Given recent revelations about FEMA’s emergency management blueprint, which claims to “instill collateral as a basis of emergency management,” Americans have been reminded of this fact in the wake of the fatal Hurricane Helene.
Not that we should n’t be surprised that the Biden administration consistently cites the greatest threat to our nation as white supremacist domestic terrorists, while the FBI cautions that “racially or ethnically motivated violent extremists, specifically those who advocated for the superiority of the white race,” pose the greatest threat to our country. Left-wing commercial media have insisted that the 2024 presidential vote is, at its heart, a battle over whether America may return to an alleged white racist, sexist history.
For assertions, at least indirectly, are grounded in a perception that tribalism — the prioritization of and intense loyalty to one’s group, become it ethnic, racial, or physical — is finally a destructive force in politics because it engenders fear, resentment, and, in its most severe form, violence.  ,
However, it is not difficult to realize that politics is really the most powerful tool for Democrats to instill power within their foundation, stoking the pretty identity-driven anger that Vice President and 2024 applicant Kamala Harris appeals to when she declares:” We are not going back,” for example. Perhaps a fleeting examination of how humanity gradually worked to achieve value for all peoples reveals which political philosophy is fueling the perilous identitarianism of our time.
Politics was Until recently the world’s proxy.
It’s easy to overlook that for most of human story, politics was the default status, as John M. Ellis argues in his guide A Short History of Relations Between Peoples: How the World Began to Move Beyond Tribalism. One can see this in the fact that the names of many people groups translate to a word or idea translating to the people, such as the Navajo ( Diné ), Cheyenne ( Tsétsêhéstâhese ), Germans ( diota ), and the Bantu peoples of sub-Saharan Africa. According to Robert Edgerton, “people in many societies refer to themselves as” the people” and consider everyone else to be alien and repulsive.”
This explains why, for the majority of human history, people groups showed little interest in displacing, enslaving, and yet massacring another foreign peoples. If your own tribe is the real humans, and everyone else is fundamentally different and perhaps even inhuman, therefore few obstacles are left to mistreating or annihilating them.
Additionally, this is the reason why people have always had a natural fear and suspicion of foreigners, who are the ones who are most likely to seize your land, steal your possessions, and kill you. You need to be concerned about those who look like you or speak your language, those who dress differently, and those who communicate in a strange tongue, especially if they arrive well-armed on your border.
What then altered the beliefs and practices that have persisted throughout the world’s numerous cultures and civilizations for millennia? According to Ellis, it was a combination of factors that came out of Europe at the start of the 16th century that fundamentally altered the world and began to promote the concept of gens una summa, which states that all of us are a one human being with a shared, inherent dignity.  ,
The Age of Discovery, for example, brought many previously isolated groups into communication across the continents of the world. The Christian missionaries who accompanied European explorers, in turn, sought to convert non-Christian peoples in the Americas, Africa, and Asia. Even though imperial powers frequently ( to their shame ) subjugated and abused new societies they encountered, the mere act of trying to Christianize them reinforced the unwavering premise that they were indeed humans deserving of the same respect and rights as their European counterparts. Books about distant, foreign civilizations could n’t help but gradually humanize them in the minds of readers, which was a crucial part of this development.
However, the Left is determined to return.
Although European interaction with the rest of the world is currently depicted as a tale of evil, exploitative plunderers, and subjugators who terrorized the rest of the world, this is utterly untrue and grossly incomplete. For it was Europeans who brought many of the civilizational advances now taken for granted to every corner of the globe, among them literacy, the scientific method, modern medicine, electricity, refrigeration, and representative government. Few Western haters would declare their desire to return to a premodern world free of books in their native tongue, vaccinations against deadly illnesses, or global supply chains in order for us to no longer suffer the continued effects of white “imperialism,” as much as the academy and media denigrate Western influence over the world as” colonialism”.
Undoubtedly, the West was the one who pioneered a world that could transcend the narrow-minded tribalistic tendencies that had been cultivated over many generations, and that the West had a new outlook on humanity, referred to as the “equality principle” derived from Christianity and scientifically grounded natural law reasoning.
However, as many of us can be so clearly seen, America is increasingly turning toward racial and sexual identitarianism, which prioritizes our status as citizens over our own. Ellis right argues that the tribalism of our day — manifested in critical race theory, DEI, and virulently anti-masculine feminism — corrupts university curricula, interferes with free speech, undermines professional training and competence, poisons our politics, and endangers the safety and security of our communities.  ,
Thus it is no surprise that the Democrats ‘ electoral movements and sloganeering—” White Dudes for Harris“,” Win With Black Women“,” Bans Off Our Bodies“, and the bizarre, celebratory obsession over” childless cat ladies” — are all extensions of this tribalist identity politics. The left’s ideological project, whether in the academy, media, entertainment industry, business world, or our justice system, is motivated, at its core, by sentiments aimed to accentuate, not minimize, tribalism. It supports a complex woke hierarchy that determines who has the most political and social capital, with “intersectional” racial and sexual minorities at the top and, as so many federal policies suggest, cisgender white men at the bottom.
Contrary to the vision of the founders and Lincoln, we are “going back” to a paradigm of fear, resentment, and tribalist conflicts— and Democrats have only themselves to blame.
Casey Chalk serves as the New Oxford Review’s editor and columnist as well as The Federalist’s senior contributor. He has a bachelor’s in history and master’s in teaching from the University of Virginia and a master’s in theology from Christendom College. The Persecuted: True Stories of Courageous Christians Living Their Faith in Muslim Countries is his book.