Trump's Tribalism Does Not Belong in a Nation Founded on Principles

In Clinton’s Values vs. Trump’s Tribalism, Slate's William Saletan connects presidential year politics to the Enlightenment values of the Founders:

In a shared-values framework, foreign peoples and faith traditions aren’t necessarily your enemies. They can be objects of empathy. [Hillary] Clinton drew an analogy between Trump’s proposed ban on Muslims and an infamous U.S. exclusion of Jewish refugees: “We remember the nearly 1,000 Jews aboard the St. Louis who were refused entry in 1939 and sent back to Europe. ... If you see bigotry, oppose it. If you see violence, condemn it. If you see a bully, stand up to him.”

America was founded on values, unlike the other nations which existed at the time, which were founded on kinship. (France was the ethnic French; Spain was the "Spaniards," etc.) The Enlightenment values in the Declaration and the Constitution—equality, natural rights, and government by the people—defined the infant nation, and define us today. Allan Bloom asserted that "it is possible to become an American in a day" (by adopting America's democratic values), while in France it is still debated, he argued, whether Jews (who have been there for centuries) are "constitutively French."

The various forms of kinship politics, by operating in the ad hominem terms of identity rather than the universal principles of liberal democracy, are inevitably behind the times. Backward.

The right's current practice of judging people in terms of religion, which Saletan describes in dissecting Trump's politics; and the left's current class warfare identity politics, are both outdated and dysfunctional. They elevate partisan factionalism and self-interest above principled values and the public good. Saletan argues that such tribalism tends toward "barbarism": "When tribalism is your only guide, reluctance to use extreme measures is weakness. ... The real enemy is barbarism, and it can infiltrate your soul."

Kinship politics is the politics of class, a tribal arrangement utterly foreign to the spirit of the Constitution. Last week Mark Joseph Stern reminded us that, as Justice John Marshall Harlan stated, the Constitution "neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens." ... "In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law."

Discussing North Carolina’s New Anti-LGBTQ Law, Stern notes:

HB 2 is also unconstitutional—not maybe unconstitutional, or unconstitutional-before-the-right-judge, but in total contravention of established Supreme Court precedent. In fact, the court dealt with a very similar law in 1996’s Romer v. Evans, when it invalidated a Colorado measure that forbade municipalities from passing gay nondiscrimination ordinances.

Stern reminds us that even a democratically elected legislature is not permitted to practice class warfare against a group of citizens it does not like:

As the court explained in Romer, the Equal Protection Clause forbids a state from “singl[ing] out a certain class of citizens” and “impos[ing] a special disability upon those persons alone.” Such a law is “inexplicable by anything but animus toward the class it affects,” and under the 14^th Amendment, “animosity” toward a “politically unpopular group” is not a “proper legislative end.” Just like the law invalidated in Romer, HB 2 “identifies persons by a single trait”—gay or trans identity—“and then denies them protection across the board.” The Equal Protection Clause cannot tolerate this “bare desire to harm” minorities.

The lawlessness of the brand of Republicanism which has developed since the 1980 presidential election has come home to roost, degrading the United States to banana republic politics in which scores of millions imagine that an utterly unpresidential scoundrel like Trump could legitimately occupy the White House; and North Carolina attempts legislated bigotry expressly forbidden by the Supreme Court to Colorado twenty years earlier.

Jacob Weisberg: "An America in which Trump can represent one of the major parties feels like a very different country from the one many of us thought we lived in."