“Two visions of America” are locked in a “vicious, bloody, and unending” fight writes Celeste Marcus¹. In her view liberalism and tribalism ceaselessly struggle “for the soul of the country” (quite a contrast to then-senator Barack Obama’s national breakout speech: “there is not a liberal America and a conservative America”). “No country,” Marcus says, “is more bound to liberalism than America” and “tribalism is the vice which liberalism was articulated to constrain.”   

Marcus arrestingly paints tribalism as “an appetite” but liberalism as “a virtue.” That striking contrast merits more attention. It pits an innate, quick-to-trigger capacity against what is usually a slowly cultivated trait. A linguistic analogy can shed light on the difference. We are born with a built-in appetite for (or “biologically prepared” for) speech: a healthy child effortlessly absorbs its caregivers’ language(s), along with related cultural norms and biases about acceptable and unacceptable behaviors (some of the more consequential of which are cast as virtues and vices). But the virtue, or skill, of literacy takes years of schooling. Because equivalent training is uneven, literacy in liberalism’s virtues may not be so common. Therein lies the tricky political rub.

One sign of the size of this mismatch is that the vocabulary of virtue has long been basically absent in our politics. It is now most often seen only in the dismissive phrase “virtue signaling” (the cynical but at times justified view that visible virtue warrants suspicion). But virtue once played a vital political role (in countering vice). So, it’s worth resurrecting the word’s prior civic life. For many now it has a vintage vaguely Christian valence, but the four so-called cardinal virtues did not come from cardinals. Long before Christ Greek philosophers considered justice, prudence, courage, and temperance to be virtues vital for any flourishing life (cardo means hinge). These virtues might now usefully be rebranded or rechristened as rational life skills (it stands to reason that there’s no rightly desirable life without them). Christian doctrine incorporated the spirit of such reasoning, and their tradition marks the distinction between the four cardinal or natural ones and the three theological virtues: faith, hope, and charity (or love²).

In concrete political terms, the authors of the Federalist Papers copiously documented the essential civic role of virtue(s). They worried that without “sufficient virtue among men for self-government nothing less than the chains of despotism can restrain them from destroying … one another.” Every political constitution seeks leaders with the “most virtue to pursue the common good,” since an “avaricious man might be tempted to betray the interests of the state.” It may “require superlative virtue to withstand” the “temptations to sacrifice” duty to self-interest. This hope that only those of “superior virtue” would rise to govern has fared poorly. Likewise limits on the vice of avarice has been little heeded in politics and beyond.

But, casting it as an appetite should not blind us to tribalism’s own virtues. Tribal energies can organize loyalty, love, and duty into a hunger to serve. Crucially, such love and loyalty can limit self-interest that harms what the tribe holds sacred (for instance, protecting against “adventurous stratagems of avarice”; Federalist 12). Many tribalists yearn to fight for their values, an inclination George Orwell observed. Reviewing Mein Kampf in 1940, he wrote,  “Fascism and Nazism are psychologically far sounder than any hedonistic conception of life. … [Rather than a politics of] ‘I offer you a good time,’ Hitler has said … ‘I offer you struggle, danger and death,’ and … a whole nation flings itself at his feet.” As Orwell notes, “human beings don’t only want comfort …; they also, at least intermittently, want struggle and self-sacrifice, not to mention drums, flags and loyalty-parades.”

Similar tribalist passions are now powerfully orchestrated in illiberal ways by what sociologist Richard Seymour calls “disaster nationalism” (he has a book out shorty called that, with a subtitle “the downfall of liberal civilization“). Its charismatic leaders have “mounted a spectacular critique of political orthodoxy. ‘It’s the economy, stupid,’ said the old governing liberals. … And then they had to watch as, serially, voters repudiated self-interest and flocked to projects and candidates, from Brexit to Trump.” Seymour adds that “in truth, people scarcely ever vote for their interests, if that is interpreted as personal economic well-being.”

Yet many virtue-brandishing liberals seem puzzled by those who don’t appear to vote with their wallets. This can bring out liberalism’s own tribal biases. Liberal leaders have complained about the bitter “basket of deplorables” who “cling to guns or religion.” Consider that uber-liberal NPR described Donald Trump’s inaugural pledge to “the forgotten men and women of our country” to end “this American carnage” as “dark and divisive.” The leading liberal broadcaster seems to discount that the poor live 15 fewer years than the rich. In the liberal newspaper of record, The New York Times, columnist Paul Krugman concedes that, in rural areas awash in “deaths of despair,” “there really is such a thing as American carnage,” but he neglects to mention that those dreadful disparities in outcomes have been growing for decades under liberal policies he promoted. And while we’re on the subject of liberal obliviousness and tribalism, let’s not forget that founding this laudable land of liberal rights and virtues involved genocidal dispossession of indigenous tribes. Slavery isn’t America’s only “original sin” (contra Krugman). Liberalism, as practiced, has a centuries-long, vice-laden involvement with voracious market-driven atrocities (described here).

As Seymour writes, disaster nationalism, “offers … a [tribal] politics of revenge …  in which self-respect is transiently secured by the destruction” of the enemy. In extremis “even the basic self-interest in living takes second-place to the adventure of revenge.” Marcus correctly calls Trump a “brilliant champion of the tribalist cause,” fueling the vengeful feeling that his followers are “entitled to their fears and furies.” Thus, Trump has said “I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed: I am your retribution.”

Today’s liberal politics typically centers economic self-interest (often simply a euphemism for greed or the vice of avarice). This dispiritingly discounts and disrespects too much of our humanity. As Orwell, Seymour, and Marcus see, we have multiple other-oriented interests, loyalties, loves, and duties (e.g., moral, social, personal, tribal). These loyalties often motivate people to put duties to protect what they love above self-interest. Indeed, duties also once held a high political role. The Federalist Papers refer to duties and obligations nearly as often as to rights (145 versus 152 times). As Thomas Paine put it, “A Declaration of Rights is, by reciprocity, a Declaration of Duties.” In The Lost History of Liberalism, historian Helena Rosenblatt notes that early liberals fought for rights but also “to fulfill their moral duties.” But she also recounts liberalism’s “turn to rights,” away from duties. Cold War liberals accepted a logic once used to malign them, that theirs was “an individualist, if not selfish, philosophy.” By the 1980s, she concludes, it had become “okay to be selfish.”

Marcus ends by rallying her side’s troops: “we have rights to defend” against “better armed” opponents. In a sense they may be better equipped morally, too. Do appeals to the word “rights” now evoke a desire to discharge related duties? Do any loves or loyalties limit collectively harmful greed (in the liberal professional class)? Failing to forcefully put the common good above greed leaves us firmly in the grip of a frequently fatal vortex of vice³. Liberalism must somehow rapidly develop the appetite to match tribalism’s virtues of duty and loyalty.

1. Marcus is managing editor of Liberties, a heavyweight literary journal of culture and politics.
2. This translation has long been contested since the precise wording has many ramifications: In 1530 William Tyndale complained that Sir Thomas More “rebuketh me that I did translate this Greek word agape into love, and not into charity” (in English love is a low-resolution word, see The Four Loves We All Need To Know More About).
3. Many examples, e.g., Liberalism’s Failure Modes, or Liberalism’s Failure by Fun.