ABSTRACT
Democracies around the world have in recent years seen increasing challenges, expressed through hamstrung politics, inability in reaching political consensus, as well as more vitriolic debates and partisan animosity – a trend often brought together under the concept of polarization. This shift seems to be grounded in a changing political logic, where political conflicts have gone from disagreements over policy positions to tribal struggles between cherished ways of life. Explanations for this change have tended to focus on specific historical contingencies, or on new media technologies – but larger-scale narratives that come to the core of this shift have been largely lacking in the academic debate. This chapter develops an explanation that points to the post-industrial transformations of capitalism of the 20th century. Just as Fredric Jameson argued that postmodernism was the cultural logic of late capitalism, so this chapter argues that a polarized tribal politics is the political logic of late capitalism.
While the industrial assembly line increased economic specialization, postindustrialization brought social specialization: cultural commodification replaced mass culture with a more segmented and fragmented culture, in a strive for monopoly profits enabled by depicting commodities as incomparable. These economic shifts came to grant value to uniqueness, authenticity, particularity, originality, and even the transgressive – dimensions of human life that had been inconsistent with the homogeneity presupposed by commodity mass-production. These economic forces pushed politics, economies, markets, and culture along a parallel trajectory: from homogenization and conglomeration in the twentieth century, to segmentation, specialization, and segregation. This created “social sorting” of identities, making the cross-cutting cleavages that moderate conflict increasingly rare. These shifts can be linked to political science and social-psychological research on the core of contemporary tribal politics.
