This isn’t exactly a rare sentiment these days, but it’s interesting coming from Nicolas since he’s one of the most aggressively pro-US Europeans I’ve met (particularly the SV vision of the US). Extra rare because he’s not just European but French.https://europeanstraits.substack.com/p/is-being-american-worth-it-anymore …
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Says something about the depth of positive potential in this country that despite 4 years of Trump and the prospect of 4 more, I don’t share this sentiment. The US is falling shockingly fast, but from a startlingly high position.
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Despite the current anti-immigrant mood, it’s still actually the place I feel most welcome. The ethnonationalist turn of the US feels extra shocking because “native” is still an extremely unnatural construct here. Everywhere else, nativism is a deeper and more unwelcoming idea.
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In absolute terms life here sucks right now. I detest the government, this state is burning, culture war is taking over everything, tech is stagnating... but when I ask, where else *could* I go with better overall prospects, there’s basically no other country on the list.
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A ton of places have fewer negatives, but basically no place has significant positives that are available to me. Many places would be much nicer if I were much richer and the barriers to getting in were much lower.
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Perhaps the view looks different if you already have a legal+linguistic foothold in a rich European or Asian country.
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There’s still enough of value in this country that it’s a no-brainer that it’s worth saving from Trumpies. If he gets 4 more years, and/or Congress remains deadlocked, I don’t know if that will still be true in 2024. His damage capacity will 3x if he stays.
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What’s valuable about the US? The story of how the hacker revolution grew out of the railroad modeling club at MIT gets at it. There were 2 groups there in the 1960s. One focused on aesthetics, accurate train models, landscapes, etc. Other was into railroads as “systems”.
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The hacker revolution grew out of the second group, who jumped on the early computers. Seems like an allegory about America to me. The aesthetics modelers were like Trumpies. Invested in appearances and symbols/signifiers. The systems people were invested in how it all worked.
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Replying to @vgr
pity the systems people don’t map to an identifiable political tendency in the contemporary US bet that would be pretty popular
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They’ve historically been large enough and powerful enough to rule, but not numerous enough to form an ideological faction.
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Replying to @vgr
They could hollow out the Democrats and seize power in west coast cities, if they would deign to get their hands dirty with local politics
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