I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup
A tangential followup to my earlier posting of this classic article from Slate Star Codex (on Tumblr as slatestarscratchpad), here’s a categorisation of the politicocultural tribes in the UK by loki-zen. I don’t endorse its accuracy in every way, and loki-zen’s own tribe is sufficiently niche than many people will never encounter it, but this sort of thing is always fun:
I think this is a useful and informative post, and it has some very interesting implications, but it is very US-centric.
I’m trying to draw some parallels in the UK but I am coming up blank. I feel like my in-group has no allegiance to any party… it’s mostly people who used to be Liberal Democrat but only because they were the least evil of the parties that was close to having a chance at doing anything and then got majorly disillusioned by the Coalition so now has no party to hang their hopes on.
Largely they are either disillusioned with voting altogether or going to vote Labour if they live in a place where that might make a difference because Labour are the new ‘least bad’.
There are, I think, at least two political ‘outgroups’ for me… there are the stereotypical Tories who are associated with things like having lots of money, being posh and/or having aristocratic heritage or aspirations, being out of touch and hating poor people. This sort of overlaps but not quite with the idea of upper middle-class people who shop at Waitrose and eat quinoa or locally-grown grass-fed free-range organic everything and fret about their children not knowing how to play the violin or speak Cantonese by the time they’re seven or whatever. Anyway, that’s like, the Blue Tribe (no relation to the US Blues since our party colours are Blue=more right wing, Red=historically left wing, now centerish).
And then there’s the other Blues who don’t overlap in any way with the former, the demographic people like UKIP and the BNP are poaching from the Tories, who are the Daily-Mail-reading immigrant-hating racist homophobic sexist ‘tribe’.
Which basically paints a picture of Tories as a group with no lower-middle-middle class people in it, I think. Blue subtribe A is at least upper-middle class with pretensions of upper class, or upper class but trying to deny it (like Cameron himself), and Blue subtribe B, if not actually working class, try to signal being working class quite strongly.
The actual left-leaning working class – mostly extent in the North and Scotland – we’ll call Red. Associations include miners, hating Thatcher, beer and blokiness, and various Northern or Scottish stereotypes.
And what is my Tribe? We can call them Yellow. My tribe of birth is the ‘chattering classes’, the middle class Lib Dem and Labour voters, the Guardian readers, the group that has a lot of parallels both with Scott Alexander’s Blue Tribe and, in fact, with some of Blue Tribe A; certainly they may well shop at Waitrose and M&S and eat either a conspicuously multicultural diet or hardcore local-organic-free-range-signalling-purity-with-my-food, but they’re also very good at putting down the white straight people they generally are, they’re very into learning things from other cultures (usually in a patronising, culturally-appropriating fashion), demonstrating how tolerant they are, etc. And they’re big into the arts and academia. Most professors (especially at ‘good Universities’) are this tribe, as is a lot of the BBC. Paul Merton and Ian Hislop, long-time stars of the UK’s longest-running satirical news/politics show 'Have I Got News For You’ are *definitely* this tribe. In fact, they almost typify it; Hislop at the upper-middle/upper-class end using his well-educated RP wit to mock the Daily Mail reading chavs, and Merton as the working-class-made-good end, earning paradoxical status for his low-status accent and mocking Hislop’s Public School education, to the delight of the Tribe.
But this Yellow (and a little Green; they’re big on the environment and will have comprised the majority of voters for the Green Party also) Tribe is the Tribe I was born into; I don’t think it is my Tribe now. It’s far too easy to mock them, for a start. Nor do I think I’m Grey Tribe; I’m definitely no Libertarian and I’ve never felt welcome in hardcore geek spaces – I’m too female, too artsy, too Yellow Tribe-ish for their liking.
The people who feel like my people care about politics but don’t feel like any party comes close to representing their views, and couldn’t do so and maintain broader popularity. We’re like 50% gay and bisexual and a much higher percentage of transgender and genderqueer than the general populace. A lot of us are into kink and various kinds of nonmonogamy. A lot, like a shit ton of us are disabled, mostly with mental illness, but not always. We’re geeky, but more fandom-geeky and into LARPing than science-geeky, although a lot of us work with computers. We’re a combination of middle class, working class and people who were raised middle class but have been a working-class level of poor for so long we no longer identify that way. We’re young. Most of us have Red-Yellow Tribe parents, but some of us have Blue Tribe parents. We probably get on with the Yellow and Red tribes better than the Blue, but we have some serious problems with the Yellows and are unlikely to know many Reds since the members of my Tribe in this country that I know about tend to live in the South and even if we’re working class we don’t frequent the Red establishments; we don’t go to the right pubs and clubs; a lot of us don’t even drink. We do a lot of other drugs though, both recreationally and medically and self-medicatingly. I dunno what to call us? But I feel like we are really not just a sub-Tribe of the Yellows.
I think maybe we like to think of ourselves as new Bohemians, wearing our fashionable ripped-up jeans cause we genuinely can’t afford new ones and experimenting with our genders and our sexualities and our art and our minds and bodies, espousing the critical and creative merits of the Yellow Tribe without the money with less of the privilege that buffers them from reality.
And then, I think, we take our meds and hug our two-to-five housemates who make living in London affordable and have a cup of tea (even when we’re on the breadline there’s a choice of normal or herbal) and realise we’re not characters from RENT.
But tribe-wise, I’m really not sure what we are.
Glossary for non-Brits:
Tories – The Conservative Party, or Conservative Party followers
The Coalition - compromise formed at the last General Election in which the Liberal Democrats joined up with the Tories (who won more votes than the other main party, the Labour Party, but not quite enough to form a Government). A lot of voters for the Liberal Democrats are very anti-Tory and saw this as a massive betrayal.
UKIP - UK Independence Party. Right wing-ish but mostly about being racist, anti-immigration and anti-Europe.
BNP - British National Party. Economically left wing, but more about being racist, anti-immigration and anti-Europe.
Waitrose, M&S – Waitrose and Marks & Spencers: a supermarket chain and chain of shops that are pretty 'upmarket’ and associated with posh people. Marks & Spencers sell other things like clothes and gifts, and it’s kind of less posh to get other things from there, but very posh to get food from there.
RP – Received Pronunciation; the 'neutral’ British accent once required to get on TV or the radio. Taught at public school and to posh kids. Associated with posh people and the South, which in the UK is the richer, more right-wing part of the country.
Chavs – pejorative; stereotypical urban white trash associated with petty crime and teenage pregnancy.
Public School – very expensive private schools for the uber rich
hmm. This seems to miss the most important “tribe” of UK post-war history, which worries me. I’m not sure where Thatcher’s Aspirational Working Class comes into it.
The type example of this species is my father. Parents were as poor as pigshit and twice as common. Bought before the property bubble and is now doing quite nicely there. Small business owner who thinks the unions are full of lazy scroungers, Europe is trying to stop him doing his job with insane rules, and that everything would be better if the government would just leave him alone.
Sure he likes the Chinese because they pay their bills on time, and doesn’t like the Pakistanis because they don’t. But he’s not really the Daily-Mail-reading immigrant-hating racist homophobic sexist 'tribe’.
Other UK people, where do you think this tribe fits?
In the brain-space of me putting that post together, these people would be Blue Tribe B. Daily-Mail-reading immigrant-hating racist homophobic sexist is more a stereotypical/exaggerated description of the hypothetical central example of that subtribe. Blue Tribe B is pretty much all the Tories’ non-posh supporters, and opinions concerning ‘lazy scroungers’ and what ethnic minorities do and don’t do various things are common in this group (and this group would voice them, which the Yellows, for instance, would never do even if they thought them).
Reminding self to write proper response when awake
