Rise of the Grey Tribe

[BvBPL]

Here's a theory. Americans can be divided into two politically and socially influential sets, the Red Tribe and the Blue Tribe.

According to Scott Alexander:

The Red Tribe is most classically typified by conservative political beliefs, strong evangelical religious beliefs, creationism, opposing gay marriage, owning guns, eating steak, drinking Coca-Cola, driving SUVs, watching lots of TV, enjoying American football, getting conspicuously upset about terrorists and commies, marrying early, divorcing early, shouting “USA IS NUMBER ONE!!!”, and listening to country music.

The Blue Tribe is most classically typified by liberal political beliefs, vague agnosticism, supporting gay rights, thinking guns are barbaric, eating arugula, drinking fancy bottled water, driving Priuses, reading lots of books, being highly educated, mocking American football, feeling vaguely like they should like soccer but never really being able to get into it, getting conspicuously upset about sexists and bigots, marrying later, constantly pointing out how much more civilized European countries are than America, and listening to “everything except country”.

While there is a positive relationship between tribe identity and party affiliation, that relationship is not deterministic. There are plenty of GOP Blue Tribers and a fair number of Democrat Red Tribers.

(There are two types of people in this world, those that divide people into two groups and those that don't.)

Alexander also suggests an up-and-coming Grey Tribe, described as:

Grey Tribe typified by libertarian political beliefs, Dawkins-style atheism, vague annoyance that the question of gay rights even comes up, eating paleo, drinking Soylent, calling in rides on Uber, reading lots of blogs, calling American football “sportsball”, getting conspicuously upset about the War on Drugs and the NSA, and listening to filk....

Which he describes as generally aligning itself with the Blue Tribe for the time being.

Obviously those descriptions are oversimplifications and caricatures, but they do have ring of verisimilitude.

It seems to me that we have a fair number of people here on CFC that could be described as belonging to this nascent Grey Tribe.

Do you think the Grey Tribe is sufficiently large and sufficiently different from the other Tribes that it necessitates a tribal designation? Will it ever reach that quanta? Are we seeing a shift to a cultural triumvirate or is this all just a big fad?

 

[warpus]

I think it's kind of depressing that the main (and maybe only?) alternative to the Democrats for left-leaning people in the U.S. are the utterly crazy and just insane Libertarians.

The movement might seem "cute" on the surface, but if they ever implemented just half of their stupid ideas, your entire country would fall apart.

 

[BvBPL]

We have a Green-Rainbow party too. That's a thing. Sort of. At least it is more of a thing than the crazy libertarian parties.

 

[EgonSpengler]

I think it's kind of depressing that the main (and maybe only?) alternative to the Democrats for left-leaning people in the U.S. are the utterly crazy and just insane Libertarians.

The movement might seem "cute" on the surface, but if they ever implemented just half of their stupid ideas, your entire country would fall apart.

I'm not sure I know a single left-leaning American who considers the Libertarians an alternative to the democrats. In the media, Libertarians seem most often portrayed as an alternative for right-leaning people, although I'm not sure what they think about that. Around the time of the invasion of Iraq, I recall The Economist positioning itself with the "Western, libertarian conservatives of Ronald Reagan, as opposed to the Southern, religious conservatives of George W. Bush."


Anyway, more to the OP's point, most Americans are badly served by our 2-party system. A parliamentary system has its own foibles, of course, but one thing it has going for it is some agility, in the sense that the myriad parties can form temporary coalitions and alliances based on specific shared interests (whether they actually do is perhaps a different question that has a different answer in every country).

In the United States, our two parties are kind-of coalitions, but fixed in place, with very little ability to go against the tide or forge alliances "across the aisle." Our Republican Party is, it could be said, a coalition of a Conservative Party, a National Party, a Traditional Values Party, and a Libertarian Party. Our Democratic Party is, sort of, a coalition of a Liberal Party, a Green Party, a Social-Democrat Party, and a Labor Party.

 

[BvBPL]

Anyway, more to the OP's point, most Americans are badly served by our 2-party system.

Would you care to expand upon that? For example, are Canadian NDP voters better served by having the NDP as a party separate from the Liberals where the NDP is a minority party or would they be better served by having the NDP join ranks as a minority bloc in the majority Liberal party? Why or why not?

 

[warpus]

@EgonSpengler I suppose I've mainly seen left-leaning people fall prey to the lure of the Libertarians, but maybe I'm not paying enough attention.

Would you care to expand upon that? For example, are Canadian NDP voters better served by having the NDP as a party separate from the Liberals where the NDP is a minority party or would they be better served by having the NDP join ranks as a minority bloc in the majority Liberal party? Why or why not?

If we only had 2 federal parties in Canada (a leftie party and a rightie party), the left-leaning party wouldn't have try to compete with any other left-leaning party. They'd always be a "shoe in" for the left vote, so unless the country was all of a sudden for some reason starting to turn conservative generally speaking, they wouldn't really have to bother to improve much. Society though is slowly moving to the left, at least up here in Canada, so that would probably never happen.

Our system isn't perfect, but if we only had 2 parties to choose from, it would be a lot worse. The Liberals, for example, in order to win this election had to make a lot of promises. They had to be more attractive to left-leaning voters than the NDP was. I mean, they were also trying to be more attractive to centrist voters who usually vote conservative or whatever... but either way competition between political parties is usually a good thing for your average voter and the country as a whole. If you only have 2 parties to vote for, and power alternates between them, instead you sort of wait for the other party to fall out of favour, and then take your turn. And then when your side falls out of favour, the other side takes over. Not much room for improvement in this machine, and not much choice for the voters.

We don't have much more choice than you guys, but the added competition is a good thing.

 

[EgonSpengler]

Would you care to expand upon that? For example, are Canadian NDP voters better served by having the NDP as a party separate from the Liberals where the NDP is a minority party or would they be better served by having the NDP join ranks as a minority bloc in the majority Liberal party? Why or why not?

I really can't speak to Canadian politics, and there are enough Canadians around here that I'd be a fool to try.

Our Congress is meant to provide a means of representation for the myriad interests and positions - we can only have 1 President at a time, after all - but lately, Congress is locked into their 2-party tug-of-war, and defeating the other team has become more important than governing. All of these divisions within the 2 parties and "offshoots" we've seen lately are, imo, evidence of dissatisfaction with the options. The Libertarians, the Tea Party, the Occupy Movement, the draw-and-quartering of John Boehner, the fight among people on the Left over Ralph Nader in '04, the rises of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump this year. There are some number of people, maybe a lot of people, who simply don't vote, not just out of apathy but also out of aggravation and a disinterest in casting a(nother) vote for the lesser evil.

 

[EgonSpengler]

@EgonSpengler I suppose I've mainly seen left-leaning people fall prey to the lure of the Libertarians, but maybe I'm not paying enough attention.

To my eye, the central pillars of Libertarianism are laissez-faire capitalism, individual rights over group rights, and small government. But to be sure, there are planks built on those pillars that people on the Left would find appealing, such as the separation of church and state, the legalization of drugs, a foreign policy that relies on soft power more than hard power, evidence-based public policy, and so on. Which is actually a good illustration of why a multi-party system has some flexibility: Right now the Democrats don't advocate for many of those things, so someone who normally leans Left may be attracted to the Libertarians.

You may also be seeing people who would always have been Libertarian, but compromised by throwing in their lot with the Democrats. Let's say a person believes in gun ownership, drug legalization, the right to get an abortion, the right to marry a same-sex partner, low taxes, and a small federal government. Who do they vote for? Democrat or Republican? They have to choose which of their values to bend over a barrel each election, and see-saw back and forth, trying to maintain some kind of balance of power.

 

[BenitoChavez]

What tribe is most classically typified by vague agnosticism, supporting gay rights, thinks guns are ok as long as they are in the hands of responsible people, eats almost anything, drinks tap water, drives the cheapest thing on wheels, spends most of their free time on the computer, gets conspicuously upset about existential quandaries, unmarried, thinks nationalism is stupid, and listens to whatever music tickles their fancy?

I think I'll call them the x-ray tribe.

 

[Borachio]

And I thought this thread would be about elderly people and baby boomers!

 

[Hygro]

Gray tribe is blue tribe.

What tribe is most classically typified by vague agnosticism, supporting gay rights, thinks guns are ok as long as they are in the hands of responsible people, eats almost anything, drinks tap water, drives the cheapest thing on wheels, spends most of their free time on the computer, gets conspicuously upset about existential quandaries, unmarried, thinks nationalism is stupid, and listens to whatever music tickles their fancy?

I think I'll call them the x-ray tribe.

Blue tribe.

 

[Bootstoots]

Gray tribe is blue tribe.

I partly agree. There are a variety of blue tribe people who have right-wing economic beliefs and maybe don't mind guns. We commonly call these people libertarians. There are also red tribe people who smoke pot, aren't particularly religious, and don't care what people do in their bedrooms. We also call these people libertarians. But if you put Silicon Valley techno-libertarians together with West Virginia redneck-libertarians, it becomes really obvious that they're just subsets of the blue and red tribes respectively, and have very little in common besides some of their political beliefs. There are probably some libertarians who can't be comfortably classed as either blue or red, but not enough to make up their own tribe.

Some people seem to be under the impression that having a few differences in political beliefs with the majority of the your tribe makes you a member of a different tribe. This is not correct - tribes are about how you think and behave on a more fundamental level than just your political beliefs, as well as how the people you know think and behave.

 

[EgonSpengler]

I partly agree. There are a variety of blue tribe people who have right-wing economic beliefs and maybe don't mind guns. We commonly call these people libertarians. There are also red tribe people who smoke pot, aren't particularly religious, and don't care what people do in their bedrooms. We also call these people libertarians. But if you put Silicon Valley techno-libertarians together with West Virginia redneck-libertarians, it becomes really obvious that they're just subsets of the blue and red tribes respectively, and have very little in common besides some of their political beliefs. There are probably some libertarians who can't be comfortably classed as either blue or red, but not enough to make up their own tribe.

Good point. Even the people we might lump into a 3rd category aren't monolithic.

Some people seem to be under the impression that having a few differences in political beliefs with the majority of the your tribe makes you a member of a different tribe. This is not correct - tribes are about how you think and behave on a more fundamental level than just your political beliefs, as well as how the people you know think and behave.

Tribes are also about how people encourage and coerce one another to fall in line and to choose a tribe to align themselves with and against. Differences are minimized, ignored, or punished. Loyalty is demanded and divisions are considered some kind of natural order. Outsiders are mistrusted, shunned, or outright attacked; renegades, deserters, and turncoats may be treated even more harshly.

This very idea that Americans can or should be divided into "red" and "blue" is, to be charitable, counter-productive. It's not new, of course. Mr. Alexander isn't making a novel observation*. I think it was Willie Nelson who said that in the 1960s the difference between folk music and country music was how you felt about the Vietnam War. And of course many of the stereotypical characteristics of "red" and "blue" can still be drawn on a map of the United States that closely resembles the map of our Civil War.




* Alexander did get one thing wrong, though: Football isn't the sport that divides our red and blue tribes, according to tradition, it's auto racing.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Grey Tribe typified by libertarian political beliefs, Dawkins-style atheism, vague annoyance that the question of gay rights even comes up, eating paleo, drinking Soylent, calling in rides on Uber, reading lots of blogs, calling American football “sportsball”, getting conspicuously upset about the War on Drugs and the NSA, and listening to filk....

I have to ask: Is "filk" a typo? I tried reading that article, and I get the impression that the author didn't intend to refer to filk music, which is a subgenre of folk music dealing with science, science fiction, and fantasy themes.

Mind you, I rather suspect that you'll find a lot more left-wing people listening to filk music than right-wing people would.

Would you care to expand upon that? For example, are Canadian NDP voters better served by having the NDP as a party separate from the Liberals where the NDP is a minority party or would they be better served by having the NDP join ranks as a minority bloc in the majority Liberal party? Why or why not?

This is an argumentdiscussion that's been going on for years. At this point, the Liberals have zero interest in accepting the NDP into their party, assuming the NDP would want to join.

There was a bit of an odd thing that happened in the runup to Trudeau choosing his cabinet, though: an online petition and letter-writing campaign to ask him to appoint Elizabeth May (leader of the Green Party) as Minister of the Environment. I have no idea what Trudeau thought of it; Elizabeth May said she was flattered that people thought so highly of her, but she said it's not an offer he would want to make, but even if he did, she would decline. It would mean compromising the Green Party's platform and goals to support those of the Liberals, and there are some issues on which they are absolutely not on the same side.

If we only had 2 federal parties in Canada (a leftie party and a rightie party), the left-leaning party wouldn't have try to compete with any other left-leaning party. They'd always be a "shoe in" for the left vote, so unless the country was all of a sudden for some reason starting to turn conservative generally speaking, they wouldn't really have to bother to improve much. Society though is slowly moving to the left, at least up here in Canada, so that would probably never happen.

Our system isn't perfect, but if we only had 2 parties to choose from, it would be a lot worse. The Liberals, for example, in order to win this election had to make a lot of promises. They had to be more attractive to left-leaning voters than the NDP was. I mean, they were also trying to be more attractive to centrist voters who usually vote conservative or whatever... but either way competition between political parties is usually a good thing for your average voter and the country as a whole. If you only have 2 parties to vote for, and power alternates between them, instead you sort of wait for the other party to fall out of favour, and then take your turn. And then when your side falls out of favour, the other side takes over. Not much room for improvement in this machine, and not much choice for the voters.

We don't have much more choice than you guys, but the added competition is a good thing.

It's only since 2011 that the NDP was any kind of serious contender for winning an election, as they became the Official Opposition. They actually could have won the election in October, but bizarre stuff kept happening. Then people realized that if they really wanted Harper gone, they'd better make a firm decision, even if it meant holding their noses and voting Liberal. Some people did this only because Trudeau promised to change the voting system from FPTP to something else. So a lot of the Liberal votes came from people who figured, "This time I'll vote Liberal to get rid of Harper and his fake Conservatives and four years from now when we have the new system, I'll vote the way I really wanted to."

So who knows what will happen in 2019... some of those Liberal votes came from people who want the old traditional Progressive Conservative party back.

Tribes are also about how people encourage and coerce one another to fall in line and to choose a tribe to align themselves with and against. Differences are minimized, ignored, or punished. Loyalty is demanded and divisions are considered some kind of natural order. Outsiders are mistrusted, shunned, or outright attacked; renegades, deserters, and turncoats may be treated even more harshly.

You've just described the situation that happened several years ago between the Orthodox Herbertarians and the "Prequelites" on Arrakeen forum and the Dunenovels forum.

Two OH'ers actually started stalking me around the internet (including here) because they didn't think I was "orthodox" enough (I'd committed the Great Sin of being polite to Kevin J. Anderson, Byron Merritt, and some of the prequel fans, and not giving the OH'ers free reign to flame the prequel fans and engage in cyberbullying).

 

[Bootstoots]

Tribes are also about how people encourage and coerce one another to fall in line and to choose a tribe to align themselves with and against. Differences are minimized, ignored, or punished. Loyalty is demanded and divisions are considered some kind of natural order. Outsiders are mistrusted, shunned, or outright attacked; renegades, deserters, and turncoats may be treated even more harshly.

To an extent. Only some of the extremists think in these terms most of the time - in reality, there is a spectrum of different opinions within each tribe, and merely having some different opinions doesn't mean you aren't a member. Within some echo chambers, people with different opinions may be treated in this way, but in general this isn't how most people organize their social lives.

This very idea that Americans can or should be divided into "red" and "blue" is, to be charitable, counter-productive. It's not new, of course. Mr. Alexander isn't making a novel observation*. I think it was Willie Nelson who said that in the 1960s the difference between folk music and country music was how you felt about the Vietnam War. And of course many of the stereotypical characteristics of "red" and "blue" can still be drawn on a map of the United States that closely resembles the map of our Civil War.

* Alexander did get one thing wrong, though: Football isn't the sport that divides our red and blue tribes, according to tradition, it's auto racing.

I agree with most of this. Certainly dividing everyone into two tribes is a counterproductive thing to do, and it would be better to try to look at differences in a more holistic way, rather than putting people into binary classes. But the red tribe/blue tribe classification is still meaningful even if focusing on it is a bad idea.

What he points out in this post is that, despite the fact that he is remarkably tolerant of other political opinions (he talks with people ranging from communists to neoreactionaries), literally zero of his top ~150 contacts are creationists compared to 46% of the population, and at most 10 (probably fewer, and probably just the neoreactonaries) oppose gay marriage compared to 40-something percent of the population. The red tribe may as well be a different ethnic group, for all the contact he or most relatively liberal people have with them. This makes them the perfect outgroup, and they're not even visibly different, so attacking them doesn't conflict with blue tribe ideology. When blue tribe people say "I can tolerate anything except intolerance," they're really saying "I can tolerate anything except the outgroup," which is where the title of the post comes from.

 

[Mouthwash]

Peter Beinart has a theory of American politics that doesn't draw upon stereotypes to explain anything. Read and compare.

 

[Bootstoots]

Peter Beinart has a theory of American politics that doesn't draw upon stereotypes to explain anything. Read and compare.

That post is a long argument that the pendulum is swinging back to the left, which is certainly true on some issues. I don't see how that's relevant to this discussion, though.

 

[Rashiminos]

Here's a theory. Americans can be divided into two politically and socially influential sets, the Red Tribe and the Blue Tribe.

...

Do you think the Grey Tribe is sufficiently large and sufficiently different from the other Tribes that it necessitates a tribal designation? Will it ever reach that quanta? Are we seeing a shift to a cultural triumvirate or is this all just a big fad?

It's a really big fad, but America loves fads. Permanent divisions just break rule number 1.

 

[Mouthwash]

That post is a long argument that the pendulum is swinging back to the left, which is certainly true on some issues. I don't see how that's relevant to this discussion, though.

It talks a lot about demographic/social trends, which are more useful than simply breaking Americans down into chunks with stereotypes attached to them.

 

[Arwon]

I'm really weirded out by arugula/rocket (the bad green for garbage people) being held up as the characteristic food of US Democrat voters.