Noah Smith reacts to some kerfuffle with a bog-standard call for increasing immigration. Not much to see here, but what strikes me about the tired nativist complaint about “integration” is that the main obstacle to integration for most illegal immigrants is… one’s illegal status.
It’s a Catch-22. And that’s a betrayal of the Promise Of America.I’m pretty sure that the US military brass smiles every time they see a dire headline from some Serious DC Policy Person complaining about our lack of cyber capabilities, because they probably know about whatever “black projects” capabilities we actually do have, but are saving until we really need them.
If I’m ever proven wrong, at least I probably won’t be around to eat crow for it.People Who Know Things love to diss on the idea of a split into Red and Blue Americas as a nonstarter for <reasons>, but they’re taking too simplistic a view of it.
The most commonly-cited reason is that the current political divide is mostly between urban and rural, and thus most Blue states have plenty of majority-Red counties, and vice versa. Furthermore, there were more Trump 2020 voters in CA and NY than about the 16-17 least populous states Trump won that year. Therefore, just splitting the country down the middle would just leave too many separatists stranded on each side of the aisle for any top-down political settlement to be practical.
While it’s based on absolutely accurate truths, it’s an overstatement of the case that both ignores the practicalities of how a deepening of the current crisis might actually result in a split, and is myopically rooted in the mindset of the two-party system.
I submit that, if push came to shove, Americans would fall back on their regional and state identities1. Although the two-party system is quite strong and beginning to totalizingly dominate our entire culture, it still means different things to different people in different places. A die-hard “Blue Lives Matter” (and most likely Italian-American) Trump supporter on Staten Island has much more in common with neighbors they may honestly hate over in Manhattan than with an equally Italian-American Wyoming rancher with the exact same set of opinions on policy positions. And their personal ideology, whether they call it “conservatism” or “libertarianism” or “classical liberalism” or whatever, means something very different to each, even under the same name.
For instance, the Staten Islander may think of their support Blue Lives Matter in terms of their personal relations to the NYPD, and also to various other long-held, specific grievances against what they perceive to be a corrupt centuries-old liberal political machine. But the Wyoming rancher will be more likely to think of their Blue Lives Matter support against the backdrop of not having many issues with (or even often receiving help from!) their own rural/small-town police department; to the extent they associate it with New York, it’s against the backdrop of a distant cultural elite — a battle they only hear about in media — or colored by negative personal, local, or regional relationship/history with business interests headquartered there.
That is to say, one of the most convincing arguments Woodard made in American Nations was that people in each nation build their political identities in relation to the dominant political intersections of their nation2, rather than piling various positions off an abstract menu onto a blank slate. It stands to reason that in a Great American Divorce, (Red) Upstate New York would find more in common with their neighbors in rural New Hampshire and Pennsylvania, and try to form a new political alliance with them in the new Blue-dominated polity based on existing ties, rather than adhere to today’s national GOP’s brand of Southern-dominated Lost Cause politics.
The point is, the mere existence of political minorities in each region doesn’t preclude a split. After all, I’m sure there were plenty of people in South Sudan who objected to its own partition.
And that’s even ignoring the new ones they’d form…
And that when they migrate from one nation to another, they adjust by trying to make sense of their new nation’s intersections in terms of the old one, until they become more comfortable understanding their new environment.