Miller is of the same mold as Roy Cohen, Trump's mentor, and is equally the personification of evil.
As for Trump, he has no grounding in the democratic principles and institutions that have made our democracy great. He only knows the rough and tumble world of dirty real estate dealings ,and of ripping off creditors and business adversaries. It's not surprising that William T. Kelly, Trump's professor at Penn's prestigious Wharton School of Business and Finance, which Trump's daddy got him into from Fordham University, said: of him: "Donald Trump was the dumbest goddamn student I ever had".
Trump grew up like as spoiled brat and never developed an intellect or vocabulary beyond the 4th grade. He himself has made a pact with the devil-the dark far right Heritage Society, which spoon feeds him the political positions they want him to take and helps him amass the contrbutions from the billionaires who stand to gain from the policies and advocacies that the Heritage Society feeds to him. In short, the Heritage Society provides the brains; Trump provides the mouth.
Trump's biggest problem is when he has to think for himself, such as his midnight spewings and spontaneous outbursts on his Truth Social Account throughout the night, only to wake up tevery moring to have to spend the day back peddling off his spontaneously visceral outbursts which his menagerie of misfits,sycophants and court jesters have to extricate him from during the day.
He's as close as the U.S. has even come to having a totally loose and unpredictable canon in the White House. While his outbursts and antics on "The Apprentice" gained him wide popularity as a big-mouth blowhard with the brain of an eight-year old, his handlers learned how to parlay this fool into a cult leader whose entertainment value and scripted extremist positions could catapult him into the White House.
Perhaps this period in American history will become known as the time when our country lost its mind and jumped the guardrails.
Michael Anton of the Flight 93 Election essay, and that whole Claremont Institute vein of Leo Strauss thought, are a major example of this as well. Strauss famously argued that virtuous elite scholars and thinkers must, if they are to influence and direct society, signal allegiance to the common morality of the people while also signaling to the knowing elite that they have different values entirely. And then to direct society in that direction without society really even knowing they were being made ever more virtuous. In other words, a moral duty to dogwhistle, but make it sound enlightened. Be reactionary, but pretend you like the Civil Rights Act. Be a white supremacist, but include some Brahmin Caste Indians who agree but aren't seen as white. Make a whole VP acceptance speech about blood-and-soil nationalism and the rejection of the Lincolnian consensus about how the core of our shared citizenship is allegiance to the Declaration of Independence... but make it sound anodyne. *Ahem*
They all knew that Pat Buchanan thought had died outside of a small core, but believed that the keepers of the Buchananite flame were the ones who had seen beyond the veil and "knew" the "horror" that would come to America if it became permanently multicultural and redistributionist. The fact the rest of the educational and political elite they came of age with vehemently rejected their ideas proved to them even more that they were the true elect few. The Nietzschean desire to see themselves as ubermenschen can thus only be proved more the more outre their beliefs.
So their entire goal became to find a message and a vessel who could perform the task of Straussian dogwhistling (or even outright bigotry) without diluting the intellectual undercurrent (such that it is) of their ideas. Trump doesn't even make a pretense out of his views, but covers them in so much lying and grift and posturing, celebrity self-worship, etc... that even though the very core of his campaign was anti-immigrant sentiment from day one, he still managed to make it about himself and about whatever new issue he wanted to bring up.
Such that even people who would find the Claremont and Heritage Foundation world abhorrent if taken in full, somehow believed each part was bluster or misdirection or exaggeration, that institutions would hold, that surely Vance wasn't actually espousing David Duke values in the open and liberals were just paranoid. That Miller, ghoulish as he is, surely wasn't actually seeking to build concentration camps for the purpose of ethnic cleansing despite his own background.
That because the ideas being vice-signaled were SO far outside of the norm, people not only refused to believe they could possibly mean what they obviously did, they eagerly bought the right's disavowals. SURELY, your average swing voter thought, these people can't REALLY mean that, it MUST be the liberals and their paranoia. After all, they have been panicking about nascent fascism and rising racism for a decade, they are just crying Wolf!
But they hadn't been crying wolf, they were right all along, it's just that institutional inertia slowed the process of destroying these values and ideas at exactly the right speed to boil the frog that is the Civil Rights Era United States.
And that is really what it looks like. That was an era, 1965-2024, RIP.
I'll never forget how Kevin Roberts praised Trump for strategically lying about his connection with what Heritage had been cooking up. He said the lie was a necessary response to "misrepresentation" of Project 2025.
An honorable person would think the correct way to answer "misrepresentation" is by accurate representation, not by a flat-out lie.
It was a small incident but revealing of the smug cynicism that characterizes so many people in that orbit. They no doubt believe themselves to be righteous, but their warm embrace of an obviously amoral sociopath as the champion of their agenda tells a different story.
Patrick Deneen was very open in his book, Regime Change, that his side would need to resort to "Machiavellian means to achieve Aristotelian ends"... which is pretty hilarious for a guy who styles himself a deontological thinker. But once one understands it through the kind of Straussian vein of conservative thought, it becomes pretty plain.
It's fascinating in its own right that, if we AirDropped David Duke into our own time, he would be indistinguishable in all the relevant ways from any number of MAGA extremists running for office today.
David Duke is still alive and younger than Trump. The 39 percent that voted for him are the core of MAGA, as are the younger folks that are even more open about it.
America doesn't deserve immigrants or their children. Like for example, Me! And my parents who came from India in the 1980s. America can fuck right off. We need a whole new constitution, or to Morgenthau plan the entire United States of America into different regions and independent countries.
Am I supposed to believe that immigrants like you can assimilate, as a result of reading this comment? How would you feel if I moved to India with a bunch of white people, stated "India can fuck right off", and tried to rewrite India's constitution or break it up into a series of smaller states? You would probably call me a colonizer.
Yes, America has, for 250 years, made an ongoing success of immigration and assimilation and we all the better for it.
But why are we so successful? Can anyone point to any other major country that accepts and successfully assimilates our level of immigration? What are we doing right?
Agreed. And it's not necessarily the US in general which is good at assimilating immigrants. It could be that we were good at it during a particular time for a particular group, but since then cultural drift, or changing migrant flows, has made us bad at it.
OP states:
"Miller has in essence shifted the civilizational goalposts: If Southern and Eastern Europeans didn’t end up threatening U.S. civilization, well, the actual threat lies further afield, in Africa, Latin America, and elsewhere. Miller has simply moved the geographic lines of the civilizational charmed circle, dividing those who are fit to partake in our civilizational inheritance from those who are not."
Imagine we shuffle a deck of playing cards and flip over the first 3 cards. Suppose they are all of a particular suit, diamonds say. Can we therefore infer that the rest of the deck must also be from the diamonds suit? Would it be "shifting the goalposts" to suggest that the next card is most likely of a non-diamonds suit? Of course not. But OP wants us to extrapolate from a small set of heterogeneous datapoints into an unknown. This is far from solid science.
Furthermore, academia has become a progressive monoculture. And the way modern science works (see: replication crisis, scientific fraud, etc.), there is simply way too much flexibility for academics to discover whatever results they want in order to support their views.
So empirical evidence by itself isn't enough for me. I want to see theoretical arguments for why the US is good at assimilation, why we expect this to persist, what we are asking people to assimilate to, etc.
It seems possible to me, for example, that part of why the US assimilates people well is because we demand that people assimilate. Perhaps a certain amount of xenophobia towards Italians for their mafia tendencies helped kill the Italian mafia in the US. Due to the nature of this hypothesis, it's functionally impossible to fairly test in academia as it is structured now. But if it's true, it would be important to know.
I'm definitely no Stephen Miller supporter. I usually vote for Democrats in fact. But I would suggest this "theory of assimilation" exercise to anyone who wants to see more Democratic Party electoral success. Figure out what a positive vision of US assimilation looks like, instead of simply defining yourself as the opposite of whatever Stephen Miller is.
BTW, it's very ironic to me that progressives seem to hold the following two mutually incompatible beliefs:
* "The US (true founding date: 1619) is an empire built on Indigenous dispossession and Black bondage, a racial‑capitalist project whose wealth and global power were made possible by slavery and segregation, blah blah blah"
* "But also, the US is uniquely good at assimilating immigrants, even minority immigrants with dark skin"
It is no coincidence that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was within a year of immigration reform. Their goal is to roll that back and then revoke the 19th Amendment.
Then perhaps all amendments based on Originalist doctrines denying the possibility of amendments to the Constitution as signed.
Civilization, cosmopolitanism. whatever, immigration is driven by two words -- cheap employment. Human capital growth is an essential for capitalism's growth. Capitalists determine immigration and not Intellectual discourse.
Miller is of the same mold as Roy Cohen, Trump's mentor, and is equally the personification of evil.
As for Trump, he has no grounding in the democratic principles and institutions that have made our democracy great. He only knows the rough and tumble world of dirty real estate dealings ,and of ripping off creditors and business adversaries. It's not surprising that William T. Kelly, Trump's professor at Penn's prestigious Wharton School of Business and Finance, which Trump's daddy got him into from Fordham University, said: of him: "Donald Trump was the dumbest goddamn student I ever had".
Trump grew up like as spoiled brat and never developed an intellect or vocabulary beyond the 4th grade. He himself has made a pact with the devil-the dark far right Heritage Society, which spoon feeds him the political positions they want him to take and helps him amass the contrbutions from the billionaires who stand to gain from the policies and advocacies that the Heritage Society feeds to him. In short, the Heritage Society provides the brains; Trump provides the mouth.
Trump's biggest problem is when he has to think for himself, such as his midnight spewings and spontaneous outbursts on his Truth Social Account throughout the night, only to wake up tevery moring to have to spend the day back peddling off his spontaneously visceral outbursts which his menagerie of misfits,sycophants and court jesters have to extricate him from during the day.
He's as close as the U.S. has even come to having a totally loose and unpredictable canon in the White House. While his outbursts and antics on "The Apprentice" gained him wide popularity as a big-mouth blowhard with the brain of an eight-year old, his handlers learned how to parlay this fool into a cult leader whose entertainment value and scripted extremist positions could catapult him into the White House.
Perhaps this period in American history will become known as the time when our country lost its mind and jumped the guardrails.
Michael Anton of the Flight 93 Election essay, and that whole Claremont Institute vein of Leo Strauss thought, are a major example of this as well. Strauss famously argued that virtuous elite scholars and thinkers must, if they are to influence and direct society, signal allegiance to the common morality of the people while also signaling to the knowing elite that they have different values entirely. And then to direct society in that direction without society really even knowing they were being made ever more virtuous. In other words, a moral duty to dogwhistle, but make it sound enlightened. Be reactionary, but pretend you like the Civil Rights Act. Be a white supremacist, but include some Brahmin Caste Indians who agree but aren't seen as white. Make a whole VP acceptance speech about blood-and-soil nationalism and the rejection of the Lincolnian consensus about how the core of our shared citizenship is allegiance to the Declaration of Independence... but make it sound anodyne. *Ahem*
They all knew that Pat Buchanan thought had died outside of a small core, but believed that the keepers of the Buchananite flame were the ones who had seen beyond the veil and "knew" the "horror" that would come to America if it became permanently multicultural and redistributionist. The fact the rest of the educational and political elite they came of age with vehemently rejected their ideas proved to them even more that they were the true elect few. The Nietzschean desire to see themselves as ubermenschen can thus only be proved more the more outre their beliefs.
So their entire goal became to find a message and a vessel who could perform the task of Straussian dogwhistling (or even outright bigotry) without diluting the intellectual undercurrent (such that it is) of their ideas. Trump doesn't even make a pretense out of his views, but covers them in so much lying and grift and posturing, celebrity self-worship, etc... that even though the very core of his campaign was anti-immigrant sentiment from day one, he still managed to make it about himself and about whatever new issue he wanted to bring up.
Such that even people who would find the Claremont and Heritage Foundation world abhorrent if taken in full, somehow believed each part was bluster or misdirection or exaggeration, that institutions would hold, that surely Vance wasn't actually espousing David Duke values in the open and liberals were just paranoid. That Miller, ghoulish as he is, surely wasn't actually seeking to build concentration camps for the purpose of ethnic cleansing despite his own background.
That because the ideas being vice-signaled were SO far outside of the norm, people not only refused to believe they could possibly mean what they obviously did, they eagerly bought the right's disavowals. SURELY, your average swing voter thought, these people can't REALLY mean that, it MUST be the liberals and their paranoia. After all, they have been panicking about nascent fascism and rising racism for a decade, they are just crying Wolf!
But they hadn't been crying wolf, they were right all along, it's just that institutional inertia slowed the process of destroying these values and ideas at exactly the right speed to boil the frog that is the Civil Rights Era United States.
And that is really what it looks like. That was an era, 1965-2024, RIP.
I'll never forget how Kevin Roberts praised Trump for strategically lying about his connection with what Heritage had been cooking up. He said the lie was a necessary response to "misrepresentation" of Project 2025.
An honorable person would think the correct way to answer "misrepresentation" is by accurate representation, not by a flat-out lie.
It was a small incident but revealing of the smug cynicism that characterizes so many people in that orbit. They no doubt believe themselves to be righteous, but their warm embrace of an obviously amoral sociopath as the champion of their agenda tells a different story.
Patrick Deneen was very open in his book, Regime Change, that his side would need to resort to "Machiavellian means to achieve Aristotelian ends"... which is pretty hilarious for a guy who styles himself a deontological thinker. But once one understands it through the kind of Straussian vein of conservative thought, it becomes pretty plain.
It's fascinating in its own right that, if we AirDropped David Duke into our own time, he would be indistinguishable in all the relevant ways from any number of MAGA extremists running for office today.
David Duke is still alive and younger than Trump. The 39 percent that voted for him are the core of MAGA, as are the younger folks that are even more open about it.
America doesn't deserve immigrants or their children. Like for example, Me! And my parents who came from India in the 1980s. America can fuck right off. We need a whole new constitution, or to Morgenthau plan the entire United States of America into different regions and independent countries.
Am I supposed to believe that immigrants like you can assimilate, as a result of reading this comment? How would you feel if I moved to India with a bunch of white people, stated "India can fuck right off", and tried to rewrite India's constitution or break it up into a series of smaller states? You would probably call me a colonizer.
Yes, America has, for 250 years, made an ongoing success of immigration and assimilation and we all the better for it.
But why are we so successful? Can anyone point to any other major country that accepts and successfully assimilates our level of immigration? What are we doing right?
Agreed. And it's not necessarily the US in general which is good at assimilating immigrants. It could be that we were good at it during a particular time for a particular group, but since then cultural drift, or changing migrant flows, has made us bad at it.
OP states:
"Miller has in essence shifted the civilizational goalposts: If Southern and Eastern Europeans didn’t end up threatening U.S. civilization, well, the actual threat lies further afield, in Africa, Latin America, and elsewhere. Miller has simply moved the geographic lines of the civilizational charmed circle, dividing those who are fit to partake in our civilizational inheritance from those who are not."
Imagine we shuffle a deck of playing cards and flip over the first 3 cards. Suppose they are all of a particular suit, diamonds say. Can we therefore infer that the rest of the deck must also be from the diamonds suit? Would it be "shifting the goalposts" to suggest that the next card is most likely of a non-diamonds suit? Of course not. But OP wants us to extrapolate from a small set of heterogeneous datapoints into an unknown. This is far from solid science.
Furthermore, academia has become a progressive monoculture. And the way modern science works (see: replication crisis, scientific fraud, etc.), there is simply way too much flexibility for academics to discover whatever results they want in order to support their views.
So empirical evidence by itself isn't enough for me. I want to see theoretical arguments for why the US is good at assimilation, why we expect this to persist, what we are asking people to assimilate to, etc.
It seems possible to me, for example, that part of why the US assimilates people well is because we demand that people assimilate. Perhaps a certain amount of xenophobia towards Italians for their mafia tendencies helped kill the Italian mafia in the US. Due to the nature of this hypothesis, it's functionally impossible to fairly test in academia as it is structured now. But if it's true, it would be important to know.
I'm definitely no Stephen Miller supporter. I usually vote for Democrats in fact. But I would suggest this "theory of assimilation" exercise to anyone who wants to see more Democratic Party electoral success. Figure out what a positive vision of US assimilation looks like, instead of simply defining yourself as the opposite of whatever Stephen Miller is.
BTW, it's very ironic to me that progressives seem to hold the following two mutually incompatible beliefs:
* "The US (true founding date: 1619) is an empire built on Indigenous dispossession and Black bondage, a racial‑capitalist project whose wealth and global power were made possible by slavery and segregation, blah blah blah"
* "But also, the US is uniquely good at assimilating immigrants, even minority immigrants with dark skin"
https://open.substack.com/pub/austinsikora/p/stephen-miller-shadow-president?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=32cg97
It is no coincidence that the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was within a year of immigration reform. Their goal is to roll that back and then revoke the 19th Amendment.
Then perhaps all amendments based on Originalist doctrines denying the possibility of amendments to the Constitution as signed.
Civilization, cosmopolitanism. whatever, immigration is driven by two words -- cheap employment. Human capital growth is an essential for capitalism's growth. Capitalists determine immigration and not Intellectual discourse.