Andrew Sullivan is full of depressing pessimism when it comes to Americans and politics:
The problem with tribalism is that it knows no real limiting principle.
It triggers a deep and visceral response: a defense of the tribe before all other considerations. That means, in its modern manifestation, that the tribe comes before the country as a whole, before any neutral institutions that get in its way, before reason and empiricism, and before the rule of law. It means loyalty to the tribe — and its current chief — is enforced relentlessly. And this, it seems to me, is the underlying reason why the investigation into Russian interference in the last election is now under such attack and in such trouble. In a tribalized society, there can be no legitimacy for an independent inquiry, indifferent to tribal politics. In this fray, no one is allowed to be above it.
On the face of it, of course, no one even faintly patriotic should object to investigating how a foreign power tried to manipulate American democracy, as our intelligence agencies have reported. And yet one party is quite obviously doing all it can to undermine such a project — even when it is led by a Republican of previously unimpeachable integrity, Robert Mueller. Tribalism does not spare the FBI; it cannot tolerate an independent Department of Justice; it sees even a Republican like Mueller as suspect; and it sees members of another tribe as incapable of performing their jobs without bias.
And then he gets worse. Go read it (it’s the first part of his weekly tri-partite column) if you want to be disheartened.
Implicitly it raises the question of how to persuade the members of both tribes – he suggests the Democrats are also moving towards tribalism – that tribalism is wrong.
I’m not suggesting we don’t have a long history of tribalism in this country. Dyed in the wool xyz voter is a familiar chestnut. I’ve always taken it to mean that that the voter had more important things to do than worry about the political scene, between raising children and working, and usually legitimately so. And then remember the mass religious revivals we occasionally indulge in, until the next, and almost inevitable, revelations of the true motivations of the leaders damages those revivals.
But now, as Andrew points out, we’re seeing the wholesale abandonment of the most honorable of vocations, truth-seeking and living by the truth, by the GOP. Let me spell it out.
Once upon a time, in situations such as these, our ancestors, not so far away in time, would, regardless of political inclination, examine the evidence presented, looking both at its trustworthiness and what it said, and if they found the evidence compelling, they’d come to a judgment that put the interests of the country first. It required judgment, fair-mindedness, and a independent frame of mind that disregarded emotional responses in favor of intellectual rigor.
But some of us have lost that common-sense approach. Today, a huge percentage of the GOP has decided, prior to looking at evidence, that their leader is sacrosanct, must be protected, and thus cannot be guilty of any major crime. From this unsupported assertion, they then apply logic and conclude that any news, any evidence, which suggests their leader may be guilty of any sort of crime, must be false evidence. Indeed, using a meme supplied by just that person to which the evidence will allegedly point, they call it fake news, they even take up a belief that numerous news organizations with more than a century of tradition of excellence are simply making up news stories. All in the face of evidence
And it’s all so ass-backwards. They have a conclusion, and for that conclusion to work, they invent wilder and wilder stories. All the news organizations are making up news. That tape of Trump talking about “grabbing pussies”? Fake. The Russians? Oh, they’re our friends, they couldn’t possibly attack us.
And all because they have an allegiance to a group that overrides the good of the country.
That’s why tribalism is wrong. That’s why, in my view, it’s un-American.
How do we answer Andrew’s implicit question, then, of how to remind our fellow Americans about how we used to evaluate evidence, about how we used to put the good of the country ahead of the good of the party, of how pre-determined conclusions are the wrong way to go about evaluating our government?
I don’t really know.
But what I’m going to do is send this off to my friends who seem to in one or the other tribe and ask them to read this, think about it, and then send it onwards to their network of friends, to inject it into the thought-stream. Maybe everyone will snort at it, their minds made up and immovable in what I consider to be error.
But I present these thoughts not as a partisan – long time readers know I’m an independent – but as a fellow American who has grown concerned at this decay in common-sense in the GOP, and worried about similar patterns in the Democrats.
And I invite my readers to take similar steps. There will be no single event which will resolve this problem, just a series of small steps, of tribe members finally sitting down, thinking, and saying, What have I been doing? Recommend this post to friends, share it on FB, or however you want to point out that tribalism is wrong and is hurting America.
