“Scott Alexander” on Political Tribalism

He writes,

How did both major political tribes decide, within a month of the virus becoming widely known in the States, not only exactly what their position should be but what insults they should call the other tribe for not agreeing with their position?

Pointer from Tyler Cowen.

Of course, my answer to his question is in The Three Languages of Politics. What Alexander calls the “red tribe” narrative does indeed have a civilization-barbarism feel, and what he calls the h”blue tribe” narrative has an “oppressor-oppressed” feel.

Anyway, read the whole piece. Another excerpt:

Daily Kos or someone has a little label saying “supports liberal ideas”, but actually their incentive is to make liberals want to click on their pages and ads. If the quickest way to do that is by writing story after satisfying story of how dumb Republicans are, and what wonderful taste they have for being members of the Blue Tribe instead of evil mutants, then they’ll do that even if the effect on the entire system is to make Republicans hate them and by extension everything they stand for.

Note that on the issue of a quarantine of countries where Ebola has broken out, the three-axes model might predict that if Ebola had broken out among Jews in Israel instead of in West Africa, there might well have been a reversal in which tribe favored quarantine. The “conservative germophobia” theory would predict otherwise.

5 thoughts on ““Scott Alexander” on Political Tribalism

  1. Saw this a few days ago when Tyler linked it. Should I be somewhat ashamed that when I read his “selling global warming to the Red Tribe” narrative, it did make me more sympathetic to some kind of action?

    Probably, but I had a similar thought to yours: if Ebola had broken out, say, in the US, and the non-downtrodden peoples of Western Europe and East Asia imposed a travel ban on the US, would Blue Tribers be decrying it as ineffective, counterproductive, damaging to the local economy, etc? Somehow I doubt it. Most would probably shrug and think “can’t really blame ’em.”

    • Your second paragraph makes a very valid point. I also think the Red Tribe would view Ebola quite differently as well. They might even see it as a threat to civilization, if it affected certain populations.

  2. The three-axes model seems to work here. But Scott Alexander is unrealistic to think that casting red tribe issues in blue tribe narrative form, or vice versa, will have much effect.
    At a deeper level, the oppressor-oppressed idea represents the way left-liberals explain the presence of evils in the world. They start from the assumption that humans are perfectible, i.e., naturally good and rational. In this view, human misconduct is attributable to bad institutions and injustice. Therefore one must work to overcome oppression that produces strife.
    Those holding to the civilization-barbarism axis believe institutions are the means of civilizing humans who are by nature fallible and tend to fall into conflict and strife, self-deception and folly, etc. One must protect institutional restraints on human misconduct.
    Simply changing the language will not change the way particular issues are viewed. For example, the blue tribe views global warming theory from a Salvationist point of view; humans can enter into a collective rational management of their affairs so as to ward off tragedy and contingency from life.
    The red tribe thinks it foolish to have such expectations. Simply casting warming theory into say a patriotic form isn’t going to take them in.
    The essential difference is those on the oppressor-oppressed axis hold to a Rousseauan sentimental view of the human condition; those on the civilization-barbarism axis follow the classical or tragic view.

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