Hacker News Reader

Comment by benreesman | Hacker News Reader

The tribes in the United States used to be called Yankee and Dixie. Now they're called other things, sometimes "red" and "blue", sometimes "MAGA" or "woke", but the geography (Mason-Dixon line), the sympathies, the prejudices, all very visible to this day.

Americans have no trouble seeing tribalism or clannish behavior when its in the Middle East, or in Africa, but seem to think America is differentnt (a phenomenon that also has a name: American Exceptionalism).

In my view, the Yankee/Dixie tribal cold war combined with American Exceptionalism is some pretty stiff stuff indeed.

View on HN

Not american and have no idea what the situation there is like, but from election county maps it seems that the divide is much more fine-grained than you make it sound (nowhere near the sort of thing you see in Germany for example).

Yes geo-wise it’s often urban vs in USA. What’s it like in Germany?

East Germany border is very very visible.

You mean the border to West Germany. /s

Sorry, but I couldn't resist to point that out. But after all it is just a matter of perspective.

Hey, borders with Poland and Czechia are clearly visible too!

> (a phenomenon that also has a name: American Exceptionalism).

I’m not American by live in the US, and I agree. This inability of Americans, on average ofc, (regardless of the degree, social status, race, etc) to accept that people in other countries may view A THING differently than what Americans think these said people think is mind boggling.

Americans see tribalism just fine: we’ve been discussing since Malcolm X how the tribal sentiments of minorities are utilized by a political party in the pursuit of power.

And the primary division these days is urban vs rural, with the secondary PMC vs working class. Woke vs MAGA maps onto that divide more cleanly than anything else.

I think its much more useful to think of those divides as artificial or manufactured creations, as a tool for pacification, divide and conquer. You can also see that expressed in US foreign policy, the sunni/shia/kurdish divide in Iraq after the war, that too was an artificial creation by the US ruling class.

US foreign policy might have exacerbated some tribal or sectarian conflicts but historically those groups have never gotten along very well. There is a long history of violence stretching back centuries before the US even existed.

I think you downplaying it, but I understand the need to defend the US at all times. A source on the matter for example:

> "This analysis paper begins by examining how the U.S. occupation effectively dismantled the Iraqi state post-2003, paving the way for sectarian conflict and allowing for armed groups and sectarian elites to fill the resulting gap. It explores the weaponization of sect and identity and its devastating consequences for the country. The second part focuses on the Baath Party-enforced political and institutional order to explain how the former regime was able to constrain the space for group identities."

> "Sectarianism would not have become the powerful, destructive force that it did were it not for the weaponization of identity and sect by the exiled opposition and a series of disastrous post-conflict reconstruction policies"

https://www.brookings.edu/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/Sectari...

I think John Dolan's take is the ruthlessly honest one: some neighborhoods are rougher than others, and that's not a parochial or imperialist sentiment a-priori the way some would try to paint it (the Troubles are far too recent to think that white/Empire-descended people have forgotten real sectarian conflict).

Saddam Hussein was siting on top of one of the most complex and high-intensity sectarian fault lines on Earth (not unlike other Baathist proto-commies-turned-strongmen who have since been replaced by Islamist hardliners) and he kept order with the kinds of brutality that keep order when salients like that are in play.

I don't know what the long-term humane solution will be, but it won't be sanctimonious twittering on the heels of an Arc Light strike. I think self-determination is an easy talk to talk but a harder walk to walk for cultures like America.

Exactly my point, this has been going on in America for a long time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com