The Power of Tribal Politics to Stupefy

The tribe is displeased

Stupefying tribalism

Republican reactions to the president's attempted coup have been mostly muted or non-existent. Some are reasonable and some are incoherent. The silence and incoherence reflects the toxicity of tribal politics. In particular, the incoherence in defense of tribe loyalty leads some into an inability to think clearly or rationally. For example, Senator Patrick Toomey (R-PA), a Harvard graduate commented “I do think the president committed impeachable offenses,” and the president's “behavior this week does disqualify him from serving.” Toomey then went on to complain that House democrats would probably  “politicize” the impeachment process.

The politicized process criticism is incoherent. First, since republican politicians refuse to act quickly to remove the president, they have already politicized the situation. Second, by objecting to the election results, GOP politicians politicized the final vote certification on the basis of no objective evidence. Third, by definition, impeachment is a political process because it is not a judicial or legislative process. That is true whether an impeachment succeeds or fails. The question is whether an impeachment has merit or not, not whether it is political. 

Clearly, Toomey's brain is scrambled into incoherence by his tribal loyalty to the GOP. Such loyalty is inherently anti-democratic because it replaces inconvenient facts and sound reasoning with partisan motivated reasoning. Motivated reasoning creates false realities that are usually (~95% of the time?) needed to create to get to a desired belief. Inconvenient facts are simply swept aside.

The art of the lie: Truth- and reason-based democracy is a deviation

A New York Times news analysis article, The Art of the Lie? The Bigger the Better, focuses on tribalism in politics. The NYT writes:

Lying as a political tool is hardly new. But a readiness, even enthusiasm, to be deceived has become a driving force in politics around the world, most recently in the United States.

In a cable to Washington in 1944, George F. Kennan, counselor at the United States Embassy in Stalin’s Moscow, warned of the occult power held by lies, noting that Soviet rule “has proved some strange and disturbing things about human nature.”

Foremost among these, he wrote, is that in the case of many people, “it is possible to make them feel and believe practically anything.” No matter how untrue something might be, he wrote, “for the people who believe it, it becomes true. It attains validity and all the powers of truth.”

Mr. Kennan’s insight, generated by his experience of the Soviet Union, now has a haunting resonance for America, where tens of millions believe a “truth” invented by President Trump: that Joseph R. Biden Jr. lost the November election and became president-elect only through fraud.

A readiness, even enthusiasm, to be deceived has in recent years become a driving force in politics around the world, notably in countries like Hungary, Poland, Turkey and the Philippines, all governed by populist leaders adept at shaving the truth or inventing it outright.

“The art of tribal politics is that it shapes reality,” Mr. Kreko said. “Lies become truth and explain everything in simple terms.” And political struggles, he added, “become a war between good and evil that demands unconditional support for the leader of the tribe. If you talk against your own camp you betray it and get expelled from the tribe.”

What makes this so dangerous, Mr. Kreko said, is not just that “tribalism is incompatible with pluralism and democratic politics” but that “tribalism is a natural form of politics: Democracy is a deviation.”

The utility of lying on a grand scale was first demonstrated nearly a century ago by leaders like Stalin and Hitler, who coined the term “big lie” in 1925 and rose to power on the lie that Jews were responsible for Germany’s defeat in World War I. For the German and Soviet dictators, lying was not merely a habit or a convenient way of sanding down unwanted facts but an essential tool of government.

It tested and strengthened loyalty by forcing underlings to cheer statements they knew to be false and rallied the support of ordinary people who, Hitler realized, “more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie” because, while they might fib in their daily lives about small things, “it would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths.” 

Despite his open admiration for Russia’s president and the system he presides over, she said, Mr. Trump, in insisting that he won in November, is not so much mimicking Mr. Putin as borrowing more from the age of Stalin, who, after engineering a catastrophic famine that killed millions in the early 1930s, declared that “living has become better, comrades, living has become happier.”

“That is what the big lie is,” Ms. Khrushcheva said. “It covers everything and redefines reality. There are no holes in it. You so either accept the whole thing or everything collapses. And that is what happened to the Soviet Union. It collapsed.” (emphasis added)

What we are witnessing with millions of Americans who sincerely but falsely believe that Biden is an illegitimate president-elect is what Kennan, called “some strange and disturbing things about human nature.” Can American democracy somehow cope with American stupefied tribalism? Or, will it revert to the mean, showing once again that democracy is just a deviation?

One thing is certain, some or most of the conservative tribal minds in modern America have been deceived, manipulated and betrayed. 

A big lie in Turkey: Protesters outside a courthouse in Turkey in 

2013 where 275 people were accused of trying to overthrow the

government. Turkey’s leader later acknowledged the case was a sham.