Long War

IDENTITY POLITICS AT ITS UGLIEST:

The Democrats’ Big Decision: Black Representation or More Blue Seats? (Clyde McGrady, June 4, 2026, NY Times)

But the next act in the drama over Black representation will be driven in part by Democratic leaders, some of them Black, who face a difficult decision. Do they preserve the majority-Black, overwhelmingly Democratic districts in blue states like New York, Illinois, Maryland and New Jersey? Or do they maximize Democratic representation in the House by diluting urban districts dominated by Black voters and expanding their boundaries into the suburbs. Doing the latter would allow them to target Republican House members in those states.

Those new districts would remain Democratic, though less so, but they may no longer be majority-Black. So Black voters could lose power in two ways — by losing the number of districts they dominate and by losing the number of Black voices in Congress.

Did President Obama only speak for Black Americans?

THE WAGES OF iDENTITARIANISM:

REVIEW: of Allen Buchanan, Political Tribalism: How It Hijacks Our Minds and Diminishes Our Humanity (Alexander Motchoulski, 2026.06.2, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews)

Morally, tribalistic ideologies impede individuals’ moral reasoning primarily by representing politics as a zero-sum struggle of life and death on which one’s existence and identity depend (52-53). By representing politics as a condition of high-stakes group conflict, such ideologies are supposed to motivate transgression of what would otherwise be seen as moral norms in one’s behavior toward those that one views as Other.

Cognitively, tribalistic ideologies undermine our ability to reason about and with persons perceived as Other because such ideologies represent the other in terms of rigid stereotypes which obscure differences among persons falling within that category (36-37), impede one’s ability to take the perspective of persons deemed Other (45-47), and impede uptake of testimony from persons regarded as Other (80-81). Tribalistic ideologies’ effects on our moral reasoning compound with those cognitive effects, transforming what should be truth-seeking discourse into interactions aimed at defensive scorekeeping against opposition criticism (rather than fair consideration of and response to such criticism) and exercises in signaling one’s group affiliation and sorting one’s interactions to take place with one’s group (62-5).

Tribalism, then, is that way of thinking and feeling, of seeing and desiring and reacting, that is the driving force behind the antagonism observed in contemporary politics.

CONTESTING VICTIMHOOD:

Anti-Woke, or Just Wounded? A Typology of Two Types of Anti-Woke Intellectuals (Scott Barry Kaufman, June 1, 2026, Skeptic)

When we hear “narcissism,” we picture the grandiose type: the swaggering, self-promoting, attention-hungry performer. But in a study with Joshua Miller, W. Keith Campbell, and Brandon Weiss, my colleagues and I mapped how narcissism actually breaks apart into different faces. There’s grandiose narcissism: antagonistic, dominant, status-seeking. And there’s vulnerable narcissism: neurotic, hypersensitive, easily wounded, perpetually aggrieved, convinced the world has failed to grant the recognition it owes. The antagonism is the thread the two share.

Both feed the second anti-woke intellectual, but in different ways. Grandiose narcissism builds the brand: the crusader who discovers that being The Person Who Fights This Thing brings a following, a revenue stream, a standing ovation, and who needs the enemy to stay enormous because the enemy is now load-bearing for the self. Vulnerable narcissismsupplies the wound: the person who was genuinely humiliated—fired, mobbed, exiled, betrayed—and for whom the critique is no longer about the world at all but about settling a score that never closes. A real injury becomes a permanent organizing principle. The crusade is the bandage that never comes off because the cut is never allowed to heal.

And when this goes collective, it gets its own engine. The work of Agnieszka Golec de Zavala on collective narcissism describes groups built around the belief that we are exceptional, that we are not sufficiently recognized, and shows that such groups reliably turn hostile toward whoever they cast as the threat to the in-group’s image. An anti-woke movement organized around shared grievance, rather than shared inquiry, will behave exactly this way: ever-vigilant, ever-aggrieved, retaliating against perceived insults to its own greatness. The truth-seeking recedes; the score-settling takes over.

That’s the distinction I’d draw, and I’d put it as a question anyone in this fight can ask themselves: Am I doing this to make society better, or to repair a narcissistic injury? The two can look identical from the outside. They have very different effects on the world.

And here is the part I find mega-ironic: the second camp talks, almost without exception, from a place of pure victim mindset. The very thing they are most likely to mock in their opponents (the grievance gang, the victimhood culture, the perpetual woundedness group, the “everyone is out to get us” cohort) is the thing they have most thoroughly become. Their accusation becomes a mirror of themselves.

This is the root of the Right’s obsession with manliness: they lack iot.

CHOKING ON THEIR BILE:

How Right-Wing Politics Make You Physically Ill (Kristen French, May 29, 2026, Nautilus)

A team of scientists found that conservative Americans got measurably less healthy than liberal Americans over the course of the 2010s. By the early 2020s they were dying at significantly higher rates, even setting aside COVID-19 deaths. They also ran a separate large survey, in 2024, of more than 21,000 people and found that right-leaning Americans—especially Republicans and Trump voters—are less likely to trust their doctors, follow medical advice, and seek care when they probably should.

It isn’t just about COVID vaccines. It extends to medications for chronic conditions like diabetes and hypertension, and to willingness to go to the doctor for chest pain.