Tag Archives: tribalism

Teams Versus Tribes

I generally hate sports metaphors, but sometimes they are too apt to ignore, so bear with me…

I recently had a conversation with a friend who–like me–remembered the “old” days of politics, when Republicans and Democrats differed on some issues and agreed on others, and when those conversations and debates were about policy.

When I served in Indianapolis’ City Hall (I know, a zillion years ago), city leaders often met with the state legislators elected from Indianapolis. Some were Republican, some Democrat, and while they reflected the priorities of their opposing caucuses on most issues, they frequently came together to support the priorities of the city. They worked with the Mayor on initiatives that would be good for Indianapolis.

Back in that day, Republicans and Democrats were two teams. The thing about teams is that they are playing the same game and obeying the same rules. That political “game” was governing, and the goal was to score policies that benefited your constituency. (Yes, both teams had players who were all about themselves, or in the pocket of some moneyed interest, or embarrassingly dumb, but those were the exceptions. The majority really did care about legislating policies they believed were sound, even if they disagreed about what those policies were.)

Those days are over.

Over the intervening years, the “Red team”–the Republican team I played on back then–has morphed into a tribal cult. Its more liberal, moderate and thoughtful members have been ejected, leaving virtually everyone unwilling to accept the new tribal identity without a team. Some of us became Democrats, others, disenfranchised Independents.

The problem with that change from teams to tribes should be obvious. While teams are competing to win the same game, tribes aren’t interested in either competition or the game–instead, they are intent upon clearing the playing field of those despised “others.” Rather than engaging in policy debates–the “game”–or concerning themselves with issues of governance, they are focused on defeating those not in their. tribe. They are intent upon establishing dominance.

In other words, today’s tribal folks aren’t interested in governing or in the relative merits of policy A or B–their goal is much simpler: to own the “libruls” and put those uppity Blacks, women and gays back in their proper, submissive place.

Historically, tribal bonds were crucial for survival. Membership in a tribe offered deep psychological and social connections, and contributed to  human well-being and achievement. However, as we are seeing, the persistence of strong group loyalties based upon identity can foster extreme attitudes, undermine democratic principles, and inculcate an “us versus them” worldview that is deeply corrosive. When tribes are based upon racial and religious homogeneity, rather than common values and aspirations, there is no middle ground.

So here we are.

The White “Christian” Nationalist tribe that has “evolved” from the once-respectable GOP is uninterested in anything but regaining social and political dominance. They are unconcerned with the Trump administration’s destruction of our federal government and its flouting of the constitutional rules of the game and unperturbed by Trump’s embarrassing and damaging international antics– because governing in the national interest isn’t the “game” they’re playing. The tribe believes that making America “great” means putting them in charge.

It’s no wonder the Democrats are at odds over how to proceed in this new environment. Most Democratic politicians still think of themselves as members of a team that is concerned first and foremost with matters of public policy, and they’re ill-equipped to face opponents whose “policy” preferences are limited to eradicating opponents and establishing White “Christian” Nationalist dominance.

I have no idea how we extricate the country from this mismatch. If this sports analogy is right, pious exhortations to find “common ground” are unrealistic, to put it mildly. Americans will simply have to choose between the team and the tribe.

Comments

Policies Matter

One of the most unfortunate aspects of our current politics is the way tribalism has obscured policy differences. As we head into the 2024 election, few–if any–voters will base their votes on the candidates’ different policy positions. That’s not a criticism of America’s voters. At the top of the ticket, our choice is between a senile megalomaniac whose sole “policy” (if it can be dignified by the term) is hatred of “the Other” and an opponent whose sanity and competence outweighs other considerations.

This won’t be a Presidential election where thoughtful policy differences drive votes, and that’s frustrating for those of us who are policy nerds.

The situation is somewhat different at the state level, however. America’s states have settled into Red/Blue tribal divisions that may or may not hold. For those of us who follow policy preferences and their outcomes, those Red and Blue states provide a rather striking natural experiment, and Blue state policies have emerged as clearly superior.

For example, The American Prospect recently ran an article comparing Oklahoma–a very Red state–with Blue Connecticut.

In Oklahoma, nearly a quarter of children live in food-insecure households, one of the highest rates in the country. The Annie E. Casey Foundation’s KIDS COUNT, its annual compilation of child well-being data, ranked Oklahoma 46th in the nation overall—as well as 49th in education and 45th in health.

Yet Oklahoma’s Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt rejected the roughly $48 million of funding for the 2024 Summer EBT program and announced in August the state would also not participate in the program next summer. Oklahoma was one of 13 Republican-led states that declined this year’s summer grocery benefit. “Oklahomans don’t look to the government for answers, we look to our communities,” a spokesperson for the governor said in a statement regarding the decision to decline the funding, which they referred to as a “handout.”

Halfway across the country, KIDS COUNT ranked Connecticut 8th overall, 3rd in education, and 11th in health. But the state, which also participated in Summer EBT this year, faces a hunger problem as well—more than 15 percent of children live in food-insecure households. In fact, Connecticut was one of the first states in the country to pilot its own program in 2011.

The article noted numerous other differences attributable to policy choices. Life expectancy in the two states had been roughly equal in 1959; today, folks in Connecticut live 4 years longer on average than those in Oklahoma. Oklahoma–with Wild West gun laws similar to those in Indiana– had the 13th-worst rate of gun violence in the U.S., while Connecticut had the 45th-worst rate.

Research shows that, as political parties nationalized, state governments followed the governing party’s ideology. Differences in outcomes followed.

State government, after all, plunges into the day-to-day minutiae of our lives through decisions about health, education, social services, criminal justice, and more. For example, families in some states get money to keep their kids fed during the summer; in other states, they don’t. 

The lengthy article illustrates the multiple ways in which these ideologically-driven policy differences affect both individual citizens and economic performance in the state. It’s well worth a read. 

Another article–this one from the American Prospect—focuses on educational vouchers, a policy choice I frequently discuss. The article warns that Red state expansion of universal school vouchers is likely to have profound impact on the lives of young people.

As states race to pay for families to send their kids to private schools, blowing up state budgets in the process, the schools attended by the vast majority of kids will be left with far fewer resources, blunting their prospects. By design, funds are being shifted away from students in poor and rural areas and into the pockets of affluent parents, entrenching inequality in the process.

Among the other detriments of these programs is an almost-total lack of oversight. In Arizona, for example, parents are allowed to direct education funds, not just to the school of their choice, but to anything they might call “education.”

As Arizona’s superintendent of public instruction Tom Horne, a loud proponent of vouchers, admitted in an interview, the state’s emphatically hands-off approach means that there’s nothing to prevent parents from using public dollars to teach their kids that the Earth is flat. Indeed, state law prohibits any kind of public oversight over the burgeoning nonpublic sector of private schools, homeschooling, and microschools, which are for-profit ventures in which small groups of students learn online while being monitored by a guide.

If, as economists insist, economic development depends upon the existence of a well-educated workforce, vouchers don’t just shortchange the children in sub-par private schools. They eventually impoverish the state.

Policies matter.

Comments

A Rerun

I particularly enjoy visiting the “your memories” function on Facebook (mostly for the pictures of grandchildren when they were younger and me when my hair was still black…). The other day, however, those memories included several comments referencing a post from 2017. I reread it, and concluded that it continues to be relevant–especially as we approach a pivotal election. So today, I’m taking the day off and reposting “Tribalism Versus Americanism.”

Think of it as a very late summer re-run.

____________

We Americans are a cantankerous and argumentative lot. We hold vastly different political philosophies and policy preferences, and we increasingly inhabit alternate realities. Partisans routinely attack elected officials—especially Presidents—who don’t share their preferences or otherwise meet their expectations.

Politics as usual. Unpleasant and often unfair, but—hysteria and hyperbole notwithstanding– usually not a threat to the future of the republic. Usually.

We are beginning to understand that Donald Trump does pose such a threat.

In the wake of Trump’s moral equivocations following Charlottesville, critics on both the left and right characterized his refusal to distinguish between the “fine people” among the Nazis and KKK and the “fine people” among the protestors as an assault on core American values. His subsequent, stunning decision to pardon rogue sheriff Joe Arpaio has been described, accurately, as an assault on the rule of law.

It’s worth considering what, exactly, is at stake.

Whatever our beliefs about “American exceptionalism,” the founding of this country was genuinely exceptional—defined as dramatically different from what had gone before—in one incredibly important respect: for the first time, citizenship was made dependent upon behavior rather than identity. In the Old World, countries had been created by conquest, or as expressions of ethnic or religious solidarity. As a result, the rights of individuals were dependent upon their identities, the status of their particular “tribes” in the relevant order. (Jews, for example, rarely enjoyed the same rights as Christians, even in countries that refrained from oppressing them.)

Your rights vis a vis your government depended upon who you were—your religion, your social class, your status as conqueror or conquered.

The new United States took a different approach to citizenship. Whatever the social realities, whatever the disabilities imposed by the laws of the various states, anyone (okay, any white male) born or naturalized here was equally a citizen. We look back now at the exclusion of blacks and women and our treatment of Native Americans as shameful departures from that approach, and they were, but we sometimes fail to appreciate how novel the approach itself was at that time in history.

All of our core American values—individual rights, civic equality, due process of law—flow from the principle that government must not facilitate tribalism, must not treat people differently based upon their ethnicity or religion or other marker of identity. Eventually (and for many people, reluctantly) we extended that principle to gender, skin color and sexual orientation.

Racism is a rejection of that civic equality. Signaling that government officials will not be punished for flagrantly violating that foundational principle so long as the disobedience advances the interests of the President, fatally undermines it.

Admittedly, America’s history is filled with disgraceful episodes in which we have failed to live up to the principles we profess. In many parts of the country, communities still grapple with bitter divisions based upon tribal affiliations—race, religion and increasingly, partisanship.

When our leaders have understood the foundations of American citizenship, when they have reminded us that what makes us Americans is allegiance to core American values—not the color of our skin, not the prayers we say, not who we love—we emerge stronger from these periods of unrest. When they speak to the “better angels of our nature,” most of those “better angels” respond.

When our leaders are morally bankrupt, all bets are off. We’re not all Americans any more, we’re just a collection of warring tribes, some favored by those in power, some not.

As the old saying goes: elections have consequences.

Comments

A Legislative Terrorist

As you all know, I am on a cruise, writing these posts from a spot on the Pacific Ocean. I’m currently six hours earlier than those on Eastern time, and thanks to the time difference and intermittent problems with Internet access, my grasp of the news is hit-or-miss. I’ve been following the incredible chaos playing out on the floor of the House of Representatives with what can only be called a feeling of unreality.

Evidently, Jim Jordan just lost his second attempt to be elected Speaker.

Jordan is easily one of the most despicable individuals ever to hold political office–and certainly one of the least able, least ethical, least accomplished people ever to be nominated as a leader of the legislative body. If successful, he would be third in line for the Presidency–a thought that makes me want to hurl.

Representative Pete Aguilar, a Democrat from California, really summed up the insanity of nominating someone like Jordan for Speaker. Aguilar began his brief talk by nominating Democratic minority leader Hakeem Jeffries (who garnered more votes than Jordan), and blaming extremism and partisanship for the unprecedented chaos of the House. He urged  Republicans to “embrace bipartisanship to do the work the American people had sent them to Washington, D.C., to conduct,” an exhortation he must have known would fall on deaf ears.

Aguilar went on to point out that Jordan is the “architect of a nationwide abortion ban, a vocal election denier, and an insurrection inciter.”

He has “spent his entire career trying to hold our country back, putting our national security in danger, attempting government shutdown after government shutdown, wasting taxpayer dollars on baseless investigations with dead ends, authoring the very bill that would ban abortion nationwide without exceptions, and inciting violence on this chamber. Even leaders of his own party have called him ‘a legislative terrorist.’

Aguilar pointed to Jordan’s opposition to disaster relief, veterans’ relief, support for Ukraine, and military aid to our allies, including Israel, and added: “This body is debating elevating a speaker nominee who has not passed a single bill in 16 years. These are not the actions of someone interested in governing or bettering the lives of everyday Americans.” Jordan as speaker would mean the Republican Party would “continue taking marching orders from a twice-impeached former president with more than 90 pending felony charges.”

Aguilar’s litany was entirely accurate. (It was also incomplete–he omitted the scandal of Jordan’s coaching days, when he closed his eyes to the sexual abuse of his young athletes.)

What boggles the mind is that 200 House Republicans would ever vote to put someone accurately labeled a “legislative terrorist”–someone described by John Bohner as a destroyer, not a builder– in charge of anything, especially an American lawmaking body.

Sinclair Lewis warned us: it can happen here.

Thomas Edsall recently devoted a column to the state of American democracy, and included a quote from Liliana Mason that goes a long way toward explaining the otherwise inexplicable:

The election of Trump is the culmination of a process by which the American electorate has become deeply socially divided along partisan lines. As the parties have grown racially, religiously, and socially distant from one another, a new kind of social discord has been growing. The increasing political divide has allowed political, public, electoral, and national norms to be broken with little to no consequence. The norms of racial, religious, and cultural respect have deteriorated. Partisan battles have helped organize Americans’ distrust for “the other” in politically powerful ways. In this political environment, a candidate who picks up the banner of “us versus them” and “winning versus losing” is almost guaranteed to tap into a current of resentment and anger across racial, religious, and cultural lines, which have recently divided neatly by party.

We have evidently devolved as a nation into very strong, opposing tribal identities –in one of which racism plays a prominent role–and we now elect “lawmakers” who privilege their tribe’s “winning” over anything remotely resembling the common good. 

Edsall also quoted Levitsky and Ziblatt, authors of a recent book on the perilous state of American democracy:

By 2016, America was on the brink of a genuinely multiracial democracy — one that could serve as a model for diverse societies across the world. But just as this new democratic experiment was beginning to take root, America experienced an authoritarian backlash so fierce that it shook the foundations of the republic, leaving our allies across the world worried about whether the country had any democratic future at all.

The results of the current effort to install a Speaker will be a clue……

Comments

Lie To Me!

It’s hardly news that former President Donald Trump was the lyingest President ever.  A column a few months back by Thomas Edsall shared research confirming that on this one dubious metric, TFG was indeed head and shoulders above the rest.

Donald Trump can lay claim to the title of most prodigious liar in the history of the presidency. This challenges commonplace beliefs about the American political system. How could such a deceitful and duplicitous figure win the White House in the first place and then retain the loyalty of so many voters after his endless lies were exposed?

George Edwards, a political scientist at Texas A&M and a retired editor of Presidential Studies Quarterly, stated the case bluntly: “Donald Trump tells more untruths than any previous president.” What’s more, “There is no one that is a close second.”

After establishing Trump’s position as Liar-in-Chief, Edsell got to the question that fascinates me: How do we understand the willingness of Republican voters to not simply tolerate Trump’s lies, but enthusiastically welcome them–and continue to vote for him?

Edsell quotes one researcher who attributes the acceptance of obvious untruths to our polarization:

We are intensely social creatures, but we are prone to divide ourselves into competitive groups, largely for the purpose of allocating resources. People can be prosocial — compassionate, empathetic, generous, honest — in their group and aggressively antisocial toward out-groups. When we divide people into groups, we open the door to competition, dehumanization, violence — and socially sanctioned deceit.

If we see Trump’s lies, Smith continued, “not as failures of character but rather as weapons of war, then we can come to see why his supporters might view him as an effective leader. From this perspective, lying is a feature, not a bug, of Trump’s campaign and presidency.”

Other scholars attribute acceptance of untruths to “orthodox mind-sets.”  People with such mind-sets desperately need to protect cherished narratives; insights and facts that undermine those narratives threaten beliefs that are central to their worldviews.

Another theory is closely aligned to the tribal explanation– it posits that Trump’s ability to persuade “millions of voters to go along with his prevarications is his ability to tap into the deep-seated anger and resentment among his supporters. Anger, it turns out, encourages deception.”

Almost all of the research confirms the centrality of those tribal identities (giving the term “identity politics” a somewhat different meaning than its common usage).

Identity leadership refers to leaders’ capacity to influence and mobilize others by virtue of leaders’ abilities to represent, advance, create and embed a sense of social identity that is shared with potential followers.

In the process, Trump’s supporters lose their connection to real-world rules and morality.

Esdall quotes one scholar who finds Americans’ political identities becoming “increasingly salient, and potentially more destructive.” Intense partisan hostilities and polarization lead people to demonize the opposition and create a climate of “us against them.” Polarization thus invites lies that create a “moral framework” within which otherwise wrongful behavior serves a moral cause. (An obvious example is January 6th.)

It’s depressing enough when “Lie X”is accepted by large numbers of people, but the speed of its distribution is even more troubling. An article by BBC Science Focus examined that phenomenon:

Mark Twain said that a lie travels halfway around the world while the truth is still putting its shoes on. Actually, that itself is a lie – Twain probably said no such thing and the true origins of the quote remain murky. Nonetheless, thanks to recent research into the spread of (mis)information on Twitter, we now know that lies spread more rapidly than facts – and it seems mostly to do with our appetite for novelty.

In a study published in early 2018 in the journal Science, three researchers at MIT analysed around 126,000 stories tweeted by around three million people between 2006 and 2017. Crucially, these stories had all been verified as true or false by six fact-checking websites, including snopes.com and factcheck.org. By comparing the tweets, the researchers found that the lies travelled faster and farther than the truth. For instance, true tweets rarely reached more than 1,000 people, whereas the most widely shared false tweets reached as many as 100,000 people. Falsehoods were 70 per cent more likely to be retweeted than the truth, and it took true tweets six times as long as lies, on average, to reach 1,500 people.

MIT’s research team attributed the speed of dissemination to the fact that lies tended to be more novel and exciting than the truth. They were also better at triggering an emotional response.

Lies that travel fastest are those that support our pre-existing prejudices and are easy to understand. it helps if they’re popular with the people in your “tribe.”

Evidently, a lot of Americans actually want to be lied to.

Comments