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I don't buy it.
Immigration is something the blue tribe just wants.
The blue tribe didn't start from the position of, how do we improve the economy, and then searched around and found immigration as a good policy for promoting economic growth. The blue wanted immigration and looked around for ways to justify it. Sure, they also believe the justification(trust the science), but the justifications are not to convince themselves, they are to convince those damn red-tribers.
They really want to live in a 'diverse' world, with ethnic restaurants, and friends who speak English with an accent, who have weird fun customs, different clothing, and different skin tones.
They are absolutely attached to it.
We are talking about the UK here, while there is an urban/rural divide it isn't as significant politically. London/Home Counties vs North/Midlands is probably more salient, although that is also complicated by coastal malaise as well. Alongside Upper/middle/working class divisions of course.
I can assure you the English Tories I worked with 10-25 years ago did not fit the blue tribe stereotypes you are mentioning here.
This should not be surprising, since the Blue/Red tribe paradigm is attempting to explain subcultural divisions amongst White Americans. Applying it to the British seems wrong-headed.
I can admit that I might be stretching the meaning of Blue and Red too far, but I like to think that I am actually getting to the heart of the division. I think it is mostly a college/political elite vs prole/working class divide, and that this divide is very similar across all countries under US cultural hegemony and has become increasingly similar over the last fifty years or so, such that it is coherent to talk about the working class proles of the UK as being 'red tribe', and the political elite as being 'blue tribe'.
In this particular instance my position is that the blue tribe or college/political elite are generally multicultural. My read is that globalism was in full swing across basically all of the west by the 90s, such that the political elite across the west were broadly in favor of increased immigration and multiculturalism. I think if you went to the best universities in Germany, France, the UK the US in 1995 and grabbed a hundred random students from each graduating class, and asked them how they felt about multiculturalism, you would get back 80%+ favorability with little between country variation. Maybe I am wildly off base, I do not actually have a survey to back this up, it is just how I feel, having spent time in all these counties during this time period. As well as my general read on the cultural output of these counties during this time period.
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Yeah that is my point. There is certainly some overlap, in some places, but it is going to confuse you more than it is going to explain if you try and translate it across one to one.
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I can buy that blue tribe is driven by an ideologically motivated positive outgroup bias.
But it isn't just blue tribe or it would have ended when they lost elections. What about the Tories? What about the business owners?
Blue tribe does not cleave easily along political parties. It is the culture of the college educated elite, and generally holds across western nations. The soccer hooligan and the NASCAR redneck have more in common with each other than either does with the Yale Conservative or the Oxford Liberal, and vice versa. The college educated elite like diversity and want to live in a multicultural world, they want to go to the sushi restaurant with their black friend and watch the India vs Pakistan cricket match while drinking a microbrew. It's their culture.
Which is exactly why it does not change much with lost elections.
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Uh, I thought there wasn’t really an English red tribe, although some of the upper crust was assimilated into the blues?
Why are we importing American cultural divisions that don’t exist over there to impose on a straightforwardsly age-and-class based set of objections?
I have quoted the deep lore.
I think Harvard culture is basically interchangeable with Oxford culture, such that the college elite of both countries are culturally very similar. Which is why I called the political elite of the UK, blue-tribe. I see globalists multiculturalism as a pretty ubiquitous cultural affectation of western college elites.
Sure, I think it's at least reasonable(if possibly debatable) to call the British elite blue-tribe. My argument was that most of the British isles don't have a red tribe.
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We can abandon the category. I'm just skeptical that one particular cultural preference -"liking diversity" - can explain everyone moving in one direction on this.
Even if we say there is no real "red tribe" surely some elites just don't give a fuck? If it was just ideological you'd also expect people like Johnson to exploit the anti-immigration sentiments of the populace to great acclaim and glory. Yet they start that way and either don't do anything or make it worse.
Especially since they can get more than enough people for their class while cutting down on the huge numbers.
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