Chris Mooney Quotes

Ethnicity and tribe begin precisely where taxes and sovereignty end.

Tribalism is the most powerful force in the world.

There's an enormous difference between voting for a candidate because you hate another ethnic group and voting for a candidate because he's a member of your ethnic group.

Identity politics is not politics at all, since it precisely negates the political as such by re-construing political positions in ethnic terms, subsuming 'ought' under 'is.'

I'm probably as royal as Elizabeth Warren is Cherokee.

When any one tells you that he belongs to no party, you may at any rate be sure that he does not belong to yours.

The idea is, we're still a society where we recognize and see and even sometimes seek members of our own tribe, whatever that tribe is. It could be ethnic, religious, geographic, political.

Incivility is not the disease. It is the symptom. Partisanship is the disease…. When your highest duty is to your party, the public interest becomes subservient.

As globalization proceeds, tribalism increases.

The defining mode of conflict in the era ahead is ethnic conflict.

You need to figure out other societies, where they came from, what the people believe in, what they do, how their ethnic divisions work, which is often very different from our own; then design your policies around that. Pay attention. I think that's the simple answer, which is just to realize that not everybody is like the United States. Whether you study history or sociology, or anthropology, journalism, there's room for seeing there are other cultures and other ways and other structures.

The bitter and agonizing fruit from the tree of nationality…

I am neither a Serb nor a Bulgarian, I am a South Slav.

… tribes with flags

Local Nationalism

I'm not - I'm not going to define people by labels: who's a real Republican, who's not a real Republican.

I want everybody to understand that I am an American Negro first before I am a member of any political party.

I grew up with so much of the identity of being Muslim and being Arab tied around politics.

People don't contest that I'm British as a black man, but they do contest that I'm English. Too many people are going back to an ethnocentric idea of what being English means.

I think it's just in human nature: if you've got two guys fighting, and you don't really know them, you're going to root for the guy who comes from your country.

People label themselves husbands, wives, moms, sisters, and friends before they label themselves Democrats or Republicans.

Tribalism never prospers, for when it does, everyone will respect it as a true nationalism, and no-one will dare call it tribalism.

Also, I think that, you know, it's tribal behavior. I don't think that Pat Robertson, for instance, doubts that we evolved. He is simply representing a tribe.

The stupidity of tribalism has made politics primarily about partisan identities, not persuasion or policy. The screamers on the right and left fuel one another. In a nation as big as ours, there is always someone somewhere saying something stupid—but tribalism takes this fact as its lifeblood. And it’s the excuse for otherwise civic-minded Americans to ignore the nuts in their own party and obsess only over the nuts in the other party. We’re tempted to think that the enemy of my enemy is my friend. It takes a genuine leader to remind us that most of the time, the enemy of our enemy is still a jackass.

Every ethnic group thinks they are the chosen ones.