‘Tribalism” is a hot concept right now – one many people believe is at the root of America’s deep divisions. But we need to pay attention to history, not prehistory, to understand complex modern politics and society.

Complaints about tribalism typically fall into two distinct categories. On one hand 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 on college campuses, where a particularly intolerant form of identity politics is said to have taken root.

On the other hand, the anti-tribalists warn against escalating tension between Democrats and Republicans, America’s supposed mega-tribes. Both parties demonize 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 that makes every 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.

We are many things at once; nobody wants to be reduced to a census category.

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.

If we are to avoid repeating a disaster like the Civil War, we might pay closer attention to another important, and more hopeful, strand of U.S. history: the tradition of religious pluralism.

At the birth of the nation, one of James Madison’s concerns was the threat of religious tyranny. He assembled a diverse coalition of deists and dissenters in a successful campaign for religious liberty in Virginia in the 1780s, an experience that informed the protections for religious liberty in the Bill of Rights.

Those protections hardly guaranteed religious sects would live in harmony; many distrusted one another and found their rivals’ world views immoral and incomprehensible. But it does suggest the liberal tradition of freedom of religion, which forges coexistence on the basis of equality and mutual respect, is a healthy paradigm for dealing with group differences. Indeed, the argument of Madison’s famous Federalist No. 10 was: The more differences, the better.

He saw it as less likely that one sect would impose tyranny on others, if a multitude of sects – however much they opposed one another – existed to counterbalance it.

Americans are in for a long struggle over the kind of nation we want to be, but all the talk of tribalism misses a crucial point. Diversity, when combined with equality, makes us stronger.

 

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