[iainmerrick]

Both you and the previous commenter seem to be talking about the polarization of politics as if it's an inevitable feature of human social interaction. But I think that's a little overly simplistic.

The current extreme polarization in the US is new and fairly unusual, in historical terms. It could be an inevitable phase that other counties will reach too, or it could just be a random artifact of the US's history and political system. Very few countries have a voting system that locks in the main two parties as strongly as the US, for example.

The idea that all politics is purely about tribal identity, and that "rationality" is a myth, would seem to suggest that we've never made any real social advances. But I'd count things like the outlawing of slavery as advances.

It reminds me of the extreme view of social structures in science (which Thomas Kuhn subscribed to, if I remember right), that all scientific "advances" and "revolutions" are just changes in fashion as one generation of scientists succeeds another. But each advance does in fact get us closer to the truth, even if we never quite reach it.

[bmelton]

I don't think it's at all inevitable, nor do I disbelieve that political polarization is new. That said, tribal clustering is as old as time.

Without getting into the whys and wherefores, my main concern is that as we eliminate some forms of tribal clustering (ethnic, gender, class, etc.) we are simply replacing them with other forms, namely political affiliation or wedge issues. Particularly, I'm concerned with tribal clustering on wedge issues that don't affect the quality of work a person might do.