Growing Tribalism Threatens the American Experiment

A call for walking our democracy back from the brink.

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(Getty Images)

One of the more distressing developments over the past couple of decades has been America’s worsening political and cultural polarization. Americans’ identities today are more rooted in partisan affiliation and social class than in the past, which has created new fault lines in public life.

On one side of our divide exists a blue tribe that is increasingly college-educated, urban-dwelling, knowledge economy-working, wealthy, secular, and culturally progressive. On the other is a red tribe that tends to have lower levels of formal education, is overrepresented in working-class suburban or rural communities in the Midwest and South, embraces more traditional religious views, and is culturally conservative.

As many Americans start to more deeply embrace these identities, they risk becoming estranged from their fellow citizens who vote, think, and live differently and less likely to encounter non-caricatured versions of them. Over time, this can produce higher levels of intergroup hostility and mistrust. What might have once been considered minor (if still meaningful) disagreements about a certain issue or policy may now seem like existential battles for the soul of the nation.

This growing estrangement has severely strained our relationships in everything from college to dating and marriage to our biological families—and made it much more difficult to even live among one another.

Worse still, as politics is increasingly upstream from culture, these divisions are now becoming tied up in questions about political power. Some may begin to think: if “those people” attain power, it could pose a direct threat to “us” and people we care about. This kind of tribal thinking raises the stakes of election outcomes and carries clear and immense risks to our democratic system of government and elections.

Consider two recent trendlines. First, partisans have become likelier to believe election outcomes have a more direct impact on their lives than they once did. Data from the American National Election Studies shows that only about 50–60 percent of Americans cared who won the presidency for much of the second half of the twentieth century. But that started changing in the 1990s, and as of 2020, over 90 percent of the public said they cared at least a “moderate amount” who won, with more than 80 percent saying they cared “a lot” or “a great deal.”

Second, partisan self-sorting has led to far less crossover voting, with fewer and fewer voters willing to support candidates of the other party at any level of government. In turn, there has been a decline in landslide elections, in which presidential winners enjoy backing from broad ideological coalition, and a corresponding rise in extremely close contests whose results are likelier to be murky or contested.

This is a recipe for combustion. As more presidential elections are decided by razor-thin margins—sometimes just tens of thousands of votes—each side feels just as close to victory as it does to total defeat. But in contrast to the past, when most partisans could reasonably believe that the country would be okay for four years if their party came up short, losses may now feel like dire, or at least unacceptable, outcomes.

Thus, for many people, politics today has become less about winning power in order to govern and more about trying to prevent one’s opponents from obtaining it; less about trying to expand party coalitions by appealing to non-traditional members and more about shoring up existing bases; less about finding common ground with members of the other party to work in the best interest of the country and more about stymieing their agenda and scoring political wins ahead of the next election.

This behavior might be described as partisan trench warfare. In traditional trench warfare, two opposing sides (literally) dig into a defensive position to protect their respective gains. Rather than making new gains, the primary objective is simply to not cede the ground they already control to their opponents.

We see this today at the cultural level in debates over hot-button issues. America’s two main tribes are largely unwilling to engage with one another on these issues or seek common ground. Not only is there more to be gained by picking a fight with the other tribe (and potentially more to be lost by working with them toward a solution), but the two sides don’t even seem to trust each other not to operate in bad faith.

For example, many in the blue tribe have been reticent to accept the growing consensus in Western democracies that the evidence base for pediatric gender care is incredibly weak, likely because they fear that doing so would only embolden their opponents, whom some believe want to banish the concept of being transgender altogether. In the other direction, many gun owners actually agree in theory with proposals to restrict the ubiquity of firearms in America, but they don’t trust that their opponents will stop at just a few new regulations, especially when they hear some politicians essentially call for the outright confiscation of guns.

In both cases, each side sees it as better to maintain the status quo than put themselves at risk of losing ground by reaching out to the other one, leaving us in a perennial limbo with no solutions in sight as public contention around the issues continues to grow.

These same behaviors are evident in government, too. Bipartisanship in Congress has been slowly ticking down over the past few decades; last year was the least productive for Congress since the Great Depression. Both parties increasingly vote uniformly against the other party’s bills in Congress—even those they agree with—especially if it gives them a campaign issue to wield as a cudgel against their opponents. Fights among members rooted in personal animus have become more common as well.

Perhaps most worrisome: as the stakes of election outcomes grow, so too might the incentives for bad behavior to prevent the other side from attaining power. If a win for the blue tribe is bad for the red tribe, the red tribe may begin to permit their side to look for shortcuts to winning or even to cheat (and vice versa for the blue side). It also becomes harder for either tribe to believe that the other one can win fairly at all.

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Suffice it to say, none of this is healthy for the long-term stability of the country. We must remember that the American experiment in self-governance and pluralistic democracy is still an experiment. Societies wherein most people can live in relative peace with a reasonable amount of opportunity and have their rights basically respected are not the natural state of humanity. The more we begin to see our fellow citizens as a problem to be dealt with rather than potential allies to strengthen our republic, the less likely it is that our experiment survives in the long run.

It is therefore paramount that we find ways to lower the temperature and coexist with members of the other tribe—who also happen to be our fellow citizens.

How might we do this? Here are a few ideas:

• Respect pluralism. The United States was intentionally founded not on a shared identity trait but an idea: that people of all backgrounds and faiths could belong here. This embrace of difference is what makes democracy messy—people with different values and identities must somehow find a way to live together and govern themselves. Though this can be difficult, it’s not impossible, and one way to make this work is by respecting other people’s right to live their lives as they see fit. It’s fine to disagree with others’ values or lifestyles, but it’s not okay to force our own on them, whether through the levers of government or cultural power. Finding peace with this notion may help lessen the threat perception each side has of the other.

• Find opportunities for inter-tribe engagement. This one takes courage, but choosing to reach out to people in an out-group can help break the taboo that says the interests of the in-group should always take precedence. We also can’t be an intellectually honest society if we’re unwilling to acknowledge that sometimes our political opponents have good ideas worth considering. No single ideological value system has all the answers or is right all the time, and by engaging with people of different persuasions, we may yet find breakthroughs on some of the thorniest issues facing the country today. We must remember that the two sides are often not as far apart on values and policy as they may think.

• Don’t assume the worst in our opponents. One of the nastiest habits in our highly polarized society is to view our opponents in bad faith from the outset. Part of the reason it can seem difficult to reach across the tribal divide is because we assume that those on the other side of it are acting in bad faith. If people from the other tribe hold what we consider to be bad values, it must be because they are themselves bad people or hold a perverse desire to be bad. But Occam’s razor would suggest this is unlikely. If we didn’t come to our own beliefs out of a desire to be a bad person, chances are pretty good our opponents didn’t either.

• Advocate for meaningful electoral changes. Ultimately, politicians’ behavior is driven by incentives, and the current incentives for too many of them are to focus primarily on their base. This creates more ideologically cohesive parties whose members have more to gain by staying in line and lobbing bombs at their opponents and more to lose by working across the aisle. To change this dynamic, voters must push to change politicians’ incentives. There are far too many specific ideas to get into here, but both nonpartisan primaries and ranked-choice voting have been associated with lower levels of political extremism.

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In Alex Garland’s excellent 2024 movie, Civil War, he follows a journalist named Lee Smith, who had spent most of her career reporting from war zones around the world. At one point, Smith lamented, “Every time I survived a war zone, I thought I was sending a warning home: Don't do this.” Indeed, the growing levels of tribalism and intergroup animosity in our homeland have parallels throughout history and around the globe—and they rarely result in good outcomes for ordinary people.

The reality is that neither side in America’s culture war is going anywhere anytime soon, leaving us with essentially two options for how to proceed: learn to coexist with people who believe different things than we do—embrace pluralism—or watch as our experiment in self-government devolves into chaos and violence.

The more we refuse to defuse the political animosity in America and engender greater understanding across these divides, the more we jeopardize the future of the country. We must walk our democracy back from the brink before it’s too late.