Editing Openai/6962ca00-cfa0-800a-ac62-bd84f6c201e0 (section)

==== You are right that cultural primacy tied to geography and birth is gone—and it is not coming back. ====

They are right that:
* This loss was not consensual
* The transition was badly managed
* The cultural messaging around “learn to code” was contemptuous

Where they go wrong is in mistaking irreversibility for invasion, and complex transition for malevolent conspiracy.

===== The immigration panic is less about immigrants than about people confronting a world in which their inherited status has depreciated faster than their ability—or willingness—to adapt. =====

Your irritation comes from seeing adaptation as obvious and available.
Their rage comes from experiencing adaptation as humiliating, uncertain, and possibly futile.

Both views are internally coherent. They are just operating under radically different payoff functions.

If you want, we can go further into:
* Why rural decline produces moralized politics rather than economic demands
* Why conspiracy thinking outcompetes self-help in low-status environments
* Or why American political discourse is uniquely bad at acknowledging status loss without turning authoritarian