11/30/2012
From an email:
"What you write about assimilation is important, probably the most important single issue, just impossible to write about openly. Huntington explained this in Who Are We, which was an important influence for me. America has lost the cultural self-confidence to assimilate immigrants. Now because of pro-immigration propaganda they feel you owe them something.
Hope is not all lost, over the long run there is some appeal to become American, you have an attractive culture.
Social Issues combined with identity are hugely turning off high IQ secular Asians. If the GOP moderates there is a chance to attract them.
The most dangerous trend is the aggressive anti-white, anti-American sentiment among successful immigrants as part of expressing one’s own identity. It is palpable among the graduate students I know, sickening."
From another email in this thread:
However, that doesn’t explain why a generally well educated, economically successful group (actually several groups) would be more Democratic than Hispanics.As best I can tell, the shift is cultural. At one time, American society was overtly assimilationist (and proud of it). Immigrants were encouraged (pressured, coerced, etc.) to join the mainstream. Rather than retaining their native cultures, values, and ideas they were told to adopt everything American. Indeed, the American definition of assimilation required the immigrant to give up all things "foreign" other than his religion and his last name (even that had to go in some cases).
This wasn’t just an idea from 1900. As recently as 1967, Norman Podhoretz wrote about how Jews could only gain acceptance in elite American circle by giving up their ethnic identity, and becoming ersatz WASPs. …
Assimilation didn’t make immigrants (or more relevantly their children), Republicans. However, it strongly encourage immigrants to identify with the mainstream of American society. That made them (first and second generation immigrants) open to the ideas and values of the Republicans.
Conversely, American society today is very overtly anti-assimilationist. The new ideology is "diversity" (as in "celebrate diversity") where each person is strongly encouraged to define him or herself in opposition to the mainstream. That makes voting for the left inevitable and inexorable.
And, of course, since most people are conformist, it very much helps that Defining Yourself in Opposition to the Mainstream is the mainstream, as demonstrated by, say, the TV commercials shown during NFL games.
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