Is Tribalism Bad?

By Abigail Anthoy

Saturday, May 17, 2025

 

‘Tribalism” is an increasingly popular word. In a heated panel discussion on a recent Piers Morgan Uncensored episode, Rikki Schlott said the following: “I hate this argument that because some people were tribal we should be tribal too. Shouldn’t we want to live in a society where we say tribalism is bad in general and negative in general, and so therefore we should be erring towards individualism and not fighting tribalism with more tribalism?” She was, I think, referring to racial tribalism specifically, since the panel addressed the controversy surrounding Shiloh Hendrix, a white woman who directed a racial slur toward a black child. But others use “tribalism” to describe broader cultural and political tensions. James Lindsay employs “tribal” as a pejorative on social media when arguing with others, and he insists that “‘tribe over truth’ is low-IQ and beta.” Joel Berry, the Babylon Bee’s managing editor, wrote that “Black American culture is infected by racism, pride, hatred, and tribalism. It’s not something for Western culture to aspire to or emulate.” (Barry also stated that “I’m tribal. My tribe is the people of all races who live in the Truth, love their neighbors, and do the will of God.”) The word keeps getting thrown around without precision, so I have to ask: What is tribalism, and why is it necessarily bad?

 

First, let’s look at the “official” definitions. “Tribalism,” as stated in the Oxford English Dictionary, is (a) “the condition of existing as a separate tribe or tribes; tribal system, organization, or relations,” and (b) “loyalty to a particular tribe or group of which one is a member.” Such definitions just seem to describe commitment to a group and don’t readily lend themselves to the notion that tribalism is immoral. “Tribe,” however, has many definitions: one is “a group of people forming a community and claiming descent from a common ancestor,” another is “one of the traditional three political divisions or patrician orders of ancient Rome in early times,” and yet another is “a gang of criminals or delinquents.” Notably, “tribe” doesn’t apply exclusively to humans, since it is also defined as “a group in the classification of plants, animals, etc.” The only generalization that applies to all the meanings of “tribe” is that it references a group; membership can be conditioned on biology, politics, conduct, or something else entirely. Again, based on these definitions, a tribe isn’t intrinsically bad.

 

If “tribalism” means something like “group affiliation and internal group cohesion,” then I have difficulty seeing it as categorically wrong. Successful political movements need their members to have a consensus on what they believe, why they believe that and not an opposing view, and what outcomes they want to see based on their shared view. A familiar example is the pro-life movement. The March for Life attendees agree that human life begins at conception, human life has a moral value at conception, abortion is the intentional killing of an innocent child, and policies should seek to prevent abortion. These individuals, I think, would engage in a subtle version of “identity politics” by describing themselves as “pro-life” because they believe that such a label succinctly summarizes an important personal value that influences their worldview. Likewise, they may further participate in “identity politics” by refusing to vote for a politician who doesn’t embrace the “pro-life” label. By these standards, the pro-life movement — along with pretty much every other activist movement — is a tribe, and it engages in tribalism by opposing the pro-abortion crowd because of disagreement on significant moral questions whose answers have significant societal consequences. Of course, there’s also in-group policing: If you think abortion is fine up until the day of birth, then you won’t be a featured speaker at the March for Life, nor will you get a job at a pro-life organization.

 

Those who condemn tribalism seemingly operate on a definition different from “group affiliation and internal group cohesion,” but they have been inconsistent and vague. Biologist Colin Wright wrote in 2020 that “a tribe implies allegiance and an unwillingness to criticize members of your own group.” In 2019, Lindsay wrote that “social identity” is “which tribe a person belongs to and where he stands in that tribe.” Although Wright had construed “tribe” in terms of members’ in-group dynamics, Lindsay framed tribalism in part with respect to the treatment of out-group members: “Parochial altruism is the tendency to be very charitable with a perceived in-group and increasingly hostile toward or distrustful of perceived out-groups. When inflamed, it becomes ‘tribalism’ and leads to polarization. It’s most easily stoked by grievance politics.” This definition, while more precise than Wright’s, still leaves some questions. It isn’t obvious why polarization is considered an outcome of tribalism rather than a cause of tribalism. And it is important to note that polarization, somewhat counterintuitively, can be a positive value if it prompts us to develop more rigorous arguments and engage in more substantive discussion to convince our intellectual opponents.

 

The definitions set forth by Wright and Lindsay, in my opinion, are politically inflected to facilitate the use of “tribe” or “tribalism” for their own agendas. They seemingly developed these notions in opposition to the “woke” group they disliked and now erroneously project those ideas onto other non-woke groups they also dislike. The strategy is clear: They apply “tribalism” as a pejorative toward groups they do not want to join for the sake of attributing immoral stances to such groups and discouraging others from joining them.

 

The general problem with weaponizing the word “tribal” as an ad hominem attack, I think, is that it assumes that all social groups are arbitrary or organized in support of something immoral. Certainly, I agree that some supposed “communities” have no legitimate basis: I’m not in a “community” with every other girl who wants to be kissed on the forehead, for example, so I don’t see why gay men form an alliance with each other for having similar sexual preferences, and I can’t comprehend why they would be lumped together with lesbians and trans-identifying individuals in the “LGBTQ+ community.” (It is worth acknowledging that some gay individuals who don’t subscribe to a broad range of progressive views are socially expelled from the “LGBTQ+ community,” and thus it isn’t formed on the basis of sexuality alone.)

 

But we can imagine plenty of social groups that have a reasonable organizing principle and aren’t mala in se. Some people have a strong affinity for their alma mater; if one alumnus meets another, they’ll probably compare experiences and briefly cultivate a sense of fraternity. Sports fans bond by supporting a certain team or star athlete; a fan might have such firm allegiance to a team that it doesn’t waver even if a bunch of the players are swapped. Pretty much any college club is a social group oriented around shared traits — be it a hobby like stand-up comedy, an intellectual interest like chess, a religious belief, or a cultural affiliation. Here in England, I was among the American students who coordinated a casual Thanksgiving potluck dinner; I technically engaged in mild “tribalism” when I joined a group chat called “Americans in Oxford,” celebrated American traditions with fellow group chat members, and poked fun at out-group members like the Brits for their unsavory food.

 

“Tribes” are simply social groups that can be organized morally or immorally, and “tribalism” is a neutral value that can be instrumentalized toward positive or negative aims. Some people who are vilifying “tribalism,” I believe, are actually opposed to intergroup hostility rather than to an individual’s self-identification with organized social groups as such, or to in-group policing. But groups formed with respect to values and ideas by definition exclude those who hold dissenting views, and opposing groups engage in social and political competition. Observable hostility that emerges from conflicting viewpoints is a symptom not of a fatal social ill but of a free society, where ideas can be debated and people can express themselves. Ironically, the relentless complaining about tribalism is self-defeating: Those who position themselves as “anti-tribalism” or “pro-individualism” are forming a tribe — whether they see it yet or not.

 

But let’s pretend that the “anti-tribe” tribe makes convincing points. Those who insist that we must be less tribal have not set forth any serious, workable framework for achieving that outcome; their instructions all simply reduce to “Reject tribalism.” When prompted on social media to provide “an actual strategy for making non-whites less tribal,” Wright utterly failed to do so and instead provided a curious mixture of logical fallacies: “Unfortunately it’s going to require actual hard work changing hearts and minds to reach a quorum of agreement, pass laws, and ensure they’re enforced. I’m sorry if I don’t accept the alternative I’m being presented with of donning a Klan hood and waging a full-on race war.” Maybe, one day, he’ll indulge us with the details of actual laws he wants passed, and maybe he’ll explain why a “quorum of agreement” among people who have changed their “hearts and minds” somehow wouldn’t constitute a tribe. (It is also worth noting that Wright has seemingly admitted that there is at least some positive value in belonging to a tribe, since he told Megyn Kelly that “at least you have a tribe to return too [sic] when things get rough.”)

 

Here is a more practical approach to cultivating a free society. Engage in introspection and ask yourself the following: Is there any conduct my fellow group members could engage in that would prompt me to abandon them, and is there any evidence or argument that could emerge and prove my group’s beliefs to be false? If your answer to both is no, then you’re not simply a group member but a group ideologue.

 

Ultimately, if a “tribe” can be any group with a shared set of commitments that regulates its membership and challenges another group with diametrically opposed commitments, then arguments that society needs to be “less tribal” are doomed to fail because there’s no even distribution of interests and values across society, and people form relationships on the basis of shared traits. If you are an “anti-tribalist” in favor of liberalism and individualism, then you have to reconcile your denunciation of social groups with the liberal principle of free association. Why can’t individuals assess the values and ideas held by themselves and others, then socially associate with respect to those shared values? An us-versus-them social landscape emerges for every possible topical issue in our free society because we occupy an idea-versus-idea environment. Rather than shriek about the human impulse to join a tribe, it’s more productive to explain which tribes are worthy of members — and doing so is necessarily a form of intertribal competition. Alternative strategies end up with the self-defeating claim: Join me in the fight against tribalism.