Home / General / “Another word for what we now call “tribalism” is disagreement.”

“Another word for what we now call “tribalism” is disagreement.”

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Julia Azari has exactly the right response to Susan Collins’s many references to civility in norms in her speech celebrating herself and impending Supreme Court Justice Bart O’Kavanaugh:

This is how narratives are born. This one may well go: The Kavanaugh nomination process was unwieldy, partisan, ugly, allowed politics to intrude on a solemn occasion among vaunted elites. Our political culture seems to gravitate toward narratives that hold division and disruption in low esteem. A severe but not entirely unfitting analogy is the lesson many of us learned about how Andrew Johnson was the victim of a nasty partisan impeachment in the 1860s — not that he was a vile racist whose decisions after the Civil War have haunted the nation ever since. Similarly, many Americans believe a sanitized version of the history of the Civil Rights movement, failing to realize how much activists had to disrupt normal politics and dislodge accepted norms in order to end unjust practices.

A portion of Collins’s speech was also dedicated to affirming her support for the #MeToo movement and attesting to the stories from survivors that she has heard. She implied that she understood the prevalence of the problem and the secrecy and shame that perpetuate it.

But these two elements of the past — norms of bipartisan civility and elite consensus, and violently enforced second-class status for women, people of color, LGBT people, etc. — are connected. Civility is not an end on its own if the practices and beliefs it upholds are unjust. Another word for what we now call “tribalism” is disagreement. The particular disagreements that define contemporary politics are connected to the introduction of controversial issues and the demands by specific groups for justice and equal treatment.

By questioning the legitimacy of a vigorous and messy process, Collins laid bare the core elements of her political reputation: as a Senator who values the dignity of the chamber over any set of partisan principles. Of course, then she announced that she would vote with her party, observing the norm of presidential deference that guided her votes for Gorsuch, Roberts, Alito, Sotomayor, and Kagan.

There are values that transcend partisan politics and unite people over squabbles about issues of social life and morality. The thing is, not all of those values are worth preserving.

More on this tomorrow, but the Supreme Court is also an institution that deserves exactly as much respect as its conduct merits.

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