Tribal Politics

It's not often that I get topical on politics, but I think this is useful with an election coming up.
Australian politics is too tribal.

You might laugh at that statement, but it's true. Most democracies are tribal - you belong to a tribe, even if you don't see it in the ethnic sense. The swinging voters in the political system are really those who don't identify with the tribe options available.

When we get presented with the idea of tribes in politics, the immediate thought is racial division, like Fiji, or religious division, like Syria or Egypt. The reality is that demographic division, like Australia & the UK, is just as tribal. Labor is considered working class. Liberal is considered ... not. If you identify with the ideals of the former - socialism, unionism, etc, then you are an ideological member of that tribe. If you don't directly believe in those things, then you are a member of the diametrically opposed tribe. If you don't like either tribe, or have been ostracised by one, then you have no tribe to belong to.

This notion of the tribe - the need to convince the tribe that there is still a strong leader who will be able to feed them with media pap over the cruel winter of the parliamentary year - drives politics. If the government did not represent one tribe to the detriment of the other, & did not need to pacify its own tribe or else make it grow, then politics would become nigh on boring, except for the occasional interesting issue where individual opinion comes into play - gay marriage being one such.

Tribe membership is generally long term - there is a personal investment of your ideals when you join a tribe. Occasionally, the tribe lets you down & you decide to leave it. You might even join the opposition tribe. In a time of war (elections), this may mean fighting (voting) against your former neighbours. There is a tendency to be the cruelest warrior in the new tribe - seeking revenge for past wrongs (real or imagined). But then, who are you really hurting? Did you leave the old tribe because it had so changed that their ideals no longer matched yours? Or did you simply leave it because the ideals represented in the tribe didn't match as closely as you'd once thought? Does your new tribe match your personal beliefs any better? Will the world be a better place if your new tribe rules over your old tribe & tries to impose their beliefs on you?

As a metaphor, this can be stretched to breaking point, but too few people put themselves in the position of understanding why they act in a particular way, & what the consequences will be. My brother-in-law, long-time working class, changed his voting preferences in recent years. He knows what he's no longer supporting, but I often wonder if he understands that he now supports the opposite - whatever that may be. "They must be punished!" I hear him thunder. Must is so strong a word.