The source of it all

Many of the people who most bemoan our political polarization and attendant incivility tend to be the same people who have, perhaps unwittingly, supported a primary cause of it—the increasing politicization of life, which, in turn, is a direct consequence of the dramatic growth of government in our lives over time.

The logic here is simple but inescapable: The bigger government gets and the more areas in which it intrudes, the more occasions we have to disagree over public policy and politics.

More government means more politics, and politics will come to matter more to more people and differing political values will become more pronounced.

In short, the more government does, the more things become politicized and the deeper the resulting political divisions, with those divisions eventually hardening into tribal loyalties that produce and “us versus them” Manichean view of the world.

Such tribalism begets an increasing tendency toward authoritarianism because each side believes the ends (keeping the evil other out of power) justify the means.

Ideas that would have once been quickly dismissed as subversive of American democracy suddenly become more thinkable under the influence of such thinking: Dubious “national emergencies” are invoked to justify unconstitutional uses of executive authority in a manner that would destroy our system of separation of powers, and the very elections that used to define the democratic process and which used to be routinely accepted with full confidence by the electorate are increasingly rejected as “illegitimate” by the losers and their supporters.

When you assume the other side is a threat to the survival of the republic (perhaps the planet itself), you become willing to do whatever necessary to “save” it, even things that run counter to the principles for which it stands.

The idea of politics as the art of compromise no longer holds when it becomes good versus evil (with each side claiming to represent the former and the other the latter).

An often overlooked result of such tribal warfare is loss of love for country, of what in more reasonable times would be called “patriotism”—the left in its woke permutation has come to despise just about everything about America, while an ever larger share of the right seems to have lost faith in America because of what it believes the left has done to it.

The left thinks an untransformed America is unworthy, the right that one transformed by the left would be (because it would no longer be America).

Where we once felt free to quibble over the small stuff because of an assumption of shared belief in the big stuff—freedom, equality, and self-government—Americans increasingly fear those foundational principles are now shared only by one side (ours) and jeopardized by the other (theirs).

Along with the creeping authoritarianism comes intellectual stagnation and close-mindedness, as each side creates something of a seamless garment in terms of issues and positions, with everything linked to everything else in the tribal worldview.

Logic no longer matters when it comes to what Charles Cooke calls “tribal wittering,” only ideological solidarity, as each member of the tribe has to embrace the entire party line, with no exceptions, even if the issues in question are unrelated and there is no logical reason to try to relate them.

A united front is required on everything lest the other side be allowed to “win” on anything, with an approved position on abortion, LGBT rights, gun control, climate change, and all else that must be the exact opposite of the other side’s (to retain the distinctive tribal identity).

The only thing that comes to matter is the relational aspect (that it be as different as possible from theirs and uniformly adopted by yours). The original reasoning for the positions taken regarding this or that issue fades from view and becomes less important than the reactionary conformity.

Every issue, however seemingly trivial, must also be tenaciously fought over under such circumstances, to prevent small losses today from becoming bigger losses tomorrow. The guard can never be let down and no respites in the struggle permitted, because the other side is eager to exploit any opportunity.

Most Americans don’t want to live in this kind of world, where everything becomes politicized and everyone seems to be itching to storm the Bastille every day. To the contrary, the hunch is that most want to live in a society (which ours was for most of its history) where they don’t have to think or worry about politics much, let alone engage in perpetual argument with their neighbors about it.

There have been other factors that have contributed to our dismal political condition: technological change in the form of social media ready-made for incivility, a decline of religious faith for which politics becomes a sad substitute, and the rise of identity politics—which represents a return to the most primitive, medieval forms of ascription and status assignment—most conspicuous among them.

But there should still be no mistaking a fundamental relationship here: More government means more politics, more politics means more politicization of life, and more politicization means more tribalism.

And tribal politics is always an ugly and dumb kind of politics.