The child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth. 

African Proverb

Over the past couple weeks, Donald Trump has rapidly ramped up his war against all things foreign, liberal, and modern. I am writing this on the morning of June 14th, so his ridiculous Kim-Jong-Donald military parade is scheduled to run concurrently with the nationwide No Kings protest marches later today. There could not be a more concrete display of the polarized tribalism that now engulfs virtually every aspect of our crumbling society.

The current form of Trump Tribalism finds its origins in the mid-to-late 90s, when conservatism had to come up with a response to Clintonian triangulation, which had turned the tables on the GOP, making the Democratic party the sexy home camp for ‘new’ wealth, the famous symbolic analyst class: lawyers, financial advisors, hedge fund managers, tech mavens, etc. The response to the freshly-financed Dems was galvanized by the Three Horsemen of the Polar-pocalypse: Limbaugh, Murdoch, and Gingrich. Having lost exclusive access to the plutocrats, these three men created the modern incarnation of the Culture Wars, using anti-Clintonism as the cement, holding together a hodgepodge of diverse interest groups: evangelical Christians, white supremacists, old money from the extractive industries, Ayn Randian utopians, gold-bug cranks, pro-life Catholics, and other assorted grievance-mongers and future-distrusters.

While it is easy to just describe this situation as a Culture War or as political polarization, we could also call this the dawn of symbolic or virtual tribalism, an acidic force that is now spreading around the globe. As mentioned above, this virtual tribalism started as anti-Clintonism, because the Clintons were a perfect example, in the new conservative view, of the decline of American virtue: a slick, lying, philandering politician, able to schmooze and bribe (and murder, as some maintained) his way into power; and his mannish, ball-busting wife, also an ambitious lawyer/feminist/politician, who overlooked her husband’s sins just to gain access to power.

To bring together its diverse constituencies, the new conservative virtual tribalism had to stay on the surest sociological footing possible: using out-group hostility as the primary mode of identity formation and community building. The new tribe really couldn’t articulate many common ground policy planks in a positive sense. Mostly, they just stuck with the usual GOP playbook: deregulation, tax cuts, and deficit hawking (only when out of power). Instead of that boring stuff of government budgets and regulations and whatnot, the new tribal energy was all about the enemy, the sinfulness and traitorousness of the libs. Everything conservative became a complaint about something hated: people who don’t say “Merry Christmas,” women who don’t want to get married and/or have babies, city-types with their Volvos and tapas, America-haters who don’t have flagpoles in their yards, godless heathens who don’t want prayer in schools, etc.

Because this virtual tribalism is fundamentally reactive and out-group focused, there isn’t a whole lot of constructive policy-seriousness happening. Conservative media spends most of its time combing every American highway and byway, every last social nook and cranny, looking for examples of liberal decadence and sin. And in a big place like the United States, you’re gonna be able to find examples of all kinds of people doing all kinds of things. You want corruption? Plenty to go around, from all political corners. You want divergent sexual stuff? Take your pick (focus on churches first, to save time). You looking for fraud, waste, hypocrisy, grift, and abuse of power? There’s lots of that in the public and private sectors (more in the latter, actually). If you want to dig dirt on your enemy, or really anyone, actually, you’ll be able to find it in the third largest country in the world. And if you run out of real material to highlight the debauchery of your foe, then just fill in your air time with any bit of conspiracy bullshit that you can scrounge up.

Everything that Trump is now doing is a performative display of this virtual tribalism that entered our zeitgeist thirty or so years ago. Every group he is targeting is part of the grand, overarching, hated out-group: immigrants, career women, African Americans, Latinos, LGBTQ+ Americans, foreign countries and leaders that don’t kiss the ring, scientists, etc. Indeed, Project 2025 itself, which is providing the blueprint for so much of Trump’s plan, is just one giant declaration of “My tribe must crush your tribe in order to make things right!”

The problem is that this tribalism is not based on any concrete realities or institutions, It is a chimera built on hyper-nostalgia for a golden age that never existed, as imagined. It is an attempt to breathe life into the long-desiccated corpses of social patterns and economic conditions that are long gone: full employment, American Alone, the idyllic nuclear family, shopkeeper capitalism, and pre-scientific social authority.

A tribalism based on illusory fantasies of the past cannot, by default, craft a reasonable vision of the future, a practical and workable plan of action for our country, Instead, Trump just floods the zone with damage to his enemies, attempting to overwhelm doubt with non-stop infliction of pain on the out-group liberals, which unfortunately now includes the poor, children, farm workers, scientists, health care workers, and all manner of public servant. This carpet-bombing strategy is starting to wear thin, even with Trump’s lackeys in Congress, because they see the writing on the wall, that they will be the ones having to answer to the voters when the shock and awe shit doesn’t actually make life better or even easier.

If you ask an ardent Trump supporter, “What does the future look like, when all of the president’s plans come to fruition?”, I don’t think that you’ll get a very confident answer. What could that answer be, really, when you run the logic of Trump’s “policies” to their end? Do you have an America that is 99% white, 100% Christian, 110% heterosexual, with no abortion, a re-blossoming of factory work and family farms, with hefty base salaries for male breadwinners, allowing their wives to stay home and tend to the little ones, a reversal of demographic transition, so that the birth rate defies all social laws and ramps up again, a transformation of of all cities from cesspool hellholes to Branson-MO clones, the disappearance of all critical journalism, a whitewashed history where Native and African American genocide and slavery are expunged? Can anyone actually imagine this all coming to pass? No matter how hard Trump and his acolytes push to enact all of these changes, it simply cannot happen, The past can never be resuscitated back into the present. A bastardized facsimile can certainly be shoved down the throats of the people, but the result will be an abomination, a Frankensteinian pastiche of dead body parts, shambling around, destroying all that it touches,

Liberals have been fighting the virtual tribalism of Trumpism with their own mirror-image tribalism. Much has been made of the Dems needing to jettison their identity politics platform, in favor of a kitchen-table, working class focus on practical economic issues.. But this is a misunderstanding of the function of DEI and wokism in general, The identity politics strand in liberalism is also a tribe-building strategy, one that is not primarily dedicated to out-group hostility, but rather to positive coalition and community building. So it has a similar loyalty-building function as Trumpian tribalism, only with a much different set of tactics.

But liberal tribe-building, while less hostility-based, is still primarily symbolic or virtual, not too much more grounded in an actually-realizable vision of the future than the Project 2025 monstrosity. While Trumpism looks to a dead past that cannot be reanimated, liberalism also looks backward for inspiration, but just not as far. The conservative dreamland is from the 50s, whereas the liberal one is from the 70s, when there was a high-point for economic equality, when unions were robust and plentiful, when social rights movements were on the upswing, and when consumer capitalism seemed like an engine for social improvement and expanded opportunity. Much like Trumpism’s wish to breathe life into a real-world Gilead, libs keep hoping for a greened-up, re-unionized, jobs-of-the-future mirage, where solar panels, TVs, and ESOPs somehow overcome the inherent, fatal flaws of capitalism itself. The fact that liberals have less passion for their leaders right now is likely due to them being smart enough to realize that they’re being sold a rotten mango.

The only antidote to the vicious virtual tribalism of Trumpism is not another flavor of the same thing on the opposite pole, dreaming of a different version of a future that can never be. We are trapped by these symbolic tribes because we don’t have any concrete forms of positive, actual tribalism that can serve as an escape route: the embodied tribe. The closest things we have to embodied tribes — schools, workplaces, church groups, social clubs (the intermediate institutions noted by Tocqueville) — are all unsuited to the tasks of true identity formation and the creation of substantive social power. Our current institutions are all compromised in one way or another: households are too small to provide financial security, and they are too ecologically destructive; workplaces are limited by hierarchy and the profit motive; schools are transitory and time-limited; churches and other social groups are not economically empowering for the rank-and-file, etc.

The only way to fight the destructiveness of Trumpism and its virtual tribalism is to actually create a concrete, embodied tribalism. How do we do this? I think that it’s through Universal Basic Income, Bigger Home Bases, and Modern Money Theory. Check out many earlier posts on this blog for background on all of these elements, building blocks for creating an actual path forward to a sane, sustainable future.

Cover image: “TI’ets’ats’in” (Working Together), by Lianne Marie Leda Charlie