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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   29231 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 19, 2024

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WHY is there a culture war?

I think most people around here accept the existence of a red tribe and a blue tribe, and accept that most of what happens in western society and politics, from George Floyd to Taylor Swift, follows from those two tribes trying to weaponize events and ideas in order to dunk on their enemies. As a description of the world, our culture war theory works very well. But as an explanation, maybe not. Yes, yes, there are these two tribes, but WHY do these tribes hate each so much? It seems obvious to me that the red tribe is currently on the defensive, and so fights on out of a spirit of plucky individualism/puerile defiance (you choose). They could just stop, but that would amount to a capitulation. Rightly or wrongly, the red tribe won't accept that, so they continue they culture war.

But the blue tribe's motivation is harder for me to explain to myself. Why do they hate the red tribe so much? One could point back to Trump and say "Look at all the damage the red tribe did!" but Trump himself seems to have been the red tribe lashing out at blue tribe condescension/scorn. Do they just want revenge for the 80s? The 50s? In I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup, the suggestion is that the tribes are too similar, and so therefore hatred is somehow inevitable. He compares the situation to Germans hating Jews, or Hutus hating Tutsis, but in both of those cases, the party on the offensive accused the other party of a pretty specific set of misdeeds. Those accusations may have been false, but they mobilized a lot of hatred. It appears that the Blue Tribe today does not accuse the red tribe of anything specific at all (barring some attempts that certainly haven't had the hoped-for effect, like mass Residential school graves or Jan 6). One might point back to the legacy of slavery or something, but that is largely absent from other Western histories, and the tribes have sorted themselves out the same way, with even more hostility, as in Canada, where the Blue hatred for Red (using the american color scheme for consistency) takes the form of quite overt punching-down.

So: 1)Is it naive to think that the red tribe hates the blue tribe defensively? 2)If it is naive, why does the red tribe hate the blue tribe? 3) Why does the blue tribe hate the red tribe?

Why is there a culture war?

Because we're still operating within the Reagan/Thatcher/Washington Consensus/End of History/Fukuyama paradigm, and we're well past due for at least the outline of a new paradigm but we can't seem to come up with one, and we're trapped in it. There's a theory among historians and political scientists that the American political paradigm shifts whenever a president wins re-election and then gets their chosen successor elected after them. Across the twentieth century we had Teddy, to FDR, to Reagan. And we're stuck on Reagan. Clinton and Obama and Biden have all operated within that Reagan paradigm, within the Washington Consensus. Obama himself said in a debate:

I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that, you know, Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. I think they felt like with all the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s and government had grown and grown, but there wasn’t much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating. I think people, he just tapped into what people were already feeling, which was we want clarity, we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing.

Arguably, Trump did not in some ways, but in other ways he tacked back in that direction from the moderate changes of Obama.

Reagan made a compromise: corporate capitalist economic structure, managed social change. Reagan did not put any serious effort into rolling back racial integration, or turning the tide on the sexual revolution. In exchange for accepting Capitalism, social outliers got grudging and slow but growing acceptance. The right wing defeated Communism, at home and abroad, but accepted the left's social gains to 1980, and further managed change in the future. As much as gay activists might like to whine about AIDs or Black radicals might like to talk about crime bills and crack, Reagan's legacy was leaving any idea of a right-wing built around segregation behind, and any idea of rolling back the sexual revolution was DOA after we elected Reagan.

The culture war becomes the only realm of politics in that paradigm. The old saw about having a Pro Life Corporate Party and a Pro Choice Corporate Party. There's no serious effort to overthrow capitalism, only to reward Red or Blue corporate groups, or to alter the degree to which the less productive are buoyed. Communists are no more relevant than segregationists in today's American politics, a freak show fringe. The parties, and the tribes, are optimized to fight over the frontier, not to strike deep behind enemy lines. Hyper-optimizing for the degree of change.

1)Is it naive to think that the red tribe hates the blue tribe defensively?

Yes. It's naive and self-serving. No one hates anyone defensively. The whole idea is silly. Defense vs. offense is just a matter of where you set the date. Ukraine says it is in a defensive war because it sets the date at 2014, Russia says it is in a defensive war because it sets the date earlier, and so on and so forth. Same anywhere. Rome conquered the world in self defense, Hitler framed his wars up to Barbarosa as essentially defensive, redressing German oppression after Versailles.

2)If it is naive, why does the red tribe hate the blue tribe?

A variety of reasons. Ressentiment, conservatism, fear, will-to-power. There is no real desire for secession at this point, the winner of the culture war seeks to impose their will from sea to shining sea.

  1. Why does the blue tribe hate the red tribe?

Virtually no Blue Triber perceives themselves as having been born into a Blue Tribe world. They perceive themselves as born into a red tribe world and having to fight their way out of it.

Take gay people as our principal example: Gays aren't born to gays, they are born to straight parents, until recently in a largely straight world. They have to fight their way out, find themselves, find acceptance, gain rights, etc.

One possible answer is the Bryan Caplan answer: the left hates markets, and the right hates the left. See Bryan for further exposition.

Another possible answer is the William Riker answer, what he calls "herestetics". The idea is that because the population will always have a distribution of preferences over possibilities, any voting mechanism will be subject to strategizing, changing the order/method by which things are considered, raising novel concerns that you think can split what would otherwise be unified opposition to your own preferences, etc. This is now done on an industrial scale, and the importance of national politics (given a strong federal government) raises the stakes significantly. Sprinkle in a little FPTP and negativity bias, and maybe that's just the fundamental reason for the culture war.

One thing I would note that would seem to support Riker's ideas, in my mind, is that when I watched Ken Burns' documentary on prohibition, I was amazed by just how poorly the political divide at that time mapped on to the divide today. Maybe someone could have gone through issue by issue and explained how I was misunderstanding, and that the same fundamental explanatory principle harmonizes them, but it really makes me think that it's all herestetics and path dependence; one group of folks try to bring up and really focus on Issue X, because they think it'll get them over whatever hump, then another group of folks tries to crack that coalition by coming up with Issue Y, and eventually lines start to get drawn.

One thing I would suggest/request for how to do a better job of getting to the real answer would be to survey across time and across the world. Is there anywhere where there ISN'T a culture war? Can we get a measure of, "In this area, the level of culture war is like a 0.3, but in this other area, it's like a 0.8"? Then, is there anywhere that is persistently low?

The question of who is the aggressor in the culture war comes up here every once in a while. As every other reply seems to be certain that the Blue Tribe is the aggressor against the Red Tribe, I feel like I should point out that the Blue Tribe believes the opposite. From the Blue Tribe point of view, they want equality and rights for everyone regardless of identity, and they believe that's the default if only the Red Tribe would stop discriminating.

If the definition of discrimination hadn’t shifted from “treating people as members of a race” to “treating people as if they’re not members of a race”, we’d be there for 90%+ of red tribe.

  1. Is it naive to think that the red tribe hates the blue tribe defensively?

Not really; despite protestations, even the blues' language betrays that they know they're the aggressors -- they call the reds "reactionaries", and in order for there to be a re-action, there must be a principal action.

  1. Why does the blue tribe hate the red tribe?

Because they stand in the way of them amassing power for themselves at the cost of primarily red demographics. Blue tribe is a racial spoils system, it's minorities exploiting white guilt to grab as much unearned advantage for themselves as they can; it's women flying the flag of feminism to advantage themselves and disadvantage men. Anyone professing an interest in "fairness" and "justice" is either doing so cynically to cover for their own grasping hands, or naively having never examined the actual motivations of their peers or effects of their ideology.

Blue tribe ideology is the ideology of singling out one group, white straight men, and agreeing amongst themselves to appropriate and steal everything possible from that group and divide it amongst themselves. Everything that comes after that is post-hoc justification as to why not only is this necessary, but a good thing -- but the fact remains, the base desire is simple looting for self-enrichment.

The culture war exists for the same reason all war exists; person A wants what person B has, and has decided to take it via force.

But the blue tribe's motivation is harder for me to explain to myself. Why do they hate the red tribe so much?

My own theory is best summarized by a tag I often use on Tumblr: "Puritans gonna Puritan." See Albion's Seed and Yarvin's days as Moldbug.

In his posthumously-published The Collapse of American Criminal Justice, William J. Stuntz devotes an entire chapter (chapter 6, "A Culture War and Its Aftermath) to an earlier culture war waged "[b]etween the late 1870s and 1933," essentially by Puritan-descended New England elites, against various "vices." The most famous being alcohol — the one area where they failed — but also Mormon polygamy; lotteries and gambling; prostitution and "white slave trafficking" (see the Mann Act, and the original name thereof); Mormon polygamy; and "obscene materials" (including pamphlets on birth control techniques; see the Comstock laws).

And as a different author (I don't remember which) noted, these moral crusades began pretty much as soon as the spread of the telegraph became possible for teetotal New England Puritans to read in their newspapers about how Borderers and Cavaliers down South or out West lived. Because those people were Doing Wrong, and thus had to be made to behave right.

Mencken defined "Puritanism" as "the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy," but a better definition might be "haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be doing wrong." You are your brother's keeper (after all, remember the origin and context of that phrase). "Let not any one pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part, and forms no opinion. Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing." "An injustice anywhere is an injustice everywhere." And so on.

A friend of mine once told me, years ago, about how a coworker of his came in one Monday morning teary-eyed and demanding a meeting so that the business could decide what they were going to do, collectively, to help address the plight of the Rohingya. A week ago, this woman had never heard of them, and probably wouldn't have been able to locate Myanmar on a map. But she saw a news report about them, and that was enough for her to feel the burning need not only to "do something" herself, but to recruit everyone else she knows to do the same. It's something I see all the time online "you don't want to intervene in [bad thing X]? Then you obviously approve of [X]!" Don't want to send more into Ukraine? Then you must think the Russian invasion was 100% justified, you Putin boot-licker!

There is a certain kind of person for whom moral disapproval and the drive to intervene are one and the same thing, inseparable. To them, a lack of a burning need to stop a thing is proof that you don't actually disapprove of it. It's the classic stereotype of the D&D Paladin played badly: "see evil, smite evil." They are constitutionally incapable of shrugging and saying "none of my business." And the Blue Tribe is full of them.

Consider every missionary of an evangelizing, expansionist faith who has set out to convert the heathen — by fire and sword if necessary — because it's their duty, it's the right thing to do, and it's for the heathen's own good. If you have the One True Faith, the true set of Universal Human Rights, the Objectively Correct Morality, then you have a duty to spread and enforce it everywhere you can.

Why fight the Red Tribe? Because if you don't, you are complicit in every wrong they do. If you let the Red Tribe keep being transphobic rather than try to stop them, then the blood of every trans kid in a Red Tribe area who commits suicide is on your hands. Like Kendi says, you are either actively anti-racist, or you are racist. It's one or the other. You are either fighting evil, or you are evil.

Why does the Blue Tribe hate the Red Tribe? Because it's in their nature to hate anyone who fails to share their values. Because this need to be a moral busybody, a crusader, a Social Justice Warrior, is a core characteristic of the Tribe, woven into their culture (and probably also a non-trivial amount of genetic predisposition).

Why does the Blue Tribe continually attack the Red Tribe, trying to force them to convert, or otherwise eliminate the "Red culture"? Because they're fundamentally incapable of not doing so. They can't stop themselves, and thus they will never stop.

That's my view, at least, for whatever it's worth.

What escapes me about all this: where does the moral certainty of the progressive "Modern Puritan" come from/what's it grounded in? What faith are they even evangelizing? To recall a recent topic around here, what's their answer to Nietzsche?

Most charitably we could credit them with a form of liberal humanism -- "we believe in self-actualization, and in the righteousness of removing all the oppressive obstacles to the self-actualization of others". But that seems like weak gruel for the Puritan soul. How to make an orthodoxy of human freedom? How do fanatics whip themselves into frenzies of 'you do you'? Isn't it paradoxical, even more paradoxical than a good religion needs to be?

Not to get all TLP here, but I think we can see the core progressive aesthetic as a fetishization of the self-actualizing process, a kind of social BDSM. The process is understandably more easily fetishized when it manifests in a YA novel trope of a special individual's picturesque struggle against the constraints of societal expectations than when it manifests in a more opaque internal process of self-cultivation. We're seeing now that it's also possible to fetishize an individual's righteous struggle for freedom against the constraints of personal biological reality.

It's the visible struggle against outward restraint that arouses the moral energy, and which draws focus away from the oppressed individual's goal in the struggle. The actual human victim's personal hopes and dreams -- tawdry or outright distasteful as they might be if laid out for sober scrutiny -- can be set aside during the ecstatic spectacle of liberation. But then, the goal achieved, the ropes untied, the scene completed, the post-nut clarity setting in, the unsettling condition of being reasserts after the spasm of vicarious becoming. What will the liberated do now with liberty (ever so exquisitely attained)? Do we really want to know? What, indeed, will we do with ours?

The answer, of course, is clear. Find a new character who can reenact the performance. The emptiness of freedom compels the search for fresh veins of righteous struggle. Better hope oppression is a renewable resource, or sooner or later we'll all have to stand around looking at each other's naked flabby souls in the cold light of full luxury automated gay space communism.

The answer, of course, is clear. Find a new character who can reenact the performance. The emptiness of freedom compels the search for fresh veins of righteous struggle

Of course, the best way to make your "righteous struggle" eternal is to make it against reality itself. Oppression is indeed a renewable resource when you're being "oppressed" by the very laws of physics themselves.

My theory is that the modern culture war in the US stems from gay marriage. Basically, gay marriage did not win democratically in the US, it was imposed from above. Therefore blue tribe is deeply insecure in their victory. And they have responded by trying to crush any and all dissent.

It would have been healthier if blue tribe had to win gay marriage the old-fashioned way, through the formal constitutional amendment process. Win referendums state-by-state. It would have taken longer, but having your fellow citizens vote with you gives confidence in the result, that it's unlikely to be taken from you.

Perhaps the loss in the California referendum spooked blue tribe, and made them think the amendment path was impossible. Personally I do think Americans would have eventually voted for gay marriage. "The pursuit of happiness" is deeply entrenched in the American soul.

A couple analogous situations. Women's suffrage was rejected by the Supreme Court. So it had to be done via amendment. But doing so made it utterly accepted.

Canada passed gay marriage with two free votes in Parliament. One under a Liberal government and one under the subsequent Conservative government. Both votes passed, and thus gay marriage has iron-clad legitimacy in Canada. This is how the process is supposed to work, what Parliament is for.

You’re thinking about this the wrong way.

The battle over gay marriage was won so fast both legally and popularly that progressives think they can repeat that with say trans issues.

I don’t think conservatives think they have a chance of ever reversing gay marriage. Best they can do is fight to have the freedom to not bake cakes for it.

The battle over gay marriage was won so fast both legally and popularly that progressives think they can repeat that with say trans issues.

Moreover, they did so by just lying about what is known about reality, enforcing it through pure social power, then freely admitting that they totally lied. There have been, and there will be, zero consequences for this lying, so ISTM that they feel emboldened to repeat the same tactic on any issue of choice.

Leaving aside the whole issue of government involvement in the institution of marriage and the court deciding things, the popularity battle was not won by lying.

I can grant your claims of some lying, but the biggest factor is that what the gays wanted was not that much of an ask, overall. It was about social acceptance, without too much of a real burden. The exceptions, of course, revolve around the trade offs with religious rights, because freedom of association and freedom from association are murky unresolvable problems.

This is not the case with trans issues. There are significant health concerns, as well as the major biological differences between men and women being pretttty difficult to overcome. It’s asymmetric of course; almost all the Culture Warring is over MtF issues.

the biggest factor is that what the gays wanted was not that much of an ask, overall

In comparison to what? There is a reason that the lies were focused on making it, "...compared to having to 'live a lie' and betray your very identity that is as core to your being as your DNA, and as a result, never ever have the chance to live a happy and satisfying life." If you lie enough to make the alternative YUGE, then you can make it sound like what you're wanting is not that much of an ask. It's baked in to your thinking that it's not that much of an ask, and you probably can't extricate it from your mind to look at it any other way.

It’s just literally not much of an ask in concrete terms, relative to say implementing the ADA, or the Civil Rights Act(s), or the various complexities of trans issues.

The gay people I know personally are quite gay, and disproportionately the type who risked/suffered a great deal personally to live as such. They weren’t lying about their reality. Some countries still execute gays. Hell of a preference to satisfy.

I’ve seen a number of instances where religious gay men tried to make a heterosexual marriage work and it didn’t pan out. The “genderqueer/fluid” crowd is a different beast, as is the whole thing with bisexuals, but most of that has emerged in more recent times and among the youths, after the popular perception tide had turned.

Graduating high school in 2006 is utterly different than in 2016 with respect to the gays. The people that can’t remember 9/11 also can’t really remember a lack of societal acceptance of gays. Even if the courts had not ruled in favor of gay marriage when they did, the cultural change was already a foregone conclusion.

Graduating high school in 2006 is utterly different than in 2016 with respect to the gays. The people that can’t remember 9/11 also can’t really remember a lack of societal acceptance of gays. Even if the courts had not ruled in favor of gay marriage when they did, the cultural change was already a foregone conclusion.

I don't know that this happens without the lies, though. That NYT article said that it was "critical" to tell people these lies so that they could effect a cultural change. Again, I think you're so swimming in the result that you really just can't fathom how important it was for the culture to change. How many people felt just utterly bullied into changing their perspective, because they felt they couldn't say anything in response to, "The Science says!" They had to retreat to, "Well, I might not personally like it, but if that's who they are," or some people even said, "...if that's who god made them to be, then..."

Graduating in 2016 meant being most exposed to peak propaganda on precisely this issue. Literally 2015 was Obergefell, when the APA told SCOTUS that a bloody opinion poll settled the science on the issue. The lies were literally more like the water they were swimming through than at any other time.

Frankly, this is just reinforcing my original point. They were sooooo successful with pushing these lies to effect cultural and legal change that you can't even see how important it was. It's no wonder they think they can just boldly do it again on any issue they please. You might personally see through it the next time, but there will be a train of people who graduated in 2026 instead of 2016 or 2006 who will be right there to say, "But you just don't understand that there was a cultural change," and completely not grokking how that cultural change happened.

To put a finer point on it, you have the causation backwards.

Even if I grant you all the lies, the lies happened because there was already critical mass where it was important. The “science lies” were a prop, not a significant load-bearing element of the cultural change machine. Now the Hollywood propaganda was load-bearing I think, but the gays had already long conquered the arts so what can you do.

I was raised in a very religious environment and served under DADT. I personally made the transition to support gay rights, and witnessed that in many others, including the devout. “The science” was an afterthought compared to knowing gay people. (I think I made the shift before actuality personally knowing a real-life homosexual, due to reading a prominent gay intellectual for several years as a teenager.)

The biggest factor for most people was the personal relations bit. Back then, being gay was certainly not a fun preference to indulge if you were from a background like mine or wished to serve in the military.

The same playbook won’t work nearly so well on trans issues because of the complications I already described, as we are witnessing.

I’m telling you that I lived through that transition and the lies you allege were just not a significant factor.

It’s not like the Red Tribe is convinced by “well if science says so”, and the Blue Tribe accepting it was a foregone conclusion, science or not. What gives this issue a strong majority is similar to the case of abortion: independents and a decent chunk of right-leaning people support the other side.

More comments

Why is there a culture war? Because the study and practice of politics is professional, and the culture war creates cheap single-issue voters. Getting cheap votes on auto-lock means that they can spend their resources on their own interests and the interests of important constituents such as the median swing voter. Politicians have gone a long way to ensure that internal party processes are often the only way for them to actually be unseated from their positions, so it vests power within the party infrastructure itself and takes away power from the people they are meant to represent.

Since 2020, I've been lurking Japanese websites regularly. Easily the biggest contrast between the English and Japanese net is the total lack of any real CW or political energy over there. Japanese people hardly vote, they don't follow politics, and if Marx is brought up they'll discuss him calmly from a historical/economic perspective rather than an ideological one. There's a palpable sense that Japanese are somehow immune to the Culture War -- that it's just fundamentally never going to happen, barring a World War II-style shakeup, and even then I seriously doubt it.

So why are they immune to the CW? The keyword is society. Japanese people (and other Asians) have a fundamentally different relationship with their society compared to Westerners. Over there, "society" is basically a sprawling, abstract, ephemeral organism that's almost like a father figure. You may not always like his authority, you definitely don't understand him, but if you listen to his rules and obey his commands, you will probably be happy. You'll be safe, you'll have clean streets, a wife, a career, expendable income, medical care, good food! Society is -extremely- stable, so virtually all risk is removed. Trust in society, and you'll be happy. Disrespect society, and you'll be shamed on national TV.

Western society -- especially America -- is the opposite. As authority is stripped away from the social body and granted to the individual, society loses its ability to fix norms and values, and so every individual is left to determine his own truth rather than inheriting some default opinion from above. The more atomized and individualist a society is, the smaller the corpus of collective knowledge/belief gets, and the more pressure is placed on each person to find an answer themselves. This is why even in Scandinavia, CW potential is much lower because they're collectivists, despite being very developed, terminally online, and fluent in English. For CW to become truly big in Scandinavia, their collectivist culture would have to decay.

I don't really think the average person wants a Culture War. They just have this void in their lives -- no social organism they can feel proud contributing to, no God that brings purpose to their life, and 2008 butchered any remaining Y2K optimism with an axe. Seems natural that mass political utopianism is the move.

My understanding is that Japan had a highly polarizing culture war in the 1950s, with street violence and riots, in which right-wing nationalist parties and organizations duked it out with communists, Weimar-style. This of course boiled over into the assassination of socialist political candidate Inejirō Asanuma by a hardcore ultra-nationalist on live television.

While I think there’s something real that you’re pointing to - and though I’ve never been to Japan (although that will change this year!) my naïve outsider’s impression jibes with what you’re saying. Knowing that Japan was roiled by bitter ideological civil conflict so recently, though, is enough to make me deeply skeptical of the claim that its current cultural/political harmony is the result of some deep primordial aspect of Eastern communitarianism, as opposed to Western individualism/idealism. (See also: the entire history of China.)

Sure it happened. What country would this not happen in, when the entire foundation of their world view is rocked? When you go from dominating your half of the planet, and viewing your emperor as a literal god, to becoming an economic vassal state of foreign powers and everything you believed in was violently flushed down the toilet? I can't imagine any scenario or any culture where this goes smoothly.

The fact it only took 25 years for all conflict to die off is amazing. There's no residual fighting, no scars left over from the transition, no one really cares about American military bases or the treaty or communism anymore. It didn't involve some enormous deal-with-the-devil style compromise cough Korea cough to lift them back up. They had the perfect opportunity to go apeshit and tear up the country for their beliefs, but it simply didn't happen. When Mishima committed suicide in 1970, he was laughed at for his extremism like he was Chris-chan. Bear in mind, this man was a teenager when Kamikaze pilots were killing themselves for the emperor. His extremism is nothing like a Civil War LARPer trying to revive the confederacy -- it's like a guy born in Alabama in 1845, waxing poetic about the Antebellum era, and getting laughed out of the room by Reconstruction-era southerners. Japan's entire world view collapsed and they moved on like it was no big deal. 25 years is amazing.

@Hoffmeister25 I belive you're correct about the post-war riots.

https://media.gettyimages.com/id/1187711152/ja/%E3%82%B9%E3%83%88%E3%83%83%E3%82%AF%E3%83%95%E3%82%A9%E3%83%88/high-angle-shot-of-a-crowd-of-labor-union-protestors-who-are-gathered-on-an-urban-playing.jpg?s=1024x1024&w=gi&k=20&c=p28vxdNNaeQ9m1WAvwUzAH0uSn90dj_6dILjbKARG1w=

https://www.gettyimages.co.jp/detail/ニュース写真/tokyo-japan-left-wing-japanese-trade-union-members-in-tokyo-are-ニュース写真/515935648

Japan is technically a democracy but practically it's a one-party state. The same party (Liberal Democrats) has been in power for most of the last 70 years; it has a cosy consensus with the news sites and bribes a lot of demographics pretty openly. For example, the recent scandal where the party turned out to have been cooperating with the Moonie cult (Unification Church) in exchange for the cult ordering its members to vote Liberal Democrat. Or the massive amounts of money that are funded to unnecessary building works to prop up local labour. People don't see any point talking about politics because the situation is mostly comfortable and there's no prospect of change.

Don't let the party label fool you. In Asia, democratic parties are much less of 'political parties' in the American or especially European sense, roughly fixed coalitions with a breadth of ideological representation, and far more personality-based coalitions of factions. You don't support the Party, as is the European norm, or even necessarily the Person of a specific geographic area as is the American practice, you support the political faction, which can be substantially more dynamic than in Europe as factions even within the same party maneuver.

In Japan in particular, the Liberal Democratic Party factions are basically parties-within-a-party, such that 'the Liberal Democratic Party' is just the current coalition government of internal LDP factions, whose breadth and diversity can marginalize, co-opt, or subsume parties outside of The Party. If you want a more pro-China Japanese government, you don't need (or want) to start a pro-China party for people to vote for- you're better off just pumping up the current more-pro-China factions so that their factional strength influences the party's internal coalitions and maneuverings. Voting directly affects these, as LDP candidates can run against eachother as much as opposition parties- meaning that instead of a 'here is your only possible candidate from the one-party', you can have as many LDP candidates as opposition candidates running in a slate. Nominally they may be from the same party, but in effect they are each from distinct factions or faction-alliances, meaning that the victory of 'the party' is not synonymous with the status quo.

Japan's Liberal Democratic Party is 'one-party' in the same sense that the American 'bipartisan consensus' is 'one party'. There have been many people who feel there's no point in voting because there's no prospect of change and that all the candidates are the same, but they'd be just as wrong in either country.

The Japanese electoral system was changed in 1994 to a mixture of FPTP and list-based PR so that same-party candidates no longer compete directly for popular votes. This was supposed to encourage anti-LDP leadership politicians to join opposition parties rather than anti-leadership factions within the LDP. I don't know why it didn't work.

The single biggest factor I've heard/been convinced by is that the 1994 reforms didn't go far enough in providing public funding for the operations of the politicians. Faction support is financial not only critical in funding for the election phase (what US political parties serve as), but in the daily operations of the candidate and their staff to, well, work. What the government provides as an operating allowance is often insufficient, and so a faction provides the function for staff and systems and such.

In short, it's a power of the purse issue.

I see, so basically you’re saying that the primaries are where the magic happens?

The UK Tory party for controlling candidate selection with a tight fist, so I guess I’m not really used to this perspective. In theory paid-up party members get a say but not really in practice.

It's not a primary issue per see, because Japan isn't First Past the Post, and so it's not solely one candidate per geographic area. Additionally, the Party isn't so unified to have total control of candidate lists (hence the factions), nor does it control the money to candidates (which is the factions key leverage/reason to align with a faction).

The Japanese system post 1994 reforms is a mix some seats being elected via plurality voting (as in, the most votes even if not a majority), and a party-list proportional voting across 11 regional blocks (voting for the party gives the party the proportion of seats on hand, but the party selects the candidates). The proportional aspect is what favors the LDP as a party, while the plurality system is what favors the factions.

The plurality seats in various regions favor the factions because this is what lets a faction have key relationships with key local players (and donors) to the point that they can be the biggest individual party/faction in an area. Key donors / electoral influencers can enable a faction to win a seat in an area, even if not a majority coalition, and these faction-candidates are thus the influence the party as a whole needs to court/convince the faction to support the government. This is part of the post-1994 reforms dynamic reverted back to LDP dominance, because LDP/former-LDP types already had the key relationships/economic relationships to win pluralities where a FPP system would have required more comprehensive majority coalitions.

The proportional representation party-list is why it's better to be a dissident-faction within the party rather than an opposition party. Part of the political game is the push/pull/negotiation of how much of the LDP's list is aligned with your faction (or, alternatively, who you think might join your faction after being elected). As long as LDP remains dominant, it's better to negotiate/play for a share of the LDP's share than to try and fight for a share outside of the LDP. Naturally, this is a self-reinforcing cycle.

One of the key tools/roles the factions play in this, which is distinct from most other modern democracies post-election phase, is the role of providing financial support for government operations. The public funding allowance provided by the Japanese government to politicians is reportedly far less than what those in the US or European electoral systems expect. This makes party money critical not only for elections (as is the expectation for the US), but also daily operations post election for things like staff and systems to, well, do the job. Except that in the Japanese political context, the critical money isn't necessarily coming from 'the Party'- the LDP as a whole- but also 'the Faction'- the patrons (political and business relationships and donors). You, as a candidate, need someone's patronage if you intend to do things / be influential- or provide patronage yourself- and who you align with can be ideological or mercurial.

This is why the intra-LDP politics can be so dynamic, even as inter-party politics just seem like a LDP monolith. Factions that gain or lose major patronage streams- such as the changing business climate making new winners/losers- may gain or lose the ability to support / attract as many candidates. Personality conflicts between a faction's key leaders may drive off people who were only there for the monetary support, while a particularly charismatic person may be able to bridge ideological divides and create a new power center. Factions are ideology + money, in a framework where it's often still better to be within the LDP than outside it.

As a consequence, though, the LDP/factions lack the sort of party control mechanisms that developed in the US/Europe for maintaining party discipline and control. There isn't the same equivalent of the UK's Leader-control over the party list, which can be used to de-select dissident party members who oppose the leader like. Because plurality-seats, there can be / are 'independent' and politically critical geographically-tied political power centers that tend to be wiped away by pure proportional systems, which weakens national-level party control to enable lower level actors (and factions). And because money comes from factions, not just the national party, there isn't the sort of national party control (by way of controlling funding) that empowers the more centralized US party setups. All of these- plus other cultural/social dynamics- prevent the LDP's current leader from having the sort of ability to discipline the party as a whole that is normal for democratic party-based-systems, or for non-democratic party-states.

While it's not the normally desired way for a national system, in many respects the LDP is it's own political eco-system, within the broader Japanese national eco-system.

Thank you for the very interesting and detailed reply.

You are quite welcome.

People switch from ‘agree to disagree’ to fury when there is a practical issue at stake. The specific reason for the culture war shifting into high gear is that the left discovered two superweapons and began using them widely.

  • Mass migration, which acts as a ‘win’ button for democracy and anti-traditionalism.

  • The doctrine of disparate impact, which boosts the above and leads to affirmative action, getting footsoldiers where they’re needed.

The sharp shift in power (and fear of where it will lead) makes red lash out. Conversely blue sees an opportunity to win and so sees no reason to hold back their loathing (which they had before but suppressed). Blue is also angered by red’s resistance and fearful of backlash in the case of failure.

The broad scale picture of two enemies at war flows fairly naturally from our election system, as it forces there to be two parties. As it exists specifically, it's due to differences in values. The right is a mixture of pro-religion and pro-liberalism forces (though the latter is waning post-Trump) while the left's predominant concern is about fairness and oppression.

I second what @07mk said about it being taught in schools—one of the big moral things that they push in schools is that slavery, racism, etc. are bad. And justifiably so. But that lends itself to the support of the left, whereas the right's values are less likely to be taught. Social media of course contributes, in the further emphases on flaws, and in the spreading of ideas within each other and the formation of a culture.

The left doesn't see things as them having power and oppressing the right. They see it rather as them, with their institutions, trying to combat a vast societal undercurrent of evil. Remember, every disparity is a sign of oppression, of failure—the wealth of the wealthy, racial gaps, everything. They are people struggling against the racism and oppression everywhere. Everyone wants to be the underdog.

And they see the right as legitimately evil. To side with the slavers over the slaves! What do the billionaires need? Why are you supporting the white people, who have perpetrated centuries of harm upon others, and (as is evident by the disparities) are still profiting? Would you treat half the world as lesser, merely because they are female, as if they needed to depend on men? Why would you let our pristine world go to waste, in the pursuit of selfish profit? They see society as a bundle of flaws and problems, and take the good it does for granted.

You point out that the left is punching down. Yes, they do. But they see themselves as attacking human scum.

To answer your three questions directly:

  1. It's kind of a mix. The red tribe does genuinely have contempt for the blue tribe, it's not merely defensive.

  2. The red tribe hates the blue tribe because it sees evil. A world of injustice, where people (they could be the victims) are mistreated because they are white, where the institutions that our society runs upon are being subverted or torn down, where the children are slaughtered by the millions. A place of debauchery, where people promote the ugly and disordered everywhere, from piercings to art to the disordered gender relations that LGBT consists in to the assault on the justice system. People lose jobs for having views like them. Christianity is attacked. Why would anyone prefer the ugly over the beautiful, or disarray to health?

  3. As I said above, the left hates the right, because it promotes oppression and injustice. Why would you side with those perpetrating harm, with the selfish, rather the with the victims?

I think you're asking an interesting question, and I look forward to reading the answers. Just wanted to add something

Do they just want revenge for the 80s? The 50s?

It appears that the Blue Tribe today does not accuse the red tribe of anything specific at all (barring some attempts that certainly haven't had the hoped-for effect, like mass Residential school graves or Jan 6).

To the extent that I've heard blue-tribers be defensive, it's in relation to the dominance of 2000s era Bush-style evangelicals. I know many who at least claim to still live in fear of those folks, the religious Right, thinking that they'll come back and totally rule the country at any moment.

Also, a lot of them want revenge for Trump.

Honestly, I think it’s because of our diversity of ideology. We’re a country trying to work together despite widely varying cultures and thus norms. You have a relatively conformist and religiously conservative group, a bohemian culture where the worst thing you could do is impose your worldview on another person, you have the various ethnic cultures that still maintain some distinction from the rest, you have the grindset culture where you just work for as much money as possible. In such a country, especially if the government is able to impose its will on the culture, there’s just naturally going to be a scrum for the levers of government. And those leavers can only be taken by people banding together around their values. And one great wat to do so is to get your tribe to rally around your causes to fight real or imagined threats to your tribal culture.

WHY is there a culture war?

A proximal cause is "fellow travelers" being more able to find each other and create echo chambers where they don't have to spend time becoming exhausted by arguing their viewpoints for their neighbors (by chance or fate) with different views. This doesn't just happen online; since people who trust governments more than private citizens tend to congregate in cities and live in apartments and condos, cities become progressive and the rural and suburban areas become conservative. The busybodies and meddlers in each group who can't stand being told what to do by "those people" try to push laws and regulations and ordinances and speech codes to interfere with "those people" getting their way, even if they themselves would never consent to being ruled in such a manner. Thus, the cold culture war.

I do offer an ultimate cause, however, and I hope it'll blow a few minds.

My sensemaking journey began with a simple pair of concepts: The physical world and the world of logic operate on separate sets of attributes and rules, and emotions are a third and equally separate realm like unto the others.

  1. The physical: temperature, color, proximity, size, weight, direction, and so on - The What
  2. The logical: axioms, premises, hypotheses, conclusions, categories, if-then-else, and so on - The How
  3. The emotional: desires, needs, relationships, identities both singular and plural, attribution and transference, and so on - The Why

Upon first making a list like this, I realized that the physical essence is masculine, the emotional essence is feminine, and the logical essence is neither. ("Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus" and geeks are from Vulcan.) I've called this worldview Triessentialism.

More recently, I observed that physically intuitive people tend to be red tribe/conservative while emotionally intuitive people tend to be blue-tribe/progressive, and logically intuitive people tend to be grey tribe/libertarian. In animal metaphors, the red tribe acts like a pack, the blue like a herd, and the grey like a hive; asymmetric but equivalent. Since coming to these conclusions, I've rarely been surprised when it comes to politics, which tells me my beliefs pay out in prediction.

I could go on and on about these mindsets, and I could even point to Jon Haidt's Moral Foundations Theory as a root cause as to why these mindsets tend to be the three fundamentals. I'd love to talk with him about looking at his data and suggesting three, not two, moral foundation mindsets, with the third being somewhat rare. But for me, I've sensemade enough to consider my theory substantiated.

It would seem that "culture war" chiefly, in the end, boils down to two separate culture wars, once concerning the status of religion (chiefly Christianity, chiefly inside that evangelical Protestantism) in the American society, with reverbations to issues like feminism, status of LGBT people and so on, and the other concerning the status of ethnic minorities (chiefly Black Americans) in the American society.

Both culture wars, in the broad sense, have been going on for centuries and the predecessors of the red tribe have flexed their power considerably when they've had it, so creating some sort of fundamental a victimology narrative for either side does not seem prudent.

He compares the situation to Germans hating Jews, or Hutus hating Tutsis, but in both of those cases, the party on the offensive accused the other party of a pretty specific set of misdeeds. Those accusations may have been false, but they mobilized a lot of hatred. It appears that the Blue Tribe today does not accuse the red tribe of anything specific at all (barring some attempts that certainly haven't had the hoped-for effect, like mass Residential school graves or Jan 6). One might point back to the legacy of slavery or something, but that is largely absent from other Western histories, and the tribes have sorted themselves out the same way, with even more hostility, as in Canada, where the Blue hatred for Red (using the american color scheme for consistency) takes the form of quite overt punching-down.

As someone who was essentially born into the Blue tribe of the culture war and raised to be its soldier, I think you almost have it with "legacy of slavery," but rather, it's the broader oppression narrative, of which the legacy of slavery is one type. When I was growing up in the 90s and 00s in the bluest of blue areas, this oppression narrative was just taken for granted as Obviously True, with the notion that all the Bad Stuff like slavery, misogyny, homophobia, etc. in our society could be gotten rid of, while keeping all the Good Stuff we like, if only those ignorant people would stop holding up these old, decrepit, sexist, racist patriarchal structures. There was generally a real sense of pity for these ignorant bigots, though certainly there was some disgust as well.

It seems that in the decades since I was in school, this kind of teaching has only become more common in schools in less-blue and non-blue areas. It also seems to me that encouragement of active disgust instead of condescending pity has come into vogue in that time. Given that, I don't think Blue tribe's nigh-genocidal hatred of the Red is that surprising.

Of course, this just moves the question back a step: why is the Blue tribe teaching its kids in such a way as to make them believe this narrative about the evils of the Red tribe? I think that's a result of status games without correction. Much of the ideas behind this oppression narrative came from academia, and specifically parts of academia that are largely allergic to empirical testing. Sans empiricism, success in the field became even more about winning status than it normally is, which freed people to make more and more extreme statements (e.g. any old idiot can argue that murder is wrong, but it takes a true genius academic to argue that murder is right) without the messy real world getting in the way. And so teachers taught the (then-current) endpoints of these runaway status games to their students under the wholehearted belief that they were teaching something verified to be True.

Of course, that just moves the question back another step: why did the Blue Tribe allow the humanities in academia to be so freed from empiricism and basic checking as to allow status games to dominate over truth? That one's probably above my pay grade, but my guess would just be generic laziness, nothing interesting in particular. Doing rigorous analysis of anything is tough, and the appeal of taking shortcuts is always there even when you know others will critique your work. When you can be confident that others won't, and this becomes common knowledge among everyone in the field... it'd be surprising if it even accidentally produced truth even once.

Of course, this just moves the question back a step: why is the Blue tribe teaching its kids in such a way as to make them believe this narrative about the evils of the Red tribe?

From the inside:

Thanks to science and reason, we know how to solve all our problems.

Given that we know how to solve all our problems, if a problem isn't solved that necessarily means that someone is choosing not to solve it, or is otherwise obstructing the solution.

Therefore, if you have a problem you can't solve, the solution is to find the people blocking the obvious solutions and get them out of the way.

From the outside:

Progressive ideology doesn't actually have workable solutions. When the solutions their ideology preaches fail, they need scapegoats. Their relationship with Red Tribe is built around this scapegoating behavior.

A whole host of those subjects have never been and will never be empirical in any real sense. They might be occasionally rigorous (I would argue the philosophy is rigorous, but outside of the logic subcategories are not really empirical. You can create perfectly logical arguments that run counter to empirical reality if you desire.) or create a pseudo-empirical structure (like psychology, sociology, and anthropology have) where terrible research methods (don’t get me started on self report) can be run through statistical analysis and conclusions can be drawn. There are ways to teach these subjects that are at least honest (historical analysis of literature or the intent of the author over a [outgroup] analysis of whatever literature).

But if you insist on empirical evidence and research in the arts, you essentially cannot have it. There’s no real scientific methodology to creating literature and thus no way to make it rigorous in analysis. And thus you either stop doing it and simply teach the undergrads to write coherently, or it morphs into a cesspit of whatever is socially and politically radical (because it’s impossible to fire someone for bad research when the entire field is unempirical) with no checks.

Of course, this just moves the question back a step: why is the Blue tribe teaching its kids in such a way as to make them believe this narrative about the evils of the Red tribe? I think that's a result of status games without correction.

I think this is the wrong answer. Your answer should naturally prompt the question 'if its just arbitrary status games across all relevant areas and institutions, why do they all cohere to exactly the same result?'

These people already shared a framework which lead to all of them to arrive at the same conclusion regardless of their subject/position/domain. That should key you in to the fact that its not the competition per se.

As you mention:

And so teachers taught the (then-current) endpoints of these runaway status games to their students under the wholehearted belief that they were teaching something verified to be True.

The end-points were predetermined because they were all competing to do the same thing for the same moral reason. The end points existed before the institutions did. They were always driving towards them.

The academics in question are largely leftists, and leftist have always held that distinctions between things and people is the moral evil and that people who support fundamental distinctions between things are therefore the least moral persons. For example:

We aspire to live and die equal, the way we were born: we want real equality or death; this is what we need....We need not only that equality of rights written into the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen; we want it in our midst, under the roofs of our houses. We consent to everything for it, to make a clean slate so that we hold to it alone. Let all the arts perish, if need be, as long as real equality remains!...We lean towards something more sublime and more just: the common good or the community of property!... Let it at last end, this great scandal that our descendants will never believe existed! Disappear at last, revolting distinctions between rich and poor, great and small, masters and servants, rulers and ruled.

Let there no longer be any difference between people than that of age and sex. Since all have the same faculties and the same needs, let there then be for them but one education, but one nourishment. They are satisfied with one sun and one air for all: why then would the same portion and the same quality of food not suffice for each of them?

Already the enemies of the most natural order of things we can imagine raise a clamour against us.

Emphasis mine. Manifesto of the Equals, Gracchus Babeuf and the Conspiracy of the Equals 1796. It goes thousands of years back before this but this quote is the one I had at hand.

But the blue tribe's motivation is harder for me to explain to myself.

You've already got it:

They could just stop, but that would amount to a capitulation. Rightly or wrongly, the red blue tribe won't accept that, so they continue they culture war.

Suffice to say that liberals do not share conservatives' assessment about the balance of power.

Is it naive to think that the red tribe hates the blue tribe defensively?

Yes. The red tribe's hate for the blue tribe (and vice versa) is fundamentally normative. The red and blue tribes hate each other because they have values that are not in alignment and which they are not willing to compromise on.

It's not like members of the blue tribe don't have cultural memory or even (due to the patchwork nature of American legislation) personal experience of the red tribe "punching" them, such as in the case of abortions, labour laws or drug prohibitions. On top of that, the tribes have conflicting aesthetic preferences that they wish to impose on the same commons - a young Democrat prefers the joint proposition of ethnic restaurants and ethnic gangs in the same measure as the boomer Republican would prefer their absence as a package deal. Finally, there are those things that still have a majority but are carried by a red-tribe backbone - car culture, militarism (though this one is shifting?) and relative libertarianism in matters such as food safety.

In my view it goes back to Albion's seed. See how many modern characteristics of each tribe you see in their descriptions here.

The blue tribe is the Roundheads who left England in the time leading up to Cromwell's revolution and then after the restoration of the monarchy and the Quakers.

The red tribe is the Cavaliers who were given lands in the US as a parting gift of Charles I before he was beheaded along with the Borderers.

The Cavaliers and Roundheads have both hated each other for more than 400 years, with fundamentally incompatible views of how society should look. Most of the US governmental quirks are ways to keep the two groups separated and they only really worked until the stakes got big enough to be meaningful as the post New Deal government became more influential on citizens lives than their state government and the US dominates the political and financial worlds.

I've always thought that, considering the full Albion's Seed descriptions and Scott's summaries of them, the blues are primarily remiscient of the Quakers and the reds primarily of Borderers. Particularly the "blues are Puritans" narrative just seems like an attempt to associate the blues with a word that immediately would cause a negative reaction in most everyone.

I associate 'Puritans' with one of the most productive groups that ever existed, but I'm not from US.

Don’t leave out the part where the Founding Fathers were made up of both Roundheads and Cavaliers (were any prominent ones Borderers?) and the constitution was designed as a truce on the culture war of the time, while allowing states to have the bulk of the power to define how life would go.

The culture war of the time was of course Protestants vs. Catholics/insufficiently Puritan Protestants, and the Founding Fathers probably all had recent ancestors directly affected by those civil wars in the UK.

The modern day culture war is more about Borderers vs. Roundheads (now puritan progressives), whereas the Cavaliers strike me as more of the business wing of the GOP.

Of course, this is very loose. The Bushes are New England WASPs, as is say Mitt Romney’s ancestry.

Of course, this is very loose. The Bushes are New England WASPs, as is say Mitt Romney’s ancestry.

GHW Bush was Blue Tribe and everyone knew it - in 1988 that was perfectly compatible with being a conservative (to the extent that he was) and a Republican because the party system had not fully aligned with the culture war, but the Red Tribe ultimately rejected him - the 1992 presidential election was the last time a Republican underperformed in the South.

GW Bush became Red Tribe by religious conversion - he left the (predominantly Blue Tribe) Episcopal Church and joined the (mixed-tribe, but he was in an evangelical-aligned congregation) United Methodist Church, announced that he had been through a born-again conversion experience, and generally said and did the things that Red Tribe Christianity requires of its adherents with visible sincerity. (He also bought and lived on a dude ranch, but that wasn't decisive.) Jeb Bush didn't, so the Red Tribe treated him as outgroup and decisively rejected him in the 2016 primary.

Mormons are neither Red nor Blue Tribe - they are their own tribe. They are political allies of the Red Tribe, but they are not part of it (just as African-Americans are not part of the Blue Tribe). Romney was only able to win the 2012 primary because Gingrich and Santorum split the tribal Red vote, allowing him to pick up a lot of delegates with narrow pluralities in winner-takes-almost-all states.

I think this is correct.

Though at this point, some Utah Mormons have gone full Red Tribe and there are internal divisions in the Utah GOP along “Mike Lee vs. Mitt Romney” lines.

Also the LDS church is fairly pro-immigration and pro-vaccination, which caused issues for some of the faithful.

I think a lot of it comes down to political science. Duverger's law: Any country with a simple-majority, single-ballot system like the US, will inevitably split into two political parties. We can't have just one, because we don't agree on everything, and we can't have more than two, because the third parties are just losers and nobody wants to lose. The two parties formed almost immediately after the constitution was signed, and they've been around ever since, albeit in different forms.

I know the culture war isn't exactly the same as the two parties and formal elections, but it is aided and abetted by them, and follows those elections pretty closely.

I know the culture war isn't exactly the same as the two parties and formal elections, but it is aided and abetted by them, and follows those elections pretty closely.

I think it is the other way round - the parties follow the culture war. Sometimes this is deliberate in search of new voting blocs (e.g. the GOP Southern Strategy), but more often they are forced into it by hostile takeovers in the primaries (e.g. Trump and MAGA more generally, McGovern back in the day) or the threat thereof (Hillary going woke as a weapon against Bernie, Kerry moving left to beat Howard Dean, Romney insincerely tacking right on immigration).

Both party establishments think (and I think they are right) that elections are won from the centre and swing voters don't like candidates who escalate the culture war.

If I had to guess...

The culture war exists because of an inherent tension between two principles of the post-enlightenment order. The first is the drive to equality and liberty, which has broad appeal for various reasons but especially those tied to a Christian and post-Christian guilt complex, and to those who identify with groups or individuals they consider to have been unduly oppressed by powerful institutions. The second is the drive to civilization, which necessarily involves the construction of hierarchies, the concentration of power and the structured application of [extreme] violence; it is unequal and illiberal.

All Hegelian narratives contend with this core tension between a hierarchical, orderly impulse and a liberal, equal one. Both are 'human', and both have their ultimate foundation in our primal nature.

Can’t you do pretty even split in the US over just liberty vs. equality/equity? Aka limited government vs. social democracy, with a corresponding “rural vs. urban” fight over culture and lifestyle options.

As soon as the shift from “equal under the law” to “equality of outcomes ensured by government intervention” became dominant on the left, that fight was going to happen, and most other fights align around it.

I don’t think the civilizational/hierarchical one works, given how much the Blue Tribe wants to use state power to ensure equity. The Classic Conservatives/Theocrats aren’t the main force on the right in the US.

Yes, yes, there are these two tribes, but WHY do these tribes hate each so much? It seems obvious to me that the red tribe is currently on the defensive, and so fights on out of a spirit of plucky individualism/puerile defiance (you choose). They could just stop, but that would amount to a capitulation.

You are missing why they are fighting in the first place. This is not a case of "I know I'm wrong, I'm just arguing to piss you off", the red tribe holds fundamental moral values. The most basic of oughts is that one ought to promote what one deems moral. Why wouldn't they fight against someone promoting something they don't think is moral?

But the blue tribe's motivation is harder for me to explain to myself. Why do they hate the red tribe so much? One could point back to Trump and say "Look at all the damage the red tribe did!" but Trump himself seems to have been the red tribe lashing out at blue tribe condescension/scorn.

This is again missing the point. You don't need an explanation for why this particular culture played out the way it did to understand 90% of it. The Blue Tribe holds different values and will fight for its morality, simple as that.

Humans set their standards by their environment, which is why nerds and jocks will self-segregate despite the countless things that make them similar. You cannot point to the far group(s) and ask why a tribe doesn't organize with the other tribe against the remote tribe, it's very rarely relevant. Failure to understand this is bizarre given that you've read SSC's Outgroup piece.

It appears that the Blue Tribe today does not accuse the red tribe of anything specific at all

This is so blind to anything the Blue Tribe says that I have to seriously consider if you are just casually speculating with no research on what either side alleges. The Blue Tribe accuses the Red Tribe of a whole host of things, which can largely be grouped into two categories: bigotry (racism, homophobia, transphobia, etc.) and irrationality (in particular, deriving views based on "common sense" and religious beliefs).

Hey now don’t forget selfishness from opposing government size/scope.

Well basically I either don't care about or actively dislike conservative values and therefore don't want to live according to those values and don't want them to be those according to which society is shaped. I think it's pretty simple. Does that mean I hate conservatives? Not on a personal level.

In America, it’s out of a political polarization spiral that started with bush and became irrecoverable under Obama; both sides can’t quite understand why their president and his merry men is so uniquely alienating to the other side and so make up motives. It’s because he’s black, or because they hate America, or whatever.

You can couple that with a preexisting liberal elite prejudice that we’d be just like some fantastical utopian version of Denmark if the typical red tribe demographics would stop preventing it(never mind that these people do not know what Denmark is actually like), and it’s a recipe for different interest groups banding together in a no-criticism-allowed way to beat up on their opponents. That’s basically where the culture war comes from.

But did the Red Tribe do something to obstruct the path to Utopia? I'm not talking about Ronald Reagan- I mean did cousin Merle on his camo 4-wheeler do something?

He's "clinging to guns and religion" and stopping progressives from solving the gun crime problem.

And that was Obama trying to be charitable.

Factually: no, they did not, and the utopia envisioned doesn’t look much like Denmark or indeed anything else that exists

However, it’s important to look at the theory and interests here- cousin Merle not having any incentive to support public transportation is pretty obvious, for example. He already owns a pickup truck and doesn’t go into the downtown areas where it’s less useful all that often. He’s an easy scapegoat for things like that. There’s other examples, too, of course, that’s just an easy one. But ‘preference for rural-coded lifestyle choices’ has been a progressive scapegoat for not having the same nice things they think Europe has for quite a while. There’s something to hlynka’s point that the Twitter DR are more progressive than conventionally conservative because a lot of them are the same, they just blame blacks instead(and factually blacks and rednecks get along much better than commonly believed).

The red tribe still has significant political power. Especially in state legislatures where they are not afraid to flex their power to do things like ban abortion.

Started with the Clintons.

All that hate for Hillary wasn’t new.

US is already spending high levels on social spending.

https://twitter.com/data_david1/status/1759013986023190724?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ

To a first approximation there is a culture war because different groups of people have different ideas about how society and government ought to be ordered and these ideas are often mutually incompatible. Disagreements about these questions are often acrimonious because they are moral questions about justice and fairness. This can turn disagreements about these issues into a perception that other people are immoral or evil for their position on the issue in question. Each tribe hates the other for approximately symmetrical reasons having to do with believing that the way the other side wants to order society is bad (for different definitions of bad).

3) Why does the blue tribe hate the red tribe?

To concretize my first paragraph a bit you can read the deluge (1, 2, 3) of stories of women with life-threatening pregnancy complications being denied abortions because they weren't life threatening enough. I think the legislatures that inflicted these conditions on these women are evil.

Those examples are from a culture war in full swing, like saying "we hate the other soldiers because they shot a bunch of our guys in the last battle." My question is why is there even a war going on.

Well where do you think the laws against abortion came from? They didn't spring forth fully formed, they came from people who believed those were the right thing to do, and the people that supported them doing so, and those are ideas based off of (in the US) a worldview that has been constructed over decades and centuries. The status quo was put in place, and if you want to change the status quo, the people who support it now, are a problem (from the POV of someone trying to change it), even if they weren't around when the status quo was introduced.

So, does your question reduce to something like "why do people disagree about how society should be ordered?" The answer is probably some unsatisfying mix of historically contingent facts.

I think what he may be bringing up is very often the debate is almost entirely on false terms.

America does for instance have too much gun violence. The debate is almost always over limiting white people from buying AR-15 which numerically are a very small part of the problem and nearly no risks to the activist class in red or blue tribe.

Where gun violence is an issue it’s mostly harms blue tribe people or politically tribeless people.

Where the debate on pro-gun/anti-gun happens is in area that is a trivial problem. Hence it seems like just tribal fights for status.

America does for instance have too much gun violence.

The optimal amount of any crime is non-zero, short of lizardman constant situations. This is true for gun violence as much as anything else.

Besides, since some gun violence is self-defense, the optimal amount of it isn't zero anyway.

This is a motte and bailey. American is way above other areas.

American gun violence is unequally distributed by race, which makes comparisons to other areas hard.

White American firearms homicides are still much higher than most other high-income countries’ total homicides.

Or easy if the other areas feature some races but not others.

No, America’s very high rate of firearms deaths mostly hurt red tribe people(through suicide) and black tribe(which is its own thing with its own cultural quirks) people through murder. Mass shootings are the only real way blue tribe elites are threatened by america’s gun violence problem, even if they’re factually not particularly common.

My favorite model of politics is that, at least in the west, our primary axis of political division splits people who benefit status-wise from transnational managerialism (AKA the Globalist American Empire, GAE) and those who don't. That supporter class, which we can call the 'blue coalition', consists of people with cushy bureacratic jobs they got due to credentialism (blue tribe proper), unemployables who could never be respectable in any system, and migrants who would be in a favela without transnational open borders. The opposer class, which we can call the 'red coalition', consists of everyone else.

So blue-tribe-hates-red-tribe and red-tribe-hates-blue tribe is a cipher for class antagonism, much like the guelphs and ghibellines, the optimates and populares, the federalists and anti-federalists, and a million other disputes that seem impenentrable to the modern eye because the contours of their society's class landscape didn't come down to us in detail.

Okay, but then why do the classes hate each other. It's not like Marxism- their class interests aren't necessarily opposed.

Okay, but then why do the classes hate each other. It's not like Marxism- their class interests aren't necessarily opposed.

On the contrary, social status is zero sum. In recent decades social status has been docked from some and redistributed to others — the blues say this is a good thing and that, in fact, reds still have a cache of unearned social status that should be stripped. This goes beyond racial justice ideology, to be clear; you will often hear school teachers or even PhD's complaining bitterly that plumbers make more than them, as if the plumber's salary is somehow decreasing theirs. Or decrying that liberal arts degrees don't secure a "good job". By this they mean "social inferiors have prominence that should be reallocated to me".

Blue and red class interests are fundamentally opposed.

To be clear, in your teacher example this is 100% one sided. I am a tradesman and nearly all tradesmen agree that teachers should be paid more, even if most of us would look at the pay scale and say ‘doesn’t seem cartoonishly low to me’. Most of us don’t support just giving money to school districts in the hopes they’ll use it for teacher pay raises, sure, but support for teachers making more money through something or other(state bonus program or whatever) is near universal among actual plumbers and HVAC techs.

This makes sense. I am a teacher, and it's worse than that, though. The teachers hate KIDS because the kid has an Audi that his dad bought him.

This goes back to waaaaaay before Covid, though. I feel your pain, but it's not an answer to the question.

Its a religious war, not a culture war.

The left hates everything non-left because the fundamental tenet of their religion is the erasure of distinctions. As I posted downthread:

I'm not sure I agree with NRx that extreme blank slatism and communism were inevitable extrapolations of liberalism; that as soon Jefferson penned "all men are created equal", CRT and HAES were a matter of time.

To clarify the timeline, the Identicals have been preaching and attempting to enforce blank slatism, and the erasure of all distinctions whatever, for thousands of years before Jefferson was even born.

The identicals force us to believe that being is identical to nothing. That p = !p in the literal and metaphysical sense. Kabbalah did it, the gnostics and hermetics did it, Hegel ("Nothing is, therefore...altogether the same as, pure being.") said so, and so on. Blank slatism and HAES are just modern Identicals finding new domains in which they can enforce the belief that everything is really just the same as everything else. Fat is healthy. All people are equally capable of all things. p = !p.

The left hate the non-left for their existence, as their existence itself is a fundamental distinction between persons which must be eliminated.

This is at least AN answer. Can you expand upon the leftist impulse to erase all distinctions, or point me to someone who already has?

To briefly introduce the concept, compare the quote I provided here and ponder the behavior of people like Pol Pot.

For and in depth answer, with quotes and examples linking the concept cohesively from Plato through to the modern period, see my recent post, which is a summary of a book on the subject..

Could you elaborate on how the P and NP complexity classes are related to this?

Because my fingers are running faster than my brain. p = !p or a = !a is the point. Thanks for the heads up.

I've seen people make the argument that the liberal ideology is universalist. Its not enough for California to totally conform to leftist ideology - the whole country must conform. Better yet, the whole world. I dont know how to square this with cultural relativism, but now that I think about it, that's not something you hear a whole lot about these days despite the fact that I recall it being a big part of the political conversation from the left about 20 years ago. The universalism of the left does ring true to me. It seems to me that they cannot tolerate pockets of red tribe anywhere they might exist.

Insofar as the red tribe is Christian, particularly Evangelical Protestant, it is by necessity also universalist and believes that the whole world should be converted (it's quite literally in the name "evangelical", after all), and works quite consistently and strongly to support missionary work, often with an implicit or explicity spread of general American cultural mindset alongside, all over the world.

This isn't just a blue tribe/liberal thing however. Pro-life people are pushing for abortion to be outlawed through out the US, not just where they live. It's a simple outgrowth of a moral judgement. If I believe X is wrong, then people should not be allowed to do X. It's the fundamental basics of civilization. If I think murder is wrong, I can't simply not murder, I have to try and stop other people murdering. Otherwise Christians could simply not try to outlaw abortion, just simply not get one themselves. But that isn't enough. Not for Christians and not for liberals. We want to live in a society that does the things we think are good, and does not do the things we think are bad.

Sure, but why? Whence the universalism? Is it a holdover from Christianity? From Communism? They don't seem to care about what happens in Mali, for example, the way Christians and Communists do.

It is universalist. Cultural relativism squares perfectly because the thing that the left is trying to make universal is the elimination of distinctions. Cultural relativism is an argument they derived from the dialectical method, which is the name for the rhetorical technique they use to eliminate distinctions. 'Its not that your morals are wrong, its that the concept of morals is broader than you think, your morals are really just one aspect of a much wider conception of morality, and viewed this way, all moral perspectives are really just the same, aren't they?'

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