In the course of three years I just spent on the road speaking with voters about President Trump, what surprised me the most was how few people have actually changed their minds about him. With rare exceptions, those I spoke with who supported him on Election Day 2016 still support him today, and the same is true of those who opposed him. That’s not to say that people’s views of the president have not changed. But where they have changed, the change has all been in one direction — toward a more extreme and more deeply entrenched conception of the president. This is the product of the increasingly tribalistic nature of American politics.
Tribalism is predicated on group loyalty, but in the political sense, I found it has two other prominent features. The first is negative partisanship, the concept that when people support a candidate, they are driven more by opposition to his or her opponent. Second, it is one factor in the country’s partisan sorting — some choose where to live based on politics. Political tribalism in America, then, can be less about affinity and belonging and more about fear or antagonism. When it comes to Trump and our current politics, tribalism manifests itself in an inability to acknowledge any nuance when assessing the president or his policies. On my trips, I found political tribalism was just as common among Trump’s critics. Some on both sides unintentionally painted tribalism as a survival mechanism.
This requires an intellectual retreat as well. When I asked a young, liberal attorney about the First Step Act, one of Trump’s criminal-justice reforms, she admitted she didn’t even know about it. Then she said: “You just kind of reminded me that after the election, I was really determined to expose myself to the full spectrum of things. And I feel like I’ve done the opposite. Even now, I’ve been so burned out with politics that I haven’t even engaged with the primaries. I’m just burned out, and I don’t have the energy.”
Following Trump’s election, a newfound desire seemed to spring up among Americans to understand the people on the other side of the political divide. Initially, reporters were deployed to Middle America to discover what had motivated people to vote the way they did, producing a glimmer of hope that after the most turbulent presidential campaign in recent memory, people were ready to engage with one another. For me, that hope dissipated soon after I started reporting from around the country. Many people I met had fallen out with friends or family members over politics, or had simply stopped trying to understand those with whom they disagreed. Many had retreated to their ideological bubbles, both in terms of the media they consumed and the people they associated with.
During a trip to Howard County, Iowa, I met a university professor who said he uses Trump as a filter when deciding whether or not to befriend someone. “If I don’t know you, and you come out with that Trump s—, I really don’t want to get to know you,” he said. That’s no easy task in a county that Trump won by 21 points.
A woman I met began crying as she recalled how political conversations with a group of longtime female friends had become extremely tense. The tension sometimes erupted into arguments over her exasperation with her friends’ unflinching support for Trump. The woman was a Republican, but she couldn’t see how her friends could support such a man. The group instituted a “no politics” policy during card games. Once when she announced, “Spades are trump,” another woman angrily shouted, “There’s no politics at the table!”
A woman in Erie County, Pennsylvania, recalled how, right after the 2016 election, a neighbor had confessed that she was grateful so many of the people living around her had put up Trump yard signs. “Now I know who not to talk to anymore,” the neighbor had said. A man in Macomb County, Michigan, wrote to say, “Hardly anyone in my family speaks to each other since Trump took office. No more holiday parties. My uncles and I used to go fishing every weekend in the summer. Something we did for 15 years. That came to an end too.”
But no relationship was more revealing of how tribal our politics has become than the friendship between Chris Chilson and his neighbor Todd Mensink. I had first met Chris and Todd in June 2017 at Chris’s home in Lime Springs, Iowa, a few miles south of the Minnesota border. When I arrived for our interview, Chris and Todd were sitting in lawn chairs in Chris’s back driveway. After Chris showed me his gleaming Harley Davidson and we cracked open up some beers, we settled in for a lengthy political discussion.
Chris and Todd were a world apart politically. Chris, a self-described “big, big constitutional guy,” voted for Trump in 2016. A former sailor, Chris cares deeply about veterans’ healthcare. For the three years I’ve been Facebook friends with him, he has posted a daily video of himself performing 22 pushups to draw attention to the estimated 22 veterans who commit suicide every day.
Todd is a progressive sociology professor. He supported Bernie Sanders for the 2016 Democratic nomination before casting a protest vote for Jill Stein, infuriated by how the “Clintonite Democrats” fixed the primary elections.
Chris, Todd, and I talked about a range of topics, from the low cost of living in Lime Springs to their pride in the town’s large municipal pool, which features a waterslide. And, of course, we talked politics. Chris and Todd disagreed about a lot, about the core responsibilities of the federal government, about whether the Democratic Party had moved too far to the left or not far enough, and much more. But the two spent a good portion of our discussion debating contentious political issues while also emphasizing whatever areas of agreement they could find. They agreed, for example, that Trump tweeted too much and that cable news deserved criticism for fanning the flames of partisanship.
When Todd was critical of progressives’ knee-jerk resistance to Trump’s nascent presidency, Chris said he had felt similarly when Republican leaders in Congress took a break-don’t-bend attitude toward President Barack Obama.
But when I returned to Howard County a year later, I discovered that Chris and Todd’s friendship had soured. First, I met with Chris and his wife, Sandy, at their home. Over pizza and beers, this time while sitting in lawn chairs in their front driveway, I asked the couple whether any of their relationships had become strained over politics. Here’s how that part of the conversation went.
Chris: “You unfriended Todd.”
Sandy: “I did unfriend Todd.”
Chris: “We were going at it pretty good on something [on Facebook], and [Todd] pulled the Nazi card.”
Sandy: “No, [Todd] lit a fire and walked away from it and let people threaten to burn the house and shoot you, and he didn’t shut the conversation down.”
Chris: “Yeah, I guess that was it.”
A few days later, I caught up with Todd. He told me his version of events. Not surprisingly, he remembered things differently. In Todd’s telling, his falling out with Chris and Sandy wasn’t the result of threats made against Chris by Todd’s Facebook friend and Todd’s failure to defend Chris. Rather, it was about the very nature of truth.
“Chris and I used to be able to have debates over policy direction,” Todd said. “But we agreed on the facts; we just disagreed on what to do with them, where to go. Now, we disagree on facts, and what are facts and what is truth, and the whole fake news. … I pretty much just stopped [engaging on social media] because I’m never changing anyone’s mind. I’m just banging my head against the wall.”
Facebook and Twitter have a unique ability to bring out the worst in us by drowning us in outrage and toxic partisanship, cocooning us in our tribes. Anonymity allows us to attack other tribes with impunity. A 2017 Pew study found that Facebook posts demonstrating “indignant disagreement” received nearly 2 times as much engagement as other content.
A 2017 Pew Research poll found that 35% of Democrats said that finding out that a friend had voted for Trump would put a strain on their friendship. Interestingly, only 13% of Republicans said the same about learning that a friend had voted for Hillary Clinton. The differential there is striking, suggesting that Trump supporters are at least somewhat more accustomed to hearing or engaging the opposing view — maybe not surprising, given that anti-Trump views are dominant in most mainstream media.
I learned firsthand just how tribal things could become on social media. A few months into my reporting, I launched a Facebook page called “Into Trump’s America” with the goal of promoting my articles and videos and perhaps bringing about lively debate about what I was finding as I traveled across the country. Unfortunately, the page immediately became a silo for Trump supporters, with the most tribal ones being the most vocal.
One post featured Darryl Howard, a black man in his late 20s whom I had interviewed several times over multiple visits to southeast Michigan. In a post from the summer of 2018, Howard explained his reasons for moving from Macomb County, Michigan, back to his birthplace a few miles south in Detroit:
“I was born in Detroit. My parents moved me to Macomb Township, and we stayed there for 15 years. And during the last election, I decided that my family would be better off in a new county. We just didn’t really feel … I don’t want to say we felt unsafe, because we didn’t feel unsafe. We felt fine. It was just, I didn’t want the ideologies of Trump being portrayed to my kids. My daughter, she was going into the first grade, and they had a mock election in the classroom. It was in kindergarten. Trump won the mock election in her class. That made me think. I didn’t want her growing up in this age, in that culture, with his ideologies.”
As soon as I posted Darryl’s photo and quote on the ITA page, the tribal arrows came thick and fast: 73 pages of comments such as “Just don’t come back”; “Good one less disrespectful Socialist”; “Hope you are already gone, AMERICA has too many of your stinking thinking.”
When I had posted a photo of Darryl’s friend George (a former sailor who’s also black) a week earlier with a mildly pro-Trump quote about reforms at VA hospitals, it prompted nearly as many responses, nearly all of them supportive of both Trump and George. Several were of the “May God bless you for your service” variety.
I’d also posted many quotes by white Trump critics, and they generally elicited just as much ad hominem vitriol. Race might have played a role in some of them, but the overarching picture was one of tribalism. By rejecting pro-Trump Macomb County, Darryl had rejected the entire Trump tribe. So, now the Trump tribe had to make it clear that they were rejecting him too.
People seeking out places to live near those who think and vote as they do predates Trump, of course. In 2004, journalist Bill Bishop wrote The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart. But the political and electoral consequences are becoming more pronounced. Rural America is increasingly becoming the domain of Republicans, and urban America of Democrats. Besides Darryl, several people I spoke to mentioned politics as the primary reason for moving to new areas.
Few institutions in America are as tribal as its political parties. It’s common for politicians to lament today’s bitter partisanship and to wax nostalgic for a bygone era when moderates were in abundance and members of Congress mixed frequently and would come together for the good of the country. Even though such lamentations can become tedious, it’s true that in this age of tribalism, people in politics step outside of their tribes at their own peril.
Brandon Davis found that out when he took over as president of Volusia County Young Democrats in Florida. When I met Davis at a Starbucks a few steps from the shores of Daytona Beach in late 2018, he told me the following story:
“When I first started in a leadership role at this club, as president, I wanted to grow our club. So I invited the mayor of Port Orange to come and speak. I thought it would be a good way for people to find out about the club. The plan was to put it on at one of the local restaurants, and it’s a win-win for everybody. But then I got a call from higher-ups, or different groups in the DNC locally, and they completely wanted to shut it down because [the mayor is] a Republican even though his son is a [Volusia Young Democrats] member.”
Davis explained to me that the group is under the auspices of the Florida Young Democrats, not under the local Democratic executive committee, which is the organization the caller represented. Still, the warning had been issued. The Democratic official told Davis: “If you do this, we’re going to have to shun your club.”
Human beings are tribal by nature. And tribalism is connected to feelings of belonging and solidarity, which are inherently good things. But taken to the extreme, tribalism prevents us from perceiving one another accurately. Tribalism means assuming the worst of those outside the tribe — about their intentions and their character. It requires complete allegiance to our tribe and complete rejection of other tribes.
An academic research paper found that 42% of the people in each political party view those in the other party as “evil.” The researchers even found that nearly 20% of Republicans and Democrats agree with the statement that their political adversaries “lack the traits to be considered fully human — they behave like animals.” They further found that roughly 20% of Democrats and 16% of Republicans sometimes think the country would be better off if large numbers of the opposition died.
Trump did not create the divisions that are tearing our country apart. He embraced and amplified them, certainly. But Trump is more properly seen as a consequence of our tribalism, not its cause. The real causes lie elsewhere, in things that cannot be erased by an impeachment or an election. They’re embedded in many parts of American life. Everything about modern politics encourages such tribalism — increasing income inequality, seismic demographic shifts, declining social mobility and the class divide, partisan redistricting, and a badly broken media model that rewards expressions of outrage.
There’s virtually no trust in the media or in the capacity of any authority to judge fairly among competing truth claims. Surveys show that public trust in nearly every societal institution, from the media and the political system to the courts and organized religion, has plummeted. When trust vanishes, tribalism flourishes.
In a 2018 Pew survey, a majority of respondents said that those who disagreed with them about President Trump also probably do not share their values. Only a year earlier, a minority of the public had felt that their political opponents probably did not share many of their values and goals. There are two crucial questions going forward. First, can Americans agree on at least some shared values? And if not, can we live together as a nation of people who embrace values that are at odds with one another?
Daniel Allott is an opinion editor at the Hill newspaper and the author of On the Road in Trump’s America: A Journey Into the Heart of a Divided Nation (Republic Book Publishers), from which this piece is excerpted.
