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Tribalism or Epiphany?
The setting is a little creek out west, where Wyatt Earp had just bested the bad guys in a gunfight that featured Wyatt taking cover from a hailstorm of enemy fire before deciding that he wasn’t going to die crouched behind some rock. The scene is from the movie Tombstone, wherein Earp opted instead to walk out in the open where he could see his targets, picking them off one by one in a display of what the brass in the Pentagon call “Extreme Valor,” (the rest of us grunts preferring a term of art that describes certain male body parts as being made of brass).
Referring to the shootings of Wyatt Earp’s brothers by the bad guys, Sherman McMasters says, “If they were my brothers, I’d want revenge too.” At which point Doc Holliday corrects him, saying, “Oh, make no mistake; it’s not revenge he’s looking for. It’s a reckoning.”
Which I suppose would compel Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse, among others, to simultaneously lament the rise of — and Wyatt Earp’s descent into — “tribalism;” a term which has come to embody the proposition that to get kicked around is noble, but to kick back against an aggressor is to succumb to more vulgar and primitive instincts.
In his recent Wall Street Journal piece, Senator Sasse performs a public service by isolating the proximate cause of a great deal of the loneliness we observe each day as those we love sit, surrounded by those who love them, unable or unwilling to lift their noses from their phones or divert their eyes from the television long enough to engage in a meaningful and prolonged exchange with people who have chosen to be present in flesh and blood to spend time with them. Senator Sasse writes:
The Harvard social scientist Robert Putnam chronicled the collapse of associational, neighborly America in his book “Bowling Alone” (2000). In the nearly two decades since, the smartphone has further undermined any sense of place by allowing us to mentally “escape” our homes and neighborhoods. We can instantly connect with the supposedly more exciting lives of others. These moments add up, until we’re in an almost permanent state of dissociation, punctuated only by the most urgent demands of life, to which we tend halfheartedly.
All of which rings quite true. The Senator’s diagnosis continues:
Humans are social, relational beings. We want and need to be in tribes. In our time, however, all of the traditional tribes that have sustained humans for millennia are simultaneously in collapse. Family, enduring friendship, meaningful shared work, local communities of worship—all have grown ever thinner. We are creating thicker, more vehement tribes around our political differences, I believe, because there is a growing vacuum at the heart of our shared (or increasingly, not so shared) everyday lives.
At this point, Senator Sasse’s analysis begins to show signs of arrested development. Are our political differences becoming more intractable and contentious because of a “growing vacuum” in the heart of our existence, or because politics insists on making deeper and deeper inroads into that existence? Perhaps it’s not an either/or proposition, but rather an unholy alliance of both. Still, it would have been helpful had Sasse at least acknowledged the role that government has played in the collapse of traditional community structures.
I offer as a shining example from Senator Sasse’s column his observation that, “More Republicans and Democrats are placing politics at the center of their lives,” and ask the good Senator pray tell, how can we do otherwise when politicians won’t leave us alone? From a Federal Register that numbers in the hundreds of thousands of pages from which blossom still more hundreds of thousands of regulations prescribing everything from how our toilets flush to what we may and may not do with puddles of water on our own property, I’d like nothing more than to relegate political matters to an inconsequential subcategory of life.
Alas, Senator Sasse’s contemporaries won’t oblige and a great many on his side of the aisle haven’t felt much like restraining them, so that we can’t even brush our teeth or change a lightbulb without running smack into circumstances about which we were warned by Alexis de Tocqueville when he described a government which:
…covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. The will of man is not shattered, but softened, bent, and guided; men are seldom forced by it to act, but they are constantly restrained from acting. Such a power does not destroy, but prevents existence; it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.
Speaking of Senator Sasse and others currently inveighing against the rise in tribalism, how vociferous were their anti-tribal concerns when the liberal tribal contingent was running roughshod over the right of citizens to go about their daily lives unharassed by the encroachments of the state? When people discovered that, no, they couldn’t keep their doctor or their health insurance under Obamacare, and they saw their premiums rise to the level of their mortgage, where were the op-eds decrying progressivism’s, “thicker, more vehement tribes?” When Barack Obama bypassed the people’s elected representatives and announced instead that he would rule by “pen and phone,” where were the lamentations over the ascendancy of “ferocious political tribalism?”
For that matter, does anyone recall reading or hearing of the dangers of this descent into tribalism when we were instructed, in no uncertain terms, that one particular group of lives mattered more than others and the police themselves became targets of assassination? When Eric Holder’s Justice Department undertook to investigate precisely those police departments battling hardest against the mayhem of the lawless, whose ambassadors blocked traffic, illegally detained motorists, plundered and vandalized businesses, and attacked the innocent, who was it exactly that admonished the left’s tribal tendencies?
Can someone explain why it is that at precisely the moment when those of us who have played by the rules and are vilified by the media and the left, announce that we’ve had enough of this nonsense and are doing something about it, that we find ourselves under an avalanche of anti-tribal recriminations and admonishments from our own side? Is the antithesis of “tribalism” defined as serial capitulations to the left’s agenda of dividing people into racial, economic, and gender categories in order to favor some over others via wealth redistribution and racial/gender spoils systems?
Thankfully, a few observant souls, such as Senator Lindsey Graham, have finally achieved mental clarity with respect to the progressive’s lust for power at all costs. The attempted wholesale destruction of Brett Kavanaugh, consisting as it did of lurid fact-free allegations of the worst kind, ultimately revealed itself to be nothing less than a desperate attempt to keep off of the Supreme Court anyone who might demonstrate fidelity to the Constitution as written. Unable to do so on the basis of legal philosophy, Democrat senators resorted to the sort of character assassination that would have made Teddy Kennedy proud.
When Kavanaugh’s senatorial executioners stated that his audacity in actually fighting back against their absurd allegations that he was a gang-rapist demonstrated poor judicial temperament, the scales at long last fell from Lindsey Graham’s eyes, and he would have no more. “If you wanted an FBI investigation, you could have come to us,” thundered the Senator whom I referred to years ago as John McCain’s sorority sister. “What you want to do,” he continued, “is destroy this guy’s life, hold this seat open and hope you win in 2020. You’ve said that, not me. …Boy, you all want power. God, I hope you never get it.”
“Both sides seem to believe that a grand solution to our political dysfunction can be found inside politics,” writes Senator Sasse, adding that, “If only we could vanquish those evil people waving a different banner, this thinking goes, we’d be on the road to national recovery.” The simplistic formulation of, “both sides,” calls to mind Bill Buckley’s rejoinder that an assumption of moral parity suggests that there is no substantive difference between the guy who pushes a little old lady out of the path of an oncoming bus and a guy who pushes a little old lady into the path of an oncoming bus — on the grounds that they are both guys who go around pushing little old ladies.
As I observed a while back, the suggestion that conservatives are merely fighting for their particular “banner,” as if in dumb allegiance to a specific-colored sports jersey, is a poorly conceived caricature of what is at stake and why it matters. One “side,” is waging an all-out assault on individual sovereignty, on the proposition that government exists to protect the rights and lives of its citizens rather than to lead them about as if they were born with rings through their noses, and on the proposition that proper government is limited to those functions actually enumerated in the Constitution. Our side seeks liberty. The other side seeks servitude to the state and its masterminds.
It’s not revenge. It’s not even a reckoning. It’s what generations of American patriots have fought for. If Senator Sasse and others can’t understand that, then they have precious little right to lecture the rest of us on questions of morality, tribal or not.
Published in General
Certainly one of many major causes. Anyone want to take a guess of how much of O’Rourke’s campaign funding is from Texas sources concerned with Texas’ role in federal government? The 17th Amendment played a big part in getting us where we are. Prior to that, even if there was some corruption, the fact is that the votes of Texas voters through their state legislators selecting or approving their Senators was more representative than now.
I am generally in agreement with you. That said I think the way to make change is gradually, make small and possible improvements. Cut spending where ever you can. Then when you have shown that you can make a good faith effort to cut things, and the world did not end, you can cut entitlements. Entitlements are the biggest problem, but if you jump right to this, taking money from actual people, while wasting tons of money elsewhere it will never pass.
Most assuredly. In keeping with that concept, I’ve argued that no one running to represent a state, be it for the Senate or the House, should be allowed to accept campaign contributions from outside their state.
You asked a question. I gave information to illuminate the question. There was nothing to agree with.
My point is simple. Politicians have no long term incentive to deal with entitlements. So they won’t.
Until it becomes a crisis.
Which is when people see direct impact in their lives to due to overspending.
Which will be too late to stave off any real fix, or prevent actual consequences.
Those consequences will be that the promises won’t be kept. (No Medicare providers, no Social Security checks, no Medicaid providers)
That won’t be as potentially controlled as deliberate spending reductions and elimination of programs, but it may work almost as well. If everything goes bust we can start from scratch. I probably should say they instead of we since it’s a future event.
I don’t think that’s right. Almost all lobbyists are professional and what they can’t allow is lose a clients interests while their competitors don’t. It is politically easier to gore all oxen deeply than to gore just a few modestly.
We don’t have to touch anybody’s retirement income, nor the money of anyone about to retire, just younger people and most of them would probably welcome privatization which could be done by replacing the payroll tax with some general consumption tax, would shrink the current account deficit, which is the threat, and automatically lead to people voluntarily work longer. However nothing can be done if we rely on Congress because they simply cant’ do it, they will always log roll. That is what they do. The budget and bureaucracy can’t be cut by congress either. It requires specific Presidential instructions to his cabinet with consequences and a serious PR program.
You might be right. But I do not like what I perceive as a devil-may-care attitude you are expressing. You might just trying to analyze the situation, but I think the time for that kind of analysis is over. Sure, I will probably be gone when this hits the fan. But I like to think that I want this experiment in the greatest governance that the world has ever seen to be continued.
Can’t we also raise the retirement and medicare ages to 66 and not allow anyone under that age? And absolutely no early 62 age retirement. Wouldn’t that help a lot?
I’m so glad you said this, Dave. I’ve been thinking “tribalism” should be at the top of the list of overused/misused banned words of 2018. To label and dismiss is a left-wing tactic. It’s shameful coming from our side.
And the moral parity argument drives me nuts, too! I appreciate the reminder of Buckley’s rejoinder. Exactly so.
Ummm George- if the country can survive the Civil War, it can survive the forthcoming fiscal crisis. People not getting their SS checks or being unable to find a doctor that will accept the pittance paid by the US Gov for medicare/medicaid is not the same as actually surviving something as traumatic as, say, Sherman’s March to the Sea.
It is simple, “promises that can’t be kept won’t be.” This is already happening.
Here is an example.
Or not, SS is already running in the red and the administrators are already having to cash in their bonds to keep up payments. This will accelerate until either failure or something is done.
By the way, whatever is done will be considered failure by the recipients.
I don’t think it is that far into the future.
I don’t have a problem with “tribes” existing. But I do worry a lot about people’s loneliness. I wish everyone had a tribe.
I think the Internet and smartphones and social media are blessings for people. They provide human contact.
I’ve noticed too that my kids keep in touch with friends from elementary school. It’s so easy for them to do so. I think it’s wonderful.
The more human contacts we have, the happier and healthier we are.
I helped a disabled person for many years, and it put me in places where there were lots of other disabled people. I wish I could find friends for all of them.
Senator Sasse is confused, I think. A bowling team is a tribe. And it’s a good thing.
Sure, and should, but not ( for political reasons) for people who are a year or two away from retirement. Almost 40 years ago we offered Federal employees who were in their early forties the choice of private accounts or defined benefits. Younger people had to adopt private accounts. We could do the same with SS. If one reaches full retirement age and benefits under the old Federal system they would have to work, de facto, for 30% of a salary. Defined benefits whether private sector, government or Social Security just don’t make any sense. We want people to save and to work longer and to face incentives that give them the freedom to choose. Privatization alone would solve the external debt problem which is the reason deficits matter.
Medicare is a tougher matter to solve with common sense but clearly raising the age is probably the most doable and we could raise it a good bit if we privatized retirement so that many people would choose to work longer and in many cases continue to benefit from employer provided health insurance.
I was also reminded of Hillary’s briefly adopted, then abandoned, stage where she was touting the “politics of meaning.” (1993 – I looked it up)
Dave, after listening to a lot of interviews from Sasse I think he has basically been worn down by the entire experience, is sick of it, and takes the view that for most Americans politics is not the center of their lives nor should it be. It’s similar to the reason that Trey Gowdy is retiring. Maybe the windmill Sasse is jousting is tribalism? Of course the primary problem is that the left has completely jumped the shark and mainstream dems are blatantly calling for harassment and assault of anyone who politically disagrees with them. Likewise it’s hard to have a rational conversation in good faith with someone who is calling you a racist or a gang rapist. Tough times man, tough times.
The staying power is an attribute that sets Donald Trump apart from the quitters. He doesn’t think he is engaged in ‘politics’, he’s in a fight for America.
‘merica!