National populism is now on the rise everywhere, representing a broad-based popular revolt against the values imposed by progressive intellectuals on Western democracies. In the US and many other democracies, arrogant university-educated activists captured policymaking imposing highly unpopular decisions on voters, including uncontrolled mass migration, rampant globalisation, subservience to unrepresentative international institutions, and a moralising crusade to impose codes of conduct that most people found ridiculous and oppressive.
It is the condescending tribal arrogance of progressive intellectuals and their divisive identitarian ideologies that finally provoked a revolt against the establishment. Trump’s victory is a warning sign of the growing tribalisation of Western political discourse. He won because the majority of voters now share his hostility to the elite progressive establishment that treated ordinary voters with disdain and condescension for too long.
The rise of national populism represents a visceral tribal response against much that the established political and intellectual elite stand for. These are powerful emotional gut reactions that are driven by archaic tribal instincts that play a very important role in many human judgments and decisions, especially in the political sphere, as also confirmed by evidence from neuropsychology.
Tribalism begets tribalism
What is remarkable that this time the tribalisation of politics originated not with the restive masses, but with the university-indoctrinated progressive elites who have become captive to neo-Marxist identitarian ideologies. It is their divisive policies that provoked the polarisation of the political discourse. Social justice for them is not about seeking fairness and equal opportunity for individuals, but about promoting tribal conflict by assigning people into rigid racial, ethnic, and gender identity groups.
Many voters now had enough of the patronising arrogance of their leaders. Their moralising contempt for the everyday concerns of voters produced a groundswell of resentment. Attempts to manipulate our behaviour, define ‘correct’ thinking, and regulate language use inevitably provoked a tribal backlash. The warning signs were there for anyone to see. On the rare occasion when people had a chance to vote on Woke initiatives they were resoundingly rejected, as in the recent Australian and Irish referenda.
The tribalisation of popular discourse is a worrying sign that all is not well in our liberal democracies. Over two thousand years ago, Plato in The Republic already warned us about the fragility of democracy and the dangers of tribalism and emotionalism inherent in human nature. Our current liberal democracies rest on a fragile set of very recent civilisational rules and norms invented following the Enlightenment, designed to control the human evolutionary tendency for tribal conflict that characterised human life for millennia.
Tribalism vs individualism
Tribalism is indeed a universal evolutionary feature of human nature, as confirmed by countless experiments in social psychology. Numerous studies show that humans spontaneously form and maintain shared, often arbitrary, norms, conform to and obey each other and universally prefer their ingroups to strangers.
Such tribalism among intelligent and educated people based on fallacious ideologies is neither new nor surprising. Throughout history, highly educated people often derived status and privilege by promoting often absurd tribal narratives. The evolutionary success of Homo sapiens is largely due to our ability for sophisticated tribal cooperation, based on the creation and maintenance of consensual tribal delusions that define and bind groups together.
Our current uniquely successful liberal epoch is based on the very recent cultural invention of individualism and universal humanism that arose during the Enlightenment. It was only after centuries of horrific bloodshed in Europe based on religious tribal conflicts that the revolutionary idea that individuals should be free, equal, and liberated from tribal constraints emerged.
Rejecting the tyranny of collectivism in favour of individualism produced our rules-based liberal democracy and the unprecedented flourishing of reason, science and well-being of which we are the beneficiaries today. But our tendency for tribalism has never been far from the surface. On the political right, appeals to nationalism offer perennially attractive tribal narratives easily exploited by autocrats like Putin, Orban, Erdogan, and Xi.
On the political left, progressive academic thinking has been dominated by the collectivist tribal ideology of Marxism for over 170 years, memorably described as the ‘opium of the intellectuals’ by the French sociologist Raymond Aron. Marxism sees history and social progress as solely driven by collectivist class conflict and revolution, leading to an eventual communist utopia.
How intellectuals became ‘prigs and pontificators’
This simple and in practice always disastrous collectivist ideology remains popular in our universities, and generations of our political leaders have now been indoctrinated with its emphasis on woke identity politics. Yet as Karl Popper showed, Marxist collectivism is little more than a speculative quasi-religious tribal ideology. Instead of the inevitable revolution predicted by Marx, workers everywhere joined the bourgeoisie instead – except, paradoxically, in dysfunctional Marxist societies.
To save the theory, neo-Marxist activists like Antonio Gramsci and members of the Frankfurt School like Horkheimer and later Rudi Dutschke demanded a ‘long march through the institutions’ like universities to promote revolutionary consciousness. This process has now substantially completed, and produced disastrous results.
In many Western societies, a new class of tertiary educated political activists emerged, indoctrinated with progressive ideas to promote collectivist conflict. Woke social justice theories like ‘Critical Race Theory’, ‘gender theory’, or ‘intersectionality’ have re-packaged the old Marxist dogma of inevitable tribal conflict by assigning people into irreconcilable racial, gender, or ethnic identity groups.
Many academics have become converts to such social justice theories, producing like-minded and similarly indoctrinated political elites. As Thomas Sowell observed, in an age of artificial intelligence, too many of our schools and colleges have now become purveyors of artificial stupidity.
Membership in this cosmopolitan elite tribe offers status, identity and privileges. Denying the role of evolutionary and biological influences on behaviour is a small price to pay for the heady illusion of re-designing society according to delusional social justice dogmas, implemented by DEI commissars at many institutions. Individual differences in genetics, intelligence and personality are ignored and even the reality of biological sexuality is denied in order to maintain the illusion that human behaviour is infinitely malleable in the hands of ‘enlightened’ activists.
Woke theories like multiculturalism dictate that obvious differences in the success and outcomes of different cultures must be ignored – even though it is such cultural differences that drive international mass migration in the first place. Such tribal certainty often justifies oppressive and autocratic practices, such as the persecution, de-platforming, and cancellation of anyone who disagrees.
In Orwellian attempts at language regulation social justice activists now seek to control our thinking. Communist dictatorships have tried to do this for the best part of a century, resulting in abject failure. The intellectual’s disdain and hostility to our highly successful liberal democracies as oppressive, colonialist and patriarchal is rightly seen by most ordinary voters as offensive.
The promotion of such divisive tribal ideologies confirms what Niall Ferguson identified as ‘the treason of the intellectuals’, inevitably producing a political backlash by voters. Instead of focusing on facts and reality, the social sciences and humanities have become islands of delusional theories where incomprehensible postmodernist nonsense masquerades as knowledge, and even intentionally meaningless texts can be published as long as they affirm the dominant woke ideology. Even science and engineering have now been compromised by DEI policies focusing on race and identity instead of expertise and merit.
The reputation of universities has been grievously damaged and tertiary education is seen by many as a source of tribal indoctrination to join the ranks of a privileged elite. This is precisely what Max Weber warned us about over a hundred years ago. The single-minded pursuit of social activism is fundamentally incompatible with the open-minded quest for knowledge that academic work demands.
What has been lost
It is the absurdity of these beliefs, and their enforcement over the wishes of the mass of ordinary voters by a condescending elite that largely contributed to the tribal backlash and the mounting revolt by national populist movements in liberal democracies. Ultimately, we can see this is as a predictable psychological response to the tribal challenge presented by elite political activism to the sensibilities of everyday people.
The resolute rejection of the woke ideology by ordinary people Hilary Clinton once described as ’deplorables’ is not without serious implications. The tribalisation of the political discourse in many countries is now a serious challenge to the fragile Enlightenment values of individualism and tolerance on which our successful civilisation is based.
It remains to be seen if the next few years might bring a return to the norms of reasoned debate and emphasis on tolerance, free speech, the rule of law and checks and balances without with the precarious system of liberal democracy cannot survive. History suggests that tribal animosity, once aroused, is very difficult to extinguish.
Joseph Paul Forgas, Scientia Professor, University of New South Wales, Sydney
