"Strong Mutually Antagonistic Governments Everywhere"

India is better ruled than before, which turns out to be a problem for Americans.

One problem for American immigration policy is that India now has a massive and growing ethnocentric Hindu nationalist movement, which has ruled India in recent years. This means that immigrants from India no longer even pretend to be as sophisticated and tolerant and un-bigoted as they did when their models were Fabian and Bloomsbury progressives.

Hindu nationalists like current prime minister Modi have done India a fair amount of good. Modi actually seems to be pretty good at getting the toilets built on time. He doesn’t have stupid socialist ideals like Indian leaders before 1991 did. He’s a decent friend to American foreign policy because he doesn’t much like China to his northeast or the Muslim countries to his west.

But a recurrent challenge to the nationalist right is getting on each others’ nerves.

From Evelyn Waugh’s masterpiece Scoop:

Lord Copper [more or less Waugh’s employer, newspaper owner Lord Beaverbrook] explained Nazism, Fascism and Communism; later, in his ghastly library, he outlined the situation in the Far East. “The Beast [the conservative working class Daily Express] stands for strong mutually antagonistic governments everywhere,” he said. “Self-sufficiency at home, self-assertion abroad.” Mr. Salter’s side of the conversation was limited to expressions of assent. When Lord Copper was right, he said, “Definitely, Lord Copper”; when he was wrong, “Up to a point.”

Indian immigrants in the 1970s-1980s tended to come from the leftist Anglophile elites, who looked to the West for models (sometimes the wrong solutions, such as Fabian socialism). Recent Indian immigrants tend to be ethnocentric Hindu Nationalists who see little reason to assimilate or even to try hard to pretend to admire their host countries.

(Also, the Internet is every day penetrating further down the Indian I.Q. pyramid. We used to hear the polite obfuscations of only the smartest Indians, but now we are getting the unfiltered views of, say, the second quartile. God alone knows what the bottom half of the Indian I.Q. bell curve thinks.)

It's like if the rare American immigrants to India used to be immigrating because of their deep interest in Hinduism and Indian art, but now instead India is being flooded by MAGA masses demanding more hamburger stands and that Indian colleges field tackle football teams.

I look forward to white MAGA immigrants in India naming their sons Christian, Hunter, and Gunner.

In the very long run, India won’t be such a dump anymore and emigration of Indians to America will tail off.

But when?

2125? 2225?

The key thing is to prevent America and India from converging by letting the quality of life in America not stay way ahead of India.