The fundamental problem the Red Tribe/American conservatism faces is a culture of proud, resentful ignorance.
This is fundamentally untrue I think and close to boo outgroup (Edit - I think you explain below what you mean somewhat better). Red Tribers have a great deal of use for knowledge. It's just usually directly applicable knowledge. Half my family are redneck equivalents and they prize knowledge. The type of practical knowledge that lets them run a successful farm or build houses. My uncle has forgotten more about small hold farming than I ever knew. My grandfather could eke a living out of poor soil and hilly terrain with a knowledge of local weather and rainfall patterns that rivaled anything the Met Office can put out. They possess a great deal of knowledge in the Red Tribe. I lived in a small Red town in the US for a number of years and this is just not a good description of Red Tribe folk even at the most general level.
It's true they don't generally want to become an anthropologist or what have you, but academia is only a subset of knowledge generation. An important one! But not the only one by far.
What is true I think is that almost definitionally Red Tribers in general don't want to sit in offices and decide on funding for hypothetical research, which means it is going to be up to the small number of conservative Blue Tribers to do that. It also explains why so often Republican politicians are more left then their base. Because they are usually Blue Tribers who are conservative, again because almost definitionally Red Tribers don't want to live in a big city and sit in meetings and give speeches for a living. But Blue Tribe conservatives are not identical to Red Tribe conservatives, we can see the spat with Musk and Vivek about H-1B visas as an example.
I don't think the Red Tribe could ever be 50% of academia there simply not enough of them who would want to do that. The whole point of different tribes is they do have different values and preferences. Just like farmers or lumberjacks or oil workers are never going to be 50% Blue Tribe.
For the Red Tribe to pull its weight in academia or politics you have to convince salt of the earth people like my uncle to go and sit in meetings and give speeches or go to school for 4 years so he can get a degree, and then teach people or research at a university, when that is the last thing he wants to do. He would rather be out in his fields.
But don't think that means he is ignorant. He knows exactly how to skin and butcher a carcass, he knows what his fields need and can diagnose a multitude of livestock illnesses. He also knows exactly what the price of feed and crops need to be before he breaks even. All without finishing school at all.
I think Red's do undervalue the kind of academic knowledge that can be transformative, but equally I think Blue's do undervalue practical day to day useful knowledge. We need both in order for societies to advance.
SSCReader
1d ago
A Celtic woman is often the equal of any Roman man in hand-to-hand combat. She is as beautiful as she is strong. Her body is comely but fierce. The physiques of our Roman women pale in comparison.
I can't find an attribution either, beyond unidentified Roman soldier. I did come across it in some book about Rome (hence why i knew roughly how it went so I could Google it), but I can't remember which, or whether it was attributed there or not.
We have some attributed quotes which say roughly the same thing, though of course how much is based upon them actually seeing Celtic women vs hearing stories is difficult to determine.
“The women of the Gauls are not only like men in their great stature, but they are a match for them in courage as well.” — Diodorus Siculus
“A whole band of foreigners will be unable to cope with one [Gaul] in a fight, if he calls in his wife, stronger than he by far and with flashing eyes; least of all when she swells her neck and gnashes her teeth, and poising her huge white arms, begins to rain blows mingled with kicks, like shots discharged by the twisted cords of a catapult.” — Ammianus Marcellinus
I think the evidence does suggest Celts were on average a couple of inches taller than Romans so probably Celtic women were taller than Roman women in the same way. Whether or not there was a besotted Roman soldier who wrote about Celtic Muscle Mommies compared to the small boring Roman women with that specific quote is unclear. I would heavily suspect that even if that is an actual quote the average Celtic woman was not actually as strong as any Roman man.
SSCReader
1d ago
Perhaps the most common example was Major Kira fighting, and while I can definitely believe that a trained and experienced guerrilla can disarm a random idiot with a hand weapon in close quarters, by the time they get to "mostly holding her own while surrounded by three Klingon warriors" it's clear that plot armor knows no gender.
Ah that is because she uses the most powerful technique known to any race. The double fist punch. She uses it like 15 times in that 1 minute clip.
SSCReader
1d ago
- But perhaps we can also admit that not every Conan story spent equal time fluffing the physical valor of a woman who was to be Conan's equal.
Absolutely. Belit throws herself at his feet, Valeria is certainly not his equal, this version of Red Sonja does save a European warrior giant who is fighting the Ottomans, but while she can overpower the "average" male warrior with strength she isn't shown to be a strength match to Gottfried directly and can't lift him out of a moat in his full armor on her own, she can only half lift him, though that is probably still reasonably impressive as he is in full armor, soaking wet and fully armed.
Celtic history and myths do have some warrior women as well:
From a Roman soldier:
“A Celtic woman is often the equal of any Roman man in hand-to-hand combat. She is as beautiful as she is strong. Her body is comely but fierce. The physiques of our Roman women pale in comparison.”
You can find others in Celtic myth cycles like:
"Aife also known as Aoife in modern Irish, was Scáthach's rival and by most accounts, her sister, or even twin. She was reportedly fierce in battle, shattering Cú Chulainn’s sword with one of her blows when the two went head to head in an epic fight. The mighty Cú Chulainn had to resort to trickery to defeat her"
But usually they are portrayed as being unusual examples of womanhood in and of themselves.
As for modern media it's certainly more common I'd agree, but as long as they do the work I don't mind it. i.e. Buffy being explicitly powered by magic, Black Widow being augmented by a shadowy Red Room especially in a world where a man with apparently only peak human strength can hold down a helicopter. They are our modern version of the mythologies of the past (or as with Wonder Woman, the actual past mythologies), reinvented.
It's a little more jarring in more grounded pieces I agree but even there they have a tendency to show one man being able to beat 5 men at the same time or what have you, so they are obviously juicing everybody up for the sake of looking bad-ass. I imagine having to show a guy just about win a fight with an equal but be exhausted then sit around healing for a month from his cracked ribs, concussion and shattered knuckles isn't exactly conducive to a fast based entertainment product. So almost every character in an action series or movie is effectively superhuman for unspecified reasons.
I have met a single woman who was as strong as I was but she was a fit 6'2 black ex D1 basketball player. And I am a 5'11 schlubby gamer, and a decade older than she was. So I don't have any illusions about average strength comparisons. A woman needs very very significant size and fitness advantages in order to match male strength. My first wife was 5' even and 90lbs and there was no possible way she could overpower me hand to hand, even if she were trained by ninjas.
SSCReader
1d ago
At no point in any novel I've read pre 1980 is any woman ever described as physically strong. Not in Dickens, not in Howard,
Certainly in Howard. Valeria is described as being strong (while still being feminine). Maybe the original Red Sonja (who inspired the later Red Sonja in Conan comics) might count.
"She was tall, full-bosomed, and large-limbed, with compact shoulders. Her whole figure reflected an unusual strength, without detracting from the femininity of her appearance." - This is the start of the description of Valeria. He does say she is unusual in her strength though.
"Then with a yell and a rush someone was at his side and he heard the quick splintering of mail beneath the madly flailing strokes of a saber that flashed like silver lightning before his clearing sight. It was Red Sonya who had come to his aid, and her onslaught was no less terrible than that of a she-panther. Her strokes followed each other too quickly for the eye to follow; her blade was a blur of white fire, and men went down like ripe grain before the reaper." - She is splintering mail with sword strokes and reaping men like grain, which takes some level of strength.
"With a croaking cry Tshoruk ran at her, scimitar lifted. Before he could strike, she crashed down the barrel of the empty pistol on his head, felling him like an ox. From the other side Rhupen slashed at her with a curved Turkish dagger. Dropping the pistol, she closed with the young Oriental. Moving like someone in a dream, she bore him irresistibly backward, one hand gripping his wrist, the other his throat. Throttling him slowly, she inexorably crashed his head again and again against the stones of the wall, until his eyes rolled up and set. Then she threw him from her like a sack of loose salt." - Red Sonja again rescuing the main character - overpowered a man, throttled him, then throws his body away, like a sack.
SSCReader
3d ago
In other words: as a white British person, your protection against black knife crime isn't your whiteness, it's most likely your physical separation from statistically more violent groups
Not just geographical separation but crime related too, much of the knife crime in the UK (and gun crime in the US) is between gangs, or drug related. If you aren't involved in those your risks are much much lower. And also if you aren't a young male of course.
Especially in the UK with those factors the average white adult in the north is very safe. They don't have to worry about a POC violent crime wave (which was the OP's point) because they are never going to see it . And given homicide is dropping overall after the Covid spike I don't see that getting worse.
Looking at your homicide stats, that is for victims not offenders. Black people are 17% of victims despite making up 4% of the population, while whites are 82% of people but only 71.4% of victims. That's the flip side of 13/52. Only 4% of the population but 17% of those killed. For the US that would be 13/54.
The average white person in America is pretty safe, the average white person in the UK is really really safe.
SSCReader
3d ago
Black people are over-represented in knife crime (6% by population, 14% of knife crime) but that is mostly concentrated in London (47% of knife crime is by black people in London, 36% by whites for comparison), in most of England, particularly the North where the show is set, the vast majority of knife wielding offenders are from the almost entirely white underclass. About 70% of knife offenders are white throughout England. In the North that is likely to be well over 80% just due to demographics.
The UK is not the US, the difference in demographics of crime and the underclasses in general is much less pronounced and is concentrated in very different ways. And given most black knife crime is intra-ethnic, most white English people who have any contact with knife crime it is going to be with white offenders.
If you are white in England, the chances of being a victim of white knife crime is hugely higher than by black knife crime. 1) Because black people are only 6% of the population and 2) Because violent knife crime is usually intra-ethnic.
White people in England probably have no need to be freaked out by "POC violent youth" at all. Or really violent youth entirely. The homicide rate overall is a fifth of that in the US, and close to a quarter of what there is in a single city, where the bulk of both victims and offenders are not white.
SSCReader
4d ago
The Tirs (Tairngire and na Nog) are fun! I ran a game where my players woke up with their menories wiped and had to piece together they had completed a run for the Elves in Tairngire which went down a storm.
Shadowrun is one of my all time top RPGs and settings.
SSCReader
5d ago
If we look at Shadowrun another cyberpunk game from 1989, they do have the United Canadian and American States or UCAS which is basically the North Eastern part of America and Canada merged together. It has Manitoba, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Ontario and Saskatchewan as states.
Then the Confederation of American States in the South and a bunch of Native American nations in between after the resurgence of magic and several pandemics and volcanos erupting.
Mexico has been taken over by a conglomerate which is both simultaneously Aztecs gone back to sacrificing people on pyramids and a merging of the drug cartels.
SSCReader
5d ago
I regret you were too late but Nybbler already beat you to it, so we had traced back to Baldassaro and also to another article in the Chicago Tribune from 2000 which has another unsourced quote about the 1928 ban in Chicago. Though as knowledge is its own reward so I hope you do not feel your time wasted!
Still being banned for being communist means my overall point holds thankfully.
SSCReader
6d ago
So I tracked back that quote to Kristina Rosenthal at the University of Tulsa in 2014 but it seems she sourced the quote from R. Wolf Baldassarro in 2013 who doesn't appear to have named a source that I can find. The "strong leadership roles" wording does appear to be his paraphrasing with just the "ungodly" wording being a quote in his original piece.
"Nevertheless, it has come under attack several times. Ministers and educators challenged it for its “ungodly” influence and for depicting women in strong leadership roles. They opposed not only children reading it, but adults as well, lest it undermine longstanding gender roles."
I did find an article in the Chicago Tribune from 2000 which said this:
"In 1928, you would not have been able to find “The Wizard of Oz” at the Chicago Public Library; librarians there considered the book “not literature, but, somehow, rather evil for children.”" but again the quote is unsourced. The Chicago Tribune was extant in 1928 so I assume they would maybe have internal archives so as to verify that the banning actually happened, but it isn't specified in the article.
I do concede however that I cannot find a contemporary source for those quotes. Though I also can't find a contemporary source for the 1928 banning at all. Possibly buried in a newspaper archive I would need a library card to access, ironically enough.
For the 1950's though I think we have better evidence (this piece is about state librarians in Florida):
"When it came to employing the tactic of using the public’s anticommunist sentiment to remove the works of Baum from public libraries (and thereby empower the library in its fight against communism), Dreier and Dodd were not alone. These localities joined Detroit, Washington, D.C., Chicago, (ironically) Kansas City, and other local library districts across the nation in purging their shelves of the works of Baum. "
"Dreier was arguing that his movement to improve the quantity and quality of Florida’s libraries was a necessary front in the Cold War. He viewed libraries as extremely important institutions that would create a populace capable of defeating the Soviet Union in the marketplace of ideas"
This paper is sourced from letters held in the Florida State archives from the 1950's and illustrates that seeing libraries as a cultural weapon was already happening then.
"Outside the pages of his library newsletter, Dreier was an even more strident anticommunist. Elsewhere he wrote vitriolic propaganda pieces with stark depictions of leftists:
"The socialist is smarter than the capitalist. He has to be to get what he wants. The capitalist is the producer. He raises the fruits and vegetables. He makes gadgets. He accumulates profits. That’s when the socialist, himself unable to create anything, steps in and passes laws that compel the capitalist to turn part of his profits into socialist projects. The time will come when the socialist will actually pass laws that compel the producer to surrender complete control of what he has created."
"Given his antipathy toward leftist politics, the fact that Baum’s work was often suspected of containing subversive political ideas gave Dreier additional impetus to support Dodd’s list of books to be removed from Florida’s libraries."
Whether it applies to Baum in 1928 or not, the evidence is that libraries were already seen as a battleground for cultural clashes well before the current timeframe.
SSCReader
6d ago
Even if no-one does respond, we have to do our best to write as if they will and we want them to. Otherwise we'll get fewer and fewer people who will.
And I did have a response, I was rewriting when he got banned. I don't know if I would stand up for all of it, but he is wrong about leftism murdering his neutral libraries and wearing the skin suit. It was already murdered when anti-Christian and anti-American books were banned back in the day and libraries had a very different lean. When the Wizard of Oz was banned because witches are theologically evil or portrayed women in leadership roles. It was already a weapon in the culture war, that's why leftists got involved. Because they felt just as disgusted by the way it was previously as he does now. It's a new zombie in the skinsuit that he doesn't like but there will always be a zombie.
"The Wizard of Oz was banned by public libraries in 1928 because the book was deemed ungodly for “depicting women in strong leadership roles.”"
"Pressure was brought to bear not only on the materials in the library but the staff who ran it. Loyalty programs sprang up around the country beginning in 1947, the year that President Harry Truman enacted a federal program for employees in the executive branch. Typically, these programs required that employees sign an oath indicating whether or not they had had or continued to have any affiliations with organizations considered subversive"
"The 1960s brought about turmoil in libraries across the southern United States. African-Americans attempted to access white libraries across the American South."
Once libraries are used as a cultural weapon, you cannot be surprised when your opponents decide it is a weapon they need to contest.
Whether equity based weeding is right or wrong is irrelevant, you can prefer one or the other, but starting history 20 years ago obscures WHY these things happen now. Why did a coalition of the left want to control libraries? Because those libraries had previously been weaponized against their coalition - feminists, leftists and black people at a minimum. Free and neutral libraries had already been skinned and inhabited long ago. It's just a fight over which zombie gets to wear the skin so to speak. And I am sure the Christians in the 1920's would argue that libraries had been corrupted and that is why they needed to assert control and ban ungodly books ,and the patriots of the 50s would cite the rise of un-American communists for why they had to fire people and so on and so forth.
If you hit someone with a club and then they wrest it away from you and hit you with it, your complaint about your opponent using a weapon is void. Your real issue is that your opponent has the club not you, not with the concept of the club being used as a weapon at all.
Probably with some introspection about why you feel violent disgust, so you can control that reaction I think. The below is my own interpretation and idea of the space.
The whole point of the space is I should want even (or especially perhaps!) the people I find violently disgusting to read what I say and want to respond to me so we can have a dialogue.
So if I am going to talk about something I find disgusting I have to take a distant view of it and try to be more dispassionate.
You'll note many people who catch repeated bans it's because they can't (or won't) disguise a seething anger that underlies their post. They aren't thinking first and foremost how do I write this in a way a progressive gay librarian (for example!) would want to engage with. They are writing from emotion first and foremost.
I could rant for days about the damage the Christian "brain parasite" does, and have in other places, but here if I post about it, it has to be with the idea I WANT Christians to read and engage. And calling their faith, something they feel very seriously about a parasite is not going to optimise for light over heat. It's starting an argument not a discussion. Its already a steep ask for them to try and discuss their own heartfelt beliefs with criticism, so my job is to try and make that as easy as possible for them, by trying to remove as much heat as I can.
I rewrite my posts usually after thinking if I were an X, how would i feel about the language being used to talk about the principles and actions I hold dear? How do I alter it so we can engage in a discussion not a fight? Try to put myself in the shoes of whoever I think believes the things I hate or find disgusting and edit my wording to offend them the least possible to make my point. I'm not always successful I don't think, but I have never got a ban or even a warning (that I recollect), so I think I get reasonably close.
You have to want to actually communicate with the people whose ideas you hate and find violently dusgusting I think, to get the most out of this space. But of course for most people they don't want to communicate with people like that. So not everyone is a good fit for what the space is supposed to be. If you can't at least pretend you WANT to engage with someone whose ideas you hate viscerally and are critiquing and make some effort to aid that, you'll probably be picking up Mod actions sooner rather than later.
Edit - spelling
SSCReader
15d ago
Even if we don't strip citizenship from people who have come to reject those ideas, I am okay with making their lives otherwise so unpalatable that they renounce citizens on their own.
Why not the opposite? Reform the nation on the beliefs that the now majority of your citizens espouse? To an extent that is what the Civil war did no? Massive disagreement about a specific ideal, fought a war over it, reformed shattered state with the new status quo in place (to an extent at least).
Or to put it another way was the Confederacy or the Union the anti-American ones in this context? Slavery had been part of America for some time, so was the abolition unAmerican or was the fact slavery contradicted some of the idealistic founding rhetoric enough to make abolition actually the American thing to do?
SSCReader
16d ago
It seems at least possible that sustainable maintenance of public order necessitates a lot more punishing bad people than we're currently doing.
Are you sure? Even last year homicide seems to have fallen again and certainly in PA's large cities we are now at a near 10 year low, and much much lower than we were in the 80's.
In Philly the homicide rate peaked at over 44 (per 100,000) in the mid 1980's. Dropping to about 16 in the early 2010's, it peaked again at about 35 in 2021 but has dropped again down to just over 17 for 2024. And so far in the year it is about 35% down on last year, which means we might actually get the lowest homicide rate in the last 50 years in 2025. Pittsburgh's numbers seem to following the same rough trajectory.
For the whole US the peak appears to have been 1991 with 10.7 before reaching a low of 4.7 in 2014 before increasing to 7.75 in 2021, and decreasing to 5.2 for 2024. So similar trends across the nation. Estimates for the 1950s and 60s put the figure around 5 then as well. So 2024 was one of the least violent (looking at homicides) years in modern US history.
The evidence seems to suggest that not only can we actually maintain a level of violent criminality much higher than we are currently at (not that I am saying that is a good idea of course!) that our current rate is not actually all that high (historically) as the Covid era increase has largely now vanished.
Just for comparison, my homeland had a homicide rate about 31 per 100,000 at the peak of the Troubles in the early 70's but had decreased to about 0.8 before Covid. It spiked up to around 1.3 during Covid and dropped back to 0.7 in 2024.
I think the evidence shows that public order can in fact be maintained with significantly higher levels of criminality and lower levels of punishing bad people. I am not advocating for that being a good idea just to be clear!
Just pointing out we do have a pretty high tolerance all in all, and that if current means whatever punishing we are doing in 2024 and so far in 2025 it seems to be working pretty well.
SSCReader
20d ago
Though of course non-combat skills actually out scale combat skills in Skyrim quite significantly. With alchemy and smithing alone (even setting aside the infinite loop trick) you can loop to create weapons that will kill even a max levelled Draugr in 1 or 2 hits even on Legendary difficulty, and boost your combat skills with alchemy if you wanted to. Not to mention you'll be rolling in gold to pay for training in combat skills if you want.
The equivalent to AI in the real world perhaps? The self-improving loop leaving behind the basics of ships and planes.
SSCReader
20d ago
Remember when Cameron promised the referendum in 2013 he was in charge with a coalition. That gave groups an out-sized power. There absolutely were enough in the euro-sceptic camp to cause him problems with votes because he didn't even have a majority on his own. The conventional wisdom as shown below was primarily because of the euro-sceptics with SOME others because they feared UKIP would cost them seats. But the biggest concern was the euro-sceptic bloc. Without them he probably could have wrangled the rest, because it was the euro-sceptic wing which was feeding the fears of the others. Cameron did not want a referendum. He did so because of the pressure he was under driven primarily by the euro-sceptic power bloc which was able to muster first 60, then 80 MPs to defy the government in votes, then over a hundred demanding a referendum. He only had 306 MPs at this time so over 100 is definitely enough to force any issue. As they did when they rebelled and sided with Labour.
"For Clegg, the reason Cameron moved to a referendum commitment was to manage his divided party.19 Echoing Harold Wilson’s 1975 European Community plebiscite, rather than a conversion to the merits of direct democracy, Cameron needed a mechanism to control an issue that was destabilising his party.20 As early as October 2011 Cameron had ‘faced 22 rebellions on Europe, involving 60 Tory backbenchers’.21 However, the pressure ratcheted upwards later in October when 81 Conservative MPs voted for a referendum in defiance of a three line whip. Both Cameron and William Hague, the Foreign Secretary, spoke forcefully against the motion in the House of Commons yet could not prevent a larger rebellion than anything seen during the Maastricht legislation in 1992.22 Political pressure from Conservative MPs continued to grow. In June 2012 John Barron MP collected over 100 signatures from Conservative colleagues asking Cameron to commit to a referendum after the 2015 general election.23 The PM publicly rejected this from Brussels which angered his critics and eroded his ‘authority over the party’.24 Pressure rose further in October 2012 when Conservative rebels united with Labour to defeat Cameron in Parliament over EU budget contributions."
"Cameron chose to commit to a vote, not because the country’s population was clamouring for one but because a significant minority of his own MPs, many of them frustrated by the constraints of coalition, were demanding that he do so – some because they feared that UKIP would cost them their seat (or the seats of too many of their colleagues) at the next election, some because they wanted out of the European Union and were more than happy to leverage that fear to their advantage."
SSCReader
20d ago
Well when we start enforcing the Johnson amendment on any church there is some room to talk about that. Given the amount of religious endorsements Trump got, its a wash, or perhaps even tilted towards Republicans just given numbers.
Either churches get to endorse or they don't. (I'd prefer not myself) but singling out black churches is just an isolated demand for rigor currently.
Also happy to remove tax exemption from both black and white churches just to be clear.
SSCReader
20d ago
Setting aside I think you're just wrong about the vote rigging, and that the black voting bloc has its own ideological things it wanted from Democrats, that make it willing to put up with some LGBT stuff, thats just reinforcing my point, the ideologues in the DNC were the ones pulling the strings, they had good control over congressional Democrats, doesn't matter how many moderate officials you appoint. Doesn't matter if the President is a pragmatist who just wants power, as long as he has it theres no point in going to war with the ideologues on his own side.
Sure trans kids, sure DEI and affirmative action even if unpopular. Sure flipping your own views from a few years ago upside down, Why would they care? The pragmatist just wants to win. If he can win without having to dial down his own side, so much the better, its political capital he doesn't need to spend.
SSCReader
20d ago
Indeed, but it was still a bone he had to throw. He isn't in power without that bone.
SSCReader
20d ago
Remember who looks to be in charge does not mean they are.
Consider that David Cameron agreed to a referendum on Brexit he did not want because of the internal politics of his party. He was reliant on the euro-sceptic wing and so was forced into calling for a referendum he explicitly campaigned against. He was in power, but he wasn't THE power. He was constrained in his actions by having to satisfy ideological power blocs within his party. He was pragmatic but he needed the ideologues. So he compromised his principles for power.
Further to that Biden won in 2020, you only have to dial your pragmatism up when you fail to win. Otherwise you can satisfy your ideologues and STILL get power. Biden is an experienced politician whose positions shifted overtime. Which ones are his real principles and which he was just wearing because his party politics wanted them, is very difficult to tell.
Thats why it is often losses or long periods in the cold that cause these realignments. Its easy to "be" an ideologue when you're winning. It's what you do when you're losing which shows whether you are an ideologue or are willing to sacrifice principles for power.
SSCReader
21d ago
But a religion acts on the elites who coopt it just as the elites act on it.
Well all ideologies do, not just religions, but regardless of that in politics you will inevitably have a mix of true believers, slightly less true believers all the way down to people who don't believe at all and are just in it for advantage. And you will also have a mix of exactly what ideology or what part of the ideology they believe or value most. So it's certainly more complicated than just pragmatists vs ideologues, I agree. You'll also have your alliance of groups (Evangelicals, business neo-liberals etc.) who also have their own internal balance of pragmatists vs ideologues.
You will have people who do not in fact care about the ideology whatsoever, but are in it for the power. They will push the most pragmatic approach (do whatever we can to win) and will be in tension with the truest believers (maintain our principles at all costs), and they will have varying webs of people who are on the scale at different levels and in different parts of the coalition to convince. That's why pivots are generally not immediate until an internal tipping point is reached.
In my direct experience at a national level most politicians are closer to the pragmatist end and will pretty happily jettison any principle they can get away with for power. It interests me that the Democrats may have accrued more true believers (or at the least truer believers) as it stands, because I think that generally makes it harder to win.
SSCReader
21d ago
They don't even attempt to explain a through line from open borders, trans kids and censorship to living wages and health care for their base.
That's the error in your model. If you think supporting trans kids is good, or open borders is good then whether it costs money or makes money is not the relevant distinction if you are not a consequentialist.
Consider the evangelical wing of the Republican party, they were still pushing for further abortion restrictions even though much of the polling was showing that was a position that might cost votes. Why? Because they really truly believe that it is wrong, and they should not compromise on that even if it means losing. They are not utilitarian. But they did not hold enough power within the party to force that decision and so Trump backed off it somewhat. Pragmatism won there. De-emphasize and move away from policies that are unpopular.
Supporting kids who want to transition will not help the economy or help people with healthcare in general, in fact it will probably cost money that could be used in other healthcare. But if you think those kids need that help badly ,then you should do it (from this point of view to be clear!) even if it costs votes and/or money.
They are NOT being pragmatic, so if you try to judge them by that measure their choices will look crazy.
"Even if everyone is telling you that something wrong is something right. Even if the whole world is telling you to move, it is your duty to plant yourself like a tree, look them in the eye, and say, ‘No, you move.'”"
In other words currently the ideologues hold sway within the DNC. Usually in a political party you'll have wings that are more pragmatic and vice versa and the power will move between them. Often a defeat will cause a realignment. Like New Labour moving towards the center in order to get away from all the "Winter of Discontent" strikes in the past which doomed them electorally against Thatcher. Pragmatically (or cynically!) abandoning some core Labour principles in order to become more electable. But those wings don't go away (see the resurgence under Corbyn for example).
It's too soon to know whether this loss will allow a more pragmatic core of the DNC to maneuver into power. A lot will depend on who the next flagbearer (Newsome?, AOC?, Someone new?) is going to be, and what direction they decide to go. Right now things are still shaking out, but within the next 6-10 months we'll have a better idea. I think there is some early evidence it might, as the more extreme left is already complaining about Democrats not fighting back enough, and that the handover of power was straightforward and peaceful. That indicates that the adults at the table have some understanding that Trumps popularity is based upon actual positional support at least privately.
To be clear I think that political parties need to be pragmatic, a lot of my job back in the day was to advise them on what areas should be de-emphasized because public support was low, and I think that the Democratic Party is going to struggle once again in 2028 unless they are able to shed some of the more ideological components (though if the economy tanks that will still be the biggest factor).
The problem of course is it is often your most committed ideologues which are willing to volunteer significant amounts of time and effort to your cause. Keeping them on side while transitioning (hah!) to a more pragmatic approach can be tricky.
SSCReader
22d ago
You start with an offer you are willing to back down from. But you don't pre-backdown from that position before you even get to the table. A return to status quo from 2014 is not going to fly, but you don't back down from that position until the Russians are actually negotiating. You are pre-emptively weakening your own position because now you have to make concessions in negotiations on top of the concessions you gave up without anything in trade.
You don't go to Russia with a reasonable offer, and they won't come to you with a reasonable offer. That is what the negotiations are for. If Putin wants to negotiate he will do so, regardless of what Zelensky is saying he will agree to.
Setting aside the word fault. If you have a culture that is suspicious of academia and other not real work, then it is likely the people in those positions are going to react and to be suspicious of you in return. I don't think it is either sides fault. Its the chicken or the egg. I think it is the outcome of the structural and systemic differences in value sets between tribes. Blues mock Reds for being dumb hicks and Reds mock Blues for being effete intellectuals. The result is any space that leans slightly one way or the other is going to cascade. Whether anyone is deliberately planning it or not.
90% of farmers are Republicans and that is ok. It is ok for your values and preferences to determine that some areas will be dominated by one tribe or the other. At scale individual choices are overtaken by systemic differences. There likely isn't any way to have a 50/50 split in academia for Reds and Blues short of changing what Reds want and hence what Reds are. Likewise with farming and Blues.
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