Tribal vs. Ideological Thinking

Re-posted by Nicholas Stix

The brief essay below is both a response (I believe) to my Christian, identical twin sister, Ann Coulter, and may have influenced her, whether directly or indirectly. About a month ago, Coulter was arguing for supporting the GOP, come hell or high water. Now, she sounds less enthusiastic.

An important debate has broken out yet again regarding the coming election among patriots who have typically voted Republican in recent years. Should we sit this one out, vote for a party that hates us and takes us for granted, or split our ticket?

* * *About a week ago, I asked my favorite blogger, the Countenance Blogmeister, if I could reprint a brilliant article he’d recently written on political strategy and (sotto voce) theory, in the form of eight bullet points. One of the points argued that a reliance on Constitutionalist thinking was doomed.

He said “Sure,” if I knew which piece it was. He’d published so much work that he couldn’t recall it.

I understand his point. Having (re-)published over 6,000 blog items over the past five or so years, I find my short and medium-term memory failing me.

Back in 1980-81, I knew a delightful British girl who lived in the same dorm with me at the West German University of Tübingen. She once told me of interpreters’ similar problem. She said that after just a few years of constantly grinding their mental gears, jumping back and forth between different languages, they suffered memory loss. I think that was her way of saying that that was one profession she would not be entering.

The issue CB treats of in the following essay is but one of his eight bullet points. I spent a few hours trying to track down Herr Blogmeister’s essay. I read through every entry in both August and September. Perhaps he’d written it earlier, and only linked to it more recently? He wrote brief related essays in the form of reader comments on or about August 11, but I still couldn’t find the big one. If anyone reading this knows what I’m talking about, I’d greatly appreciate his sending me a link. Until then, this’ll have to tide you over.
 

We’re Closer Than We Think

By Countenance Blogmeister
September 29, 2014
Countenance

BRA

Instapundit linked to this Hot Air piece, the kind which I know most of you have read hundreds of times before.

I left this comment at Instapundit, which I am pleased to see has three likes so far:

Here’s something that bothers me.

If you read these comments here on this Instapundit thread, and the comments over at the Hot Air article, not only do most people leaving comments get it, the comments read like the high quality comments that would have been written if this story was an American Renaissance thread.

What frustrates me, though, is that in spite of that, most people here and at Hot Air are still spinning their wheels in the muck and mud of the laughable joke that is the useless incompetent “right” in this country and the Stupid Party that “represents” it.

Yes, we’re mad at the black undertow and obvious plain-as-the-nose-on-your-face media double standards. So what do most of us do? YAY RED TEAM on election day. And what does that get us? Rand Paul, who, in case you haven’t noticed, is getting worse and worse with his black pandering by the month.

Plain words, the Republican Party by and large isn’t going to do anything about these kinds of problems.

But there’s another more fundamental reason why we’re stuck in the mud. As long as the official right is neoconservative slash lamestream conservative slash right-libertarian slash classical liberal slash Lincolnian-egalitarian, the official right will be mostly useless in trying to combat the black undertow and media double standards. That’s because we’re responding to tribal problems by leaning on ideology, instead of being tribal ourselves. We delude ourselves into thinking that our enemies are ideologically inclined, instead of what they really are, tribally inclined. Therefore, we’re stuck with ideological responses, when we should be engaging in tribal responses.

That means, among other things, the official right should be far less ideological and far more ethnonationalist.

BTW, what good will the Republican Party do us when it comes to these problems, when their official summer get-togethers are called LINCOLN Days?

I think the reason that so many people getting it has not yet resulted in quality change in public policy is that most of us are still living under the delusion that we can vote our way out of our racial problems.  Aside from what I wrote in the comment.