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Notes -
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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