{"id":7330,"date":"2018-11-13T07:32:54","date_gmt":"2018-11-13T07:32:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/?p=7330"},"modified":"2018-11-13T07:32:54","modified_gmt":"2018-11-13T07:32:54","slug":"hidden-tribes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/2018\/11\/13\/hidden-tribes\/","title":{"rendered":"Hidden tribes"},"content":{"rendered":"

Niall Fergusson wrote in The Sunday Times a couple of weeks ago about Hidden Tribes: A Study of America\u2019s Polarised Landscape<\/em>, saying that it\u00a0offers\u00a0<\/em>a\u00a0new political typology that divides Americans into seven political categories:<\/p>\n

1 <\/b>Progressive activists: younger, highly engaged, secular, cosmopolitan, angry (8%)<\/em><\/p>\n

2 <\/b>Traditional liberals: older, retired, open to compromise, rational, cautious (11%)<\/em><\/p>\n

3<\/b> Passive liberals: unhappy, insecure, distrustful, disillusioned (15%)<\/em><\/p>\n

4<\/b> Politically disengaged: young, low income, distrustful, detached, patriotic, conspiratorial (26%)<\/em><\/p>\n

5<\/b> Moderates: engaged, civic-minded, middle-of-the-road, pessimistic, Protestant (15%)<\/em><\/p>\n

6<\/b> Traditional conservatives: religious, middle class, patriotic, moralistic (19%)<\/em><\/p>\n

7<\/b> Devoted conservatives: white, retired, highly engaged, uncompromising, patriotic (6%)<\/em><\/p>\n

I know where I sit on this typology \u2013 well, for the moment \u2013 even though it is not fully applicable to the UK. \u00a0Fergusson said that, on the extremes \u2014 groups 1 and 7 \u2014<\/p>\n

\"... life is literally as well as metaphorically black and white. \u00a0Fully 99% of progressives believe that many white people today don\u2019t recognise the real advantages they have, but 82% of devoted conservatives reject this, maintaining that nowadays white people do not have any real advantages over others. \u00a0It\u2019s the same polarised story on the whole suite of identity politics issues: immigration, Islamophobia, feminism.\" \u00a0He noted that the picture is very different in the middle where the study characterises groups 2 to 5 as \u201cthe exhausted majority\u201d.<\/p>\n

Exhausted, that is, by identity politics. \u00a0We're not quite there in the UK, although identity politics is being pushed hard by people whose interests lie in disrupting the prevailing political order.<\/p>\n

I read all this at the same time as a report in the Economist which said that Americans are more likely to change their religion that their politics as they get older, which might explain a lot. \u00a0There is, of course, a lot of choice: I remember Henry Hobhouse writing that in the early American colonies all you needed were 7 followers to form a religious sect. \u00a0This was in stark contrast to Spanish Catholic South America where sects were not tolerated no matter how many zillion members they had.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Niall Fergusson wrote in The Sunday Times a couple of weeks ago about Hidden Tribes: A Study of America\u2019s Polarised Landscape, saying that it\u00a0offers\u00a0a\u00a0new political typology that divides Americans into seven political categories: 1 Progressive activists: younger, highly engaged, secular,...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":237,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7330","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-comment","category-new-publications"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7330","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/237"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7330"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7330\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7330"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7330"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/edswahs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7330"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}