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Presumably I am one of the individuals you have in mind. I can understand why you find it baffling: your hatred of “the Blue Tribe” — a fictitious construct which, I maintain, exists more in your head than it does in the real world — verges at times on the atavistic. I don’t expect that a fully-committed partisan such as yourself will be able to put aside your grudges and live in comity with true-Blue progressives.
My perception is that the vast majority of Americans, though, are nowhere near as committed to hatred of those who vote for a different party, nor would they be so thoroughly filled with hatred and distrust of the other side in the event that the extremely live-wire issue of pervasive black criminality were removed from the everyday lifestyle calculations of so many people. In no way do I believe that issues related to crime and racial grievance are the sole motivating reason for political polarization in America; I simply believe that these issues have a far stronger valence than most others — at least for urban (and, increasingly, suburban) voters — given their intractability, the web of obfuscation and lies characterizing discourse about them, and the way that these issues reveal some vexing contradictions at the heart of the American individualist/liberal framework.
Perhaps I am the pot calling the kettle black, and that in fact it is I who am wildly overestimating the salience and centrality of my pet issue. No doubt I am, to some extent. But I truly do believe that most non-black Americans can return, with not insurmountable difficult, to the relative comity of the 90’s, if and only if there is a significant marginalization of blacks as a cultural and political entity.
As a non-American familiar with American history, I am inclined to agree with this take.
Even if you don't think that the Civil War was caused by slavery, it is very obvious from soldiers' accounts that the necessary hatred for Americans to cheerfully put themselves through four years of danger and material deprivation for the primary purpose of shooting other Americans had a lot to do with slavery. And of course most of the pre-Civil War political violence was explicitly about slavery.
And then post Civil War you still see ongoing white-on-white political violence driven by the Negro Question (the Lincoln assassination, Reconstruction and the 1st Klan, Redemption and the Red Shirts etc.) There is a lull after the anti-racist side gives up and cuts a deal to tolerate Jim Crow, but the Civil Rights Movement sees more than a little actual white-on-white political violence, and a lot of credible threats which end up getting walked back when it becomes clear that the Feds are not backing down. The fact that the Kennedy assassination turned out to have nothing to do with race surprised Americans so much that you seem to have had a collective head explosion.
In our generation, the George Floyd et al riots seem to involve a lot of white-on-white political violence nominally driven by concern for blacks. Rittenhouse vs the idiots is just the specific case that got put under a microscope.
I'm not aware of any other issue where white Americans are willing to kill each other and think they are serving the common good by doing so.
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My tribe- 'the church crowd' in vernacular parlance- does not want European style mass conformity, though. We'd rather the good, the bad, and the ugly with blacks than deal with that, at least as long as social progressives get to set the terms of it. You're way overestimating the solidarity across different social groups of whites in the USA.
I want to make sure I actually understand what you’re claiming here.
Is the claim something like: blacks, by being an unassimilable block and a thorn in the side of any project aiming toward American political/cultural reconciliation, are actually performing a positive service. They’re what’s preventing non-black Americans from coming together to form some sort of cultural consensus, and this is a good thing, because the rise of such a consensus — at least, if it were to arise under current ideological conditions — would be shaped largely by progressives. Therefore, blacks should be encouraged to continue to be a pain in the ass (or at least no active steps should be taken to force them not to be) because if they were marginalized or mollified, white people might start forming a “mass conformist” culture like the ones in Europe.
Am I getting this right? I don’t want to misinterpret or misrepresent your view.
Yes. I would rather the commons be shit up than used as a weapon against me and mine. I know you’re not a social conservative but surely you can see why I would hold this view.
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Communism was pretty clearly a thing, and there's a reason it remains so disproportionately popular, even in America, given its history. That reason has pretty much nothing to do with Black people or America's racial history. More generally, I'm curious what you would consider an existence-proof of Blue Tribe as you perceive me to understand it. We've been in the middle of a steadily-escalating tribal war for several years now. This war routinely results in very public political violence, frequently of a highly organized nature, and this violence observably receives broad-based institutional and public support in large volumes. It's obvious that large percentages of the population actively sort their social context along the lines of the Red/Blue tribal split. The number of norms and institutions that have collapsed under the tectonic force of the Red/Blue faultline is quite long and rapidly growing, and most of the rest are visibly shaking.
You've got me on the atavistic hatred, though.
The vast majority of Americans have no significant commitments, to hatred or to any other ideological construct. They simply follow the crowd, as humans always have and always will. Most Russians in 1920 were not "committed" in any meaningful sense to the Communist project, nor most Germans to the Nazi project in 1938. Most Democrat-voting Americans didn't support rioting and defunding of police in 2016, and probably weren't all that comfortable with it even when it was happening post-Floyd.
The model you seem to be applying is that there's a problem, and conflict over how to fix the problem is driving the split, and so if the problem were removed the split would heal. You don't seem to recognize a values-level split between Reds and Blues, which is presumably why you think the categories the split demarcates are in my head.
The model I'm applying is that tribes exist to coordinate and control power, as is necessary and proper for all large-scale populations of humans. Power exists to solve problems, and if one specific object-level problem goes away, another will take its place. Unfortunately, values-incompatibility is a meta-level problem, and past some level of divergence, solutions are not compatible with cooperation across the divide. Object-level problems, which is what our society previously perceived race to be, do not directly create values-level conflict, but rather are drawn into them as the tribes grope for leverage against each other. It seems entirely possible for race to rise to a values-level problem itself; maybe it already is one for our society, and certainly it is one for many individuals. Maybe that's the way we'll go. The fact remains that from my perspective, Blacks and their dysfunction is far less of a problem for me and mine than their white Blue-Tribe patrons. Blacks do not rule me, and I see no plausible path by which they could rule me in the foreseeable future, so the threat of their hatred is manageable. Blues can and have ruled me, and intend to do so again; their hatred is a much more serious problem, and it's hard for me to see how that would change regardless of the disposition of the race question.
I have 2/3rds of a reply to your comment on religion sitting in the hopper, btw. Always a pleasure.
I think the idea is more that the conflict over that problem creates far more day-to-day strife and personal animus than value differences do, in line with Scott's memorable post about people's shocking ability to get along even when they have, on paper, deep and irreconcilable value differences.
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