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This article is bad.
As someone who studies intergroup relations, I'm getting tired of seeing this argument blaming all our problems on "tribalism" repeated near-weekly for 4 years in the opinion pages of elite media.
Let me explain. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/09/predicate-fear/616009/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share
As someone who studies intergroup relations, I'm getting tired of seeing this argument blaming all our problems on "tribalism" repeated near-weekly for 4 years in the opinion pages of elite media.
Let me explain. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/09/predicate-fear/616009/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share
To analogize, blaming current political woes on "tribalism" (or "polarization" or "motivated reasoning," etc.) is the explanatory equivalent of your doctor telling you that your physical pain is caused by "your nervous system on overload, firing a lot of signals to your brain."
The problem isn't that this explanation is wrong. It's not. The problem is that it's a mechanistic explanation. These are very important: it's much easier to relieve pain if you understand the nervous system. But if you have a broken bone this "explanation" is not very helpful.
The "because tribalism" explanation does not answer *any* of the questions we actually care about: Why is one party, but not the other, descending into authoritarianism? Why now, but not in the past? Who is more likely to support said authoritarianism? And how do we combat it?
Maybe the issue is undemocratic institutions, which enshrine minority rule and incentivize said minority to adopt authoritarian ideologies and tactics to justify and maintain their minority rule? (i.e., 2.5 of our 3 branches of federal gov are currently under minority control)
Maybe the issue is the trifecta of ethno-religious nationalism, racial resentment, and elite distain for democracy (see: Mike Lee's tweets) located within a single party, as decades of research have shown that these dispositions are psychologically linked to authoritarianism.
Maybe the problem is inequality, precarity, and disenfranchisement, which has caused some people to lose faith in democratic institutions? Maybe the problem is the rise of private propaganda networks (e.g., Fox News) that have mainstreamed authoritarian ideology?
Maybe it's all of the above? I don't have the answer, but each of the explanations above is much more informative about both the cause of and solution to our political issues than the pablum "because tribalism" explanation. So why is blaming "tribalism" popular among journalists?
Because merely considering something like one of the explanations I provide above requires selectively questioning existing ideologies and institutions, and that seems to be bad in the eyes of journalism because it means "being political."
Citing "tribalism" allows for the performative objectivity, shallow analyses, and false equivalencies that characterize the putatively "non-political" worldview of elite journalism (you'll note this very article is chock-full of such both-sides-isms).
So can we please stop publishing this very argument ad nauseam? As someone who studies polarization, understanding its dynamics are important. But those dynamics don't tell us why we're on our slow descent into right-wing authoritarianism.
