Content warning: conjunction fallacy. Trigger warning: basilisk for anxiety.
Sources
Interestingly, I think I see the difference between leftists and liberals become more important for Americans as well — at least among the coastal, educated middle classes where outright conservatives are rare enough to make the other two turn on each other in fits of online culture warring, just like game theory would predict. In a pure Thrive environment the ways leftists and liberals agree become nothing more than background scenery and the divisions start to stand out.
- https://srconstantin.wordpress.com/2018/04/24/wrongology-101/
- https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/22/right-is-the-new-left/
Fundies – in all of their Bible-beating gun-owning cousin-marrying stereotypicalness – have so far served as the Lower Class With Which One Must Not Allow One’s Self To Be Confused. But I think that’s changing. Sorting mechanisms are starting to work so well that, at the top, the fundies just aren’t plausible.
Reasoning
Over the last decade, the coalition between socialists and liberals has visibly become increasingly tenuous in America. This suggests to me that a rearrangement, such that the two political coalitions would not be separated along the thrive-survive axis but along the cognitive (de)coupling axis, is somewhat probable within a decade (10-50%, I'm uncertain whether my crystal ball works at all). Conditional on this happening, I find it much more probable that the existing party brands would move "clockwise" (Democrat couplers, Republican decouplers) than the contrary. To my mind, the most salient trigger (or "factor that is currently missing") is a libertarian (rather than Up) Republican presidential candidate.
Where would memes develop, particularly of the hypothesized Left+Up coalition? There's already a lot of anti-capitalism, anti-decoupling (of the "math is racist" sort), and ancestry-based category-essentialism applied to people. These can be expected to be intensified once they no longer have to please the erstwhile allies, the liberals. Furthermore, the makeup of the respective coalitions would by itself create a situation where the currently (in 2020) narratively-approved ethnicities would be joined on the L+U side by the "fundies" who are at this point a fargroup which can be condescended to. Conditional on the shift happening, I consider it mildly probable (no %, ball fogged up) that the narrative would change to disapprove specifically of Asians and/or a traditional middleman minority, given the preexisting stereotypes of high-decoupling and capitalism.
This leads to a counterintuitive conclusion that, for the time being, having authoritarian "right-wing" politicians/figureheads in office benefits traditionally persecuted groups. They cannot do anything against them (because that pattern-matches to a known form of evil) but they might delay the above-described shift.
Summary
Overall, I'm hypothesizing a rearrangement of the Red/Blue tribes, which seems absurdly unlikely; but the internal fraying of the Liberal+Socialist coalition (mostly along the Blue/Gray tribe boundary) seems to be a driving fashion; electorally, "free radicals" (sorry) have to bind somewhere; and one tribal rearrangement is a force that can cause another.
P.S. Elevating self-esteem as one of the most important virtues leaves a trap under it. Its logic goes, "If you don't feel happy, that's sinful, and you should feel bad for it, then notice that you aren't happy." (I did promise a basilisk for anxiety, right?)
I also(?) have a sort of intuitive sense that this post is Not Less Wrong, in some sense. (Probably because "contemporary politics, boo."
At the same time, I'm glad you wrote it, glad I read it, and I got useful things from it. Since I wouldn't have read it if you hadn't posted it here, that kind of commits me to thinking it's lucky for me that you did.
I don't find the categories confusing, I'd speculate that this is because there's a lot of overlap in the ontologies being used by you, me, and Nerst- these feel like clusters-I-recognize-and-care-about rather than gerrymandered-feeling ones. But this is interestingly subjective- a lot of people mentally carving reality in ways that seem gerrymandered to me are doing that because they care about different features of category membership than I do, not being dishonest or disingenuous or even making any kind of mistake. This leaves me without any principled way to determine how much rigor is really needed- any level less than "infinite" is gonna confuse some people.
I'm trying to keep the content enumerated in this comment to LW-approved/LW-typical topic areas- I get a lot of value out of this place, getting banned would suck, and I really do owe the people running it a certain amount of consideration. This is also why my comment says things like "I'm glad I read this, and I guess I'm glad you posted it here so I could" rather than "AWESOME ARTICLE! Thanks so much, I have all kinds of thoughts about this!" but I do wanna convey my sincere gratitude.
I'm interested in how you think this fits the trajectory we've seen since you wrote it- a few things jumped out to me, there- but I think I'm gonna wait and ask you about that somewhere I can be sure I'm not violating norms. (I'm not great at intuiting ambiguous or unarticulated social norms, so I try to leave myself a lot of slack- there's a decent chance I may need it later). I think I actually know you from twitter- I'm like 97% confident you're the same person, both based on username and conversational content- so venue-shuffling doesn't seem likely to present much practical difficulty.
One more marginal comment: I have the strong sense you're doing truthseeking here- trying to actually model the physical world. I've just come from an argument about politics on another blog that I gradually realized was... not about that, at all, after I'd already emotionally invested in it some. That's locally a very disheartening experience- it doesn't last, but you feel pretty bad for the next hour. This kinda pulled me out of it, and I'm thankful.
Retrospectively, I'd say that I was doing counterintuitiveness-seeking. "Hey, look at this, the commonly used extremely simple model says that definitely P, while this more complex model (which seems to me to be more descriptive of the world) says that maybe not P." This is mildly dangerous on its own, because while it runs on truthseeking, it also subordinates that to contrarianism. And doing this on a political topic was particularly stupid of me.