disputes over trade provide a good example. The great French anthropologist, Marcel Mauss, said “In order to trade, man must first lay down his spear”. It is not a coincidence that Donald Trump has chosen trade as his antagonism of choice. It is also not a coincidence that the British right-wing, which is intellectually pro-trade, engages in absurd contortions and denials of evidence to justify leaving the most profitable free trading bloc in the world – the European Union – in order to set up new trade deals with other tribes deemed preferable.
MARK: That all makes sense. So we have two types of public anger. We have moral outrage – a legitimate response to being ignored, a vocalizing of wrong-doing, and a call for redress and action. That is the anger we should be listening to and responding to. On the other side we have anger as a tribal energy that can be cynically harnessed and weaponized by opportunists. But in viewing both of these forms of anger as emotions that function to solve a collective action problem – to help us survive collectively – you risk making tribal anger seem benign. Is it?
ERIC: We need to draw a clear distinction between legitimate public anger and the cynical manipulation of tribal anger for political ends. Indeed, I would go much further. By focusing on tribal anger I think we can make the case that an alignment of the interests of the media and the global political elite is using this energy to motivate voters and win elections, and this is extremely dangerous. Tribal anger is after all only one step removed from tribal violence. The challenge for a non-violent politics is to get the message loud and clear about legitimate grievance, and then to respond with an alternative politics. Why? Because any alternative politics has to matter – it must be significant enough on an emotional level to create political identities independent of tribalism. Tribalism is not the only motivating political identity, but it is a powerful reflex when we are stressed and angry.
MARK: Let’s talk some more about this. Aren’t political identities always tribal? I’m left – you’re right, etc. Can we make a clear distinction between legitimate and tribal anger in our politics and economics, if everything is polarized and what’s “legitimate” depends on which side of the fence you sit on?
ERIC: Party politics is often described as “tribal”, but this is simplistic. Humans may be hardwired to form groups, but not all group identities are the same or equally motivating. Tribal identity, which has a tacit or explicit allusion to ethnicity, place or origin, is a very distinct way of aligning political orientation. Nationalism is the dominant modern form of political tribalism.
As our first parable alluded to earlier, I grew up with nationalism in Ireland. The constellation of political parties made little sense without reference to nationalism, because the Cold War legacy of a left-wing party on one side and a right-wing party on the other didn’t, and still doesn’t, really exist there. In Ireland, the party structure is a legacy of the 1922–23 civil war, which to a large extent reflected one’s degree of allegiance to one faction of the Irish tribe. This still influences voting patterns today. What’s instructive about the Irish example is that tribalism as a form of political motivation is powerful and enduring, and the political elite can and do use it to deflect us from their failings. Nationalism is a “political technology” that is everywhere used instrumentally by societal elites to secure their privileges. Whether it’s Modi in India, Trump in America, Orban in Hungary, or Johnson in the UK.
Growing up with tribal politics made me very aware of its pernicious features. At one extreme there is a tendency towards non-democratic violence, manifest in the Irish case in a bloody terrorist campaign. But tribal politics is destructive in another way. It hijacks genuine political debate and deflects us from the issues that really matter to people, like wages, housing, healthcare and education. Why worry about the influence of money in politics, or underinvestment in public services, when we can get vexed about Brexit and “the Wall” instead?8 That way the elites are kept secure and we can avoid dealing with the hard stuff.
Tribalism, which was exploited by the political elite very early on in the Irish case, is now being mobilized everywhere. Consider the Brexit debate in the UK. Whatever ones’ view on Brexit, EU membership was never the population’s primary concern, and yet it has overwhelmed the government and it obsesses the political classes. It paralysed the UK for over three years. It deflects while it inflames. It disguises what’s going on by blaming it on some other tribe. Tribalism today is being utilized by parts of the political class and a media under economic threat, to fill an identity-vacuum created by an anodyne and complacent political centre that has lost authority and the ability to motivate.
MARK: Explain why you think the political class is exploiting tribalism?
ERIC: I think there are two forces at work. First, politics has descended into the tactical mobilization of small minorities of the electorate in order to win elections. Close elections are decided by fractions of fractions. Second, there is a destructive symbiosis between the traditional media, which is under a relatively new but existential competitive threat from the internet, and the political classes of the developed world.
MARK: Please unpack those rather bold claims.
ERIC: It is a common mistake to think that democracy is majority rule. In the absence of a significant consensus, it rarely is. Majoritarian electoral systems are actually rule by minority, with protections, and the promise that “you get to try to win next time even if I win now”. A truly fair electoral system may not be possible when there is significant disagreement. We accept the outcome of an unfair process because we can’t think of a better way, and we collectively agree on the need for a peaceful transition of power.
We know from sports games that angry fans are a minority, and we know from research in political science that angry people are more likely to vote.9 Harnessing tribal anger to motivate a minority can then be a winning strategy. Consider the United States where around 60 per cent of the electorate has a strong partisan allegiance. They are also more likely to vote than those without party allegiance. But winning a presidential election is primarily about motivating a significant minority that is not already committed, and we know from existing research that anger does just that. This becomes crystal clear in electoral tactics.
Trump won in 2016 thanks to 80,000 votes in three states. Motivating an angry minority won him the presidency. Trump instinctively exploited the two forms of public anger we identified. First, he appealed to legitimate moral grievance in the Rust Belt, citing the neglect of manufacturing industries, infrastructure, and Midwest communities by coastal elites, and then without missing a beat he shifted to tribal anger with images of walls to keep out marauding criminalized immigrants, in districts where racial tensions were elevated or nascent.
MARK: This is far less novel than it appears – there are direct parallels in Ronald Reagan’s campaign strategies and Trump’s. In Reagan’s case the tribal focus was in Southern states and the nod was to racial violence, which he picked up in turn from Richard Nixon. Likewise, Trump’s “Tariff everyone” trade policy seems new, but people have forgotten the stealth trade war that Reagan fought in the 1980s against Japan, other Asian economies, and even the European car industry. We have been here before, but we forget that.
ERIC: In my view, beginning with the end of the Cold War, and accelerating through the crisis and crash of 2008, tribal anger has become a more pronounced and a much more global feature of political strategy. Much of what we are seeing is the cynical response by the political classes in developed countries to their loss of control over their economies and to the lack of a common political identity that they were unable to forge in the post-Cold War world. Tribalism is a motivating reflex to fill that vacuum, which is in turn amplified by a far more competitive mainstream media landscape and by social media.
The interaction between hysteria, stereotyping, fictitious enemies and fears, generated by the media, and among our online tribes, should not be underestimated.10 Fake news has economic roots in the mainstream media. We don’t talk enough
