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Everyone invoking principles needs to understand it’s all tribal. Democrats were for pushing Starlink to help with Biden’s military, but against pushing Anthropic to help with Trump’s military. Anthropic is for copying data when it trains their models, and against when it comes to Chinese distillation attacks on their models. Republicans were against state power when Democrats were using it to make everything woke, and for state power when Republicans are using it for MAGA. I mean, duh! This is all completely rational. It is as rational as being for a gun that’s in your hands, and against a gun that’s pointed in your face. That said, recognizing tribal reality doesn’t mean being against cooperation, or even against principles. You can cooperate within tribes. And you can even cooperate between tribes. You just have to understand what tribe you’re in and what tribe you’re dealing with. You can also have principles. But recognize that the only principles that survive natural selection are those that generate collective strength for a tribe over time. Once you know your tribe, and you know their tribe, and your principles, and their principles…you can propose a true win/win deal that satisfies both tribes’ interests. Just don’t imagine that their tribe will foolishly agree to unilaterally lose because of your tribe’s (selectively invoked!) principle. Because if following the rule leads them to lose, what use is the rule? Americans don’t naturally think tribally, till recently. Why? Well, Democrats presumed everyone shared their universalist ideology, the tribe of those who pretend to have no tribe. Republicans meanwhile were used to an effortlessly dominant global empire, and not used to brooking any real resistance. And within tech, there was a big AI vs crypto split. Crypto thinks tribally, naturally. That’s what crypto tribalism is. But AI tech guys were highly enriched for being politically naive. Remember: they continued building, heads down, in the SF Bay Area, even after COVID and BLM and the like, because they believed the center-left postwar consensus would return. That the pendulum would swing back, that this too will pass, and so on. That admirable-yet-naive faith in the continued stability of America is what led them to build what they did, where they did, as the sort of last amazing contribution that Silicon Valley would make to the world before its lights went out forever. Now the political conflict, the wealth taxes, and the attacks on datacenters and tech founders themselves is ramping up. AI is learning what crypto has always known — namely that the digital is political, and that there is just no escaping the dialectic of network and state. So: assume Silicon Valley as a geographical place is going to zero because it just isn’t set up to simultaneously take on Democrats, Republicans, and China. Assume it radiates out into a thousand startup cities around the world. And focus instead on the decentralized, intrinsically tribal Internet. First, there is no moderate majority. Every graph shows escalating polarization, to the point of what Democrats are now calling “soft secession.” Second, there is no “American” — only Blue American, Red American, Tech American, and countless fragmenting sub-tribes. Third, Blue Americans like Newsom, Walz, and Mamdani are actually fine allying with China, because they need Xi if they don’t have DC. Carney’s Chinese Canada shows the way. See: https://t.co/lNwJrQjJBF I think I understand it from @slatestarcodex’s point of view. (1) First, just like a Republican, he was being loyal to his tribe. Except that tribe was center-left Bay Area EAs, as opposed to center-right DC tech MAGAs. These tribes actually have many shared friends, but neither really represents “America” — which doesn’t exist anymore as a unified nation, except in the heads of Republicans, which is in part what all the anger is about. (2) Second, just like a Republican, Scott was angry at a betrayal. But not of the American nation (which, again, only still exists in the heads of Republicans). Rather, from Scott’s standpoint, he kind of went out on a limb to sort of gingerly support the tech right, on the basis of libertarianish principles shared by some (but no means all) people in his tribe. And what does he get in return? His friends’ companies are threatened with seizure to use in a war he doesn’t support. (3) A fundamental issue is that just like Democrats use “democracy” to mean rule by Democrats, Republicans use “American” interchangeably with Red American. Thus, just like Democrats are always confused that ~50% of democratic votes don’t go their way, Republicans are always mad that ~50% of Americans just aren’t Red Americans. I thought the Kirk assassination would convince Republicans that “America” doesn’t exist, because millions of their “fellow Americans” were cheering to shoot Republicans on sight. But they still seem to think their primary issue is with foreigners rather than Blue Americans. All the tariffs on Uruguay and threats against Greenland or whatever are just a way for Republicans to externalize their grief about the end of America. Only when Blue Americans formally ally with China — like Carney’s Communist Canada — will Red Americans finally treat Blues like Blue treat Reds, namely as their principal enemy tribe. After all, Blues also support strong borders and mass deportation…they just want to deport ICE (namely Republicans) from blue states. But all that is still some time away. (4) When that day comes, I actually don’t think the tech left will go all the way to the communist left, btw. I think they will ultimately work with the tech right again, on open source AI and crypto. If only because tech leftists have better things to do than serve as overseas apparatchiks for the Communist Party, while woke leftists do not. (5) But until then, everyone will do better if they just understand that 1950s homogenous America doesn’t exist, and won’t be coming back, and that the basis for all cooperation is to (i) establish what tribes are involved and then to (ii) figure out what win/win relationships are even possible between those tribes. However, just that realization alone means recognizing that the American experiment is unfortunately over, and that we’ll need to rebuild from scratch on the Internet. Much as Russia rebuilt after the end of the USSR, and China rebuilt after Maoism, and India rebuilt after 1991, it is possible to rebuild within decades. But to get to that W we need to take the L. @slatestarcodex The right is composed of subtribes, because US left and right aren't symmetric. A better conceptual frame than left and right is woke and non-woke. Like Soviet and non-Soviet. There was only one way to be Soviet. But many ways to be non-Soviet. You could be capitalist, Catholic, Estonian, etc. Similarly, there's only one way to be woke. But many ways to be non-woke. Hence, many subtribes on the right: