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My understanding is that the blue and red tribe refer more to cultures than to a set of ideas. Of course these cultures and certain political ideas go hand in hand, but they are not necessarily the same.
To quote the original SSC article coining these terms:
This is purely speculation and gut feeling, but I suspect most people here are part of the blue tribe minority whose politics do not line up with their tribe. HBD to me sounds more like an idea for disaffected edgy blue tribers, than for red tribers to be honest. I'm not from the US so maybe my perception is completely off, but I don't have the impression that the average grill-pilled rural Trump voter knows what HBD is. The people talking about HBD on the internet and the red tribers might both be anti-immigration, but that doesn't make them from the same tribe. A white Westerner converting to Islam on paper shares a lot of beliefs with the average Arab, but he doesn't become an Arab, even if he might be a more conservative Muslim than the average Arab. A middle-class college educated urbanite might develop edgy right wing political opinions, but that doesn't make him red tribe.
I get the same impression that being deep red tribe makes me a minority here, and that nearly everyone being a blue tribe conservative contributes to a lot of the doomerposting.
You're correct, of course, but the average blue triber doesn't either; believing "most blacks are stupid and we can't fix it" would be coded as a red tribe complaint about AADOS culture. The phrase "blacks have genetically lower IQ's" would come off as a little more blue tribe, but mostly for dialect reasons. The mainstream of both thinks that IQ is not particularly hereditary; for red tribers this is usually in the form of "a culture that values hard work and learning will generate smarter people. Look at the orientals- they were dirt poor when they came here, now they're the smartest and richest people in the country" and the blue tribe in the form of "education resources dictate outcomes" or something like that.
They may believe it doesn't vary by ethnic group, but they certainly believe it's hereditary in the sense that they expect smart parents to result in smart kids and that the opposite is true as well. Many may have conflicting views in this area, believing this on the micro-level while denying larger-scale consequences.
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Yeah. The tribes are not a particularly well-defined thing anyhow, but from what I've understood, it would be a mix of various scales like:
Blue vs Red Urban vs Rural Secular vs Religious Academic vs practical job "Anywhere" vs "Somewhere" Post-sexual-revolution mores vs. pre-sexual-revolution mores
Of course you could continue this list quite a bit (views feminism positively or negatively, dietary questions, attitudes towards military service etc.) but those would probably be the most important ones.
Insofar as the rationalist community goes, I daresay most would be firmly urban, secular, academic "anywhere" and have post-sexual-revolution mores, ie. blue tribe, whatever their views on politics are. Not everyone, of course. The whole "gray tribe" thing, as has been said repeatedly, is less a tribe and more of a way for people who often are super-duper blue tribe, so blue that even most blues blanch, to disattach themselves from whatever "blue" political views and qualities they feel uncomfortable with - perhaps aided by the very process of tribal detachment that the extremeness of their "blueness" causes.
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Unfortunately, these days people often just use "red tribe" to mean Republican and "blue tribe" to mean Democrat, even though thre are loads of blue tribe Republicans (even a lot of the Republican leadership would feel more comfortable at a dinner party with professors in Rhode Island than at a barbecue with plumbers in Texas) and red tribe Democrats (someone like Jim Cornette is a classic example, albeit imperfect since he's an atheist).
Reality is indeed unfortunate.
Tribal splits are polarizing. Polarization is a process; the system's state changes over time, in this case with the divide between the tribes growing more and more stark as people drift toward one of the two poles. And in fact, within a year or two of that article, a considerable number of prominant republicans endorsed the democratic presidential candidate over the candidate of their own party. "Blue Tribe" did, in fact, mean "Democrat", even for purported Republicans.
Two or three times a month, people reference the part of the article where Scott states that Blue Tribe and Red Tribe aren't equivalent to Democrat and Republican. But if tribal identity grows more important to people over time, then we should expect to see the correlation between blue:Democrat and red:Republican to increase over time, not stay the same. And this is, in fact, what we've seen. The tribes and parties are more closely correlated than they were when the essay was written, and they will be more closely correlated still in the future as the culture war continues to escalate.
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