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Notes -
'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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