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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?
Since 2020, I've been lurking Japanese websites regularly. Easily the biggest contrast between the English and Japanese net is the total lack of any real CW or political energy over there. Japanese people hardly vote, they don't follow politics, and if Marx is brought up they'll discuss him calmly from a historical/economic perspective rather than an ideological one. There's a palpable sense that Japanese are somehow immune to the Culture War -- that it's just fundamentally never going to happen, barring a World War II-style shakeup, and even then I seriously doubt it.
So why are they immune to the CW? The keyword is society. Japanese people (and other Asians) have a fundamentally different relationship with their society compared to Westerners. Over there, "society" is basically a sprawling, abstract, ephemeral organism that's almost like a father figure. You may not always like his authority, you definitely don't understand him, but if you listen to his rules and obey his commands, you will probably be happy. You'll be safe, you'll have clean streets, a wife, a career, expendable income, medical care, good food! Society is -extremely- stable, so virtually all risk is removed. Trust in society, and you'll be happy. Disrespect society, and you'll be shamed on national TV.
Western society -- especially America -- is the opposite. As authority is stripped away from the social body and granted to the individual, society loses its ability to fix norms and values, and so every individual is left to determine his own truth rather than inheriting some default opinion from above. The more atomized and individualist a society is, the smaller the corpus of collective knowledge/belief gets, and the more pressure is placed on each person to find an answer themselves. This is why even in Scandinavia, CW potential is much lower because they're collectivists, despite being very developed, terminally online, and fluent in English. For CW to become truly big in Scandinavia, their collectivist culture would have to decay.
I don't really think the average person wants a Culture War. They just have this void in their lives -- no social organism they can feel proud contributing to, no God that brings purpose to their life, and 2008 butchered any remaining Y2K optimism with an axe. Seems natural that mass political utopianism is the move.
My understanding is that Japan had a highly polarizing culture war in the 1950s, with street violence and riots, in which right-wing nationalist parties and organizations duked it out with communists, Weimar-style. This of course boiled over into the assassination of socialist political candidate Inejirō Asanuma by a hardcore ultra-nationalist on live television.
While I think there’s something real that you’re pointing to - and though I’ve never been to Japan (although that will change this year!) my naïve outsider’s impression jibes with what you’re saying. Knowing that Japan was roiled by bitter ideological civil conflict so recently, though, is enough to make me deeply skeptical of the claim that its current cultural/political harmony is the result of some deep primordial aspect of Eastern communitarianism, as opposed to Western individualism/idealism. (See also: the entire history of China.)
@Hoffmeister25 I belive you're correct about the post-war riots.
https://media.gettyimages.com/id/1187711152/ja/%E3%82%B9%E3%83%88%E3%83%83%E3%82%AF%E3%83%95%E3%82%A9%E3%83%88/high-angle-shot-of-a-crowd-of-labor-union-protestors-who-are-gathered-on-an-urban-playing.jpg?s=1024x1024&w=gi&k=20&c=p28vxdNNaeQ9m1WAvwUzAH0uSn90dj_6dILjbKARG1w=
https://www.gettyimages.co.jp/detail/ニュース写真/tokyo-japan-left-wing-japanese-trade-union-members-in-tokyo-are-ニュース写真/515935648
Japan is technically a democracy but practically it's a one-party state. The same party (Liberal Democrats) has been in power for most of the last 70 years; it has a cosy consensus with the news sites and bribes a lot of demographics pretty openly. For example, the recent scandal where the party turned out to have been cooperating with the Moonie cult (Unification Church) in exchange for the cult ordering its members to vote Liberal Democrat. Or the massive amounts of money that are funded to unnecessary building works to prop up local labour. People don't see any point talking about politics because the situation is mostly comfortable and there's no prospect of change.
Don't let the party label fool you. In Asia, democratic parties are much less of 'political parties' in the American or especially European sense, roughly fixed coalitions with a breadth of ideological representation, and far more personality-based coalitions of factions. You don't support the Party, as is the European norm, or even necessarily the Person of a specific geographic area as is the American practice, you support the political faction, which can be substantially more dynamic than in Europe as factions even within the same party maneuver.
In Japan in particular, the Liberal Democratic Party factions are basically parties-within-a-party, such that 'the Liberal Democratic Party' is just the current coalition government of internal LDP factions, whose breadth and diversity can marginalize, co-opt, or subsume parties outside of The Party. If you want a more pro-China Japanese government, you don't need (or want) to start a pro-China party for people to vote for- you're better off just pumping up the current more-pro-China factions so that their factional strength influences the party's internal coalitions and maneuverings. Voting directly affects these, as LDP candidates can run against eachother as much as opposition parties- meaning that instead of a 'here is your only possible candidate from the one-party', you can have as many LDP candidates as opposition candidates running in a slate. Nominally they may be from the same party, but in effect they are each from distinct factions or faction-alliances, meaning that the victory of 'the party' is not synonymous with the status quo.
Japan's Liberal Democratic Party is 'one-party' in the same sense that the American 'bipartisan consensus' is 'one party'. There have been many people who feel there's no point in voting because there's no prospect of change and that all the candidates are the same, but they'd be just as wrong in either country.
The Japanese electoral system was changed in 1994 to a mixture of FPTP and list-based PR so that same-party candidates no longer compete directly for popular votes. This was supposed to encourage anti-LDP leadership politicians to join opposition parties rather than anti-leadership factions within the LDP. I don't know why it didn't work.
The single biggest factor I've heard/been convinced by is that the 1994 reforms didn't go far enough in providing public funding for the operations of the politicians. Faction support is financial not only critical in funding for the election phase (what US political parties serve as), but in the daily operations of the candidate and their staff to, well, work. What the government provides as an operating allowance is often insufficient, and so a faction provides the function for staff and systems and such.
In short, it's a power of the purse issue.
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