We Can't Go Away and Hide in our Little Platoons

We humans naturally prefer our own kind, for "man is by nature a tribal creature," writes Robert Stacy McCain, approving of Burke's "little platoons."

How, then, has this principle of group loyalty become so wickedly warped, and turned into a weapon destructive of all social order, by the contemporary practice of progressive identity politics? Why is tribalism in America now asserting itself in such toxic and ferocious ways?

Actually, I would say that all group loyalty has been "wickedly warped" since, well, since humans started to live in communities bigger than "Dunbar's number" of about 150 people. La Wik:

Dunbar's number is a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships—relationships in which an individual knows who each person is and how each person relates to every other person.

I am relying on the anthropological writings of C.R. Hallpike. In his How We Got Here he argues that hunter-gatherers were pretty relaxed about tribe. They were pretty individualistic, except about sharing food. And they would change from one "band" to another without much fuss.

According to Hallpike, humans didn't start getting really tribal until they started living in village of 2,500+ people.

I take Hallpike's ideas and propose that all modern tribes are "fake tribes," gussied up to unite people against a real or perceived threat. Read La Wik on "Clans" and tell me what you think about clans, bands, and tribes.

So I say that all modern tribalism is "fake tribalism," whether tribalism of religion, of class, of nation, of race, of tribe or clan or band, of occupation, of level of education. All fake. All tribes, all identities, all groups are artificial, using the natural groupishness of humans for a political purpose.

Here is an example of what I mean. America's "Blacks" -- once "black" and then "African American" -- are descended from a whole bunch of tribes in western Africa. Each individual Black got enslaved by some tribal incident of conquest slavery and then sold to a white European slave trader. Yet now, we are told by our betters, all Blacks belong to one race -- except that race is a social construction. Anyway, if you disagree with any American liberal on race you are a "racist." Barack Obama, son of a white mother and a well-born East African, is America's First Black President.

Obviously the invention of "fake tribalism" is the most important thing since sliced bread. Or before sliced bread.

But when McCain proposes that we check out of the crazy world of "victims" and "oppressors" and "get through the week, pay our bills... by clinging to those 'little platoons,'" and when Jackie Gingrich Cushman says our problems must be "conquered in a bipartisan way," I say fuggetaboutit.

All politics is "fake tribalism." All religion is "fake tribalism." All culture is "fake tribalism." There is no checking out of the game and going back to your "little platoon." If you want to be a "man in the arena" then you are a player in the "fake tribalism" game.

There is only one way forward: to create a "fake tribalism" that is better and nobler and more popular than the left's "fake tribalism" of race, of gender, of identity politics, of "allyism." And let it be said right here that Donald Trump's MAGA movement, based on the idea of America as a nation and the American people as one American people, was the first shot fired in developing this new -- better, nobler, popular -- "fake tribalism," No wonder our liberal friends want to kill it in its cradle.

The question is: on what principle do we raise our banner? Our liberal friends have based everything on the concept of victimhood. Whether it was the industrial workers of the nineteenth century or the unemployed of the 1930s, or blacks suffering under Jim Crow, or women from an eternity of patriarchy, or gays suffering from ages of homophobia -- did you know that Edward II of England was gay? -- or oppressed peoples in general suffering under white oppressors but for the heroic "allies:" it's all about the victims.

And about the "fake victims." I buy slaves as victims; I buy blacks under Jim Crow as victims. But post 1965 Civil Rights Act? Well-born educated feminists as innocent victims? Well-born gays as innocent victims? Ahem.

There is, I think, an eternal temptation to don the mantle of "innocence." I say that it is almost universal that small minorities use a "culture of innocence" to maintain tribal unity. But that is not for us; innocence is for the Garden of Eden, not for life in this vale of tears.

I don't think the victims narrative works for us. And the reason is quite simple. We middle-class Americans are Commoners, what I call, in my reductive Three Peoples theory: People of the Responsible Self. Responsible people cannot be victims.

I think it is pretty obvious what works. We need to base our politics on the "fake tribe" of nation, and the "fake tribe" of the middle-class Commoner, responsibly getting a job, getting married, raising a family, and providing for our own.

And we must stop apologizing. A good start would be Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA). Every Republican and every American Commoner should be saying: "hey Dems: come and talk to us when you have dealt with the poisonous racists and sexists and anti-semites in your own party. Period."

President Trump fired the first shot heard across America. It is up to us and to a new generation of politicians and culture warriors to continue the fight.

And that means having the zingers ready when the liberals come with their pejoratives. Such as this on the accusation of systemic racism.

So, pal, what is it about the Civil Rights Acts you don't understand? It is illegal in the United States to discriminate on the basis of race. So, if you see discrimination, report it to the police. Don't complain to me. I ain't the system. You are.

And so on. I was talking to a nice liberal lady the other day and she talked about race as a social construction. So what is 23andme.com all about, I asked? Profits, she said. Oh yeah, I said, of course. Silly me.

What is about America as the best country in the history of the world, and the American people as the best people in the history of the world that our liberal friends don't get?