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I did want to become a librarian. It wasn't open to me due to lack of money and other reasons. Today, I think if I did train as a librarian (and depending what country you are in), there might or might not be the push to be progressive, but I think it's very likely that the education will be on the liberal side, and to get your qualification you will have to (1) genuinely agree and be converted to The Right Side Of History (2) pretend to agree to pass and hide your real opinions (3) openly disagree and be failed by your professors.
(1) means changing to the Blue Tribe side so you are no longer counted as Red Tribe (so people like you can then go on to sneer about the ignorant Reds because look, all the educated people are Blues in thought and behaviour). (2) means always have to be 'just following orders' or else your career is over, which again hobbles the chance for expression of conservative values. And (3) of course means you never get to be a librarian or museum curator or anthropologist, which again enables the sneers about "see how dumb and arrogantly ignorant the Reds are?"
It's a lot harder to switch than this though. If you grew up rurally with a family with a pick up truck watching NASCAR then you are almost certainly Red Tribe and will remain so even if you change political views. Becoming Blue Tribe would mean rewriting not just your political views (there are after all Red Tribe Democrats and Blue Tribe Republicans) but also your preferences for food and entertainment and dress. And not just at the surface level (that would just be "passing") but at the level where you actually preferred football ("soccer") to NASCAR and a hybrid compact to a truck and avocado toast to a steak and so on and so forth.
Red Tribe and Blue Tribe are cultural groups that overlap heavily with political groups but the Tribal markers remain, absent significant effort to remove them.
I've tried to get Violet Tribe (as the equivalent to Grey Tribe) adopted for that exact thing - grew up Red, had or adopted Blue tastes.
In fact I do have Blue Tribe preferences in (some) food and dress and (much more) entertainment. But I don't like the very progressive "we must have Representation which means Black Romans in Britain" style attitudes, so I guess I remain Red in some things (though since I'm not American, NASCAR doesn't apply to me. But plenty of liberals in my own country like to sneer at the bogtrotters, so the attitudes remain recognisable and relatable).
Is Vance, for example, Red or Blue? He seems more Violet to me, but of course the Blues very much want him to be a redneck (literally). Same with Ross Douthat and some others. That is what is meant to be the alchemy of higher education - it takes the base material of the Red young adult and refines it in the crucible so that the end product is flawlessly Blue and the dross of the old attitudes have been purged away. And if you come out the other end Blue to the core, then of course you no longer count as a Red, and hence "Reds don't care about education or learning" is propagated.
But it was my rural and working class family which always went "education is no burden". Yes, often it was because of the same push to go to college because "college educated earn more" and not for disinterested love of learning, but in general they are ambitious for their children to do better than they did, and not have to engage in hard manual labour. But if you can be a successful small businessman without going to college, or at least not for a degree in Queer Gender Glaciers, then is that "not interested in education"?
I think there are a lot of Blues also not interested in education qua education, but more "now we can set out to decolonise geology" and such agendas.
Right, one of the issues with keeping the Red Tribe going is they are (or were) supporters of their kids going to college. I've mentioned before how miners and steel workers in small town America don't necessarily want their kids to do those jobs because they know how dangerous and back breaking they can be. Now I think they're more interested in the perceived benefits of getting a degree (better, easier, less body destroying jobs) but they are to sn extent the architect of their own destruction, by buying into that part of the American dream. If you send your kids off to college in bigger towns and cities, some of them will get assimilated, and stay and some will choose to stay for those better jobs. So even before neoliberalism crushed the steel and mining sectors, they were on a slow steady road to decline.
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Yes, unfortunately Scott’s original anthropological definition has gotten filed off over the years and it’s just used as a shorthand for Republican and Democrat. If we’re using the term correctly, almost everyone on this board is Blue Tribe, even the most right wing among us.
Yeah, and it is a useful distinction, even if its not a perfect set of descriptors. Which is why I often try and oush back towards Scott's formulation. Even if that is a losing battle.
And there's nothing wrong with being a Blue Tribe conservative, but in general that conservatism is not exactky like Red Tribe conservatism so we're missing a pretty important part of America's "voice".
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