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@arcana I think it's definitely valid to want an ethnic majority in some circumstances (like many European countries as you mentioned), but for a fully pluralist society like America I feel like those kinds of viewpoints are fully a detriment, as long as there's a fully established sentiment of what being "American" is and how to assimilate into that identity.
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@allison @arcana I think calling America pluralistic leaning is more accurate, as opposed to fully. For instance: if you were to ask any random from the 3rd world they'd tell you, correctly, that America is a fundamentally white nation, where some other groups live too. Now of course whites haven't been the majority for a few years now, but that's due in significant part to left leaning views on borders. Really the whole situation is a mess, and I don't have really any sympathy with the "pluralism = you aren't allowed to have a national identity" argument whatsoever.
>as long as there's a fully established sentiment of what being "American" is and how to assimilate
See that's the thing, there isn't really consensus right now, because of the social and ethnic upheaval, and people immigrating here be it legal or, the more common, otherwise *arent* assimilating.
Only reason I'm confident in saying that is that I live near both the border and near a massive hub of legal immigration too.
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@merchantHelios @arcana Yeah there are always qualifications you can apply, and most of America's cultural folkways are still fundamentally British at the end of the day, no matter the nominal ethnic or religious origin of those inhabiting said folkways. I think most of the people advocating for the full derogation of our national identity are convinced leftists while nearly everyone to the right of that is (after a decade of cultural mudslinging) converging on a relatively moderate vision of what America is and what it means to be an American, and it is the latter that I see winning this particular battle going forward.
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@samjayganges @arcana @merchantHelios I would dispute this in part by saying that the south actually had *two* distinct cultures decades before the civil war was a twinkle in anyone's mind and that the tension between these two cultures (regarding things like, for example, the enforceability of the confederate draft) was one of the reasons that the south lost the war (the north was able to keep a far better cultural cohesiveness, and the southern tidewater elites once the war wrapped up began a slow but steady assimilation to the cultural and political mores of the north).
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@merchantHelios @allison @arcana America doesn't have an identity because people have constantly been shuffled around before they can develop one. This is intentional as it makes the population easier to control. One of the true causes of the Civil War was the fact that South was developing a distinctive culture and the powers that be wanted to nip that culture in the bud.
Far, far too many immigrants have come to America and they have muddled it down and transformed it into the United States of Generica. There need to be MASSIVE deportations and a permanent end to immigration so that Americans can develop their identity regionally and organically without the malevolent interference of bankers, businessmen, and jews
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@allison @arcana @merchantHelios The North won because they had superior infrastructure and industry. The South on the other hand had better soldiers. Initially the South won handily, delivering one humiliating defeat after another to the North. However, they were not in a position to win a war of attrition and so the North gradually wore them down.
Stonewall Jackson had the right idea of waging total war deep in the interior of enemy territory to force a surrender. Unfortunately he died prematurely and it was instead the Yankee commander Sherman that used this strategy against the Southerners to great effect.
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@samjayganges @arcana @merchantHelios And how do you propose the North got that superior infrastructure and industry?
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@allison @arcana @merchantHelios Also the North hardly had cohesiveness, with a reliance on foreigners, such as Germans who didn't speak English, and the Irish who rioted on at least one occasion I can recall.
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@samjayganges @arcana @merchantHelios The Germans were in general fiercely pro-Union because of the circumstances in which most of them arrived (as either revolutionary exiles post-1848 or religious and civic dissenters decades and centuries earlier). As far as the Irish, I remember them being mostly confined to their port of entry (NYC) and thus having a limited impact one way or the other.
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merchantHelios
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