Tribalism in our politics won’t fade without reform

Back in the late 1970s, when I was covering the Lebanese civil war, a story made the rounds in Beirut that the Lebanese Christian Phalangist militia had come up with a novel way of discovering a Palestinian trying to pass through one of its checkpoints. The Phalangists would show the driver a tomato and ask: What’s this? If the driver used the standard Lebanese pronunciation, “banadurra,” he was allowed to pass. If he used the Palestinian pronunciation, “bandora,” he could be shot on the spot.

That is tribal politics at its raw essence: It doesn’t matter how you live your life or what you aspire to for your society. All that matters is your sectarian or tribal identity, revealed by how you pronounce tomato.

The Alabama Senate race reminded me of that story — not the shooting part, of course, but the way so many people were ready to vote along tribal lines, ready to vote for a credibly accused child molester, Roy Moore, just to prevent a Democrat from taking office.

In past moments of raw, tribal/cultural divisions, our system was always able to produce leaders able to summon our better angels and pull us together. I don’t see that now, and I worry that technology — social media networks in particular — and archaic laws that prevent new players from entering politics actually work against the emergence of such leaders.

Consider President Lincoln and his Congress. In the middle of a civil war and in the middle of our transition from an agrarian to an industrial society, they approved the Homestead Act of 1862, which opened the West for settlement; the Pacific Railway Acts of 1862 and 1864, which connected the eastern and western halves of the country, laying the basis for a truly national economy; the Morrill Act of 1862, which established the landgrant colleges to teach skills the country needed to go to the next level; and the National Academy of Sciences in 1863, to encourage America’s best researchers.

Lincoln, a sort of liberal Republican, could not get through most GOP primaries today, and he’d be eaten alive on Twitter for his centrism.

And yet we are going through a similar period of rapid change today.

And what do we have instead? A highly tribal Republican tax bill that targets none of our issues.

The GOP has totally lost its mind and soul. Nothing will sustainably improve without “institutional reform” in how we elect candidates, argues Stanford University democracy expert Larry Diamond, “and fortunately I see the ground starting to shift. Pay attention to Maine.”

A grass-roots effort is underway in Maine to gather enough signatures for a June referendum to require all primaries for state offices and Congress to use rank-choice voting, where you vote for your first-choice and your second-choice candidate. That way, if you want, you can vote for a thirdparty candidate first and then for a Republican or a Democrat second. It not only gives third-party candidates more of a chance but it also forces Republicans and Democrats to move closer to the center to pick up every possible second vote.

I say: What do we have to lose? When so many people voted for an apparent child molester over a Democrat, we’ve surely hit rock bottom. There is only one level lower, and that’s when people with guns start asking you how to pronounce “tomato.”