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Notes -
Your thesis:
As with all such narratives, this says more about you than the world. You simply focus on all the ways Blues hurt Reds and ignore the millions of boring policy changes where nothing of the sort happens.
This lets your “model” be “correct” since you simply ignore all disagreeing events. For instance, I really don’t see how Biden turning immigrants away at the border is him hurting the Reds or how him sending arms to Ukraine is hurting the Reds or how a boring HOA meeting about lawn care is hurting the Reds.
Then you interpret your own bias as an objective fact of the world, which lets you make fun of people who don’t share that bias by effectively calling them stupid (which is the framing for your entire comment)
Not exactly a paradigm of clear and charitable thinking.
That phrase does not contain a reference to Blue Tribe, because it is not a statement about Blue Tribe. It is, as it has always been, a statement about the Culture War and everyone involved in it. Sure, a million things happen every day on both sides that aren't about hurting the outgroup. But things happen every day, on both sides, that are about hurting the outgroup, and further are about hurting the outgroup as badly as possible without getting in too much trouble. Note the last part of that phrase. It's not that there aren't moderating influences; people don't see harming the outgroup as a terminal goal. It's just fun, and they want to keep doing it unless there's a very good reason not to.
I don't think Guzman is very intelligent. If you are reading the rest of the post as a claim that anyone I refered to is stupid, whether Blues or Reds generally or Blues or Reds here, you have very much missed the point. Some people here are, in my view, wrong, however intelligent they may be. And tribal warfare is not stupid. Evil, maybe, but not stupid.
The "Culture War" is defined as waring between political factions. So if your post is entirely confined to the "Culture War", isn't it entirely circular? It becomes
Not exactly insightful...
Your edit breaks the statement. "the last several years" is explicitly a claim about the centrality and significance of the Culture War to our social and political reality. It is not a side show, and ignoring or misunderstanding it cripples one's ability to make accurate predictions, to understand the world they live in. Sure, things happen that aren't Culture War. Mostly those things either don't matter, or the Culture War observably engulfs them over time.
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I don't see too much in his comment where the language is more inflammatory than the ideas, or where he's mocking people who disagree with his conflict theory take. Otherwise your criticism is... that he believes his own model of the world. Yes?
It's also a tortured reading to his quote. Obviously not everything every institution has done for the last 31 months has has been anti-outgroup punitive measures. How much qualification is required? Open any work of political economy or op-ed section and you'll find statements rounding the measly complexity of nature into digestible simplifications. @FCfromSSC likely does not think Biden pardoning the 2021 Thanksgiving turkey was part of a blue counterinsurgency.
Him mocking people is literally making fun of people. That is my criticism...
The reading he claims to prefer makes his entire comment entirely definitional. So, I would like qualification that make his comment both true and not entirely definitional. That is, I'd like his comment to include a meaningful thesis - not a meaningless one.
If you want to understand:
the Trump administration
the #Resistance
the 2020 riots
Politics and public policy surrounding Covid 19
The January 6th riots
The Biden Administration
The Supreme Court's makeup and recent decisions
...and a great deal else besides, you need to understand the Culture War. And the most important thing that you need to understand about the Culture War, is that it's prosecuted by finding ways to hurt the outgroup as badly as possible without getting in too much trouble.
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Recognizing your enemies are in fact your enemies, and not deluded, or too stupid to see the consequences of their actions, is charitable and clear. It would be an unrivaled act of arrogance to decide that the reason people work against you is because they're misguided, and simply don't understand simple truths.
Thinking that Democrats wanting to hurt Republicans explains the bulk of Democrat behavior is neither charitable nor clear. That was OP's thesis: not that it was a motive but that it was the chief driver of all their behavior.
It is the chief driver of American Politics, and has been since 2015 at the latest. Our politically-active class, Red or Blue, are not looking to persuade their opposites, they are looking to punish them, to compel their acquiescence.
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It is charitable and clear; the alternative is that Democrats don't want to hurt Republicans, but do so (and then loudly brag about it) out of... what, crippling mental dysfunction?
I concede that's plausible, but I'm not convinced.
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