Trump, tribalism and institutional failure
eroding, partisan loyalty has radically intensified. As we lose our old meaningful attachments, we find new ones in shallow tribalism.
These trends have been in the pipeline for a long time, and while one can point a curmudgeonly finger of blame at the people, particularly these kids today, that wouldn’t be fair. Many older Americans haven’t exactly been model citizens either. Dismayed with the direction of American politics, they often grew as angry at the system as the young radicals. The real blame falls to elites of all stripes and ages — political, journalistic, economic and educational. Every generation has a responsibility to instruct the next on what is important. As an empirical matter, they — we — failed.
The failure runs deeper, though. Throughout American history, institutions outside of the government have played a vital role in binding people together and giving them a sense of meaning and rootedness. Our politics, both national and local, were always downstream of these institutions.
That intricate ecosystem has been supplanted by virtual communities, which serve not so much to educate and civilize but to reinforce preestablished beliefs. Elites who once guided media outlets, universities, even rotary clubs to temper and channel anger have been replaced by leaders who are more like followers, chasing the online mobs wherever they want to go. Our politics, in other words, are upstream now.
The norms we’ve come to rely on no longer match the landscape. Like Japanese snow monkeys, we’re creating new “behavioral traditions.”
In this, Trump is less an aberration than a leader for his time. In his rhetorical contempt for free speech, his ignorance of basic constitutional facts, his addiction to drama and ratings, his personalization of every political question and conflict, and his uncanny ability to bring out the same qualities in his biggest detractors, he breathes new life into H.L. Mencken’s definition of democracy as “the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.”