The Birth, Evolution and Consequences Of Today's Political Tribalism

Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse has written a book entitled ‘Them --- Why We Hate Each Other---and How To Heal’…In interviews he presents as a bright, articulate, intellectually honest politician who demonstrates insights into where we are as a society, particularly how various forces work to alienate us from one another.  One of his notions is that our current political tribalism has its roots in societal influences that impact on our politics. 

Contrary to Sen. Sasse’s view, it seems to me that our current political ‘tribalism’ is something that began on the morning of Barack Obama’s Inauguration Day when the G.O.P. ‘leadership’ met to pledge that they were going to oppose everything that the White House sent them to consider for the crafting into legislation. The politics of the ‘ends justify the means’ became the vehicle to carry out this action plan.

The Speaker of the House John Boehner went so far as to say that ‘the word compromise doesn’t exist in his vocabulary.’ This is a strange assertion for the leader of the House to make, especially when one of the foundations of politics is that it involves the ‘art of compromise.’ For Boehner and other conservatives to compromise was to show ‘weakness,’ and weakness was not to be shown.

One of Obama’s initial gestures of sincerity was his attempt to reach out to the members of Congress to work with the G.O.P. in an effort to gain traction on his legislative agenda.  His ‘YES WE CAN’ desire to work together met with the ‘NO WE WON’T’ on the part of the G.O.P.  His attempts to ‘compromise’ were seen as weakness on the part of those who opposed him. His efforts to work with the Congress only emboldened those who were working against him to redouble their efforts to resist his legislative offerings.

Mitch McConnell, the leader of the Senate, implied on December 7, 2010, in the heat of the mid-term election, that his top priority wasn’t health care, or attending to the needs of our homeless, emotionally and physically wounded returning veterans, or addressing the needs of public education or repairing our crumbling infrastructure. Rather, McConnell’s stated emphatically that his ‘top priority was to make Obama a one term president.’

And so for the eight years of Barak Obama’s Presidency, the G.O.P. was repeatedly guilty of not doing anything of import on behalf of those who elected them to office. It was an eight-year vendetta to destroy the efforts of an elected President whose candidacy excited 65 percent of registered voters to turn out at the polls on Election Day. The fact that Obama, working with W. Bush, was able to salvage our economy during 2008 financial crisis, and later, Obama’s effort to create a health care program that made it possible for millions of Americans to gain access to health care were ignored and even became a source of harsh criticism from the conservatives of the G.O.P.

During the Obama years, government was viewed as being gridlocked and a source of frustration to those whose lives had been devastated by the 2008 financial melt down. The focus of the politicians who opposed Obama and the citizens who wanted government to do its job on their behalf had a ‘Come To Jesus Meeting’ in the Presidential Election of 2016.

Donald Trump, ‘Don-the-Con, the liar, the misogynist, the racist, the xenophobic and the malignant narcissist, the man Michael Blumberg called a con artist and not fit for the Presidency, was elected President by the Electoral Collage. His opponent, Hillary Clinton defeated Trump in the popular vote by three million ballots. Trump, in an example of his delusional thinking that has become a hallmark of this Presidency, asserted that those who cast those three million votes were illegal immigrants and that had they not voted, he would have also won the popular vote.  

Why was Trump elected? There were seemingly three groups who voted for him.  The ‘deplorables’ as Clinton referred to them, those who were misogynists, racists, xenophobic, Alt-right and David Duke types. There were those who figured he was a businessman who might be the change agent who was needed to get something done in Congress. And, then there were the uninformed who were tuned into Fox Entertainment News.  As Senator Sasse has said, Fox had a formula of telling the uninformed that ‘liberals are evil, you’re a victim and you should be furious.’ So these folks were propagandized into being an unknowing support group who became part of Trump’s ‘base.’ Many of those who thought Trump, the businessman, might be an agent for overcoming government’s gridlock have abandoned Trump.  It is estimated that Trump’s base is realistically made up of twenty-two million, which is down from the nearly sixty three million who voted for him on Election Day.

There is another even more sinister reason why a Trump-like person was elected President. Obama scared the hell out of the alt-right, racist and uninformed segment of our society.  With Obama’s election to the Presidency, he drove the last nail into the coffin of the myth of ‘white supremacy.’ Those whose need to believe that they were better than others because they were white hit the wall of reality when a Black Man moved into ‘their’ White House and was elected twice to serve as Commander-In-Chief and leader of the free world.

A second and similar reality became evident. Demographers have shown that, it is just a matter of time, before ‘whites,’ will become surpassed in numbers by brown skin humans in the United States. For many these two realities, Obama the Black Man as President and the ‘browning of America’ is too threatening for those who were being faced with an America that would no longer remain a white dominated society. And, the ‘browning of America’ served as an excuse to mobilize Trump’s base against immigrants and anyone who opposed them as the 2018 midterm elections draws near.

And so, Trump era ‘tribalism’ continues to play a destructive role in American Society. The ends justify the means is still present. Promoting fear of immigrants is an added tactic. Added to this was the advent of alternative facts, fake news, minority group voter suppression, Trump’s suspected involvement in Russian attempts to influence our elections in his favor, treating the media as the ‘enemy of the people, treating others, especially liberals not as people but as an out of control mob, and the belief, that Trump was a ticket to returning to a 1950’s era America.

In the wake of today’s political tribalism is found the destruction of our values, the breaking of norms of our institutions, the disintegration of our relationships with one another, with our allies, and America’s diminished standing in the world community. The America of Trump is the personification of the Ugly American Way of Life. And, so tribalism will continue to exist in our American Society until it is neutralized by our overcoming of our fear, our ignorance and by our use of the ballot box.

We can overcome treating others as the enemy and as objects when we begin ‘to treat others’ as we would like to be treated’ and realize that ‘but by the grace of God, their go I.’ This is the way we will achieve the E pluribus unum, ‘out of many, one’ ideal of that our Founding Fathers hoped we would achieve 241 years ago.  It is, also, the only way that we will survive as a free and democratic society in the Twenty-First Century.