At the time, the British Isles were occupied by multiple, sometimes warring tribes, and it wasn’t unusual for someone to try and kill you just for being on their territory. By contrast, today, the governing assumption for modern Western regimes is that no such rivalry is ever legitimate.

We got to this point via several centuries of tribalism-lite, in the form of nation-state patriotism, which climaxed in two disastrous world wars. After that, a consensus formed, with some justification, that even this much in-group preference was too dangerous. Instead, leaders dreamed that we might one day make separate nations obsolete, end all tribalism, and treat every human on the planet as, at least potentially, a member of the same tribe as ourselves.

But one of the most ironic consequences of this approach has been to set Britain on a retrograde path, not to the patriotic recent past, but to something akin to the Britain of St Wilfrid. More plainly: after half a millennium of growing ever more egalitarian and individualistic, Western nations are becoming more tribal — including some among ethnic majorities. And though opponents confuse this with nationalism, tribalism is harder, fiercer, and potentially much more violent.

By global standards, British culture has long been highly individualistic. Though this hasn’t historically always ruled out excluding someone on some ground or other, most ordinary Brits would shake their heads at (for example) preferring someone less qualified for a job purely on the basis of ethnic solidarity. But this may be changing. Tommy Robinson’s English Defence League was the first warning: more recently, phenomena such as Raise the Flags, and the Patriot Platform protest in Portsmouth last week, suggest English in-group ethnic preference is on the rise.

If the administrative class is spooked, it should be: this may point to a future in which they, not nation-states, are obsolete. For such a world would be governed not by managers, procedures, or “rule of law” — that is, by the current administrative class — but by warlords.

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According to the movement’s leader, Daniel Thomas, the catalyst for “Patriot Platform” has been the years-long refusal by those committed to internationalist governance to control Britain’s sea borders — and the increased threat posed by an influx of unvetted men to British women and children. But if this has been the most recent spark, the fading of nation-states long precedes the small boats crisis. It was a governing theme of the Brexit debate, and has, in fact, been a policy objective (at least for some) ever since the Second World War if not longer.

In this utopian vision, we’d all join John Lennon in imagining there’s no countries. In the place of these racist, bellicose entities, we’d have an architecture of international governance that would bring about world peace by removing any need for nationalism and letting us all live as one, free from petty tribalism.

But if today this vision is bitterly contested, the irony is that both sides in this clash mistake the terms of the contest. For the internationalists, the villain to be defeated is still nationalism, identified (not unfairly) with a racially inflected model of nation-state rivalry that, historically, did cause two global wars. Those on the other side, meanwhile, long to return to nation-state patriotism. This, too, is understandable: for centuries this was the normative, unremarkable foundation of policy, governance, and national identity as such.

But what’s actually happening is far stranger than a battle between globalists and nationalists. The globalists already won the battle, comprehensively, and nation states really are obsolete. But their victory comes with an un-anticipated sting in the tail. For in the aftermath, what we’re seeing is not the utopia envisaged by John Lennon, but rather a return to something more like the hyper-local tribalism of Dark Ages England.

Perhaps the single most catalytic new factor, across the board, is the digital revolution. Smartphones make migration — both legal and illegal — easier and more appealing, while translation apps and long-distance calling make integration less necessary. The writer Fred Sculthorp has described the effect of the resulting transformation in areas such as Dagenham, where formerly homogeneous working-class polities have become dizzyingly pluralistic and at times alienated patchworks.

Then, too, as minorities cluster, the resulting enclaves may extend in-group preference beyond specialist groceries or religious centers, to alternative economies or disciplinary systems — sometimes in contravention of local law. There is, for example, some evidence that the so-called “grooming gangs” are one manifestation of an ethnic mafia, analogous to the Sicilian one, whose bedrock is Pakistani-heritage clan-based networks. Another notable such mafia is Albanian, while cash-in-hand car washes that fall foul of modern slavery laws tend to be Romanian-controlled, and people-smuggling into the UK is controlled by Kurdish networks.

This isn’t to imply that there is something uniquely innocent and blameless about Brits by comparison. This country has its share of home-grown organized crime “firms”: think of the Krays. It’s more to contrast both the legal and criminal versions of such ethnic in-group preference with the normative view across ordinary Brits and the government alike; namely, that ethnic nepotism is at best low-status, if not outright immoral.

The sociologist Eric Kaufmann has critiqued the official version of this as “asymmetric multiculturalism”. But a less grievance-y term might be “de-tribalization”. This isn’t just a British cultural trait, but a key element of being “Western” as such: a greater than usual willingness to take any individual on their own terms, rather than simply as a representative of their group or tribe.

This works well enough, as long as most of your citizens are similarly detribalized. If they are, you can perhaps aspire to what the Marxist philosopher David Graeber called a “utopia of rules”: a system of neutral procedures that frees all of us from messy partiality and decision-making (even if it also causes stagnation). In rather less critical terms, this neutral realm of procedure is what New Labour’s famous “British Values” image refers to as “the rule of law”.

But what if you share your utopia of rules with large minorities who still adhere to in-group preference? Then, instead of working neutrally for everyone, your rules risk degrading to a thin veneer over a morass of competing tribal interests. The former Singaporean leader Lee Kuan Yew stated this problem starkly, when he rejected British-style democracy as unsuited to Singapore. “In multiracial societies,” Yew said, “you don’t vote in accordance with your economic interests and social interests, you vote in accordance with race and religion.”

Until recently, with a few widely-condemned exceptions, the British ethnic majority has largely clung to de-tribalized legal and cultural norms despite a rapid uptick in the country’s ethnic pluralism. But this is clearly no longer the case. Again, the internet plays a part: whatever your heritage, all the incentives of clickbait tend not towards broad common culture, but away from it, into sometimes-adversarial in-group identities. These are then consolidated on the most reductive possible lines, and intensified by selective sharing of rage-bait stories.

The result has been a rapid propagation of tribalistic identities, including among previously individualistic normie Brits. Patriot Platform and Raise the Flags likely see themselves as restoring historic nation-state norms. But in practice they’re roaring back past patriotism, becoming a vehicle for in-group mobilization, among working-class men who feel their government now treats them as just one tribe among many, in a place that used to be “theirs”.

This emerging landscape has been acknowledged for some time, by British policing in practice. Last election’s “Gaza Independent” agitators and political actors, such as the wheeler-dealer Akhmed Yakoob, hint at the shape of things to come. Similarly, the decision last year to block a Ukip march through Muslim-majority Tower Hamlets was criticized as “two-tier”, but was clearly a pragmatic effort to keep one tribe from infringing the territory of another, hostile one. The same logic likely informed officials’ decision last year to block a notoriously tribalistic group of Israeli football fans from attending a match in a Muslim-dominated area of Birmingham known for strong views on Gaza.

The efforts by Birmingham Council to impose heavy penalties for “flagging” have likewise been denounced as un-patriotic. But in a place such as Birmingham, where less than half the population is white British and districts tend to self-segregate, suppressing this practice reads less as anti-government, than as a last-ditch attempt to slow the Ulsterization of a major city.

Daniel Thomas, meanwhile, seems out to accelerate the Ulster dynamic: Patriot Platform is reportedly inspired by tactics Thomas witnessed in Belfast. Things fall apart; the center cannot hold. If this gyre continues to widen, we’ll be looking forward to a new kind of localism: not the plethora of mayors Andy Burnham seems to want, but something (at best) more like the fiefdoms of the Middle Ages, with territory controlled by whoever can command enough loyalty from fellow-tribesmen to hold it. And this is a starkly different personality profile from what we tend to think of as an ideal modern leader. A world of warring tribes is probably less destructive in absolute terms than rivalrous nuclear-armed nation-states, but it doesn’t run according to the same calculus as a de-tribalized, peaceful one.

Notably, fitness to be a tribal leader is very different to fitness for de-tribalized governance. Guardian columnists can express puzzlement at the idea that men might have domestic violence convictions, and also answer (in Tommo’s formulation) a call to “Protect our country! And more importantly our women and children!”. But, from a tribalistic perspective, there’s no conflict between protecting in-group women from rival men, and (perhaps) abusing those women. Much has also been made of Thomas’ conviction for attempted kidnapping, which is obviously bad from a de-tribalized perspective. But a tribal leader’s task is to mobilize in-group men to protect the tribe, and, in that context, a capacity for strategic violence is not automatically a demerit.

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Whatever you think of his project, footage of Thomas makes clear that he is a natural leader, on a template that would once have found an easy home in the military. The discipline shown by his group so far suggests he inspires loyalty. If the practices he is now modeling spread among white Englishmen, it’s not unthinkable that the country of the future really could look more like that of the past. Not, that is, precisely the “civil war” some predict, but a place fractured even more dramatically than envisaged by the nationalist leaders of Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. Perhaps, we might speculate, along lines more closely resembling the Heptarchy, or still more minutely into fiefdoms controlled by leaders on the Daniel Thomas or Akhmed Yakoob template.

In fairness to Thomas, he’s insisted his end objective is to “restore order” and to bring his followers to the voting booth. But his critics aren’t wrong to sense that, against this, the sheer intimidating number of black-clad men he can mobilize evokes a more pre-modern kind of power. Officials and civic nationalists are right to be frightened. A country where re-tribalized working-class men are turning out in large numbers, at the bidding of a telegenic leader with no loyalty to the regime, is one in which the universal, neutral “rule of law” is on borrowed time.

And the infuriating thing is that none of this has to happen. Our political class can choose to stop playing John Lennon Pretend at any moment, and take pragmatic Lee Kuan Yew-type action to restore order. My sense is that “Danny Tommo” would probably consider this acceptable. As a woman, and a mother, I would too. It’s my desperate hope that our country manages to shed its ideologues, and change course in such a direction, before we find ourselves back in St Wilfrid’s world.

The Anglo-Dutch philosopher Bernard Mandeville is today neither well-remembered nor wholly forgotten, but his work may hold some helpful insights for the present moment. His most infamous tract was The Fable of the Bees (1714) in which he argued for recognising self-interest, rather than other-regarding sentiments, such as solidarity or altruism, as the soundest basis for organising society. Even more than David Hume, Adam Smith, and the classical economists who were to follow, it was Mandeville who best embodied the emergence of what we now understand as liberal-capitalist modernity, sounding the death knell for the pre-liberal forms of private and communitarian morality that still held sway among the political and ecclesiastical classes.

Mandeville’s intervention, taking place in the years after the 1688 Glorious Revolution, gave expression to the transformation then unfolding in public life, from the passionate (and violent) preoccupation over moral sectarianism and ultimate ends, which so brutally scarred the 17th century, and toward the relatively peaceful and civilised pursuit of wealth and affluence that characterised the 18th. One wonders if the West is overdue for another paradigm shift from solidarity to self-interest as the animating principle of politics.

First, it is worth considering the difference between the two paradigms. Enacting such a change would not eliminate conflict from public life but radically alter its direction and outlet. It is one thing for there to be sharp divisions structuring political exchange, but conflicts over competing material interests or economic programmes can be hashed out in rational processes of give-and-take; whereas the kind of reductive battles over intangible values — what is known as the culture war — has led to the wrong kind of conflict, one in which humanity’s natural tendencies toward solidarity and communal morality degenerates into rigid, zero-sum stand-offs. The result is stasis and stultification. Compared to this, there can be little doubt that a renewed politics of self-interest would be conducive to more dynamism and material progress: the only question is how do we get to such a place from where we are now?

The England to which Mandeville immigrated from Holland in the 1690s was already one generation removed from the apocalyptic, often theologically motivated bloodshed of the Cromwellian era. It was in the midst of the post-1688 commercial boom and financial revolution, on course to becoming the world’s richest nation.

Yet even as England’s social complexion was changing, the moral outlook of many of its elites (embodied by Lord Bolingbroke and his magazine The Craftsman) remained mired in antiquated notions of virtue held to by the Old Whigs and Commonwealthmen, whose agrarian, puritanical, and civic republican sensibilities derided the new forms of mobile financial wealth and concentrated state power arising under the Court Whig government of the day as harbingers of a plague of “corruption”/ This corruption was attributed to the spirit of avarice encouraged by the new economy; and it was contrasted with the selflessly patriotic and solidaristic ethos of virtue espoused by the anti-Court opposition. It was in this context of conflicting moralities that Mandeville became the centre of national controversy when the 1723 edition of his book led to a presentment before the Grand Jury of Middlesex. He was accused of wishing to “run down Religion and Virtue… and to recommend Luxury, Avarice, Pride, and all vices, as being necessary to Public Welfare… tending to the Destruction of the Constitution,” a line of attack that paralleled opposition polemics against the Court Whig regime, with which Mandeville became identified.

But just what exactly did Mandeville write for such a charge to be levelled against him? The core of his argument was that impulse and ego were the main drivers of human behaviour and that this fact necessitated the construction of a public morality based on self- deception by cunning elites, who had an interest in subduing the unruly passions of men. And while the insight was not new, with antecedents going back to Lucretius and Epicurus, Mandeville’s innovation was to draw out its implications in a modern setting and propose an alternative counter-model of society to that held up by traditional morality.

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Mandeville’s vision accepted impulse-driven self-interest as its sole premise and in so doing, radically affirmed the imperatives of the emerging liberal-capitalist system. To illustrate his view, he took the beehive, oft-used symbol of virtue and frugality by the opposition writers, and turned it on its head. In Mandeville’s telling, the bees were not selfless citizens devoted to the public interest but greedy, self-seeking creatures whose competitive appetites made the hive a more prosperous place: “Thus Vice nurs’d Ingenuity / Which join’d with Time and Industry / Had carry’d Life’s Conveniencies, / It’s real Pleasures, Comforts, Ease, / To such a Height, the very Poor Liv’d better than the Rich before / And nothing could be added more.”

And so, it became the duty of wise statesmen to devise ways by which this self-interest could be transmuted into socially productive endeavours: successive Whig ministries were able to do that by sponsoring and regulating the development of complex financial institutions such as the new Bank of England and the growing trade of joint-stock companies, including both the wildly successful East India Company and the ill-fated South Sea Company. The same capitalist superstructure that the opposition denounced as a source of venality and injustice functioned, in the hands of men like Sir Charles Montagu and Sir Robert Walpole, as the instruments by which the greed of England’s magnates (the “bees”) contributed to the growth of its national wealth, power, and prestige. The Whig government achieved this by providing means to concentrate and de-risk large capital investments, enabling the funding for prohibitively costly and otherwise unsustainable ventures, like imperial expansion overseas and economic modernisation at home.

This process of enrichment through doux commerce led to greater refinement, and to England becoming the “polite nation” to which Addison and Steele’s Spectator addressed its lessons on manners and etiquette, a far cry from the violent and brutish ways of the previous century. British history under the Court Whig oligarchy could be understood, then, as firm validation for The Fable of the Bees and in particular, one of Mandeville’s central insights — that “Private Vices by the dextrous Management of a skilful Politician may be turned into Publick Benefits”.

With the triumph of Walpole, the austere, virtue-seeking sensibilities of the men who attacked Mandeville — represented by John Trenchard, Thomas Gordon, and Bolingbroke — would have passed quietly into history had it not been for the strange process of moral transplantation by which their ideas and values migrated across the Atlantic through pamphlets and reprints. For they later formed the intellectual nucleus of the American Revolution, as historian Bernard Bailyn demonstrated in his magnum opus, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (1967). The editorials of The Craftsman practically served as templates for the Patriot press in its denunciations of the Stamp Act and, later, of the whole British political and economic system, from the King on down: in American eyes, the empire itself had become irredeemably corrupt and had to be severed like gangrene.

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Like Bolingbroke, the rebels embraced a classical morality rooted in the example of the ancients, of Cincinatus and Cato, whose willingness to sacrifice all for their country’s liberty inspired the founders to wager their “lives, property and sacred honour”. The American idiom has since been inflected with republican notions of the “common good”, understood differently but present nonetheless on both the the Right and the Left. Even when politicians acknowledge self-interest (or get caught acting on it in embarrassing ways), the moral instinct is always one of deferring back to the same communitarian ethos. (Reagan’s rhetoric was emblematic of this tension, with its praise for both the selfishness of the profit motive and the selflessness of patriots past.)

As Mandeville would argue, however, such ideologies are forms of self-deception that elites employ, whether knowingly or not, to cover up their competing base impulses and egoistic desires. For instance: today, the professional managerial class speak the language of social justice even as they preside over new forms of hierarchy and domination that do little to help the lower classes they claim to represent; while conservative elites in the small-town millionaire class speak the language of “America First” patriotism even as they engage in horribly regressive and exploitative industries that stand in the way of true national development.

The culture war is essentially the moral economy of recognition of these elite classes, where competition is waged between and within the ranks of the two enemy tribes. Solidarity is the symbolic currency of this economy: and their virtue-signalling on behalf of their party’s respective ideological value sets (whether it’s “pronouns and Palestine” or “guns and God”) is an expression of this principle.

What is needed now is an American Walpole who can see beyond the facade, take this impulse toward pride and amour-propre among the elites, and turn it toward something more productive and beneficial in the material (as opposed to the moral) economy. A Mandevillian politics would channel these drives away from the false pursuit of virtue and connect them instead to economic aggrandisement, through which both the elites and the nations they lead can attain new riches and power. In this scheme, politics would become a lot more rational, instrumental, and manageable as it would come down to the brokering of interests (difficult but doable) rather than a contest over values (impassable and never-ending).

Of course, the cultural antagonisms between Americans are still much too great for this change to take place anytime soon, and it may take a few unstable election cycles before America moves from its Cromwellian age of moral absolutism to its next Mandevillian age of enlightened self-interest. But that doesn’t me we shouldn’t start now. Faced with our overbearing embrace of solidarity, a bit of “private vice” wouldn’t go amiss.

November 2008 marked the theatrical release of Twilight, the first film adaptation of the romance novels that centred on a love triangle between a vampire, a werewolf, and a teenage girl. By this point, they had already become a transformative force in the book world — but this was only the beginning.

Within a year, you couldn’t swing a cat without hitting something Twilight-themed. There was a Twilight-themed makeup palette, and Immortal Twilight perfume to dab on your pulse points. You could drink your coffee from a Team Edward mug in the morning, roll up to the Burger King drive-thru in Edward Cullen’s Volvo C30, order a Twilight-themed kids’ meal for lunch, then go home and curl up in the arms of your Edward body pillow beneath your precise replica of Bella’s purple duvet. The franchise’s rabid fanbase was a market force unto itself: brand something as a Twilight tie-in, and they’d snap it up.

These fans weren’t just a reliable income stream, though: they were a powerful, even political, faction that was not to be trifled with. I was a reporter on the Young Hollywood beat for MTV News at the height of the Twilight craze, and so great was their cultural power that an editorial edict instructed we refrain from calling them “Twihards”, because they didn’t like it.

At first, Twilight‘s cultural influence was chalked up to its popularity among adolescent girls. Edward and Bella’s romance was a love story, but also an obvious abstinence parable, making it a perfect vehicle for teens to explore the burgeoning passions for which they otherwise had no words. This, at least, was not surprising: every generation has something that both captures the imagination and inspires the lust of a young female audience. I was too old to be swept up in the Edward Cullen craze, but just the right age to spend long hours earnestly debating with my friends which of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles would make the best boyfriend. (Raphael, obviously.)

But the way Twilight captured the broader discourse was more unusual, which had as much to do with timing as with the story itself. Twilight dropped directly into the midst of a digital revolution that catapulted fandom from niche communities to a global, quasi-political force. The iPhone, Goodreads and Tumblr all debuted in 2007; when Twilight the movie was released a year later, it was the spark in an armoury already filled with 10 different types of ammunition.

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The resulting explosion wasn’t just in consumption: fans were curating mood boards, making memes, writing their own fanfics, and engaging in direct conversations with creators courtesy of social media. Stephenie Meyer might have written Twilight, the book, but the ever-expanding universe in which it existed? That belonged to the fans — who increasingly felt a sense of entitlement, control, even ownership over the stories, the characters, and the culture they loved.

For this, we may credit Twilight‘s ageing fanbase, who rather than discarding fandom in favour of more grownup concerns ended up simply carrying it with them into the adult world. For teenage girls, the Edward vs Jacob debate offered a way to explore romantic relationships — who you liked and what you wanted — within the safe framework of fiction. But for adult women, Twilight was more than an excuse to be horny on main; it was a framework for discussing literally anything, from race to religion, to romantic mores, to decolonisation. Was Bella a victim of Stockholm Syndrome, or a feminist icon who persisted in chasing what she wanted at all costs? Was Jacob cruelly and undeservedly friend-zoned, or was he a total incel? Was Twilight racist because the vampires were pale — or should it be celebrated for representing Native American characters? Then there was the question of the age gap between Edward and Bella: you say immortal teenage dreamboat; I say creepy 108-year-old man.

All this was happening against the backdrop of a collapse in the distinction between teen and adult content in publishing and entertainment: 2008 was the era of Peak YA. As many not-so-young adults suddenly discovered a passion for content aimed at teenagers, bookstores were overwhelmed by “chosen one” stories, in which a heroine who doesn’t know how beautiful she is has to fight the forces of evil — while caught in a love triangle between two equally strapping suitors. For decades, this type of content had been written off as frivolous, a passing fancy; now, its power could not be denied. Twilight was perhaps the first property to make clear that, in the digital age, young women’s passions are not to be taken lightly.

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Twilight itself has now faded from view, but its influence lives on; it taught us to see absolutely everything as a question of teams. It wasn’t just the Edward-or-Jacob debate, which would always be a sort of friendly rivalry owing to its predetermined resolution (you could make a good enough case for Jacob, but Bella was never going to end up with him). It was the Twilight fandom itself, and what it became for its adherents. Loving Twilight was a cause, a chance to be part of something bigger than yourself — as was hating Twilight, if that was your thing, for whatever evils you felt it represented.

And by the time the final film in the series was released — one week after Barack Obama’s successful re-election to the presidency — American culture at large was beginning to look a lot like American politics: a highly polarised world of in-groups and out-groups, where the rivalries weren’t so friendly anymore. At the same time, a new mode of cultural critique had arrived in the form of Your Fave Is Problematic, a witch-hunting Tumblr that indicted celebrities and content creators (and by extension, their fans) for various sins against social justice. The whole thing was a guilt-by-association machine. If an admired creator was called out for some -ism or -phobia, you had two choices: denounce the sin and renounce your fandom, or be tarred as complicit.

In this moment, the cult of fandom and the culture of consumption fully collided to create something monstrous — but also, something deeply compelling. If art and politics were inextricable — as both Tumblr users and mainstream culture critics now reliably assured us they were — then so was fandom and activism. Fandom mattered. Fans mattered. And whatever you were into, it was more than mere interest; it was your identity. In this world, what you like is who you are.

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And in a world where fandom had become political, it was only a matter of time before politics became fandom: tribal, facile, and tailor made for our current moment. As a mode of engagement, fandom neither rewards nor leaves room for nuance; the whole point is that it’s obvious which team you should be on, which makes it the ideal medium for a political culture that thrives on simple sloganeering, Instagram-sized infographics, and 60-second TikTok explainer videos. Fandom is what fuels the blonde college student in a keffiyeh, rolling her eyes as she explains that once Israel has ceased to exist, the Jews who lived there can simply return to wherever they came from — like Yemen, or Ethiopia. It fuels, too, the pro-Israel activist who thrusts a camera in her face, knowing she’ll beclown herself.

It’s not just the tribalism but the blazing certainty — that there’s a right side, and that identifying it is both uncomplicated and fun. For people coming of age on social media, Twilight offered the first inkling of how good being part of a mob could feel. How wonderful to just pick a side and root for it: fiercely, loyally, unconditionally and absolutely. And once you had done this with sparkly vampires, it was surprisingly easy to do it with everything else.

When he was satisfied, Brooks walked over to the desk of Massachusetts’s Republican senator Charles Sumner, who was busy writing and barely even looked up. Between the two men there was no love lost. Brooks, who walked with a cane after having being injured in a youthful duel, was a passionate defender of slavery. Sumner, by contrast, was one of the nation’s most outspoken abolitionists. Only days earlier he had delivered a blistering speech mocking Brooks’s cousin, Senator Andrew Butler, as a hapless Don Quixote-style knight devoted to “the harlot, Slavery”.

To Brooks, the speech seemed an intolerable affront. At first he had considered challenging Sumner to a duel, but decided against it on the grounds that the Massachusetts politician was no gentleman. But he remained determined to take his revenge. And now, as Sumner glanced dismissively up, Brooks spoke. “Mr Sumner, I have read your speech twice over carefully,” he said quietly. “It is a libel on South Carolina, and Mr Butler, who is a relative of mine.”

At that, Sumner tried to rise, but Brooks was too quick for him. He lifted his thick gutta-percha cane, with its heavy golden top, and brought it savagely down on Sumner’s head, again and again. Sumner fell. Blood trickled down his face. He was trapped behind his desk; he could not get up. Still the blows rained down, Brooks lashing away like a man possessed. Sumner was unconscious now. At last, some of Brooks’s colleagues managed to pull him off. A pool of blood spread across the floor of the Senate.

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Although Charles Sumner didn’t die that afternoon, the sheer violence of the assault struck many Americans, even at the time, as a terrible harbinger of the horror ahead. But while thousands of anti-slavery Northerners joined rallies in Sumner’s support, the reaction in the South was very different.

Ordinary people sent Brooks hundreds of new canes to replace his own shattered weapon; one was inscribed “Hit him again”. Many Southern politicians insisted that Sumner had exaggerated his injuries, dismissing the fake news of the abolitionist media. And on the fire-breathing wing of the Southern press, there was no doubt about who was really in the wrong. Brooks’s attack was “good in conception, better in execution, and best of all in consequences”, declared the Richmond Enquirer. Ideally, it said, the “vulgar abolitionists in the Senate” should be “lashed into submission”.

Today, historians see the Brooks-Sumner confrontation as a milestone on the United States’ road to the Civil War, encapsulating the collapse of civility, the triumph of tribalism and the disappearance of the political middle ground. I’ve been thinking about it a lot over the past couple of years. And I thought about it again this week amid the frenzied reaction to the FBI’s raid on Donald Trump’s home in Mar-a-Lago, Florida, where he is alleged to have taken — and even tried to destroy — confidential government documents.

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Put aside, if you can, your own views about the rights and wrongs of the FBI raid. Perhaps it really is a sign of the overreach of the deep state, determined to smear and undermine a decent American patriot. Or perhaps it’s a welcome reminder that nobody, not even a former president, is above the law. Perhaps you think Donald Trump isn’t the kind of man who would trample roughshod over rules and conventions; perhaps you simply can’t imagine him making off with classified records and trying to flush them down the toilet. Or perhaps you think he is — and you can.

But this isn’t really the issue. Does anybody really see the fate of Donald Trump’s paperwork as the most pressing challenge facing the American republic? The more interesting question — as with the caning of Charles Sumner in 1856 — is what the whole imbroglio tells us about the health, or otherwise, of American politics.

As soon as news of the FBI raid broke, Republicans almost unanimously rushed to denounce the agency’s abuse of power, and to defend the former president as the victim of a witch-hunt. Would they, I wonder, have said the same thing if, say, the FBI had raided Hillary Clinton’s house in search of her controversial private emails? I doubt it, somehow.

And it works the other way around, too. The same Democrats glorying in Mr Trump’s embarrassment today would have been appalled if the FBI had applied the same tactics to Mrs Clinton yesterday. You don’t hear many liberal Democrats wondering if the FBI was a bit heavy-handed, just as you don’t find many conservative Republicans insisting that nobody must be above the law. And you didn’t find many pro-slavery Southerners in 1856 rushing to condemn Preston Brooks. In the 2020s, as in the 1850s, the tribalism is total, and partisanship is all.

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To get a sense of what today’s successors to those antebellum Southern editorialists are thinking, I turned to Fox News. First up was the conservative classical historian Victor Davis Hanson. “Biden Administration is Using Soviet-Style Tactics to Crush its Political Opponents” read the banner at the bottom of the screen. Hanson was in no doubt: the FBI raid was a plot by the Democrats running the “national security state”. “They believe they’re morally superior to America and therefore any means [are] necessary or justifiable for their morally superior ends,” he said grimly. “Right now, we don’t have the rule of law in Washington.”

That, I thought, is a pretty bleak thing to say about your own government. An odd thing, too, since the director of the FBI, Christopher Wray, is an avowed, card-carrying Republican. I had a quick look at his biography. It turns it out he went to the same New York private school as Donald Trump, Jr., then the same Massachusetts boarding school, Phillips Academy, as the two Bush presidents. He served in George W. Bush’s administration and was appointed to run the FBI by… Donald Trump himself!

I suppose it’s just plausible that Wray has been playing a very long game, and has been a radical leftist all along. Or it’s possible that despite his long Republican service, he’s a man of such careerist self-interest and deep moral spinelessness that in the last two years he’s allowed himself to become a puppet for the sick neo-Stalinists running the Biden Administration. Possible, but not terribly probable.

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Anyway, back I went to Fox News. Maybe the conservative talk show host Greg Gutfeld would add a bit of perspective, or at least lighten the mood? Not a bit of it. The FBI raid had been cold-bloodedly planned, Gutfeld said, to provoke Mr Trump’s supporters, inciting them into “another January 6th”. They — the deep state — “want an excuse to track down more Republicans and people in red hats… Walls are closing in. Tick, tick, tick. Boom. This is it.”

Once again, dark territory. You could easily forget that at the heart of all this is basically an argument about some paperwork. But of course the paperwork isn’t the point; the point is the existential, apocalyptic, all-or-nothing conflict between right and wrong, good and evil, blue and red — which, as we are always being told, is a “struggle for the soul of America”.

Another Fox host, Will Cain, put it very starkly. “A day after the FBI’s raid on former president Donald Trump,” he told his viewers, “we are starting to see what a permanent national split looks like. A divorce. Nobody wants to say it out loud, but it’s true. And this is not simply a break between Democrats and Republicans. No, that’s too simple. What we are seeing is a divide between people who are willing to use the power of the state to silence their opponent and those who are unwilling.”

Put aside the exaggeration of that final sentence, and is he wrong? There are tens of millions of Americans who don’t follow politics closely, don’t spend their time shouting at their opponents on social media and certainly don’t see themselves as foot-soldiers in some future civil war. But in many ways the reaction to the FBI raid feels like precisely the kind of thing you’d see in the early chapter of some book subtitled “How the Second Civil War Began”. The partisanship. The distrust. The belief that your adversaries are part of a giant, malevolent conspiracy. The dismissal of facts that don’t fit. And above all, the sense, as in the late 1850s, that the stakes just could not be higher. “Walls are closing in. Tick, tick, tick. Boom…”

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By James Pogue

Is talk of a new civil war so ludicrous? The Oxford history professor Adam Smith, one of the shrewdest observers of American politics I know, recently sketched out a scenario for the Sunday Times, suggesting that “red America and blue America would become increasingly antagonistic entities, competing for the allegiance of a clutch of divided ‘purple’ states.” In this scenario, he writes, “it is easy to imagine that with the Republican majority on the Supreme Court baked in for decades, and an electoral system that gives an advantage to rural Republican states, the big Democratic states such as California and New York will push for more and more autonomy.” And if the federal government pushed back, who knows what might happen?

Even at a grassroots level, you can see signs of trouble. Writing for UnHerd in January, the essayist James Pogue reported that in his rural northern California county, “there is a very totalising war of worldviews, touched off by the pandemic and resistance to expert advice and state action, led by a militia-aligned faction that thinks the local government betrayed the county’s free-living values by participating in California’s Covid protocols”. There haven’t, Pogue noted, “been any bombings or shootings, but there have been fights, and much of the local police force is more or less openly sympathetic to the radical faction. The Right in the county is now almost entirely alienated from the other structures of government, and it is hard to see how this situation could change.”

Too bleak? Perhaps. When I visited America before Easter, it didn’t feel like a country on the brink. The sun shone. The shops were busy. People wandered happily about, as friendly and hospitable as ever. In two weeks, I didn’t hear a single remark about politics. Nor did I see a single MAGA hat, or a Trump T-shirt — and this in Florida.

But I would probably have said similar things in the summer of 1856, too. The sun often shines, before the storm.

But even where the po-faced stop short of lamping the smart-arsed, it’s widely noted that there’s a growing societal intolerance towards offensive comedy. Discussion of this in the media tends to assume a predictable form. First, someone well-known for being funny — Maureen Lipman, or John Cleese, or Dawn French — will say that wokeism is stifling comedic impulses by making comedians (and managers, and booking agents) afraid of backlash. Editors will then scramble to find someone authoritative to say there’s no evidence of this.

If anything, though, the resulting defensive responses tend only to increase the sense that there’s a problem here. Take, for instance, comedian Russell Kane’s response to Maureen Lipman: “I don’t think anyone is saying you can’t be offended, nobody is saying that, what we’re saying is you can’t use hate speech that would prompt a gender-related crime, a sex-related crime or a race-related crime.” Phew — that’s a relief! What this answer obviously ignores is that in the feverish imaginations of many, the bar for what’s considered likely to prompt a crime is getting lower every day.

Or take this Guardian op-ed from last year by comedy commentator Rachel Aroesti. With perhaps telling overkill, Aroesti writes off each and every concern about comedy cancel culture as “scaremongering about progressive politics”, “nonsense”, and (of course) “an absurdist joke”. In prosecuting her argument, she points out, accurately, that the careers of some high-profile comedians — Jimmy Carr, say, or Chappelle again — have been boosted from scandals surrounding their routines. Differently rendered, the very same evidence might have been used to provide comfort and reassurance to would-be shock merchants, along the lines of: Dear comedians, there’s no evidence your career will suffer if you are disgustingly obnoxious on stage. So relax, get back out there, and start making no-holds-barred jokes about transmen and Roma people once more!

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Probably unsurprisingly, though, that’s not how the piece reads. Even as Aroesti insists that cancel culture doesn’t affect people’s ability to make jokes that refer to minorities, her evident disapproval for the sort of person that would do this undermines her point. An accompanying eyeroll seems to say: no, of course you haven’t been cancelled, idiots — but you probably should be. This eyeroll can be sensed, too, in an exceptionally moralistic review of Catherine Tate’s body of work, written by Aroesti last month, which stops just short of calling Tate’s material “racist and homophobic” — but only just.

The real reason that the careers of comics like Carr, Rock, and Chappelle continue to flourish in spite of, or even because of, their deliberate minority-baiting, is that, in going as far as they gleefully do, they signal that there is little real point in coming after them. Unlike cancellers on the Right, who are mostly interested in targeting the opposition, cancellers on the Left tend to go for those they think are likely to be psychologically susceptible to their criticism.

For the purposes of speech control, a good target is someone who is likely to care about being called a “misogynist”, “racist” or “transphobe” by fellow tribe-members. And it’s even better if the transgression in question has the air of an inadvertent slip-up — because in that case you’re more likely to be able to extract an abject apology from the perpetrator, simply by pointing out that offence has been caused. Comedians who stoke outrage in front of millions don’t exactly scream potential in this respect. There’s nothing that says resilience to progressive guilt trips like deliberately savage jokes on stage about vulnerable groups.

What this suggests is that the comedians most at risk of the effects of cancellation are not the big names building their brands by pushing the limits of taste and decency. Rather, it’s the more strait-laced and less confrontational ones, sticking mainly to whimsical observation but with occasional tentative forays into edginess, who are most in danger — those from whom routines that inadvertently hit a cultural nerve would stand out far more vividly.

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It’s a strange world where Catherine Tate is more likely to be criticised for the supposed immorality of her comic choices than, say, Jerry Sadowitz — described with admiration by the Guardian in 2017 as the “twisted granddaddy of abusive comedy”. But I think it’s probably the world we live in. (To be clear — as far as I’m concerned, the answer here is not to level things out by going after Sadowitz, too.)

In effect, the progressive Left has moralised huge swathes of communication, both within comedy and beyond it. Any utterance that involves a reference to a minority tends to be sliced from its surrounding context. The intentions or character of its owner are ignored. The implication is reduced to the version that the most sensitive representative of that particular minority might choose to hear, and then connected in full, psychic technicolour with hideous potential repercussions for that often completely imaginary person.

You can see this in Kane’s response to Maureen Lipman, and you can also see it in Aroesti’s review of Catherine Tate, in which the supposedly “racist and homophobic” material she mentions turns out to have come from the mouth of Tate’s Nan character — surely an important difference. Perversely, the best way for a comedian to circumvent these censorious effects seems to be to boldly march up to statements that might genuinely stoke up bad feeling against a group and then spit them out in your own voice, smirking knowingly as you do it.

Like many other parts of culture then, comedy is polarised. If you’re a comedian, you now have one of two choices: either avoid controversy like the plague or run happily towards it. There’s not much in between, and comedy has lost some of its richness because of it.

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But there is another loss here too, and it’s a loss to the political culture of the Left. For as the progressive wing has embraced the ever-evolving permutations of identity politics so enthusiastically, it has also — and probably non-coincidentally — made it impossible for anyone on its own side to laugh at these permutations, or at identity politics generally. In the reductive algebra of progressive offence-seekers, mocking identity politics is equated with mocking minorities. Of course, all politics is tribal, and no political party or movement, Right or Left, can easily tolerate mockery, especially from within its own ranks. But this is not just an understandable dislike of being laughed at by those on the same side as oneself. It is a positive taboo against it, with all the enforcing of speech codes, wilfully reductive misunderstandings, and attempted humiliation of miscreants that this implies.

And yet there is so much to laugh at! Last week alone gave us the Head of Trans Inclusion at Stonewall, on a hefty salary to oversee Stonewall’s many trans-related programmes, asking to be accompanied by a support worker, his mother, and a support dog during cross-questioning at Allison Bailey’s employment tribunal. (The judge instructed him not to discuss the case with his mother during a break; whether he was allowed to discuss it with the dog wasn’t mentioned).

We also were treated to the spectacle of 61 mainly Labour MPs, holding placards at the behest of nameless LGBTQ+ campaigners, and passing on the bonkers message to the general public that confused adolescents shouldn’t be given any therapy in their hasty rush to get rid of various body parts. Brass Eye’s Chris Morris — famous for getting celebrities to unwittingly humiliate themselves on camera in the name of various confected moral panics — couldn’t have done any better if he’d tried.

Lots of people on the Left want to mock events like these — they are, after all, preposterous. But they also know that the pinched-mouthed censors on their own side would reduce any attempts at humour to, at best, unkindness, and, at worst, hatred towards trans people. The same goes with relevant adjustments for any mockery of BLM, or indeed of any activist movement claiming to speak on behalf of a minority. And this needlessly forces those uncomfortable with the simplistic logic of identity politics to pick a side.

Those with enough rebellious spirit will eventually seek to break free from their suffocatingly humourless companions, making the Left less diverse and less robust. Worse than that, freed from exposure to that particularly bracing form of critique that is trenchant piss-taking from people whose opinions you care about, the Left’s representatives are likely to carry on doing ridiculous things in public, to the befuddlement of the voter. Until progressives are better able to take a joke — or even to understand one — I predict that Labour will give us lots more to laugh at in the next few years. And the amusement will all be that of the Tories.

Take the debates surrounding the trucker protests in Ottawa. The mainstream press, by and large, has attempted to assimilate the protests into categories familiar from the Trump years.

According to Politico, “far-Right” truckers, some of them sporting “Confederate and Nazi flags”, have “wreaked havoc on Canadian cities”. In the Guardian, one writer warned that the “siege of Ottawa” was an “astroturfed movement funded by a global network of highly organised far-Right groups and amplified by Facebook’s misinformation machine.” Slate, after dropping the trigger words “militia”, “hate”, “extremist”, and “Nazi”, called the protests an “armed occupation of a G-7 capital”. All linked the truckers with the domestic threat posed by Fox News, the Republican Party, and the American far-Right.

Critics of the establishment have responded with their own counter-narrative, aimed at portraying the truckers in a sympathetic light while focusing attention on the tyrannical response of the Canadian government. After Justin Trudeau invoked the Emergency Powers Act, Tucker Carlson labelled Canada a “dictatorship” and warned that similar measures would soon be coming to the United States. Over the weekend, as Ottawa police attempted to clear the city centre, Twitter was filled with viral videos of police violence against the protestors, juxtaposed with old quotes from progressive leaders praising the BLM protests of summer 2020, intended to highlight their hypocrisy.

These narratives have a recognisable logic, which holds whether the underlying event is the truckers or the Capitol riot. They are tribal, pitting a virtuous “us” against a malevolent “them”. They are curated to provoke fear of, and rage against, the out-group, often through “empathic triggers” that highlight aggression against the in-group. They are also, in a loose sense, conspiratorial, running together phenomena that have no logical connection except within the pattern of the narrative.

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This is easy to recognise in Right-wing conspiracies about the 2020 election, but establishment media indulges in something similar. When CNN leads a story about Joe Rogan’s use of the n-word with a line about a man carrying “a Confederate flag inside the US Capitol rotunda”, the purpose is to train readers to create an emotional connection between the podcast host and white supremacist domestic terrorism, when none exists in reality.

The war between these tribal narratives, according to media theorist John Robb, is the defining feature of US politics today. He argues that a combination of establishment failures — the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Global Financial Crisis — and the information explosion ushered in by the internet have annihilated the legitimacy of the old narratives that used to hold Western states and societies together, nationalism being the most prominent one.

But humans are tribal and narrative creatures — take one story away and we will invent another one. Today, our most compelling narratives — the ones that provide us with the sense of “fictive kinship” formerly provided by membership in a nation, religion, or ethnic group — are political narratives defined by enmity.

This development, claims Robb, is largely the product of social media, where we are presented with more information than we can possibly pay attention to, let alone understand. We make sense of it by picking patterns out of the noise. These patterns, however, are social phenomena. And as the pioneers of clickbait discovered a decade ago, we are especially drawn to content that provokes a strong empathic response — generally something shocking or outrageous, though our specific triggers will depend on which pattern we are curating. Over time, we come to identify with those who respond to the same triggers and assimilate them to the same pattern. Our tribe is the collective of people outraged by the same things that outrage us.

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The clearest example of how this works in the real world is the response to the video of Derek Chauvin killing George Floyd. The video was shocking and vivid. In a previous media environment, however, it would have had its emotional impact blunted by layers of context, expert commentary, and he-said-she-said quotes from local police and the Floyd family. Instead, the video was immediately assimilated to patterns such as “systemic racism”, provoking mass rage and mobilisation against not only Chauvin or the Minneapolis police department but the United States as a whole. Video of the ensuing protests set in motion a similar dynamic on the Right, as users curating patterns about “BLM rioters” and “antifa terrorists” circulated vivid footage of lootings, arsons, and assaults, often framed to induce outrage at the Left-wing politicians and journalists who were vocally supporting the protests.

Robb developed his framework as a way of understanding how digital politics and social media were bleeding over into the real world during the Trump administration. Trump himself, of course, had ridden a wave of social media enthusiasm into the White House, and his election prompted many of his more elite, media-savvy opponents to self-organise into the #resistance, which identified and amplified every real and imagined outrage of his presidency (including conspiracy theories about Russiagate).

Robb dubbed the open-source network supporting Trump ‘the #insurgency’. Unlike ‘the resistance’, which operated in the open and tried to compel government and corporate action through moral coercion and appeals to expert consensus, the #insurgency was largely anonymous. It sought to confuse and disorient its opponents, often through jokes and targeted harassment, and to prevent the emergence of consensus around resistance narratives.

For Robb, however, 2020 kicked the tribalisation of American politics into overdrive. First came the pandemic, which damaged an already fraying social fabric and forced Americans to spend more time online than ever before. The death of George Floyd then served as a huge empathic trigger for the Left, not only sparking mass popular mobilisation but also inducing a moribund Democratic Party establishment and many mainstream institutions to officially endorse Left-wing patterns such as “white supremacy”. The Right, in turn, began to tribalise in earnest after November 2020, uniting around patterns of conspiracy — surrounding the 2020 election, vaccines, the Covid-19 pandemic, Big Tech censorship — promoted by Trump and his allies.

The final accelerant, in Robb’s telling, was the Capitol riot. The assault on the Capitol proved for the Left that Trump and his supporters — including the Republican Party and virtually all of its voters — were not merely racists but existential threats to the republic, whose suppression was crucial to ensure the survival of democracy. Perhaps more importantly, the Capitol riot prompted the major tech companies to openly align with the Left, disconnecting Trump — then the sitting president — from their networks under the guise of preventing further violence. Given the control of these companies over not only political discourse but also much of the infrastructure of modern life, this alignment, for Robb, amounted to a declaration of corporate sovereignty over the U.S. political system.

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Today Robb sees, on the one hand, a corporate and political establishment aligned around enforcing curated, Left-wing patterns as the de facto consensus view of reality — one that combines a technocratic emphasis on “facts” and “science” with a tribal moral narrative about the existential threat posed by racists and white supremacists, constantly reinforced by curated, emotionally charged stories that fit the pattern. On the other hand is an emerging tribal Right — though this tribe can more easily accommodate cranks and dissidents of all political persuasions — organised around a curated pattern of elite conspiracy, drawing its strength from any and all establishment failures and from attempts to censor or suppress its narrative. The victory of the former would represent what Robb calls “networked fascism”, or the alignment of government and corporate power behind a single approved narrative. The victory of the latter would lead to dissensus, disunion, and nihilism.

Robb’s framework provides a useful, if alarming, way of looking at contemporary debates over “misinformation” and online “hate”. Whether or not one buys his ominous warnings about “networked fascism”, his diagnosis of the tribal dynamics of social media — our tendency to assimilate information into politicised patterns, and to respond to empathy triggers that fit our pattern with rage and loathing directed at our tribal out-group — is an important reminder about the ways in which we are constantly emotionally manipulated by social media, often in ways we don’t recognise. And it should make us sceptical of both top-down attempts to enforce a consensus interpretation of reality — which is usually messy and offers few clear moral lessons — and of any bottom-up patterns that posit, as an explanation for all the phenomena that trigger us, some unified conspiracy or plan.

For individuals, too, Robb’s work is a warning about how easily the architecture of social media can be weaponised to make us hate our fellow citizens. Indeed, it is precisely when we don’t experience the emotion as “hate”, but rather as justified outrage against the enemies of everything righteous and holy, that we should be most suspicious.

After I had run out of excuses, the day arrived and, predictably, after a few minutes of the usual small talk, my friend launched into a tirade about the Iraq War, which several of my colleagues strongly supported.

“You don’t belong there, Ayaan,” she said.

I remember trying to steer the conversation on to actual policies. I had voted for supporting the American coalition in Iraq when I was a Member of Parliament in The Netherlands — and I started to explain why.

But she wasn’t interested in a rational discussion. She interrupted me mid-sentence, launching into a monologue about John Bolton, the former Ambassador to the United Nations and a fellow at AEI (and subsequently National Security Advisor to President Trump). Bolton, my friend insisted, was a loathsome, hateful, racist, neo-conservative warmonger. The list went on and on until eventually she said that he looked like a walrus with a moustache. You could tell by his physiognomy, she explained, that he was a psychopath.

“But what about the policies?” I responded, trying to redirect the conversation away from personalities. The more she spoke, the more I recognised her broad disposition as something I had experienced earlier in my life. Her attitude was almost entirely tribal. Two things, in particular, stood out: an almost blind hatred of a particular group (Republicans); and secondly, the use of deeply personal attacks on individual researchers to justify that hatred.

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Today, ten years later, this attitude seems to be the prevailing norm. Numerous studies support the hypothesis that American life — not just politics, but life in general — has become deeply polarised. The deeply divided society we now live in increasingly reminds me of clan or tribal behaviour in Africa.

In Somalia, where I was born, my mother was blindly loyal to our clan. So much so that, apparently, she claimed she could detect the malicious intentions of an individual from a different clan just by the structure of his forehead. She would, for example, often warn my father that someone was trying to take advantage of him, purely by the way he frowned.

In Culture and Conflict in the Middle East, anthropologist Philip Carl Salzman recounts meeting tribesmen in Baluchistan. What, they had asked Salzman, would he do if he faced a real danger in his home country? Well, Salzman replied, he would call the police. The tribesmen roared with laughter, then looked at him pityingly: “Oh no, no, no, they said: only your ‘lineage mates’ will help you.”

In tribal communities, neutral institutions of civil society that Westerners take for granted — such as the police, impartial courts, and the rule of law — simply do not, and cannot, exist. In such societies, everything is tribalised, and the task of building civic institutions is laden with difficulties.

In Somalia, I was taught to be suspicious of anyone from a different clan, to always think harm was coming my way and to be guarded against anyone that was “other.” I come from the Darod clan, and was taught to constantly listen to accents, examine face shapes and overanalyse all non-verbal cues, searching for any indications of a different tribe. I can still identify a Somali (and usually their clan) from across a room.

We were captives of an echo chamber, hearing constantly of the evils of the neighbouring Hawiye clan. We were taught from a young age that the Hawiye were coming to rape, rob, and destroy us. In response, we amassed weapons, hoarded food and exhorted young men (as young as 12) to join the military. The looming threat of the Hawiye was so great that my mother eventually sent my sister and me abroad.

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In the end, because of such protracted tribal tensions, Somalia collapsed into civil war. Every attempt at mediation proved incapable of handling the deep-seated mistrust and hatred that accumulated by each clan over the years; tribal elders, reluctant to compromise, could not de-escalate the situation. With such high levels of distrust, the conflict spiralled into bloodshed.

While such violence is yet to seize America, all the tribalist ingredients are present. There is a blind commitment to one party or the other; emotions are running high; there is a lack of trust in civic institutions. If such tribalism isn’t overcome, it’s only a matter of time before the situation escalates.

Some of this has its absurd side: for instance, the strange ways that public-health measures such as mask-wearing and vaccination have become politicised, to the point that I know of fully vaccinated people in California who say they will continue to wear masks for fear of being mistaken for Republicans. Bizarre? Of course. But it is also symptomatic of a dangerous trend towards tribalism.

We are, I fear, close to the precipice of serious destabilisation. Many American cities are either militarised (Washington, DC), near a social boiling point (Minneapolis), or have capitulated to anarchist protests and pressures (Portland, Seattle).

These tribal quirks run deep on both sides of the aisle. Many Republicans continue to dispute the legitimacy of the result of the last presidential election; while on the Left, the woke are eroding the Democratic Party from the inside, as identity politics displace universalist aspirations. Some citizens are viewed as part of oppressive groups, some as part of oppressed groups. A person’s individual actions can generally do little to change the immutable characteristics of the tribe to which they belong.

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Just as I noticed with my friend over lunch, there is frequently a visceral hostility towards anyone who leans even slightly toward the Right. Today, especially in academia, those who don’t conform with the “progressive” narrative, no matter how ethical they might be as individuals, are vilified as racists, white supremacists, homophobes or transphobes. Individuals can be attacked, cancelled, disinvited or even fired for the tiniest of verbal transgressions.

This kind of intolerance has for some time been apparent in high schools, too. Another friend of mine has a daughter who attends a private school outside of San Francisco. Last year, when it was revealed that she had expressed mild support for President Trump, she was pushed down the stairs by a fellow pupil.

It was a horrifying and, one hopes, rare incident. And yet there is something very striking about tribalism: it is a basic human trait, like skin colour or gender. However, despite being the natural state of being for many humans, it is not a positive or helpful trait, particularly in modern times. Tribalism developed as an imperfect social survival mechanism in the early stages of human civilisation. But in modern times, it can lead to social disintegration and severe violence between groups.

The beautiful story of America, the reason so many people around the world still yearn to come here, is to a large extent founded on our rejection of tribalism and our establishment of civic, neutral institutions, based on the fundamental principle of equality before the law. These institutions are imperfect, of course, but they are far superior to the tribalism that rules other parts of the world. Our overcoming of such a natural urge is an accomplishment.

As “woke” politics strengthens its grasp on our institutions — extending beyond the educational system into the media and now many corporations — that accomplishment is being eroded. The presumption of innocence, the commitment to blind justice and the whole notion of due process are all falling victim to spurious notions of “equity” and “anti-racism” — both of which carry within them an implicit intention to discriminate on racial lines.

If we continue to slip down this path, the thirst for tribalism will be unquenchable. That’s why moderate liberals need to stand up to the destructive forces that are taking over the Democratic party, just as moderate conservatives need to resist the tribal impulse that often grows in reaction to the other side’s excesses.

In Somalia, we failed to do this. In America it is imperative that we succeed.

This piece was originally published in May.

These good times may be coming to an end. Faced with a real rival like China, Americans will have to make some tough choices if their country is to maintain its pre-eminence. They will have to decide what they value, and for what values they want their institutions to be optimised.

They have four options for deciding how to share power in their country, all in relative competition with each other: loyalty, equity, legitimacy, and ability. How these values are weighted can have serious consequences, as the experience of other societies shows.

During his first decade of rule, the Turkish president, Tayyip Erdogan, relied on competent technocrats, who helped engineer a period of economic growth not seen in decades. Things have changed a lot since those heady days. Turkey’s ruling party has recently ditched its emphasis on ability, prioritising fidelity to Turkish nationalist Islamism and personal loyalty to Erdogan.

Erdogan and those connected to him have come out fine in this bargain, but Turkey has suffered tremendously. The Turkish Lira is in total collapse, continuing a long slide that hasn’t been helped by Erdogan’s recent decision to appoint as finance minister an associate of his son-in-law, a loyal supporter of the ruling party who lacks an educational background in economics. While Erdogan has ceased to deliver economically, he has waged the culture war with a vengeance, turning historic churches into mosques and polarising the public sphere in a manner aimed at distracting conversation from the increasing difficulty of everyday life.

This focus on loyalty and ideology as the most important factors in appointments to powerful positions is common in systems experiencing decline. One can also see it in the United States today, both from the Right and Left.

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Americans received a brief taste of what a country optimised for loyalty to its leader might look like during the Trump presidency. Despite the panicked rhetoric of his opponents, Trump did not, indeed, could not, govern the United States as a dictator. He did, however, make an obvious point of basing his political appointments on factors such as family ties and sycophancy, rather than a hard-nosed appreciation of who would be best at running U.S. institutions. His appointment of unqualified sons and son-in-laws to powerful offices gave a taste of what a Right-wing monarchy might look like if it grew on American soil.

The Left, by contrast, is advocating for a system that optimises for ideology. The ideology in question could be called “equity,” and its most influential proponent is the anti-racist author Ibram X Kendi. To remedy the long history of racially-based exclusion in America, Kendi advocates staffing U.S. institutions using reverse discrimination. “The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination,” as Kendi puts it, characterising racial disparities in institutions as ipso facto proof of racism and calling for instituting a demographic rebalancing of power in American society.

Kendi’s proposal for a regime of sectarian power-sharing makes sense on its own terms as a response to centuries of racist exclusion that deeply harmed African-Americans. But there is also a certain myopia here. It rests on the assumption that time is unlimited and that there are no peer competitors beyond our borders waiting to eat America’s lunch as it prioritises ideologically correcting the sins of the past for a generation or two. It’s not even clear if giving more positions to African-Americans or other minorities would satisfy these demands, unless the people being appointed also align politically with the rest of the progressive project.

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Kendi’s view is also based on a decidedly optimistic view of human nature, in which white Americans will accept overt discrimination on moral grounds over the long-term even if it proves adverse to their real-world interests. The heightening of racial consciousness and doling out of power on those grounds seldom looks good in other countries. The end result of proposals such as Kendi’s seems less likely to look like the Civil Rights Movement, which championed a religiously-influenced, colourblind view of society against racial tribalism, and more like Lebanon, where various sectarian groups fight for their share of the system while society as a whole grinds towards collapse.

What Kendi and Trump have in common is a desire to see power allocated in society on some basis other than ability. This is usually a sign of decadence setting in. The Soviet Union experienced a similar sclerosis after going through waves of purges focused on getting rid of politically inconvenient individuals. The Islamic Republic of Iran today forces many of its brightest minds out of power, or out of the country entirely, for being insufficiently zealous about the country’s post-revolutionary ideology or loyal to its ruling clerics. An expert on water affairs described to me how he was forced to flee Iran after being accused of purposely engineering droughts by political rivals suspicious of his lack of Islamist zeal. Water shortages today are ravaging major Iranian cities while experts like him work at universities abroad.

The United States is not immune to similarly perverse outcomes.

An unsettling truth is that the American democratic system no longer functions as a reliable mechanism for elevating the most competent people to political responsibility. The legitimate, democratic election of a wildly inexperienced and unfit candidate such as Donald Trump, partisan considerations aside, raised uncomfortable questions about whether the their system for choosing leaders by popular acclaim is indeed better for society than the Chinese Communist Party’s consensus-based appointments of capable technocrats. Given the American veneration of their own country’s institutions, it is unlikely that an explicitly anti-democratic tendency is going to take hold anytime soon. But a prolonged failure of democracy to raise the country’s best and brightest to positions of power underlines the shortcomings in prioritising democratic legitimacy as the highest value, even if the trade-off is deemed worthwhile.

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What if we did optimise for ability above all else? The people who would stand to benefit the most in the short-term are Asians and other immigrants, who tend to excel academically in U.S. schools and have ironically been among the most harmed by programs seeking to redress historic imbalances between black and white Americans. An America geared for results above all else might actually look less white in the halls of power, particularly if forms of elite affirmative action like legacy enrolment at Ivy League schools were done away with. The problem that arises in a diverse society, however, is the issue of trust. If different groups perceive themselves primarily as racial or ethnic categories rather than as Americans sharing one destiny, they will care less about whether their national leaders are capable than about whether they look like them.

A credible external rival might help smooth over the differences between people at home in the service of a higher calling. During the mid-20^th century, faced with enemies such as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, the U.S. government was able to carry out incredible achievements like the Manhattan Project and the Apollo Program. Its accomplishments not only meant real improvements in how Americans lived but also served as advertisements for the success of the American system. The government was justly shamed at the time for its shortcomings in fairness and egalitarianism. But that shaming often took place on the grounds that institutionalised prejudice was excluding competent people from the system, particularly African-Americans and members of religious minorities. No one at the time would have argued that society should accept less competence while trying to fight World War II or win the space race against the Soviet Union. It would make as little sense to argue that ability should be demoted in importance as the U.S. prepares to compete with Chinese Communism.

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If the United States is to succeed in the 21^st century, and prove that a multiracial, multicultural liberal democracy is capable of delivering a better standard of life than China’s authoritarian one-party state, Americans will need to find a reasonable balance between their desires for equity, political loyalty, and ability. There can be measures other than abolishing testing at top schools to redress historic inequalities, including expanding trade school education as a leg out of the working class and emphasising the social prestige of such jobs. The stakes in the culture wars, though, will have to be reduced to something less than absolute, which is where they are trending at present. People who fall short of constantly shifting ideological standards, but who, crucially, know how to build things, cannot simply be shunned in favour of those who are practically incapable but who know how to chant ideological mantras and root out heretics.

The long period of fantasising and navel gazing enabled by America’s time as the world’s sole superpower is coming to an end, and for that we may have China to thank. George Orwell articulated well how jarring the move from fantasy back to reality can be for a nation faced with an external threat. His words suit Americans in the present day well. “We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right,” he wrote. “Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.”

Looking at the tribalism prevalent in today’s public sphere, however, I am concerned and worried. Indeed, the toxicity of the West’s ongoing culture wars seems uniquely suffocating. People across the political spectrum agree that this needs remedying — but the solutions on offer are largely inadequate.

“Can’t we all just get along?” is a common refrain. But how? Shrugging off unpalatable ideas without challenging them only has a further corrosive effect in our society. “How about we all meet in the middle and leave behind us the strict commitment to ideologies?” But why meet in the middle if it requires us to compromise our ideas, values and what we believe is the truth?

What these approaches have in common is that they ultimately ask us to abandon our capacity for independent thinking — but isn’t that the essence of tribalism? Tribalism is not people disagreeing or even engaging in a robust battle of ideas. Disagreeing and taking ideas seriously are, and always have been, at the root of progress.

Tribalism is something completely different: it is surrendering one’s independent thought for the sake of a group. It is viewing oneself, others and the world through the prism not of one’s mind, but through that of the tribe. It elevates a group mentality to one’s existential horizon, placing other people over and above reality.

Of course, when we think independently it inevitably leads to disagreement, and it might often turn out that we are wrong. But we still retain the ability to appeal to others through persuasion, rather than force. And when we are wrong, we learn and correct our mistakes. Because even when independent thinkers disagree on specific issues, they retain a mutual commitment to the free exchange of ideas. Their final arbiter is reality, and they agree that truth is something that we can know, if only we use our reason.

Tribalism, on the other hand, makes persuasion impossible. It implies that different groups view the world in a different way. Notice how many prominent intellectuals today reject the idea of universal reason and talk about different kinds of knowledge: black, indigenous, gendered — the list goes on. But if we find ourselves confined to such an epistemological tower of Babel, the only way to resolve disputes is ultimately to force our ideas on the outgroup.

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Yet even people who identify tribalism as a problem disagree on its nature. For Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, tribalism is an “evolutionary endowment”, preparing us for conflict with other groups. Amy Chua, meanwhile, sees tribalism as an instinct of belonging and of excluding; Joshua Greene agrees that the tribal tendencies in us are innate.

So is tribalism wired into us? I am not convinced. As I explain in my new book, tribalism is first and foremost a voluntary option, taken in default of thinking. It is the lazy route of following the herd and letting the heavy lifting of judgment to others. It is the abandonment of the responsibility to do the mental work required for grasping the world, of judging what is true and what is false, what is right and what is wrong, and what one should do. Tribalism should not be seen as an inescapable fate, but as an epistemological choice.

The Rwandan genocide is a case in point. In the summer of 1994, more than half a million Tutsis were massacred with machetes by their rival group, the Hutus. These were people of the same racial, religious and linguistic background. There was no way to tell if someone was a Tutsi or a Hutu, except by personally knowing the family history of someone.

As a Hutu killer reflected years after his crimes: “Our Tutsi neighbours — we knew they were guilty of no misdoing, but we thought all Tutsis at fault for our constant troubles. We no longer looked at them one by one; we no longer stopped to recognise them as they had been, not even as colleagues.” So the killer knew very well that his victims were innocent and often even people he used to love, and that what he was doing made no sense. But he had to suppress that knowledge, and put his loyalty to his own tribe above his thinking. The horror in Rwanda is the most naked exhibition of tribalism in recent history.

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However, three decades after one of the darkest moments of the 20^th century, the country is more peaceful, scoring above the world average on the Freedom Index. Same people, different culture, different outcomes. Tribalism, then, is neither an instinct nor a gene; it is a choice.

And if that is true, it becomes easy to discern the cure for tribalism: independent thinking — using one’s mind and having one’s own judgment as the final arbiter and horizon, rather than being guided by loyalty to a group or by hatred to an opposing tribe.

That isn’t to say that independent thinking is easy to achieve. Almost everyone — from the social justice warrior to the white supremacist — believes that they have truth by their side. I thought I was an independent thinker in my radical leftist past. I remember protesting with a Palestinian scarf, indignant about what I considered as injustices in the Middle East and Israeli imperialism. The fact that I couldn’t even point to Israel on the map and thought that Hezbollah were merely leftists on the side of progress was an insignificant detail. Under the tribalist mindset, if the facts of reality are against our narrative and the way we view the world, reality doesn’t stand a chance.

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Being an independent thinker is therefore neither a default mindset nor something that is easily attainable. It is an achievement, and a rather heroic one. It requires someone to overcome their own prejudices and emotional investments. It requires a commitment to reality as the final court of appeal.

Of course, one can learn and benefit from the knowledge and insights of others. But whether they are right or wrong needs to be judged meticulously. Other people might be great thinkers, but they cannot think for us. This might sound like a burden; these judgment calls are often hard to make. But who is in a better position than each one of us to make them?

After all, the ability to make sense of the world through reason is the distinguishing characteristic of human beings. Thinking for ourselves is not an unjust requirement, or a burden we should wish to place on somebody else. It is precisely what makes us humans — and what sets us apart from the tribe.

After I had run out of excuses, the day arrived and, predictably, after a few minutes of the usual small talk, my friend launched into a tirade about the Iraq War, which several of my colleagues strongly supported.

“You don’t belong there, Ayaan,” she said.

I remember trying to steer the conversation on to actual policies. I had voted for supporting the American coalition in Iraq when I was a Member of Parliament in The Netherlands — and I started to explain why.

But she wasn’t interested in a rational discussion. She interrupted me mid-sentence, launching into a monologue about John Bolton, the former Ambassador to the United Nations and a fellow at AEI (and subsequently National Security Advisor to President Trump). Bolton, my friend insisted, was a loathsome, hateful, racist, neo-conservative warmonger. The list went on and on until eventually she said that he looked like a walrus with a moustache. You could tell by his physiognomy, she explained, that he was a psychopath.

“But what about the policies?” I responded, trying to redirect the conversation away from personalities. The more she spoke, the more I recognised her broad disposition as something I had experienced earlier in my life. Her attitude was almost entirely tribal. Two things, in particular, stood out: an almost blind hatred of a particular group (Republicans); and secondly, the use of deeply personal attacks on individual researchers to justify that hatred.

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Today, ten years later, this attitude seems to be the prevailing norm. Numerous studies support the hypothesis that American life — not just politics, but life in general — has become deeply polarised. The deeply divided society we now live in increasingly reminds me of clan or tribal behaviour in Africa.

In Somalia, where I was born, my mother was blindly loyal to our clan. So much so that, apparently, she claimed she could detect the malicious intentions of an individual from a different clan just by the structure of his forehead. She would, for example, often warn my father that someone was trying to take advantage of him, purely by the way he frowned.

In Culture and Conflict in the Middle East, anthropologist Philip Carl Salzman recounts meeting tribesmen in Baluchistan. What, they had asked Salzman, would he do if he faced a real danger in his home country? Well, Salzman replied, he would call the police. The tribesmen roared with laughter, then looked at him pityingly: “Oh no, no, no, they said: only your ‘lineage mates’ will help you.”

In tribal communities, neutral institutions of civil society that Westerners take for granted — such as the police, impartial courts, and the rule of law — simply do not, and cannot, exist. In such societies, everything is tribalised, and the task of building civic institutions is laden with difficulties.

In Somalia, I was taught to be suspicious of anyone from a different clan, to always think harm was coming my way and to be guarded against anyone that was “other.” I come from the Darod clan, and was taught to constantly listen to accents, examine face shapes and overanalyse all non-verbal cues, searching for any indications of a different tribe. I can still identify a Somali (and usually their clan) from across a room.

We were captives of an echo chamber, hearing constantly of the evils of the neighbouring Hawiye clan. We were taught from a young age that the Hawiye were coming to rape, rob, and destroy us. In response, we amassed weapons, hoarded food and exhorted young men (as young as 12) to join the military. The looming threat of the Hawiye was so great that my mother eventually sent my sister and me abroad.

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In the end, because of such protracted tribal tensions, Somalia collapsed into civil war. Every attempt at mediation proved incapable of handling the deep-seated mistrust and hatred that accumulated by each clan over the years; tribal elders, reluctant to compromise, could not de-escalate the situation. With such high levels of distrust, the conflict spiralled into bloodshed.

While such violence is yet to seize America, all the tribalist ingredients are present. There is a blind commitment to one party or the other; emotions are running high; there is a lack of trust in civic institutions. If such tribalism isn’t overcome, it’s only a matter of time before the situation escalates.

Some of this has its absurd side: for instance, the strange ways that public-health measures such as mask-wearing and vaccination have become politicised, to the point that I know of fully vaccinated people in California who say they will continue to wear masks for fear of being mistaken for Republicans. Bizarre? Of course. But it is also symptomatic of a dangerous trend towards tribalism.

We are, I fear, close to the precipice of serious destabilisation. Many American cities are either militarised (Washington, DC), near a social boiling point (Minneapolis), or have capitulated to anarchist protests and pressures (Portland, Seattle).

These tribal quirks run deep on both sides of the aisle. Many Republicans continue to dispute the legitimacy of the result of the last presidential election; while on the Left, the woke are eroding the Democratic Party from the inside, as identity politics displace universalist aspirations. Some citizens are viewed as part of oppressive groups, some as part of oppressed groups. A person’s individual actions can generally do little to change the immutable characteristics of the tribe to which they belong.

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Just as I noticed with my friend over lunch, there is frequently a visceral hostility towards anyone who leans even slightly toward the Right. Today, especially in academia, those who don’t conform with the “progressive” narrative, no matter how ethical they might be as individuals, are vilified as racists, white supremacists, homophobes or transphobes. Individuals can be attacked, cancelled, disinvited or even fired for the tiniest of verbal transgressions.

This kind of intolerance has for some time been apparent in high schools, too. Another friend of mine has a daughter who attends a private school outside of San Francisco. Last year, when it was revealed that she had expressed mild support for President Trump, she was pushed down the stairs by a fellow pupil.

It was a horrifying and, one hopes, rare incident. And yet there is something very striking about tribalism: it is a basic human trait, like skin colour or gender. However, despite being the natural state of being for many humans, it is not a positive or helpful trait, particularly in modern times. Tribalism developed as an imperfect social survival mechanism in the early stages of human civilisation. But in modern times, it can lead to social disintegration and severe violence between groups.

The beautiful story of America, the reason so many people around the world still yearn to come here, is to a large extent founded on our rejection of tribalism and our establishment of civic, neutral institutions, based on the fundamental principle of equality before the law. These institutions are imperfect, of course, but they are far superior to the tribalism that rules other parts of the world. Our overcoming of such a natural urge is an accomplishment.

As “woke” politics strengthens its grasp on our institutions — extending beyond the educational system into the media and now many corporations — that accomplishment is being eroded. The presumption of innocence, the commitment to blind justice and the whole notion of due process are all falling victim to spurious notions of “equity” and “anti-racism” — both of which carry within them an implicit intention to discriminate on racial lines.

If we continue to slip down this path, the thirst for tribalism will be unquenchable. That’s why moderate liberals need to stand up to the destructive forces that are taking over the Democratic party, just as moderate conservatives need to resist the tribal impulse that often grows in reaction to the other side’s excesses.

In Somalia, we failed to do this. In America it is imperative that we succeed.

So it was intriguing to read in an interview this weekend that he would be “really worried” if any of his children decided to follow him along the path of power in Westminster. In any case, while all his four children were “politically committed”, none wanted to go near parliamentary politics.

Blair bemoaned the declining calibre of today’s political class, adding that it was so poisoned by social media that he would be especially worried if his daughter decided on becoming an MP.

This is a depressing commentary on our times. What does it say about Britain’s political system when someone who so obviously thrived in it, someone who remains an astute analyst of electoral currents, feels so despondent about the harshness of its environment?

We need the best possible people in politics, so it is a problem if there is a dwindling talent pool. Look at the cabinet and there seems an obvious dearth of quality, which may help explain our country’s disastrous response to coronavirus. I asked several leading business figures which ministers they might like to employ; all struggled after a couple of obvious names at best. “The quality has definitely sunk far lower,” said Steve Richards, author of The Prime Ministers: Reflections on Leadership from Wilson to May. “Whatever your opinion, whether Left or Right, this cabinet looks the least substantial of the last 100 years.”

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Every generation complains about its leaders; no doubt some Victorian analysts bemoaned that Disraeli and Gladstone were useless compared with Pitt, Peel and Palmerston. There are also always some time-servers, obsequious careerists and dunderheads. But just take a look around the cabinet table and compare that callow collection with the giants seen on both side of the tribal divide throughout the 20th century, many from generations forged by awful war or economic collapse and driven by deep sense of public service. Our post-war education secretaries, for instance, included Quintin Hogg, Anthony Crossland, Thatcher, Shirley Williams, Sir Keith Joseph, Ken Baker, Ken Clarke, David Blunkett, Alan Johnson, Ed Balls, Michael Gove and Justine Greening. Today it is Gavin Williamson.

There are some obvious reasons for this sorry state of affairs. Brexit reshaped the Conservative party, forcing out several heavyweight figures. Boris Johnson runs a highly partisan operation, a sign of insecurity that permits no dissent. Labour endured the Corbyn nightmare and Momentum takeover, which sparked despair among moderate MPs. Both parties have hardened ideologically at local level, so people of differing opinions cannot win selection despite representing swathes of their side’s traditional terrain.

Yet the roots of this crisis go deeper, revolving around the nature of politics in an age of coarsening discourse. One obvious problem is social media, which fuels tribal division and fosters aggression especially against ethnic minority and female MPs. “The abuse I get is horrendous,” said Labour’s Naz Shah. “I accept I’ve made a couple of mistakes, none of which were intentional, but it’s become normal to get horrible stuff all the time. Last week I was told to go back to Pakistan, then told I was racist. You have to have an almost psychotic desire to change the world to endure this abuse. The average person would step away.”

Then there is the changing nature of the job. The Tories have adopted the Liberal Party style of pavement politics over the past decade. This led to a shift towards MPs, especially in marginal seats, serving as local representatives rather than seeking to become national voices. Meanwhile well-connected advisers and A-listers were handed the safest seats. “For the past four general elections, CCHQ has increasingly co-opted safe seats for the favoured view, supplying associations with narrow, heavily-vetted shortlists,” said one long-serving member of the party board. “In the ’92 election a safe seat would often receive upwards of 300 CVs but by 2019 this was managed down to three. Open selections are deemed to carry too much risk as they can’t be guaranteed to produce the right result.”

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This Tory said marginal seats reflect the “collapsing attraction” of parliamentary politics — but even winnable seats now receive fewer applications than in previous decades. “Too much risk for too low a status.” Much debate has focused on pay, but politics can never offer competitive rates for talent against worlds such as law and finance. “Successful people are willing to take a step back on salary for status and job satisfaction,” he said. “Strip those away and what is left?”

Their workload, like in so many professions, has increased and comes with a ceaseless deluge of emails — often organised by campaigning charities and pressure groups — and a constant struggle to escape their endlessly bleeping phones. In the chilling words of one female Labour MP: “Who wants to be away from the family and work all the time only to get death threats?” They also face pressure to concentrate on issues of local concern. “Once an MP could have got away with focusing on foreign affairs all the time if they wanted, but not now,” said a Tory backbencher. It is valid to ask whether this blinkered approach, however logical, is always best for the nation’s interests?

Another senior Tory MP put it starkly, with an apology for his pessimism: “The job is about survival,” he said. “It has become very, very attritional which is emotionally draining and physically taxing. It is a state of constant warfare that eats away at your self-worth. You are frightened the whole time — it’s like being under siege. We’ll end up only with people that have rhino skins rather than caring. Meanwhile demands on your time from constituents are constantly accelerating and much of it is not doing the helping of people that gives such satisfaction.”

When I ask this Brexiteer, a respected figure across Westminster, if there had been an impact on the calibre of people in politics, his reply was unequivocal. “Of course it has gone down. You can see that on all sides.” Perhaps the only way forward is to accept the decline and open up cabinet posts from outside parliament, subject to accountability. Yet this feels defeatist and counter to our democratic traditions.

I have met many decent and dedicated people in politics. Yet the prevailing view of the public — inflamed by the scandal over expenses, the banking crisis and Brexit — is to see Westminster as filled with duplicitous self-servers who all deserve scorn. One Tory MP who has focused energy on fighting racism, often in unfashionable areas such as mental health, told me he was frustrated by being repeatedly called racist due to anger on the ground. Such attitudes have been fuelled by the media, symbolised by the idea Jeremy Paxman approached all political interviews asking himself: “Why is this lying bastard lying to me?” Perhaps like many columnists, writing fast in the heat of the moment, I have gone overboard myself at times.

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One poll last year found just four per cent of respondents feel properly represented in national politics. Yet studies have found women are only half as likely as men to be interested in standing for political office while poorer, less well-educated and working-class people tend to be less ambitious politically. People with disabilities are rarely seen and woefully failed by Westminster. Efforts to open up institutions, however, seem to have had less impact than expected. This will lead to “an intensification of anti-political feeling and a perceived growth in the distance separating those involved in political life from those who are not”, concluded a 2018 paper for Political Quarterly by academics Peter Allen and David Cutts. “Neither of these things should be accepted… in a healthy democracy.”

It is too simplistic to solely blame either traditional or social media for the steady corrosion of politics in this country. Both are influential, of course, but ultimately they inflame already existing attitudes in wider society. Now there are reports Downing Street plans to use worsening cultural conflicts for its own political advantage, a selfish and short-termist strategy. Yet as James Johnson, former pollster for Theresa May, told me, the public want to see more political consensus rather than division, especially on the big issues. “I saw this for myself at No 10  — people don’t operate in the partisan bubbles seen at Westminster.”

I glimpsed the hideous strength of this bubble during my brief formal time in party politics as David Cameron’s speechwriter. On the night of the 2010 coalition deal, I suggested to the new Prime Minister that he might exploit the new collegiate style of politics by allowing MPs to speak more freely on issues rather than forcing them to parrot party lines. He paused briefly, then shook his head and said it was impossible.

I remain convinced it is the remorseless spin, rooted in tribalism, that is so destructive for politics and sets the tone for much of the national debate. Ironically, a big chunk of the blame lies with Blair, who made much of Tory politicians’ personal problems under John Major — then unleashed a ruthless spin operation after winning office and deceived the public over Iraq, further eroding public trust.

This combative tribal stance is a world away from the reality of most people’s lives. It is anachronistic in an age in which traditional party loyalties have broken down. It also stops Westminster finding solutions to some of our most intractable problems, such as fixing the social care crisis, building sufficient homes or tackling drug addiction.

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One of the finest political initiatives I have covered as a journalist was a prison reform process in Texas that spread nationwide and took the sting from the US criminal justice debate — and it began when a pair of politicians from opposing sides put aside their differences to find a solution to spiralling use of incarceration.

I was struck when Jerry Madden, a veteran Republican, explained to me how they started by working out where they disagreed, laid those issues to one side, then focused on their common ground to fix a problem that had become a costly failure destroying lives.

Is it really so naive to suggest that our own politicians might sometimes put national interests before their own sectarian struggles to solve the biggest issues? In this country, even at this time of grave crisis, our leaders talk of bold change and disruption but fear being challenged or the slightest dissent. And instead of reaching across the divides, we all end up retreating  deeper into our bunkers, fuming with disgust at our foes and frothing with fury over political failures.

Yet at the same time, there’s still some part of me that hankers after integrity. That is, if I choose a particular value, I want to hold it across the board. I don’t want to affirm it in one place and deny it in another, recall it here and forget it there. That’s why I find myself also repelled by tribalism in politics.

For the bundling up of myriad moral issues into ideological “package deals” has meant that my coveted acceptance by one tribe has become conditional upon my automatically accepting all manner of other positions, positions I can’t reconcile with my deepest convictions, and even — when I really examine them — theirs.

For example, when I went off and tried to make friends with conservatives, I thought I would be an attractive, indeed ideal, candidate. When it comes to the family, I am prepared to bite the bullet and say that family structure is crucial and marriage does matter. I believe that while there are critical exceptions — cases of psychological and physical abuse, for example — when family breakdown is the norm, children fare worse than they do in home where parents struggle through.

Whether it is being subject to the merry-go-round of changing relationships, or being constantly on the move — not knowing how long their dresses and trousers will hang in the wardrobes, not knowing whether their suitcases will or will not gather dust under their new beds — I think the ideal of the married two-parent family is worth fighting for. That is a fairly standard, orthodox conservative position.

Yet when I divulged these convictions, to my surprise I found they weren’t sufficient. “Family Values” apparently stood for a wider bundle of beliefs, and there was other baggage I had to carry, other commitments I had to approve. If I believed that intact families to be a condition of flourishing, I had also to accept that family breakdown was a main cause of poverty.

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Now on one level it is obvious that there is some truth to this. When family breakdown entails the loss of a second income, and a previous partner’s alimony payments are insufficient, parent and child will be worse off. The question, however, is what is causing that family breakdown in the first place?

The conservatives whose company I craved explained it as “cultural trickle-down”. According to that story, it was the lamentable behavioural change resulting in the nosedive of marriage among the elite, the rise of “expressive divorce” as the chance to “make oneself from the inside out, to refurbish and express the inner self” (in the words of sociologist Barbara Whitehead). Their assumption was that the persistence of such behaviour explains the concentration of family breakdown in the poorest communities today.

But try as I did to absorb it, that conclusion grated with me. What it overlooked, I felt, was the profound effect of scarcity on “intellectual bandwidth”. As sociologists Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir posit in their book Scarcity: “When we function under scarcity, we represent, manage and deal with problems differently.” Not well, that is, since pressure does not focus the mind, as we might like to think. No, it affects people’s fundamental “orientations” — that is, their concern with the future as well as the present; it erodes their sense of agency — all crucial to sustaining a marriage.

The longer I cavorted with conservatives the more clearly I saw how the insistence on the “culture of poverty” thesis — the belief that family breakdown causes poverty, and not the other way round — sustains a larger package deal in which fidelity to the family is wrapped together with a commitment to unfettered capitalism fundamentally at variance with it. Bluntly, if it is not lack of financial resources that affects the stability of marriage, then fixing an economic system which punishes the working poor need not be a priority if you want to tackle family breakdown.

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And so, finally finding myself unable to make a home on the Right, I assessed my options. Maybe I’d been knocking on the wrong door, courting the wrong team? I started thinking seriously about the alternative tribe: the liberal-Left. But no sooner had I started to take soundings, then I found myself facing exactly the same problem: yet another package deal.

What I thought might endear me to the Left was the two years I spent leading a review into the conditions of life for the poorest older people. What had confronted me at every juncture was the depth of marginalisation, the realisation that despite the phenomenal rise in life expectancy, Britain is for many no country for old men.

I visited care homes where residents told me, “the outside world never comes in here”. I met carers in circumstances so isolated that they and the parent they were caring for had become “each the other’s world entire”. I conducted a telephone poll revealing that 40% of those older people who were going to be home alone for Christmas had children living in the same country. And I found that marginalisation expressed itself most frequently in older people’s fear of being a burden — upon the state, upon society and upon the family.

Inspired by the Left’s historic value of inclusion of the elderly — most notably, the campaign by the Fabians and Liberal Party to provide pensions to older people left high and dry by industrialisation — I assumed that I would feel at home with their attempts to transform the lives of the elderly. Instead, however, I found that for many the next great reform was assisted suicide.

Again, this grated with me. For in a society where older people increasingly fear becoming burdensome, it struck me that putting the assisted suicide option on the table would prove disastrous. Having learnt so much from the Left about power, and the way coercion can operate subtly beneath the cover of consent, I found questionable the assurances of assisted suicide advocates that no one would ever be pressured to die. How are doctors really going to know that, at the deepest level, a terminally-ill older person has not been put under pressure?

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Brexit is going to drive us all mad

By Ed West

Where, then, have I ended up? Have I found a home, an ideology to underwrite my existence? One towering temptation I’ve felt is to renounce the culture wars altogether and insist that ultimate ethical questions are kept out of political discourse. We should focus on building a common political life together, many contend, and for the sake of that we should set aside trying to resolve vexed moral quandaries.

The problem with this solution, however, is that there are actual lives at stake. Sexual consumerism, family breakdown and the mindlessness of marijuana are real threats to human flourishing. How we think of the beginning and end of life, about the entrances and exits of human beings in the world, has lasting consequences.

Instead, as I argue in my book Vexed: Ethics Beyond Political Tribes, an etch-a-sketch approach to ideology is called for. We need to start from first principles and decide, undetermined and undeterred by our historic political identifications, which positions on the weightiest moral questions align with the good.

We need to be prepared to concede that our historic ideological enemies, whichever tribe they come from, may have got it right when it comes to a particular controversy. This pick-n-mix approach is very different from carving out some amiable middle ground; it means taking substantive positions on specific issues, but from across the political spectrum. For difficult though this may be, failing to do so ensures a kind of moral stagnation we should all find unacceptable. The deals may give us mates, but they cannot deliver genuine progress.

There is something totalitarian about package deals, and having our thinking governed by the constellations of opinions which are but the product of historically contingent coalition-building. And because of this, I find inspiration in the Vaclav Havel  essay The Power of the Powerless and the Czech playwright’s exhortation that “the primary breeding ground for what might be understood as an opposition in the post-totalitarian system is living in the truth”. It is, he wrote, a drama “originally played out in the theatre of the spirit and the conscience of society”.

Deciding where we stand as individuals on moral questions, irrespective of political parties, may not be the terminus. But it is the place to begin.

James Mumford’s Vexed: Ethics Beyond Political Tribes is published by Bloomsbury on 5 March

“Will you let them drink and smoke, too?”

This is usually the first response I get when I propose enfranchising all citizens under the age of 18. The answer is, obviously, no. We have laws that prevent young people from drinking and smoking because these things are harmful. Voting, by contrast, is not harmful; drawing an X on a ballot paper is substantially less dangerous than inhaling toxic smoke into your lungs.

Before you start freaking out, let’s be clear: this wouldn’t mean the sudden election of a government that promised free ponies and paintball instead of the NHS. At the last count, 17% of the population were under the age of 18, and I am not proposing that only children should vote — simply that they deserve to have a voice in shaping our shared future.

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Still, there are two significant arguments for continuing to deny children the vote. Firstly, that they are too young to understand politics, or the consequences of their decisions; secondly, that they are vulnerable to outside influence, and will just vote the way their parents do — or against their parents to spite them.

The first is a reasonable concern. But we have already set, as a nation, an age threshold at which we expect children to understand the law sufficiently to be able to abide by it. It’s the age of 10: the age of criminal responsibility in England. From 10, a child is required to follow the law, and if they do not, they can be punished by the state.

How can we argue that a 10-year-old has the judgement required to understand the law and the consequences of breaking it — and then argue that a 10-year-old doesn’t have the judgement required to understand democracy or the consequences of voting? If you have to follow the law, you should have a role in making it.

And until you reach that age of 10, your parents should be able to cast your vote as your proxy. Clearly, a small baby would struggle to exercise their vote directly, given their basic inability to control a pencil. But a parent with a second vote, to cast in their child’s name, could be expected to consider that child’s interests, and talk to them about their choices and ideas from an early age.

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Of course, this brings us to the argument of undue influence. Whether the parent is directly casting their child’s vote or not, we can expect the family environment to shape a child’s choices. But then, you could say the same thing about any one of us. None of our votes really make sense, from first principles. We all have stories and experiences that shape our political identities — and the votes we cast from election to election. If some children vote the way their parents do, that makes them no different from millions of adults. If some children vote to spite their parents, the same is true of some adults.

If some children vote without really understanding the facts; if some spoil their ballot paper with a drawing of a penis; if some vote for the candidate whose surname starts with A simply because they’re at the top of the list; if some vote for the party with the prettiest logo: they are simply following in the footsteps of generations of voters before them.

There is no test of wisdom or thoughtfulness for over-18s. A distant relation of mine voted Leave in the referendum convinced that Turkey had already joined the EU. She was wrong. But she still had the right to vote: the right to be wrong, and the right to be heard anyway. We shouldn’t use age as a proxy for seriousness: we should enfranchise every citizen, wise or foolish, young or old. The right to vote should be inalienable.

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Now, there is a toxic movement, in particular on the Remain side of the Brexit debate, to celebrate the idea that Leave voters — and social conservatives more broadly — are dying off. That’s evolved in some places to proposals to strip the vote of the over-70s, arguing that they don’t have a stake in the future, in the way young people do. These arguments are repugnant. Every citizen has a right to their vote, no matter their age.

But we do have a problem when the electoral system is inherently biased towards the 83% of the population who are over 18. By granting the vote to all children — exercised by proxy until they reach 10 — we would simply rebalance the system to recognise that all citizens are equal.