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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.
Somehow, I sort-of agree and mostly disagree with both of you.
First off, the vast majority of people believe what they're told to believe. The source can vary (based mostly on historically contingent details) but it's external nature does not.
So, when @FCfromSSC talks about tribes and irreconcilable differences, it feels rather silly to me. There are no tribes, just some really loud megaphones (currently mostly in the media) and a lot of people dancing to their tune. Change the megaphones and the people will follow, both red and blue.
And Secondly, the conflict isn't about some specific problem. It's not even about any specific values. It's about power! Ambitious unscrupulous person A needs a weapon against political opponent B. What is he to do?! In our current system, the answer is to accuse the person of some moral failing. If this exact same person was to be dropped into a corporation, they would play dumb office politics games (and maybe hopefully differentiate themselves through commercial achievements). If they were dropped into China? They'd sing the praises of the party and complain about how their opponents were letting the party down.
And ambitious people are simply a fact of life. With a few scruples and the right incentives, they can be quite beneficial! But not when their incentives are to shit on the moral commons in the pursuit of power.
The root problem here is democracy. It weakens central authority and makes power a free-for-all. The net results is that politics infects everything downstream (and everything is downstream of the sovereign).
@FCfromSSC, get rid of the blue tribe and you will find the red tribe splitting at the seams. And you won't like the results.
@WandererintheWilderness, get rid of this problem and another will be found in its place.
It is evident that Blue Tribe had uncontested control of a supermajority of the "megaphone" for a very long time, and now this control is almost entirely gone. If there are only megaphones and people dancing to their tune, how did this occur?
At a minimum, your account of the political process is missing the concept of policy starvation.
I understand that values-coherence is not maintainable in the long term. The nation long divided will unite, the nation long-united will divide. All works of the human mind and hand decay eventually. The fact remains that some of them decay like stone, and some decay like nitroglycerin.
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