From Tribe to Community

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/09/can-democracy-survive-tribalism.html

America Wasn’t Built for Humans

Tribalism was an urge our Founding Fathers assumed we could overcome. And so it has become our greatest vulnerability.

By Andrew Sullivan

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.


One of the great attractions of tribalism is that you don’t actually have to think very much. All you need to know on any given subject is which side you’re on.