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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?
The broad scale picture of two enemies at war flows fairly naturally from our election system, as it forces there to be two parties. As it exists specifically, it's due to differences in values. The right is a mixture of pro-religion and pro-liberalism forces (though the latter is waning post-Trump) while the left's predominant concern is about fairness and oppression.
I second what @07mk said about it being taught in schools—one of the big moral things that they push in schools is that slavery, racism, etc. are bad. And justifiably so. But that lends itself to the support of the left, whereas the right's values are less likely to be taught. Social media of course contributes, in the further emphases on flaws, and in the spreading of ideas within each other and the formation of a culture.
The left doesn't see things as them having power and oppressing the right. They see it rather as them, with their institutions, trying to combat a vast societal undercurrent of evil. Remember, every disparity is a sign of oppression, of failure—the wealth of the wealthy, racial gaps, everything. They are people struggling against the racism and oppression everywhere. Everyone wants to be the underdog.
And they see the right as legitimately evil. To side with the slavers over the slaves! What do the billionaires need? Why are you supporting the white people, who have perpetrated centuries of harm upon others, and (as is evident by the disparities) are still profiting? Would you treat half the world as lesser, merely because they are female, as if they needed to depend on men? Why would you let our pristine world go to waste, in the pursuit of selfish profit? They see society as a bundle of flaws and problems, and take the good it does for granted.
You point out that the left is punching down. Yes, they do. But they see themselves as attacking human scum.
To answer your three questions directly:
It's kind of a mix. The red tribe does genuinely have contempt for the blue tribe, it's not merely defensive.
The red tribe hates the blue tribe because it sees evil. A world of injustice, where people (they could be the victims) are mistreated because they are white, where the institutions that our society runs upon are being subverted or torn down, where the children are slaughtered by the millions. A place of debauchery, where people promote the ugly and disordered everywhere, from piercings to art to the disordered gender relations that LGBT consists in to the assault on the justice system. People lose jobs for having views like them. Christianity is attacked. Why would anyone prefer the ugly over the beautiful, or disarray to health?
As I said above, the left hates the right, because it promotes oppression and injustice. Why would you side with those perpetrating harm, with the selfish, rather the with the victims?
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