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Indeed. But that will have to be sustained for a while. If the next President just reverts all of that, then a few years is easy enough to get through for most institutions. That's my point. It has to be a sea change from parents on up. Academia is a symptom not a cause.
Where do you think the parents got their views from?
You must be anticipating I'd say... their parents? To be a little less glib, parents and family.
Blue Tribe people make Blue Tribe institutions. Which is the chicken and which the egg?
Are you familiar with the phrase "trust the science"? Where does "the science" come from?
blue tribe people make blue tribe institutions, which in turn generate a consensus reality wherein Blueness is obviously true and correct, with contrary facts elided or buried. Academia is a knowledge-generating apparatus, together with media. By the time a Blue Tribe kid arrives on campus, their reality has been defined by this apparatus their entire life. Then they spend four years being taught and graded and managed by high-status members of this apparatus, often in a close pseudo-paternal relationship, with discrimination against anyone contradicting the apparatus being policed by the full force of the institution backed by the power of the federal government, to say nothing of the informal status economy, before moving into a career where office life is similarly policed.
None of this seems mysterious to me. It seems pretty obvious to me that it's an interlocking system of control, wherein each of the components is purposely designed to bolster and reinforce the others. It's almost certainly true that solving it by aiming at Academia alone won't be sufficient, but that doesn't mean that it isn't necessary.
This is a lot more in depth than I was planning, and I am not sure how much time I will have to reply in the next couple of days, but I didn't want to just give you a "You're wrong" answer. Changing academia itself is not only not necessary but probably counter-productive. Academia does not create the Blue Tribe, it is in its current form created by the Blue Tribe. It doesn't matter what you do to academia, it will return to doing Blue Tribe things. Academia also thinks it is more important than it is. Buying into that framing will not get you a solution. Blue academia prepares you for Blue office life. This is how it should be. No point in preparing Blue Tribers to be farmers with Red Tribe values(generalization of course). Academia is a Blue Tribe pursuit that prepares you for Blue Tribe roles. This is not because the Blue Tribe is smarter or whatever. It is because Red Tribe and Blue Tribe are different.
There is a reason the Blue half of my family all became professors and teachers and the like and the Red half of my family all went into trades, and this is 50 years ago. Blue Tribe and Red Tribe are different, they have different values and different preferences. Definitionally the Blue Tribe cares more about academia for its own sake than the Red Tribe (but see below!). Ergo academia will always be governed by Blue ethos and rules. You can't change them to operate by Red Tribe preferences, because the actual Red Tribe doesn't want them (again we're operating in generalizations here) and if they did they would no longer be recognizable as the Red tribe. Do not confuse Blue Tribe conservatives with Red Tribers. They are not the same. Which is why when the Red Tribe relies on Blue Tribe conservatives (such as all the Catholics on the Supreme Court) it ends up not getting what it wants re gun control et al. There is some overlap in goals, but they are not the same. This is a crucial point.
The issue is that Red Tribe roles are always (but see below!) going to be harder and more physically demanding and therefore less prestigious than Blue Tribe roles. Miners want their kids to go to college so they can get an office job. They want their kids to sit in an air conditioned office and only have to worry about office politics and not a mine collapse, or fire, or black lung or losing fingers. This is where the American Dream collides with Tribal identities.
This is the fundamental issue the American Red Tribe has. The economic compounding effects of cities means high paid "easy" jobs are in cities and because cities make Blue Tribe people, that means Red kids need Blue Tribe education to fit in. Which means their kids have to go to university so they can qualify for Blue Tribe roles in Blue Tribe places.
So it's no good complaining Blue Tribe places teach Blue Tribe values. If they didn't they would be no good for getting Red and Blue Tribe kids into Blue Tribe jobs! Blue Tribe places do Blue Tribe things.
Or to put it another way, you can't make cities Red Tribe, because the Red Tribe largely does not want to live in big cities. That's part of what makes them definitionally Red Tribe in the first place. So it is with academia. In trying you would have to destroy what makes the Red Tribe the Red Tribe in the first place.
If there is a solution it is the economic re-distribution of value from cities to more rural areas, so that Red Tribe kids don't have to be taught how to be Blue Tribe to get a "good" job in the American Dream framing. This will rebalance the importance of academia fundamentally. It also hopefully stops the hemorrhaging of young people away from rural towns and therefore reduces "conversion" rates. Notably it can be accomplished with political power alone. Spending that political capital on changing academia is again a distraction (though you could fine/tax/defund them as part of a way to pay for it, this is going to be redistributing wealth from Blue to Red after all).
The other possible solution is time and AI. The Blue Tribe model is a better fit economically for current modernity. An AI revolution that substantially devalues white collar work may also tip the scales such that more manual tasks once again become economically dominant perhaps even over and above the compounding effects of cities. At least temporarily until we are all replaced by robots or nanites or something.
Fiddling inside academia is a smokescreen for the Red Tribe. It's not going to help. It can't. It's buying into a Blue Tribe framing of the Red Tribe problem.
And just to be really clear. The Red Tribe is not worse than the Blue Tribe, it's not overall any dumber or more backwards or ignorant or any of the other insults that are often flung by some Blue Tribers. Individual Red Tribers can and do excel in academia. Some of the very smartest people I know are Red Tribe through and through. Academia is not its forte not because of a lack of intelligence or curiosity but because of different values. Different desires. You can't change those without fundamentally destroying the Red Tribe as it exists. And it goes way beyond just academia.
The Red Tribe has to find its national political representation from Blue Tribe conservatives for the same reason. Hence the RINO tag et al. It's not about interlocking systems of control, it's about tribal identity, and what that means when those tribes actually have different values and preferences. Or perhaps to rephrase the problem with academia is not that it is Blue Tribe heavy, it is that it has become so dominating above the Red Tribe equivalents due to the way the modern economy works. You can't fix academia to be more Red any more than you could make a farming trade college more Blue without fundamentally destroying what it means to be Red or Blue. But you can put a finger on the scale if one is becoming too powerful.
Which is the irony of Trump of course, he is arguably a Blue Triber who shares the values of Red Tribers, even if he isn't actually all that conservative. Which means hopefully he will meaningfully work to shift economic value to rural Red areas. That will do far more to solve the academia problem than anything else I think.
And now I have written Red and Blue Tribe so much that I will probably be seeing it in my dreams tonight.
I'd say he's a Blue Triber who just has a soft spot for Red Tribers, which is even farther removed, and which makes the Red Tribe situation even more clearly sad. Although I admired the principles of Evan McMullin voters, I really feel for the religious conservatives who (perhaps correctly!) decided that their least awful electoral option in 2016 was Mr. "Grab them by the pussy". Many of them have since resolved the cognitive dissonance of all that by deciding that actually Trump is a good person, which is less sympathetic, but even more tragic, if only in the Greek sense.
Kudos for using "Blue Tribe" and "Red Tribe" accurately, though, not just as synonyms for "Democrat-leaning" and "Republican-leaning". TheMotte seems to be filled with Republican-leaning Blue Tribe folks so you'd think we'd slip up on that less often...
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This is a great post.
I think a good way of summing up the social dynamics @SSCReader is talking about is that the Red and Blue tribes have different theories of American greatness. The Red Tribe believes that the secular source of American greatness is the natural resource wealth (including, possibly even especially, the agricultural land) of the American continent. (Reds often say, and the ones who say it appear to genuinely believe, that the true source of greatness is America's special relationship with Divine Providence, but the way providence works itself in practice is that God gave Americans a continent with huge natural resource wealth). The Blue Tribe believes that the source of American greatness is Yankee ingenuity and (for centrist and right-wing Blues) the capitalist institutions which maximise the economic value of it.
In many ways the cleanest ways this shows up is in the Europoor discourse. Most of the people mocking the Europoors are Red, and the mockery therefore focusses on the destructive stupidity of European (mostly German) energy policy, and includes a lot of factually dubious insinuations that Europeans are not going to be able to keep the lights on. But when a Blue like Noah Smith mocks the Europoors, he focusses on the failure of Europe to build a trillion dollar tech company.
This model is, for me, the best way of explaining Trumpian economic policy. Part of the reason why the Red Tribe loses in American politics is that the Blue theory of American greatness is mostly correct - it really is the case that as of 2025 the main source of American wealth and one of the main sources of American geopolitical leverage is software-driven innovation, and that the place where it happens is the Bluest place in America (coastal California and greater Seattle). Trump wants to change this by changing the economic rules, such that the Red theory becomes correct. At the level of vibes, the memes coming out of the White House in support of a new masculine, blue-collar vision of American prosperity don't show men working on assembly lines (understandable - there is a whiff of pink-collarness to assembly line work and non-union assembly line work really is pink-collar in most times and places) or even men doing traditional heavy industry (like WPA/Nazi/Soviet propaganda posters of manly men with hammers) - they show miners and farmers. At the level of policy, if the UK/EU/Japan trade deals actually happen roughly as announced, then the US will have higher tariffs on steel than on car parts and higher tariffs on car parts than on finished cars - the exact opposite of what you would do if you were encouraging US manufacturing. But the other side of the coin is that all three deals very explicitly promote US natural resource exports - as did the trade deals Trump did in his first term.
The corollary is that MAGA doesn't need to fix academic Blueness. If you believe that the source of American greatness is national resource wealth, then burning down the universities won't break America. And MAGA in the country want Trump to just burn Harvard down yesterday, not carry on faffing about trying to reform it.
This also explains why remote workers moving out to rural areas doesn't help - the people who rise to the top in that world are still doing so based on Yankee ingenuity, and so Blue will be higher status than Red. The sales of North Face jackets and demographics of National Park guests make clear that the Blues aren't actually anti-rural or anti-outdoor. A NYC banker doesn't stop being Blue because his wife keeps a horse at their upstate vacation home, and remote work is no different.
The obvious exception to this model is MAGA embrace of cryptocurrency. I think this is an exception which proves the rule - I am comfortable arguing that MAGA embrace of cryptocurrency is top-down in the way that MAGA embrace of coal mining is bottom-up. It also appeals to the Kulak_Revolt type of Red Triber who has given up and thinks watching the world burn is more practical than a return to a masculine blue-collar model of economic prosperity.
On the other hand, everything about rural physicians.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=haPcdobyINc?si=ncLFUNKgJeahFTyU&t=10
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Do you think the shift to remote work will allow value to accrue more in rural areas, and outside of cities? I know some Christian writers like Rod Dreher and Stephen Morello have mentioned this as a possibility, remote work opening up more rural collectivist efforts amongst red tribers.
You know I think it potentially could be a factor yes. Though you might just get Blue Tribers moving out to rural areas to take advantage of cheaper land.
Though rural infrastructure would need improvement too, most likely. Could be part of shifting value to rural areas in and of itself.
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Peripherally, I think your point has a kernel of truth, but I worry that you're constructing a worldview in a direction that is prone to revanchism and decoupling from reality. Your complaints sound uncomfortably close to the logic behind that infamous Smithsonian poster, but complaining about blue, rather than white power structures.
At least, it makes me uncomfortable even though I think there are certainly elements of truth to it.
You're going to have to spell it out. The Smithsonian poster correctly noted some things about white culture (or rather, certain white cultures), but implied that their value were arbitrary. They got jeered at because the people jeering thought some ofthe things on the posters were good things for non-arbitrary reasons, and ascribing their value to "whiteness" was ridiculous.
FCfromSSCs complaint is simply about indoctrination. There doesn't seem to be much relationship.
Maybe the Smithsonian poster was the wrong example, but the tone and content of the comment I replied to struck me, at least, very much the mirror of a Kendi or DiAngelo. To moderately change the quote:
Googling for "interlocking system of control" shows at least one notable book from 1982 (The Highest Stage of White Supremacy by John W. Cell) that uses exactly that phrase to describe white supremacy:
I'm willing to take the original comment in good faith, but it really seems like it's perilously close to becoming the tribalism I take it as literally arguing against: "[outgroup] has rigged the system to keep [ingroup] down!" is, while in both cases probably true to some extent, is a meme I don't think is helpful in most circumstances.
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A brief look at the recent history of the awakening clearly shows the ideas flow from the institutions to the children, with parents having very little to say about it outside of "it's just a couple crazy kids on college campuses".
These ideas flow up, actually. Tumblr bullshit infects the students who spread it around campus and the professors may let them because they’re sympathetic but they also don’t have the power to stop them- this is a one star resort for unsupervised teenagers, not a strictly disciplined educational institution.
Tumblr was already citing academia, and the only reason they were taken seriously, was they were long-marching through the institutions and gaining political power. Without at that, Tmblrinas would be the equivalent of 4chan incels, so it strictly points to a top-down direction.
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Right this is exactly my experience (though nowadays it's Tik-Tok not Tumblr). These kids come in already complaining about Israel and with pro-Palestine flags and what not. I or my colleagues didn't teach them that. Which is not to say that some of my colleagues don't share those sympathies somewhat (though obviously varies on Jewishness level) but it's more acts of omission than commission in my experience.
The students with those ideas coming in got them from their prior teachers, who got them from a previous generation of leftist academics.
As per hydro who is I believe right wing, that is not my experience.
I think people heavily overestimate what people get from teachers and the like compared to family and nowadays social media.
Just look at the terminology. Cisheteronormativity. Anticarceralism. Cultural appropriation. Decolonisation. These are not words that Tumblr users, teens or their families create. Teens create words like "yeet" and Tumblr creates words like "otherkin".
I don't think high school teachers were sitting kids down and giving them college level sociology lectures directly. I think outside of school hours terminally online grad students were flexing their wordcel power level on Tumblr among impressionable teen girls, from whom it spread via a few more steps to clickbait columnists and their incestuous codependence with pre-Elon Twitter.
By the time the teens who were on Tumblr got to college they were fully marinated in progressive sociology shibboleths, only without any of the independent thought and critical analysis that university is supposed to encourage.
Academia was always the source, kids were just an influential and early stage vector with low intellectual immunity, especially for the kind of memes that can impart righteous social power to teenage girls (although the claims to righteousness were largely a mask and a multiplier for the underlying social power, without which the memeset would have languished in the obscurity of academia and the post grad blogosphere).
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Exactly. Respect for elders and experience is a red tribe value.
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Does it? I can assure you in very Blue Tribe places that is not so. Maybe you can argue it flowed from Blue Tribe places to Blue Tribe academia to academia in general.
That protests happen on college campuses does not mean the colleges are responsible for the ideas those protests are expressing. As I pointed out the kids I get in my classes are already well to the left of me in general.
And why should I put any weight on your assurances? Because you're blue tribe and I'm not? It hasn't crossed your mind that I could have been blue tribe myself at the time?
I was there when these ideas were becoming dominant, and in the conversations I was having, their academic backing was THE argument for why they should be taken seriously. Hardly anyone could argue them with their own words, and without relying on arguments from authority. It's half cancelations became a thing.
Not at all. I'm not Blue Tribe. I just live with them and educate their kids. Academic justifications follow belief systems not the other way round. What you're talking about are the rationalizations being used. But almost everyone is not reasoned into a position, they rationalize their beliefs post hoc. If you refute their academic arguments it won't change their minds, because that isn't how they got to that position. As the saying goes you can't reason someone out of a position they didn't reason themselves into.
Just to be clear when I am talking here I am just giving my opinion and experiences, there is no reason for you to be believe some random guy on the internet. Having said that hydroacetylene also said the same thing above and he is a Red Tribe conservative (as far as I recollect), so someone in a very different milieu than I am is seeing the same things.
Cool, thanks for sharing your experience, but I have my own, and I see no reason to accept yours over mine.
Saying "I'm deeply familiar with the Blue Tribe, and that's not what I've seen" makes sense as an argument, but I don't see how "this guy is Red Tribe, and he agrees with me" makes any sense in the context. I think he's also wrong, and responded to him. The bottom-up vs. top-down view of society is a disagreement that's (literally) orthogonal to left vs. right.
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Considering these "woke" ideas specifically have academic heritage, I'm not sure how this flow of ideas is plausible. Is the contention that these ideas that explicitly source themselves on stuff developed by "critical X theory" and "X studies" departments of the past 50 years actually somehow flowed into these departments through influence of people from Blue Tribe "places," who also influenced their children with these ideas? To whatever extent this is true, it just seems to be a way of describing the process by which academia developed these ideas - it's not surprising that the people in academia who developed and propagated these ideas largely came from cultures that were predisposed to such ideas.
That the protests are based around ideas that are essentially word-for-word, identical to those taught by academia is what means that colleges are responsible for the ideas those protests are expressing. No one's making any claims about proximity or location.
And your students being more left of you in general doesn't say much, since having the proclivity to comment on a forum like this already makes you a highly atypical academic, but also, if you teach high schoolers or above, this is entirely consistent with the notion that academia is responsible for the flow of ideas to these students, via their exposure to academia in grade school and middle school.
That was exactly my experience as someone who grew up in Blue Tribe environments. My experience with proto-woke ideas (I was ahead of the phenomenon by about a decade, but the typical sociopolitical narratives that were hegemonic at my schools in the 00s would have been nearly indistinguishable from the typical SJW and "woke" ideas from the late 10s) was that they absolutely flowed in from academia to students, with my parents being essentially non-factors (this part is likely mostly caused by my own parents' parenting behaviors and hard to generalize), with my earliest memories of such ideas being from my 4th grade homeroom teacher.
We wouldn't normally call that academia though. And my experience right now is that these kids are getting their ideas from their parents and from Tik-Tok. So they come in already having opinions about Palestine for example. They weren't taught that in elementary school. And as I said before they are also left of most of my colleagues as well (who are yes a bit to the left of me on average).
But again you have it reversed. Critical theory is a creation of the Blue Tribe, it didn't create the Blue Tribe. You're again just saying Blue Tribe places do Blue Tribe things. Well yes, of course they do. If they didn't they wouldn't be Blue Tribe! All the concept of critical theory does is putting an academic skin on things Blue Tribe people already believed. They believed it, then they taught it in an academic way, but the Blue Tribe already HAD those beliefs. So the students are at best being taught how to express the things they already believe in an academic fashion. Because it's the very water they and their parents swim in.
Academia is downstream not upstream in other words. Academics frequently overestimate their own importance. Don't fall for it.
This is exactly what the flow of ideas from academia to to students would look like; parents and TikTok get these ideas from academia, whether it's indirectly through their peers or other TikTokers, or directly through their own experience in academia.
This is simply false, though. The concept of "White Privilege," for instance, which is a tool that can be used as needed to explain why any white person in any situation is advantaged over any black person, isn't something Blue Tribe people believed without academia. They might have a general sense of dissatisfaction at what they perceive as society-wide injustice due to how they believe that white people are treated better than black people in society, and they might go into academia in order to research and develop this dissatisfaction into grand theories about White Supremacy and Colonialism and such. You can describe it as putting an "academic skin" over things they already believed, but that'd only make sense if we took the "skin" metaphor pretty far, with how complex and active an organ the skin is on our bodies (not just a bunch of stickers to put on your car or some textures to swap on a character model, as "skin" means in other contexts).
I mean, it's both downstream and upstream. No academic endeavor happens on an island free of external influences, and the academic endeavors behind "wokeness" has clearly had extreme impact on the culture in America/the West, including the very Blue Tribe culture that had incredible input on that academia itself. That's why the chicken-and-the-egg metaphor is apt here. It's clearly both, and trying to claim that one is the actual upstream source will just lead to fallacy.
It absolutely is. It was called white guilt in the 60's and a moral blot in the 18th century and so forth. White privilege is just a fancy academic term for already existing feelings. It's not a chicken and an egg here. Feelings lead to rationalizations. Academic thought is rationalization. Ergo academic thought is ALWAYS downstream of of feelings. Feelings trump facts always. That's why you can punch holes in someone's arguments (their rationalizations) and they still will not change their mind. Because the rationalization is downstream of their internal sub-conscious feelings.
If academia did not exist, these parents and kids would still feel the same it just wouldn't be described in academic language. Academia is not as important as it thinks it is. So don't buy into it's own rhetoric.
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It was a fringe idea from outside the Blue Tribe's overton window, that took over the Blue Tribe
Well no, because an idea can't take over anything. But critical theory:
Critical theory is a social, historical, and political school of thought and philosophical perspective which centers on analyzing and challenging systemic power relations in society, arguing that knowledge, truth, and social structures are fundamentally shaped by power dynamics between dominant and oppressed groups.
Is just a fancied up academic way of justifying already existing belief sets, the ideas and beliefs go way back beyond the 1920s. This is part of my point, don't buy in to how important Academia (especially social sciences academia) tells you it is. All the fancy words, words, words just tell you that dynamics between groups with different levels of power can result in some groups oppressing others and that this is bad. That was already known back when Jefferson was writing!
Critical theory for most Blue Tribers is a post hoc justification for the fact they are uncomfortable with power dynamics around race within the United States. It is adopted because it explains their white guilt. It doesn't cause their white guilt.
You're working from a perspective where people have their minds changed by theories, but everything in my experiences suggests the opposite, that people choose which theories they adopt based on which ones fit with their already preconceived notions. So no Critical theory did not take over the Blue Tribe. It's a justification for their already existing feelings. The Blue Tribe took over critical theory in other words. That's why it is then adapted into Critical Race Theory (which is now the one getting most attention) because it is this race based "stain" on America that Blue Tribers were and are most sensitive too.
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