Although the Senator from Alaska was Ted Stevens, not Murkowski, the point you make is not only salient, but it is vital to any future for the Union of fifty States that make up the Federal Republic.
We are dangerously close to anarchy or worse, outright civil war, if the overheated rhetoric and stupidity continue to squelch reasoned discourse under some mob rule.

You are absolutely right. You can’t listen to that kind of trash and not be effected. Thank God most Americans get the picture. We must continually remind our neighbors how twisted and destructive these folks are. Violence, hatred, and racism are not funny; yet that is how they justify this crap. Hatred ain’t deep thinking and it ain’t entertaining.

Stephen-
You are so right – and I’d intended to correct that error after I had gone back to double check some facts. Then I forgot.
My bad! Particularly embarrassing since I’m a political scientist. I will change it now, leaving this mea culpa to document that I’m sometimes a lot more spacey than is good for me…
Gus

Al Franken is in involved in a senate race in MINNESOTA, not Wisconsin! Otherwise, excellent piece!

This is embarrassing!
Today is obviously not my day to do good proof reading of first drafts…
the ‘duh’ is duhZerega…
I will edit it!

Tribalism? Hardly. Need to go back and familiarize yourself with Gravesean psychology. Beck is blue-orange. Limbaugh is orange with a touch of blue. Palin is another blue-orange. Blue is of course authoritative and orange is classical liberalism. They all advocate a certain level of division, but it’s hardly tribalism. The postmodern/romantic greens are more actually divisive, claiming we cannot know anything about each other, so we shouldn’t try. That is, when the Left-greens are not advocating the overthrow of the bourgeoisie. The nature of 1st Tier thinkers is to be divisive, no matter where they are on the spectrum. The Left is as guilty as the Right, liberals as guilty as conservatives, when it comes to divisiveness. Most people are just comfortable with the way their group is doing the dividing is all.
I am curious as to what it is you would call what Obama is doing with the economy. Which form of economy do you think he is trying to create?

I am deeply skeptical of the nice neat color coordinated psychological typing that I first encountered among associates of Ken Wilber. I assume you are describing the same kind of ‘spiral dynamics’ model of psychological change, a model which like Ptolemy’s astronomy, keeps getting epicycles added to account for cases that do not fit, and in the process making it fit every conceivable way of behaving. In my view there isn’t a genuine classical liberal bone in any of their bodies, though they can employ its rhetoric on occasion.
I think there is such a thing as psychological growth, but not so neat and self-congratulatory as with that crowd.
The subject is worth a post of its own, especially since the middle part of the Higgenbotham’s new book, ‘Cristopaganism,’ depends so heavily on it. Unnecessarily so. In my view they’d be better off without it.
Tribalism as I use it is my group over your group, with my group being very concretely defined and your group barely human. It emphasizes real and imagined differences as ethically more important than similarities, rejects universal standards for all, and often would rather see a project fail than succeed if the other side is in charge. It easily tips into violence given the right provocations.
It is a universal human predilection, based on our preferring the concrete closest to us over the more abstractly defined larger group more distant from us. We gradually, the best of us, enlarge the in-group and shrink the out group. Religion at its best expands the morally important group to include all of humanity or even the world as a whole. The people I mention do the opposite.
My posts on the bailout cover my view on what Obama has done so far. It has nothing to do with the idiocies that come from their mouths.

Tribalism is the natural end product of nearly thirty years of continually escalating xenophobic rhetoric. If the prime motivation for voting is fear of the “other” then the tribe becomes the only safe refuge. This has been a long time coming. I am not sure where it will end.

I don’t get my spiral dynamics theory from Wilbur, but from Beck and Cowan. One thing to keep in mind is that the different levels are described in their pure state so one can see them most clearly, but the vast majority of people are mixtures. Your postmodernists, Marxists, etc. are green, your typical American liberal is green-orange, your classical liberal is orange, your typical American conservative is blue-orange. Pat Buchanan is pure Blue. Us-them thinking is just plan 1st Tier human thinking, though as you move up the spiral, more and more people are included in your group, as you correctly observed. But a tribe is a distinct kind of unit. Islam, Christianity, Buddhism all include many groups that one would more correctly call tribes — only they are now unified under a single theology (Greens try to unite under a single ideology). Of course, us-them thinking is rooted in tribalism, but the fact that the lungs are evolved from fish swim bladders doesn’t mean humans have swim bladders.We need better terms for this kind of Othering, because tribalism is a very distinct thing, involving very small, ethnically pure groups.
Hayek, though he identifies himself as a “classical liberal” is in fact 2nd Tier — yellow. You can always identify 2nd Tier people by their deep understanding of the importance of time and their recognition that the world is a system. Nietzsche was also a yellow (the first?). Fred Turner’s turquoise. Maybe beyond. Sometimes I don’t exactly get what he’s up to.
I like Gravesean psychology precisely because it is a systems-theoretic, emergentist view. It may not be exactly right, but right now, it’s the only game in town if you’re looking for a psychological theory that takes fullest consideration of the complexity of reality. I recommend Beck and Cowan’s book (for content, not style).

I think one clue as to the tribalism of people like Beck and Coulter is that they do not believe in anything other than that their group should be in power. For example, during the Bush II regime there was the greatest expansion of government power and interference in the private lives of the citizenry that has ever occured in U.S. history. Yet the very same people who rant today about how the government is expanding and interfering completely supported Bush II. The reason? Bush II is part of their tribe.
Another example of their tribalism is their consistent hostility to democracy. The ongoing litigation to keep Franken from taking his seat is just the latest example. They only support elections when one of their people wins; otherwise they despise the process. Which means that when push comes to shove, they despise the democratic process itself.
Jim

The same is true on the Left. For example, Franken is not being seated because completely different rules were used for high-Democrat counties than were used throughout the rest of the state. What is in court now is the proposal that the same rules be used throughout the state, so that the same kinds of ballots not counted in some counties, but counted in others, will also be counted. This is an issue of equal protection under the law. Something people support, until it threatens someone in their tribe. Then they despise the process.
You also apparently do not remember all the criticism Bush II got on economics from the Right.

Regarding Franken, I don’t know what planet you’re living on Troy, but it’s sure not mine – or Ramesh Ponnuru’s at that noted left journal National Review or even papers in Minnesota who backed Coleman against Franken and are now calling on him to concede the defeat he so surely merits if we do anything weird, like count votes. I notice Rethugs don’t really like to count votes too much when the going gets tough.
Wilbur uses the Beck/Cowan stuff to get his own model going. It seems to differ only in that he adds later stages taking us to the NonDual. I will be dealing with this model in detail when I discuss the Higgenbothams. Suffice it to say for now, any scheme of development that equates different levels of cultural/psychological development for whole societies with fairly early stages of childhood doesn’t have too much going for it in my view. Rudyard Kipling did it better, and he was still wrong. The Green or Blue or whatever man’s burden, and all that.
That this model also so defines itself as to make counter factuals almost impossible to identify adds to its unpersuasiveness. I have quite a bit more to say, but will save it for a post all to itself. I think it has VERY VERY anti-Pagan implications, if true. Which it isn’t.

This liberal Democrat doesn’t mind tribalism..he only minds certain tribalisms. La Raza (which means “the race”) and the Congressional Black Caucus don’t bother them in the least. Rush Limbaugh defending his heritage and culture do bother them. Americans protesting the destruction of their nation and country do bother them. This beign the case Beck is right. Like it or not it can only end with force.
Yugoslavia was quite the opposite of the description given by this dizergera character. It was a totalitarian communist dictatorship imposed on the various factions at the point of a gun. The Croatians, the Serbians, and every other nationality in Yugoslavia tried at some point to express itself and had their leaders arrested and executed for their efforts.
Peace and tranquility…and long live the workers paradise. And long live the illegal immigrations of milliosn of new Demcrats. Look how well it worked for the Albanians who took over Kosovo through illegal immigration.

It’s hard to condense so many errors and misunderstandings into one small post, but you succeeded. In the deepest and most literal sense, you do not know what you are talking about.
Let me deal with only one error. Yugoslavia was established after WWI. Long before there was communist rule. The people had certain things in common – especially a common language, Serbo-Croation. Three different religious traditions and two alphabets made the mix much weaker.
Later, under the Communist Tito it held together in large part because it was NOT a traditional totalitarian dictatorship and Tito strongly discouraged Serbian nationalism. The Yugoslav model was quite different from other Communist rules countries.
The natural religious and cultural fissures in that society only began to really fall apart due to aggressive Serbian nationalism and divisive politicians on all sides. Read, if you will. Chris Hedges’ The Love of War is a Disease With Us. Might give you some background you’re lacking. By its very nature Yugoslavia could not be a strong highly centralized state except through Serbian tyranny. But there were other possibilities.
The tone of your post indicates that rational argument and recourse to history places a distant second to your love of rhetoric and scoring cheap points, so I’ll let the rest pass for now.

I think you misunderstand spiral dynamics, but if you’re going to post on it later, we’ll leave such discussions until then. I don’t see several of the levels applying to early childhood. Certainly, they couldn’t apply as I think they do to each person’s development until new levels emerged.
I will say, give me your counterfactuals, and I’ll see if I can explain them. I haven’t run across any so far — at least through my understanding of the model, anyway. On the other hand, the “inability to identify counterfactuals” isn’t an argument against evolutionary theory. All living things evolve through genetic change.

I go away for a while, and I nearly miss a discussion about development. I’m definitely not a fan of spiral dynamics. I prefer James Fowler. I look forward to the discussion.
Interestingly, I recently picked up Higgenbothems’ book. No spoilers please.
Oh, and to Creedofcrusades…did you really just come into someone else’s house and start bashing the host as a “totalitarian”? Wow, that’s unbelievable. Please stop trolling. You’re embarrassing Jesus.
(FYI: I recommend removing trolling posts. It’s not being inhospitable. Quite the contrary, it teaches people that they need to behave in a respectful way toward others if they want to participate.)

You are right xiananarchist. Creedofcrusades has been banished from this blog until he learns to behave himself. I suspect it will be a while. The lunatic right has poisoned so much i this country – here at least we will be free from people who do not know the difference between an argument and an insult.

Oh, and to Creedofcrusades…did you really just come into someone else’s house and start bashing the host as a “totalitarian”? Wow, that’s unbelievable. Please stop trolling. You’re embarrassing Jesus.
No bucko, I didnt. I came onto beliefnet, being a registered member, and replied to a blogger with totalitarian leanings. Exactly what the comment section was set up for. Or maybe not? Maybe it was set up for you to kiss up? Feel free…but I would appreciate you dropping the “christ” part of your screen name. False advertising it seems.

You talk of the “Republicans” like they are all of one mind. The “Republicans” consist of a couple of different factions. We have the Neocon faction who are currently in control of the party. These folks want a Christian Theocracy. They believe in spiritual warfare. They are intolerant of descent and they have no trouble breaking their own rules in order to maintain control of the party. They back the Military industrial complex and like to use “Wars”, the war on drugs, the war on terror to steal peoples liberties. Then there is the libertarian faction. These are the people who are thought of, traditionally, as Republicans. They want a constitutional government, and small government. They want to have control over their own lives and not have a paternal government come in and tell them how to live their lives. They don’t want to live as serfs or slaves under a fascist government. They like to play by the rules and compete fairly. They believe our countries military should only be used for self defense and not for empire building. They believe that diplomacy should be used instead of warfare.
Because you’ve lumped these people into one group you have made a number of mistakes in the assumptions you made in this article. In the future it would be nice to see some research done before the article is written. And just because this lunatic listened to certain entertainers (Limbaugh is a lunatic also) does not mean everyone that also listens to these people are nuts. Rush happens to be a Neocon, Glen Beck is a Libertarian. It’s like grouping Odinists (racists) with Wiccans, Druids and Asatru. They are all Pagan, right? Get my drift.

Gus is also guilty of romanticizing the Democrats a bit so that he can’t see that many of the things he rightly accuses the neocon Republicans of are things many of the Democrats do as well. Arrogance among the neocons? Most certainly. But not among the Democrats? Are you kidding me? Stealing elections? Chicago Democrats and Louisiana Democrats. Need I really say more?

Once the Republicans included people such as Mike describes as a significant part of its members. No more. They may still vote Republican out of habit, but that reflects more on their willful blindness than on the Party they support.
You say Beck is a Libertarian – I’m afraid you are not even close. Do you remember his words when his party was in power? Now that Republicans are out of power they fall back on their talk of limited government, etc. but when they were in power they rode roughshod over the constitution, the law, and the rights of people who disagreed with them to an extent unprecedented in a peacetime government. Because war was never declared they could blur the difference between war and peace, exercising wartime powers all the time, and attacking critics as unpatriotic.
It is now a highly monolithic force by American standards as witnessed by its enormous discipline in Congressional votes both in and out of power, something unprecedented in recent times. It has divisions that matter, this includes the “christian” right, the right wing side of corporate interests, and neoconservatives in the driver’s seat. They agree on big government, militarism, and using moral issues as a means to win and gain political power. Their differences are real, but usually easily compromised away, enabling them to make genuine small government Republicans about as relevant as flat earthers. This centralized discipline overcomes the logic of Federalist 10 on how to prevent tyranny of the majority. I invite you to go read it.
The Republican Party is a subversive and destructive force in our country, controlled by the power crazed and/or bigoted, who have a lock on primaries, with Republicans such as you describe too timid, weak, or blind, to challenge their current base. Consider this- in 2006 60 percent of white evangelical Christians believed the Bible should trump democracy. This is the controlling part of the Republican ‘base.’ I’ll listen to arguments such as yours with less disbelief when you show me a case of small government Republicans defeating these folks in a primary.
I look forward to that day. More likely, the Republicans will be replaced by a political opposition in greater harmony with our constitution. Either would be good.
A single party is not good for us, although I anticipate an interesting set of Democratic primaries in years to come, as that is where good citizens will now go to effect the future of their country.
And no, the Democrats have never been like that. Troy, misses my point.

I have as little use for big government conservatives as I have for big government liberals. You won’t find a lot of praise of Bush and his policies on my blog. The true small government conservatives are, unfortunately, a very small group. But do small government liberals exist at all? I am of the opinion that most of the criticisms of Bush were entirely partisan, as if he had in fact had a D after his name, nobody would have guessed he was a Republican. HIs rhetoric on a few social issues was “conservative,” but his actions made no difference on those social issues — any more than Clinton’s actions did in the other direction (“Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” resulted in even more gays being thrown out).

I guess that’s why until the very end he was called a conservative, by conservatives, eh?
Small government conservatives are actually a contradiction in terms, once they have power. The states rights crowd only wanted a small national government so they could do whatever they wanted at the state level they controlled.
Once they controlled the national government all talk of local government independence disappeared. Terri Schiavo, anyone?
Small government LIBERALS made a deal with the devil when they allied with conservatives after World War Two, and most have still to comprehend the depth of their mistake.
Maybe someday.

Actually, I heard a lot of criticism from conservatives that Bush wasn’t a conservative. However, Nixon, Reagan, and Ron Paul are all called “conservatives.” How similar are those three, actually? Would Nixon, with his economic policies, be a Republican now? Doubtful. Unfortunately, you can’t help what people want to call themselves. I would love it if conspiracy theorists wouldn’t call themselves libertarians, but they do. I would love it if the Left hadn’t taken the term “liberal,” but they did. You know as well as I do that such liberals have become almost meaningless in the U.S.
In the U.S. liberals are really center-leftists (and increasingly postmodernists), yet “neo-liberals” are supporters of free markets and are practically interchangeable with “libertarians.” The libertarians consider themselves to be the true American conservatives, but at the same time you have your Religious Right, which is in fact primarily made up of social conservatives and former Southern Democrats who could really care less about free market economics, and if pressed are actually welfare statists and interventionists. Then you have your neocons, whose ideas can be traced back to Leo Strauss, who studied under Heidegger, but whose founding ranks were mostly ex-Marxists (politically, if you combine fascism and Marxism, you get postmodernism — the neocons are thus really the postmodern right). Most in the GOP aren’t ideological at all, but are only sort of vague Keyneseans. I suspect that Bush II falls mostly in the last category, though on foreign affairs, he was greatly influenced by neocons.
In short, the terms are all over the place, and inconsistent. I would love it if we could actually clarify terms in American politics. It would clear things up quite a bit.

The break up of Yugoslavia showed not that it is possible for divisive politicians to destroy a country, but rather that it was a communist dictatorship that held the country together in the first place.
Similarly, the “problem” in Iraq is not simply that Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds are three groups with little sense of mutual identity, but rather that they never had a significant mutual identity, and were the victims of having a Western-style nation-state forced upon them where none existed before, held together by–here we go again–a dictatorship.
Not everyone in the world believes in the desirability, or even cultural portability, of the Western-style state. In fact, the West didn’t even believe in that before the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648.
Tribalism is almost certainly the wave of the future, partly as the West and its ideals decline in influence, partly as the internet facilitates communication among the like-minded (i.e., the West’s answer to the idea of ‘tribe’).