Tribalism and Peak Left

[Valin]

Via Meadia:

Nicholas M. Gallagher

Dec 30, 2014

 

“Where you stand depends on where you sit” is favorite aphorism of progressive activists. It’s used to imply that “privilege” can blind someone to inconvenient facts, e.g. police aggression against minorities. But based on the events of the last few months, from Ferguson onward, it’s become pretty clear that both left and right-leaning groups suffer from this sort of narrowed vision. Writing in USA Today, Glenn Reynolds (a.k.a. Instapundit) points out that tribalism—the desire to identify ‘your’ group and stick with them, no matter what—explains an awful lot of the recent national tensions:

 

(Snip)

 

Tribalism would seem to explain the “police wars” better than racism: as we have pointed out, the NYPD is roughly 50% minority, a number that closely echoes the figure for the city as a whole, and so for most people, allegations of “New Jim Crow” just don’t wash. But the idea that people reflexively retreat to “their” side during a time of crisis certainly makes sense. And often that side is as much ideological (or job and culture-based, in the case of the NYPD cops who turned their backs on de Blasio) as racial.

 

Read Reynolds’ whole article; it’s a necessary look at a phenomenon that should disturb us all. Tribalism afflicts everyone, no matter their affiliations and no matter how they reassure themselves that they operate on the basis of fact alone. Indeed, one of the chief causes behind the “Peak Left” moment that Walter Russell Mead addressed recently is leftist intellectuals’ inability to recognize that they, too, are a tribe. For various reasons, the elite progressive world is much more insulated than its right-wing counterpart. In fact, the divide between the left’s view of the world (and consequently its rhetoric) and the way the rest of the country views things seems to be increasing, fueling an unhappy cycle. Recognizing the tribal dynamics at work within its own movement may be the left’s first step toward correcting this—if it’s willing to take it.