Alexander Sullivan writes a long
article about our latter-day tribal politics for
New York magazine. It's decent and worth reading, if you have the time. A couple of choice quotes:
Tribalism, it’s always worth remembering, is not one aspect of human experience. It’s the default human experience. It comes more naturally to us than any other way of life. For the overwhelming majority of our time on this planet, the tribe was the only form of human society.
The tribes that best survived (and thereby transmitted their genes to us) were, moreover, those most acutely aware of outsiders and potential foes. A failure to notice incoming strangers could end your life in an instant, and an indifference to the appearances of other human beings could mean defeat at the hands of rivals or the collapse of a tribe altogether. And so we became a deeply cooperative species — but primarily with our own kind. The notion of living alongside people who do not look like us and treating them as our fellows was meaningless for most of human history.
And he quotes
Townhall.com blogger Kurt Schlichter, an out-in-the-open example of tribal politics, who writes:
They hate you. Leftists don’t merely disagree with you. They don’t merely feel you are misguided. They don’t think you are merely wrong. They hate you. They want you enslaved and obedient, if not dead. Once you get that, everything that is happening now will make sense.
The only reasonable response to such hatred is reciprocity. Hat tip to
RealClearPolitics for the link.
