In 2014, the New York Analysis of Policy and Government recalled how the scholar Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. endorsed the concept of a melting pot rather than ethnic identity politics. As he saw it, the alternatives were stark: a single, united country, or a tribalistic society in which different groups constantly quarreled with each other.
In the two years that have followed, both race and ideological relations have deteriorated. In Early June, horrific photos of a threatening pursuit and attempted beating of an individual merely because the victim supported another candidate were seen on numerous outlets. Even more chillingly, some, particularly followers of Progressive viewpoints, failed to condemn the heinous act.
Writing for the Center for Politics, Alan I. Abramowitz and Steven Webster, noted that “The most important influence on the 2016 presidential election as well as the House and Senate elections will be the division of the American electorate into…partisan camps…” Throughout much of the world, loyalty, above all else, to the particular clan, ethnic group or race into which one is born—has caused devastating harm. Given the clear and abundant evidence of tribalism’s horrific impact on so much of the planet, why are so many in the U.S. Progressive movement and the left generally increasingly wedded to it? Why is tribalism occurring in America?
In an insightful comment, Don Zapsic Jr, writing in the Columbus Dispatch, noted:
“A not-so-surprising source of tribalism in America comes from the federal government…Affirmative-action programs and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission have done more to divide and distance the U.S. citizenry from one another than prejudice and bigotry acting alone arguably ever could achieve. As a result, we tend to think of individuals in terms of race, religion, national origin, age, gender, sexual orientation and even culture. The following questions serve as a litmus test for tribalism: Is America more of a pressure cooker than a melting pot? Do political operatives generally acquire and maintain positions of power and influence through principled leadership or more by appeasement of critical-mass voting blocs? Is group entitlement and privilege promoted and embraced at the expense of national security and long-term economic stability?”
The Black Lives Matter (BLM) organization has recently been at the forefront of those who reject the concept of being seen as “American” as opposed to a member of an ethnic group. Their website states:
“We are committed to disrupting the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and ‘villages’…We see ourselves as part of the global Black family and we are aware of the different ways we are impacted or privileged as Black folk who exist in different parts of the world.”
BLM seeks to use incidents such as Ferguson, in which a police officer allegedly inappropriately shot a black man, to incite violence across the nation. It doesn’t seem to matter to either that group or the politicians who sought to capitalize on it that a review of the facts eventually found that the police officer acted appropriately. The myth of a disproportionately large killing of blacks by Police is disproven by statistics, as noted by Heather MacDonald in Hillsdale College’s Imprimis: “The nation’s police killed 987 civilians in 2015, according to a database compiled by the Washington Post. Whites were 50%–0r 493—of those victims, and blacks were 26 %–or 258. Most of those victims of police shootings, white and black, were armed or otherwise threatening the officer with potentially lethal force…the black violent crime rate would actually predict that more than 26% of police victims would be black.”
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The division runs far deeper than racial attitudes, ideological debates between liberals and conservatives, or the partisan wrangling of Democrats against Republicans. There is an entire segment of the U.S. population, particularly (but far from exclusively) among those schooled in the last few decades who have received little objective education on America’s history and founding principles, and who therefor have little intellectual affinity with the nation’s core beliefs.
That problem of rejection of America’s core beliefs is best illustrated, disturbingly, by statements of two U.S. Supreme Court Justices.
In 2012, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, in an address given in Cairo, Egypt, stated that “I would not look to the U.S. Constitution, if I were drafting a constitution in the year 2012.”
Fellow Obama appointee Justice Elena Kagan believes that the U.S. Constitution should be interpreted on the basis of international law. During her tenure as Dean of Harvard Law School, notes Topica, “a student could graduate without taking a course on interpretation of the U.S. Constitution. But an international law course was mandatory.”
During her nomination hearing, Kagan refused to acknowledge the fundamental underpinnings and the central reason for the founding of the United States: the concept that individuals are born with inherent rights, and those rights cannot be taken or limited by governments. Senator Tom Coburn (R-Kansas) pointedly asked the then-nominee whether she accepted the statement in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” She declined to agree.
Without this guiding concept of inherent rights, which Kagan refused to subscribe to, there is no reason for America to exist in its current form. It was for this reason that it was born. It was for this reason that the bitter faults of slavery and segregation were finally outlawed. It is for this reason that America has succeeded.
America was not built on a concept of ethnic or religious identity. It was founded on the concept of individual freedom. Without it, it ceases to exist in any recognizable form. Absent that unifying principle, tribalism succeeds, and chaos follows.