Americans should worry about tribalism, not identity politics

Paul Ryan, the outgoing House Speaker, is worried about “the deinstitutionalization of society writ large.”

He’s also worried about tribalism and identity politics, which he described this week as politically effective but morally wrong. I’m not particularly worried about Ryan, the Wisconsin Republican who’s retiring from Congress at the end of this term. But his comments caught my eye because I share his concerns about political tribalism, and the deinstitutionalization of society writ large. Those are related phenomena, and neither of them serves us well.

But Ryan is wrong to conflate tribalism and identity politics. They’re similar, and sometimes coexist, but they’re not the same thing. The former prioritizes the interests of a group, usually in relation to other groups in a society. The latter prioritizes the interests of individuals who, as members of a particular group, have concerns related to that aspect of their identity.

And tribalism is something that all Americans should be worried about. As Ryan said, it’s politically effective. He himself has been a direct beneficiary of the fierce partisanship that explains why most Republicans ultimately voted for Donald Trump for president in 2016, even if they hadn’t supported him in the primary — and why so few of Trump’s detractors were willing to fully buck the party and back Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee.

But Republicans may come to see Trump’s election as a pyrrhic victory. Their prospects in this year’s midterm elections have been compromised by their own commitment to partisanship. They may lose control of the Senate as well as the House. In fact, they may lose control of the Senate as a result of losing a seat in Texas, a state that has been crucial to the

GOP’s overall electoral strategy since the dawn of the 21st century.

Setting Trump aside, though, tribalism is inherently risky in a system where elections are supposed to serve as a safeguard against the elevation of a manifestly unsuitable candidate. It also makes no sense, given that there are plenty of buffoons on both sides of the aisle and that political parties are subject to failure, just like all other institutions.

All things considered, I wouldn’t necessarily say that tribalism is morally wrong, as Ryan did. But it definitely doesn’t serve the public interest. And Americans who agree should reconsider their stance on identity politics — which sometimes coexists with tribalism, but can also serve as a corrective to it.

There’s a lot of knee-jerk antipathy to the concept on the right. Some of it is sincerely felt. I am routinely annoyed by the ham-fisted appeals to identity that Democrats sometimes make while pandering, to women in particular. And there’s a case to be made that identity politics ultimately has the effect of marginalizing the people making such arguments.

In fact, the late Henry B. Gonzalez, the longtime Democratic congressman from San Antonio, made this case in the 1960s in response to the rise of the Chicano movement.

And yet I’ve noticed that those fretting about identity politics lately, mostly white men, never even make reference to Gonzalez, who was the first Mexican-American to represent Texas in Congress and served nearly 40 years in Washington. It’s as if critics of identity politics haven’t bothered to seek out other perspectives on the issue.

The Americans raising identity-related concerns — those who belong to the Black Lives Matter movement, for example — are, in fact, experiencing differential treatment or differential outcomes. It’s not as if such concerns, in general, are inherently frivolous, or only worth taking seriously if you happen to be a member of the affected group. And Americans who raise concerns about systemic injustices affecting them aren’t dismissive of the concerns that others might be harboring, along similar lines. In my experience, it’s the opposite.

And that makes sense, actually: In a country as heterogeneous as this one, it’s hard to pursue identity-related concerns via the political process except as part of a coalition of voters. Tribalism encourages an “us versus them” mentality, in which success is measured by the outcome of an election, rather than what happens next. Proponents of identity politics are insisting that they, and we, should expect better than that.