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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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