The problem may be more difficult to understand than to solve. Beneath the veneer of civilization, in the trite phrase of humanism, lies not the barbarian and the animal, but the human in us who knows what is right and necessary for becoming fully human.

Paul Shepard, “Nature and Madness”

As the linguist and philosopher George Lakoff has been telling us for many years now, the framing is the thing. What we talk about and how we talk about it are 90% of the battle (that’s my figure, not Lakoff’s). Decades ago, roughly in the mid-90s, conservatives picked their macro-frame for political and cultural discourse, led by the Three Horsemen of the Polar-pocalypse: Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, and Rupert Murdoch.

Since then, the controlling motifs of the GOP have been scorched-earth polarization, pseudo-religious demonization of liberals, and a full-scale project to build a grand scheme of anti-liberalism, cobbled together from every available frankensteinian corpse-piece: racism, sexism, hatred of gays/lesbians/transfolk, anti-abortion, anti-science, anti-expert, etc. This blueprint of ressentiment essentially elevated the ancient current of rural anti-urbanism into a full-scale, theological, apocalyptic battle-cry, portraying everything as an existential conflict for the soul of America.

In this cosmic, faith-based mission of conservatives, all tactics are fair, and the traditional bulwarks of American republicanism and democracy were abandoned, including adherence to institutional and constitutional norms. Instead, this holy war allowed any and all stratagems, legal or illegal, in the name of saving America from, as Stephen Miller recently put it, “the forces of darkness.” This was a three-pronged attack on political and cultural liberalism: judicial (via the Federalist Society, and their signature Unitary Executive Theory), executive (via the Heritage Foundation, culminating in Project 2025), and congressional (via Gingrich-style obstruction and asymmetrical flexing of partisan power). The result, of course, is Trumpism.

Democrats and liberals were completely unready for this powerful GOP framing, and that power comes from its archaic roots. Tribal out-group hostility pre-dates even the existence of homo sapiens, stretching millions of years back into our primate past. Our brains are literally hard-wired for some measure of out-group hatred. It’s as natural to us as bipedalism and omnivorousness. And in today’s media-laden, centralized power landscape, examples can be found anywhere (or can just be made up) to buttress this out-group hostility. In a huge, sprawling country like the US, you can find whatever stories and anecdotes you need to make your case.

In this state of affairs, Dems and libs have essentially brought a twig to a rock fight. They are trying to combat archaic forces with rational and/or practical ideas like “common-sense kitchen table reforms,” or “expanded economic opportunity,” or “reversing system injustice.” There are, of course, some willing combatants in the polarization battles, like Bernie and AOC. But those efforts can only go so far, because the core liberal idea, and the basic building block of the Democratic party, is that all people are equally deserving of respect, dignity, opportunity, and the essential support mechanisms of life (food, shelter, healthcare). Today’s conservatives are under no such constraint, as they openly don’t want many kinds of people around in the first place, let alone giving them access to all that good stuff that society and government can provide.

So how do you combat an ancient human and pre-human trait, the tribalistic out-group hostility that stretches back millions of years?

I think the only answer is to leverage another ancient and deep-seated characteristic of our species, the exact inverse of out-group hostility: In-group loyalty, love, and community. Our brains are not built only to distrust and hate others. They have also evolved over millions of years to live in intimate, supportive, and cooperative tribes, inside of which altruism, generosity, and love reign. This is the only mechanism that is robust enough to break the darker side of out-group hosility.

But this in-group strategy isn’t possible when our core domestic unit is so small. Average household size in the US is now down to around 2.5 people, with roughly 30% of households being just a single person. Our archaic sense of in-group love and loyalty cannot be leveraged when people don’t actually live within tribal-sized groups.

What is happening is that out-group hostility is feasting on the very breakdown of community which conservatives decry. This polarized demonization thrives in our current conditions of isolation, loneliness, and detachment from nature and from each other. This allows pseudo-communities like MAGA to flourish, and these are “places” where people are easily manipulated and exploited for the benefit of the plutocrats. There is no concrete grounding in these faux communities of out-group hostility, so any positive connotation of “conservatism” is lost.

There is no question that out-group hostility is an excellent way to bind people together, mainly for two reasons. First, it allows people to erase internal differences by focusing on the enemy. Trumpism is made up of a bunch of uncomfortable bedfellows: Evangelical Christians, tech bros, straight-up white supremacists, incels, libertarians, hawkish cold warriors, isolationist nationalists, anti-abortion crusaders, Christian nationalists, and others. Without the libs as a common enemy, this group would likely splinter into many disparate, competing groups. But the enemy of my enemy is my friend, so the out-group hostility holds things together. The second main reason for the effectiveness of out-group hatred is that it simplifies the complex, substituting an easy, conflict-based worldview for what is really a complex set of ecological, social, economic, and political problems, systemic flaws and faults that require broad knowledge to understand and fix. Out-group hostility gets you off the hook for that complicated stuff, since you can just chalk everything up to those evil libs. This is effective at building a pseudo-community, but its lack of grounding in reality means that it cannot actually deliver anything tangible that would effect positive macro-change.

To combat this strong but dysfunctional model, and to leverage the primal power of in-group love and community, we must build concrete new communities first, so that a new avenue of social change can be opened up. Larger domestic units, what I refer to as Bigger Home Bases (BHBs), are the only way to begin to address all or most of our problems at the same time. These BHBs should be buttressed by a Universal Basic Income, and funded via an overhaul and re-envisioning of federal spending philosophy along Modern Money Theory lines.

UBI-funded BHBs would have the potential to address many problems at once: they would sharply reduce economic inequality, which would undermine our current authoritarian plutocracy; they would bring more economic functions “in-house,” lessening dependence on outside sources and increasing self-reliance; the UBI itself would lower people’s sense of economic precarity, and allow for reduction in personal debt; community togetherness would go far in solving our current crisis of loneliness and despair, the main sources of addiction and depression; actual community with real people would squelch the obsessive use of social media, which has done so much damage to our children’s and teenager’s mental health; the building of large households would combat the deteriorating conditions of paid work, by focusing people’s energy and attention on the significant maintenance needs of the internal community.

Marx was not a great historical soothsayer, but he was an astute social thinker, and I subscribe to the general gist of historical materialism. Culture grows from the material conditions on the ground, especially economic factors: how and where we work, how we move ourselves and our economic goods around, how the household is arranged geographically, how we construct our legal structures surrounding property ownership, etc. No matter how compelling our ideas and ideologies might be, if the material conditions on the ground are not acknowledged and changed, then there is no fertile ground for those ideas to take seed. We have to combat the emptiness and seeming dead-end nature of our society by building a new one from the ground up. As Marx noted, “life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life.”

A determined push to create pathways for people to move into Bigger Home Bases has the potential to shatter the drift towards the empty rewards offered by virtual and pseudo-communities, especially those built on out-group hostility. Living in real tribes again, committed to in-group love and support, would dry up the demand for the worst aspects of capitalism and the Polarization Industrial Complex: excessive therapeutic consumption, polarized and siloed information, obsession with endless growth, crippling inequality, economic precarity, fever-dreams of an AI utopia, and the psychological damage resulting from isolation, loneliness, and despair.

Once we have a bigger and better platform for our internal household communities, we can then approach our fellow citizens, other countries, and the natural world itself with a comprehensive plan to offramp ourselves from the unsustainable system in which we find ourselves right now.