We're seeing this pattern where the coasts of many countries are cosmopolitan and well-integrated into the world economy, but the interiors are very conservative and nationalistic. Scotland & London vs. Wales & the rest of Britain. The U.S. West Coast & Northeast vs. the Farm Belt, Rust Belt, and Mountain states. Croatia & Slovenia vs. the rest of Yugoslavia. The Baltic Republics vs. the rest of the USSR. Even in a Red State like Texas, Houston (on the coast) has gone democratic.

What happens if economic ties between coastal regions of major trading partners become greater than cultural ties within nations?

Here in California, some of the proposals about sending all the immigrants back to where they came from seem absurd. The economy would cease to function. On one of my teams of 10 people at Google, we had immigrants from Iceland, England, Vietnam, China, Taiwan, and India, and I was the only native-born American citizen. California would sooner secede than deport all of its immigrants.

What if it actually came to that? If push came to shove and the interior decided to push a nativist, nationalist agenda, what if the coastal regions that benefit significantly from trade were to say "Okay, you guys can play with yourself, we're going to play with the rest of the world." Scotland has threatened to do exactly that, and is planning on holding another referendum on independence if Britain actually follows through on Brexit.

What sort of organizing principle would the world have then? I haven't seen anything historically like that - the closest would be the Roman Empire that rimmed the Mediterranean. For most of recorded history, the primary means of production has been land and so fights have been over land, but over the last 150 years or so (contemporaneous with the nation-state as a social organizing principle, BTW), the primary means of production shifted to capital, and now it's shifting to information. What kind of social organizing principle does that imply?

If you think the immigration debate is about Google employees, I think you don't understand the immigration debate.

> If push came to shove and the interior decided to push a nativist, nationalist agenda, what if the coastal regions that benefit significantly from trade were to say "Okay, you guys can play with yourself, we're going to play with the rest of the world."

The interior (culturally and geographically) is massively over-represented in the security forces and military. So good luck with that.

I work for a multinational contract manufacturing company; we currently have plants and employees in (among many other nations) Mexico (full of the Mexicans Donald Trump threatened to build a wall around) and Malaysia (which is majority Islam, of whom Donald Trump threatened to ban from the USA). So, yes, this result is quite... interesting... to me. Hopefully Trump is more bluster than action here.

I'll be honest, the problem with the current wave of anti-globalization (eg Brexit and Trump, also count France's Le Pen among others) is that I can't see the solutions being advocated doing any good economically for those who are advocating it. If anything, it may make things worse. Of course, a lot of what is driving these movements is more cultural anxiety and has less to do with pure economic factors, which in my opinion makes this a lot more challenging to resolve.

Those are certainly valid concerns, but can you explain to me how legal work visas don't address that? (Serious question.)

It may end up being nothing, but to me it is an uncertainy. Businesses generally don't like uncertainty.

Plus, if we took Trump's primary bluster 100% literally (that "ban all the Muslims" talk), no one from our Malaysia plant who is Islam could visit corporate headquarters for any reason, work visa or not.

Such of course could end up being complete bluster, it probably is to be honest. Again, though, there's the uncertainty.

- If Trump renegotiates, or kills NAFTA, legal works visas of Canadians and Mexicans are affected (maybe even revoked).

Saying "legal work visas" is meaningless in this context.

He probably got it from Trump himself on one of the many occasions when Trump has talked about it. It seems plausible that he wants a c. 30% drop in net legal immigration.[1]

This is also a cornerstone of the Brexit "movement" (if you can really call a loose coalition of people without degrees in low income areas a movement). They want to cap or limit immigration, despite not being exposed to it in any meaningful way. (40% of inner-London's population is "foreign born", which suggests that a disproportionately high number of the UK's migrants live here -- a city which almost unanimously voted to stay in the EU.)

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/10/18/us/politics/tr...

It's interesting that a "highly educated physician" can't draw a distinction between one potentially anomalous datapoint -- their own characteristics -- and the data drawn from the characteristics of 15 million people. I had thought the makeup of the two respective movements were well-known.

Remain voters are more likely to be degree educated, and to live in a large metropolitan area which experiences significant immigration. Leave voters are more likely to be older, have tertiary college or a GCSE as their highest form of education, and live in a smaller cities, towns, and villages.

> There are plenty of well informed, well read and intelligent people who feel that the concept of the European Union no longer provides a net benefit to Britain.

By and large they're shuffling about with their tails between their legs at the moment as every single fiscal institution's observations about what a disaster a "leave" vote would be comes true, but you're right and I don't dispute this. The point I made is that the aggregate view of the leave movement -- and you can find this as galling as you like -- is of an uneducated, parochial, and ageing demographic.

> No doubt there are plenty of well educated Americans who voted for Trump too.

This is true, and is entirely unrelated to my original post. Amongst the college-educated, Trump won men and women by the bucketload (I think the only category he didn't win was college-educated white women but it was still a close-run thing).

> Sovereignty

In purely semantic terms we are a sovereign nation irrespective of our EU membership. So it would be useful for you to unpack exactly what you mean by sovereignty. (IIRC the only way to violate one's sovereignty are: harbouring terrorists, invading a neighbouring country, violating the genocide convention, breaking nuclear non-proliferation.)

> Population density

Population density is fascinating to me because when you look at the 6m or so foreign-born workers in the UK, only 1.9m of them come from the EU. Bans on India, China, and Pakistan would be better ways to reduce population density. And, of course, if you removed all of the foreign born workers in the UK, you would see a massive reduction of… 24 people per km2.

I always thought people really cared about immigration's perceived drain on welfare. Which is why it's so funny that EEA migrants either a) overwhelmingly pay for themselves (pro-Remain numbers) or b) almost pay for themselves and certainly do a better job of it than the average UK national (pro-Leave numbers). Of the 7% of non-UK nationals who take up the welfare budget, Pakistanis are more likely to receive benefits than any other nation, and in the top 10 there's only three or four EEA nations.

> Culture

Left this one until last. The culture of Britain hasn't changed for the worse since Enoch Powell in the 1960s, Paki bashing in the 1970s, monkey chants from the football terraces in the 1980s, has it?

You cannot equivocate on this point. When considered in the aggregate, leave voters are less educated than remainers. You can read whatever you want into that, but to say it's "played out" sounds like you're disputing it.

> One does not become "enlightened" and align some common set of views by simply getting a degree.

Nobody said anything about enlightenment or aligning around a common set of views simply by getting a degree.

> If this is true then it's not called education, it's called brainwashing.

Actually, no, it's probably called education. It's impossible to quantify, but it's axiomatic that traversing through to most classical forms of higher education has the effect of opening one's eyes to a broader range of viewpoints and beliefs than one might have previously been exposed to.

Education isn't about specific points of view or pieces of information, but about philosophy, critical thinking, and communication. For the many thousands of Brexit voters who feel duped by the economic aftermath and winding-back on promises made by the leave side, a little education on critical thinking and the outright, literal lies of the media they consume would probably have led to them voting differently, and feeling happier about it.

[1] http://articles.extension.org/pages/9960/migrant-farm-worker...

[2] http://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2016/01/29/464758284/act...

So, it is not just about illegal immigration, this is just a red herring for what it really is at stake here.

But is she really? Source?

I think if it actually came to that, it would eventually mean war. The interior economy falls apart, coastal regions secede, the poor countries would inevitably be driven to war against the coastal regions out of desperation. Extreme nationalism would just make this more likely. No one should think this is a good idea.

Also, saying coasts are "well-integrated into the world economy", implying the rest of the country is not, is just a horribly myopic view of the world. They are only "well-integrated" because the government chose and planned that explicitly - globalization and free trade as an economic policy, removal of protectionism (e.g. NAFTA, etc) and heavy subsidies of the industries involved (especially tech, via military spending).

It didn't have to be that way - it isn't because tech, finance, whatever is more meritocratic or anything. With more sensible protectionism you could have international trade while still preserving your country's manufacturing base, allowing the rest of the country's economy to also be "well-integrated". But labor is expensive in developed countries, corporations want more profit, and our government doesn't particularly prioritize the working class.

So leaving morality and emotions out of it - why does globalization seem to disproportionately benefit the coasts? I don't buy the "because the government chose and planned that explicitly" - the laws and treaties they write affect all citizens equally. Obviously there are going to be some winners and some losers, but how did it come to be that the winners are disproportionately concentrated in certain geographic locations? There's plenty of military spending and military bases that go into Montana and Wyoming, and much of it is quite high-tech (that's where the nuclear arsenal, is after all), but you haven't seen Silicon Mountain spring up. What's different?

And if we answer that, how can we replicate that in many places so that we don't see so much political blowback because a large segment of America is left out of the prosperity that globalization has brought elsewhere?

S.F. has one of the largest homeless populations of any city in the U.S.. By any sensible definition, most cities in the U.S. are doing pretty terrible at providing quality of life, or "success", to their occupants.

I think the only way to improve things is the government would have to make policies that actually benefit the majority of the population. That would mean taking a look at all industries in the country, figure out what kind of economic policies would benefit most people (not military spending), curb the excesses of capitalism (prevent monopolies, ensure competition), and fund basic social policies like health care. The U.S. has gone so entirely bonkers, giving in to the natural progression of capitalism, it's hard to see if there is any possible hope left.

Expand the Americorps program for instance. Investments in commuter transit seem like a particularly good idea because would be construction jobs building it, and then it could make commuting from rural areas to cities faster and easier which means that more people could participate in the growth of the cities.

I'm sure it wouldn't be perfect, and maybe I'm just biased as one of the liberal elites or whatever. But this seems like a much better world to live in then one where we just start curbing technological advances further and further to preserve the 19th century ideal of working class jobs when they are less and less needed.

Even though I lean libertarian, I think we are quickly approaching a time where a basic income will be needed. The pace of technology moves so fast, that jobs literally disappear overnight.

Cities have much more freedom of labour, and fewer single industry employers. They're more agile, more resilient, to changes in the world economy. They're less dependent on industry that can reasonably expected to be aided by a nationalist industrial policy. They have more people who weren't born there; people who are used to moving to where work is, finding a community where they go, rather than identifying with an area and a community they inherited and will bequeath. They are literally less tied to the land that makes up a nation.

For starters, most of globalized shipping happens by sea, so logistics and industry will tend to aggregate near the large ports.

There are also less obvious effects: For example, Silicon Valley grew out of a naval base into which the Navy poured a lot of research money.

Coasts are where most of the cities are. As for where globalization benefits? This question is somewhat oversimplified. There are two factors: the culture/demographic side and the economic side. That is, globalization has economic winners and losers AND cultural consequences.

Obviously there are going to be some winners and some losers, but how did it come to be that the winners are disproportionately concentrated in certain geographic locations?

You might better ask, why did certain geographic locations win? The people have changed. One of the key requirements of globalization is the free movement of labor. Jobs move to where the labor is and labor goes to where the jobs are. A small town has no future when it loses its only factory to Mexico while all its brightest youths go to Silicon Valley and New York City to work in IT, Media, and big Finance and spend lots of time getting drunk and having sex. Once that happens, the small towns left behind either manage to pivot into tourism or an exburban haven for telecommuters, or they just die a long, slow death; kept on life support by Wal Mart while Meth labs and Mexican heroin ravage their communities.

One other important thing to look at, as far as people's attitudes go, is the pace of change and the nature of the change. If a local factory failed because they failed to compete with foreign competition, that would inspire people to figure out a better way to compete. Everyone fails together or succeeds together. But when a local factory is shut down because the owners have decided to cash in on globalization, people are more likely to be upset and feel betrayed and look to government for help.

There is also a matter of food supply. There is a sentiment among rural people in my area (not US) that it's them who are doing actually important work for little pay while the cities waste time and money on bureaucracy and pursuit of fads.

And this is why liberal- and capitalistic-minded farmers despise EU subsidies. You have to take them to be competitive, but in order to get them you have to do what Brussels wants you to do. They set quotas on how much of particular goods particular countries are allowed to produce, subsidize regions they think are "important" or "disprivileged" or whatever. And if they feel like funding something else instead of you today, you are uncompetitive and screwed.

I remember back in the day when Mexican president Carlos Salinas promoted the NAFTA deal as a solution to our problems. I started to disagree when reason came to me (I was too young when it happened), few reasons:

- I believed in a more protectionist system that encouraged internal growth. I still do to a point. - Trading is good as long as you don't compromise internal production and employment. NAFTA is way too aggressive in this sense. - It will triggered this bad "us-american?" behavior of consumerism and materialism.

Well, here we are 22 years after and it's evident the system got exhausted, even for US-Americans who were supposed to be the strong link in this chain.

Is killing NAFTA a good idea? maybe. I don't know. We are so deep into these waters that it has to be a small "chunk by chunk" change, and even so, it'll be chaos.

What I am sure we need, is to find a new balance, going all protectionist will be a huge mistake, just like this crazy aggressive neoliberalism that allowed companies behave irresponsible. Believe me, the consequences of this 20+ years trade system in Mexico are massive.

Wait, I'm not a pro-Trump crazy Mexican, keep reading.

As I said, we need a new balance. To my eyes, Trump is an extremist and a dangerous man, he doesn't sound or act like a guy that could bring this balance. I think USA voters made a huge mistake on electing him. But, at the same time, they had 2 very poor choices. They just chose the worst one.

The years to come will be interesting ones... that is given.

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-eu-referendum-36617781

I suspect what we're seeing here isn't actually even cities vs everywhere else. I suspect this correlation is obfuscating the real connecting variable which is age.

Young people live in cities. As they get married, buy houses and have children they move out into the suburbs.

Young people tend to vote left wing and be more supportive of the 'elite'. Older people tend to be more conservative and, apparently, more willing to give the 'elite' a good kicking.

This "if you are left you support the elite" thing at least in the UK was a way of conjoining the left and the elite into a single entity so that you could say to Joe Bloggs "these people don't care about you" and it needs addressing by the left.

The lefts biggest problem (here) is they simply aren't addressing the concerns of their traditional voting block at all, they seem to be more concerned about in-fighting and political correctness, I'm all for political correctness but you can only focus on so many issues and some issues are simply more important (particularly if you want to win elections and if you aren't focused on that you are a debate society not a political party).

A simple reading of what the left has traditionally stood for should make it obvious that the left and the 'elites' are opposed purely on simple economic grounds, We want them to pay more taxes, they don't want to pay more taxes (which is to be expected, who does?).

Frankly the biggest issue in regards to politics in the UK is the media (and I don't just mean the majority of the print media that is hilariously and obviously biased towards whatever Murdoch wants) but the media as a whole, the drop in revenue from the move to internet news has meant that they have to sell click bait and "agendas" to get traffic so we end up with these horrible echo chambers of bias-confirmation.

Frankly I think we are heading into a really dark period of politics here and I don't see any way to stop it.

From my point of view, the lefts biggest problem is that the "left" of today is pretty much the center. I find it extremely hard to take any left-of-center (think Bernie Sanders) position today. Anyone not in the center or in the right and you'll have both the liberal (as in economically liberal) and the conservative media against you. I don't live in the US/UK, but I live in an increasingly anti-leftist country. I can't even complain that Uber eroding worker's rights without being called a commie here. I honestly feared for my life one time when I was wearing a red t-shirt and accidentally bumped into a right-wing rally when I was visiting another town.

But the thing is, it doesn't take a lot of empathy to see that a lot of conservatives are feeling the same way: they complain that the media has a liberal-bias, they complain about not having the right to speak (because of political correctness), they complain about persecution because of their religion, they had their jobs taken away and the establishment (which they perceive as being completely on the left) failed them... they have liberal media against them. I can completely sympathize with all that.

Funny thing is that from reading comments of Trump voters, I feel as if the more radical left and Trump voters have a lot of fears in common: automation taking jobs, globalism taking jobs, elites raking it, the center-left liberals being too worried about what they call "political correctness" but saying fuck-off to workers, religious and rural people... Not to mention I can totally sympathize with how they crave for more radicalism in politics, just like I, as a leftist, do.

As I wrote that last paragraph, I wondered if what we're actually witnessing is the end of that brand of centrist/moderate liberalism. I'm biased but I think that the demise of liberalism will be that cause "dark times ahead", unless we find a viable left to strike a balance with the current right.

In a way I think the values of "left" and "right" don't really apply like they did (if they ever did) anymore.

On some issues I hold views that the left would call me a right for and the right would call me a left for (e.g. Some things the the state runs should be private, some things that are private the state should run, not all defense spending is bad, fairer taxes can mean higher taxes on the rich, regressive taxes hit the poorer harder, religion has zero place in the bedroom or in reproductive rights, equal rights does not mean positive discrimination, the right to free speech doesn't mean the right to no consequences, single payer healthcare is not the devil (I'm British, the NHS is one of the better things we did), a social safety net is part of the social contract, immigration is broadly a good thing and rarely a very bad thing etc etc), corporations should pay their taxes and those found to be avoiding them should be punished in a way that actually makes it easier for them to just pay, we need to spend a lot on infrastructure (our national audit office found that there is between a 3 to 1 and 7 to 1 RoI on infrastructure spending).

I'm all over the spectrum when it comes to left/right, what I don't like (near universally) is the crop of politicians on either side of the old left/right.

What I'd really like is a party that addresses the tough issues with evidence led policy and the honesty to say "That's a tough problem, We don't have a total solution but we are going to try <foo> because we think it'll work better than <bar> because <fizz>".

There isn't enough nuance in politics anymore, everything is absolutist "This good, you bad", I want smart, articulate thinking politicians who are thinking about the big problems (where the problems aren't how do I benefit myself).

But get out of the cities in the north of England and you find a place not dissimilar to America's Rust Belt: forcibly de-industrialised, full of lingering resentment. When I go back to my hometown in the north it sometimes feels as though time has stood still since the 1980s, and the steelworkers and miners who Thatcher put out of work now have children and grandchildren who have been brought up feeling hard done by, apathetic and with few aspirations, despite having access to free education, welfare and healthcare that other countries would kill for.

This is the white working class problem incarnate.

That's the rub. I think they'd prefer to work. There are few places left in the modern world to find meaning. Supporting one's self through productive work used to be a great one. Living off the largesse of the state is demoralizing.

The jobs their looking for are not coming back, and its not just trade and immigration, but technology as well. While poverty can be mitigated through the welfare state, it isn't an ideal solution in the long term.

This is a hard problem.

Yes. That's why I'm critical of Universal Income. I believe that UI would only push those people further down, making them completely unnecessary, without purpose at all, their tasks in society being relegated to merely being a consumer.

I'm totally in favor of having free education, welfare and healthcare, though. I do think we need a balance here.

In other words, to pick your own purpose: to be able to contribute to society (and the economy) in a way that you actually might enjoy instead of whatever stupid job you can manage to find where you live.

I don't know that this vision of every mom-and-pop becoming an entrepreneur would actually work out that way -- few things work out the way they sound on paper -- but it sounds better than people getting so upset they just want to burn it all down.

I think we need to unpack that a bit more and deal with this "left wing elite" myth.

If I remember rightly, people have been digging for correlating variables and found that the best one for Brexit is .. support for the death penalty. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-36803544

(I doubt many Leave voters even realised they needed to vote leave the EU to allow for the possibility of peacetime death penalties; it certainly wasn't a campaign issue!)

Not the death penalty specifically, but anti-ECHR campaigning has been going on for years. (Yes, I know that's not quite the same as the EU). And I do feel that there is a big, vague punitive component to both Brexit and Trumpism.

Manchester, Leeds and Newcastle all voted remain. Birmingham voted leave by 50.4%

(At least in my ear the word is often used in a pejorative manner).

I would have said suburbs but that wasn't quite right as there are decent sized towns and cities encompassed in the area I am talking about but whom OP was using to claim that Newcastle voted leave when it didn't - it was the surrounding towns and cities that did.

There are parallels with Brexit, though I don't think many of the underlying causes are the same. I very much agree that those who play identity politics and deal in absolutes - "you must agree with me or you are an X" - are being burned an electorate who have heard that line a few times too often.

The election in France with Marine La Pen does have the potential for another Trump like upset - the next one to watch.

But remember that "white" and "foreign" are not the same thing! Edinburgh has a substantial Polish community. I have coworkers from Ukraine and Romania.

"How cosmopolitan is Scotland, really" is a complex question. It's official policy of the very popular SNP, and there's little toehold for UKIP or xenophobic politics. I think they've quite successfully attached the free-floating blame to Westminster. While in the rest of the country blaming foreigners is more popular.

Having different press (including separate editions of the Mail and Sun) probably also makes a difference. Brexit is very much a long-term press project.

But as you said - it's nothing like what our grandparents' generation would have experienced, or what went on in Northern Ireland during the Troubles.

I really hope the marches just sorta melt away into nothingness. I'm not even catholic and I feel like their role is purely to stoke the fires

It definitely is big cities versus rural areas rather than coast vs not coast.

It just so happens that most big cities are on or closer to the coast (or along large rivers in earlier history). It made travel and trade much easier.

  four international airports

Have you visited London's "docklands"?

Should probably have said "was" a port, but the point was that it doesn't really count as "inland".

Simplifying: non-newbies feel that newbies are hurting them more than helping.

London, Manchester, Liverpool, all have multiple Premier league teams. Birmingham used to have a couple. Glasgow in the Scottish league has a couple.

You will find the same in all of Europe. Top teams are based in Paris, Madrid, Barcelona, Munich, Milan, Dortmund, Amsterdam, and so on.

Note that there are several teams whose names are suburbs rather than the main city.

Yes, I agree it would hurt the California economy if that happened. But are you saying that on your team of 10 people at Google, all of them were here illegally? I can't comprehend the fact that Google would hire immigrants without proper visas or background checks. If they're legal immigrants or they have the required visas, they would be just fine.

edit: the proposal is also just that...a proposal. It's not guaranteed this will happen.

I'm also pretty sure that there are supporters of his that actually want to send all immigrants back to where they came from. "America for Americans", right? And most of the hypotheticals in this thread are about what happens if that wing of the party gets its way and pushes through rather extremist legislation.

Please find me a single example of this. I haven't heard a single republican ever complain about legal immigration.

I was answering someone who questioned whether there was even a single example of complaints about legal immigration.

And I personally have come across people that wanted to do much worse than deport legal immigrants.

John Derbyshire (http://www.unz.com/jderbyshire/orlando-paris-yorkshire-and-d...)

Steve Sailer (http://www.unz.com/isteve/will-the-zeroth-amendment-trump-th...)

Ann Coulter (author of Adios, America: The Left's Plan to Turn Our Country into a Third World Hellhole)

Pat Buchanan (http://buchanan.org/blog/immigration-time-out-163)

It's a pretty central issue right now.

No one at This American Life has any insight into what it means to be a blue collar worker worker.

Please don't hold me to a standard that was not requested. I don't believe there is any evidence that this was drawn out; as far as I can tell, many of the statements are simply recordings of town hall meetings.

I didn't mean to direct that at you, but rather the larger problem of blue collar workers being an out-group of discourse at the national level.

The kind of people that I know that actually voted for Trump could not care less about the color/religion of a person so long as they had a basic desire to assimilate. In other words; come to America to become an American not to make America like place you left.

Now we have an obligation to understand these Trump voters as generously as possible; or we can berate, belittle, and battle-harden them and get another Trump (or worse) in 8 years.

If you cannot understand them you cannot help them see why Trump is a bad idea.

It seems to me that you've dismissed them, having never thought to put yourself in their shoes; the shoes of the factory worker.

Michael Moore has friends that he likes, that he thinks are good people--not ignorant racists--that voted for Trump and instead of closing his mind to them he's tried to understand >> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YY-CiPVo_NQ

Maybe you should too...

But to now extrapolate from that to imagining that 47% of Americans voted for Trump because they are xenophobic assholes is not going to be a winning strategy.

Stop talking about racism/xenophobia in relation to Trump's being elected. You cannot win the ~90% of Trump supporters by linking them with the ~10% of his supporters that are disgusting low lifes. You are distracting people from solving the problem.

Seems to me like you are disregarding my concerns in the same way you're accusing me of disregarding Trump supporters' concerns.

I am going beyond what I agree with. My statement is a strict super-set of your's.

Yes, Trump is a morally repugnant person. Yes, he has supporters that are as well. Yes, you should be concerned about both of those issues.

Now, while remaining concerned, let's talk; do you think lambasting 47% of voters--some of whom are (by your own admission) not intrinsically, categorically, irrecoverably, lost--is a good or bad strategy towards avoiding another Trump?

I also agree that lambasting all 47% is a bad idea. I never said that it was good; I just made a statement that a portion of those 47% are horrible people who are emboldened by Trump's demagoguery and will make life difficult for minorities like me (which, as you described is a subset of your statement). I made no comment describing the rest of your statement (perhaps you misread my initial reply to you as a blanket statement when it wasn't meant as such?) and I don't disagree with you on it. I would be very happy if we could find a way to make America work for everyone, rich or poor, white or coloured.

Is this likely to be reciprocated?

There will always be people who don't have the ability, capacity, wherewithal, or life experiences needed to see the bigger picture or recognize the need to put themselves in the shoes of others.

That leaves you with two options: fight "dirty" right back or deal with the reality and accept that you face an uphill battle.

Not in all cases. But you still have to pick your battles.

When faced with opposition you can negotiate or go to war. If you start a war, you'd better be ready to win, or else you stand to lose everything.

And you had better be ready for the moderates to side against you.

More accurately: comes from a compatible culture and shows an interest and willingness to assimilate.

In the "Five actions to restore security and the constitutional rule of law" section is this:

> FIFTH, suspend immigration from terror-prone regions where vetting cannot safely occur. All vetting of people coming into our country will be considered “extreme vetting.”

Just like how he was much more moderate once he got the nominatim and didn't have to appeal to just the republican base?

They want to protect their culture and values from the effects of mass immigration from people with very different heritage and values who are discouraged from assimilating and encouraged to join in the culture of grievance and victimhood preached by the progressive left. Repatriate everyone is definitely the most extreme position I have seen. A moratorium on all immigration is the next most extreme. Then there's the White Nationalist contingent, they are OK with immigration so long as it is from Europe but not anywhere else. Regardless, there's a general sense that the inflow of illegals must be stopped before any plan for amnesty should be allowed on the table and that the prevailing dogma that the entire world has a fundamental human right to immigrate to the US needs to be rejected completely.

It's like Ann Coulter's tweet last night where she said nobody should be able to vote unless all 4 of their grandparents were born in America - and then had to put her foot in her mouth when people pointed out that this would disqualify Donald Trump.

So yeah, as the other poster mentioned, "if you go back far enough". If you go back far enough, we're all relatives, too. But that doesn't necessarily have meaning by itself. It's the individuals that choose to, or choose not to, apply meaning from such a technicality.

Even lots of illegal immigrants. :-)

For what it's worth, while I don't think Trump is likely to be even close to as draconian as his early rhetoric made it seem, it's worth noting that many of his supporters really are opposed to immigration in a much broader sense than merely legal or illegal. There's a very strong sense that the current philosophy of immigration + multiculturalism is out of control. Too many immigrants are coming in who do not share traditional American values and then are being encouraged NOT to assimilate by the progressive left; but to instead complain about oppression and racism.

My impression is that people just want this insane trend to STOP. Most don't want to see mass deportations. Most don't care about the finer points of what's illegal and what's not. They want someone to address the obvious threat to their culture and values.

No one wants to send legal immigrants on your team back their countries of origin. Blue collar, unskilled laborers want to stop the influx of unskilled laborers and illegal immigrants who 1) take their jobs and depress their wages and 2) take up resources from social programs.

It may take some time to evaluate, but I honestly feel my manager is good enough at his job to evaluate his worker's performance.

So, maybe initially, he pulls himself out of destitution with the job he 'stole' from me. Now he is just forever grateful that he doesn't have it much worse so he never wants more?

If the company gets a company man who does the job, never complains, and never asks for a raise, why would they ever hire me? The american who wants more money for the same job.

Oh come on. Nobody is calling for sending all immigrants back. Trump's wife is an immigrant... The questions are:

* Big one: What to do about illegal immigration.

* Smaller one: What to do about the widespread abuse of the h1b program. For example, FY 2015, Infosys [outsourcing Indian company] leads the h1b pack with 23k visas, whereas Google has 3k visas.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/11/06/us/outsourcing...

http://www.myvisajobs.com/Reports/2015-H1B-Visa-Sponsor.aspx

One of Trump's signature campaign promises was to repeal NAFTA, which defines a class of skilled laborer status called TN status, which allows Canadians to show up at the border with $50, an offer letter and a diploma (in a skilled labor category) and work in the US. Mexican nationals are afforded similar status though require consular processing. This is cheap, flexible and un-capped. I'd wager the bulk of legal Canadians and Mexicans are in the US on TN status, so they would have to go were NAFTA repealed.

I have a hard time seeing a world where isolationist/protectionist policies increase free movement of labor so almost by definitions legal immigration will be restricted, IMO.

I think we're past the time period where water transport was hugely superior to land transport (and air didn't yet exist). It's not that much harder or more expensive to get a plane ticket or UPS package to the Midwest compared to California.

I think the election results by county support this. Even in red states, urban centers are blue, and in blue states, rural areas are red.

I'm not sure there's a sufficient segregating force to change this. Aside from election time and resulting legal frameworks that apply to both areas, the ease of transportation and also of moving information mean that there's little friction in being next door to or embedded within the other groups.

This is a little hyperbolic, but by the time the rural factory worker has finished killing the chicken and plucking its feathers for dinner, the attorney at New York's finest law firm has just settled a class action lawsuit for $100,000,000.00

There is no question rural areas are getting the short end of the stick, but I have a hard time believing it's primarily because of any intervention on the part of special interests (though they almost certainly are not innocent). It's because on a global scale the smartest, most connected people in the world can literally move mountains relative to their blue collar counter parts.

So a response may be to get more people engage in trade and globalization instead of only seeing the bad sides, the closed factories, etc.

How does one do that I don't know. Maybe Google should move its campus to Iowa.

I don't know how to get more people to engage in trade either. Better education, probably. Even though I live in the Bay Area, used to work for a multinational corporation, know plenty of immigrants (including a parent), and have entrepreneurial friends that basically employ an army of international contractors through UpWork, I still find myself reluctant to take the plunge and take advantage of globalization.

https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/inside/locations/co...

I don't expect wars over land to be done anytime soon. We might be doing most of our work on computers rather than on land, but the resources for these computers gotta come from somewhere. This is why esp. China has been going around and buying huge troves of land in Africa: not only to feed their growing population, but also to call dibs on the minerals in the ground.

That doesn't mean that information wars are not happening as well. (Though not nearly as prominent since these need way less personnel and happen less openly.)

(Nationalistic media and propaganda are just as much an information war as attacks on computer systems. Even if it does sound more like a "misinformation war".)

Land is apparently good, even if arid desert or useless very high mountains (ie Chinese invasion of India and land grab for 0 purposes)

How is this an argument? I'm not from the US and I'm not very well read on the issue, but isn't it illegal immigrants they want to deport?

Who said that people from those countries couldn't be well educated and be fully functional Americans?

Also, I live in Malmö Sweden (coastal city) and the right-wing party here is strong, and we have lots of problem with immigrants, both legal and illegal.

However, the tenor of the campaign in the american press and social media has such that the left is convinced that they are going to be sent to robot death camps constructed for people who vote democrat. The right was concerned about the opposite until they won.

For many of the young and educated democrats this is the first time they have lost an election. The hysteria will pass. And then we will see where it all goes

Not good example. They were not voluntarily part of USSR (see Molotov-Ribentrop pact), Stalin sent a lot of them to Siberia. They have huge Russian minority too (remember Putin's policy for "protecting" russians in foreign countries). It it not easy for them to survive, they have to be as independent on russia as possible, so they have no other choice than integrate into international organizations.

Also, being dependent on imports to feed the population would have major national security implications.

The Hanseatic League was a federation of free-trading market towns along the North Sea and Baltic Sea coastlines. [1]

A number of people have suggested that cities (and federations of cities) may become more of a focus as a political unit in the medium term over the nation state.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanseatic_League

Basically City-States

It differs from historical city-states in that the primary factor of production in the classical/medieval era was land, and so city states negotiated from a position of weakness and remained confined to the city because they lacked the resources to capture more territory. Now, food is abundant, and actually requires fossil fuels and genetic engineering for its production. That changes the negotiating position of a port city without a lot of land significantly.

(It does make me wonder what would happen if we got a nationalist heartland ringed by a number of small city states, and then the heartland would refuse to sell food. Massive famine and political collapse? Peaceful trade with overseas nations to supply an alternate source? A large army streaming out of the city states to capture the heartland by force? Mutually assured destruction where everyone dies, since modern crops don't actually grow by themselves without fresh inputs of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, antibiotics, and genetically-modified seeds?)

Just look at the success of Singapore to see how effective a modern city-state can be. London, New York, San Francisco, etc. would all be better off as independent self-governing city-states.

I'm actually a little confused why liberals want to push everything up to the federal level. They have total control over many states like New York and California, and it seems like they could accomplish their goals more efficiently if they weren't sharing senate seats with Alabama on key issues.

You get less federal funding for programs if the federal taxes are cut, but given California's salaries and population you're probably paying more than your fair share anyways.

Also, I think the whole "states rights" thing is bullshit. Republicans only favor states rights when those rights run in favor of their positions. Otherwise you wouldn't have things like the Defense of Marriage Act—why should Republicans in Georgia get to decide who Californians can marry?

The other big problem is that certain policies are inherently handled at the federal level. Disregarding foreign policy, immigration and trade are both hot-button issues this cycle and the policies which the heartland voted for are likely to be destructive for coastal cities.

It is true, that the Confederacy is to possess, and may exercise, the power of collecting internal as well as external taxes throughout the States; but it is probable that this power will not be resorted to, except for supplemental purposes of revenue; that an option will then be given to the States to supply their quotas by previous collections of their own; and that the eventual collection, under the immediate authority of the Union, will generally be made by the officers, and according to the rules, appointed by the several States. Indeed it is extremely probable, that in other instances, particularly in the organization of the judicial power, the officers of the States will be clothed with the correspondent authority of the Union. Should it happen, however, that separate collectors of internal revenue should be appointed under the federal government, the influence of the whole number would not bear a comparison with that of the multitude of State officers in the opposite scale. Within every district to which a federal collector would be allotted, there would not be less than thirty or forty, or even more, officers of different descriptions, and many of them persons of character and weight, whose influence would lie on the side of the State. The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce; with which last the power of taxation will, for the most part, be connected.

A glance at Wikipedia shows the IRS collects 7.7 times as much income tax revenue as the sum of all state income tax revenue. So to a first approximation, a Madison federal government would be 308 times smaller than our current one. That's crazy-talk to any traditional Republican, no matter how much they pretend to talk about states' rights and limited government.

Ron Paul, his son Rand Paul, and Ted Cruz have all expressed thoughts along these lines, and they seem to be gaining support compared to the evangelicals. Assuming Trump wins again in 2020, we'll see if the trend continues for truly limited federal government in 2024.

Of the choices on the ballot, Johnson was a lot closer to being a traditional Republican than Trump.

Tokyo already does this and food there is not substantially expensive than it is in other alpha cities.

Also there are plenty of big cities not surrounded by farmland. Hong Kong and Singapore, for example.

FYI, I'm not aware of anyone proposing to send all immigrants back, only undocumented (also known as "illegal") immigrants. Like it or not, the current laws are such that people in that category are not here legally, so if we truly are a nation of laws, those laws should be upheld, no?

If you don't agree with the law, vote to change it rather than act as if the law just doesn't exist.

To single out a certain group of people and act as if laws don't apply to them in a country that is otherwise built on laws is to deprive them (and all of us) of one of the most fundamental American virtues. Whether we agree with the laws or not, if we don't uphold them, we cease to be a free country (it's the laws that keep us free, after all). It's absurd to believe otherwise.

Or, you know, we can keep going down the rabbit hole of selectively enforcing laws, and we can ignore your vote too because some people don't agree with it; the voting laws are just words on paper.

OK, when you catch them, write them a ticket and make them show up with their Mexican ID and fill out the paperwork to be documented again. It's false to conclude that deportation is the only possible redress. There's no reason to turn one person's or a whole family's life upside down for a victimless crime of not filling out a paper form that takes 7 years to complete. The RIAA tried this with suing MP3 purveyors in the 00's, once an efficient legal market existed infringement plummeted.

I do agree that the process can and should be streamlined in many ways, but it should begin with those seeking to follow the law rather than essentially giving a free pass to everyone who knowingly broke the law as their first deed on American soil.

For the record, I know several Mexican families (in Mexico and in the US) affected by this, and I firmly believe that a strong border is better in the long run - both for the US and Mexico. Legal immigration should be an option and it should be a more straightforward process, but blanket amnesty doesn't really do any favors for anyone.

I don't know if this is what is likely to happen, but I've been pondering this: The Westphalian order for the world, which we currently live under, involves drawing borders for countries, and then basically insisting that the governments within those borders must have some sort of unity, regardless of what those borders are, do, or come from.

Do you have a group of people that are geographically localized but have borders going right through the middle of them, like the Kurds? Then they are not a country, not countrymen, and regardless of their affiliations they are subject to their country's policies for dealing with each other. The split of East and West Germany was an extreme case of this, where a national border was drawn, and you had families cut in half.

Do you have bunches of people that basically loathe each other with the fire of a thousand suns, but there's a border drawn around them on the world map? Then they live together, until the most pathological cases like Yugoslavia finally just blow apart.

And where did these borders come from? Did some bureaucrats in Europe in the 1700s or 1800s draw some conveniently straight lines in Africa? You're a country now in the 21st century, regardless of how anyone local feels about that. Pretty much anywhere in the world you see a straight line border you see something very artificial that took no account of conditions on the ground.

In the 1990s, the cyber utopians thought that technology would lead to more decentralization. With improved technology, you don't need industrial-era practices to deal with cities and counties and states and countries. You can have very sophisticated government and government services now at much smaller polities; even the small local cities take online payments now, for instance, and have online billing.

Perhaps the future looks like the Westphalian system cracking up, and polities being more willing to secede, easily join together in arrangements of convenience as needed, and easily break apart again as their interests diverge. There are certainly a lot of practical issues involved in that transition, but as diversity increases all around the world, there's increasingly a lot of practical issues involved in forcibly jamming people together because of borders drawn 200+ years ago. It wouldn't solve war; that's not on the table. But it might just prevent World War III.

The reality is that there are now three populations - one connected, educated, cosmopolitan, and international. Another made of globalisation's cast-offs, who tend to be poorly educated, rural, reactionary, and reliant almost entirely on right-wing propaganda outlets for its world view. And a third, which is an indentured working class in the emerging economies which build things for the other two, but has very limited personal and economic freedoms.

Connected people are - ironically - more similar than different the world over. Allowing for local colour, you'll hear the same conversations in Barcelona, Berlin, Berkeley, Bankgkok, and Beijing. These people often see nation states as a distraction - something that gets in the way of getting cool shit done.

The cast-offs are also more similar than different, but they still identify strongly with nation states and nationalist politics because they have no other identity they can call their own. National pride is literally the only thing that allows them to feel any agency in their lives.

The Brexit and Trump votes are Luddite machine riots, where the machine is the globalised order.

Technology can't fix this. Globalisation has to decide what it wants to do with them.

The sensible humane option is to work out some way to re-enfranchise them.

The inhumane option - historically popular, and looking more and more likely - is to cull them in a major war and hope nothing else gets broken.

It's a bigger problem than it looks. In fact we have a is a kind of reinvention of medieval feudalism, with a plutocratic nobility who can move around freely, a supportive caste of technological and financial aspirants who can move with permissions, and an indentured worker caste who can't move, and sometimes don't want to.

There is no sense in which this is a functioning, inclusive popular democracy. It has some of the trappings - popular votes, etc. But absolutely none of the substance.

The point is that they don't have to be so immutable. We don't have to tie together two populations that don't want to be together if it's less of a Major World Shift to draw a new line between them and declare a new polity, or merge two polities that have no great need to be separate anymore.

A lot of the conflict in the US right now is in some sense artificial, imposed by the lines that exist. The truth is, what does it matter to San Francisco if the heartland is "racist homophobic bigots" and what does it matter to the heartland if San Francisco are "globalists engaged in foolish social policies and crazy obsessions with things that don't matter", if they weren't bound together by centuries-old lines? Obviously economic ties continue either way, because trade is flowing regardless and neither of the two are, in practice, all that concerned about the other places in the world that have the same description. It's only the people you're locked in the room with that bother you. Maybe we should unlock the door instead of having increasingly bitter and violent fights about who gets the couch tonight.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age#Phyles

I would expect the largest, most successful cities to be located on the coast, or in extremely fertile regions like the Nile Delta or Mesopotamia. Couldn't find any pretty visualisations that would show that though, so I might be wrong.

1 https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a9/Griechis...

2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanno_the_Navigator#Modern_ana...

Do you think the US would let California leave? Can CA defend her own borders (especially against the rest of the US)?

They also have the advantage of being exceptionally technically advanced - perhaps moreso than the U.S. military, given that Lockheed has a large presence in the Bay Area and all the Predator drones are made in San Diego. And they're a nuclear power - Livermore is one of two sites that actually develops atomic bombs.

This'd be fun to wargame out as a board game or computer simulation, although the subject matter is a little macabre.

CA is a big part of the US economy and culture, but in no way would I imagine that it could resist the rest of the 49 states.

https://www.quora.com/If-every-state-of-the-USA-declared-war...

Certainly there is a lot of high tech industry in CA but I doubt that Lockheed and the other defense corps are disproportionately reliant on CA, they have plants and R&D centers spread throughout the country.

I agree it's something interesting to ponder.

It actually might now. The Right is in full control of the country, and it had been generally very sympathetic to the idea of just splitting up the country and each going their own way lately. It was never really seriously looked at by the Left - sure, there are semi-joking proposals like Cascadia, but nothing as serious as, say, Texas secessionists. But right now Cascadia might sound like a very good idea for a lot of people.

Similarly in Scotland I think the major urban areas dominate, where populations are more diverse. But rural populations away from communications and conurbations seem far less accepting of [large groups of] migrants.

Similarly in the UK poorer populations that might feel threatened by incomers seeking low-skilled jobs (eg due to poor language skills) seem less welcoming of migrants.

Personally I think the whole "culture" aspect is a red herring and what people really care about is their own wealth. I mean the UK's history is epitomised by outside influences either due to invasion of Britain or British invasion and Empire.

Personally I think to survive and meet the needs of everyone the West will need give up some of its luxuries, get rid of our need to own everything we use, move away from the disposable lifestyle.

In short my analysis is it's liberal just greed that drives this whole thing - 'I deserve wealth but other people don't'.

Does that idea fit in other geographies or not?

>What if it actually came to that? If push came to shove and the interior decided to push a nativist, nationalist agenda, what if the coastal regions that benefit significantly from trade were to say "Okay, you guys can play with yourself, we're going to play with the rest of the world." Scotland has threatened to do exactly that, and is planning on holding another referendum on independence if Britain actually follows through on Brexit.

It's a decent idea for large parts of America to be devolved into separate nation-states. Texas, California, and Massachusetts are looking not to be governable as a unified country.

More people get what they want when you have a larger number of smaller countries. California could have a democratic president and Texas could have a republican one. They don't need to hate how the other votes.

California Democrats were loving it when Obama and the Democrats were in control in 2008. Couldn't they realize that sooner or later the pendulum would swing the other way?

We're about to witness an object lesson on why you enforce the rules even on your own party - even when the ends seem to justify the means. Think about the overreach of executive orders and the suspension of the filibuster as tools in the hands of the opposing party.

Then those regions might form their own government, see for example the Hanseatic League [1]. These cities answered directly to the Emperor, instead of some local nobility or government.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanseatic_league

There was an interesting article on this some time ago that broached some of these ideas:

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22329850-600-end-of-n...

Are we really all part of New Hansa?

London is the interior, it is not on the coast. Wales and and Scotland are both coastal.

>"Croatia & Slovenia vs. the rest of Yugoslavia."

I assume you mean the former Yugoslavia? Bosnia and Herzegovina and Montenegro are also on the coast. So what does that leave for non-coastal fomer Yugoslavia? Macedonia?

>"The Baltic Republics vs. the rest of the USSR"

There hasn't been a USSR since 1991. Do you mean the former USSR?

Agggressive, negotiators with awareness of cognitive biases like base-rate fallacy, asymmetry of information advantage, etc.... will form or create the organizing principles most likely.. I think of it and it becomes a pain thinking about the asymmentry of information. Hopefully, if it happens, we'll build a better deterrant against withholding information.

Until you can fix your toilet, repair your house, teach your kids, pave your roads, and have your meals cooked for you remotely, I don't think this is a valid concern. The upper "coastal" class depends on local, blue collar labor that can't be outsourced (with current technology).

Rich folk can move to the suburbs but everyone will need to coexist within contiguous geographic states for the foreseeable future.

You're so far from the average Trump voter that they would never see your point.

How is Wales less coastal than Scotland?

It simultaneously trivializes my culture while hating its own culture.

I watched Justin Trudeau dance the bhangra and people claim "oh what beautiful Indian culture". I've seen people eat butter chicken to partake in "Indian culture" experiences.

That's just wrong. Indian culture - any culture - is far, far more than a dance or some dish.

At the same time, I see white people negate their culture altogether. It might have been built on colonialism and imperialism, but what, say, Renaissance artists pulled off is significant, very significant.

Everyone needs to back off and think about this for a bit

I think there's a key concept missing from every discussion about culture, and that concept is that "X immigrant culture" is a completely different culture from "X culture." Indians in India have one culture, while Indians in e.g. Britain have a related, but divergent culture.

Two places this matters:

• Frequently, the people of "X immigrant culture" care a lot about 'preserving their heritage', because it's a constant struggle for them—while the people of "X culture" couldn't give a damn, because they're constantly steeped in their own culture and it's not going away. "Cultural appropriation" is an invention almost entirely of immigrant cultures.

• People "exploring a culture" frequently have the implicit goal of exploring the domestic-immigrant offshoot of a culture, not the native one. Because of the lack of connection and cultural touchstone organizations that immigrants face, things like dances and dishes are seen as far more relevant in immigrant cultures, similar to their role in itinerant cultures.

When I speak to American friends (especially as part of a larger group), I get many of the pop culture and other references which my Indian friends sometimes miss. I however, feel left out when I speak to some Indians because I don't get or appreciate many local idioms since I was never exposed to them. This can be isolating at times and I'm trying to make amends but that can be harder as you grow older.

I think that the best way to do it is to have deep roots in ones own culture (which is why they - especially the fragile ones - should be preserved) and then have a liberal education which opens your mind to external ideas. This comes from reading literatures of other peoples, languages, poetry, history etc. much more than a more "scientific" education that emphasises logic, problem solving, analytical skills etc. One of the reasons I bemoan the lack of emphasis on the humanities in primary education and am trying to compensate for this with my own children.

Having a deep understanding of ones own culture keeps one relaxed with it. No insecurity and resistant to attempts to appropriate it for political mileage. It also creates a sense of "being" and a "home" to come back to when you've had a bad day rather than lashing out.

Being open minded about others makes you receptive to people's ideas drastically different from your own and gives you the tools to assimilate them or parts of them into your own world view.

My own background has made me a cultural nomad of sorts. I don't feel any pride when I talk about any facet of my identity but I do miss having a deep historical well to draw inspiration and ideas from. A desire to be a link in a longer chain.

A friend of mine who is a first generation Indian immigrant observed exactly same thing. He noticed his conservative Indian parents had become more extreme in their beliefs over time, as a sort of reaction against American culture. His parents feel a bit closed off from the rest of American society since they never fully integrated. However, simultaneously, he noticed that when he went to India, people there were actually becoming more liberal and tolerant over time, as compared to his parents who were becoming more traditional.

A very interesting phenomenon.

People from cultures that wear something over the head does so much more in the new country while the home country is starting to loosen up. Even though this is exactly why they moved away in the first place.

(We have friends from Somalia, Germany, Turkey, Russia, Egypt and then some, that describe this for us)

And even then, it's hard to pin down.

I, for one, notice that Australians are quite different from Americans and Brits. And of course even more so from the multitude of Asian, South American and European cultures.

Whether the origin country has a singular culture of many subcultures is really irrelevant to that point. It's just a matter of whether the immigrant culture diverges from the source subculture.