Kamalas pivot away from wokeness was also more of an Etch a Sketch shake than some new direction the Democrat Party was taking. Biden governed way to the left of how he campaigned for the first 3.5 years of his presidency, until it came time to pose as moderates again for the next cycle.
Part of what this election demonstrated is the limits of Etch a Sketch politics.
"Nevertheless, voters are not wrong to connect Democratic governance with radical views on issues related to race and sex."
Specifically, 4 years of Biden/Harris governance and the previous Harris campaign. Harris kept her mouth shut about the entirety of her belief system. So yeah, they weren't remotely wrong to connect Harris to the worst aspects of wokeism, since she did ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to walk any of her history back.
This is the same reason why voters don't trust Republicans on abortion. Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on your perspective), the woke stuff has gotten so bad that it can't be countered by just yelling about abortion.
There's also the fact that with Kansas keeping abortion legal, anyone really worried about the pro-lifers seriously restricting abortion is either a political hack, doesn't pay any attention, or proof we need mandatory sterilization for eugenic reasons.
Well, they're trying to scare people with the specter of national legislation restricting abortion, which I think obviously won't happen under Trump. But to be fair, who's to say that kind of sentiment won't eventually gain dominance on the right, just as wokes did on the left? That's why the issue still makes people anxious, because they know there is still a dedicated sub-faction in the right that would do something like that if they could (I should know, I'm pro-life myself).
Yes, this seems under discussed since the election, but I don’t think you’ll see much institutional support from Dems for any more of these left-leaning ballot measures anymore (abortion, minimum wage, cannabis etc).
I think this is very true. There’s a reason many of us moderate Dems kept looking for a Sister Soulja moment when a leading Dem affirmatively disavowed some far leftist stance, but it hasn’t happened (yet). No, pro-Hamas protesters weren’t allowed to speak at the convention but to my knowledge no prominent Dem came out and said that Israel had a right to eliminate the threat to it in Gaza. Likewise cities like SF elected a bunch of reform candidates but I haven’t seen too many of them come out and openly say that decriminalizing petty theft and public drug use was a huge mistake. Maybe I’m just not well informed but I do think Dems need to come out very publicly in favor of policing and the maintenance of public order even if it means more POC get arrested than they have for the last few years.
Might as well be more skeptical of disparate impact ideology altogether. I mean, there have been cases in regards to this that have unnecessarily resulted in huge, juicy lawsuits:
Surely hiring firefighters based on test results is a good idea, no? Similar for cops? If certain races or ethnic groups are underrepresented, well, that's just tough luck.
Oakland just recalled its "progressive" Mayor & DA; SF has done the same. Their replacements won't be touting the same "woke" nonsense, but they won't be Republicans.
Look at what happened in California. Prop 36 won in every county. Yet, governor Nonsense wouldn’t back it. I’m skeptical that Democrats are going to walk away from woke. Some still believe in defunding the police and decriminalizing drug dealers. They just aren’t taking about it.
I think "blue" is largely implied in the case of large cities (in the US in the last umpty years, I mean), although with Eric Johnson's (Dallas) recent D->R party switch there is a Republican mayor in the top 10 for the first time in some years (prior to that the largest R-mayor city was Fort Worth and until recently Jacksonville), and San Antonio's mayor Ron Nirenberg is sort of a progressive independent. I'm a bit too lazy (make that much too lazy :) ) to go all political nerd and find the largest city that gave Trump a plurality in the recent election.
Re sane Democrat, one to watch might be Cherelle Parker (Philadelphia since Jan 2024); again out of laziness, I'll quote Wiki (salt heavily) on the election:
"In the mayoral campaign primary, Parker ran as a moderate Democrat compared to other more progressive candidates.[16] Her campaign focused on crime and public safety, pledging to hire 300 new police officers and opposing the establishment of a supervised injection site for heroin and other injectable drugs in Philadelphia."
Keep an eye on Dan Lurie in San Francisco. It'll also be interesting to see who succeeds (the ousted) Sheng Thao in Oakland -- though the municipal unions and busybody NGOs will undoubtedly do all they can to regain their foothold here.
"The idea that parties are coalitions is something that I’ve gone back to often. It’s why Trump being as bad as his critics say isn’t as important as most people think, and Democrats seeming like nice and reasonable people doesn’t mean they won’t give us awful policies. The causes holding together each party are more important than individuals..."
Yes, a thousand times yes. I have been saying stuff like this to (among other people) anti-Trump conservatives since I was a 19-year-old in the College Republicans way back in Spring of 2016. Elected officials are only the tip of the iceberg, and while many Democrats seem to personally have moderate or reasonable views, they still empower the worst members of their coalition in the judiciary, permanent civil service, NGOs, etc. And that's where the bulk of policy is actually made. A few months ago I even wrote a whole substack post about this topic, entitled "Why it Doesn't Matter if Tim Walz is a Moderate Democrat." https://twilightpatriot.substack.com/p/why-it-doesnt-matter-if-tim-walz
Some of my readers complained about the title - "How dare you say that any Democrats are moderate!" and all that. But the smart ones got the point.
One only needs to look at what havoc seemingly innocuous policies brought down upon San Francisco. Defunding the police, reducing penalties for crime, abetting and empowered anti-social behavior, and stopped prosecuting crime. Don't even start on the Covid policies. These policies implemented by Democrats who were incompetent at best, corrupt at worst, hustled constantly, blaming outside sources ("billionaires") or outright lying ("crime is actually down") and destroyed a world-class city.
This point perfectly ties into your piece about Democrats being reasonable as a last resort. The worst excesses of the 2020 insanity are all sincerely believed by most of their coalition to this day.
Just finished the article, which I'll supplement with an example: when Manchin came out against confirming Neera Tanden in 2021, he responded to obligatory accusations of sexism by just saying "it's not personal" (https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/w-v-senator-responds-sexism-charges-after-torpedoing-neera-tanden-n1258663). I thought it was classy how he shrugged it off, but crucially, he made a conscious choice not to address what he was being accused of. Being "sexist" means you disfavor a group, not an individual, and he chose to downplay that rather than litigate it. The only alternative gets you in deeper shit in the short-term, but might be healthier for discourse and intraparty conflict long-term.
There's an inverse phenomenon where shrewd politicians might choose to not litigate credible examples of their *opponents'* racism/sexism. When Trump attacked Kamala for supposedly not being black, she just said it was the "same old tired playbook". When Obama was asked how he felt about voters rejecting him because of his race, he shrugged it off and said some might reject also him because his ears are too big. The real talent in the party knows how to spin this stuff, but you're right, the real pressure comes from below.
The evidence of "deep blue" and "deep red" polities also provides important evidence about what happens when each respective coalition gets a big win.
I know it's a lot more complicated than this, but a typical swing voter might say "TX and FL seem well-run, SF and DC not so much." Like it or not, national Dems are saddled with the actions of the SF school board, whether they deserve it or not.
Now,.as to how this same logic applies to the psychology of racism and racial stereotyping.... Actually, never mind about that.
While the idea that coalitions are more important than personalities may be somewhat true in general, it is also true that A)coalitions do sometimes change and B)there are _all signs_ of this change happening in US for the whole world to observe.
I’m not convinced that “wokeness” mattered that much this cycle. Democrats were way more aggressive about it in 2020 and they won that year. They then won in ‘22 and wokeness as a part of the party platform and strategy has only declined. Why would it be decisive this year?
The much more reasonable explanation is inflation backlash and the global anti-incumbency trend.
Wouldn't it be nice if the Left actually allowed *liberal* race realists or at least people who are adjacent to them to speak out publicly without being banned or censored or shunned?
If one wants to argue against disparate impact doctrine, then the best argument for this would be to tackle the equality thesis at its very core by embracing race realism, ideally *liberal* race realism for the left.
Your friend Anatoly Karlin wrote the above article 12 years ago.
“The media is so unused to Democrats pushing back on identity politics that a leader beginning to do so forcibly would get the attention of a man-bites-dog story.” That’s basically all John Fetterman does and it seems to work.
Yes, I think voters realize the DEI and other Woke policies are being implemented by the bureaucracy and the people staffing that bureaucracy were appointed by Democrats and mandates by executive order coming from Democrats.
Until Democrats become explicitly Anti-Woke, voters will assume (correctly) that they are just covertly Woke.
Richard...Come on now. Any two bit dunderhead knows that the Democrats when moderating their policies and hiding their pasts are lying and doing so transparently. They are hidden low decouplers something you should be more familiar with. heh heh heh
Decoupling doesn't actually make sense in most cases. It's only useful if you want the truth for some reason, such as collecting intelligence for strategy, or for intellectual curiosity.
As Richard says in his tweet, coalitions are more important than individuals, and low-decoupling is useful in judging what to say to the people around you. If someone makes a statement about the effects of defunding the police, to take an example the left is now running away from, the actual truth of that statement is only of use to a mayor or budgetary person (or police chief defending his budget). In most cases, it's more useful for you to know that the statement is coming from the Enemy (if Blue Tribe) or your side (if Red Tribe), and to reject or accept accordingly. The vast majority of people are not in a position to change police funding, and choosing who to vote for is usually about which coalition is going to be better for you. Latino men, for example, have recently decided Trump's coalition is better for them, and maybe the deportation of (illegal) immigrants opening or raising the wages of blue-collar jobs for them, or the fear of their son coming back from school as their daughter (or vice versa) outweighs whatever inflation may occur as a result of tariffs. You have a choice of two packages, you pick the one that's better for you, most people don't sit there surfing the web to see the effects of tariffs on inflation over the past 100 years in OECD nations. They don't have time, they often don't have the skills, and people would look at them funny if they talked about it. Are racial disparities due to systemic racism, or other factors? Am I going to spend my time looking at black income per capita before and after the introduction of the Civil Rights Act, or say whatever lets me keep my job?
It gets even more obvious with unverifiable things like theology. Is Jesus the Son of God or just another prophet? Does the Holy Spirit proceed from the Son? Is the Pope really the vicar of Christ? I don't know, what's more important is what the guys in shield, longsword, and chainmail rampaging through my town want to hear. You see it even now with elements of the woke 'catechism'. Is someone born biologically male but having undergone surgery to correct that 'really' a woman? What pronouns should I use for them? Well, what answer lets me keep my job?
Low-decoupling, or forming an opinion based on social desirability, has been a pretty good strategy for 99% of humanity throughout time.
I look at it this way. Both the left and the right have factions that believe deranged stuff that threaten America’s well-being. The difference is that even though Trump says and does lots of bad things, elite American institutions have been remarkably unified in resisting his craziness, like they did on January 6. The far-left may not have the unifying charismatic leader the right has but they are ultimately more dangerous because their ideas (disparity=discrimination, healthcare should be allocated on race, school discipline and law enforcement should be neutered in the name of antiracism, reparations and race based university admissions) have been eagerly absorbed by most of America’s elite institutions like universities, teachers’ unions, media and bureaucracy.
The article is quite good. I hope some Democrats follow it and the right makes the most use of its limited time.
I guess this isn't really falsfiable at the present time, but I'm waiting to see the predictions in 2 or 4 years about how wokeness is really impossible to defeat because the young are woke and Trump's victory was only an interregnum.
Being old enough to have lived through the stories about 'the death of the left' in 2004 after Kerry lost...I really wonder how much commentators would benefit from looking at politics in a cyclical fashion. I'm not expecting Richard to start calculating Fourier transforms or wavelet analyses, but the president's party usually loses in the midterms, and before we know it the apparent return to sanity/fascist takeover will be seen as a temporary mirage...
You know, hippies back in the 60s used to be big into Eastern philosophies like Buddhism and Taoism. During one of my occasional spasms of Sinophilia (completely unrelated to a breakup with a daughter of the Middle Kingdom, of course) I decided to look up the 'politically-incorrect' Asian philosophies like Legalism and Confucianism. Can't say I got all that far, though Han Fei is a pretty funny guy on occasion. I got distracted reading a massive war novel written by a Ming dynasty strategy nerd... but I do think the Asian cyclical view of time is more accurate than the Western one where we have progress building to something. Nah, the empire, long divided, must unite, and the empire, long united, must divide. You've got 1d3+1 years. Make the best of it.
Richard is confusing "coalitions" with tribes. They are two very different things.
Forever fleeting, coalitions come together for a very specific cause that is a strategic outcome and they assemble people from various cultural social and political groups
This is not what Richard says is happening to the Democrats and other parties.
”Tribes” refers to people who share kinship in feeling if not in blood. Unlike coalitions, tribes have long standing causes holding them together.
Kamalas pivot away from wokeness was also more of an Etch a Sketch shake than some new direction the Democrat Party was taking. Biden governed way to the left of how he campaigned for the first 3.5 years of his presidency, until it came time to pose as moderates again for the next cycle.
Part of what this election demonstrated is the limits of Etch a Sketch politics.
"Nevertheless, voters are not wrong to connect Democratic governance with radical views on issues related to race and sex."
Specifically, 4 years of Biden/Harris governance and the previous Harris campaign. Harris kept her mouth shut about the entirety of her belief system. So yeah, they weren't remotely wrong to connect Harris to the worst aspects of wokeism, since she did ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to walk any of her history back.
This is the same reason why voters don't trust Republicans on abortion. Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on your perspective), the woke stuff has gotten so bad that it can't be countered by just yelling about abortion.
There's also the fact that with Kansas keeping abortion legal, anyone really worried about the pro-lifers seriously restricting abortion is either a political hack, doesn't pay any attention, or proof we need mandatory sterilization for eugenic reasons.
Well, they're trying to scare people with the specter of national legislation restricting abortion, which I think obviously won't happen under Trump. But to be fair, who's to say that kind of sentiment won't eventually gain dominance on the right, just as wokes did on the left? That's why the issue still makes people anxious, because they know there is still a dedicated sub-faction in the right that would do something like that if they could (I should know, I'm pro-life myself).
The problem with countering with abortion is that it's clearly become a state's issue again that people get to vote on on that level.
So you can punish the Democratic party and vote for a ballot measure for laxer abortion limits.
The decoupling has not been good for Democrats
Amusing if true, not that long ago there was a chorus of "Republicans are going to lose elections forever because of abortion" sentiments.
Yes, this seems under discussed since the election, but I don’t think you’ll see much institutional support from Dems for any more of these left-leaning ballot measures anymore (abortion, minimum wage, cannabis etc).
I think this is very true. There’s a reason many of us moderate Dems kept looking for a Sister Soulja moment when a leading Dem affirmatively disavowed some far leftist stance, but it hasn’t happened (yet). No, pro-Hamas protesters weren’t allowed to speak at the convention but to my knowledge no prominent Dem came out and said that Israel had a right to eliminate the threat to it in Gaza. Likewise cities like SF elected a bunch of reform candidates but I haven’t seen too many of them come out and openly say that decriminalizing petty theft and public drug use was a huge mistake. Maybe I’m just not well informed but I do think Dems need to come out very publicly in favor of policing and the maintenance of public order even if it means more POC get arrested than they have for the last few years.
Might as well be more skeptical of disparate impact ideology altogether. I mean, there have been cases in regards to this that have unnecessarily resulted in huge, juicy lawsuits:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ricci_v._DeStefano
Surely hiring firefighters based on test results is a good idea, no? Similar for cops? If certain races or ethnic groups are underrepresented, well, that's just tough luck.
Oakland just recalled its "progressive" Mayor & DA; SF has done the same. Their replacements won't be touting the same "woke" nonsense, but they won't be Republicans.
Well that’s fine. I’m not a Republican. I’d be very happy to see sane democrats running large blue cities.
There are sane Democrats?
Look at what happened in California. Prop 36 won in every county. Yet, governor Nonsense wouldn’t back it. I’m skeptical that Democrats are going to walk away from woke. Some still believe in defunding the police and decriminalizing drug dealers. They just aren’t taking about it.
I think "blue" is largely implied in the case of large cities (in the US in the last umpty years, I mean), although with Eric Johnson's (Dallas) recent D->R party switch there is a Republican mayor in the top 10 for the first time in some years (prior to that the largest R-mayor city was Fort Worth and until recently Jacksonville), and San Antonio's mayor Ron Nirenberg is sort of a progressive independent. I'm a bit too lazy (make that much too lazy :) ) to go all political nerd and find the largest city that gave Trump a plurality in the recent election.
Re sane Democrat, one to watch might be Cherelle Parker (Philadelphia since Jan 2024); again out of laziness, I'll quote Wiki (salt heavily) on the election:
"In the mayoral campaign primary, Parker ran as a moderate Democrat compared to other more progressive candidates.[16] Her campaign focused on crime and public safety, pledging to hire 300 new police officers and opposing the establishment of a supervised injection site for heroin and other injectable drugs in Philadelphia."
Keep an eye on Dan Lurie in San Francisco. It'll also be interesting to see who succeeds (the ousted) Sheng Thao in Oakland -- though the municipal unions and busybody NGOs will undoubtedly do all they can to regain their foothold here.
"The idea that parties are coalitions is something that I’ve gone back to often. It’s why Trump being as bad as his critics say isn’t as important as most people think, and Democrats seeming like nice and reasonable people doesn’t mean they won’t give us awful policies. The causes holding together each party are more important than individuals..."
Yes, a thousand times yes. I have been saying stuff like this to (among other people) anti-Trump conservatives since I was a 19-year-old in the College Republicans way back in Spring of 2016. Elected officials are only the tip of the iceberg, and while many Democrats seem to personally have moderate or reasonable views, they still empower the worst members of their coalition in the judiciary, permanent civil service, NGOs, etc. And that's where the bulk of policy is actually made. A few months ago I even wrote a whole substack post about this topic, entitled "Why it Doesn't Matter if Tim Walz is a Moderate Democrat." https://twilightpatriot.substack.com/p/why-it-doesnt-matter-if-tim-walz
Some of my readers complained about the title - "How dare you say that any Democrats are moderate!" and all that. But the smart ones got the point.
One only needs to look at what havoc seemingly innocuous policies brought down upon San Francisco. Defunding the police, reducing penalties for crime, abetting and empowered anti-social behavior, and stopped prosecuting crime. Don't even start on the Covid policies. These policies implemented by Democrats who were incompetent at best, corrupt at worst, hustled constantly, blaming outside sources ("billionaires") or outright lying ("crime is actually down") and destroyed a world-class city.
This point perfectly ties into your piece about Democrats being reasonable as a last resort. The worst excesses of the 2020 insanity are all sincerely believed by most of their coalition to this day.
Just finished the article, which I'll supplement with an example: when Manchin came out against confirming Neera Tanden in 2021, he responded to obligatory accusations of sexism by just saying "it's not personal" (https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/w-v-senator-responds-sexism-charges-after-torpedoing-neera-tanden-n1258663). I thought it was classy how he shrugged it off, but crucially, he made a conscious choice not to address what he was being accused of. Being "sexist" means you disfavor a group, not an individual, and he chose to downplay that rather than litigate it. The only alternative gets you in deeper shit in the short-term, but might be healthier for discourse and intraparty conflict long-term.
There's an inverse phenomenon where shrewd politicians might choose to not litigate credible examples of their *opponents'* racism/sexism. When Trump attacked Kamala for supposedly not being black, she just said it was the "same old tired playbook". When Obama was asked how he felt about voters rejecting him because of his race, he shrugged it off and said some might reject also him because his ears are too big. The real talent in the party knows how to spin this stuff, but you're right, the real pressure comes from below.
The evidence of "deep blue" and "deep red" polities also provides important evidence about what happens when each respective coalition gets a big win.
I know it's a lot more complicated than this, but a typical swing voter might say "TX and FL seem well-run, SF and DC not so much." Like it or not, national Dems are saddled with the actions of the SF school board, whether they deserve it or not.
Now,.as to how this same logic applies to the psychology of racism and racial stereotyping.... Actually, never mind about that.
There's a lot of poverty and social problems in deep-red places like MS and AL too, and MA is pretty wealthy.
There's something to be said for purple.
While the idea that coalitions are more important than personalities may be somewhat true in general, it is also true that A)coalitions do sometimes change and B)there are _all signs_ of this change happening in US for the whole world to observe.
I’m not convinced that “wokeness” mattered that much this cycle. Democrats were way more aggressive about it in 2020 and they won that year. They then won in ‘22 and wokeness as a part of the party platform and strategy has only declined. Why would it be decisive this year?
The much more reasonable explanation is inflation backlash and the global anti-incumbency trend.
Wouldn't it be nice if the Left actually allowed *liberal* race realists or at least people who are adjacent to them to speak out publicly without being banned or censored or shunned?
https://akarlin.com/race-denial-vs-racism-a-false-dichotomy/
If one wants to argue against disparate impact doctrine, then the best argument for this would be to tackle the equality thesis at its very core by embracing race realism, ideally *liberal* race realism for the left.
Your friend Anatoly Karlin wrote the above article 12 years ago.
“The media is so unused to Democrats pushing back on identity politics that a leader beginning to do so forcibly would get the attention of a man-bites-dog story.” That’s basically all John Fetterman does and it seems to work.
Yes, I think voters realize the DEI and other Woke policies are being implemented by the bureaucracy and the people staffing that bureaucracy were appointed by Democrats and mandates by executive order coming from Democrats.
Until Democrats become explicitly Anti-Woke, voters will assume (correctly) that they are just covertly Woke.
The Woke were always about bureaucracy.
Richard...Come on now. Any two bit dunderhead knows that the Democrats when moderating their policies and hiding their pasts are lying and doing so transparently. They are hidden low decouplers something you should be more familiar with. heh heh heh
Decoupling doesn't actually make sense in most cases. It's only useful if you want the truth for some reason, such as collecting intelligence for strategy, or for intellectual curiosity.
As Richard says in his tweet, coalitions are more important than individuals, and low-decoupling is useful in judging what to say to the people around you. If someone makes a statement about the effects of defunding the police, to take an example the left is now running away from, the actual truth of that statement is only of use to a mayor or budgetary person (or police chief defending his budget). In most cases, it's more useful for you to know that the statement is coming from the Enemy (if Blue Tribe) or your side (if Red Tribe), and to reject or accept accordingly. The vast majority of people are not in a position to change police funding, and choosing who to vote for is usually about which coalition is going to be better for you. Latino men, for example, have recently decided Trump's coalition is better for them, and maybe the deportation of (illegal) immigrants opening or raising the wages of blue-collar jobs for them, or the fear of their son coming back from school as their daughter (or vice versa) outweighs whatever inflation may occur as a result of tariffs. You have a choice of two packages, you pick the one that's better for you, most people don't sit there surfing the web to see the effects of tariffs on inflation over the past 100 years in OECD nations. They don't have time, they often don't have the skills, and people would look at them funny if they talked about it. Are racial disparities due to systemic racism, or other factors? Am I going to spend my time looking at black income per capita before and after the introduction of the Civil Rights Act, or say whatever lets me keep my job?
It gets even more obvious with unverifiable things like theology. Is Jesus the Son of God or just another prophet? Does the Holy Spirit proceed from the Son? Is the Pope really the vicar of Christ? I don't know, what's more important is what the guys in shield, longsword, and chainmail rampaging through my town want to hear. You see it even now with elements of the woke 'catechism'. Is someone born biologically male but having undergone surgery to correct that 'really' a woman? What pronouns should I use for them? Well, what answer lets me keep my job?
Low-decoupling, or forming an opinion based on social desirability, has been a pretty good strategy for 99% of humanity throughout time.
I look at it this way. Both the left and the right have factions that believe deranged stuff that threaten America’s well-being. The difference is that even though Trump says and does lots of bad things, elite American institutions have been remarkably unified in resisting his craziness, like they did on January 6. The far-left may not have the unifying charismatic leader the right has but they are ultimately more dangerous because their ideas (disparity=discrimination, healthcare should be allocated on race, school discipline and law enforcement should be neutered in the name of antiracism, reparations and race based university admissions) have been eagerly absorbed by most of America’s elite institutions like universities, teachers’ unions, media and bureaucracy.
The article is quite good. I hope some Democrats follow it and the right makes the most use of its limited time.
I guess this isn't really falsfiable at the present time, but I'm waiting to see the predictions in 2 or 4 years about how wokeness is really impossible to defeat because the young are woke and Trump's victory was only an interregnum.
Being old enough to have lived through the stories about 'the death of the left' in 2004 after Kerry lost...I really wonder how much commentators would benefit from looking at politics in a cyclical fashion. I'm not expecting Richard to start calculating Fourier transforms or wavelet analyses, but the president's party usually loses in the midterms, and before we know it the apparent return to sanity/fascist takeover will be seen as a temporary mirage...
You know, hippies back in the 60s used to be big into Eastern philosophies like Buddhism and Taoism. During one of my occasional spasms of Sinophilia (completely unrelated to a breakup with a daughter of the Middle Kingdom, of course) I decided to look up the 'politically-incorrect' Asian philosophies like Legalism and Confucianism. Can't say I got all that far, though Han Fei is a pretty funny guy on occasion. I got distracted reading a massive war novel written by a Ming dynasty strategy nerd... but I do think the Asian cyclical view of time is more accurate than the Western one where we have progress building to something. Nah, the empire, long divided, must unite, and the empire, long united, must divide. You've got 1d3+1 years. Make the best of it.
Richard is confusing "coalitions" with tribes. They are two very different things.
Forever fleeting, coalitions come together for a very specific cause that is a strategic outcome and they assemble people from various cultural social and political groups
This is not what Richard says is happening to the Democrats and other parties.
”Tribes” refers to people who share kinship in feeling if not in blood. Unlike coalitions, tribes have long standing causes holding them together.