Out on a Limb

by Andrew Sullivan

  Yes, he is an incompetent, a dilettante, a man who doesn’t know what he doesn’t know. Many of his moves will probably lead to a nosedive in support. But Trump cannot admit error and will need to deny it or scapegoat others or divert public attention. Those diversions could well be deeply destabilizing—and galvanized by events. There will doubtless be another incident between police and an unarmed black man under a Trump presidency. Rather than calm the nation, Trump will inflame it. There will be an Islamist terror attack of some kind—and possibly a wave of such attacks in response to his very election. Trump will exploit it with the subtlety of a Giuliani and the brutality of a Putin.

  I have long had faith that some version of fascism cannot come to power in America. The events of the past year suggest deep reflection on that conviction. A political hurricane has arrived, as globalization has eroded the economic power of the white working classes, as the cultural left has overplayed its hand on social and racial issues, and as a catastrophic war and a financial crisis have robbed the elites of their credibility. As always in history, you still needed the spark, the unique actor who could deploy demagogic talent to drag an advanced country into violence and barbarism. In Trump, America found one for the ages.

  Maybe the worst won’t happen on Tuesday. Maybe this catastrophist possible reading of our times is massively overblown. Maybe this short essay will be ridiculed in the future, as either Clinton wins and prevails in power or Trump turns out to be a far different president than he has been a candidate. I sure hope so. But the fact that we may barely avoid a very deep crisis does not mitigate my anxiety. To paraphrase Benjamin Franklin, we live in a republic, if we can keep it. And yet, more than two centuries later, we are openly contemplating throwing it up in the air and seeing where it might land.

  Do what you can.

  America Wasn’t Built for Humans

  September 19, 2017 | NEW YORK magazine

  From time to time, I’ve wondered what it must be like to live in a truly tribal society. Watching Iraq or Syria these past few years, you get curious about how the collective mind can come so undone. What’s it like to see the contours of someone’s face, or hear his accent, or learn the town he’s from, and almost reflexively know that he is your foe? How do you live peacefully for years among fellow citizens and then find yourself suddenly engaged in the mass murder of humans who look similar to you, live around you, and believe in the same God, but whose small differences in theology mean they must be killed before they kill you? In the Balkans, a long period of relative peace imposed by communism was shattered by brutal sectarian and ethnic warfare, as previously intermingled citizens split into unreconcilable groups. The same has happened in a developed democratic society—Northern Ireland—and in one of the most successful countries in Africa, Kenya.

  Tribal loyalties turned Beirut, Lebanon’s beautiful, cosmopolitan capital, into an urban wasteland in the 1970s; they caused close to a million deaths in a few months in Rwanda in the 1990s; they are turning Aung San Suu Kyi, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, into an enabler of ethnic cleansing right now in Myanmar. British imperialists long knew that the best way to divide and conquer was by creating “countries” riven with tribal differences. Not that they were immune: even in successful modern democracies like Britain and Spain, the tribes of Scots and Catalans still threaten viable nation-states. In all these places, the people involved have been full citizens of their respective nations, but their deepest loyalty is to something else.

  But then, we don’t really have to wonder what it’s like to live in a tribal society anymore, do we? Because we already do. Over the past couple of decades in America, the enduring, complicated divides of ideology, geography, party, class, religion, and race have mutated into something deeper, simpler to map, and therefore much more ominous. I don’t just mean the rise of political polarization (although that’s how it often expresses itself), nor the rise of political violence (the domestic terrorism of the late 1960s and ’70s was far worse), nor even this country’s ancient black-white racial conflict (though its potency endures).

  I mean a new and compounding combination of all these differences into two coherent tribes, eerily balanced in political power, fighting not just to advance their own side but to provoke, condemn, and defeat the other.

  I mean two tribes whose mutual incomprehension and loathing can drown out their love of country, each of whom scans current events almost entirely to see if they advance not so much their country’s interests but their own. I mean two tribes where one contains most racial minorities and the other is disproportionately white; where one tribe lives on the coasts and in the cities and the other is scattered across a rural and exurban expanse; where one tribe holds on to traditional faith and the other is increasingly contemptuous of religion altogether; where one is viscerally nationalist and the other’s outlook is increasingly global; where each dominates a major political party; and, most dangerously, where both are growing in intensity as they move further apart.

  The project of American democracy—to live beyond such tribal identities, to construct a society based on the individual, to see ourselves as citizens of a people’s republic, to place religion off-limits, and even in recent years to embrace a multiracial and post-religious society—was always an extremely precarious endeavor. It rested, from the beginning, on an eighteenth-century hope that deep divides can be bridged by a culture of compromise, and that emotion can be defeated by reason. It failed once, spectacularly, in the most brutal civil war any Western democracy has experienced in modern times. And here we are, in an equally tribal era, with a deeply divisive president who is suddenly scrambling Washington’s political alignments, about to find out if we can prevent it from failing again.

  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. We lived for tens of thousands of years in compact, largely egalitarian groups of around fifty people or more, connected to one another by genetics and language, usually unwritten. Most tribes occupied their own familiar territory, with widespread sharing of food and no private property. A tribe had its own leaders and a myth of its own history. It sorted out what we did every day, what we thought every hour.

  Tribal cohesion was essential to survival, and our first religions emerged for precisely this purpose. As Dominic Johnson argues in his recent book God Is Watching You, almost all indigenous societies had a common concept of the supernatural, and almost all of them saw their worst threats—hunger, disease, natural disasters, a loss in battle—as a consequence of disobeying a god. Religion therefore fused with communal identity and purpose; it was integral to keeping the enterprise afloat, and the idea of people within a tribe believing in different gods was incomprehensible. Such heretics would be killed.

  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.

  Comparatively few actual tribes exist today, but that doesn’t mean that humans are genetically much different. In his book Tribe, Sebastian Junger relates a little-known fact about the Americans who pioneered the frontier. In the centuries in which white Europeans lived alongside Native American tribes, many Europeans split off from their fellow colonists, disappeared into the wilderness, and joined Indian society. Almost no natives voluntarily did the reverse. “Thousands of Europeans are Indians, and we have no examples of even one of those Aborigines having fro
m choice become European,” wrote one eighteenth-century Frenchman. “There must be in their social bond something singularly captivating and far superior to anything to be boasted of among us.” That “something,” Junger argues, was being a member of a tribe.

  Successful modern democracies do not abolish this feeling; they co-opt it. Healthy tribalism endures in civil society in benign and overlapping ways. We find a sense of belonging, of unconditional pride, in our neighborhood and community, in our ethnic and social identities and their rituals, among our fellow enthusiasts. There are hip-hop and country-music tribes; bros; nerds; Wasps; Dead Heads and Packers fans; Facebook groups. (Yes, technology upends some tribes and enables new ones.) And then, most critically, there is the über-tribe that constitutes the nation-state, a megatribe that unites a country around shared national rituals, symbols, music, history, mythology, and events, that forms the core unit of belonging that makes a national democracy possible.

  None of this is a problem. Tribalism only destabilizes a democracy when it calcifies into something bigger and more intense than our smaller, multiple loyalties, when it rivals our attachment to the nation as a whole, and when it turns rival tribes into enemies. And the most significant fact about American tribalism today is that all three of these characteristics now apply to our political parties, corrupting and even threatening our system of government.

  If I were to identify one profound flaw in the founding of America, it would be its avoidance of our tribal nature. The Founders were suspicious of political parties altogether—but parties defined by race and religion and class and geography? I doubt they’d believe a republic could survive that, and they couldn’t and didn’t foresee it. In fact, as they conceived of a new society that would protect the individual rights of all humanity, they explicitly excluded a second tribe among them: African American slaves. Within a century, that moral and political blind spot cleaved the country down the middle and led to the kind of bloody, manic, and brutal tribal warfare we now think of as something that happens somewhere else.

  But it did happen here, on a fault line that closely resembles today’s tribal boundary. For a century after the Civil War, this divide, while still strong, was nonetheless diluted by myriad other ethnic loyalties, as waves of European immigrants came to America and competed with one another as well as with those already here. Some new tribes, such as Mormons, were accommodated simply by the ever-expanding frontier. And in the first half of the twentieth century, with immigration sharply curtailed after 1924, the World Wars acted as great unifiers and integrators. Our political parties became less polarized by race, as the FDR Democrats managed to attract more black voters as well as ethnic and southern whites. By 1956, nearly 40 percent of black voters still backed the GOP.

  But we all know what happened next. The re-racialization of our parties began with Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign in 1964, when the GOP lost almost all of the black vote. It accelerated under Nixon’s “southern strategy” in the wake of the civil-rights revolution. By Reagan’s reelection, the two parties began to cohere again into the Civil War pattern, and had simply swapped places.

  The failed nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court was perhaps the first moment that a hubristic GOP nominated a figure on the far right, and an increasingly vocal left upended previous norms for judicial hearings, using race and gender as political weapons. Mass illegal Latino immigration added to the tribal mix as the GOP, led most notably by Pete Wilson in California, became increasingly defined by white immigration restrictionists and Hispanics moved to the Democrats. Newt Gingrich’s revolutionary GOP then upped the ante, treating President Bill Clinton as illegitimate from the start, launching an absurd impeachment crusade, and destroying the comity that once kept Washington from complete partisan dysfunction. Abortion and gay rights further split urban and rural America. By the 2000 election, we were introduced to the red-blue map, though by then we could already recognize the two tribes it identified as they fought to a national draw. Choosing a president under those circumstances caused a constitutional crisis, one the Supreme Court resolved at the expense of losing much of its nonpartisan, nontribal authority.

  Then there were other accelerants: the arrival of talk radio in the 1980s, Fox News in the ’90s, and internet news and MSNBC in the aughts; the colossal blunder of the Iraq War, which wrecked the brief national unity after 9/11; and the rise of partisan gerrymandering that allowed the GOP to win, in 2016, 49 percent of the vote but 55 percent of House seats. (A recent study found that a full fifth of current districts are more convoluted than the original, contorted district that first gave us the term “gerrymander” in 1812.) The greatest threat to a politician today therefore is less a candidate from the opposing party than a more ideologically extreme primary opponent. The incentives for cross-tribal compromise have been eviscerated, and those for tribal extremism reinforced.

  Add to this the great intellectual sorting of America, in which, for generations, mass college education sifted countless gifted young people from the heartland and deposited them in increasingly left-liberal universities and thereafter the major cities, from which they never returned, and then the shifting of our economy to favor the college educated, which only deepened the urban-rural divide. The absence of compulsory military service meant that our wars would be fought disproportionately by one tribe, and the rise of radical Islamic terrorism only inflamed tribal suspicions. Then there’s the post-1965 wave of mass immigration, which disorients in ways that cannot be wished or shamed away; the decision among the country’s intellectual elite to junk the “melting pot” metaphor as a model for immigration in favor of “multiculturalism”; and the decline of Christianity as a common cultural language for both political parties—which had been critical, for example, to the success of the civil-rights movement.

  The myths that helped us unite as a nation began to fray. We once had a widely accepted narrative of our origins, shared icons that defined us, and a common pseudoethnicity—“whiteness”—into which new immigrants were encouraged to assimilate. Our much broader ethnic mix and the truths of history make this much harder today—as, of course, they should. But we should be clear-eyed about the consequence. We can no longer think of the Puritans without acknowledging the genocide that followed them; we cannot celebrate our Founding Fathers without seeing that slavery undergirded the society they constructed; we must tear down our Confederate statues and relitigate our oldest rifts. Even the national anthem now divides those who stand from those who kneel. We dismantled many of our myths, but have not yet formed new ones to replace them.

  The result of all this is that a lopsided 69 percent of white Christians now vote Republican, while the Democrats get only 31. In the last decade, the gap in Christian identification between Democrats and Republicans has increased by 50 percent. In 2004, 44 percent of Latinos voted Republican for president; in 2016, 29 percent did. Forty-three percent of Asian Americans voted Republican in 2004; in 2016, 29 percent did. Since 2004, the most populous urban counties have also swung decisively toward the Democrats, in both blue and red states, while rural counties have shifted sharply to the GOP. When three core components of a tribal identity—race, religion, and geography—define your political parties, you’re in serious trouble.

  Some countries, where tribal cleavages spawned by ethnic and linguistic differences have long existed, understand this and have constructed systems of government designed to ameliorate the consequences. Unlike the United States, they encourage a culture of almost pathological compromise, or build constitutions that, unlike our own, take tribal conflict seriously. They often have a neutral head of state—a constitutional monarch or nonpartisan president—so that the legitimacy of the system is less easily defined by one tribe or the other. They tend to have proportional representation and more than two parties, so it’s close to impossible for one party to govern without some sort of coalition. In the toughest cases, they have mandatory inclusion of minority parties in the govern
ment.

  In Northern Ireland, for example, since the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, there are intricate arrangements in which no regional government for the province can exist without support from at least two parties representing the Catholic minority and the Protestant majority. The first minister and the deputy first minister have to be from different parties, one Catholic and one Protestant. If one or the other drops out, power reverts to Westminster. The Belgian government, to take another example, is required to have both French-and Flemish-speaking parties, representing the two linguistic and cultural tribes that make up the country.

  These contrivances are not fail-safe, especially if the divisions are too great—such as Cyprus’s experiment in the 1960s. But they can channel tribal conflict constructively and thereby weaken it. The Netherlands is the clearest success story. Its three main tribes (or “pillars,” as they became known) were, for many years, Catholic, Protestant, and socialist. Each had its own political culture, media, and unions. But these were divided into five parties (one socialist, one conservative, one Catholic, and two Protestant). In practice, this required tribal cooperation through constant coalition governments that gravitated toward the center. Over time, as secularism took hold, the Netherlands evolved into a much more familiar variety of ideological parties, but its tradition of compromising, coalition governments remains.