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Culture War Roundup for the week of February 23, 2026

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What penalties do you observe for being a calculating tribalist who makes decisions based on tribal allegiance rather than principles? Do you observe these consequences to be uniformly applied? If I argue that being such a calculating tribalist is the correct response to the current situation, what would your counter-argument be?

The big ones in recent memory that I see are the reduced credibility of most mainstream journalism outlets due to their obviously and blatantly tribal behavior with respect to Trump starting over a decade ago, and also the 2024 election, where I believe plenty of marginal Democrats and would-be Democrats seemed to tear away from the party due in part to the blatant tribal hypocrisy in that same period of time. I don't know, but I heavily doubt that it's uniformly applied. If you were to argue that, I would respond that, based on your writing, you likely have very good, very strong reasons for believing that, and unfortunately there's no real way to adjudicate which one of us is correct.

How did this chink in the armor manifest, in your view? Obviously not only did a single activist do this, but it was the default response for Blue Tribe as a whole, with any dissent being exceedingly marginal and fringe.

I think it lowered the rate at which white people (and white-tolerant people) were won over by the ideology in question, especially among young people who were just awakening politically and just gaining the right to vote.

People talk (foolishly, in my opinion) about Woke being dead. It is obvious to me that Woke did not "die" because principled moderates put it back in a box, but because Red Tribe burned many of its principles to go all-in on tribal warfare, and turned out to have better terrain for it than the Blues.

That's not my perception. Principled moderates didn't put it back in the box, and principled moderates largely can't (I think, most likely, no one can, just like no one can put things like Nazism or Communism (by many people's lights, wokeness is the latest iteration of this) "back in the box" - they'll always be with us, and that's why we'll always need to keep developing new antibodies against them, because god knows that they aren't stopping their continual evolution). What I think happened is that people who actually do care about principles got turned off from the Democratic party, and due to how the 2 parties are, at a baseline, around 50/50, there didn't need much of a shift to change the election results, which had downstream effects with respect to Common Knowledge about how much other people liked wokeness. Which was never popular organically, but rather popular like Kim Jong Un is in North Korea.

And, indeed, it ain't dead. It's not even hibernating. It's going just as hard in full force, in the many little and large fiefdoms that it still owns. Again, I doubt it's possible to kill it, and I don't even have much of an idea on how to reduce it further.

Trump will not last forever. A large portion of the Republican elite very clearly want to wash their hands of him and go back to the way things used to be. That is not an acceptable solution to Red Tribe, though, and every success we have had at securing our values has come from refusing to accept this exact sort of "moderation".

I mean, to whatever extent that the Red Tribe wants to crush wokeness, I'll root for them and even help them along, in the same way that I would root for a surgeon to cut out a malignant tumor. But I'm not sure what sort of "moderation" you're talking about that would be the right-wing equivalent of a blue-haired leftist deciding that progressive leftist critical race theory/third-wave-feminist-informed principles find it perfectly okay that white people feel okay being white.