Unfortunate reality is that inciting hatred towards, let's call them "The Other", is just good political business in a representative democracy. You have to get elected in a representative democracy. Which means people need to vote for you. Tribalism, for all it's faults, can accomplish one task exceedingly well, and that's getting people to vote for you.

Doesn't make you racist or a bad person to concede, in a debate, that which really is just millennia on millennia of human evolutionary biology at work. Does it make politicians irresponsible when they employ tribalism? Absolutely. No question. But it's abundantly clear the left and the right employ that strategy all the time.

This sounds nice, until you look at what Nixon did as president and what he said behind closed doors. He was both a racist and a bad person.

Which is why I said the politicians are irresponsible. When I said you're not a bad person if you concede that politicians employ tribalist strategies, I was talking about the commenters on this forum not the politicians themselves.

Many commenters here appear to be testing the extents of mental flexibility in order to render their side of the political divide innocent of tribalism. I assume they are doing so because they believe conceding that fact is tantamount to being a racist. My assertion is that conceding this fact is not racist, it's just laying out contemporary political realities. It's just laying out behavioral evolution. We, as in "our society", put the screws to certain groups, because in our society doing so delivers votes. When it no longer delivers votes, maybe we won't do it? But for now, it's just how the game is played.

And all political sides play this game. It's just that different political sides put the screws to different "tribal" groups. And some tribes have the rare misfortune of coming under pressure by all political sides.

Nixon is obviously a good example of a politician who used tribalism to his benefit. I don't argue that at all. Because, again, conceding that doesn't make me a bad person or a racist. Just makes me a guy stating a fact.

>My assertion is that conceding this fact is not racist, it's just laying out contemporary political realities

Conceding the fact and still voting for them is. Yes, this is rampant on "both sides." It is still morally repugnant, and it continues because it doesn't cost them enough votes.

Political realities exist because people accept them.

No, it seems more an after effect of LBJ's famed 'vote for 100 years' plan.

The degree to which that’s an “apt description” is overstated: https://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/10/magazine/10Section2b.t-4.... (2006)

> It’s an easy story to believe, but this year two political scientists called it into question. In their book “The End of Southern Exceptionalism,” Richard Johnston of the University of Pennsylvania and Byron Shafer of the University of Wisconsin argue that the shift in the South from Democratic to Republican was overwhelmingly a question not of race but of economic growth.

More important, that alliance is already mathematically impossible. Trump only won by courting blue collar whites and a critical mass of conservative people of color. By 2050, Hispanic people will comprise 30% of the population. To ratchet up the racism while still managing to win elections (you can’t “annihilate” anyone without having political power), the right would have to pull in almost all white Democrats. But those are the most liberal group in the entire electorate, and a big chunk of the electorate’s socialists.

The mathematics of the situation is that there are billionaires, and 10-20% of the population that are riding the wave behind them. (These folks are disproportionately urban and suburban white people, and also disproportionately liberal.) There is no way to build a coalition with those people that involves scapegoating fully half the population that comprises people of color and immigrants.

Personally, I would be really unsurprised to see the hispanic vote start to match the traditional "bible belt" vote in the next few decades. That might be republican, it might be something else - but the idea of a conservative catholic demographic voting similarly to another conservative christian demographic makes a lot of sense to me.

>There is no way to build a coalition with those people that involves scapegoating fully half the population that comprises people of color and immigrants.

You can limit people of color's access to the ballot box and turn away immigrants. Like rich people have regularly done for most of this countries existence.