A better form of belonging

When my wife and I lived in Portland, Oregon, we were ardent fans of the Portland Timbers major league soccer team. We had season tickets in the stadium's North End, where 5,000 of the most hard-core fans—"ultras," as they're called in soccer—stood and sang and chanted and waved scarves and barked at the referees the entire 90 minutes.

If an opposing player went down grimacing after contact with a Portland player, we shouted "wanker!" and considered it obvious he was feigning injury to trick the ref into penalizing our team. When the roles were reversed, we were certain the Portland player had been grievously assaulted and the culprit deserved a red card if not a prison sentence. Referee decisions against Portland were grave injustices. Every call that went our way was, of course, correct.

So it goes with soccer fandom, and it's mostly harmless.

It's much the same with politics now, too. And that is definitely not harmless.

It's disturbing to see that many Americans’ political identities—more than their beliefs, more than their values—determine the positions we take on the most important issues and, especially in the case of MAGA, how the enthusiasts relate to their leader. Among the political "ultras," whatever Trump does is, by definition, correct. Whatever his opponents do is, by definition, not just wrong but evil. As are they.

If this country and others like it are going to have any chance of seriously confronting the century’s risks and challenges, we must find ways to break loose from these entrenched political formations. We must transcend the tribal warfare mentality that prevents us from facing our biggest problems. We must shift the paradigm that has us fighting old culture wars rather than the crucial battles that will determine whether we even have a culture.

Climate degradation, runaway technology, nuclear weapons, and other existential risks—these require political responses (not only political, but yes, political) and the better forms of identity and belonging on which a more productive form of politics depends.

Not what we do but who we are

It wasn’t always like this. Not to glorify days of old (which were usually problematic in their own special ways), but even a few decades ago American politics had a less divided, less us-versus-them tenor.

In the Watergate drama of the Seventies, congressional Republicans joined with Democrats to force out Nixon. In the years that followed, politics were often bruising—a “blood sport” to quote the title of a book about Bill Clinton—but certain high principles tended to supersede people’s and politicians’ team loyalty, at least in their rhetoric. Like the Constitution and rule of law.

For all their problems, the 1980s and 1990s look like “a golden age of peace and tranquility compared with today,” David Brooks observes. Over the past three decades, people have tried to derive righteousness through their political identities. “When you do that,”Brooks writes, “politics begins to permeate everything and turns into a holy war in which compromise begins to seem like betrayal.”

Politics have devolved into a state where they are not just something we do, but who we are. Therein lies the trouble.

Abortion and the Christian right

Was it Trumpism that changed everything? It has amped up tribalism and polarization, for sure. But there’s credible research showing the story goes back to the late 1970s and early 1980s. In this telling, it begins with the abortion issue and the Jerry Falwell brigade.

After the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision of 1975, and the strategic decision by the nascent Moral Majority to emphasize abortion, the nation went through a dramatic re-sorting. Christians of a religiously conservative bent gravitated to the “pro-life” party, while those of a secular or religiously liberal orientation flocked to the Democrats.

What happened next with the two major parties is fascinating. Contrary to conventional wisdom—the idea that our political behavior is shaped by our beliefs, values, religion, and ethnic and gender identities—citizens’ political identity began determining our behavior. It’s still that way today.

“Political identity outweighs all other social identities in informing citizens' attitudes and projected behaviors towards others,” Julie M. Norman and Beniamino Green write in a study published in 2025.

In over-simplified terms, the thought process goes something like this:

My team has decided it’s imperative to demonize immigrants by calling them “illegals” and to treat them in harsh, inhumane ways. It might be hard to harmonize that with my Christian values. But I’m committed to the team, and this is what the team has decided. I’m in.

Or:

As a liberal, I believe in free speech. But influential activists on my side are saying this speaker and that speaker must be silenced because their views are tantamount to violence. Given the repercussions I might face if I disagree, I’ll keep my mouth shut and go along.

Behind it all is a sense that “my side” is under the gun. There’s no time for niceties and nobler principles in the midst of an emergency. It’s just win, baby. High-profile Christian minister and early Trump backer Robert Jeffress summed it all up with his dismissal of the grating dissonance between Trump and Jesus. “I couldn’t care less about (a) leader’s temperament or his tone or his vocabulary,” Jeffress famously said. “Frankly, I want the meanest, toughest son of a gun I can find.” 

Emotional responses

Losing hurts. I remember how gutted we felt in the North End at Timbers games when the opponents scored against us or, worse yet, when we lost the game.

So it is when our political team loses. Michele Margolis, a political science professor at the University of Pennsylvania, points out that those with strong political identities are more likely to donate money, join a protest, or contact their congressperson, as we’d expect. “They’re also more likely to respond more emotionally to their group’s successes and losses,” she says, “and to interpret objective events through that group lens.”

Sports fandom and political identity share this, too: Affection toward our team’s players is often matched by, if not exceeded by, our contempt for the villains on the other team. Because of who they are, everything they do is wrong, corrupt. We exaggerate it, ridicule it, and, at all costs, oppose it.

Bad deeds committed by those on our side are, of course, just fine, nothing to make a fuss over. In the view of pundit Michelle Goldberg, the pattern is playing out quite vividly in the case of Florida Congressman Cory Mills and the revenge-porn allegations against him. Mills’ party has shown no obvious concern about the ugly behavior of which he is accused, or any intention to do something about it.

“Mills embodies America’s ruling ethos,” Goldberg writes. “When you’re MAGA, they let you do it.”

When you’re not MAGA, they’ll block you at every turn. Even if the action you’re undertaking is objectively sensible and important, like doing something about the worsening climate for the sake of a viable human future.

Research shows that political identity strongly predicts whether a person accepts the reality of anthropogenic climate degradation and the need to take concerted action to confront it. If the libs are for it, the Trumpers are against it, by and large. Never mind the existential stakes. It is, for my money, the worst and most worrisome example of reactionary politics from the right.

Yes, secular-minded liberals are guilty of our own reflexive opposition to the words and deeds of those on the other side. One example might be our automatic defense of established institutions when they’re criticized, even if said institutions have failed on numerous scores and need some shaking up. Another might be our too-quick tendency to dismiss anything smacking of a religion, even if it’s religion in one of its more socially positive forms.

Each of us could rattle off other examples. None, I suspect, can match the enormity of our political inaction on the climate front.

Better belonging

Accumulated wisdom and sociological research show that humans need experiences of group belonging. Our survival depended on it through most of evolutionary time, and our emotional and psychological well-being depend on it still today.

Group identity, it appears, is inevitable. We just need better versions of it. I hope for the day when we form our political groups and identities in ways that equip us to face reality and confront our threats, and when we relate to other groups with more wisdom and less hostile reaction. I hope for the day when politically potent majorities and coalitions can take shape with a keen recognition of who the real enemies are, and with the ability to take effective action against them.

One can argue that today the “enemies” are not so much other humans but destructive ideas, social forces, and technologies, and the ominous geological processes our species has set in motion. It’s time to direct our energies against problems, not people, it seems. Team Human! Unite or Die!

It’s not that simple.

Because it’s people—a lot of them, anyway—who are standing in the way of our marshaling resources and taking actions commensurate with the enormity of the threats. At this moment, if we’re focused on the headlines and news cycles, it seems like the impossible dream that the would-be protectors of the planet might win over the opposition or defeat them politically. But paradigms, like fevers, eventually break. It can happen fast.

If you want a hopeful view, think about the leveraging of abortion decades ago and what it did to realign political identities. Those facing today’s existential risks are also pro-life, and in a sincere, comprehensive sense of the term. If “life” could change the game once, it could change it again.

As hinted at by MAGA’s continued frustration with Trump over his handling of the Epstein files, there are matters and moments—even in today’s intractable political environment—that have the potency to break allegiances and shift lines. As climate degradation continues to advance, and human suffering right along with it, is it so hard to imagine more people finally seeing what’s under their noses? Reflecting on their own pain? And turning against the political group that had the power to do something but chose instead to obfuscate and stall?

Big change is coming, whether by effective human hand or environmental devastation. We must work, while there’s still time, to ensure that what comes next is something good or, at least, less bad than it would otherwise be. There’s no joy in saying “told you so” on a scorched planet where there is hardly anyone left to hear.