Your Tribalism Is Dumb

My father visited me once while I was working for Congress, and I took him to the D.C. Armory to see the marching bands perform. This was a brilliant stroke on my part as a son, as my father loves marching band music. He listens to John Philip Sousa every morning on his way to work, and he unwinds by playing Risk on his computer while listening to the kind of jaunty tunes you'd see in old war propaganda films as the aircraft carrier zips toward Japan. Dad might actually enjoy being invaded by a foreign army, so long as they did it while goose-stepping to a solid drumbeat. (I suspect he dislikes terrorists primarily for their lackluster showmanship.)

At one point, the Army bands split into two sections, then marched to opposite ends of the field. One band played some pithy march, like "We Could Wallop Denmark if We Had To." Then paused, so the other band could blast out "The National Coast Guard's Pickleball Fight Song."

When they alternated back, the stadium instinctively knew what to do: clap for their respective marching band, which had been created and assigned approximately six seconds ago.

When the first band finished its installment of "The Fightin' 51st Airborne Squirt Gun Squadron," the north half of the stadium roared with applause, while we in the southern section waited expectantly for our own response. Our band outdid the north section with an upbeat rendition of "Bury My Spleen at Fort Gibson," and we applauded even louder. (We wanted the north section to know that our band was the superior band, and that we adored them and their brassy musical prowess more than those anemic northerners loved their own middling ensemble.)

I was probably the only person in the entire stadium that day who thought it was the slightest bit curious that we were supposed to cleave into arbitrary groups, then arbitrarily root for an arbitrary team we had just been assigned. No one else seemed to consider the situation odd, because tribalism is so deeply hardwired into us. We instinctively form teams the way beagles sniff for rabbits, or how minotaurs build labyrinths to hibernate in.

Tribalism compels us to belong to a team—to love it, affirm our loyalty to it, help it, and subordinate our own interests to its greater good. We gain a desperately needed sense of almost transcendent belonging when we lose ourselves to these tribal identities.

So far, so good. The urge to team up, coordinate neckties, and sing fight songs is a positive one, springing from the depths of our nature as cooperative, social animals. The pleasant shift from "me" to "us" is an enjoyable and meaningful part of the human experience.

Here's the problem: We don't just crave being on a team; we also crave a rival. We want to be in a club and we want a nemesis to motivate us. We desire an external entity to rally against. In American history, particularly when we have a disconcerting nemesis like the Nazis, the Soviets, or a minotaur, we shift our competitive drive to the external threat and get surprisingly chummy with each other. Absent a compelling bad guy to unite against, partisans glance around and say, "Well, I guess I hate you!"

The urge to spar with a competing team is foundational, not circumstantial. That is to say, we are not blissfully lacking in team spirit or the inclination to coalitional rivalry until confronted by an external menace, at which point we suddenly group up and compete in response. Rather, the urge to oppose an outside foe precedes the foe itself.

It's similar to sex drive, in that tribalism can be inflamed and engorged by external stimulus, even as it hums nicely along by itself either way. I've known several men who have resorted to crazy, reckless things when deprived of sex for too long: flying across the world for a first date, calling up unquestionably ill-suited former lovers at odd hours, wearing hairpieces resembling a dead weasel. Humans are not wholly rational and well-balanced eunuchs until a hot person walks by and makes us leak cash and willpower.

That indisputable urge to reproduce does not mean we are hapless apes who wake up each day exclaiming, "Boy howdy, today I'm gonna go out and bang somebody!" then arrange our Google Calendars around getting laid. Yet it would be folly to view sex as some modular desire which we turn on and off when it's convenient, or which only activates when aroused by external stimuli.

Civilizations past and present are brimming with rules and parameters to appropriately channel our boundless libido. Much of the time, they've been onerous and stodgy. But there have to be some guidelines. I'm about as libertine as they come—good luck with your S&M throuple!—but even I acknowledge that we shouldn't try to achieve orgasm while standing in the middle of a busy intersection. That's not prudish, that's just basic logistics. It's inappropriate to satisfy our baser instincts in some places (funerals, highways, children's birthday parties while making prolonged eye contact with other parents) and it's inappropriate in some circumstances (adultery, while piloting a fighter jet, etc.).

We know we have a sex drive, but we acknowledge we have to delay gratification until we've landed the plane we're piloting. There's nothing prurient about a desire to eat, but we understand that we have to chew the odd salad instead of hamburgers and pastries, lest we catch diabetes with both hands. Society needs to develop a similar awareness of, and solutions to, our equally strong coalitional instincts. We can't inoculate ourselves against tribalism, but we can at least stop ourselves from willfully exacerbating it.

I went into stand-up comedy knowing that everyone relates to death and sex—even monks, who occasionally get erections and die (hopefully not at the same time). Jokes that deal with these issues, particularly if they release some taboo or unstated tension, resonate with the human psyche in a way that punchlines about QuickBooks or airline food cannot. A lot of stand-up comedy revolves around tension in courtship (sex) and the quirks of aging (death).

I was surprised to discover tribal loyalty is just as potent and visceral as death and sex. In fact, more often than not, allegiance to a tribe is more important.

I'm not a particularly edgy comic, so I'm unlikely to ruffle feathers with bawdy jokes. All the same, I've rarely seen anyone in an audience get angry about an implied lack of sex, or gags aimed at their impending mortality. They can take it. Conversely, if you start asking people why they like a particular sports team, onstage or otherwise, they seriously contemplate running you over with their car.

How exactly are the Vikings "Minnesotan"? The players aren't from there. Their teams drafted or traded them. And they will leave when they get a better deal. The owner probably lives in New York or Florida half the time. As Jerry Seinfeld puts it, are we just rooting for the jerseys?

In high school, it surprised me to discover that many of my conservative, rural family members were registered Democrats. They came of age in a one-party state, and so affiliated with the only game in town, and had never felt compelled to change it. Why bother? It was simply a clerical distinction filed away in a building somewhere, not a personal expression of their values or chosen community.

In college, I had entire relationships with people whose politics I never learned. Granted, I might not remember due to binge drinking, but I seem to recall going on strings of dates where politics never really came up. Conversely, when I moved to Manhattan, a young lady told me on our first date, "I wake up every morning and try to be a better liberal." At the time, this statement made absolutely no sense to me. It sounded like picking a wrench instead of a hammer, then somehow incorporating daily devotionals about wrench usage.

Polling shows today's parents are more open than ever to the prospects of their son or daughter marrying outside of the family race or religion. But at the same time, parents are increasingly bothered by the idea of their child stumbling into a cross-partisan marriage. Politics has become the new religion.

For those deaf to the siren's call of tribalism, political discussions are particularly vexing. Partisans increasingly assume all political conversations are a referendum about who is the good team and who is the death of humanity. Try as you might to discuss policy or philosophy outside of the partisan Thunderdome, people assume you're agitating for Blue Team or Red Team. And make no mistake: There are exactly two teams. Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia. You're not allowed to opt out.

Criticism of any politician, then, must likewise fall within that well-worn partisan gutter. I call it Teeter-Totter Thinking: If you say something negative about a Republican, it must mean you are simultaneously championing Democrats as the alternative, or vice versa. So, if you critique [former] President Barack Obama, they will bring up that George W. Bush was worse. If you criticize Donald Trump, they will dredge up Bill Clinton's sexual exploits with underage minotaurs.

All political conversations—and increasingly everything is a political conversation, from whether you prefer salad over barbecue to whether you drive a motorcycle or a unicycle—boil down to affirming loyalty to Our Team and, subtly or overtly, expressing disgust with Team Evil. Comedians have turned into pundits, and pundits have turned into minotaurs.

It would baffle an extraterrestrial visitor to discover that Red Team and Blue Team, which nominally promote policy prescriptions, influence whether you think Bud Light is progressive inclusive swill or sanctimonious woke swill. Back in the day, Bud Light was largely apolitical swill. In a world of inflamed tribalism, everything is a totem pole, and everyone wants to desecrate the enemy's sacred idols.

When we fail to reward partisan rancor as evidence of loyalty to the Good Team, Teeter-Totter Thinkers grow angry—we were supposed to applaud their polemical tirade! When we rebuff their efforts to bond over a shared hatred of some sinful person or ideologically dangerous sect, they infer we must harbor illicit sympathies for them. In fact, a lot of us simply don't want more hatred and fear in our lives.

Most troubling, teeter-totter/tribal/partisan politics increasingly gives those who are drunk on tribal warfare license to suspend basic human decency. Heathens on Team Evil have willfully forfeited their humanity, and so are beneath contempt. Otherwise lovely, considerate people make cripple jokes about wheelchair-bound politicians, or wisecracks about dead spouses and troubled children, because the target is of the opposing party and therefore exempt from ethical norms.

In online arguments, partisans fight their enemies with euphoric ruthlessness. In a spat about something as quotidian as trade barriers or the filibuster, they spew hurtful invectives calculated to inflict maximum emotional damage, in a way that would be wildly inappropriate (if not alarmingly sociopathic) in any other arena of life. A kind of derangement sets in to inflict not just emotional damage, but also social and vocational harm. If the villain winds up killing themselves, well, that's one less evildoer holding us back, right?

If someone on your adult kickball team laughed and laughed when a player from the other team accidentally split their femur in half, we would rightly view that schadenfreude as inappropriate. Yet, often crusaders from Red Team and Blue Team are not merely exempted from such basic considerations, they are openly celebrated for flouting them.

Sanctified as an epic struggle between two cosmic, warring factions, teeter-totter politics tells us that not only are you at liberty to be nasty and hurtful in a way you cannot be anywhere else in polite society, you are a good person for indulging such odious behavior. You can express your most vicious impulses and spew hate at your opponents for emotional release. Your cruelty will be tolerated, if not praised, in this singular aspect of society where normal restraints do not apply.

Perhaps one day we can quit reflexively bristling and squirting fire hoses of partisan bile at each other. Only then will we be able to focus on the real threat to our great nation: minotaurs!

This essay was adapted from Andrew Heaton's book, Tribalism is Dumb: Where It Came from, How It Got So Bad, and What to Do about It, by permission of Last House Standing Books.