Brief blurts about about tribes and tribalism — Evan Osnos

“Trump has succeeded in unleashing an old gene in American politics — the crude tribalism that Richard Hofstadter named “the paranoid style” — and, over the summer, it replicated like a runaway mutation. Whenever Americans have confronted the reshuffling of status and influence — the Great Migration, the end of Jim Crow, the end of a white majority — we succumb to the anti-democratic politics of absolutism, of a “conflict between absolute good and absolute evil,” in which, Hofstadter wrote, “the quality needed is not a willingness to compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish. Nothing but complete victory will do.” Trump was born to the part. “I’ll do nearly anything within legal bounds to win,” he wrote, in “The Art of the Deal.””

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/08/31/the-fearful-and-the-frustrated