Our Balkanized, Imperial Present—and Future

The elections of the past week surprised no one, and for good reason. The main issue driving voters, as many predicted, was inflation, brought on by the undeclared war the United States has been fighting with Iran for the past year and a half. That the deciding factor in midterm elections was an unpopular war fought on behalf of a reckless, foreign client-state, is symptomatic of the United States in 2026. For years now, our domestic political scene has been dominated by combatants in areas of the globe where the United States seeks to exercise hegemony. The conflicts between Israelis and Palestinians have become a defining feature of our politics, especially among the younger generation, as have the politics of other ethnic groups such as Mexicans, Somalis, and Indians, who constantly agitate on behalf of their countries of birth rather than the United States.

Such balkanization of our political and public life is both the cause and consequence of the imperial ambitions of our government leaders. The United States since World War II has pursued a patron-client style politics, first during the Cold War and now in the post-Cold War era, providing resources, expertise, and military support to those allies that would aid her first to fight the Soviets and then to spread “globalization,” i.e., its hegemony, across the world. In return, the United States expected these client states to adhere to its policy demands.

One of the ways it provides resources to these client states is allowing them easy access to the United States itself: the 1965 Hart-Celler Act, which repealed laws that limited immigration by country of origin, passed during the Vietnam War partly to encourage our Asian allies to get on board with us. Secretary of State Dean Rusk told Congress in 1964 that immigration based on country of origin “results in discrimination in our hospitality to different nationalities in a world situation which is quite different from that which existed at the time the national origins system was originally adopted.” Likewise, he saw the Act as “a powerful weapon in our fight against misinformation,” i.e., to counteract Soviet propaganda and convince the Vietnamese the U.S. was on their side. Now that the U.S. is planning its “pivot to Asia” to counter growing Chinese power, we have given preferential treatment to Indian immigrants, since they are a key ally in this cause.

In 1965, this policy was sold as a minor adjustment which would not lead to large waves of immigration, but it has led to the reshaping of the population of the United States. The percentage of “white” (European) population has dropped from over 80% to less than 60% of the total population since 1980 and will continue to drop further. The bulk of this change has to do with immigration from Mexico, but the importing of peoples from places like Somalia and India has led to their politics being brought to the center of public life. We are all aware now of the fraud that has been perpetrated by Somali immigrants in Minnesota and the overwhelming presence of Indians in the tech industry, for example, where many Indian CEOs have a penchant for only hiring other Indians. (A member of my parish was forced to train two Indian replacements for her IT position, a common practice among corporations.) And as of the midterm elections, we now have the country’s first Muslim Senator, Abdul El-Sayed, who hails from Dearborn, Michigan, the epicenter of Arab immigration in the U.S. for decades now.

I should state at the outset I do not intend to incite ethnic or religious hatred. It is that which I would like to prevent. My point is that you cannot do this while simultaneously importing immigrants from cultures that are radically different from that of the U.S. and treat them in the same way we treat African or Native Americans, who are foundational peoples of this country and long since assimilated to its mores. The continued importation of these peoples in massive numbers erodes the ways of life most Americans are accustomed to and brings these peoples’ ethnic conflicts with them at the same time. This is why encouraging Palestinians, Israelis, Arabs, Somalis, Indians, and other peoples to view their interests and political aspirations through the lens of the Civil Rights Movement is a disastrous policy, since it exacerbates these conflicts and fills these immigrants with a sense of entitlement and grievance their history does not justify and that only fuels further conflict.

We should all be very aware of the limits and downsides of ethnic diversity by now, but if you are not, you can read about Robert Putnam, who famously conducted a social experiment designed to prove the benefits of ethnic and racial diversity to communities and instead found the opposite. That there is “a statistically significant negative relationship between ethnic diversity and social trust” is one of the most replicated findings of social science. Today, mass migration and the divisions it causes are the primary threat to the social contract underwriting modern societies. As I have written elsewhere, that social contract is predicated on nationalist lines which presume a high level of social and cultural homogeneity, which is why diversity on steroids undermines it. Cultures are not easily fungible as our multicultural imperialists would have it. As the Arab writer Ibn Khaldun long ago noted, societies that lack asabiyyah or solidarity inevitably succumb to those that don’t.

What readers should understand is that this demographic and political transformation is linked to American global ambitions since the Cold War. If American citizens didn’t know it already, our leaders by and large see us the same way as they do their client states abroad, as dependents who must follow the policy dictates of their patrons. Many conservative Republicans, especially religious and cultural conservatives, have been exasperated by the unwillingness of party leaders to take their concerns seriously. They have plenty of company: just ask the Israelis, who never seem to get what they want from Uncle Sam, even though they often get far more than the American electorate does from its elected leaders.

The midterms bear this out and demonstrate how American client-voters understand this. These elections reversed the outcome of the 2024 presidential election, where Trump won voters 18-29 by wide margins. This time Republicans were wiped out in that demographic, for obvious reasons: they voted for Trump in 2024 because he promised to take their concerns seriously and instead gave them war and inflation. His administration made their lives worse in service to a foreign power, and voters punished Republicans for it. Attempts to suggest otherwise are simply propaganda.

Whether voters can do anything about it is another matter. There is probably no way to undo the effects of demographic change at this point, though putting an end to the worst excesses of the immigration system would limit the damage it has caused. But this is primarily a political problem, and I doubt any of our potential leaders have the will to do anything about it. Most of our elites—the venture capitalists, CEOs of international conglomerates, those who run NGOs with no particular stake in the country—are joined at the hip with the imperial proletariat we have imported, as well as the activist class that feeds their vanity.

While I appreciate the statement put out by Vice President Vance on X, in which he stated bluntly that the war with Iran was the reason for the Republican wipeout in the midterms, most Republicans don’t care about anything but cheap labor. He—or perhaps Ron DeSantis—if one of them wins the Republican nomination, will have a difficult time overcoming opposition from their own party, who seem to resent the fact that their voters hate their policies. Meanwhile Democrats have managed to get around this problem by importing new voters through mass immigration. There are already calls on lame-duck Texas Governor Abbottto stop cooperating with ICE and effectively stop enforcing federal immigration laws. Should the Democrats regain the White House in 2028, this process will accelerate, to say the least.

What the future holds for the country is very uncertain. Globalism is an American system of hegemony for a post-Cold War world, but China’s defiance of this system, and to a lesser extent Russia, means that it is coming to an end at some point. Some on the right like to make apocalyptic predictions of American societal collapse, like that of South Africa, a once prosperous nuclear power which is on the verge of becoming a failed state. I don’t think American decline will be this dramatic. Others have compared the current U.S. to the late-stage Soviet Union (old, sclerotic leadership, empire beset by ethnic and nationalist tensions), which makes sense. But there are differences. America is much wealthier than the old USSR and therefore there is much more left to plunder from the imperial treasury. Decline, if that is what is taking place, will likely take longer and be a slower process punctuated by low-level ethnic conflicts rather than sudden collapse. My guess is that we are looking at a future more and more like Latin America, a collection of ethnic and political enclaves riven by more or less permanent social conflicts.

What are Catholics to make of this? Many American Catholics have largely internalized the individualism of American society and can’t see how corrosive mass migration and the attendant balkanization of their society has been, nor the changes that it inevitably has and will bring with it. Again, while recognizing that racial and ethnic hatred are immoral and disastrous for society, they probably need to embrace what many have long derided as “identity politics.” Whatever the future holds, the American Church is going to have to face the fact that ethnic and racial loyalties are going to become more and not less important in the future, as other loyalties wither.

And if virtually every other ethnic group is going to identify with their heritage and history, “white” Americans are going to have to do this too. There simply won’t be any other way to organize politically and protect those interests—family, businesses, churches—that are crucial for maintaining and perpetuating themselves as a distinct people. I know some people believed that Donald Trump could turn the tide of these forces that have reshaped society, but it seems clear at this point that hope is gone. Whatever else they herald, the midterm elections should impress upon everyone that the American Empire is headed for an uncertain future, one which will not likely include a return to the social stability and solidarity that existed in twentieth-century America.