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The red tribe produces plenty of petroleum geologists, clergy are generally quite intelligent, has successfully engineered affirmative action for themselves in the legal profession despite the legal profession trying to do the exact opposite.
What you’ll notice is access to status from non-academic sources(money, religion, conservative activism). This is a consistent pattern- the red tribe does not care about status within the school system for its own sake(which is the main reward for anthropologists).
All of this just seems to me to be implicitly conceding the point. My contention, contra Hanania, is not that Red Tribers are literally stupid. It is that Red Tribers are somewhere between uninterested in and actively hostile to intellectual/cultural production (by which I mean things like scholarship or art). But they are still very much interested in those products, hence my remark that they want liberals to think conservative thoughts for them. They want (liberal) artists to create conservative-inflected art, (liberal) historians to write conservative historical narratives, etc...
I think it's correct to say that conservatives don't care about academic status and prioritize income/general social status - that's my point. Nothing wrong with that on an individual scale (I'm certainly not one to talk), but a side effect of this taken across a whole society is an extraordinarily vulgar* culture that produces little thought, little art, and can't handle critical perspectives.
*for lack of a better term. I do not mean that it is rude/inappropriate.
Who’s hostile though? My perception of most of academia is that they are not going to give an “out of the closet” conservative a position, let alone a tenure track position in a university. The field has been closed to them for decades. Under such conditions, I think great claims of “conservatives, bless their little hearts, just aren’t interested in academia,” to be equivalent to claims that blacks in the Jim Crow South just weren’t interested in attending white majority schools. The system keeping black out of those schools was legal as well as cultural, while tge system keeping out conservatives is informal, but if you’re not going to be allowed into a system, your interest in going into that system tends to fall off a cliff.
One thing about the clampdown on college protests and DEI will hopefully bring is to make the campus less openly hostile to conservatives who are open about being conservatives.
True, but given that the Dems will be back in power eventually forcing a bunch of conservatives into tenured positions in the academy might have some long term positive effects
It’s a generations long project because the liberals have long been in charge of the hiring and are looking specifically for signs or being insufficiently progressive. That’s one thing that the DEI and Land Statements and Pronouns in Signature are meant to do — weed out those who aren’t actively progressive by forcing them under threat of losing their jobs to make performative progressive statements. And until you have at least non-progressives in those hiring positions, it’s going to be really hard to get conservatives into those positions and other high powered positions.
Near term, I think it’s best to also build parallel institutions where the conservative opinion can be put out in publi.
Parallel institutions are good, but Harvard is Harvard and its reputation extends far beyond the US. Tenure can’t easily be revoked, so pressuring universities into hiring conservatives could be long term smart.
I’ve heard of red state universities doing this. Specifically I’ve heard rumors about Texas A&M and Ohio state being made to begin doing this.
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And it can’t work unless there are good tenure ready conservatives with a strong background and lots of published papers that are pushing their field forward. If old progressive universities are not going to hire conservatives, they can’t get in the door, let alone be in a position to hire conservative professors. Plus, having those conservative institutions around gives the public a fair test case. If conservative leaning universities are producing more useful research, better quality education, more capable graduates, either the old guard dies off, or they are forced to compete by producing the same results.
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By all means, try to go to art school and get elite support and patronage - some nice New York galas - as a traditional painter who wants to make Christian iconographic art. Really emphasize in your applications and piece descriptions how Christian it is. Maybe throw in some quotes like, "If your right eye causes you to stumble, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell." Make sure to REALLY tie that into current trans trends, and pornography! Man, really emphasize how bank loans are usury and a mortal sin, and how all the people working for Chase (who funded the museum wing) are going to (justly) burn for eternity. I'm sure that will go over really well over champagne and salmon bites.
I'm sure you'll have your own special exhibit in MoMA in no time at all.
There is a vast amount of conservative art, but you do not see it in your bubble. It is not on TV, it is not in the papers, it is not advertised - cities don't commission it, (taxpayer funded) nonprofits don't fund it, museums don't host it, universities don't teach it.
I think a Christian artist might get artworld support if their art was about their complex feelings toward Christianity or had some kind of critical lens, or maybe if it was by a Christian outsider or even mentally ill person and mixed in another culture or influences in novel ways. If it was primarily proselytising art, it wouldn't stand much of a chance though, especially if it was iconographic in the sense of emulating previous artists in already existing styles. Today's art world insists on newness above all. Not to say most 'tastemakers' of the 21st century aren't incredibly judgemental, they are, but they don't generally deny the incredible artistic output of christianity in centuries past, just today.
If you have got some good example of contemporary conservative Christian art that is uncelebrated, would you be willing to share? I'm genuinely interested.
They say they do, but whether they actually do is another question. And at any rate, constant newness is not a reasonable demand. Creative work always falls into regular patterns; in both the sciences and the arts, the majority of work consists in simply filling out the details of a given paradigm, rather than actually pushing at the boundaries of the paradigm itself. True innovation is hard, and at this point in human history, the possibility space of the traditional plastic arts has been explored pretty thoroughly.
A sculpture that consists of, say, a few loose pipes and concrete slabs strewn about the floor, which are alleged to represent the struggle for Palestinian liberation, is just as much of a genre piece as a representational painting of the deposition of Christ. It follows genre conventions, it shares a clear lineage with other works in the same group, etc. It's just that "abstract sculpture paired with a leftist artist statement" is a politically favored genre, whereas "representational Christian painting" is a politically disfavored genre.
I don't know if you're describing an actual or hypothetical sculpture, but yes, it does sound workmanlike from your description (although, if we're evaluating comparative newness alone, we can note that it is at least in a relatively new genre compared to a representational religious painting, and potentially expresses emotion about a breaking situation rather than depicting the motifs of an ancient faith).
I also think a lot of the artworld would agree that abstract political sculptures genuinely were a lot more exciting back when there was something innovative about them as a form. In other words I suspect artworld people often really are interested in newness and I am not convinced by your suggestion that it's a pretense. (Of course within that story, loads of art is totally boring and not innovative and exists only for reasons of business, personal ambition and to rally political causes.)
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Not off the top of my head, in regards to painting. I was just giving an example of conservative subject matter that would not fly far in contemporary art circles. You raise a good point that one of the issues is the constant drive for novelty, which I think comes at the cost of alienation from more universal experiences and values that could reach a larger audience.
I'm more familiar with Christian music. POD is an example of a Christian group that was very contemporary and found wider market success when I was younger. I like Alive and Youth of the Nation by them. Looking them up, I hadn't realized they were still going, I need to check out their recent stuff.
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Sad Puppies says hello.
You are looking at the empty buildings and barren fields and conflating it with a lack of interest, refusing to acknowledged that the bodies have already been buried and the survivors herded away elsewhere.
I'm just going to refer back to what I wrote when this came up a few years ago, since nothing has really emerged that had changed my views on the subject (tl;dr Correia and Torgersen mostly precipitated the situation they claimed to be fighting because they were upset pulp wasn't winning awards, pre-2015 Hugo winners were totally fine):
Part 1
Part 2
If we are going to assign blame to anyone on the puppy side, I think the problem was Vox Day/Theodore Beale rather than Correia and Torgersen.
Beale is a prime example of why the Red Tribe doesn't produce good cultural products. He first came to my attention for his theology blogging - heresies as interesting as his views on the equal divinity of the Holy Spirit are rare nowadays. The Selenoth books are overly wordy and ultimately I couldn't read them, but they were not written by an idiot. And he has other mid-tier accomplishments in multiple fields (music, video-game development, hardware design etc.) I am happy to call him a genius. But in order to remain relevant, he gradually shifted his blogging output from serious theology and literary criticism to standard-issue midwit Confederate apologia and ultimately to antivax and conspiracy theories. Whatever incentives he was responding to were to be less interesting and less intelligent. Last time I bothered to look into what he was doing, his main project was putting out superhero comics with a crass political message in every panel, which is as unappealing to a normie reader as the left-wing equivalent.
The only one of the Puppies who I found plausibly award-worthy was John C Wright. Correia writes technically competent schlock which plays the same role for his male readership that romance novels do for their female readership. It is valuable work and harder than it looks, and he fully deserves the money he made, but that kind of book has never been supposed to win awards.
How is this different from transgender blm lockdown posturing taking over previously cogent blogs?
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I would have to agree with this, although some more explanation would be nice.
@Skibboleth: I don't have personal experience* (yet; I suspect this'll show up when I do my MEd) but I strongly suspect that in the arts/humanities side of things, expressing conservative views/tastes in assessments will literally often get you marked down (when you aren't thrown out), which literally makes it harder to become legibly "a historian" or "an architect" as a conservative than as a progressive. If you want to see the prior ratio, you need to either enforce political neutrality in the current universities' assessments, or enforce that degrees from those universities be held to be of negligible credential value (as in, "I hired this architect because he got a Harvard degree in architecture" becomes identical in legal ramifications to "I hired this architect because he's white").
I suspect that that ratio does favour progressives, but not remotely to the current extent.
*Well, I do have personal experience that there are opportunities open to progressives and not conservatives in university, just not in the academic side - specifically, I wasn't able to become an RA in my dorm because "spread SJ propaganda" was part of the job description. Would have been nice to not have to pay rent, particularly since I was doing much of the rest of the job anyway!
I don't find this to be true except in one very particular sense: there are a subset of bigots who are also conservatives who define conservatism in terms of their own prejudices, who arrive in a space that is extremely hostile to those prejudices and find that expressing them gets them in trouble. You're not going to get marked down for saying we should lower taxes or be tougher on crime, for using nationalistic iconography, taking a pro-American stance in history class etc... If you study philosophy, there's a good chance there will be literal fascists on the curriculum. You may find yourself as a distinct minority opinion and arguing with your peers a lot, which is undeniably an unpleasant experience, but the actual landmines tend to be homophobia and racism.
Assuming all of this is entirely accurate, it seems exactly as bad a situation as the worst things that people are complaining about here. In a humanities course, someone being marked down for making arguments in favor of open homophobia and racism is utterly horrifying. It defeats the entire purpose of a humanities education to judge students' capabilities based on the conclusions they land at, rather than the arguments and reasoning they use to land at those arguments. Some professors might claim that only bad reasoning could land at those conclusions, but that, in itself, would be even more perverse, in a humanities professor being that simple- or closed-minded as to hold such a belief.
Why? No one would blame a geology teacher for marking down a student who hands in a paper whose conclusion is that the Earth is flat. Sometimes positions are known by a field to be outrageously wrong, so that any student who's let those ideas become a part of their conceptual landscape is worse than ignorant. There is no reason, prima facie, why sociology couldn't deem other positions equally deleterious.
If a geology student used all the best scientific practices and all the best available empirical evidence and all the best arguments by the standards of all the best geologists that somehow ended up with a convincing conclusion that the Earth was flat, then the geology teacher would absolutely be in the wrong for marking down the student.
In any case, questions of moral truths like "is homophobia or racism wrong" is categorically different from questions of empirical facts like "is the Earth flat," and to whatever extent academics conflate the two, they ought to be called out and actively denigrated for it. The purpose of humanities education is to teach how to properly think through these moral truths (as well as other things), not what to properly conclude about these moral truths.
A sociology class that deems certain moral truths out of bounds isn't a sociology class, it's a religious sermon. Sociology can make claims about how homophobia and racism affect society and individuals within it, and the teacher can even make the argument that these effects are bad, but once they cross the line into demanding that students conform to their own judgments of what's bad and good, they're taking on the role of preacher, not teacher. "Deleterious" and "wrong" are not synonyms.
In Thought Experiment Land, sure. But in the real world, it would be clear that the student had started from the bonkers conclusion and worked backwards, and I would want the teacher to mark him down, both to make it very clear to him that the claim is nonsense he should un-learn ASAP, and to teach him that you shouldn't assume the conclusion in the first place, let alone a crazy one.
That's a fair point. But to the extent it holds, to the extent that homophobia or racism are moral issues and therefore different magisteria from science - then students shouldn't be "arguing in favor of" them either - any more than teachers should be looking for the converse.
So when you wrote "arguments in favor of homophobia or racism" I assumed you meant answers to questions of fact where some claims are designated as racist or homophobic - "claims about how homophobia and racism affect society and individuals within it,", as you say. "Why is Europe more successful than Africa" is a valid historical question, for example, but one for which some factual answers would be deemed racist - eg "because blacks are genetically dumber and more violent than caucasians".
(You might, of course, believe there is something to that, as a question of fact. But assuming we take the opposite to be definitive, demonstrated scientific fact on par with "the Earth is round" - or, simply, assuming the history teacher believes it to be so in good faith - then it doesn't seem to be wrong on the history teacher's part to mark down an essay which takes it to be true, no matter how eloquent it is.)
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When you say you don't "find" this to be true, are you saying you're involved with this personally in some fashion?
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I think you should be more specific about the subset you have in mind.
My first thought was “Civil Rights era Southern Democrats,” a group which unapologetically grounded their racism in conservative thought. But those people are mostly dead now, and their legacy is a good bit more complicated.
If you’re accusing Bob Jones fundamentalists or scientific racists or based post-Christian vitalists of confusing prejudice for conservatism, you’ve got to do more work to establish it.
It's not a unified subset. It's a disparate collection of individuals with discriminatory beliefs which they nevertheless consider to be an integral part of their political identity, though you can point to specific groups in some cases. Religious conservatives are a big standout on the gender and sexuality front, but they're hardly exclusive. Insofar as there's a real unifying theme, it's the "facts don't care about your feelings" aesthetic that many conservatives (especially younger ones) adopt, which IME mostly ends up glossing prejudice as "realism".
To put it as plainly as I can: whenever you find right-wingers saying "I don't think I can be open about my political beliefs because I'll be ostracized", it's never about fiscal policy or foreign policy or even touchier things like immigration or criminal justice. You can think we should slash welfare or defend aggressive foreign policy or declare that Christianity is the one true religion and your left-wing peers at college may think you're an asshole (or a rube), but you're not going to be a pariah (nor is the TA going to mark you down on your essay). The sticking point is basically always about either gender/sexuality or race, and often beliefs that would be considered boundary-pushing even in conservative milieus. For example.
Russ Roberts talks about the reaction he gets when he talks about some pretty basic free market economics. I know he's told a story where he used the phrase "they edge away from you". I think it had to do with minimum wage. I may or may not have also gotten the phrase "they stare at you like you're an alien" from him, which I used here, in context of a not-even-boundary-pushing sort of take on sexuality. Perhaps the moment has passed, because the political battles have been won, but at the peak of the cultural pressure cooker, trying desperately to win the political battle, it really was the case that even the most mild doubt of the Dogmatic Position was heavily disfavored.
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This is literally just that one reddit meme that they change every time there's a new sacred cow
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Do you want some gun rights examples? Because oh boy do I have gunnie examples; shall we start with the people who did get fired for putting twenty bucks toward Rittenhouse’s defense fund?
Even for gender/sexuality, the progressive taboos are far more often dependent on matters that are not controversial, or worse are only controversial to the opposing direction. There’s fair argument against misgendering a trans school shooter, but it’s not some universal standard, and people did still lose literal careers over (liking a tweet that did) it.
This was construed as supporting a murderous racist, not just a pro-guns position.
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It is in fact often about immigration and criminal justice.
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I just had someone on an unnamed forum say that he wanted me banned (fortunately he is not a mod) for "supporting genocide" by defending Israel with respect to Gaza. So forgive me if I think you are not being accurate here.
A weirdo leftist failing to get you banned for sharing a conservative opinion seems like evidence in favor of my point.
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In my experience, I lost a huge amount of friends for my dissident opinions about policing, immigration, and COVID. My most recent girlfriend broke up with me because I disagreed with her that it wasn’t “fascist” for the Trump administration to detain children and separate immigrant families at the border. I lost a ton of friends for opposing strict COVID lockdowns and mask mandates. And of course I started losing friends as early as college because I expressed tepid opposition to the Black Lives Matter movement.
Believe me, the opinions I express in public are far more tame than the things I say here, and also I started getting anathematized in certain circles even when my worldview was far closer to the progressive mainstream than it is now.
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And Larry Correio, John Ringo, David Weber, Orson Scott Card etc remain extremely successful science fiction writers. Again, the red tribe just cares about things other than status within the academy. I'll wager their fiction is better than black lesbians in outer space or whatever wins the hugos these days. I don't read that much fiction.
The majority of your examples cut their teeth on writing novels over 30 years ago, exempting Larry Corerria, who seems to thrive on controversy and culture war, and is a relatively newcomer, putting out his first book in the 2008.
That we're discussing the current state of conservatives producing cultural content and how we got here and the writers you point to are a bunch of giants in their field nearly three decades old does not make the argument you think it does.
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How do you square this with the phenomenon of "this artist expressed rightwing opinions, we have to disavow anything he ever made"?
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If anything, I think they'd be happy with conservative artists making conservative-inflected art, but The Academy has largely destroyed the teaching of traditional forms of (visual) art. Over the last decade or so I've found a decent list of artists whose works I enjoy, but most of them have very mixed advice about "art school" specifically: it's not a great place to learn, for example, traditional painting (landscapes, formal portraits, still life) because "traditional" isn't "cool," and so you see those produce things (uncharitably: ugly schlock) like "CalArts-style" or brutalist architecture that are IMO visually unappealing.
For some reason, the (traditional) music side of the academy seems to have held onto tradition better, although even there "I went to music school. Don't go to music school. Just make music." is a surprisingly common piece of serious advice. And despite not being a huge Rand-stan, The Fountainhead feels fairly relatable here: most of the artists I'd list seem successful because they chose to make what they were themselves were passionate about, not what the zeitgeist told them to. Some of them seem to be doing reasonably well based off their social media profiles. And I really appreciate it, because it's had me take up art as a modest hobby, even if it'd never work for me as a career.
I think this has largely the same concerns as the artists: the pipelines for traditional publishing are fairly tightly controlled, and while it's possible for non-leftist fiction authors to self-publish, non-fiction has a higher expectation of review. I'm not the biggest reader of history, but my understanding is that nonfiction skews more male than other parts of literature, and I haven't seen modern book reviews of history (say, Scott's review of Hoover) take on a hugely strong left-leaning bent. But your average school history textbook is probably a left-of-center framing.
There are beautiful traditional churches with traditional art being newly built today. Somebody, presumably, is making that art. I don't know where we source it from but it is representational and new.
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That depends on what you mean by "Red Tribe" (everyone seems to have a slightly different definition).
It's not particularly hard to list right-wing intellectuals and artists. Nietzsche, Heidegger, Pound, Eliot. There was an intimate link between Italian futurism and Mussolini's fascism.
I think Yarvin's concept of the dark elves is useful here: internal traitors to the Blue Tribe who align with Red Tribe on certain key issues and provide intellectual and cultural support to the reds. If your definition of a Red Triber is a person who prioritizes "income/general social status" over intellectual development, then sure, ex hypothesi such a person will take little interest in cultural production. But you're ignoring all the dark elves who very much are in the business of thinking "conservative" thoughts, and as others in this thread have pointed out their perspective has been systematically censored in elite institutions.
I mean, Ross Douthat is not a red triber. He seems unlikely to deer hunt or listen to country music. He's clearly quite conservative, but he's a blue tribe conservative.
I think this exposes the fundamental flaw in the red tribe/blue tribe model and undermines this whole debate.
If we're defining "red tribe" (as Scott does, it's his model) solely in terms of class markers for the white working class, and dumping literally all other Americans into the other bucket... well, uh, yeah, it's going to be a tribe that values higher education less than the other bucket. Put the way you have, "the red tribe" isn't even represented by the Republican Party -- Trump is not a red triber in this sense, Josh Hawley (the Trumpiest senator) is not a red triber in this sense, Clarence Thomas is not a red triber in this sense, Alito is not a red triber in that sense, Amy Coney Barrett is not a red triber in that sense, all but very few in elected office is a red triber in that sense, Vance grew up in the red tribe but is very much not so red tribe now.
In fact, J.D. Vance is a perfect example; he grew up "red tribe" but adopted many values of the "blue tribe" as he gained social status, yet he's a fairly conservative guy who believes in God and cares about the needs of rural white people. If red tribers who adopt the beneficial aspects of the blue tribe like the pursuit of higher education, while having a religious conversion experience and supporting policies driven by patriotism, lose their "red tribe" cred... then the distinction doesn't actually cleave to anything relevant for whether conservatism or progressivism values art and scholarship more. It would mean that valuing art and scholarship makes you not a red triber, making the whole debate circular.
Conservatism, in any meaningful sense, isn't about being a member of the white working class. It's about having a commitment to conserving the values of the past that contribute to human flourishing. Often it's about believing in God.
If a devout Christian who reads his Bible every day and goes to church every Sunday and puts his hope in Jesus Christ for eternal salvation -- but also lives in a city and works in a computer science lab on a university campus -- is a member of a different tribe than his fellow parishioner who lives outside the city limits and works as a contractor, then not only these tribal markers but the Church itself means nothing. If we're going to talk about whether conservatism is intellectually vacuous, we had better get our definitions right first, just as we had better get our dogmas in a row before we start anathematizing people as formal heretics. We should probably try to understand reality before we condemn.
The near-complete alignment of the tribes with politics is a result of the culture war. The progressive long march through the institutions not only threw conservatives out of the institutions but out of Blue Tribe itself. Much of this is conversion -- your devout Christian who goes to progressive college will likely lose his faith. Some is oppression -- your devout Christian who doesn't lose his faith but remains in the progressive environment will conceal it out of self-preservation, and so be invisible. Some is reverse-conversion -- your political conservative who is driven out of Blue Tribe will adopt at least some of the tribal markers of the tribe that DOES accept his politics.
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I go deer hunting with a senior partner at a CPA firm. He plays 70s country, has a masters degree, drives a pickup truck, speaks only English but thinks learning Spanish is generally wise(this is not echoed for eg French, Japanese, etc), wants nothing to do with Europe except maybe a vacation, and watches college football in his free time.
This is red tribe, but very much not working class. Now he probably valued money over self actualization(no one dreams of becoming an accountant, let’s be real) when he was ~20, which is a red tribe value that does go a ways towards explaining the conservative under representation in academia. But it’s tribal identity markers, not class, and there may be class markers involved but they’re tangential at best.
Yes, thank you for saying this. Conservatives tend to be a lot more practical about career choice, and working at a museum just isn't the kind of thing you can make a career out of that can support a family. When I was growing up, my parents told me a big long list of careers I should not get into, including music and art.
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The Red and Blue Tribes may have rough analogs in other countries, but IMO they are strictly American (and primarily White American, though there peripheral non-white members) phenomena. As I've said before, the artistic and intellectual bankruptcy of the Red Tribe is not some universal attribute of conservatives. It's not even some atemporal quality of the Red Tribe. It seems to be something that's emerged in the past few decades.
So what is your basic definition of the Red Tribe, exactly?
More or less what what @hydroacetylene said. I'll admit that there's an element of "I know it when I see it", but I think it's important to note that it's not just (or even primarily) a proxy for rural - most Red Tribers live in suburbs/exurbs, not rural areas.
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White Southerners (including the white Southerners who settled the Mountain West after the Civil War), Appalachian hillbillies, anyone who goes to or pretends to go to a church where those groups dominate, and any non-white or white ethnic who makes a good-faith attempt to assimilate into the traditional culture of the white South or Mountain West. Serious Catholics and Mormons are generally allies of the Red Tribe, but they are not part of it.
My equivalent definition of the Blue Tribe would be New England Yankees, Quakers, pre-Ellis Island era German/Scandinavian immigrants*, descendants of the above who lost religion, and any non-white or white ethnic who makes a good-faith attempt to assimilate into the traditional culture of the Northeast - notably including Conservative/Reform/secular Jews. Unassimilated non-whites are (or were) allies of the Blue Tribe, but not part of it.
* i.e. all Mainline Protestants
Albion's Seed is the definitive book on the origins of the culture war.
Yes we are(can't speak for Mormons obviously but it probably applies). We have a lower view of evangelicals than they typically do of us, but your median Knights of Columbus family has recent experience of representation in the military, serious Catholics drink a lot but don't pot smoke(tell tale tribal marker- blue tribe loves its party drugs, red tribe has a big double standard), Catholics make a big outreach to supporting police and fire and often distrust the public school system, etc, etc.
There's a class difference between the majority of serious Catholics and your stereotypical red triber, but there's plenty of higher-class red tribers.
You are saying that Toby Keith, Steve Earle, Hank Jr, Kris Kristofferson, etc -- are/were not Red Tribe?
I'll grant there's a bit of a schism going on with older school law&order types, but modern (meaning post-1970ish) Red Tribe certainly has room for the wacky tabbacy.
We don’t expect our entertainers to be saints. The double standard is still a thing that exists, and it’s a tribal tell tale this day and age. That does not mean that everyone lives up to their own standards, they don’t. For an example with a different valence see the discussion of the male feminist sex pest a few weeks back- next to no one takes this as evidence that Neil Gaiman is not an SJer.
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'People who match the culture of white republicans' is a basic paraphrase of Scott's original definition.
What that culture is is of course not monophyletic; there's the country music crowd, the church crowd, the red dirt types(genuine connection to the rural), and that's before getting into the importance of regional and religious differences. But there's an identifiable cluster there, where a Cajun and an eastern Oregon rancher and a UAW worker and a snake-handler all would rather socialize with each of each other rather than a professor of gender studies, despite their vast differences.
Would this apply also to socializing with an academic in a field that is more neutral but still without practical applications, such as for example a professor of theoretical astrophysics? I suspect it very much would but I'm not an American so I won't outright make such a claim.
Here in Finland there is a similar contingent who see non-practical work as "useless" but it's smaller due to historical reasons (education was seen as an important factor in increasing national consciousness in the 19th century as well as a way to improve the next generation's social standing). More importantly the lack of a two party system means it never got coupled to the broader left vs right political orientation. It's easy to see the difference even in looking at who people consider to be academic compared to the discussions here on The Motte where The Motte definition of an "academic" has a large bias towards social sciences and other left dominated fields (whereas locally people would consider a professor of Electrical Engineering very much an academic).
The way a red triber uses the word ‘academic’ probably implies philosophy or something similarly self-referential, perhaps some vapidity or ivory tower tendencies. A professor of electrical engineering or astrophysics or business or history would probably be referred to as a ‘professor’ or ‘researcher’ or maybe ‘scientist’.
Edit- to address your question more directly, talking to an astrophysicist who uses layman’s terms would be considered very interesting to most red tribers. I don’t think that that necessarily translates into making friends, though.
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