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In New England, it was quite the opposite. “Order was an obsession” for the Puritan founders. Everything was regulated.

Cotton Mather defined an “honorable” person as one who was “studious, humble, patient, reserved and mortified.” These habits have lingered, too.

“Albion’s Seed” makes the brazen case that the tangled roots of America’s restless and contentious spirit can be found in the interplay of the distinctive societies and value systems brought by the British emigrations — the Puritans from East Anglia to New England; the Cavaliers (and their indentured servants) from Sussex and Wessex to Virginia; the Quakers from north-central England to the Delaware River valley; and the Scots-Irish from the borderlands to the Southern hill country.

The values of the Virginia Cavaliers caused the unusual brutality of the American system of Black enslavement.)

Fischer writes of the Scots-Irish: The people of the Southern hill country region “were intensely resistant to change and suspicious of ‘foreigners.’ … In the early 20th century, they would become intensely negrophobic and antisemitic.”

But how does one prove such an assertion? The only way is through the meticulous accumulation of detail. Over nearly a thousand pages, Fischer describes 22 different patterns of behavior or “folkways” for each of the four cultures — from dress and cooking, to marriage and child-rearing, to governance and criminal justice

These culminate in four distinctive definitions of liberty. Freedom, he writes, “has never been a single idea, but a set of different and even contrary traditions in creative tension with each other.”

Here is the nub of the book: The Puritan, Cavalier, Quaker and Scots-Irish notions of liberty were radically different, but each provided an essential strain of the American idea

The Puritans practiced an “ordered freedom” with the state parceling out liberties: Fishing licenses allowed the freedom to fish

Scots-Irish leaders were charismatic — Andrew Jackson was the paragon — and their religion was evangelical,

“Natural liberty was not a reciprocal idea. It did not recognize the right of dissent or disagreement,

The Scots-Irish were the opposite: Their sense of “natural freedom” was deeply libertarian. You moved to the backcountry so that you could do what you wanted

Honor was valor, a physical trait (among the Puritans and Quakers, honor was spiritual).

The Virginia definition of freedom was complex, contradictory — and remains problematic. It was hierarchical, the freedom to be unequal. “I am an aristocrat,” John Randolph of Roanoke said. “I love liberty; I hate equality.”

Freedom was defined by what it wasn’t. It wasn’t slavery. It was the freedom to enslave. It was a freedom, granted to the plantation masters, to indulge themselves, gamble and debauch.

Over time, this plutocratic libertarianism found natural allies, if strange bedfellows, in the fiercely egalitarian Scots-Irish hill country folk. Neither wanted to be “ruled” by a strong central government. Look at the Covid maps: The regional alliance remains to this day.

The Quakers seem an afterthought, but their migration was larger in size than that of the Puritans or Cavaliers. And their version of liberty seems most amenable today. It was “reciprocal freedom,” based on the golden rule.

American cuisine mirrored the cultures — the Puritans baked (as in beans and pies), the Cavaliers roasted (as in barbecue), the Quakers boiled (as in cream cheese) and the Scots-Irish fried and mashed (as in pancakes and grits)

The Scots-Irish spoke a dialect that predated current British English, and that, because of their notion of freedom, included “an actual antipathy to fixed schemes of grammar and orthography and punctuation.”

Culture is a sticky thing. “To change a culture in any fundamental way,” Fischer writes, “one must transform many things at once.”

Child-rearing was wildly different in the four colonial systems, for example. And, in turn, that affected education, which affected criminal justice and traditions of governance.

While the individual events of the English Revolution could be somewhat involved and complicated, they did fit into a basic pattern.  Parliament and the ruler of England would clash over the issues of religion and taxes as the government became less decisive and/or reasonable.  This would trigger a reaction by Parliament that would bring in a new ruler, and then the process would start all over again.  This cycle would repeat itself three times over the next sixty years, with each successive stage feeding back into the aforementioned cycle as well as into the next stage

The first stage would see England plunged into civil war (1642-49) that would result in the beheading of Charles I and the rise of the Puritans and Parliament to power.  In the second stage, continued fighting over religion and money, this time between Parliament and its army, would bring in military dictatorship under Oliver Cromwell in the 1650's.  After Cromwell's death (1658) would come the third stage with the restoration of the monarchy (1661-88).  However, the old conflicts over money and religion would resurface in the reign of James II and lead to his overthrow by Parliament with the help of William III and Mary of Holland in 1688.

the tradition served “as a kind of safety valve that contained class resentments within clearly defined limits,” and thus, ultimately reinforced the hierarchy.

Christmas misrule was largely tolerated. After all, the birth of Jesus had been tacked onto pagan traditions that had existed for centuries.

So a period of gorging and resting was almost written into the stars, and most pagan European cultures had a holiday for this. In fact, Romans had been celebrating Saturnalia — a similar celebration of social inversion and orgiastic gluttony — for much longer before that.

December meant three things in early Europe: The work of harvesting the year’s crops was done, the beer and wine they’d been brewing was ready to drink, and it was cold enough to slaughter animals without the meat going immediately bad. December was often the only time of year when people got to eat fresh meat.

Puritans were fully aware of the non-Christian roots of Christmas, and unlike the Anglican church, they were having none of it

During Puritan rule of England in the mid-1600s, they attempted to make it illegal, scheduling Parliament to meet on Dec. 25 and ordering a day of fasting and repentance. They were met with riots and insurrection.

The Puritan ban on Christmas lasted much longer in New England, on paper from 1659 to 1681. But even after English authorities overturned the ban, it was still culturally taboo for well over a century afterward.

Blaming black Americans for dying from a novel virus because they had diabetes or high blood pressure was precisely what Azar was doing

the moment when the US response to coronavirus escalated into a full culture war is revealing. The big protests at state capitols, with crowds of white Americans demanding their governors reopen the economy, started about a week after national news outlets began reporting in early April that black Americans made up a disproportionate number of the dead.

Systemic racism created the health disparities that made black and brown Americans more vulnerable to dying from coronavirus, public health experts say; and now the same racism is also shaping, and undermining, the country’s political response to the pandemic.

It’s not a new idea that thousands of people must die to preserve America’s “business as usual”. It’s not a new assumption many of those people will be brown or black.

Americans don’t have much of a national vocabulary for talking about collective action and sacrifice

a gun rights activist from Austin, Texas, has strong opinions about tyranny and freedom. But he said he was frustrated that some of his usual allies did not seem to understand that dealing with a novel virus, in a country where no one has immunity, required a different kind of politics.

“Our rights are being violated. That is all actually real,” Stokes said. “But this is one of the few times when that’s OK. Pandemics – these call for a collectivist response. They don’t work without one.”

For some wealthy Americans eager to reopen the economy, the motivating fear may be the risk of social change, the historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz said.

It’s not surprising that Americans, who are used to tackling every problem through the lens of “individual rights”, would struggle with how to respond to the collective demands of a pandemic. “It’s this mismatch in terms of a social problem, and the tools we have at our disposal to make sense of it,” the sociologist Jennifer Carlson said.

Early Puritan accounts of arriving in the New World and seeing indigenous people dying of illness are marked by a familiar self-righteousness. The Puritans look at an epidemic and “think it’s a divine dispensation”, Blanchfield said. “The very fact that people are dying is taken as both pragmatically offering market opportunities ... but also as a theological vindication of your own survivorship.”

European colonists established their settlements in the midst of the mass death of indigenous people and opened the American market for business “at gunpoint, in the wake of that epidemic”, said Patrick Blanchfield, the author of a forthcoming 500-year history of American gun violence. Enslaved black people died performing the essential labor that kept the economy running.

Today, “who is being asked to die for the market to be open?” Blanchfield said. “It’s black people. It’s Native American tribal communities.”

The coronavirus culture war is “kind of a petri dish of all the psychoses of US history”, as Dunbar-Ortiz, the author of An Indigenous People’s History of the United States, put it.

That Puritan instinct to see infection as a sign of guilt, and health as a kind of vindication, is currently playing out across the political spectrum.

American liberals sometimes treat their belief in science as a kind of religion, Blanchfield argued, fetishizing technocrats and rejoicing when conservatives who do not “believe in science” are punished.

This impulse to blame other people for getting sick is rooted in fear

“Everyone wants some narrative, to explain the unimaginable level of illness and death and vulnerability that we’re all feeling,” he said. “Everyone wants there to be a logic to this.

The victim-blaming on the left, though, has come from individuals’ Twitter accounts, not Democratic party leadership. The victim-blaming of black Americans has come from the highest levels of government.

Just days after national news outlets first reported the emerging racial disparities in coronavirus deaths, Trump’s surgeon general, Jerome Adams, said at a White House briefing that communities of color needed to “step up” and advised them to “avoid alcohol, tobacco, and drugs”.

Lecturing individual black Americans about smoking, rather than talking about African Americans’ increased environmental exposure to air pollution, a demonstrated coronavirus risk, was classic “victim-blaming”

Poll results from mid-March had shown black respondents were actually more likely than white respondents to see coronavirus as a serious threat to their own health, he said.

“It’s hard, when you have so many white people who are protesting and not social distancing, to argue that they are taking it more seriously and that’s why they are less likely to die,” he said.

But the same argument that black Americans were to blame for dying simply evolved, Kendi said, to focus more on their “pre-existing conditions”.

In Louisiana, Senator Bill Cassidy, a white Republican and a medical doctor, had already cast doubt on whether inequities rooted in systemic racism were the reason so many black Louisiana citizens were dying of coronavirus. “That’s rhetoric,” he told NPR in early April. The real answer, the answer backed by science, was that “African Americans are 60% more likely to have diabetes” and that “we need to address the obesity epidemic”.

Blaming the victims of American racial disparities for what they suffer has a reliable outcome: nothing is done. The deaths mount.

Ronald Reagan attacked America’s post-war investment in social programs, Kotsko said, “by pointing out that the generosity is now extending to black people” and suggesting that “it’s better to tear down the system of solidarity than to allow the wrong people to get the benefits”.

Metzl argued in his book Dying of Whiteness that the way racism has shaped gun policy and healthcare choices in this country has led to outcomes that hurt black and brown Americans, but that also led to measurable increases in the deaths of white Americans. Today, he’s afraid that same dynamic is playing out again.

The Puritans had a form of torture called “pressing”, used during the Salem witch trials. They made the accused person lie on the ground, and then very slowly, over many days, placed one rock on their chest, and then another.

If it just means that Americans have believed their country is special, then (as a British skeptic writes) there is “nothing exceptional about this exceptionalism. All great nations cherish national myths.”[1] If it means that the U.S.A. was exceptionally virtuous given its precocious dedication to civil and religious liberty, equality, justice, prosperity, social mobility, and peace and harmony with all nations, then ipso facto the U.S.A. is exceptionally vicious for falling so short of those ideals. If the term means rather that Americans are somehow exempted from the laws of entropy governing other nations—that (as Bismarck reportedly quipped) “God has a special providence for fools, drunks, and the United States of America”—then such exceptionalism can only be proven sub specie aeternitatis. Indeed, the very illusion that a nation is under divine dispensation may perversely inspire the pride that goeth before a fall (“thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God”) or the many bad ends to which reckless adolescents are prone. Finally, if American Exceptionalism means that its power, values, and “indispensable” status render the United States exempt from the rules of behavior it makes and enforces on other nations, then enemies, neutrals, and allies alike are sure to push back.

it was probably just a matter of time before somebody turned the Stalinist term of derision into a patriotic badge of honor and ait stamped it over all of American history. As it happened, that somebody was Max Lerner, a former editor of The Nation turned Cold War liberal and author of the one-thousand page America as a Civilization (1957).

he concluded that “these distortions should not blind us to the valid elements in the theory of exceptionalism.... America represents, as I have stressed above, the naked embodiment of the most dynamic elements of modern Western history

Exceptionalism dovetailed perfectly with a new orthodoxy among political scientists that extolled what Harvard professor Louis Hartz called America’s Liberal Tradition.

the idea of an America set apart by Providence and endowed with a special mission to reform (not to say redeem) the whole human race dovetailed perfectly with the political rhetoric needed to rally Americans to lead the Free World in what amounted to a “holy war” against “godless Communism.”

Those were the years when the “Judaeo-Christian tradition” became a civilizational motto

Those were the years when presidential rhetoric became steeped in what sociologist Robert Bellah called “God-Talk,”

how come computerized word-searches show that references to American Exceptionalism exploded—literally from hundreds to tens of thousands—only after the Cold War was over?

the Cold War was over, globalization and multiculturalism were the new trends, and American identity got contested as never before. What made exceptionalist rhetoric ubiquitous was the fact it was now contested

the myth of American Exceptionalism, ironically inspired by Roman Catholics and Marxists, entered our lexicon as historical gloss for the campaign to persuade a skeptical, war-weary people that global commitments such as the UN, Truman Doctrine, and NATO were not really a break with tradition, but a fulfillment of the nation’s hoariest, holiest calling.

As early as 1630, Massachusetts Governor John Winthrop implored his people ‘to Consider that wee shall be as a Citty upon a Hill, the eies of all people are uppon us.’”[12] I took for granted that my teachers and textbooks were right when they traced our national identity back to the Puritans beginning with Winthrop’s Model of Christian Charity. Composed on board the ship Arbella bound for the New World, it seemed the elegant spiritual companion to the Pilgrims’ Mayflower Compact.

he borrowed a New Testament image when he imagined New England as a city on a hill called to inspire the whole human race by its example.

the dogged literary excavations of historian Richard Gamble have now exposed it as myth. It turns out that Winthrop’s manuscript, far from serving as keynote address of the American pageant, was either unknown or forgotten until it turned up in the family archives in 1809. Donated to the New York Historical Society, it slept for another three decades before publication in a Massachusetts collection of colonial documents in 1838

The famous “City on a Hill” passage appears in the Sermon on the Mount as one in a list of metaphors Jesus uses to describe his disciples. He speaks of them as the salt of the earth, the light of the world, a city on a hill, and a lamp not hidden under a bushel. The passage served as text for many a sermon preached by colonial divines, not least Jonathan Edwards. But those pastors were quoting the Bible to make theological points to Christian audiences; none was quoting Winthrop to make political points to American audiences. What has been lost “in the fierce crossfire of the battle to define the American identity,” Gamble writes, is “the story not of how the metaphor helped make America what it is today but the story of how America helped make the metaphor what it never was.”

not even the Puritans were “impelled by a unique or exceptional American impulse. On the contrary, they were products of European education, European culture, European piety, and they were engaged in a great European quarrel.

Americans have always been tempted to think that because they live in God’s Country they must be God’s Elect. Such faith has its uses, for instance to motivate a free and disparate people to rally and sacrifice in times of crisis. But it verges on idolatry from the standpoint of Biblical religion and—if exploited for partisan purposes—verges on heresy from the standpoint of civil religion.

There’s also a generational divide

Arguably we can talk about how the combination of Christianity and white supremacy goes to the American founding, with early folks like Puritans showing up and claiming they’re the nation upon a hill and that this is now their land and they have dominion over it. It’s not like we can say that the Klan came from the Puritans. But a variety of different movements in different time periods pick up the same ideas and rhetoric and practices.

Klansmen went around with hoods and robes, so they are not sharing their identity. One of the interesting things to me about this movement now is the willingness of people to be so public about their beliefs. I think they’ve been emboldened by Trump’s behavior.

The Klan was not as apocalyptic as some of the current folks are, you know, where they are thinking about the world ending.

It is interesting that there are conservative Christians who support Trump but say the violence is a step too far. I think that is important. But I have this kind of inkling that that means they’re OK with everything else. Like, the violence is a step too far, but is the white supremacy? Is the anti-immigrant impulse?

it is beautifully written and a magnificent read, whether or not one follows the author all the way to his final destination in this journey of the pilgrim soul in the capitalist wilderness.

McCarraher challenges more than 200 years of post-Enlightenment assumptions about the way we live and work. He rails against “the ensemble of falsehoods that comprise the foundation of economics”, which offer “a specious portrayal of human beings and a fictional account of their history”.

Homo economicus, driven by instrumental self-interest and controlled by the power of money, is condemned as a shabby and degrading construct that betrays the truth of human experience.

After capitalism has delivered what the author describes as “two centuries of Promethean technics and its irreparable ecological impact” there must be a return to an earlier, gentler, more sacramental vision of the world; one that has a greater sense of natural limits and a restored sense of wonder at creation.

McCarraher embarks on a kind of genealogy of neoliberal morals, barrelling his way through the tracts, studies, theories and literature that have constituted the “symbolic universe” of capitalism since the Renaissance.

From the English Puritans who made money for the greater glory of God, through the machine idolatry rampant in 1920s Fordism, to the cult of the ruthless entrepreneur

capitalism is best understood, he concludes, as a secular faith. It operates through myths and dogma, just as any religion does.

Modernity is not, as Max Weber maintained, the culmination of a process of intellectual “disenchantment”, in which societies lost their sense of the sacred and embraced the rational

Instead, a different enchantment took hold of our minds; the material culture of production and consumption. “Its moral and liturgical codes are contained in management theory and business journalism,” writes McCarraher. “Its iconography consists of advertising, marketing, public relations and product design.”

This brave new era produced a “predatory and misshapen love of the world

Spiritually diminished by the commodification of things and people, and the desire to consume, we have lost sight of what the Catholic poet Gerard Manley Hopkins described as the “dearest freshness deep down things”.

On Avarice. This work, says McCarraher, signalled a transition: the growth of commerce and banking was beginning to loosen the grip of biblical disdain for “filthy lucre”

the Florentine then makes an argument that is precociously modern, suggesting that without it, there would be “no temples, no colonnades, no palaces…”

The 17th-century Puritans are presented as a capitalist “avant garde”, driven by notions of a divine calling to turn common land into private property and then turn a profit on it

Milton mourns this sellout of the English revolution, using Paradise Lost to portray Mammon as a fallen angel, driven to blasphemous self-aggrandisement on eart

by the 20th century such satanic cunning is the new common sense in business circles

McCarraher leaves the poetry of Milton to move, via the Industrial Revolution, to the outlandish business utopias dreamed up in early 20th-century America

In February 1928, Vanity Fair caught the mood, praising Henry Ford as “a divine master-mind”

the epilogue of this mammoth portrait of the religious longings at the heart of secular materialism carries a bleak message: 20th-century fantasies of the world as one global business have been realised. Capital’s empire now extends to all corners of the world. Globalisation has built a “paradise of capital”

But Mammon is delivering an unsustainable future dominated by wage stagnation, tech-led unemployment, deepening inequality and environmental peril. As disaster looms, distraction is being sought in “a tranquillising repertoire of digital devices and myriad forms of entertainment” along with “the analgesic pleasures of consumption”.

“get back to the garden”. A new Romantic left is needed to reinhabit a sacramental imagination, which values people and things in themselves rather than as factors of production, and places collaboration over competition

recalling John Ruskin’s principle of “amazement”, which teaches that the gifts of nature should be admired and nurtured, rather than ravished and depleted

where pessimism might take hold, the author’s Christian faith gives him a trump card. For McCarraher, it is simply the case that “the Earth is a sacramental place, mediating the presence and power of God”

however obscured the truth is by a destructive lust for power and accumulation. It is simply a question of seeing things as they truly are.

By contrast, refugees are the zombies of the world, the undead who rise from dying states to march or swim toward our borders in endless waves.

Today, when many Americans think of Vietnamese-Americans as a success story, we forget that the majority of Americans in 1975 did not want to accept Vietnamese refugees

For a country that prides itself on the American dream, refugees are simply un-American, despite the fact that some of the original English settlers of this country, the Puritans, were religious refugees.

For people like my parents and the Syrians today, their voyages across land and sea are far more perilous than the ones undertaken by astronauts or Christopher Columbus. To those watching news reports, the refugees may be threatening or pitiful, but in reality, they are nothing less than heroic

It is understandable that some do not want to speak of their scars and might want to pretend that they are not refugees. It is more glamorous to be an exile, more comprehensible to be an immigrant, more desirable to be an expatriate. The need to belong can change refugees themselves both consciously and unconsciously, as has happened to me and others

it is precisely because I do not look like a refugee that I have to proclaim being one, even when those of us who were refugees would rather forget that there was a time when the world thought us to be less than human.

The most comforting explanation of these facts is that they are mere artifacts of class — rich parents passing on advantages to their children — or of immigrants arriving in this country with high skill and education levels. Important as these factors are, they explain only a small part of the picture.

Take New York City’s selective public high schools like Stuyvesant and Bronx Science, which are major Ivy League feeders. For the 2013 school year, Stuyvesant High School offered admission, based solely on a standardized entrance exam, to nine black students, 24 Hispanics, 177 whites and 620 Asians. Among the Asians of Chinese origin, many are the children of restaurant workers and other working-class immigrants.

Merely stating the fact that certain groups do better than others — as measured by income, test scores and so on — is enough to provoke a firestorm in America today, and even charges of racism.

The irony is that the facts actually debunk racial stereotypes.

Nigerians make up less than 1 percent of the black population in the United States, yet in 2013 nearly one-quarter of the black students at Harvard Business School were of Nigerian ancestry; over a fourth of Nigerian-Americans have a graduate or professional degree, as compared with only about 11 percent of whites.

By 1990, United States-born Cuban children — whose parents had arrived as exiles, many with practically nothing — were twice as likely as non-Hispanic whites to earn over $50,000 a year. All three Hispanic United States senators are Cuban-Americans.

Meanwhile, some Asian-American groups — Cambodian- and Hmong-Americans, for example — are among the poorest in the country, as are some predominantly white communities in central Appalachia.

MOST fundamentally, groups rise and fall over time.

while Asian-American kids overall had SAT scores 143 points above average in 2012 — including a 63-point edge over whites — a 2005 study of over 20,000 adolescents found that third-generation Asian-American students performed no better academically than white students.

The fact that groups rise and fall this way punctures the whole idea of “model minorities” or that groups succeed because of innate, biological differences. Rather, there are cultural forces at work.

the strikingly successful groups in America today share three traits that, together, propel success

The first is a superiority complex — a deep-seated belief in their exceptionality. The second appears to be the opposite — insecurity, a feeling that you or what you’ve done is not good enough. The third is impulse control.

research shows that some groups are instilling them more frequently than others, and that they are enjoying greater success.

Ironically, each element of the Triple Package violates a core tenet of contemporary American thinking.

it’s precisely this unstable combination that generates drive: a chip on the shoulder, a goading need to prove oneself. Add impulse control — the ability to resist temptation — and the result is people who systematically sacrifice present gratification in pursuit of future attainment.

We know that group superiority claims are specious and dangerous, yet every one of America’s most successful groups tells itself that it’s exceptional in a deep sense.

That insecurity should be a lever of success is another anathema in American culture. Feelings of inadequacy are cause for concern or even therapy; parents deliberately instilling insecurity in their children is almost unthinkable. Yet insecurity runs deep in every one of America’s rising groups; and consciously or unconsciously, they tend to instill it in their children.

Numerous studies, including in-depth field work conducted by the Harvard sociologist Vivian S. Louie, reveal Chinese immigrant parents frequently imposing exorbitant academic expectations on their children (“Why only a 99?”), making them feel that “family honor” depends on their success.

In a study of thousands of high school students, Asian-American students reported the lowest self-esteem of any racial group, even as they racked up the highest grades.

Moreover, being an outsider in a society — and America’s most successful groups are all outsiders in one way or another — is a source of insecurity in itself. Immigrants worry about whether they can survive in a strange land, often communicating a sense of life’s precariousness to their children.

Finally, impulse control runs against the grain of contemporary culture as well. Countless books and feel-good movies extol the virtue of living in the here and now, and people who control their impulses don’t live in the moment.

The dominant culture is fearful of spoiling children’s happiness with excessive restraints or demands. By contrast, every one of America’s most successful groups takes a very different view of childhood, inculcating habits of discipline from a very early age

Needless to say, high-achieving groups don’t instill these qualities in all their members. They don’t have to

At the same time, if members of a group learn not to trust the system, if they don’t think people like them can really make it, they will have little incentive to engage in impulse control.

success comes at a price. Each of the three traits has its own pathologies

Even when it functions relatively benignly as an engine of success, the combination of these three traits can still be imprisoning — precisely because of the kind of success it tends to promote. Individuals striving for material success can easily become too focused on prestige and money, too concerned with external measures of their own worth.

Only in combination do these qualities generate drive and what Tocqueville called the “longing to rise.”

It’s just much harder when you have to do it on your own, when you can’t draw on the cultural resources of a broader community, when you don’t have role models or peer pressure on your side, and instead are bombarded daily with negative images of your group in the media.

But it would be ridiculous to suggest that the lack of an effective group superiority complex was the cause of disproportionate African-American poverty. The true causes barely require repeating

Nor does the lack of a group superiority narrative prevent any given individual African-American from succeeding. It simply creates an additional psychological and cultural hurdle that America’s most successful groups don’t have to overcome.

Culture is never all-determining. Individuals can defy the most dominant culture and write their own scripts

The same factors that cause poverty — discrimination, prejudice, shrinking opportunity — can sap from a group the cultural forces that propel success. Once that happens, poverty becomes more entrenched.

Disappearing blue-collar jobs and greater returns to increasingly competitive higher education give a tremendous edge to groups that disproportionately produce individuals driven, especially at a young age, to excel and to sacrifice present satisfactions for long-term gains.

THE good news is that it’s not some magic gene generating these groups’ disproportionate success. Nor is it some 5,000-year-old “education culture” that only they have access to. Instead their success is significantly propelled by three simple qualities open to anyone.

The way to develop this package of qualities — not that it’s easy, or that everyone would want to — is through grit.

It requires turning the ability to work hard, to persevere and to overcome adversity into a source of personal superiority. This kind of superiority complex isn’t ethnically or religiously exclusive. It’s the pride a person takes in his own strength of will.

research shows that perseverance and motivation can be taught, especially to young children.

The United States itself was born a Triple Package nation, with an outsize belief in its own exceptionality, a goading desire to prove itself to aristocratic Europe (Thomas Jefferson sent a giant moose carcass to Paris to prove that America’s animals were bigger than Europe’s) and a Puritan inheritance of impulse control.

But prosperity and power had their predictable effect, eroding the insecurity and self-restraint that led to them. By 2000, all that remained was our superiority complex, which by itself is mere swagger, fueling a culture of entitlement and instant gratification.

the trials of recent years — the unwon wars, the financial collapse, the rise of China — have, perversely, had a beneficial effect: the return of insecurity.

Like many Nazi mass murderers, he possessed a puritanical petit-bourgeois sense of family and social propriety, indignantly denying that he indulged in extramarital relations or that he profited personally from his duties, and yet he lived quite comfortably with the mass killing of Jews. This was so, Stangneth argues, because Eichmann was far from a thoughtless functionary simply performing his duty. He proceeded quite intentionally from a set of tenaciously held Nazi beliefs (hardly consonant with Arendt’s puzzling contention that he “never realized what he was doing”). His was a consciously wrought racial “ethics,” one that pitted as an ultimate value the survival of one’s own blood against that of one’s enemies. He defined “sacred law” as what “benefits my people.” Morality was thus not universal or, as Eichmann put it, “international.” How could it be, given that the Jewish enemy was an international one, propounding precisely those universal values?

In the trial in Jerusalem Eichmann cynically invoked Kantian morality, but as a free man in Argentina he declared that “the drive toward self-preservation is stronger than any so-called moral requirement.” Kantian universalism was diametrically opposed to his racially tinged völkisch outlook. He had been a “fanatical warrior” for the law, “which creates order and destroys the sick and the ‘degenerate,’ ” and which had nothing to do with humanist ideals or other weaknesses. From a surprising admission of German inferiority — “we are fighting an enemy who . . . is intellectually superior to us” — it followed that total extermination of the Jewish adversary “would have fulfilled our duty to our blood and our people and to the freedom of the peoples.”

She documents the almost incredible lack of interest, inactivity, even cover-ups by the numerous groups charged with bringing Eichmann to justice. It now appears that by 1952, German intelligence services — and to some degree Jewish and Israeli bodies — were aware of Eichmann’s whereabouts, yet for various political reasons did nothing to apprehend him. Remarkably, Eichmann actually drafted an unpublished letter to Chancellor Adenauer proposing to go back to Germany to stand trial. Convinced of his blamelessness, he felt sure that he would receive only a light sentence and, like many other Nazis at the time, go on to live a comfortable German life. The story of Eichmann before Jerusalem is thus also a tale of missed opportunities to hold the trial in Germany and create a genuine new beginning in an era that wished the dark past would simply go away.

no future discussion will be able to confront the Eichmann phenomenon and its wider political implications without reference to this book. To what degree the man’s biography is unique or exemplary of mass murderers in general remains, of course, an open question.

“How does it feel,” Tchiya Amet wrote to Tyson, and she was addressing not just what she claimed he had taken from her, but also what she claimed he had taken from the world: her gifts, her skills, her potential for a particular kind of contribution.

the term sexual harassment has become too unwieldy, too imprecise, too commercialized. As the writer Rebecca Traister put it, “We must regularly remind everyone paying attention that sexual harassment is a crime not simply on the grounds that it is a sexual violation, but because it is a form of discrimination.”

what gets lost in the easy binaries? What of the lives and careers and ambitions of the people doing the accusing—people who, in coming forward with their allegations, will have their names permanently entangled with the man they say did them harm? The stories of those who have lived in Tyson’s orbit have served as reminders that, here on Earth, we remain biased toward the stars

In early 2013, a few months after the mass shooting at Sandy Hook elementary school, a Yale psychologist created an experiment to test how political bias affects our reasoning skills. Dan Kahan was attempting to understand why public debates over social problems remain deadlocked, even when good scientific evidence is available. He decided to test a question about gun control.

Then Kahan ran the same test again. This time, instead of evaluating skin cream trials, participants were asked to evaluate whether a law banning citizens from carrying concealed firearms in public made crime go up or down. The result: when liberals and conservatives were confronted with a set of results that contradicted their political assumptions, the smartest people were barely more likely to arrive at the correct answer than the people with no math skills at all. Political bias had erased the advantages of stronger reasoning skills.

The reason that measurable facts were sidelined in political debates was not that people have poor reasoning skills, Kahan concluded. Presented with a conflict between holding to their beliefs or finding the correct answer to a problem, people simply went with their tribe.

It wasa reasonable strategy on the individual level – and a “disastrous” one for tackling social change, he concluded.

But the biggest distortion in the gun control debate is the dramatic empathy gap between different kinds of victims. It’s striking how puritanical the American imagination is, how narrow its range of sympathy. Mass shootings, in which the perpetrator kills complete strangers at random in a public place, prompt an outpouring of grief for the innocent lives lost. These shootings are undoubtedly horrifying, but they account for a tiny percentage of America’s overall gun deaths each year.

The roughly 60 gun suicides each day, the 19 black men and boys lost each day to homicide, do not inspire the same reaction, even though they represent the majority of gun violence victims. Yet there are meaningful measures which could save lives here – targeted inventions by frontline workers in neighborhoods where the gun homicide rate is 400 times higher than other developed countries, awareness campaigns to help gun owners in rural states learn about how to identify suicide risk and intervene with friends in trouble.

When it comes to suicide, “there is so much shame about that conversation … and where there is shame there is also denial,”

When young men of color are killed, “you have disdain and aggression,” fueled by the type of white supremacist argument which equates blackness with criminality.

Swear words are swear words for a reason, and the urge to show that one is sophisticated and anti-puritanical sometimes leads to the false conclusion that they’re just words like any other, and don’t communicate anything special. They do, and it did.

Just ignore his words.

I have a hard time believing that anyone really thinks like this as a general proposition. Certainly conservatives who spent the postwar era reciting the mantra “ideas have consequences” didn’t think the words that carried political ideas were impotent

More recently, conservatives over the last ten years seemed to attribute totemic powers to words like “radical Islamic terrorism”—or, for that matter, “Merry Christmas.”

With his words threatening to subordinate the collective self-defense commitment of NATO

People put up with being ruled, and those who carry out the ruling on others’ behalf put up with taking orders in light of their beliefs about legitimacy and political reasonableness, beliefs that depend on prior speech and persuasion.

Norms rest on beliefs which rest on persuasion, and institutions rest on norms.

Hannah Arendt treated political speech as the core of her special sense of “action,” the chief way in which we shape and constitute our life together.

one particular kind of Trump’s speech, his especially outrageous and transparent lies, are words that have shaped the world: demonstrations of power, attempts to undermine the existence of shared belief in truth and facts.

Words are so central to international affairs that they get their own special professional and legal category: diplomacy. We hope that speech, if it does not draw countries closer together, will at least allow clear communication about interests, demands, and the possibility of war.

A large part of the population begins with a tribal sense of what team they’re on, which side they support, but relatively little information about the substantive policy views associated with that

Trump undermined the most longstanding pillar of American foreign policy.

America’s closest allies now have to believe that its treaty commitments are up for grabs in each election, and have to plan accordingly.

Coercion is expensive, and the in the postwar West the US has often been able to get its way without violence, as the widely-trusted anchor state in an order with a lot of perceived legitimacy

This is true in security, where the US is able to shape the world order to an outsized degree, cheaply, because of its network of alliances.

And it’s true in economics; the US benefits from the use of the dollar as a reserve currency, the international willingness to hold US debt, and the global system of trade that it created.

They leave because they hear and understand that they’re not wanted.

Trump called on Congress to allow Cabinet officials to “remove federal employees who undermine the public trust or fail the American people,” i.e., to fire civil servants on grounds of political disagreement, ending the century-old rule of a professional and apolitical civil service that stays on as political appointees come and go

Trump saying it matters. House Speaker Paul Ryan echoing the call for a “purge” at the FBI matters. Fox News’ constant public delegitimation of the civil service matters

Immediate policy outcomes mainly have to do with coercion: who is taxed, regulated, expropriated, imprisoned, deported, conscripted, what wars are fought, who is kept out of the country by force of arms.

immigration enforcement is a domain in which there’s a lot of discretion on the ground

Trump’s demonization of immigrants and celebration of ICE change policy de facto. Trump’s words have sent the message of “anything goes” to ICE  and “you should be scared” to those who might be vulnerable to ICE. Both messages have been heard. ICE has become so aggressive in its tactics that a federal judge described it as “treatment we associate with regimes we revile as unjust, regimes where those who have long lived in a country may be taken without notice from streets, home, and work. And sent away.”

it also matters more broadly for the character of the American state and bureaucracy. By discouraging professionals and encouraging politicization, Trump is already changing the civil service by his speech.

the Republican and conservative rank and file now have an unusually direct, unusually constant source of information about the things that people like us are supposed to believe and support. I think that we can see the effect of this in the rapid and dramatic swings in reported Republican opinion on questions from free trade to Russia policy

Trump’s stump speeches and unhinged tweets, and Fox News’ amplification of them, are changing what Republican voters think it means to be a Republican. He doesn’t speak for them; how many of them had a view about “the deep state” two years ago? He speaks to them, and it matters.

The delegitimation of the basic enterprise of independent journalism is something else, and something new to the US

In their important new book How Democracies Die, the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt point to the delegitimation of the independent press as one of the key warning signs of a genuine would-be autocrat.

We don’t know how far Trump will be able to go in his attempts to suppress the media, but we know that he’s persuaded millions of Republicans to let him try.

Trump has successfully communicated to his voters that being on their team means not being on the FBI’s team. He’s changed what being a Republican means.

And he’s trying to change what being an American means

It’s also the power to channel and direct the dangerous but real desire for collective national direction and aspiration. Humans are tribal animals, and our tribal psychology is a political resource that can be directed to a lot of different ends

all those presidents put forward a public rhetorical face that was better than their worst acts. This inevitably drives political opponents crazy: they despise the hypocrisy and the halo that good speeches put on undeserving heads. I’ve had that reaction to, well, every previous president in my living memory, at one time or another. But there’s something important and valuable in the fact that they felt the need to talk about loftier ideal than they actually governed by

In words, even if not in deeds, they championed a free and fair liberal democratic order, the protection of civil liberties, openness toward the world, rejection of racism at home, and defiance against tyranny abroad. And their words were part of the process of persuading each generation of Americans that those were constitutively American ideals.

When he tells us that there are “very fine people on both sides” as between the Klan and their critics, he turns the moral compass of American public discourse upside-down. He channels the desire for collective aspiration into an attempt to make us worse than we are.

a norm that was built up through speech, persuasion, and belief can be undermined the same way. Trump’s own racism, his embrace of white nationalist discourse, and his encouragement of the alt-right over the past two years have, through words, made a start on that transformation.

Much the same is true of his demonization of political opponents, from “lock her up!” chants on the campaign trail and telling Hillary Clinton that “you’d be in jail

In the long term, it tells a large portion of the country that it is patriotic and virtuous to reject political disagreement, to reject the basic legitimacy of the views of the majority of the electorate.

The business of prioritizing procedural norms, the rule of law, alternation in power, and electoral fairness is psychologically difficult

stating the norms out loud—in the U.S., affirming that they are central to the American system—helps to balance out the authoritarian and populist temptation

what populists and authoritarians do is to make a virtue out of the inclination to love our in-group and hate the out-group

As with his embrace of white nationalism, Trump’s equation of opposition with crime and treason isn’t just “norm erosion,” a phrase we have seen a lot of in the last year. It’s norm inversion, aligning the aspiration to do right with substantive political wrong

“Ignore the tweets, ignore the language, ignore the words” is advice that affects a kind of sophistication: don’t get distracted by the circus, keep your eye on what’s going on behind the curtain. This is faux pragmatism, ignoring what is being communicated to other countries, to actors within the state, and to tens of millions of fellow citizens

somehow we’ve reached a point where any behavior short of violent predation – let’s call it the “not as bad as Weinstein” standard – is characterized as misunderstood seduction.

There’s a reason so many people are conflating bad and sometimes criminal behavior with romance: traditional ideas about seduction rely on tropes of women witholding sex and men working hard to get it. It’s a narrow notion of heterosexuality – one that does a good job excusing abusive behavior.

When will we have more concern for the women hurt by abuse than the men accused of it? One of Roy Moore’s accusers had her house burnt to the ground – arson is suspected. Harper’s magazine was on the brink of publishing the name of a woman who created the Shitty Media Men list before a feminist Twitter campaign stopped it. Some women won’t see justice for years, some ever. This moment isn’t about romance, it’s about abuse. Perhaps the fact that so many people can’t tell the difference is part of the problem.

In 2001, it found, only 12 percent of English 16- and 17-year-olds considered themselves non-drinkers; in 2016, that was up to 35 percent.

“Alcohol doesn’t play as important a role in socializing as it did in the past,” Mr. Nicholls said. “Young people can now have an active social life without leaving their house.”

Alcohol has become more expensive in Britain over the last decade, driven in part by higher taxes, which may help dissuade young drinkers. Some young people guessed a reason for the decline is that their peers have become more likely to resort to drugs like marijuana and ecstasy, which are often more accessible to minors than alcohol.

“I suppose it was a combination of it being more cool and more enjoyable,” said James Samouel, a 19-year-old history student who grew up in south London, referring to marijuana use by peers. “A health thing as well — alcohol is so much worse for you.

But in fact, surveys show that drug use, while still common, has also become less prevalent among young people.

“It doesn’t seem that people are switching from drinking to drugs,” said Dr. Melissa Oldham, the lead author of the Sheffield University report. “It’s a move away from alcohol and drugs to other hobbies.”

our elite debate has become far less focused on individual issues as such, and the complicated variety of positions, left, right and center, any thinking individual can take. It has become rather an elaborate and sophisticated version of “Which side are you on?”

An analysis of American National Election Studies data from 1964 to 2012 shows that education is related to decreases in interethnic/interracial prejudice, but also to increases in ideological (liberal vs. conservative) prejudice

But even this doesn’t capture the emotional intensity of it all, or the way it compounds over time

In their 2015 paper, “Losing Hurts: The Happiness Impact of Partisan Electoral Loss,” the authors found that the grief of Republican partisans after their party lost the presidential election in 2012 was twice that of “respondents with children” immediately after “the Newtown shootings” and “respondents living in Boston” after “the Boston Marathon bombings.”

That’s an intense emotion, and it’s that intensity, it seems to me, that is corroding the norms of liberal democracy

I find myself instinctually siding with the independent artist in these cases, perhaps because I’ve had to fight for my own individuality apart from my own various identities, most of my life. It wasn’t easy being the first openly gay editor of anything in Washington when I was in my 20s. But it was harder still to be someone not defined entirely by my group, to be a dissident within it, a pariah to many, even an oxymoron, because of my politics or my faith.

Friendly dissidents are no longer interesting or quirky; as the stakes appear to rise, they come to seem dangerous, even contagious

And before we even know it, we live in an atmosphere closer and closer to that of The Crucible, where politics merges into a new kind of religious warfare, dissent becomes heresy, and the response to a blasphemer among us is a righteous, metaphorical burning at the stake

I think that’s the real context for understanding why magazines and newspapers and websites of opinion are increasingly resistant to ideological diversity within their own universes

The dynamic here is deeply tribal. It’s an atmosphere in which the individual is always subordinate to the group, in which the “I” is allowed only when licensed by the “we.

Hence the somewhat hysterical reaction, for example, to Kanye West’s recent rhetorical antics. I’m not here to defend West. He may be a musical genius (I’m in no way qualified to judge) but he is certainly a jackass, and saying something like “slavery was a choice” is so foul and absurd it’s self-negating

And yet. There was something about the reaction that just didn’t sit right with me, something too easy, too dismissive of an individual artist’s right to say whatever he wants, to be accountable to no one but himself. It had a smack of raw tribalism to it, of collective disciplining, of the group owning the individual, and exacting its revenge for difference.

It has been made far, far worse by this president, a figure whose election was both a symptom and a cause of this collective emotional unraveling, where the frontal cortex is so flooded by tribal signals that compromise feels like treason, opponents feel like enemies, and demagogues feel like saviors

I believed in an identity politics that would aim to leave identity behind, to achieve a citizenship without qualification.

I’m not whining about this experience, just explaining why I tend to side reflexively with the individual when he is told he isn’t legit by the group. In that intimidating atmosphere, I’m with the dissenter, the loner, and the outlier.

It makes a liberal politics that rests on a common good close to impossible. It makes a liberal discourse not only unachievable but increasingly, in the hearts and minds of our very elites, immoral.

I bristle because, of course, Coates is not merely subjecting West to “expectation and scrutiny” which should apply to anyone and to which no one should object; he is subjecting West to anathematization, to expulsion from the ranks.

Just as a Puritan would suddenly exclaim that a heretic has been taken over by the Devil and must be expelled, so Coates denounces West for seeking something called “white freedom”: … freedom without consequence, freedom without criticism, freedom to be proud and ignorant; freedom to profit off a people in one moment and abandon them in the next; a Stand Your Ground freedom, freedom without responsibility, without hard memory; a Monticello without slavery, a Confederate freedom, the freedom of John C. Calhoun, not the freedom of Harriet Tubman, which calls you to risk your own; not the freedom of Nat Turner, which calls you to give even more, but a conqueror’s freedom, freedom of the strong built on antipathy or indifference to the weak, the freedom of rape buttons, pussy grabbers, and fuck you anyway, bitch; freedom of oil and invisible wars, the freedom of suburbs drawn with red lines, the white freedom of Calabasas.

Leave aside the fact that the passage above essentializes and generalizes “whiteness” as close to evil, a sentiment that applied to any other ethnicity would be immediately recognizable as raw bigotry.

Leave aside its emotional authenticity and rhetorical dazzle.

Notice rather that the surrender of the individual to the we is absolute.

That “we” he writes of doesn’t merely influence or inform or shape the individual artist; it “dictates” to him.

it’s at that point that I’d want to draw the line. Because it’s an important line, and without it, a liberal society is close to impossible.

I understand that the freedom enjoyed by a member of an unreflective majority is easier than the freedom of someone in a small minority, and nowhere in America is that truer than in the world of black and white.

But that my own freedom was harder to achieve doesn’t make it any less precious, or sacrosanct. I’d argue it actually makes it more vivid, more real, than it might be for someone who never questioned it.

And I am never going to concede it to “straightness,” the way Coates does to “whiteness.”

As an individual, I seek my own freedom, period. Being gay is integral to who I am, but it doesn’t define who I am. There is no gay freedom or straight freedom, no black freedom or white freedom; merely freedom, a common dream, a universalizing, individual experience.

“Liberation from the dictates of the we” is everyone’s birthright in America, and it is particularly so for anyone in the creative fields of music or writing.

A free artist owes nothing to anyone, especially his own tribe. And if you take the space away from him to be exactly what he wants to be, in all his contradictions and complexity, you are eradicating something critical to a free and healthy society.

Freedom, in this worldview, does not and cannot unite Americans of all races; neither can music. Because there is no category of simply human freedom possible in America, now or ever. There is only tribe. And the struggle against the other tribe. And this will never end.

And that, of course, is one of the most dangerous aspects of our elite political polarization: It maps onto the even-deeper tribalism of race, in an age when racial diversity is radically increasing, and when the racial balance of power is shifting under our feet.

That makes political tribalism even less resolvable and even more combustible.

I never believed that the gay rights movement was about liberating people to be gay; I believed it was about liberating people to be themselves, in all their complexity and uniqueness.

The promise of Obama — the integrating, reasoned, moderate promise of incremental progress — has become the depraved and toxic zero-sum culture of Trump.

The project of American democracy — to live beyond such tribal identities, to construct a society based on the individual, to see ourselves as citizens of a people’s republic, to place religion off-limits, and even in recent years to embrace a multiracial and post-religious society — was always an extremely precarious endeavor. It rested, from the beginning, on an 18th-century hope that deep divides can be bridged by a culture of compromise, and that emotion can be defeated by reason.

Tribalism, it’s always worth remembering, is not one aspect of human experience. It’s the default human experience. It comes more naturally to us than any other way of life. For the overwhelming majority of our time on this planet, the tribe was the only form of human society. We lived for tens of thousands of years in compact, largely egalitarian groups of around 50 people or more, connected to each other by genetics and language, usually unwritten.

Tribal cohesion was essential to survival, and our first religions emerged for precisely this purpose.

Religion therefore fused with communal identity and purpose, it was integral to keeping the enterprise afloat, and the idea of people within a tribe believing in different gods was incomprehensible. Such heretics would be killed.

we became a deeply cooperative species — but primarily with our own kind. The notion of living alongside people who do not look like us and treating them as our fellows was meaningless for most of human history.

Successful modern democracies do not abolish this feeling; they co-opt it. Healthy tribalism endures in civil society in benign and overlapping ways.

in our neighborhood and community; in our ethnic and social identities and their rituals; among our fellow enthusiasts

most critically, there is the Über-tribe that constitutes the nation-state, a megatribe that unites a country around shared national rituals, symbols, music, history, mythology, and events, that forms the core unit of belonging that makes a national democracy possible.

Tribalism only destabilizes a democracy when it calcifies into something bigger and more intense than our smaller, multiple loyalties; when it rivals our attachment to the nation as a whole; and when it turns rival tribes into enemies. And the most significant fact about American tribalism today is that all three of these characteristics now apply to our political parties, corrupting and even threatening our system of government.

If I were to identify one profound flaw in the founding of America, it would be its avoidance of our tribal nature

The founders were suspicious of political parties altogether — but parties defined by race and religion and class and geography? I doubt they’d believe a republic could survive that, and they couldn’t and didn’t foresee it. In fact, as they conceived of a new society that would protect the individual rights of all humanity, they explicitly excluded a second tribe among them: African-American slaves

But it did happen here, on a fault line that closely resembles today’s tribal boundary.

in the first half of the 20th century, with immigration sharply curtailed after 1924, the world wars acted as great unifiers and integrators. Our political parties became less polarized by race, as the FDR Democrats managed to attract more black voters as well as ethnic and southern whites. By 1956, nearly 40 percent of black voters still backed the GOP.

The re-racialization of our parties began with Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign in 1964, when the GOP lost almost all of the black vote. It accelerated under Nixon’s “southern strategy” in the wake of the civil-rights revolution. By Reagan’s reelection, the two parties began to cohere again into the Civil War pattern, and had simply swapped places.

The greatest threat to a politician today therefore is less a candidate from the opposing party than a more ideologically extreme primary opponent. The incentives for cross-tribal compromise have been eviscerated, and those for tribal extremism reinforced.

When it actually came to undoing the reform earlier this year, the GOP had precious little intellectual capital to fall back on, no alternative way to keep millions insured, no history of explaining to voters outside their own tribe what principles they were even trying to apply.

Add to this the great intellectual sorting of America, in which, for generations, mass college education sifted countless gifted young people from the heartland and deposited them in increasingly left-liberal universities and thereafter the major cities, from which they never returned, and then the shifting of our economy to favor the college-educated, which only deepened the urban-rural divide.

The myths that helped us unite as a nation began to fray. We once had a widely accepted narrative of our origins, shared icons that defined us, and a common pseudo-ethnicity — “whiteness” — into which new immigrants were encouraged to assimilate.

we should be clear-eyed about the consequence. We can no longer think of the Puritans without acknowledging the genocide that followed them; we cannot celebrate our Founding Fathers without seeing that slavery undergirded the society they constructed; we must tear down our Confederate statues and relitigate our oldest rifts. Even the national anthem now divides those who stand from those who kneel. We dismantled many of our myths, but have not yet formed new ones to replace them.

The result of all this is that a lopsided 69 percent of white Christians now vote Republican, while the Democrats get only 31. In the last decade, the gap in Christian identification between Democrats and Republicans has increased by 50 percent. In 2004, 44 percent of Latinos voted Republican for president; in 2016, 29 percent did. Forty-three percent of Asian-Americans voted Republican in 2004; in 2016, 29 percent did. Since 2004, the most populous urban counties have also swung decisively toward the Democrats, in both blue and red states, while rural counties have shifted sharply to the GOP

When three core components of a tribal identity — race, religion, and geography — define your political parties, you’re in serious trouble.

Some countries where tribal cleavages spawned by ethnic and linguistic differences have long existed understand this and have constructed systems of government designed to ameliorate the consequences

There is no neutral presidency here, and so when a rank tribalist wins the office and governs almost entirely in the interests of the hardest core of his base, half the country understandably feels as if it were under siege. Our two-party, winner-take-all system only works when both parties are trying to appeal to the same constituencies on a variety of issues.

Our undemocratic electoral structure exacerbates things. Donald Trump won 46 percent of the vote, attracting 3 million fewer voters than his opponent, but secured 56 percent of the Electoral College. Republicans won 44 percent of the vote in the Senate seats up for reelection last year, but 65 percent of the seats. To have one tribe dominate another is one thing; to have the tribe that gained fewer votes govern the rest — and be the head of state — is testing political stability.

Slowly our political culture becomes one in which the two parties see themselves not as participating in a process of moving the country forward, sometimes by tilting to the right and sometimes to the left, as circumstances permit, alternating in power, compromising when in opposition, moderating when in government — but one where the goal is always the obliteration of the other party by securing a permanent majority, in an unending process of construction and demolition.

And so by 2017, 41 percent of Republicans and 38 percent of Democrats said they disagreed not just with their opponents’ political views but with their values and goals beyond politics as well.

61 percent of Trump supporters say there’s nothing he could do to make them change their minds about him; 57 percent of his opponents say the same thing. Nothing he could do.

When criticized by a member of a rival tribe, a tribalist will not reflect on his own actions or assumptions but instantly point to the same flaw in his enemy.

By the 2000 election, we were introduced to the red-blue map, though by then we could already recognize the two tribes it identified as they fought to a national draw. Choosing a president under those circumstances caused a constitutional crisis, one the Supreme Court resolved at the expense of losing much of its nonpartisan, nontribal authority.

In America, the intellectual elites, far from being a key rational bloc resisting this, have succumbed. The intellectual right and the academic left have long since dispensed with the idea of a mutual exchange of ideas.

Conservatism thrived in America when it was dedicated to criticizing liberalism’s failures, engaging with it empirically, and offering practical alternatives to the same problems. It has since withered into an intellectual movement that does little but talk to itself and guard its ideological boundaries.

among tribal conservatives, the Iraq War remained a taboo topic when it wasn’t still regarded as a smashing success, tax cuts were still the solution to every economic woe, free trade was all benefit and no cost, and so on. Health care was perhaps the most obvious example of this intellectual closure. Republican opposition to the Affordable Care Act was immediate and total. Even though the essential contours of the policy had been honed at the Heritage Foundation, even though a Republican governor had pioneered it in Massachusetts, and even though that governor became the Republican nominee in 2012, the anathematization of it defined the GOP for seven years.

the now near-ubiquitous trend of “whataboutism,” as any glance at a comments section or a cable slugfest will reveal. The Soviets perfected this in the Cold War, deflecting from their horrific Gulags by pointing, for example, to racial strife in the U.S. It tells you a lot about our time that a tactic once honed in a global power struggle between two nations now occurs within one.

George Orwell famously defined this mind-set as identifying yourself with a movement, “placing it beyond good and evil and recognising no other duty than that of advancing its interests.” It’s typified, he noted, by self-contradiction and indifference to reality

As for indifference to reality, today’s Republicans cannot accept that human-produced carbon is destroying the planet, and today’s Democrats must believe that different outcomes for men and women in society are entirely a function of sexism. Even now, Democrats cannot say the words illegal immigrants or concede that affirmative action means discriminating against people because of their race. Republicans cannot own the fact that big tax cuts have not trickled down, or that President Bush authorized the brutal torture of prisoners, thereby unequivocally committing war crimes.

Orwell again: “There is no crime, absolutely none, that cannot be condoned when ‘our’ side commits it. Even if one does not deny that the crime has happened, even if one knows that it is exactly the same crime as one has condemned in some other case … still one cannot feel that it is wrong.” That is as good a summary of tribalism as you can get, that it substitutes a feeling — a really satisfying one — for an argument.

When a party leader in a liberal democracy proposes a shift in direction, there is usually an internal debate. It can go on for years. When a tribal leader does so, the tribe immediately jumps on command. And so the Republicans went from free trade to protectionism, and from internationalism to nationalism, almost overnight

And then there is the stance of white Evangelicals, a pillar of the red tribe. Among their persistent concerns has long been the decline of traditional marriage, the coarsening of public discourse, and the centrality of personal virtue to the conduct of public office.

In the 1990s, they assailed Bill Clinton as the font of decadence; then they lionized George W. Bush, who promised to return what they often called “dignity” to the Oval Office. And yet when a black Democrat with exemplary personal morality, impeccable public civility, a man devoted to his wife and children and a model for African-American fathers, entered the White House, they treated him as a threat to civilization

And when they encountered a foulmouthed pagan who bragged of grabbing women by the pussy, used the tabloids to humiliate his wife, married three times, boasted about the hotness of his own daughter, touted the size of his own dick in a presidential debate, and spoke of avoiding STDs as his personal Vietnam, they gave him more monolithic support than any candidate since Reagan, including born-again Bush and squeaky-clean Romney.

In 2011, a poll found that only 30 percent of white Evangelicals believed that private immorality was irrelevant for public life. This month, the same poll found that the number had skyrocketed to 72 percent.

Total immersion within one’s tribe also leads to increasingly extreme ideas. The word “hate,” for example, has now become a one-stop replacement for a whole spectrum of varying, milder emotions involved with bias toward others:

Or take the current promiscuous use of the term “white supremacist.” We used to know what that meant. It meant advocates and practitioners of slavery, believers in the right of white people to rule over all others, subscribers to a theory of a master race, Jim Crow supporters, George Wallace voters.

But it is now routinely used on the left to mean, simply, racism in a multicultural America, in which European-Americans are a fast-evaporating ethnic majority.

Liberals should be able to understand this by reading any conservative online journalism and encountering the term “the left.” It represents a large, amorphous blob of malevolent human beings, with no variation among them, no reasonable ideas, nothing identifiably human at all

It’s not easy to be optimistic with Trump as president. And given his malignant narcissism, despotic instincts, absence of empathy, and constant incitement of racial and xenophobic hatred, it’s extremely hard not to be tribal in return. There is no divide he doesn’t want to deepen, no conflict he doesn’t want to start or intensify. How on earth can we not “resist”?

In 2015, did any of us anticipate that neo-Nazis would be openly parading with torches on a college campus or that antifa activists would be proudly extolling violence as the only serious response to the Trump era?

In fact, the person best positioned to get us out of this tribal trap would be … well … bear with me … Trump. The model would be Bill Clinton, the first president to meet our newly configured divide. Clinton leveraged the loyalty of Democrats thrilled to regain the White House in order to triangulate toward centrist compromises with the GOP. You can argue about the merits of the results, but he was able to govern, to move legislation forward, to reform welfare, reduce crime, turn the deficit into a surplus, survive impeachment, and end his term a popular president.

The Democrats are now, surprisingly, confronting a choice many thought they would only face in a best-case-scenario midterm election, and their political calculus is suddenly much more complicated than pure resistance. Might the best interest of the country be served by working with Trump? And if they do win the House in 2018, should they seek to destroy Trump’s presidency, much like GOP leaders in Congress chose to do with Obama? Should they try to end it through impeachment, as the GOP attempted with Bill Clinton? Or could they try to moderate the tribal divide?

if the Democrats try to impeach a president who has no interest in the stability or integrity of our liberal democracy, and if his base sees it, as they will, as an Establishment attempt at nullifying their vote, are we really prepared to handle the civil unrest and constitutional crisis that would almost certainly follow?

Tribalism is not a static force. It feeds on itself. It appeals on a gut level and evokes emotions that are not easily controlled and usually spiral toward real conflict. And there is no sign that the deeper forces that have accelerated this — globalization, social atomization, secularization, media polarization, ever more multiculturalism — will weaken

But we should not delude ourselves that this is all a Trump problem.

As utopian as it sounds, I truly believe all of us have to at least try to change the culture from the ground up. There are two ideas that might be of help, it seems to me. The first is individuality.

I mean valuing the unique human being — distinct from any group identity, quirky, full of character and contradictions, skeptical, rebellious, immune to being labeled or bludgeoned into a broader tribal grouping. This cultural antidote to tribalism, left and right, is still here in America and ready to be rediscovered

I may be an extreme case, but we all are nonconformist to some degree. Nurturing your difference or dissent from your own group is difficult; appreciating the individuality of those in other tribes is even harder. It takes effort and imagination, openness to dissent, even an occasional embrace of blasphemy.

we also need mutual forgiveness. It doesn’t matter if you believe, as I do, that the right bears the bulk of the historical blame. No tribal conflict has ever been unwound without magnanimity. Yitzhak Rabin had it, but it was not enough. Nelson Mandela had it, and it was

But this requires, of course, first recognizing our own tribal thinking. So much of our debates are now an easy either/or rather than a complicated both/and. In our tribal certainties, we often distort what we actually believe in the quiet of our hearts, and fail to see what aspects of truth the other tribe may grasp.

Not all resistance to mass immigration or multiculturalism is mere racism or bigotry; and not every complaint about racism and sexism is baseless. Many older white Americans are not so much full of hate as full of fear.

The actual solutions to our problems are to be found in the current no-man’s-land that lies between the two tribes. Reentering it with empiricism and moderation to find different compromises for different issues is the only way out of our increasingly dangerous impasse.

All of this runs deeply against the grain. It’s counterintuitive. It’s emotionally unpleasant. It fights against our very DNA. Compared with bathing in the affirming balm of a tribe, it’s deeply unsatisfying. But no one ever claimed that living in a republic was going to be easy — if we really want to keep it.

They were “voices for democratic individualism,”

the decline and marginalisation of the socialist left since the 1970s opened the path for the widespread moralisation and psychologisation that marks our politics today.

The latest catastrophe, the Covid-19 pandemic, has revealed the deep untruth underlying Adam Smith’s claim that ‘individuals, without desiring or knowing it, and while pursuing each his own interest, are working for the direct realisation of the general interest.’

The truth is that individuals pursuing their own interests produce group identities that have no sense of the general interest, but are rather marked by feelings of oppression, resentment or both. Only social trust and collective action, involving not only democratic co-ordination but genuine leadership, have a chance of returning us to a sense of the collective interest