‘Tribalism’ is healthy — and America should embrace it

Somewhere between the 10,000th think piece about polarization and the hundredth talk on bridging divides, a strange consensus formed: Tribalism is democracy’s deepest disease, its most persistent poison.

Professors and pastors warn of it. Columnists mourn it. Podcasters monetize their mourning. The diagnosis is always the same: Humans clustering together with their own kind is dangerous, primitive, a malfunction of the civic mind.

The people most loudly condemning tribalism tend to be surrounded by people exactly like them, at universities exactly like theirs.

Fine. But what if they’re wrong?

Not partially wrong, but actually, foundationally, embarrassingly wrong — the way doctors were wrong about bloodletting or the way everyone was wrong about cargo pants being over.

Friendship by another name

Tribalism has an image problem. Many associate it with mob violence, ethnic cleansing, and mass unrest. But that’s not tribalism. Not really. The base ingredient — people who share values and show up for each other — predates democracy, predates government, predates trousers. We used to just call it friendship.

My life runs on tribes. Boxing buddies on Tuesday mornings — punching things together turns out to be exceptional social glue. Drinks on Friday evenings with people who know my views, share my basic read on how the world should work, and will tell me honestly when I’m being an idiot. Football on Sundays: same faces, same complaints about the same referee.

These groups form through proximity, repetition, and the steady accumulation of shared in-jokes about Tom’s terrible parking. Nobody recruits anybody. The politics surface eventually, the way they always do — not as a pitch but as a mutual nod. Oh, you also think that. Good. Pass the beer.

Condescending critique

The anti-tribalism crowd conflates the existence of a tribe with hostility toward outsiders. But the two aren’t the same thing, and they don’t have to travel together. A group of friends who share values is not automatically a firing squad aimed at people who don’t. The aggression that looks like tribalism is usually something else — fear, scarcity, manipulation by people with something to gain from the mob. The tribe itself is just the group chat.

There is also something condescending baked into the critique. The implication is that enlightened people transcend their loyalties. The sophisticated move is to float above any particular community, dispensing equal approval in all directions. This person does not exist. And if people like that do exist, nobody wants to live beside them, work with them, invite them to anything, or get stuck next to them at a wedding.

The people most loudly condemning tribalism tend to be surrounded by people exactly like them, at universities exactly like theirs, publishing in the same journals, citing each other’s footnotes, all nodding along in perfect, oblivious unison. The irony apparently doesn’t register.

Tribal to the bone

My ancestors were Irish. They were tribal to the bone, tribal by necessity, tribal the way people get when the alternative is disappearance. That tribalism — stubborn, clannish, occasionally violent, always inconvenient for the people trying to govern them — is precisely what produced the independence that eventually let them leave. Seven centuries of enthusiastic British imperialism tore Ireland apart. The tribe was the solution, not the problem.

America was the same story once. The founders were a tribe. So were the suffragettes, the labor organizers, the civil rights marchers. Every movement that actually changed anything was, underneath the rhetoric, a group of people who genuinely liked and trusted each other enough to take serious risks together.

As for the loneliness epidemic affecting the country, it didn’t arrive because people had too many tribes, but because tribes became harder to build and easier to lose. Jobs moved. Cities got expensive. The bowling leagues, union halls, and neighborhood associations that once knit people into groups of mutual obligation slowly disappeared, and we got LinkedIn as a replacement.

Against this backdrop, telling people their tribal instincts are dangerous is useful the way a fire safety lecture is useful during an actual fire.

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Believe in belonging

What tribalism needs — contrary to the credentialed, conspicuously left-leaning, remarkably group-minded people writing op-eds about its dangers — isn’t elimination, but better PR and a little calibration.

Think of the happiest moments of your life. They almost certainly happened with the same handful of people, in the same handful of places. Some of those people aren’t around any more. That absence is its own argument — not for giving up on tribes, but for holding them closer while you can.

The alternative — atomized individuals, each navigating life as a fully independent unit, allegiant to nothing, accountable to no one — isn’t utopia. In truth, it’s just lonely, and loneliness radicalizes. Belonging stabilizes. This isn’t a controversial finding, but it’s certainly inconvenient for the people whose careers depend on pathologizing friendship.