Kaiserschmarrn wrote:
I don't want to be rude, but you are a good example of what's wrong with the left/progressives.
I'm oddly amused by this statement for some reason.
I'm completely baffled that you have to ask those questions. Just think about yourself moving to China, Italy or Uganda. Would you consider yourself to be Chinese, Italian or Ugandan simply because you resided in the country? Do you believe that the people in those countries would or should think about you as being one of them just because you have just turned up? In other words, if you think about what you as an immigrant need to do to feel, say, Italian, and for the local Italians to think about you as an Italian, you have answered your own question.
I obviously have my own views on what would give someone living in the US the illustrious status of being considered american. Those views are going to be different than what an Italian thinks makes someone Italian which itself will be vastly different than what a Japanese person will consider makes someone Japanese. The history and culture I grew up in leads me to have very lax views about what makes someone an american and I can't speak for any other country and what it decides on that issue.
I will say that the standard has been changing, has always been changing, and always will change. You used to only be part of the political community if you were a wealthy white landowning male in a lot of countries. Now our political communities in the west are expanded to groups who would never have been considered part of the political community before. Now it's expanding more where foreigners residing in a country are beginning to be seen as part of the political community. I consider this neither particularly good or bad. I think it's weird that you have to be ethnically Japanese to ever get Japanese citizenship for instance but whether or not it's a good or bad thing that japan has this standard is impossible to ever really show objectively. I could never be Japanese. There are certainly countries I can imagine going to live in and feeling like part of that country without too much trouble as well.
Basically the only standard I can really speak too is the American one, and I do think that someone moving to the US can and should be able to integrate into the country. They should be able to feel like an american, it's an rather ingrained sentiment in our mythology of ourselves afterall.
Even if you thought - and I'm not claiming you are - that Italians should accept you as an Italian on the day you entered the country, I'm fairly certain that even on the left nobody is deluded enough to claim that they could feel Italian on day 1. Hence, feeling Italian must become arbitrary and the existence of a unifying culture and anything beyond the mere physical presence of a person being important must be denied. That's the only way to interpret statements, such as “There is no such thing as French culture. There is culture in France, and it is diverse.” (Macron) and, as Merkel has recently described Germans, there are those who have lived in Germany a little longer and those that haven't. And going by developments in the US and increasingly in Europe, to me it looks like whether you are in the country legally or illegally is not supposed to matter in the future either.
Cultures are amorphous concepts that change over time, they are in some sense arbitrary constructions of humanity over several generations in a time and place. This too isn't really good or bad. Whether or not you let other people into your country with the evil seeds of the essence of not frenchness French and German culture was never going to simply stay what it is now. There's too much cultural mixing from media and the internet to ever really go back to the age of strongly stratified cultures.
Really though, we both know we aren't really talking about all cultures mixing into France an Germany. No one is overly concerned about Americans living in Italy. This is about Muslims and the particular set of cultures they are from.
By that logic, we could take the world's population, mix it up well, and then redistribute people randomly. There would then be hundreds of cultures in France and any Frenchmen who by chance ended up in his home country together with millions of foreigners ought to at worst feel neutral about and at best welcome this change. After all, France has just become a little bit more diverse and diversity is self-evidently always a good thing. Further, since things have always changed and immigration has always occurred, the only people who could be opposed to this have irrational fears and/or are xenophobic and racist.
Overall, my view of the left is as follows: They used to have no problem wrecking our countries economically if we let them run wild, but they didn't use to be culturally suicidal and destructive. However, ever since they've given up on economics and basically left this area to the right, they have now embarked on wrecking our societies and cultures. I'm at a point where I would be relieved to have the old left back. You can recover from bankruptcy after all, but the kind of destruction the left is aiming for now is very hard to recover from.
This just boils down to amorphous complaints about how the left is going to kill the very essence of frenchness. Or, from what I've seen from most people who talk about the left committing cultural suicide, it's more a complaint about how they are trying to let Muslims take over and be the dominant culture.
I don't have anything to make you feel better about this. Leftists aren't writing policy with the goal of killing all that is french. They write policies with a particular set of values that you disagree with. Perhaps they do undermine what it means to be french in the long run. After all that's something people level against right wingers as well, that authoritarian controls on what sort of people should be allowed into France also undermines what it means to be french. Many Americans on the left view right wing immigration policy as a fundamental rejection of American culture and values.
In the US at least, and I suspect in europe as well, both sides push opposite policies based on the same set of mythical cultural values while complaining that the other side is destroying everything good about american culture. In the US accepting immigrants to become part of the country is considered fundamentally american by the left. True this is purely liberal ideology and simply boils down to peoples feelings about what our culture and values are, but all politics boils down to peoples feelings and values about stuff.
Nobody is right, nobody is wrong, and we're probably screwed either way. Talking in breathless terms about how the other side is out to destroy all hope and joy in the world, whether talking about how the left is out to kill all that is french, or about how right wingers want to gas the Muslims is a good way to spin your wheels and never get anywhere while talking about abstractions instead of the real things sitting in front of us.
When I see someone in the US doesn't have healthcare and is dying I don't overly concern myself with abstract notions of american culture that the right proclaims precludes us from having welfare programs to help the poor. In the same way I don't see a Mexican immigrant struggling to feed his family in the US and feel overly burdened by the abstract possibility of undermining some sense of Americaness by not deporting him.
It seems strange to me that so many on the right, and the left, are so much more concerned with abstractions and vague feelings about some grand sense of good and evil and mythical culture and ignore real world things we can actually effect and can know for sure have at least some actual meaning.
My dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders.