It’s All Tribalism, Son

What we generally know: in the U.S. at least, there’s a sharp decline in religion. Religion definitely isn’t for everyone, but it’s a way of social organization and community building, for sure. By some measure, 75% of American adults don’t really know any of their neighbors. Many white-collar jobs have been working from home, or periodically to often from home, for close to two years now — and service/retail/hospitality/etc. jobs that had to be in-person? Those people are now quitting in droves. There’s also a belief and some research to say that the American notion of family is in decline, with David Brooks arguing during early COVID that “the nuclear family was a mistake.” We also know that Americans, despite generally-OK quality of life comparative to the rest of the world, are largely a bunch of nervous wrecks. And finally, perhaps, we know that social isolation is on the rise — it was before COVID, and it certainly is since COVID. COVID, if anything, made us more insular.

If you look above, then, a number of different institutions and social constructs that kinda “held together” American lives for 50+ years, if not longer, many are in decline. I’m not saying America is a bad place or anything; I still live here and probably am not leaving anytime soon. But many of the glue mechanisms of social structure seem to be somewhat eroding like an old bridge, and what’s going to replace that?

Fauci is a Nazi!

Indeed. Good old tribalism. That’s how we evolved, and with the advent of algorithms and like-minded news consumption pens, that’s where we’re arrived back at, full force. Would Tucker Carlson have been possible in 1955? Absolutely. Is he more possible and more powerful in 2021? Yes. Could a dude like Trump have been elected after Truman? No question. Was it more possible after Silicon Valley gutted the Rust Belt of jobs and we started talking in academic literature about “Deaths of Despair?” Also very powerful.

Tribes are everything to us at some level, and if we can’t find a tribe through …

• Family
• Neighborhood
• Church
• Work

… then where are we going to find a tribe?

Ideology.