The whole tribal thing is something of an exaggeration when it comes to politics. You do get people who are totally dedicated to one party and would continue to support it even as its policies totally transformed, but I think more people are interested in particular issues. For instance, can you imagine an African-American fanatically opposing the Democrats in the 2006 midterms on the basis that they want to treat him as an inferior, because he decided his party alignment while living in 1950s Alabama and hasn’t thought about it since? A few people may be like this, but I doubt it’s a mainstream position.
What does happen though is that people become partisans for or against particular policies or approaches, such as small government or states’ rights; they may support these policies conditionally, having examined the available evidence to decide what is best, but more likely their support for the policy is intellectually divorced from any benefits they might actually derive from the policy being put into action.
This is not to say that people will support the party whose policies most closely align to these wishes, of course, because people are often hopelessly incapable of analysing what politicians actually achieve when in power. The way policy support turns into party affiliation is more through marketing, where a party gives the impression that it’s ‘good’ for supporters of a given policy or approach in the same way an advert for men’s sunglasses implies that wearing the shades will make you attractive to women. Marketing works more on the basis of Pavlovian conditioning than tribal loyalty. (A particularly bizarre example of this was the association of France with all things evil by some Iraq war supporters in the US, to the point where describing John Kerry as ‘French-looking’, alluding to his partial French ancestry, was meant trigger an instinctive antipathy. I wonder how one is supposed to react to the knowledge that one of their favourite allies in foreign policy, Tony Blair, is also a fluent French speaker and has given at least one speech in the language to France’s National Assembly?)
The whole tribal thing is something of an exaggeration when it comes to politics. You do get people who are totally dedicated to one party and would continue to support it even as its policies totally transformed, but I think more people are interested in particular issues. For instance, can you imagine an African-American fanatically opposing the Democrats in the 2006 midterms on the basis that they want to treat him as an inferior, because he decided his party alignment while living in 1950s Alabama and hasn’t thought about it since? A few people may be like this, but I doubt it’s a mainstream position.
What does happen though is that people become partisans for or against particular policies or approaches, such as small government or states’ rights; they may support these policies conditionally, having examined the available evidence to decide what is best, but more likely their support for the policy is intellectually divorced from any benefits they might actually derive from the policy being put into action.
This is not to say that people will support the party whose policies most closely align to these wishes, of course, because people are often hopelessly incapable of analysing what politicians actually achieve when in power. The way policy support turns into party affiliation is more through marketing, where a party gives the impression that it’s ‘good’ for supporters of a given policy or approach in the same way an advert for men’s sunglasses implies that wearing the shades will make you attractive to women. Marketing works more on the basis of Pavlovian conditioning than tribal loyalty. (A particularly bizarre example of this was the association of France with all things evil by some Iraq war supporters in the US, to the point where describing John Kerry as ‘French-looking’, alluding to his partial French ancestry, was meant trigger an instinctive antipathy. I wonder how one is supposed to react to the knowledge that one of their favourite allies in foreign policy, Tony Blair, is also a fluent French speaker and has given at least one speech in the language to France’s National Assembly?)