Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Let's not forget that (European) immigrants were mostly wanted, so as to provide needed workers. Sure. I’m talking about the long-term effects of that deliberate policy choice. > Again, the "movie" is that over generations, those people became fully assimilated into American society and values. Quite a bit of evidence shows that core cultural values, such as levels of social trust and attitudes towards the nature o…
> core cultural values, such as levels of social trust and attitudes towards the nature of government, are durable across generations Interesting. Does that take into account the mixing of cultures as the generations go by? My own immigrant ancestors came to this country in the 19th- and early-20th centuries — from four different countries in northern- and southern Europe; two different religions; and arguably three…
It’s using GSS data, which doesn’t identify ancestry in that level of granularity. But I suspect mixing changes the host culture significantly. My wife is of almost completely British American descent. I’m of completely Bangladeshi descent. But because in my culture married couples assimilate into the husband’s family, the kids are being raised with a strong dose of Bangladeshi traditionalism.
> Which "British America[]"? The New Englanders like the Puritans, and later the Adamses? The mid-Atlantic Quakers? The Virginians? The Cavalier enslavers who came from their Carribean sugar plantations to grow cotton? Very different subcultures.
The British America that was the confluence of those British sub-cultures—the things they agreed on and their distinctive conflicts. In particular, participatory self-government reflecting both Puritan small towns and Jeffersonian agrarianism has been supplanted by mass government.
The widespread American attitudes towards government is now similar to those in Bangladesh, which was shaped by half a millennium of Mughal and then British rule. The government is the administrator of a fractious and foreign population. “Democracy” is reduced to merely “voting.”
> My guess is that Trump appeals to a certain fearful, hero-worshipping, authoritarian mindset that's widely distributed among the human population, and whose adherents have far greater ability to communicate and organize than ever before.
That’s close to the same point that I’m making. Every society has conservatives and liberals—these are rooted in psychological traits. Specific conservative or liberal ideologies, however, are rooted in culture. When you change the country’s cultural mix, you change what kinds of political ideologies you need to carry a viable coalition. And when you fragment the culture, politics becomes much more about unifying around things that speak to gut-level reactions across cultures.
The small-government conservatism that would be popular in Rhode Island can’t win Florida. You need to cobble together a coalition of Mexicans in Arizona, Scots-Irish in West Virginia, Cubans and Puerto Ricans in Florida, Germans in Ohio, etc. And Trump is the manifestation of that.