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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?
Because we're still operating within the Reagan/Thatcher/Washington Consensus/End of History/Fukuyama paradigm, and we're well past due for at least the outline of a new paradigm but we can't seem to come up with one, and we're trapped in it. There's a theory among historians and political scientists that the American political paradigm shifts whenever a president wins re-election and then gets their chosen successor elected after them. Across the twentieth century we had Teddy, to FDR, to Reagan. And we're stuck on Reagan. Clinton and Obama and Biden have all operated within that Reagan paradigm, within the Washington Consensus. Obama himself said in a debate:
Arguably, Trump did not in some ways, but in other ways he tacked back in that direction from the moderate changes of Obama.
Reagan made a compromise: corporate capitalist economic structure, managed social change. Reagan did not put any serious effort into rolling back racial integration, or turning the tide on the sexual revolution. In exchange for accepting Capitalism, social outliers got grudging and slow but growing acceptance. The right wing defeated Communism, at home and abroad, but accepted the left's social gains to 1980, and further managed change in the future. As much as gay activists might like to whine about AIDs or Black radicals might like to talk about crime bills and crack, Reagan's legacy was leaving any idea of a right-wing built around segregation behind, and any idea of rolling back the sexual revolution was DOA after we elected Reagan.
The culture war becomes the only realm of politics in that paradigm. The old saw about having a Pro Life Corporate Party and a Pro Choice Corporate Party. There's no serious effort to overthrow capitalism, only to reward Red or Blue corporate groups, or to alter the degree to which the less productive are buoyed. Communists are no more relevant than segregationists in today's American politics, a freak show fringe. The parties, and the tribes, are optimized to fight over the frontier, not to strike deep behind enemy lines. Hyper-optimizing for the degree of change.
Yes. It's naive and self-serving. No one hates anyone defensively. The whole idea is silly. Defense vs. offense is just a matter of where you set the date. Ukraine says it is in a defensive war because it sets the date at 2014, Russia says it is in a defensive war because it sets the date earlier, and so on and so forth. Same anywhere. Rome conquered the world in self defense, Hitler framed his wars up to Barbarosa as essentially defensive, redressing German oppression after Versailles.
A variety of reasons. Ressentiment, conservatism, fear, will-to-power. There is no real desire for secession at this point, the winner of the culture war seeks to impose their will from sea to shining sea.
Virtually no Blue Triber perceives themselves as having been born into a Blue Tribe world. They perceive themselves as born into a red tribe world and having to fight their way out of it.
Take gay people as our principal example: Gays aren't born to gays, they are born to straight parents, until recently in a largely straight world. They have to fight their way out, find themselves, find acceptance, gain rights, etc.
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