Prometheus 6

Tribalism Here, and There
By ROGER COHEN

Back in the 1960s, Obama’s father, shaped by his American experience, warned that “tribalism was going to ruin the country,” according to the senator’s memoir. Kenyatta, a Kikuyu, punished the “old man” for his frankness.

Odinga’s father also suffered as a Luo. Oginga Odinga, the first vice-president to Kenyatta, was arrested in 1969 after ethnic violence in the Luo-dominated western city of Kisumu, near the Obama homestead. Today, burnt buildings and shattered stores line Kisumu once again.

But we’re beyond tribalism, right?

Wrong. The main forces in the world today are the modernizing, barrier-breaking sweep of globalization and the tribal reaction to it, which lies in the assertion of religious, national, linguistic, racial or ethnic identity against the unifying technological tide.

Connection and fragmentation vie. The Internet opens worlds and minds, but also offers opinions to reinforce every prejudice. You’re never alone out there; some idiot will always back you. The online world doesn’t dissolve tribes. It gives them global reach.

Jihadism, with its mirage of a restored infidel-free Caliphate, is perhaps the most violent tribal reaction to modernity. But fundamentalism is no Islamic preserve; it has its Christian, Jewish, Hindu and other expressions.

America’s peaceful tribes are also out in force. As Obama and Hillary Clinton engage in the long war for the Democratic nomination, we have the black vote, and the Latino vote, and the women-over-50 vote, and the Volvo-driving liberal-intellectual vote, and the white blue-collar vote, and the urban vote, and the rural vote, and the under-30s vote — sub-groups with shared social, cultural, linguistic or other traits and interests.

That’s democracy at work. Sure. But the United States is divided, within itself and from the world, in growing ways.

It is divided by war, by income chasms, by foreclosures, by political polarization and by culture wars. Increasingly it is looked upon from outside with dismay or alarm. Healing, within and without, will be a central task of the next president.

For several years now, Obama has made the possibility of unity beyond division the core of his politics. That’s just poetry, the pooh-poohing Clinton people say, but governing is about the prose of experience and grit.

I see plenty of Obama prose, in new proposals for national service, for more equitable taxation, for health care, for international dialogue; and in his unique experience, both personal and professional, of reaching across continental, racial, religious and class lines. His grit is self evident. Look where he came from.