Again, you can feel however you like about the term ‘tribe’ in this context, but I wrote my response precisely because you seemed to not understand what was being conveyed. So if you claim you have “no problem understanding” it — well, that’s up to you to prove.
Additionally, while you personally may have only started hearing the term last year, it’s been in use for quite a while. For example, from 2014:
Finally, while some people use it in a derogatory fashion, it isn’t always used this way. The problem is that, as I’ve said before, the highly-educated people who dominate the press and universities don’t tend to think of ‘tribal’ or ‘cultural’ concerns as real. When people believed that Trump voters were primarily those worried about the economy, there was at least some sympathy from the educated set. When it turned out that, no, the swing states preferred Clinton on economic issues, and the Trump voter was mostly fueled by culture, the reaction was suddenly much less kind: “look at these [racists / xenophobes / sexists] and their outdated bigoted values”. So a significant portion of the left uses “tribal” in a derogatory way to slam conservatives; but in reality the left is no less tribal than the right.
Here’s an example: Recall the “War on Christmas”? The intelligentsia treated the whole thing as a joke, “haha look at those backwards hicks moaning about their stupid commercialized holiday”. If you don’t think RationalWiki is a good source [see note below], here’s FiveThirtyEight talking about the same thing [they’re much more measured about it]. Jon Stewart, the poster boy of the intelligentsia, also liked to talk about it as do his successors.
[‘RationalWiki’ is run by the foulest, most extreme members of the intelligentsia, and is therefore a useful barometer of their general attitude. What is written there in their sneering, spitting tone is usually vaguely felt among their less-vulgar co-culturals.]
It never occurred to the fashionable educated leftist crowd that these “backwards” people were defending their culture, that the phrase “Merry Christmas” was actually deeply important to them because they’d grown up with it, and that hearing it replaced by “Happy Holidays” was actually a significant, meaningful change. The literati react to this with hostility for their own tribal reasons.
An anecdote, related: when Coca-Cola freaked out over the “Pepsi Challenge”, they decided to replace their recipe with the sweeter, mellower New Coke. Complaints about the change began to flood into Coca-Cola; a psychologist they hired reported that some people sounded like they were talking about the death of a loved one. Coca-Cola hadn’t understood how deeply they’d become part of the culture, and how a change to their formula would affect people.
Do you consider the New Coke story derogatory to Coke drinkers? It’s effectively the same thing as the War on Christmas. To me, both are quite reasonable.
