Tribalism

 

Truth presenting a Mirror  to the Vanities of the World
Northern European School
Photo Credit: Ashmolean Museum Oxford [CC BY-NC-ND] 

... When you place loyalty to party, to leader, above all other considerations - for jobs, policy positions and execution - you will inevitably degrade the quality of the outcome.

Tribalism eradicates accountability. If all that matters is that you say and do the right thing by your party and its boss, you can literally get away with anything. It is now the dominant organising principle of American politics as well as the media. It causes senators to forsake their roles as part of a co-equal branch of government. It causes members of Congress to abandon their responsibility to scrutinise the actions of an executive branch. It causes the media to forgo their role as public watchdogs and become instead cheerleaders.

The same tribalism led political and media loyalists of Joe Biden to engage in a four-year act of political deceit, the pretence that the former president was mentally capable of doing the job even as they saw he was increasingly senile, with disastrous consequences for US security, economic policy and domestic stability. The wages of tribalism are incompetence, decay and, ultimately, failure.

I think it is no accident that the escalating partisanship and blind loyalty in American politics in the past 20 years has coincided with a sharp decline in the quality of political leadership and collapsing trust in institutions. The willingness to defend absolutely anything your party does, the belief - deep rooted on both sides - that opposition to you cannot be principled but is only ever an act of bad faith, motivated by pure animus and opportunism, has dangerously eroded the quality of decision making and execution.

Successive presidencies have failed in a trail of massive blunders that have become routine at home and abroad.

Representative democracies cannot function without rigid party discipline - "Damn your principles. Stick to your party!" said Benjamin Disraeli  a century and a half ago. But neither can they work when demand for discipline overrides all other objectives in public affairs, when loyalty reigns supreme above competence, integrity, decency and truth.

(Gerard Baker, The Times, 2025

Let us not imagine that tribalism is just the state of affairs in the United States. Far too often in the political realm it becomes the norm -  an unquestioning loyalty. And the media? Is the media in this country or your country a "public watchdog" or a "cheerleader for the side they choose?" Blind obedience to the "party line" is the antithesis of the critical spirit.