everything

I think the worst feature of American life that has emerged since I grew up is the tribalism.

When I think about where our family can live and be happy, I think about whether one tribe or another dominates that place. Is that tribe full of people who we can get along with, who will respect and value us? Or are they people who will judge us for our skin color, or where we're from, or who we vote for, or whether we took a vaccine, or, or, or...

I remember politics being quite a blood sport even when I was a kid, but I don't remember this level of tribalism. Yes, people from the country would laugh about city folk, and vice versa. But it seemed to be far less. We would all mostly drive the same cars, and you couldn't always tell people apart based on how they presented themselves.

Now I can sense these tribes everywhere we go. In fact, many more signifiers of tribal membership are much more common. Think about wearing masks during the pandemic. About pronouns.

I don't think this is healthy in any way. We are drawing stark lines around groups of ourselves in ways that are going to be very hard to undo in the future. This causes all manner of social dysfunction.

When I think about where we should live in the US, I think about this, and the more I think about it, the more I just want to leave again. I don't think we fit into either of the two biggest tribes, and tribalism has come to dominate more and more of social life here in the states.

The worst part about it is that within these tribes, it is very difficult to admit mistakes. If you spend all your time defending yourself from the other tribe, you reflexively start to respond to anyone criticizing your tribe as being from the other side, instead of considering their argument. You do this because arguments made from the other tribe are often in bad faith anyway, so there is no point even engaging them on the merits, right?

This can create weird dynamics, where policies that only make sense to some vocal minority get adopted by your tribe, and even though the majority of people within the tribe disagree with those policies and ideas, no one wants to change it because most of the criticism is coming from the other side. The left in the US is most susceptible to this. I'm fairly certain that a huge majority of Biden voters would agree that defunding the police with no alternative plan is a bad idea, yet it has happened in several cities anyway, and remains a talking point of the left.

There is no space for nuance, because the left tribe is so busy defending itself from bad faith arguments from the right tribe. There is no space to consider, what about left leaning countries like Spain which have some of the highest number of police per capita, are very safe, and do not have a rampant problem with police corruption and victimization of ethnic and racial minorities like we do.

The result is that left-leaning cities are increasingly unsafe because police departments are defunded or laws are passed to hamstring their ability to police in the way they are used to, and simultaneously, nothing is being done to change the way policing is done to make it more equitable and safe for all.

There can be no nuance, no experimentation, no compromise, in a tribally divided society like this.