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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?
WHY is there a culture war?
A proximal cause is "fellow travelers" being more able to find each other and create echo chambers where they don't have to spend time becoming exhausted by arguing their viewpoints for their neighbors (by chance or fate) with different views. This doesn't just happen online; since people who trust governments more than private citizens tend to congregate in cities and live in apartments and condos, cities become progressive and the rural and suburban areas become conservative. The busybodies and meddlers in each group who can't stand being told what to do by "those people" try to push laws and regulations and ordinances and speech codes to interfere with "those people" getting their way, even if they themselves would never consent to being ruled in such a manner. Thus, the cold culture war.
I do offer an ultimate cause, however, and I hope it'll blow a few minds.
My sensemaking journey began with a simple pair of concepts: The physical world and the world of logic operate on separate sets of attributes and rules, and emotions are a third and equally separate realm like unto the others.
Upon first making a list like this, I realized that the physical essence is masculine, the emotional essence is feminine, and the logical essence is neither. ("Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus" and geeks are from Vulcan.) I've called this worldview Triessentialism.
More recently, I observed that physically intuitive people tend to be red tribe/conservative while emotionally intuitive people tend to be blue-tribe/progressive, and logically intuitive people tend to be grey tribe/libertarian. In animal metaphors, the red tribe acts like a pack, the blue like a herd, and the grey like a hive; asymmetric but equivalent. Since coming to these conclusions, I've rarely been surprised when it comes to politics, which tells me my beliefs pay out in prediction.
I could go on and on about these mindsets, and I could even point to Jon Haidt's Moral Foundations Theory as a root cause as to why these mindsets tend to be the three fundamentals. I'd love to talk with him about looking at his data and suggesting three, not two, moral foundation mindsets, with the third being somewhat rare. But for me, I've sensemade enough to consider my theory substantiated.
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