Tribalism is now the word used by commentators in the media to describe the woeful state of our politics here and in the world. In her new book, Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations, Amy Chua makes the argument that though we are a biologically tribal species, we should be able to resist the destructive polarizing effect our tribalist nature has on our politics.In chapters on Afghanistan, Iraq, Venezuela and Terrorism, she impressively documents, the tribal cultures that define their politics and the blindness of American foreign policy in trying to impose our version of democracy on them. She is understandably less successful in offering solutions. In the chapter on Iraq, she cites the successful efforts of then Colonel H.R. McMaster, who later became Trump’s national security advisor, to conciliate the Sunnis by listening respectfully to what they said of their needs and desires and addressing them. His efforts were a model for a surge of new “coalition” troops led by General David Petraeus. Whatever success they achieved in reducing American and Iraqi casualties, McMmaster and Petraeus did not put an end to the conflict between Sunnis and Shiites. What Chua does not say is that by her own logic we should never have invaded Iraq. No nation from the outside can solve the problems of countries in the Middle East; it is the task of the indigenous populations.
According to her, America is not exempt from tribalism, exemplified by the intense hostility between left and right. The left she argues sees the right as racist and bigoted and the right views the left as afflicted by political correctness and identity politics. “They are both right.” And, she argues, their tribalism tears at the fabric of American society. To the same degree? Do we have here a false equivalence? What we need is a spelling out of terms and their application. Political correctness is reflexively seen as the exclusive possession of the left as if the right is free of it, but one only needs to attend to the behavior of the “conservative” ruling party to see how their version of political correctness is practiced: an unregulated “free market,” denial of climate change, little or no role for the federal government in providing health care. Identity politics is a more complicated matter. It has its origins on the left and has provoked identity politics on the right. “Black lives matter” is set against the interests of the white working class. In its exclusionary aspect, identity politics is destructive, but this has not always been the case. When a group is marginalized or oppressed, identity politics is inevitable. The question is: what form does it take and how does it evolve? In the case of the civil rights movement when identity politics was led by Martin Luther King, the aspiration was for equality and inclusion. Identity politics becomes destructive when it becomes antagonistically exclusionary.
Is it fair to say, as Chua seems to be saying, that both left and right sides of the spectrum, especially in the Trump era suffer in equal measure from tribalism? Certainly, left identity politics and political correctness do not begin to match racism and bigotry in their poisonous effect. The conservative side, particularly its Trumpian manifestation, asserts its white identity against immigrants. The progressive side in the main is universalist, cosmopolitan and inclusive. By what stretch of language can progressive universalism be considered tribal. There are, to be sure, conservatives who are inclusive in their embrace of ethnicities with various degrees of conviction and there are progressives who indulge in an exclusionary identity politics in behalf of particular oppressed groups. It would seem that the moral advantage would be on the inclusionary side. In any campaign for workers’ benefits by trade unions, white, black, brown and yellow would be on the palette. Common ground would have to be found on the inclusionary side if one wishes to put an end to tribalism. Then why paint it with the tribal brush? Chua faults the cosmopolitan coastal elite for its disdain of the heartland and its values: fear of immigrants, an unregulated gun culture, an unexamined hostility to scientific knowledge about climate change. What is there not to disdain in such attitudes and values and where is the tribalism in the disdain?
Tribalism may be a useful category in characterizing the divisions between Sunnis and Shiites. Here I would defer to Chua, but in the United States It may obscure the more relevant category in considering what divides our country, ideology. Unlike tribalism, which is a matter of group sentiment, traditions and customs, ideology is the site of a contest of ideas about the role or roles of government. Is climate warming a reality? Is it influenced by human practices, for example, emissions from automobiles, and should government have a role in mitigating the deleterious effects of climate change through regulation? Scientists answer these questions with a forceful YES. Democrats, liberals, progressives (the left) agree. Republicans and their president are in denial. The president with no knowledge of the subject calls the scientific consensus about human induced climate warming a hoax. On gun control, the evidence is overwhelming that in countries where the sale and possession of guns are regulated, there is a significant reduction in violence and death. The responses to the call for government regulation are “yes” by Democrats and “no” by Republicans. What motivates the right’s resistance to regulation is a combination of ideological mistrust of central government and corporate interest. How does tribalism fairly characterize the rational liberal views of climate change and gun control? I am not dismissing “tribalism” as a useful way of characterizing aspects of our political culture. My objection is to its indiscriminate application to both sides off political divide.
In a recent op-ed in The New York Times, “Respect First, Then Gun Control,” David Brooks laments the absence of civil discourse in our politics. He sees civility, as I see it, as a condition of a healthy democratic process. Ideally, the civil give and take across political lines produces or should produce principled compromise. But civil discourse is not possible when one side represents views that are beyond the pale. (Nor is it possible when the president is the height of incivility.) An example is gun control, which is the subject of Brooks’ article. But first examples where people with different good faith ideological perspectives can reasonably and civilly disagree: the size of the national debt, immigration, trade and the respective roles central government and local government play in solving problems. Take the example of national debt and how large it can safely be. There is just too much uncertainty in our knowledge of our economic future to close the debate. (“Good faith” is a necessary qualifier because it implies consistency of conviction. The Republicans cannot plausibly argue for financial austerity in a time of recession when government spending is necessary as they did when out of power and be indifferent to the large increase in the national deficit and debt in a time of prosperity when in power.) Where the concern is the sale and possession of guns, we have long reached the point when resistance to regulating the purchase of guns is morally acceptable, given the cost in lives resulting from our gun “culture”. To repeat, the evidence of the benign effect of regulation in countries where it has been enacted is overwhelming. The case for no or little regulation rests in part on paranoid fears of gun owners that any regulation is a slippery slope to the total banning of guns, fears exacerbated by the NRA and the manufacturers concerned about their profits. It has become necessary for people of conscience, regardless of political persuasion, to view intransigent resistance to regulation as intolerable. What divides the parties on the issue is on one side resistance to any regulation and on the other side willingness to compromise, that is, to give and take on what and how to regulate. The total banning of guns is not on the table. The opposition is between compromise and no compromise. The NRA has been an uncompromising and unprincipled shaper of our gun culture. For the NRA hunting and profits trump the protection of life. The argument that people and not guns are the killers is
laughable. Nor is it possible to take seriously the argument for widespread freedom to carry concealed weapons everywhere as a protective measure against “the bad guys.” Imagine the mayhem of a shootout in a school in the event of an attack upon it. The fact is that advocates of regulations offer compromises whereas the opponents are unwilling to concede an inch. How is it possible then to respect such intransigence in the light of the mass killings? Brooks knows better elsewhere where he is unequivocal in disparaging Trump and his party leadership. Why should he then urge us to respect the base that supports him and his NRA allies? Incivility is imbedded in their intransigence. Brooks argues that confrontation has gotten advocates of gun control nowhere, but neither has civil willingness to enact moderate regulations. For certain causes you must simply fight to win, not without civility but passionately. Once there is agreement about the possibility of gun control then respect is possible and necessary and civil debate can begin about solutions.
Consider the ideological conflict between progressives and conservatives within the capitalist system. I emphasize the capitalist system, because, notwithstanding conservative stereotypes about their socialist and communist tendencies, progressives and liberals are actors within the capitalist arena. They are implicitly, if not explicitly (as in the case of Robert Reich), devoted to “saving capitalism,” the title of one of his books. Reich’s progressive argument is against monopoly practices by corporations and for a vigorous, competitive economy. Is there a trope higher in the capitalist lexicon than “competition”? The specter of socialism or communism haunts the hard right. Capitalism is in fact common ground between liberal progressives and conservatives in the United States. What is at issue is not the existence of the system, but how it is conceived and practiced. From Reich’s progressive perspective, its main beneficiaries should be the “many” (the working class, the middle class, small businesses), not the “few” (CEO’s of large corporations and banks). Corporate advocates claim that corporations making huge profits benefit shareholders who constitute a large portion of the population and that the profits trickle down to the rest of the population. As it turns out, the trickle has been very small for the working class. What is usually missing from both sides of the divide is an appreciation of the positive contribution each side makes to society—workers on one side, entrepreneurs on the other. Where is common ground to be found? Reich’s Saving Capitalism is a good place to begin. His argument is against crony capitalism, not its essence. Hardline conservatives such as Ted Cruz have also spoken out against it. (Whether he means it and about whom he means it is another matter.) Missing from the progressive perspective is a sufficient acknowledgement of the role the entrepreneur plays in creating prosperity, which benefits employees as well as employers. How prosperous would we be without Microsoft, Google and Apple? To acknowledge this fact should not distract from the ways in which the distribution of the wealth that results from this prosperity is distributed. The result has been an ever-increasing widening of inequality between rich and poor. Unless we are prepared to say that the current state of affairs is an inevitable condition of our prosperity, we can attribute the lopsidedness of the distribution of wealth to the excesses of greed and corruption. During the financial crisis, the excesses defined the system. They still do. The argument for the redistribution of wealth needs to be made not only on grounds of compassion, but also on merit as well as the health of the system. The working poor earning a minimum wage are not getting what they deserve. We don’t need to overthrow capitalism to give them what they deserve and empower them as consumers. Reich’s progressive view represents a compromise within the capitalist market system against which the current Trump inflected “conservative” view is uncompromising and has the emotional resonance of tribalism. We hear it in Trump’s rabid rants, demonizing Democrats and others who oppose him at rallies that feed the rage of his base. Tribalism is loyalty to a tribe or other social groups and negative feelings about people outside the group. Where is the loyalty and tribalism greater than among Trump’s supporters about whom he said that he would not lose their support even is he had shot someone on Fifth Avenue?
I don’t mean to dismiss the relevance of tribalism to what is going on in our country. I am simply cautioning against its indiscriminate application to both sides and, its obscuring of a category, ideology, the site of debate about policy and programs, that does not apply to tribal cultures. The antidote to political tribalism, where it exists, is the willingness of adversaries to enter reciprocally and sympathetically into the mindset of the other even while arguing and acting forcefully for one’s ideas about governance, always willing to compromise and to be open to persuasion by the well-reasoned views of the adversary. All this assumes the Enlightenment spirit that inspired those who wrote the Constitution, a spirit utterly missing in those on the right who see themselves as the strict originalist interpreters of the Constitution. They are its spiritual opposite.