Complaints about tribalism typically fall into two distinct, if overlapping, categories. On one hand are the well-worn laments about identity politics. This is the idea that Americans have divided into hard-shell groups (or “tribes”) based on racial, religious and sexual identities; people who possess those identities, the argument goes, then organize their politics around the belief that they are victims. Critics often focus their ire about this kind of tribalism on college campuses, where a particularly intolerant form of identity politics is said to have taken root.
Teaching students to focus on their racial, gender and class identities is dangerous, Haidt warns, because students are “young human beings, whose minds evolved for tribal warfare.” (This might be true if tribal warfare involves heavy drinking.)
On the other hand, the anti-tribalists warn against escalating tension between Democrats and Republicans, America’s supposed mega-tribes. It is true each party demonizes the other with rhetorically vicious language that embitters politics and sometimes flares into violence. The two parts of this anti-tribalist argument fit together through the notion that identity politics has fueled intense partisanship. Organizing politics around claims to identity makes it harder to compromise, since every core issue seems existential.
All of this amounts to very clumsy anthropology. The primordial “us vs. them” oppositions it evokes are, or ought to be, alien to our postmodern age of fluid self-fashioning. “I contain multitudes,” wrote Walt Whitman in the 19th century, and this is even truer for Americans today. We are many things at once; nobody wants to be reduced to a census category, and everyone has multiple allegiances.
Particular aspects of identities can be activated politically depending on our own circumstances and priorities and how our leaders talk to us. Women, for example, might have been more inclined to vote in the midterm elections after watching the Kavanaugh hearings, but their sex did not dictate whom they voted for.
Concerns about political tribalism also neglect an important trend in American politics. It may be true the parties are becoming more ideologically polarized, but a smaller proportion of Americans identify as Republicans or Democrats than they used to, and more people identify as independents than with either party. The 40 percent of Americans who now consider themselves independents do not fit into tribalist scaremongering, yet the parties spend a great deal of money and energy in every election trying to get them to vote.
