Bipartisan Senate group proposes ‘no fly, no buy’ gun measure

[Bob Butler 54]

(10-17-2018, 12:43 AM)Classic-Xer Wrote: Actually, the amount tribalism on the right is minimal compared to the tribalism that seems to exist on the left these days.  You don't have to worry about people like me getting directly  involved with blue politics or becoming  directly associated with blue politics. The Left looks diverse but the Left doesn't seem to be as diverse to me.

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I started using ‘tribal’ in response to Kinser.  He justified tribal thinking with the claim that all humans are tribal and that there is a limit established scientifically that you can identify with only so many people.  I have been saying that there is no such limit, that the size of the tribe is not limited, that it could be all humans if you want, that there is no such limit on tribe size.

But he nor I do not own the word.  Saying the word has political meaning is quite right.  I scanned the internet briefly to make sure we use the word comfortably near the common political usage.  I found we did pretty much, and in the process bumped into Amy Chua’s book Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations.  Amazon includes the following review…

Amazon Wrote:The bestselling author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, Yale Law School Professor Amy Chua offers a bold new prescription for reversing our foreign policy failures and overcoming our destructive political tribalism at home
 
Humans are tribal.  We need to belong to groups.  In many parts of the world, the group identities that matter most – the ones that people will kill and die for – are ethnic, religious, sectarian, or clan-based.  But because America tends to see the world in terms of nation-states engaged in great ideological battles – Capitalism vs. Communism, Democracy vs. Authoritarianism, the “Free World” vs. the “Axis of Evil” – we are often spectacularly blind to the power of tribal politics.  Time and again this blindness has undermined American foreign policy. 
 
In the Vietnam War, viewing the conflict through Cold War blinders, we never saw that most of Vietnam’s “capitalists” were members of the hated Chinese minority. Every pro-free-market move we made helped turn the Vietnamese people against us. In Iraq, we were stunningly dismissive of the hatred between that country’s Sunnis and Shias.  If we want to get our foreign policy right – so as to not be perpetually caught off guard and fighting unwinnable wars – the United States has to come to grips with political tribalism abroad.
 
Just as Washington’s foreign policy establishment has been blind to the power of tribal politics outside the country, so too have American political elites been oblivious to the group identities that matter most to ordinary Americans – and that are tearing the United States apart.  As the stunning rise of Donald Trump laid bare, identity politics have seized both the American left and right in an especially dangerous, racially inflected way.  In America today, every group feels threatened: whites and blacks, Latinos and Asians, men and women, liberals and conservatives, and so on. There is a pervasive sense of collective persecution and discrimination.  On the left, this has given rise to increasingly radical and exclusionary rhetoric of privilege and cultural appropriation. On the right, it has fueled a disturbing rise in xenophobia and white nationalism.
 
In characteristically persuasive style, Amy Chua argues that America must rediscover a national identity that transcends our political tribes.  Enough false slogans of unity, which are just another form of divisiveness. It is time for a more difficult unity that acknowledges the reality of group differences and fights the deep inequities that divide us.

I can agree with most of the above review.  I have doubts about the bolded part.  It does not see the “increasing radical and exclusionary rhetoric” as an extension of the Enlightenment idea of equality, or mesh well with how crises during the Industrial Age each extend values and morality.  Well, you have to admit crises are radical, that the “winner” appropriates the ability to moralize, to judge, that the process has been and remains dangerous.

But it does not seem like Amy Chua sees that tribal thinking grows less in time, how it changes with the shift from autocratic to democratic forms of government, that a culture improves as tribe size gets larger, more inclusive, that setting the tribe size at all humans (or all beings as a future step) is the natural extension of Enlightenment thought.

But otherwise, I would agree with at least the review.  It also seems like Kinser and I have used ‘tribalism’ consistently with the common political sense of the word.

But I would disagree with any implication that both red and blue are equal in tribal thinking.  A major difference between the two cultures is the red tendency to indulge in it, the blue tendency to be intolerant of it.