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Notes -
WHY is there a culture war?
I think most people around here accept the existence of a red tribe and a blue tribe, and accept that most of what happens in western society and politics, from George Floyd to Taylor Swift, follows from those two tribes trying to weaponize events and ideas in order to dunk on their enemies. As a description of the world, our culture war theory works very well. But as an explanation, maybe not. Yes, yes, there are these two tribes, but WHY do these tribes hate each so much? It seems obvious to me that the red tribe is currently on the defensive, and so fights on out of a spirit of plucky individualism/puerile defiance (you choose). They could just stop, but that would amount to a capitulation. Rightly or wrongly, the red tribe won't accept that, so they continue they culture war.
But the blue tribe's motivation is harder for me to explain to myself. Why do they hate the red tribe so much? One could point back to Trump and say "Look at all the damage the red tribe did!" but Trump himself seems to have been the red tribe lashing out at blue tribe condescension/scorn. Do they just want revenge for the 80s? The 50s? In I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup, the suggestion is that the tribes are too similar, and so therefore hatred is somehow inevitable. He compares the situation to Germans hating Jews, or Hutus hating Tutsis, but in both of those cases, the party on the offensive accused the other party of a pretty specific set of misdeeds. Those accusations may have been false, but they mobilized a lot of hatred. It appears that the Blue Tribe today does not accuse the red tribe of anything specific at all (barring some attempts that certainly haven't had the hoped-for effect, like mass Residential school graves or Jan 6). One might point back to the legacy of slavery or something, but that is largely absent from other Western histories, and the tribes have sorted themselves out the same way, with even more hostility, as in Canada, where the Blue hatred for Red (using the american color scheme for consistency) takes the form of quite overt punching-down.
So: 1)Is it naive to think that the red tribe hates the blue tribe defensively? 2)If it is naive, why does the red tribe hate the blue tribe? 3) Why does the blue tribe hate the red tribe?
In America, it’s out of a political polarization spiral that started with bush and became irrecoverable under Obama; both sides can’t quite understand why their president and his merry men is so uniquely alienating to the other side and so make up motives. It’s because he’s black, or because they hate America, or whatever.
You can couple that with a preexisting liberal elite prejudice that we’d be just like some fantastical utopian version of Denmark if the typical red tribe demographics would stop preventing it(never mind that these people do not know what Denmark is actually like), and it’s a recipe for different interest groups banding together in a no-criticism-allowed way to beat up on their opponents. That’s basically where the culture war comes from.
But did the Red Tribe do something to obstruct the path to Utopia? I'm not talking about Ronald Reagan- I mean did cousin Merle on his camo 4-wheeler do something?
He's "clinging to guns and religion" and stopping progressives from solving the gun crime problem.
And that was Obama trying to be charitable.
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Factually: no, they did not, and the utopia envisioned doesn’t look much like Denmark or indeed anything else that exists
However, it’s important to look at the theory and interests here- cousin Merle not having any incentive to support public transportation is pretty obvious, for example. He already owns a pickup truck and doesn’t go into the downtown areas where it’s less useful all that often. He’s an easy scapegoat for things like that. There’s other examples, too, of course, that’s just an easy one. But ‘preference for rural-coded lifestyle choices’ has been a progressive scapegoat for not having the same nice things they think Europe has for quite a while. There’s something to hlynka’s point that the Twitter DR are more progressive than conventionally conservative because a lot of them are the same, they just blame blacks instead(and factually blacks and rednecks get along much better than commonly believed).
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The red tribe still has significant political power. Especially in state legislatures where they are not afraid to flex their power to do things like ban abortion.
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