The cosmopolitan right and left vs the tribalist left and right

[Tammuz]

If we look at contemporary politics in the Western world today, perhaps particularly the US, but also other countries, we can see a division not only left and right, but also within them. I would call them cosmopolitanism or universalism vs tribalism.

The cosmopolitan left and right treat people as individuals. White, black, Jew, Muslim, etc, it doesn't matter. They all have the same rights. This perspective is really an outgrowth of classical liberalism.

The tribalist left and the tribal right, by contrast, consider people primarily to be part of groups, and those groups are either good or bad. But the tribal left and the tribal right differ on which groups are good and bad. For the tribal right, minorities, blacks, Muslims, etc, are at least suspect, and whites are the good ones. For the tribal left, it's the opposite way around. And the tribal left also considers criticisms of anything associated with their favored groups to be suspect, possibly racism.

The tribalists are also essentalists. A Muslim is a Muslim, this can't really be changed, and those who chane are considered suspect, or "native informants". They don't really consider that people can change their views over their lifetimes.

I am of course much more sympathetic to the cosmopolitans than to the tribalists. And it also saddens me that during the past 10 years or so, the tribalists have really strengthened their positions. How did this happen, and what can be done to reverse it?

 

[untermensche]

Who exactly does this so-called left tribe not like?

The right is filled with authoritarians and racists and bigots and xenophobes.

The left doesn't like things like injustice and descrimination and the killing of unarmed people.

There is a difference.

 

[Politesse]

Except that your "tribal" groups* exist primarily exist as popular fictions created and maintained by a money-hungry morass of private media broadcasters and content creators. Neither actually exists in any meaningful sense, at either end of the spectrum. Run this as a poll and you'll see what I mean.

* I hate this term by the way. If you want make a bud for yourself as an enlightened, unbiased egalitarian among humans, promoting tired colonialist stereotypes of tribal governments is not imo the way to start.

 

[ronburgundy]

It is not possible to be a cosmopolitan rightist. There are the rightists for whom bigoted tribalism is the goal (social/religious conservatives) and rightists for whom bigoted tribalism is a neccessary assumption on their way to their goal, which is to defend the status quo inequalities (i.e., economic conservative free-market faithers and pseudo-libertarians who are against government regulations to correct for tribalism-based inequalities). The former type of rightist tribalist is more obvious and acknowledge them. However, the latter are most of those you would incorrectly categorize as "cosmopolitan rightists". They use rhetoric about liberty and individual rights in the service of maintaining the status quo and denying the need/justness of measures to correct for the rightist tribalism that has controlled society for centuries and has created unjust inequalities that persist and will continue to have indirect impacts that need to be vigilantly examined and corrected. The objective reality and evidence of these effects and the need to regulate them is so obvious, that only a person who accepts racist/sexist tribal assumptions could deny them and take the type of anti-government pseudo-libertarian position that you call cosmopolitan rightist.

To reject these right-wing racist and sexist assumptions would inherently mean that one leans liberal (and toward the Dems in the US), even if one also rejects forms of tribalism on the left, which is not parallel or a mirror image of the bigotry on the right.

The left has 3 broad categories. Two correspond roughly to what you call tribalists and cosmopolitans, but the tribalism are a small %. They are people who hold their group as superior, whether in relation to the economically/politically dominant group of whites/males, and/or as superior to other non-dominant minority subgroups (such as bigotries between blacks and Hispanics).
But even they are not parallel to the tribal rightists, b/c this leftist tribalism is a reactionary fear from being objectively attacked and persecuted for centuries by the tribal rightists who choose tribalism even when they have their boots on the necks of all other groups and are under no real threat.

A different type of leftist (that I think you are lumping in with the leftist tribalists) are leftists who do believe in equality and do not favor their group over others, but they lack principled respect for each person as an individual and still view the "groups" as central rather than the mere mental construct they are. They seek to "fight fire with fire" and a form of "eye for an eye" retribution/justice that is meted out at the group level, where causing more injustice to more individuals is accepted, so long as the aggregate amount of injustice over time at the group level is equal, and thus there are no group level inequalities in outcomes. This is what is done by any affirmative action policy that goes beyond efforts to solicit applications by under-represented groups and actually makes any use of group membership when the applications are being considered.
So, they are not tribalists, so much as group-justice leftists.

Then there are the cosmo leftists, who as you point out are the classic liberals who value individual rights and equality. But since rigthist tribalism has ruled for so long and its effects continue to reverberate to create unjust inequalities depending of group, cosmo leftists do not support the status quo and seek to change it, and recognize that many if not most of the group-level inequalities are a byproduct of the violation of individual rights and enforced inequalities. They strongly oppose the rightist tribalism of the GOP, conservativism, and most so-called "libertarianism" that seeks to preserve the unjust tribalism-created status quo by preventing collective action to make corrections to it. They share with group-justice leftist the respect for equality and opposition to actual tribalism, which mostly comes from the right. However, the also oppose the methods of group-justice that cause greater injustice to individual person's and disrespect the principle of individualism that is the foundation of all human rights and the moral progress of the few centuries.