Long time readers who’ve followed the thread concerning political “tribes” are aware that, well, I’ve been using the word tribe. I don’t recall if I came up with it on my own, or picked it up from Andrew Sullivan, but I’ve been vaguely uncomfortable using it.
The reason is that it reflects unfairly on the Native American tribes (the First Nations of Canada, I think) because I use it as a faintly denigrative term. While the insult is unintended, it’s there, and I do regret it.
In its place, I think cult is a better term. Cults do not feature rationality, but rather a type of magical thinking often incompatible with reality, and that seems to fit a subset of the political types, especially in the extremist right-wing, quite well. Other points of congruence include the alleged supremacy of the leader, the critical nature of apostasy, the elevation of ideology over truth, and the preference for conspiracy theories to explain the hideous gaps and results of the overriding ideology over the more sane possibility that the ideology is fucked in the head.
I am aware that cult is, at least for some, a synonym for religious sect, or so it was thirty years ago. Some religious folks even find that equivalency offensive. Given the ascendancy of religious over non-religious people, though, I find it a little difficult to extend sympathy to the offended.
I will try to use cult in the future, and my apologies for the use of tribe.
