All Politics is Tribal

The last thing I want to do is prolong what has become a rather ugly debate over Conor’s suggestion that Palin be dropped from the ticket, but I think there’s some profit in pointing out one misstep in his logic. I could probably state my entire objection in a single sentence—"Conor, you’re my editor and I love you, but don’t take sides with anyone against the Family, ever"—but I’ll say a little more for clarity. Conor writes :

Let me clear something up for Mr. Erickson: I’ve never claimed to be on the conservative team first and the Republican team second because I am not on the Republican team at all. I am on the team of people who believe that intellectually honest argument is essential to the long term viability of the conservative project, and indeed of democratic governance generally. Insofar as I have political loyalties, it is to those who favor the things for which George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan stood.

I’m not sure Conor can get away with using the world "loyalty" here. A man cannot be loyal to an idea. Loyalty is for people and institutions.  Consider the difference between being loyal to Abraham Lincoln and being loyal to "the things for which [he] stood." One means you’re on his team, the other means you’re on his team only as long as you agree with him, in which case it isn’t loyalty at all.



For contrast, here’s something my (liberal) friend Noah once wrote :

. . . if you [as a liberal] think that the feminist movement is racist because, using your different mode of analysis, you figured out that it privileges problems of the white middle class (and you’d be right more often than not!), you don’t get to take your ball and go home. You fight like hell and take it over. Because at the end of the day, they’re on your team.



. . . So really, all I’m saying is that since we aren’t all special little political snowflakes, you have to pick a team. That means figuring out what similarities matter to you and which differences matter. To me, the movement matters. Are you in or are you out?

Conor’s preference for brutal honesty over party loyalty has a long pedigree: it was Jefferson who said that, if he could not get to heaven but with a party, he would not go at all. Hume said, "As much as legislators and founders of states ought to be honored and respected among men, as much ought the founders of sects and factions to be detested and hated.” Your favorite anti-faction line from Federalist Ten goes here.



But Noah’s right: we aren’t all special political snowflakes, and we have to pick teams .  The rules would be different if politics were meant to be a process for discovering truth, but it isn’t, not even in a democracy. You stick with your team and help it win, and, if you have problems with the ideas your team is promoting, you take it up with them outside the political realm. I’ll admit that blogs exist in a strage middle ground between political rhetoric and intra-party discussion , but I think I can sidestep the problem by saying that, if you can’t take your discussion out of the other team’s view, then at least conduct it in such a way that the other team understands you’re still standing by your guys no matter how the argument turns out.



Two objections to this argument come to mind: first, that the Republican party is not the same as the conservative movement; second, that we need some way to keep the Republican party true to conservative principles. To the first I say: ridiculous. The Democrats are on the left, and we’re on the right. At any given movement, the GOP might be more or less in line with conservative principles, but it is, and will continue in the near future to be, the conservative party in our two-party system.



The second point deserves more serious attention, but I don’t have much hope that elections will ever be a reliable method of enforcing conservative orthodoxy; withholding votes from ideological heretics just ain’t the electorate’s way. Don’t ever say "We need to show the party that they can’t win when they betray conservative principles," because, really, they can . They can betray conservative orthodoxy on Monday and win an election on Tuesday as long as long as they don’t stray too far and their other campaign methods work. The most I can hope for is that the GOP will achieve the greatest success with those "cultural cues" (Conor’s phrase) that serve as shorthand for the most important conservative values. (I’d say that Sarah Palin does just that, but I could stand to be disagreed with.)



I should distinguish between two slightly different claims I’m trying to make: that elections are about tactics and not ideas, and that democratic dialogue is about pulling for your team and not about discovering truth through argument. Even assuming that you find the first statement both false and overly cynical (which, on some days, I do), there’s still the second. If you want a clash of ideas that eventually leads to an agreed-upon truth, try philosophy. This is democracy . There’s enough philosophy involved in democracy that a certain amount of intellectual foul-calling is justified, but enough politics involved that loyalty matters, too.