yet), and the Cabinet has been carefully crafted to represent all sorts of intersectionalities.
It's kind of a chicken and egg thing as successful areas tend to attract migrants who usually bring ethnic diversity. The most multi-ethnic yet non-immigrant part of the US is probably the deep south, where ethnic tensions have continually contributed to poverty and lack of development since they were created. On the other hand NYC has always been ethnically very diverse, but maybe that just goes to show that few things can be fully explained in a substack comment
And the South's history, not surprisingly, has a lot of parallels with South Africa. Sure, it wasn't "diversity through conquest", but "diversity through chattel slavery" is basically the same concept and has the same negative effects.
I think there's an interesting contrast here between the parts of the South that are diverse primarily through retained history (like Louisiana and Mississippi) and the parts that have turned that diversity into an active draw for immigration from other parts of the country (like Atlanta and Houston).
The most diverse cities are all older port cities though- that's just a requirement to be a wealthy city. Flyover country is poor because it's landlocked, the same way central Asia and Africa are poor.
Gotta love farm and ethanol subsidies, and how much of Nebraska's GDP is phony accounting attributing Berkshire Hathaway's income to Nebraska, the way Ireland pretends it's rich by laundering multi-national profits in return for low taxes?
And it's not like the Western European ethnostates are all that modern either.
Lots of people of German descent in Alsace and even Lorraine, plenty of Flemings in the Pas de Calais, when did Breton become a type of French person rather than something in opposition to Frenchness? Same for Corsican. Provençal used to be a type of Italian. And then there are the Occitans and the Catalans. Perpignan's rugby league team isn't called "Catalan Dragons" by mistake.
Now, they've integrated all of these people. Burgundy used to be a different country from France, but it's a classic French wine now. Ratatouille, perhaps the most "French" dish in many imaginations is Provençal; the name is a Occitan loanword.
The ethnic divisions of Spain and Italy and Switzerland are much better known. And the idea that Germany is a single homogenous ethnicity would have been a surprise to most Germans only a century and a half ago. The question of whether Austrians were German or not wasn't settled until the end of WWII.
And, of course, all of Europe had a lot more Jews until WWII.
Also, early twentieth century Europe was, in historical terms, unusually white. Shakespeare certainly had met black people of African descent in London when he wrote Othello. There were black people working on the docks everywhere from the moment the first one escape from a slave ship. The expulsion of the "Moriscos" (converted former Muslims) from Spain resulted in lots of people of Arab and Berber descent all over Europe. And there was no shortage of descendants of Mongols and earlier Steppe peoples - including, of course, Magyars, who would not have been nearly as white as the present speakers of their language.
The unfortunate conclusion I draw from studying history is that when ethnicities share a state or region they either eventually assimilate into one people or they eventually war and violently conflict with each other resulting in new states, expulsions, ethnic cleansing, etc.. The only exceptions I can find are minority groups that maintain their own culture while asking for no control over their majority neighbors, and even then, things like the Holocaust happen.
Happily the trend the US is for assimilation at greater and greater speeds. But there are many actors on both the right and left who would like our ethnicity (usually they would say our "race") to be a defining and permanent feature of our identity.
There are certainly non-war examples of a geographical split. Czechia and Slovakia is the first to come to mind; the so-called "Velvet Divorce".
How long are you expecting assimilation to take? Samnites and Romans were in a single country from about 300 BCE, where equal citizens from 80BCE but were still identifiably different as late as the Crisis of the Third Century. Gaul was Latin-speaking at the end of Roman rule after five centuries, but Britannia was Celtic-majority at the end of Roman rule after three and a half. Angles and Saxons had still not assimilated together at the Norman Conquest, though defining Anglo-Saxon against Norman probably pushed them together; Norman/Anglo-Saxon assimilation took at least two centuries; a Middle English-speaking England really took until the Edwards of the thirteenth century.
Black Americans and White Americans have only been equal citizens since 1964 at the earliest, so I think the expectation of a much faster assimilation is unreasonable. You really do have to wait until the people who were told about inequality by their grandparents have died at the very soonest.
I think that things like affirmative action are intended to accelerate assimilation, they might push groups apart in the short term, but they are clearly intended to achieve economic (and thus social) equality in a hurry, which is the prerequisite for full assimilation to begin.
True, it doesn't have to be violent. But eventually the ethnic groups living together either merge or split, and much like divorce, an amiable split is the exception rather than the rule.
All the data I've seen suggests that most big immigrant groups have assimilated, more or less fully, over the course of 3 or 4 generations, and the same is happening with today's Latinos. Although every time a new waves of Latinos enters the US the process is refreshed. But my impression is we can expect the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of today's Latino immigrant to have weak ties to a Latino identity. That's especially so given they will likely have non-Latino grandparents or great-grandparents.
For well known historical reasons Black assimilation didn't really get started until much later but it's increasing at an accelerating pace. As one major piece of evidence I'd point to interracial marriages which were at 3% of black marriages in 1980 and 18% in 2015 according to Pew. I'd also point to the weakening of religious and linguistic barriers to assimilation and even the generation gap in voting habits (younger Blacks vote Republican about 15% more than the elderly). I can't really guess how long it will be until we no longer think of Black and White Americans as separate racial groups but we are moving in the direction of getting their eventually.
The Great Demographic Illusion by Richard Alba is an interesting recent survey of data and trends on integration and assimilation in the US, and concludes its happening much more quickly than many expected.
I notice in my reading that the Romance-speaking parts of Roman Europe are correlated with extremely violent wars of conquest by the Romans. Caesar boasted that in Gaul he had killed a million and enslaved a million. The same happened in Spain. Same in Dacia (now Romania). At the end of this there were few of those people left to assimilate and their culture was annihilated. Britain never went through that process. Nor did Germany.
I'd always thought of affirmative action more strictly along the lines of "righting historical wrongs", rather than as assimilation - but I think the latter a very interesting and useful lens.
Taking it further, I think it's probably also useful to apply the assimilation lens when thinking about class and political divides. Regardless of how traditional ethnic assimilation progresses, there's still a danger of splitting on those other lines.
Is there any EU member-state that does NOT have a law like that? I think the US jus soli is the aberration instead. Having lived the majority of my life in the EU, I'm perplexed when Americans decry "ethnonationalism" but also say nice things about Europe.
>>>I'm perplexed when Americans decry "ethnonationalism" but also say nice things about Europe.<<<
Decrying European-style ethnonationalism while lauding European trains or healthcare doesn't seem very perplexing. Also, fairly large swaths of the continent have become ethnically diverse, and enjoy (at least pre-pandemic) sizable immigration inflows and a dynamic cosmopolitanism (though Eastern/Central Europe less so).
I also think it's reasonable to make allowances for European countries (not to mention Asian countries), who face a much higher degree of difficulty in *not* being ethnonationalistic. Their countries literally exist because certain people groups have lived there for hundreds if not thousands of years. They need to paddle upstream to be diverse. In the US, it's the other way around: we need to paddle upstream *not* to be diverse.
That's fair. Let me rephrase. Saying "I like Europe!" while disliking "ethnonationalism" is like saying "I like the US!" while disliking the Declaration of Independence. Of course, you can like specific parts about each place (European trains or American universities) without endorsing the whole place.
As far as diversity is concerned, it depends. Do you consider a French National Team that has both Griezmann and Pogba as diverse? Or do you only see two different Frenchmen? You might remember the controversy when Trevor Noah celebrated the French World Cup win in a way that caused the intervention of French diplomatic authorities.
I guess it is confusing under your framing, which is a fair enough one. But another way to read the situation is there are people saying "ethno-nationalism is the worst political sin ever, you're literally Hitler if you support it" in one breath (tweet) and "we should be more like Europe" in the next. Those are very prominent sentiments from the left of the party.
Amsterdam, Dublin, Berlin, Barcelona, London, Lisbon, Frankfurt, Stockholm, Vienna, Madrid, Athens and Paris (and many others) are objectively cosmopolitan nodes of the global economy that are home to large numbers of foreigners. But sure, rural Poland or Hungary is less so. And these cities are housed in countries that, broadly speaking, employ policies that would improve life in the United States if adopted there. Not seeing the contradiction.
I disagree on this, and I’ll use examples from sports. Giannis was born and raised in Athens, but he couldn’t obtain Greek citizenship and was thus stateless until he became a good NBA prospect. Meanwhile, Italy played in the latest European Championship with Jorginho, a Brazilian guy who automatically got Italian citizenship because he had one Italian great grandparent. I don’t think this situation is comparable to the US.
Of course, there’s that whole Danish center-left thing about mandatorily teaching the kids of families coming from majority Muslim countries about Christmas.
I actually think it is a very worthwhile project to inject patriotism into progressive discourse. I personally get my fix from reading good Lincoln, imagining the big Confederate tears whenever daddy Grant told them no terms except unconditional surrender, and jamming out to Woody Guthrie's anti-fascist folk tunes. We need more of that. I'm a progressive liberal and I fucking love this country and we need more of us.
I feel exactly the same way.
Are people here familiar with Richard Rorty's "Achieving Our Country"? Part of the message of that book is that liberals need to get more comfortable with embracing national pride... written over 20 years ago and yet we're still struggling with this issue.
The whole aversion to 'nationalism' seems mistaken to me. Creating an in-group in which we all belong should be thought of as a good thing.
I’d love to play an isometric detective RTS where you start right after Lincoln was shot and the events move in real time as you try and catch the assassin. I am a nerd.
I hope the market isn't giving you this. But it wouldn't surprise me if it was.
Would you like to shut down civil war re-enactments? There is a whole industry doing this in person.
I wouldn't participate in civil war re-enactments as it seems pretty goofy to me. But to the extent that real people from the North and South went out and bonded in some way, I'm not against it. But to the extent, it's people trying to vent for past wrong doings, I would think it was a good idea.
But I think people need to come to that conclusion themselves and if I had the power, I'm not sure I would shut it down.
I think it's your fantasy of killing that's would be the disturbing part. I'm sure most Union soldiers thought the war was necessary but most didn't relish killing. Many slaves didn't hope for violent retribution.
I don't know, I guess I think righting wrongs and freeing people from bondage are nice things to dream of, and there are times that could require violence. But fantasizing, focusing on or relishing the violence is kind of disturbed and not something to be proud of.
There's a quote from the Gandhi movie (and I assume the real life Gandhi), something to the effect of "I want to change their minds, not punish them for weaknesses we all possess" that's nice to aspire to.
It just seems like a bad idea to me to get enjoyment from killing other Americans. Even if it’s imaginary. I think it’s a bad idea to go back as nazis and kill Americans. I think it’s bad to go back as southerners and kill northern Americans. Clearly, I don’t think FPS is a good idea in general.
I have bad news for you because Far Cry 5 has been out for years and it has made hundreds of millions of dollars and people love it. The game is about shooting militia crazies in Montana.
Of course in a lot of those games you can play as the Nazis too.
And the southerners.
Which ones?
Based on my google search, Call of Duty allows this.
Two points:
1. The current mainstream of American “conservatism” does not give a damn about economic performance, occasional attempts to pretend Reagan’s legacy works well aside. Trump’s version of the GOP is defined by a single concept: own the libs. There is no policy discussion because no one cares about policy.
2. Few progressives spend enough time abroad or study foreign societies deeply enough to realize how rare the US is to be as, well, progressive on race as it is.
Virtually everywhere else in the world it is more common and less stigmatized to be bigoted against various groups and openly talk about it. Civil society groups are less effective at highlighting the issues surrounding race, statistical data is never gathered or analyzed, and the governments don’t even attempt policy fixes.
There are few places that do better by multi-racial citizens than the US (including Canada, from which we could learn quite a bit) and many that do worse (including traditional progressive idols Sweden, France, Germany, and Denmark).
It would be helpful to the progressive movement, in support of a healthy sense of patriotism, to have views more rooted in history and balance on the matter. It would also mean that my older black neighbors don’t find young white progressives completely nuts.
I think “own the libs” is a bit of a facade. I think the right actually does have values but they are illiberal values. They haven’t quite figured out how to talk about them on the public stage. Therefore, you get performative “own the libs” theater. Tucker going to Hungary is at least more authentic than this.
"Own the libs" is a lowbrow rhetorical substitute for the word "reaction". So yes, it's a façade, but it's also a very good summary of the substance of the "conservative" program here.
As much as some people, like Dreher, would like to pretend otherwise, very few of the GOP's current illiberal values and stances are rooted in tradition. They're rooted, quite simply, in opposition to whatever the other side is doing or places value on at this moment in time. They are reactionary in the original, most basic sense of the word.
David Brooks has a good taxonomy of both sides in the current Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/09/blame-the-bobos-creative-class/619492/
There are elites on the right with an agenda, sure. But for the vast majority of the right-wing electorate, what binds them and motivates them is culture war.
I think the point of the conservative elites in question is that the culture war *is* their agenda. Thus why they distain the chamber-of-commerce/neocon Republicans of years past and why they'd sacrifice so much of what makes America American for cultural dominance.
The culture war isn't substantive in policy or societal terms - it's mostly just complaint about things that make you uncomfortable - but it's very substantive in political or audience terms. If your goal is to win votes or get people to watch your show, culture war stuff works very well
I think they’re wrong, but they sincerely think it’s the inverse, policy and society downstream of culture, so the culture war is the *most* substantive thing — it’s the war for the future.
That would be true if the "culture war" was in fact a war fought to control future American culture. Instead, it's a political war over the conclusions to be drawn from current American culture...which is not at all the same thing.
C.f. https://scholars-stage.org/culture-wars-are-long-wars/
I would suggest if the left (such as it is, mostly an anti-free speech commissariat) wants to get more votes they drop, not only 'culture war issues' and their 'anti-racism/woke bona fides' but words that set teeth on edge, like 'normie' and 'middle class narcissism'.
The conservative elite wants low taxes and transfer of wealth up. That's been consistent, see "The Big Con" and other works. Culture war is how you reach power with an unpopular economic agenda. True also for Orban.
Absolutely the case. What I find fascinating and hilarious is how little the sort of Potemkin Village of conservative intellectuals understand about the nature of their movement.
I’m sure many rich elites are riding the populist wave in hopes that keeps giving them tax cuts, but don’t underestimate the number of True Believers who would happily disregard financial conservatism in pursuit of cultural power.
As another point, the liberal elite is more disparate and harder to pin down, but seems much more motivated by social issues than economic ones, which explains why the Democratic party isn't as good at exploiting Republican weakness on economic issues.
Agreed, I think the framing of "both sides" is a critical fallacy when thinking about american politics. One "side" is a loose multiracial coalition with a million different competing small-bore interests, many of which are at serious odds with one another. The other "side" is an anti-democratic white identity party that, for a very long time, has been effectively harnessed to a plutocratic agenda. Right now the latter side has been oriented around the GOP, but at different times that's not been the case.
Conservative elites are absolutely driven by maintenance of hierarchy and a belief that having wealth makes one more moral. That doesn't necessarily translate to the "side". If you look at what the conservative elite goes to the mat for, despite its unpopularity, it is always tax cuts, eliminating minimum wage, destroying Social Security/Medicare, cutting benefits, etc. I don't think the conservative base believes this, which is part of the reason Trump is popular. This is the distinction between the base and the elites.
I don't know what "civil liberalism" is but law and order are certainly possible in urban places. In fact we have pretty good law and order in most urban places, though it could be improved by policing reform.
I mean pretty good on a scale of things that are worth making national political issues.
Objection #1: Japan is very diverse.[1] In fact, Singapore is too: "Education in Singapore is bilingual whereby English is the main medium of instruction and students are also taught a second language which may be Malay, Mandarin, or Tamil."[2] is unthinkably cosmopolitan relative to American conservatism.[3]
Objection #2: On the scale of Mogadishu to Tokyo, most American cities are much closer to Tokyo than Mogadishu. But Somalia is 85% Somali[4] — more homogenous than Singapore![2] If you examine all cities, and not just relatively-crime free ones, I think you'll find that the trend is not nearly so pronounced.
Objection #3: Inasmuch as a trend exists, it is because of a confounder. Nations (in the sense of ethnicity) are imaginary,[5] and produced by a strong central state to ensure a populace's loyalty. So strong states tend to assimilate minorities. They also tend to be good at suppressing crime. So a larger proportion of people in low-crime cities will tend to imagine themselves native.
[1]: https://noahpinion.substack.com/p/how-homogeneous-is-japan
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Demographics_of_Singapore&oldid=1033045617
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Geno%27s_Steaks&oldid=1035110904#English_sign_controversy
[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Somalia&oldid=1037134379
[5]: https://acoup.blog/2021/07/02/collections-my-country-isnt-a-nation/
Reading this makes me wish American politicians or commentators weren’t considered ready for the job until they had spent a couple of years living in another country. So many takes about how country x is THE model to follow, or country y is a shithole nation, strike me as hopelessly naive, and the type of thing one would never say if one had actual experience living somewhere else. (This is not a criticism of Matt Y, this is a criticism of those on the left who worship the social democracies of Europe, and those on the right who elevate dictators.)
Spending five years in Germany and Austria in the mid-2000s — a fresh graduate of an ultra liberal university, on Fulbright, then staying on as a PhD student — was some of the best political education I ever had. There’s the initial shine: public transportation is so good here! People take care of each other! I don’t have to worry about healthcare benefits! And then eventually some skepticism: why is there this sense that the best achievement is to work as little as possible until you get your pension from the government? Does the strength of this social safety net result in a lack of urgency, or is it something else? Why does this feel different? And is that urgency I feel once more as soon as I land in London good, actually?
The absence of nuance in these sorts of discussions are a good indicator of an embarrassing absence of experience. There’s a lot to learn from other countries, and a lot that’s good about this one. Once you live abroad for awhile, you know!
That’s true of almost every country you could go live in, I think, if you’re at all adventurous. Sure, there are examples with no redeeming features, but most folks won’t end up there in the first place.
China had a similar sheen for years 1-2 of my 6-year stint:
“Wow, it’s so dynamic”
“The culture take care of family”
“Mass transit is awesome here”
“The government seems to be loosening up, maybe their politics will liberalize”
“Damn, that’s an impressive public project”
“The people really do work harder than Americans”
Only once you’ve been somewhere a while do you know the place well enough to understand the ugly underbelly. And there always is one.
Sometimes it goes the other way. My first experiences with LA were mostly negative—the cars, the mostly-ugly architecture, the lack of an attractive city center—but the longer I’ve lived here the more I’ve come to appreciate what runs beneath it all.
Although I was primed for an interest in urban planning/development issues from various things earlier on (including reading early Matt Yglesias), my biggest impetus to get into it was my first six months in LA, discovering that it wasn't what I had heard in all the stories when I lived in the Bay Area, but was actually a great thing of its own (yes with lots of dysfunction, but also with many advantages over the Bay Area, even in some aspects in terms of walkability and transit).
I was raised in the Bay Area too! The amount of looking down our nose we did about LA was shameful. Now, well, LA has its problems but the Bay Area is in a full blown crisis that it seems incapable of pulling out of.
I wasn't raised in the Bay Area, but I did do undergrad and grad school there. (I think we discovered in a previous comment thread that we were in Berkeley in different years though?) I do remember a bit after 2010 starting to feel like the Bay Area was sliding towards some sort of disaster that LA was avoiding, though I think my image of how bad it was about to get in the Bay Area, and how much LA was avoiding it, were both overblown.
You’re right, we did cover this ground.
I didn't know what planning was when I was in college reading literature and philosophy. After I had been working in policy for a while, I did a stint in London. Living without a car was a revelation--I had always hated driving (despite growing up in the super-auto-centric Detroit suburbs). My interest in walkability/transit/physical planning grew from there, and now it's what I do professionally.
In that respect, a lot of other countries have us beat (in my opinion, in large part because of historical development patterns), but the time abroad was instructive in other ways. Random example: I found my British colleagues' willingness to be considered "subjects" as opposed to "citizens" incredible.
I think it is valuable to travel/live abroad and if that is not possible try to read widely about other countries. That said a couple caveats:
1. People want to be good hosts and want to show off the best of their home. That is natural!
2. It is important not to just assume that the relevant political issues in another country are the same as they are in the USA. For example Germany has been slowing its own growth and impoverishing its neighbors for the last two decades by insisting on maintaining a positive trade balance! This is not something that US policy makers are considering doing that much about, we are generally fine with the trade deficit as it is.
3. I think it is wise to use other countries to question things you assume to be true about politics and economics. For example in the United States it is taken for granted that culturally liberal big cities are the most successful. But in Germany the richest part of the country (the South) is the most culturally conservative.
Ultimately I don't think saying "Denmark is better than the USA because of universal health insurance" is a very useful point. All you are expressing are domestic political preferences but using a foreign example. Looking at foreign countries off the typical "left/right" scale of US politics allows you to see there are a lot more possibilities in the world...
I didn't read the comment as purporting that it would make people "more leftist," just that she suggests that living abroad is a mind-opening experience that enables one to view one's own country with a broader perspective and a bit of detachment.
It’s telling that a process like that scans as “Leftist” to scf
How do you mute people on Substack?
You can't unfortunately :(
That's too bad. This is my first time really noticing scf0101, and it just seems so obvious that he is some flavor of self-aware authoritarian. And I just don't think there is anything to gain interacting with a person like that.
Also seems like lowkey trolling. Matt attracts a wide range of viewpoints, but I’m not really here for “lol, immigrants are dirty and gay rights are woke overreach.” And that person is an incredibly prolific commenter.
You seem convinced that conservatives are in favor of institutionalizing the mentally ill homeless and drug addicted. And I just don't see that they are. I certainly favor it and I'm on the left.
Can you point me to a politician that's campaigning on a promise of reinsitionalizatio?
Those on the right don't want to spend the money to reopen the state hospitals. And I disagree about being destroyed. I think it has become obvious that as bad as the state hospitals were letting their patients out to rot on the street is worse.
A politician, with a decent amount of charisma and some good marketing, could make a strong case. For example - don't call it "reopening the state hospitals." Do some "death tax" rhetorical magic and call it "mandatory supportive housing."
A parenthetical comment on this side issue. If memory serves, many mentally ill people were released because of costly and inhumane conditions inside the large state-run facilities. The thought was that it would be easier to care for people closer to home. I guess this has proven incorrect or have we simply not tried to support this idea with sufficient resources?
As far as I know the issue was new drugs were developed that really seemed to help. So the thought was, obviously these folks would much rather live out in the world and as such would religiously take their medication. But as any of us who take a statin or blood pressure medication can attest, sometimes you miss a doss, forget to pick up your refill, etc. But with severe mental illness, this can often send someone into a downward spiral.
That, plus old-fashioned psychiatric institutions became obsolete with the development of modern antipsychotic pharmaceuticals that allow more people to live more normal lives. But as good as the drugs are, they do have side effects and not everyone wants to take them.
I dunno but my recent visits to Tokyo and Singapore made me long for a bit more crime-ridden disorderly places. To each his own.
RE Ethnic homogeny in Central and Eastern Europe. Its very modern. I don't know if you've read Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War by Keith Lowe, but you should, it really highlights how historically odd the present ethnostates of central/eastern europe are. The years immediately following World War II saw continued violence and what we'd today call ethnic cleansing. Ukraine had big Hungarian and Polish minorities, and vice versa. Hungary had Roma, Germans, Serbs, Poles etc, because of course it did, it was the heart of one of Europe's great empires. But in the immediate post-war world a narrow ethnic nationalism won out. These countries had been at war with one another and with themselves for six years.
So the ethnic homogeneity and cultural purity of Hungary or wherever which the modern right lauds is actually a historical anomaly. During the pre-communist heyday of all these nations they were multi-cultural and were home to significant national minorities. So its not only dumb its fake.
(I don't think its mentioned in the book but its also interesting that Israel was founded in the same period where ethnostates just weren't odd. The Poles got a state and had to kick out Ukrainians and Ukraine got an SSR but had to kick out poles, and so on. Jews getting a state just makes way more sense viewed from the late 1940s than it does from today.)
Yes exactly, they’ve made a virtue out of what is in fact just a very sad series of events.
While how it happened was indeed sad, the effect of what has happened is not that sad. Pre-1918 (or pre-1945 in case of Poland) multi-ethnic states were fragile and dysfunctional for the same reasons America becomes dysfunctional (you can't do X because it "disproportionally" affects population Y, even if X is badly needed). Austria-Hungary was dirty poor, and the only developed part of it (Bohemia) was also the only one with a clear ethnic majorities (Germans in Sudetes, Czechs elsewhere). The contrast to states which were either ethnostates (like France or UK), or had a strong ethnic majority dominating the country (like Prussia) was stark.
But I notice that here in the US the most diverse (in the sense of multiple ethnicities present, not just “% nonwhite”) cities and states tend to be the really successful ones. Am I wrong?
I think there are two aspects to it.
First, these places are diverse since relatively not long ago; 50 years or so. Austria-Hungary was diverse for more than a century. Second, and I think this is more complicated, Austria-Hungary was diverse mostly through conquest while the US is diverse mostly through immigration.
If you've asked me 10 years ago, I'd be very optimistic of the US future because of that. However, since a few years, and especially since last year, we've seen a major change in how the US thinks of diversity. Instead of "we're diverse and that contributes to create a one common American identity (that's blurred on the edges but has a defined core)", the US switched to "we're diverse and we must fight integration because integrating is partaking in the white supremacist culture of the US" or something along these lines. This second version comes with all sorts of ethnic/racial quotas, vehement opposition to the thought that broad social groups can have different outcomes coming from something else than discrimination etc. It's a Lebanization or South Africanization of the US in a sense, and these are not countries on the path to success.
I think you're also overlooking a truly enormous amount of diversity that existed in the big American cities of 100 years ago. Eastern European Jews, Southern Italian Catholics and unassimilated Germain-Americans rubbed shoulders with WASPS and Blacks everywhere you looked.
Nowadays we view most of those people as "White" but they certainly didn't consider themselves as all the same ethnicity back then. Diversity was very real 100 years ago in urban America, it's just been forgotten.
No one reads history anymore.
"White" began as a concept that meant only "not black or Chinese", back when the overwhelming majority of immigrants were ethnic whites.
That didn't mean that the to be "white" was to be equal. Far from it.
But the US, even when it's trying to be exclusionary, still manages to botch the job and assimilate people, and eventually "white" meant something very different, and the old rules mattered very little.
I have no doubt that the same thing will happen for Hispanic immigrants today, and probably Asian as well.
I lived briefly in a majority-Hispanic neighborhood before moving to my current majority-black one. From experience, I can tell you that the average African-American community is far more similar to white Americans than any group of immigrants.
To our shame, we've never quite managed to be open to that notion long enough to allow them to join the big tent with the rest of us. They've always been "othered" in some way.
That's true, but there are some very significant difference between those minorities and current minorities:
- they all named their children with generic American first names, and many changed their last names to American-sounding ones too (there are 10 million Polish Americans, twice as many as Chinese Americans; how many Polish last names do you hear daily?). By comparison, we all know the Kamala pronunciation debate
- when they moved to the suburbs, they all blended in because they were all white. Sure, recent immigrants from Europe could probably tell someone is looking very Slavic or very Germanic but most people couldn't. Newer minorities are what Canada calls a visible minority - they cannot blend that easily
"we're diverse and we must fight integration because integrating is partaking in the white supremacist culture of the US"
This is basically a strawman. It's an extremely narrowly-held view that would destroy any politician that embraced it.
The only place it exists in any meaningful way is on Twitter, among a small group of very loud people, and that mostly as a backlash to the bitch-fit that "conservatives" are throwing about being replaced.
I mean, I obviously exaggerated here a bit but you cannot be serious in saying that this is an extremely narrowly-held view. This is exactly the view of the Squad, it's a view that's being replicated nationwide through teacher's unions (remember, showing up on time is white supremacy), and especially in California, city councils are actively working to stop racial integration if it means white people moving into Latino or black neighborhoods.
I’m not knowledgeable about A-H but it’s obviously not true that these places in America have only been diverse for decades. New York was diverse early in the 19th century or even before; LA since the time it joined the US; San Francisco has one of the world’s oldest Chinatowns; etc.
I have my problems with the current approaches to diversity but our multiethnic polity is very well established and I think it would take a lot to turn us into South Africa, to put it mildly.
The question is how much of an impact Chinatown had on SF ca. 1950 for example. I would argue it was extremely limited. Chinatown is a bad example maybe, because as the Asian population grew in SF they actually integrated very well into the broader society (to the point that Asian neighborhoods - mostly on the West side, where Asian Americans moved - are the most Republican in SF) but if you look at the Mission (Latino), that's a very different story: actively fighting integration.
As for South Africanization, I agree that's not here yet but Lebanization is here already: you had the Democratic party nominee outright saying that his running mate will be a black woman (even though they haven't chosen one yet), and the Cabinet has been carefully crafted to represent all sorts of intersectionalities.
It's kind of a chicken and egg thing as successful areas tend to attract migrants who usually bring ethnic diversity. The most multi-ethnic yet non-immigrant part of the US is probably the deep south, where ethnic tensions have continually contributed to poverty and lack of development since they were created. On the other hand NYC has always been ethnically very diverse, but maybe that just goes to show that few things can be fully explained in a substack comment
And the South's history, not surprisingly, has a lot of parallels with South Africa. Sure, it wasn't "diversity through conquest", but "diversity through chattel slavery" is basically the same concept and has the same negative effects.
I think there's an interesting contrast here between the parts of the South that are diverse primarily through retained history (like Louisiana and Mississippi) and the parts that have turned that diversity into an active draw for immigration from other parts of the country (like Atlanta and Houston).
The most diverse cities are all older port cities though- that's just a requirement to be a wealthy city. Flyover country is poor because it's landlocked, the same way central Asia and Africa are poor.
The poorest parts of America are all in the South, the Upper Midwest is quite well-off. Nebraska has higher GDP per capita than New Jersey.
Gotta love farm and ethanol subsidies, and how much of Nebraska's GDP is phony accounting attributing Berkshire Hathaway's income to Nebraska, the way Ireland pretends it's rich by laundering multi-national profits in return for low taxes?
And it's not like the Western European ethnostates are all that modern either.
Lots of people of German descent in Alsace and even Lorraine, plenty of Flemings in the Pas de Calais, when did Breton become a type of French person rather than something in opposition to Frenchness? Same for Corsican. Provençal used to be a type of Italian. And then there are the Occitans and the Catalans. Perpignan's rugby league team isn't called "Catalan Dragons" by mistake.
Now, they've integrated all of these people. Burgundy used to be a different country from France, but it's a classic French wine now. Ratatouille, perhaps the most "French" dish in many imaginations is Provençal; the name is a Occitan loanword.
The ethnic divisions of Spain and Italy and Switzerland are much better known. And the idea that Germany is a single homogenous ethnicity would have been a surprise to most Germans only a century and a half ago. The question of whether Austrians were German or not wasn't settled until the end of WWII.
And, of course, all of Europe had a lot more Jews until WWII.
Also, early twentieth century Europe was, in historical terms, unusually white. Shakespeare certainly had met black people of African descent in London when he wrote Othello. There were black people working on the docks everywhere from the moment the first one escape from a slave ship. The expulsion of the "Moriscos" (converted former Muslims) from Spain resulted in lots of people of Arab and Berber descent all over Europe. And there was no shortage of descendants of Mongols and earlier Steppe peoples - including, of course, Magyars, who would not have been nearly as white as the present speakers of their language.
The unfortunate conclusion I draw from studying history is that when ethnicities share a state or region they either eventually assimilate into one people or they eventually war and violently conflict with each other resulting in new states, expulsions, ethnic cleansing, etc.. The only exceptions I can find are minority groups that maintain their own culture while asking for no control over their majority neighbors, and even then, things like the Holocaust happen.
Happily the trend the US is for assimilation at greater and greater speeds. But there are many actors on both the right and left who would like our ethnicity (usually they would say our "race") to be a defining and permanent feature of our identity.
There are certainly non-war examples of a geographical split. Czechia and Slovakia is the first to come to mind; the so-called "Velvet Divorce".
How long are you expecting assimilation to take? Samnites and Romans were in a single country from about 300 BCE, where equal citizens from 80BCE but were still identifiably different as late as the Crisis of the Third Century. Gaul was Latin-speaking at the end of Roman rule after five centuries, but Britannia was Celtic-majority at the end of Roman rule after three and a half. Angles and Saxons had still not assimilated together at the Norman Conquest, though defining Anglo-Saxon against Norman probably pushed them together; Norman/Anglo-Saxon assimilation took at least two centuries; a Middle English-speaking England really took until the Edwards of the thirteenth century.
Black Americans and White Americans have only been equal citizens since 1964 at the earliest, so I think the expectation of a much faster assimilation is unreasonable. You really do have to wait until the people who were told about inequality by their grandparents have died at the very soonest.
I think that things like affirmative action are intended to accelerate assimilation, they might push groups apart in the short term, but they are clearly intended to achieve economic (and thus social) equality in a hurry, which is the prerequisite for full assimilation to begin.
True, it doesn't have to be violent. But eventually the ethnic groups living together either merge or split, and much like divorce, an amiable split is the exception rather than the rule.
All the data I've seen suggests that most big immigrant groups have assimilated, more or less fully, over the course of 3 or 4 generations, and the same is happening with today's Latinos. Although every time a new waves of Latinos enters the US the process is refreshed. But my impression is we can expect the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of today's Latino immigrant to have weak ties to a Latino identity. That's especially so given they will likely have non-Latino grandparents or great-grandparents.
For well known historical reasons Black assimilation didn't really get started until much later but it's increasing at an accelerating pace. As one major piece of evidence I'd point to interracial marriages which were at 3% of black marriages in 1980 and 18% in 2015 according to Pew. I'd also point to the weakening of religious and linguistic barriers to assimilation and even the generation gap in voting habits (younger Blacks vote Republican about 15% more than the elderly). I can't really guess how long it will be until we no longer think of Black and White Americans as separate racial groups but we are moving in the direction of getting their eventually.
The Great Demographic Illusion by Richard Alba is an interesting recent survey of data and trends on integration and assimilation in the US, and concludes its happening much more quickly than many expected.
I notice in my reading that the Romance-speaking parts of Roman Europe are correlated with extremely violent wars of conquest by the Romans. Caesar boasted that in Gaul he had killed a million and enslaved a million. The same happened in Spain. Same in Dacia (now Romania). At the end of this there were few of those people left to assimilate and their culture was annihilated. Britain never went through that process. Nor did Germany.
I'd always thought of affirmative action more strictly along the lines of "righting historical wrongs", rather than as assimilation - but I think the latter a very interesting and useful lens.
Taking it further, I think it's probably also useful to apply the assimilation lens when thinking about class and political divides. Regardless of how traditional ethnic assimilation progresses, there's still a danger of splitting on those other lines.
As well, quite a few of the post-WW2 newly homogenized nations had/have ethnic right of return laws similar to Israel’s.
Is there any EU member-state that does NOT have a law like that? I think the US jus soli is the aberration instead. Having lived the majority of my life in the EU, I'm perplexed when Americans decry "ethnonationalism" but also say nice things about Europe.
>>>I'm perplexed when Americans decry "ethnonationalism" but also say nice things about Europe.<<<
Decrying European-style ethnonationalism while lauding European trains or healthcare doesn't seem very perplexing. Also, fairly large swaths of the continent have become ethnically diverse, and enjoy (at least pre-pandemic) sizable immigration inflows and a dynamic cosmopolitanism (though Eastern/Central Europe less so).
I also think it's reasonable to make allowances for European countries (not to mention Asian countries), who face a much higher degree of difficulty in *not* being ethnonationalistic. Their countries literally exist because certain people groups have lived there for hundreds if not thousands of years. They need to paddle upstream to be diverse. In the US, it's the other way around: we need to paddle upstream *not* to be diverse.
That's fair. Let me rephrase. Saying "I like Europe!" while disliking "ethnonationalism" is like saying "I like the US!" while disliking the Declaration of Independence. Of course, you can like specific parts about each place (European trains or American universities) without endorsing the whole place.
As far as diversity is concerned, it depends. Do you consider a French National Team that has both Griezmann and Pogba as diverse? Or do you only see two different Frenchmen? You might remember the controversy when Trevor Noah celebrated the French World Cup win in a way that caused the intervention of French diplomatic authorities.
I guess it is confusing under your framing, which is a fair enough one. But another way to read the situation is there are people saying "ethno-nationalism is the worst political sin ever, you're literally Hitler if you support it" in one breath (tweet) and "we should be more like Europe" in the next. Those are very prominent sentiments from the left of the party.
Amsterdam, Dublin, Berlin, Barcelona, London, Lisbon, Frankfurt, Stockholm, Vienna, Madrid, Athens and Paris (and many others) are objectively cosmopolitan nodes of the global economy that are home to large numbers of foreigners. But sure, rural Poland or Hungary is less so. And these cities are housed in countries that, broadly speaking, employ policies that would improve life in the United States if adopted there. Not seeing the contradiction.
I disagree on this, and I’ll use examples from sports. Giannis was born and raised in Athens, but he couldn’t obtain Greek citizenship and was thus stateless until he became a good NBA prospect. Meanwhile, Italy played in the latest European Championship with Jorginho, a Brazilian guy who automatically got Italian citizenship because he had one Italian great grandparent. I don’t think this situation is comparable to the US.
Of course, there’s that whole Danish center-left thing about mandatorily teaching the kids of families coming from majority Muslim countries about Christmas.