Tribalism and Peak Left. By Nicholas M. Gallagher.

Tribalism and Peak Left. By Nicholas M. Gallagher. The American Interest, December 30, 2014.

Politicians benefit from American tribal warfare. By Glenn Harlan Reynolds. USA Today, December 29, 2014.


Gallagher:

“Where you stand depends on where you sit” is favorite aphorism of progressive activists. It’s used to imply that “privilege” can blind someone to inconvenient facts, e.g. police aggression against minorities. But based on the events of the last few months, from Ferguson onward, it’s become pretty clear that both left and right-leaning groups suffer from this sort of narrowed vision. Writing in USA Today, Glenn Reynolds (a.k.a. Instapundit) points out that tribalism—the desire to identify “your” group and stick with them, no matter what—explains an awful lot of the recent national tensions:

[T]here is much opportunity for political empire-building in tribalism, and if the benefits of stoking tribal fires exceed the costs for political actors, then expect political actors to pour gasoline on even the smallest spark.

That’s pretty much what’s happened in the last few months, and the results haven’t been good. In America, we have both a police culture that is too quick to escalate force, and an aggressive victim culture, embodied by the loathsome Al Sharpton, that seeks to portray every police use of force, at least against members of the wrong racial and ethnic groups, as excessive.

A healthy society would stigmatize, marginalize and shun the tribalizers. Sharpton, who has incited racial violencein the past, would not have a network TV show (even on MSNBC), and would not be treated as a legitimate civil rights spokesman. Police unions, which have a history of interfering with efforts to hold officers accountable for acts that, if they were committed by civilians, would be prosecuted as crimes, would not be given a preferred political position, if they were allowed to exist at all. (Personally, I agree with FDR that public employee unions are essentially a conspiracy against the taxpayers; it’s an even more significant matter when they’re public employees who carry guns.)

Tribalism would seem to explain the “police wars” better than racism: as we have pointed out, the NYPD is roughly 50% minority, a number that closely echoes the figure for the city as a whole, and so for most people, allegations of “New Jim Crow” just don’t wash. But the idea that people reflexively retreat to “their” side during a time of crisis certainly makes sense. And often that side is as much ideological (or job and culture-based, in the case of the NYPD cops who turned their backs on de Blasio) as racial.

Read Reynolds’ whole article; it’s a necessary look at a phenomenon that should disturb us all. Tribalism afflicts everyone, no matter their affiliations and no matter how they reassure themselves that they operate on the basis of fact alone. Indeed, one of the chief causes behind the “Peak Left” moment that Walter Russell Mead addressed recently is leftist intellectuals’ inability to recognize that they, too, are a tribe. For various reasons, the elite progressive world is much more insulated than its right-wing counterpart. In fact, the divide between the left’s view of the world (and consequently its rhetoric) and the way the rest of the country views things seems to be increasing, fueling an unhappy cycle. Recognizing the tribal dynamics at work within its own movement may be the left’s first step toward correcting this—if it’s willing to take it.

Reynolds:

Self-serving lawmakers and unions get a boost from aggravating racial tensions.

“What if I told you,” asks a Matrix-themed photo-meme that has been circulating on Facebook, “that you can be against cops murdering citizens and citizens murdering cops at the same time?”

Judging by the past few weeks, this really is a Matrix-level revelation, obvious as it may seem. We have Americans protesting because of police shootings, and we have police turning their backs on New York City’s Democratic Mayor Bill de Blasio over lack of support after two police were assassinated by Ismaaiyl Abdullah Brinsley, a gunman from Baltimore who said he was seeking revenge for the choking death of cigarette-tax evader Eric Garner.

And, as blogger Eric Raymond notes, the response has been divided: “Because humans are excessively tribal, it’s difficult now to call for justice against Eric Garner's murderers without being lumped in with the ‘wrong side.’ Nor will Garner’s partisans, on the whole, have any truck with people who aren’t interested in poisonously racializing the circumstances of his death.”

This is a tragedy, but not a surprise. Tribalism is the default state of humanity: The tendency to defend our own tribe even when we think it’s wrong, and to attack other tribes even when they’re right, just because they’re other. Societies that give in to the temptations of tribalism — which are always present — wind up spending a lot of their energy on internal strife, and are prone to disintegrate into spectacular factionalism and infighting, often to the point of self-destruction.

Societies that temper those tribal tendencies, replacing them with the mechanisms of civil society, do much better. But there is much opportunity for political empire-building in tribalism, and if the benefits of stoking tribal fires exceed the costs for political actors, then expect political actors to pour gasoline on even the smallest spark.

That’s pretty much what’s happened in the last few months, and the results haven’t been good. In America, we have both a police culture that is too quick to escalate force, and an aggressive victim culture, embodied by the loathsome Al Sharpton, that seeks to portray every police use of force, at least against members of the wrong racial and ethnic groups, as excessive.

A healthy society would stigmatize, marginalize and shun the tribalizers. Sharpton, who has incited racial violence in the past, would not have a networkTV show (even on MSNBC), and would not be treated as a legitimate civil rights spokesman. Police unions, which have a history of interfering with efforts to hold officers accountable for acts that, if they were committed by civilians, would be prosecuted as crimes, would not be given a preferred political position, if they were allowed to exist at all. (Personally, I agree with FDR that public employee unions are essentially a conspiracy against the taxpayers; it’s an even more significant matter when they’re public employees who carry guns.)

In a healthy civil society, people can deal with others without worrying about tribalism, confident that disputes will be settled by neutral and reasonably fair procedures overseen by neutral and fair people. In a tribalized society, what matters is what tribe you belong to, and who is on top at the moment.

Healthy civil societies are a lot better places to live. They’re richer, safer and more peaceful. But healthy civil societies don’t provide the opportunity for political power grabs, for payoffs and for extortion that tribalized societies do. It’s no wonder that so many political figures favor tribalism. The question is, how long will the rest of us allow them to get away with it?