Citizenship is dead

Once in a while some Socialist Worker people set up a stall outside my local Tesco to shout slogans at the progressive middle-class folk who make up much of the local demographic. One of the phrases I’ve heard them use is ‘Refugees welcome! Tories out!’ which is great and everything, except – what if the refugees are Tories? But then there are Sacred Groups and Out Groups, and each has their role to play in the modern morality play that is leftist politics.

Ideological tribalism is the subject of a new book by Yale’s Amy Chua, who argues that politics has replaced national or religious identity as a source of division. Chua has written about this subject before; although she is best known for the Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mum, before that she wrote World on Fire, about how market dominant minorities are always vulnerable to less privileged majorities – something I think we’re going to be reminded of in the near future.

America, she writes, is a society in which ‘membership is open to individuals from all different backgrounds — ethnic, religious, racial, cultural’, something that is almost given as a good thing in polite society, and yet she warns against ignoring the role tribalism plays in our lives. The prevailing political idea behind America today is that nationality is not defined by ancestry, religion or any of the ways in which group membership has traditionally been demarcated; ‘this is who we are’, as Obama, among others, defined it.