ON OUR TRIBAL POLITICS

ROUGH WATERS

This dramatic picture from the New York Times is a lawyer in Islamabad, Pakistan, fleeing a tear gas attack by the police this past Sunday.

The accompanying story is about the on-going struggle by opposition political parties against President Musharraf's rule.

Such dramatic confrontations between lawyers and the government have been going for a few months now in Pakistan, as I pointed out last November.

This battle between the secular, legal community of Pakistan and the government is but another example of the tribal conflicts that are wreaking political havoc in Pakistan.

For all his alleged lack of experience in foreign policy, Barack Obama describes the broader forces involved rather eloquently, as seen in this Wall Street Journal op-ed piece from last week:

""This is the wild frontier of our globalized world," Mr. Obama has said of the territory spanning Pakistan and Afghanistan.

"There are tribes that see borders as nothing more than lines on a map, and governments as forces that come and go. There are blood ties deeper than alliances of convenience, and pockets of extremism that follow religion to violence."

Think he gets the nuance and the broad strokes.  Which shouldn't be too much of a surprise given his unique background.

Which brings me to this great op-ed  piece by Roger Cohen in this Sunday's New York Times, titled "Tribalism, here and there".  He continues to connect the dots as follows, starting with the current tribal conflict tearing apart Kenya, between the Luo and Kikuyu tribes:

"History is prologue. Back in the 1960s, Obama’s father (of the Luo tribe), shaped by his American experience, warned that “tribalism was going to ruin the country (Kenya),” according to the senator’s memoir. Kenyatta, a Kikuyu, punished the “old man” for his frankness...

But we’re beyond tribalism, right?

Wrong. The main forces in the world today are the modernizing, barrier-breaking sweep of globalization and the tribal reaction to it, which lies in the assertion of religious, national, linguistic, racial or ethnic identity against the unifying technological tide.

Connection and fragmentation vie.

The Internet opens worlds and minds, but also offers opinions to reinforce every prejudice. You’re never alone out there; some idiot will always back you. The online world doesn’t dissolve tribes. It gives them global reach.

Jihadism, with its mirage of a restored infidel-free Caliphate, is perhaps the most violent tribal reaction to modernity. But fundamentalism is no Islamic preserve; it has its Christian, Jewish, Hindu and other expressions.

America’s peaceful tribes are also out in force. As Obama and Hillary Clinton engage in the long war for the Democratic nomination, we have the black vote, and the Latino vote, and the women-over-50 vote, and the Volvo-driving liberal-intellectual vote, and the white blue-collar vote, and the urban vote, and the rural vote, and the under-30s vote — sub-groups with shared social, cultural, linguistic or other traits and interests.

That’s democracy at work. Sure. But the United States is divided, within itself and from the world, in growing ways.

It is divided by war, by income chasms, by foreclosures, by political polarization and by culture wars. Increasingly it is looked upon from outside with dismay or alarm. Healing, within and without, will be a central task of the next president."

Regardless of which of the three candidates we all support, we need to keep our broader tribal issues in mind. 

Tribal politics are coming into play with every one of the major "issues" identified as important for Democrats or Republicans.   Whether it's the Economy, Immigration, Heath-care or Iraq, they're a common thread through them all.

Populism may help the Presidential candidates through the primaries, but it's tremendously corrosive in the long-term.  For example, it's not really about corporations vs. the ordinary worker, as some of our politicians would have us believe. 

Nor are trade agreements really bad for us...in fact quite the opposite in this globalizing world. 

We're going to have to figure out how to focus and temper our tribal passions on these issues to get anything practical done.  And stand up to politics of fear and division.  Just like those brave lawyers in Pakistan.

Comments

[stuart]

michael,

a rather eloquent and insightful piece on some of the ills that we are facing in the political and cultural climate the world is currently engulfed in..

i wonder w/ch of the 3 candidates left will have the best perspective on how to deal with this very thorny and condufing issue(s)..not easy to just place it in a basket or a soundbyte..but thanks for opening the discussion...it is something we need, as a country, to begin to discuss and face.

SE

[Suki Fuller]

What an excellent way to start a Monday morning. Thanks.

[jeff]

The Times article and your post reminded me of some of the "predictions" in Peter Drucker's 1993 book Post Capitalist Society. He made a rather strong case that society was returning to a tribal element, while at the same time (and perhaps paradoxically) becoming more global. It's interesting that your insights on a tribal society in the US were in part inspired by events half way around the world. It seems the nation-state is becoming less important to people's everyday lives than the tribes of which they are a part.