Tribalism and the Two Stories of America on Display This Election

(Photo By Al Drago/CQ Roll Call)

I’ve been thinking about this marvelous and distressing Facebook posting from our friend Bob Fine the other day, in which he recounts a recent exchange at the local Jewel with a Donald Trump supporter.  She couldn’t comprehend why Bob wasn’t a supporter, too: “But you’re white, you’re white!  Nobody’s looking out for us anymore!”

Reading Bob’s account sent me back to something I’d read (from Nancy LeTourneau in the Washington Monthly) on the related subject of tribalism.  Here’s a key snippet from her piece:

… The president also talked [in a recent interview] about how tribalism is the root of the problem in the Middle East right now.

One of the most destructive forces in the Middle East, Obama believes, is tribalism—a force no president can neutralize. Tribalism, made manifest in the reversion to sect, creed, clan, and village by the desperate citizens of failing states, is the source of much of the Muslim Middle East’s problems, and it is another source of his fatalism. Obama has deep respect for the destructive resilience of tribalism—…

“It is literally in my DNA to be suspicious of tribalism,” he told me. “I understand the tribal impulse, and acknowledge the power of tribal division. I’ve been navigating tribal divisions my whole life. In the end, it’s the source of a lot of destructive acts.”

Tribalism isn’t merely a phenomenon in the Middle East. It is also obviously animating the “white nostalgia” of Trump’s supporters. We’ve seen similar reactions in Europe. So it’s interesting to contemplate what is driving all this.

…

As President Obama said, to retreat into tribalism at this moment is dangerous. While the forces of a changing America and increasing globalization are unsettling and challenging, it is a recipe for disaster to simply identify with those who think/look like ourselves and draw battle lines with those who don’t. The goal is not to assume we can all agree with each other on everything – but to be able to see and value the humanity of those with whom we don’t.

As Jon Favreau wrote recently: “Every election is a competition between two stories about America.” Right now, one of those stories is about tribalism – the need to “take our country back” to a mythological day when a lot of white people assume that things were better. That story rests on demonizing, expelling and/or punishing those who are blamed for the changes that we don’t like.

The other story is the one President Obama is talking about…the potential we have to expand our moral imagination. That is not some ideal that humans are incapable of reaching. We see people do it every day. And it is old enough to be embedded in every major religion as something resembling the Golden Rule: “do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

And of course, there are reverberations of the attraction of tribalism in reactions to the brutality in Brussels earlier this week.  Mr’s Trump and Cruz have (unsurprisingly) rushed to draw battle lines and shrink their definitions of “we.”  Here’s the wonderful Jonathan Chait on that:

…

The great benefit enjoyed by the United States over Europe is its multicultural character, in which citizenship is not identified with a racial group. That multiculturalism has allowed American Muslims to assimilate much more easily than in Europe, which makes Americans safer — though not, of course, perfectly safe — from terrorism. Looking at this state of affairs, with a dangerous, ghettoized European Muslim population and a much less threatening, well-assimilated American Muslim population, Cruz proposes to treat American Muslims like European ones. He endorses racial profiling of “Muslim neighborhoods.”

Cruz does not even justify this policy as a response to radicalization. He proposes to do so, in his words, “before they become radicalized.” Cruz’s belief is that subjecting a non-radicalized population to discriminatory policing will prevent rather than cause its radicalization.

This is the kind of madness that now prevails for foreign-policy logic in this party…

How about we stop shaking fists at each other and instead shake hands and move forward together to build an America that works for all of us?