Tribalism in America

Thought-provoking comment by Ed Foster at Tam’s (excerpted at length here because Blogger doesn’t permlink comments):

...The problem with so many Irish-Americans (I can say this, as I was raised in a Gaelic speaking house by my little old County Galway grandmother) is that they still act as if there were NINA^[1] signs in the windows of every business and school.  I respect the hell out of an ethos and sense of loyalty that could keep a people together through eight centuries of madness and wholesale butchery.  The idea that a poor rural people could stand up and beat the greatest empire the world had ever seen, after being defeated every two or three decades for thirty generations, puts a certain extra cockiness in my step.
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But America’s been good to its Irish Catholics, and they are the wealthiest, best educated Christian ethnic group in the country, running neck and neck with the Jews in both categories.  In the bigger cities, you’ll still see the big-armed Mick cops and firemen with their bulldog tattoos.  One of them is a son of mine.  But you’re many times more likely to see a stockbroker, a lawyer, a successful businessman.

And yet, the urban Irish, a brutally conservative people, secure in their upscale ghettoes and Catholic schools, are so often still the power brokers in the Democratic political machines their grandfathers created.  They say things they have no belief in, consider public hypocricy nothing more than a tool, and maintain an essentially European political world in the cities they control.

The urban Italians and Poles are no different.  No suprise there, as they were “Americanized” in the churches, parochial schools, and colleges built by the Irish, and prospered in direct proportion to the degree they assimilated into the local machine. In a very real sense, none of these people have ever left Europe.

I’m prouder of the Irish side of my heritage than I am of the Scottish side.  This one small country gave us more presidents than any other, along with Davy Crockett, Daniel Boone, Francis Marion, Simon McKendrick and Simon Girty, Jim O’Hara, Tim Murphy and two thirds of George Washington’s Continentals.  But the “Suicidal stubborness,” the desperate tribalism that showed so well at places like Bennington and Fredricksberg, with the 7th Cavalry and the Lost Batallion, has a dark side, at least in the cities.

It is the cynical ideal that honesty is an absolute only among the tribe or personal friends.  The difference between the kind of Irish Catholic you’re likely to meet in Iowa (think Frankie Morrisson, otherwise known as John Wayne) and a big city politician manipulating the remnants of a people’s cultural memory.  What makes it all the more difficult is that the city Mick is going to have the same cheerful, chatty, likeably gregarious manner as the Americanised Mick.
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My mother was a private detective, and was not the least bit naive or given to foolish sentimentalism.  But, again out of tribalism, she was on the town Democratic comittee.  She came home one night, laughing to beat the band, and wrote down verbatim what she had just heard from John Bailey, the Connecticut equivalent of the Daleys and Kennedys.  He, after hours of putting up with a roomful of Middletown Sicilians, had found himself in a corner with several other Irishmen and more Jameson whiskey than he needed.  His comment was “I’ll tell you how to run the Democratic Party.  You buy off the Guineas with highway contracts and office jobs for their nieces.  You give the Jew lawyers their fair share.  You throw a bone to whatever witch doctor is running the ghetto this week.  But you never let control out of the hands of the Irish.”

That's what we see in Chicago and New York, Boston and St. Louis.  It’s the mistrust, the clannishness, the ruthlessness that made sense in a beleagued collection of rebels a century or two ago.  And it’s given us one of Boss Daley’s discreet sociopaths as POTUS.

I’d rather have Obama as President, considering the only option is that utter moron (and Irish Catholic machine politician) Joe Biden.  Or, God help us, Nancy Pelosi, one of the few women in politics that make me smile at the name Hillary Clinton.  At least Obama is bright enough to realize he isn’t very bright, and essentially has handed everything except the speech reading over to a melange of Clinton and Bush II bureaucrats.

But the more I look at the mess my cousins have made in urban America, the more I think the next conservative President we get should offer the choice of secession to the big coastal cities.

It’s easy for those of us out here in flyover country to ignore the degree that “big-city Democratic politics” remains “big-city Irish politics.”  Oh we see the names: Kennedy, Daley, O’Neil, but the people in the smaller cities and rural areas who bear those names have, over the last hundred years, by and large assimilated into the community.^[2]  Today for many of us, “Irish” is something you can be on St.Patrick’s Day, not the defining aspect of a person’s identity.  So we forget.

But the tribalism which Ed laments above remains, and it seems to go a long way to explaining how the Democratic Party works, as well as much of its ideology.  When “tribe” is elevated, relations with “outsiders” tend to be tribe-based (Bailey’s “guineas, Jews, and ghetto”).  If government is primarily an engine for dividing up spoils, then strong tribal membership is the way to ensure, in some rough-and-ready way, that you get your share.

And tribes fit very comfortably with the 19^th century left’s penchant for dividing society into classes, although “classes” have an important advantage over “tribes:” All it takes to create a new class is for someone to identify it.   Once created, the new class can join the existing tribes in lining up for “its share.”  It’s all part of the process!

Where’s the individual among all these tribes?  Well, if he’s smart, he’ll find one to align with, lest he become William Graham Sumner’s “forgotten man,” the c who pays the cost and takes the consequences of a’s and b’s efforts to “help” tribe x.

On the surface, “tribal” government appears a good way to stay in power:  Give each tribe enough to keep them quiet.  Make them believe they’re getting one up on the others.  Then steal the rest.
 
Of course it all falls apart if, sometime, a tribe turns up that won’t buy in and  can’t be bought off.

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Posted by: Old Grouch in In Passing at 03:52:48 GMT | Comments (1) | Add Comment
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