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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?
Not really; despite protestations, even the blues' language betrays that they know they're the aggressors -- they call the reds "reactionaries", and in order for there to be a re-action, there must be a principal action.
Because they stand in the way of them amassing power for themselves at the cost of primarily red demographics. Blue tribe is a racial spoils system, it's minorities exploiting white guilt to grab as much unearned advantage for themselves as they can; it's women flying the flag of feminism to advantage themselves and disadvantage men. Anyone professing an interest in "fairness" and "justice" is either doing so cynically to cover for their own grasping hands, or naively having never examined the actual motivations of their peers or effects of their ideology.
Blue tribe ideology is the ideology of singling out one group, white straight men, and agreeing amongst themselves to appropriate and steal everything possible from that group and divide it amongst themselves. Everything that comes after that is post-hoc justification as to why not only is this necessary, but a good thing -- but the fact remains, the base desire is simple looting for self-enrichment.
The culture war exists for the same reason all war exists; person A wants what person B has, and has decided to take it via force.
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