Tribalism Corrupts Politics (Even When One Side Is Worse)
Opposing the far right isn’t an excuse to indulge our tribal instincts.
The philosopher Jason Stanley has recently “fled” the USA, which he views as an authoritarian state undergoing a coup by a fascist party using Nazi tactics. In an interview outlining this perspective, he has harsh words for those who draw on the concept of “polarisation” to understand these developments:
“All the people talking about polarization are just fascism enablers. They’re almost worse than the fascists because they’re just like, “Hey, how do I keep getting money in power?” I’ll say the fascists are normal.”
Talk of polarisation is so objectionable, he says,
“because one side is led by fascists. I mean, it’s like saying the… problem with the Civil War was polarization. It’s literally like that… One group thinks that slavery is good, and the other group thinks it’s bad, terribly polarized. Or Nazi Germany. One group thinks Jews should be killed, the other one thinks they’re okay, it’s polarized. It’s nonsensical. It’s just fascism enabling.”
These sentiments are highly influential on the left, where articles have proliferated with titles like “The Problem Isn’t ‘Polarization’ – It’s Right-Wing Radicalization”, and “Our Problem isn’t Polarization. It’s Fascism.”
The Polarisation Industry
Such critics are responding to a large body of recent scholarship and commentary that links many of the world’s political problems to the extent of division, or “polarisation,” within and between societies.
Much of this discourse focuses on the USA, where Republicans and Democrats famously dislike each other much more than they did a few decades ago. For instance, between 2014 and 2024, the share of Democrats who reported that they would be unhappy if a family member married a Republican rose from 19% to 39%. For Republicans asked about Democrats, it increased from 22% to 33%. Of course, one also finds intense polarisation in many other contexts, ranging from Northern Ireland to Lebanon, the Israel-Palestine conflict to the left/right divide that structures democratic politics in many countries.
Many people view polarisation—especially “affective” polarisation, the fear and dislike of opposing groups—as a powerful force that threatens democracy, social trust, cooperation, and fact-based political debate and public opinion. In highly polarised societies, groups become less willing to compromise and transfer power, more willing to endorse political violence, and more likely to succumb to “tribal” or “sectarian” biases that distort perceptions of reality.
Terms like “tribalism” and “sectarianism” here underscore a crucial reality: the attitudes and emotions in highly polarised contexts like the US are not specific to those contexts. They emerge whenever intense intergroup conflict maps onto social identities such as partisanship, ideology, religion, sect, ethnicity, region, or tribe. That is, while every group rationalises their fear and hatred of the outgroup by pointing to its specific crimes, the emotions are strikingly similar and symmetrical across radically different conflicts, whether between Protestants and Catholics, Hutus and Tutsis, or Sunnis and Shias.
This pattern is typically explained in terms of our evolved “tribal” or “coalitional” nature. Our species was forged under selection pressures that favoured powerful motives and abilities for forming alliances designed to outcompete other alliances for prestige, dominance, and resources. So, when we support and identify with a group, automatic “coalitional instincts” are activated. We divide the world into ingroup and outgroup, us and them. We frame group relations as zero-sum conflict for power and esteem. We become obsessed with sending and monitoring signals of group loyalty. And we become instinctive apparatchiks and propagandists, embracing narratives crafted to make our side and its defining narratives look good, and the other side look bad, if not outright demonic.
Polarisation exacerbates those instincts, which in turn exacerbate polarisation, fuelling a runaway process in which competing tribes lose access to a shared reality and a willingness to empathise and compromise with each other.
The Critique
For Stanley and many others on the left, this diagnosis of modern politics is preposterous. Their central objection is that ‘polarisation’ implies a false symmetry, depicting two poles drifting away from a virtuous centre. This means that it can’t capture what the critics take to be a self-evident fact: that the real threat to liberal democracy and social justice comes from the right, the political home of extremism, racism, sexism, transphobia, lies, conspiracy theorising, and—at least in the views of figures like Stanley—fascism.
The problem isn’t that people are divided and tribal. The problem is that one tribe is a sinister menace to society. Treating that menace as an existential, fascistic threat doesn’t involve an irrational “tribal” psychology, an unfortunate hangover from our primitive, evolutionary past. It means seeing the far right for what it is. When confronted with this reality, the appropriate response is not depolarisation (i.e., political moderation); it is to be even more opposed—and hence more polarised—against it.
By misrepresenting this state of affairs and misdirecting our political energy, those talking about the dangers of polarisation and tribalism are complicit in normalising and enabling the right’s attacks on democracy and vulnerable minorities. As Noah Berlatsky puts it,
“A social science that sees polarization and partisanship as the main threats to democracy is a social science that implicitly—and often more than implicitly—is calling for white, Christofascist solidarity against Black (and feminist, and queer, and disabled) demands for justice.”
