James Fallows

Back in the 1980s,  I wrote a long detailed article about the design concepts that the AR-15’s creator, Eugene Stoner, put into this weapon, and the ways it changed before going into service as the military’s M-16. If you want to know about the “barrel twist” differences in various models of the rifle, or the controversy about its bullet size, or how the AR-15 and M-16 compare with the Soviet-designed AK-47, or why it uses the kind of gunpowder it does, I would direct you to that article. (Or—please!—at least consider reading the article before firing off an incensed complaint that I haven’t addressed any of those aspects.)

In the past week I’ve posted several sequences of reader mail about the AR-15 and its uses. You can read the sequence first here, then here, then here. The latest item was from a one-time Colt engineer with a perspective like Dean Winslow’s: These rifles were meant for the military, not civilians.

Mail keeps pouring in on this topic. After a first winnowing,  by throwing out messages that include the words “libtard,” “cuck,” “ass from your elbow,” or “left-wing liar,” I’ll offer a sample of the range of views, some of them extremely detailed. Here goes:

When did the AR-15 first become available to civilians? One of the engineers I quoted said that the AR-15 had gone into military production (as the M-16) before appearing on the civilian market. Several readers disagree, with details like the ones offered here:

In your article "Why the AR-15 Was Never Meant to be in Civilians' Hands", your source claims that the AR-15 was not commercially available to civilians before it was standardized by the military. This is factually incorrect.

Colt sent a pilot model rifle (serial no. GX4968) to the BATF for civilian sale approval on Oct. 23, 1963. It was approved on Dec. 10, 1963, and sales of the "Model R6000 Colt AR-15 SP1 Sporter Rifle" began on Jan 2, 1964. The M16 wasn't issued to infantry units until 1965 (as the XM16E1), wasn't standardized as the M16A1 until 1967, and didn't officially replace the M14 until 1969. Colt had been selling semi-automatic AR-15's to civilians for 5 years by the time the M16A1 replaced the M14. Going off of the serial number records for the SP1, Colt had sold at least 2,501 rifles to the civilian market by 1965, 8,250 rifles by 1967, and 14,653 rifles by 1969.

Your source further says that he's shocked to "see this weapon any place other than the battlefield", and suggests that Stoner would have been as well. Colt was literally selling the rifle to the civilian market at the same time that they were testing and refining the rifle with the military in an attempt to land a contract. I don't understand how one could have been working at Colt and not have known this, particularly with so many civilian sales by 1967. It would have been something like 7 rifles sold on the civilian market per day that year, at least.

Furthermore, while I'm don't want to suggest that you're attempting to mislead by quoting this source in your article, it's prudent to note that there have been numerous articles lately (and have been over the years) which have been attempting to portray the civilian sale of the AR-15 as some recent development in order to explain the rise in mass shootings. The Colt AR-15 has been on the civilian market for 53 years (since 1964), and AR-15 pattern rifles made by companies other than Colt have been for 40 years (since 1977, when Stoner's patent on the AR-15 gas system expired). Sales of the AR-15 to civilians even predates background checks (Gun Control Act of 1968).

The first record I could find of a shooting with an AR-15 was George Banks in 1982 - at which point it had been on the market for 18 years, and Colt's SP1 serial numbers indicated 158,201 rifles sold… Its popularity in modern era mass shootings is unique, and is no doubt spurned on (like the mass shootings themselves) by media fetishization of the details, motives, and equipment of mass murderers.

Finally, I take issue with your article "Why the AR-15 Is So Lethal". The wounding potential of fragmentation (which is a result of a fast moving bullet yawing in tissue) is negligible compared to the wounding potential of hollow point bullets which generally expand to twice the bullet's diameter. Such bullets have existed since at least 1899 when they were (in my opinion, erroneously) banned by the Hague Convention. Jim Sullivan, one of the AR-15's designers, confirmed as much here:
"But 5.56 can’t complete with hunting cartridge bullets which can legally be expanding hollow point that are more lethal than tumbling and their lethality is based entirely on how powerful they are."

Hollow point bullets have been available in just about every cartridge for decades, and outclass military ammunition across the board (due to the Geneva Convention restrictions). The recommended cartridges for police and government use are all hollow point derived designs, whose lethality is thus correlated with the size of the projectile - not the weapon system itself. No departments use the original M193 or M855 to my knowledge for this reason.

In short: these two articles appear to be portraying the AR-15 as a rifle that was never supposed to be sold to civilians/was only sold to them at a later date, and a rifle which is inherently uniquely lethal. On both counts this is demonstrably false. There was good research in your articles (and the 1981 one), to be sure, but there is yet more correct information available and I believe the headlines are misleading ("Why the AR-15 Was Never Meant to be in Civilians' Hands", and "Why the AR-15 Is So Lethal"). More correct headlines would be something like these: "Why the AR-15 was sold to civilians before the army decided to adopt it", and "Why the AR-15's cartridge was and is not particularly lethal compared to the modern technology available at the time." Of course, they wouldn't exactly grab your attention.

You’d expect me to disagree with a lot of this perspective, and I do, but I’ll save that for later. For now I’m giving a range of people their say. Here is another reader with a similar complaint:

Regarding your comments made in your recent article "The Nature of the AR-15": you are being disingenuous when you claim that the AR-15 is "more lethal" than the M16, at least without making the distinction between the original ArmaLite AR-15s and the AR-15s sold commercially today. [JF note: the point of the article was that the M-16 became less reliable than the AR-15, because of changes in the process of “militarizing” it.]

The AR-15s sold at your local sporting goods store are a far cry from the ArmaLite AR-15s first used experimentally in Southeast Asia back in 1962-63, for two reasons. 1) The original AR-15s used in Vietnam were capable of semi or full-automatic fire, whereas all AR-15s sold to civilians today are semi-automatic only. 2) The original AR-15s had a 1-in-14 barrel twist, the effects of which you yourself described in your 1981 article. Virtually all AR-15s sold today have a 1-in-7, 1-in-8, or a 1-in-9 barrel twist. [This lower barrel-twist rate makes the bullet rotate more rapidly and therefore stay more stable in flight — and on impact.]

And from another reader, further on the twist ratio:

Most of the complaints by troops serving over seas currently is that the hits they are making are going right through with little damage.

When Stoner first shrunk the AR-10 in 7.62 [a larger bullet] to the smaller AR-15 with its 5.56 bullet, the barrel had a twist of one rotation in 14 inches.  

The Marines asked that this be increased to one twist in 12 inches as they felt the accuracy, especially in cold climates was insufficient.  

Most current Civilian and Military 5.56mm rifles use a twist of 1:7, 1:8 or 1:9.  At these high twist rates, the tumbling that was seen in the 60's and 70's is nonexistent.  

In fact most of these are considered over stabilized based on the weight of the bullets most are shooting.  

For a different perspective on the broader question of semiautomatic weapons in civilian hands, first here is a reader who mocks an earlier reader’s claim that the AR-15 can’t really be all that deadly. After all, the 2000 or so rounds fired in Las Vegas killed “only” 58 people:

Thank you - 36 years late - for the piece on the history of the AR-15. A friend who knows of what he speaks praised it as the most comprehensive look at the multitude of nightmares.

Concerning the tactless and inane comment on the 2000 shots fired to 58 deaths in the Las Vegas accident, it seemed really unusual that the author would provide that ratio as evidence that the AR-15 is ineffective.  

After all, the GAO reported that the military averaged 250,000 shots fired per kill in Iraq and Afghanistan.  

Another reader, on another argument that the AR-15 isn’t really all that deadly:

One thing seems to be overlooked by many of the readers who object to your characterization of the AR-15’s lethality. Several have commented that the AR-15 is not suitable for hunting big game, because it lacks “stopping power” or will leave large deer or bears merely wounded.

I am willing to assume that these readers, who seem to be experienced hunters, know what they are talking about, as far as shooting large animals in the bush is concerned.

This raises two issues to me:

1. It rather discredits any NRA claim that AR-15s are for sportsmen to hunt with.

2. It ignores the circumstances of the mass shootings you have been discussing.

Shooting a charging bear in the woods clearly requires different tactics and ammo than shooting large numbers of unarmed victims at close range in an enclosed space. You don’t need “stopping power” when you targets are children cowering on the floor at your feet or concert-goers gathered in crowds before a stage.

In these circumstances, the strengths of the AR-15 that you noted—such as speed of firing, lack of recoil, ease of use, rapid reloading, and so on—are clearly more important that raw “stopping power.” At the kind of close range involved in the church, theatre, and school shootings, there is no need for a large round to effectively kill the victims. And the speed of firing allowed the shooters to hit far more victims with a murderous “spray” in a short time.

The Las Vegas gunman was shooting farther, but not beyond the rifle’s effective range. And the massive number of rounds he was able to fire were the key to killing so many in the crowd in such a short period of time. These mass shootings are awfully close to the cliche of “shooting fish in a barrel.”

So I would submit that these reader objections may wll be accurate, but are not relevant to the kinds of incidents you are discussing. If you’re hunting bear, it’s key to be “loaded for bear.” But if you are hunting families at church, bear ammo may not be the most effective choice. Based on the information in your “Bureaucratic Nightmare” article and the comments of these readers, it seems the AR-15 is poorly suited to big game hunting, but all-too suited to murdering large numbers of confined civilians quickly.

And:

While many can’t perhaps believe that these tragic losses of life could be any worse, as a US Army Infantry Vet I certainly can .   

Ban or heavily regulate those semi auto rifles ?  Select-fire ones from Mexico will be the replacements, with rocket propelled grenades. Good bad or indifferent, that's the reality.

Finally for today, from a recent veteran of the military:

In my mind there are three reasons for gun ownership

1. Sport (hunting, competitive shooting)
2. Personal protection
3. "Safeguarding liberty" - or put bluntly, the ability of citizens' to overthrow a tyrannical government through violent means

The list above is, in order, my sympathies towards gun ownership. I believe that shooting is a fun past time that ought to be shared and participated in. I believe that when we live in a world where people reasonably do not trust the authority and power of the state and law enforcement, they should be allowed to protect themselves. I used to be in favor of the argument that a free society needed guns.

In reverse order, I believe the list above matches the intent of the framers of the Constitution. They were concerned with an overzealous state, and believed that a (white) man ought to protect himself. I am sure they were aware of sport shooting and hunting but I doubt that had anything to do with the right to bear arms.

***

So how did I, a red-blooded veteran who enjoys guns and loves America because of its evangelical mission for freedom, find myself almost at odds with the founders?

Really, our only sticking point is point #3 - that guns safeguard liberty. I believe there is legitimacy to this argument. I believe that it is not worth the price of mass shootings. I changed my mind after Newtown, CT. And I will fully admit that after I changed my mind I justified it with the following arguments.

• A) There are free, stable democracies across the world - Europe and Japan since WWII, India as well but with less economic freedom. For most of my lifetime, South Korea and South Africa as well. Great strides in Latin America since the Cold War. And in all those countries, only 2 have a "right to bear arms" in their constitutions - us and Mexico. (Guatemala does as well but they aren't the most stable democracy, yet). Both Guatemala and Mexico specifically do not allow "military-style" weapons, so they have it for the reason of personal protection.
• B) The founders (some of them) would be most horrified by our police force and our standing Army (more so than the Navy and Air Force). Any theoretical rebellion for freedom would necessarily be asymmetric. We have decided against their intent because we now have a doctrine that securing the blessing of liberty means America must be the "Arsenal of Democracy." I tend to agree with this doctrine, and think it neuters the ability for military-style small arms to be effective in safeguarding liberty among the citizens.
• C) I believe our Federal system - with State-controlled National Guard units, and equal representation of states in the Senate - very effectively checks and balances the power of the federal government. See: California in the time of Donald Trump.
• D) Article IV, Section 2, Clause I has been interpreted to give Americans a "Freedom of Movement." And yet we allow for restrictions on this - "No Fly" Lists (which I believe are too much), the security procedures at airports you've documented, the licensing procedure to drive and own a car. Gun control does not mean the end of freedom to own guns.
• E) Likewise, whenever we've been faced with attacks of any other kind - Timothy McVeigh using a VBIED, 9/11 - we've adjust our policies and procedures significantly. We didn't end flying on 9/11 or truck rentals after OKC. But we've managed to effectively limit the impact of terrorists copycatting.
• F) And finally, the most successful armed insurrection in United States history came from an entrenched interest group of wannabe aristocrats. They purposefully took up arms against their country and convinced their fellow citizens to do so as well - and did so to advance the cause of slavery, against freedom.

The 2nd Amendment was written and ratified when the French were transitioning power to a Constitutional Monarchy - when the idea of sovereignty was still wrapped up in the idea of kingship. When America was a radical idea. When the "Declaration of the Rights of Man" and the "Bill of Rights" were both extreme ideas, and nobody was sure if they'd really be implemented or last. And I still think it's important.

But it is not limitless, and the founders were wrong that it is "necessary to the security of the state" for citizens' to be able to overthrow their government through violent means. I believe that was their intent. I believe it had has disastrous consequences. I also believe I'm justifying re-interpreting this because of those consequences.

So what should we do? You've pointed out before - it's not realistic to remove guns. I don't want us to do that. I believe it's needless and also unfair. But either way it isn't realistic to stop modifiers like "bump stocks" from being taken off the streets.

My solutions:

1. Register every transaction of guns in America
2. Register all sales of ammunition
3. Require a notification with the ATF if guns are being transported across state lines
4. License all gun owners (on a state by state basis)
5. For anybody who owns more than, say, 8 guns, license them as gun collectors  (state)
6. Partner the ATF with the NRA or somebody else for "outreach and training" to extend safe gun knowledge and usage an ownership
7. Ensure that every state has a "no ownership" shooting range where gun enthusiasts can practice and train and decide if gun ownership is for them
8. Likewise, allow (and endorse) game areas to rent firearms to hunters for use in a designated area since there is now an onus on gun ownership for sport

It's a burden. It would make for a safer society. It would sacrifice a bit of liberty. Security and liberty will always be at odds with each other. I'm ok with this.

Overall: you can argue about exactly how deadly the AR-15 is, but indisputably it is lethal enough. You can argue about when exactly it first got into civilian hands, but with at least five million now owned by Americans other than the military, it is certainly widespread to a degree none of its designers foresaw. And I find it hard to argue with Dean Winslow—retired Air Force colonel, Trump administration appointee—when he so bluntly says it is “insane that in the United States of America a civilian can go out and buy a semiautomatic assault rifle like an AR-15.”

There was no commercially available civilian version of the AR-15 prior to the U.S. Military's decision to make it the default military rifle replacing the M-14, and designating it as the M16A1. I have significant personal experience with the issues experienced by the M16A1, which were the result of a combined civilian/military screw-up. [JF note: this screwup was the subject of my original article.]

The AR-15 was developed specifically as a military weapon to replace the M-14. It was probably one of the first major weapons systems to be privately developed following the DOD's decision to privatize the design and development function. This function had heretofore been carried out by publicly funded government operations, most notably, in the case of military small arms, the Springield Arsenal.

The AR-15 derived from a design by Eugene Stoner. His original design using that architecture and operating system was the AR-10, which used the 7.62mm NATO round. Seen today, it looks like an overgrown AR-15. The Armalite Company tasked two engineers with developing a version of the AR-10 that used the 5.56mm cartridge; these engineers were Jim Sullivan and Bob Fremont.

Only after civilian manufacturers like Colt's made boatloads of money producing M16A1's and selling them to the government did someone (I believe it was Colt's Firearms) decide to make and sell a semi-automatic-only version of the weapon for civilian sale. It was, of course, known as the AR-15.

Small but significant changes were made to the architecture of the lower receiver, primarily slight relocation of pivot pins and redesign of the trigger/hammer components that pivoted on them, so that it would not be possible to acquire, legally or illegally, M16 trigger/hammer and fire selector components and thus easily convert the AR-15 to possess the same full automatic capability as the M16.

***

Like Eugene Stoner, whose mission was producing better equipment for the military, I do not believe that there is any place in the civilian world for a family of weapons that were born as an assault rifle. I am a staunch supporter of properly equipping our nation's military but also of effective gun control for weapons available to civilians, to include banning those which are inappropriate outside a military context.

There is a legitimate culture in the countryside of hunting, but that is all about killing as well. The idea of guns as fashion statements or toys for macho posing or as general abstract symbols of something is the result of dangerous stupidity. The contemporary of Mark Twain, the comedian Bill Nye, referring to guns in the Wild West said a gun was something "with a coward at one end and a dead body at the other".

From a friend who is a veteran news reporter:

As you know, during WWII, the standard issue for GI’s was the M-1. It could hit a target at 100 yards but wasn’t effective in spraying potentially deadly fire.

I wrote a piece for [a major paper] in the late 50’s on why the Army was sticking with the M-1. What it came down to was that at the time, the NRA  sponsored competitions which the Army brass wanted to win. It was my first brush with the Pentagon bureaucracy: a dozen senior officers in a conference room with one young reporter. The paper ran my story which got some attention. But it required another war for things to change.

And similarly on the military background of the weapon:

I remember reading in a book on military history during my enlistment which said that there was a proposal in the 1930s for the US Military to switch from the existing .30 caliber (now known as the NATO 7.62mm x 51mm) round to a smaller, higher velocity round, but budget issues because of the Depression prevented the change over.

During basic training, I also had a drill sergeant tell us that the reason M16's were replacing M14's was both to allow the increasing number of women in the military to be able to use the weapon and to allow us carry more bullets. [The more-bullets point is one I discuss in my “Horror Story” article.]

I also think that part of the solution to the gun violence issue is finding a non-lethal home defense weapon to help remove the incentive to own either a pistol or long gun. I live in a crappy neighborhood, and the local beat cop recommends a 20-gauge semi-automatic shotgun with a laser sight for home defense because it will stop a home invader at the less than 20-foot distance of most home invasions, but it won't go through a wall and kill you neighbor.

In the same vein:

Thanks for your piece on the lethal power of the AR-15 bullet. I wish it would help change the thinking of the NRA and Americans who practice what the NRA preaches.

The piece also reminded me of my basic training drill sergeant at Fort Knox, just before Vietnam, explaining the virtues of the .30 caliber bullets used in our Korean War vintage M-1 Garand rifles: they would penetrate the wooden wall of a house, he said, and take out someone inside.

That sounded positively thrilling to my fellow trainees—18 and 19 year old recruits from Ohio, Kentucky, West Virginia and Pennsylvania west of Philadelphia, where I had found a Reserve unit with a vacancy just before the draft would have taken me.

On the other side, first from a reader in the Carolinas:

I think it is so funny when people like you, that it is very apparent that you know nothing about guns tries to convince people, That a AR15 is any more lethal than any other rifle. Even though I have watched ballistic test, that shows that an AR round of .556 or .223, does not have near the stopping power as many other regularly used hunting rifles. Many hand gun rounds are larger and more deadly.

The AR 15 has never been, nor ever will be a military grade weapon. No matter what lies you left wing liberals keep try to tell people.

For what it’s worth, the 1981 article described at length why the AR-15 was in fact more lethal than its military counterpart, the M-16. But judge for yourself.

Similarly, with the subject line “Why Are You A Coward?” and with a grace-note slur on my colleague Ta-Nehisi Coates, another reader in the South wrote:

Why are and that reparations Boy with the made up name the only ones who refuse to allow comments on your writing?  What are you afraid of?  Is your Libtard ego not able to handle different opinions?

“A poor killing machine”:

Your article lacks foundation and fact. The AR-15 is a civilian version of the M-16. [As pointed out.] …

The AR-15 is not more lethal and is in fact a poor choice for defense or hunting. Las Vegas shooter fired over 2000 rounds with 57 deaths shows how poor a killing machine it really is. [Nice.]

And with the subject line “Your Crappy Article,” from a reader (who gave his real name) in California:

As someone with a lifelong liberal orientation but who has also spent a lifetime in and around firearms, your article is worthy of Fox news.  The .223/5.56 round is being replaced because it LACKS lethality, it isn’t legal to be used on deer or anything larger for that reason.  In addition, what lethality the round had originally has been discarded in favor of accuracy by increasing the rifling twist and hyper stabilizing the projectile.

But most of all, modern tactics which drove the adoption of the AR and other modern assault weapons was the understanding and belief that wounding the enemy was more effective than killing him.  Dead people don’t need supply trains, wounded people tie up vast amounts of resources.   The AR was somewhat effective shooting malnourished 100lb Vietnamese boys, it is NOT proving lethal against full grown men in the ME.

ARs are popular because the kool kids like them and they make cowards feel powerful.   They are used for that reason, not because they are more lethal or even more effective.  The shooter in the Texas tower had a bolt action rifle and if you want to talk about lethality, hunting rifles are VASTLY more lethal.

More than happy to have an intelligent conversion about this because until the left can speak with at least a modicum of accuracy about weapons, the right is never going to listen to or trust any gun control efforts and because the laws are written by people who mistake appearance for reality, gun control laws are rarely effective.  [

Of course, I am just one more opinion in the wind but I have actually shaken Mikhail Kalashnikov’s hand, worked for some of the largest legal machinegun dealers and firearms importers, and have known the owner of the company that manufactures the US army’s heavy machineguns since I was a kid and have a bit more than your average layman’s knowledge.   In addition, I worked on liberal campaigns from Gary Hart to Bernie Sanders and am not a right wing nut.

My only reply for now is: read the 1981 article and decide for yourself its level of accuracy about firearms. I should add that I’ve just received a long, detailed, supportive-with-additional-detail note from a person who was directly involved in the M-16 design and manufacture back in the 1960s, which I’ll share tomorrow.

Finally for now, from a reader in Canada:

You, and every other Hollywood sensation are actually making us safer spreading this bull about the lethality of the AR 15, and we salute your for this misinformation campaign. The wacko criminals are reading this stuff and want that “full metal jacket” imagine as they do their crimes. That’s a good thing because it diverts their attention away from the reality of ordinary big game hunting ammo and its truly devastating terminal ballistics. Some day one of those criminals is going to do a shoot up with hunting ammo and then the media will be awakened and horrified.

But it is amazing how this lethality myth works on so many people in America. I guess they are mostly urban dwelling experts on guns or have served in the army and want to celebrate the authority that gave them, big guns and all. I have met plenty of Canadian army people who are in that same league.

But here on the prairies any kid over 6 that ever shot a gopher knows that “hard point” or “full metal jacket” ammo has pathetic killing power compared to hollow points. It should only be used on fur bearing animals where you specifically don’t want to do much damage. And when a 16 yr old kid starts hunting deer he better have learned that an AR 15, shooting .223 Remington calibre, is ILLEGAL BECAUSE IT LACKS KILLING POWER and leaves wounded animals. Our hunting regulations have prohibited .23 and smaller calibres for big game hunting for at least 50 years for that reason!

Of course a Colt AR-15 is a restricted gun here in Canada, thanks to the political activist’s perception of its lethality as seen on TV…

There are tons of AK-47 style rifles kicking around and they are cheap, robust, and more lethal at close range than a AR-15. But they just don’t scream America. Even Canada is awash in $200 Chinese SKS rifles used as “plinkers” because the media isn’t focused on them, ammo is so cheap, and its widely available in 500 round cases. Most Vietnam Vets would know the AK-47s are more lethal than an M-16 at close range due to its bigger penetrating bullet. [My article goes into this in some detail.] And even my son now knows not to take on a bear in the bush with one! He could also tell you that ordinary Winchester hunting ammo is too potent and will destroy some of those old Soviet and Chinese guns….

The basic deer gun around here is a 308 (7.62 NATO) or a 30-06, or one of many hunting cartridges that use the same casing and have about the same ballistic energy (eg 25-06, .243WIN, 284 WIN). Hunting regulations specify the use of “expanding bullets” such as “hollow points”, “soft points” or any of the more sophisticated expanding bullet types to insure the lethality of the ammo. These calibres and ammo are expected to kill a 300lb game animal swiftly in a single impact….

If a wacko shooter ever uses one of these ordinary hunting rifles every person hit will be dead and so will the two people standing behind them. Lets hope the wackos were never competent hunters. Lets keep them mis-informed.

Doubling down here means more and more the GOP will be characterized by this president and his media elite consorts, FOX News, Sinclair Broadcasting, right-wing talk, etc., etc., as not being true believers in Trump America, especially if they can't get tax reform done. "If only they were like so-and-so who truly believes, we would have the peace and prosperity all Americans want and deserve"—this will form the rightmost column.

What remains to be seen is whether there is enough maturity and forbearance of these candidates to avoid the dicier cultural issues—white supremacy, guns, LGBTQ, guns, women's health/justice, guns, and so on—to let them fly under the radar just far enough to keep the Dems from being able to animate their voters.

If VA was a real harbinger, I think the vote margin would have been much wider. As it is, there are enormous swaths of rural America who only get local news from Sinclair or FOX affiliates and so have a steady diet of low-grade rhetoric that prevents them from seeing things as they would if they would pay attention to any other media....

This is why the kneeling protests are so effective at animating the Trump base ... and why he's draped himself in the flag at every turn. In this ongoing war of rhetoric, the Left has relied for too long on public schools to deliver an egalitarian civic-mindedness. As more and more people choose to home school their kids and close their minds to ideas they don't like, the easier it is for the Right to control the ways in which rural America engages in the political. Like lambs to the slaughter.

I'm not certain I want the Left to weaponize their media the same way the Right has, but I'd rather there was some level of parity ... and an eventual detente, between the sides.

P.S.  IMHO, yard signs sealed the deal for Trump here in the Midwest.  That's a very low-order rhetoric that's hard to miss when neighbor after neighbor has a Trump sign but there were few if any Clinton signs as I was driving through Iowa, Wisconsin and rural Illinois.  I'm pretty sure Michigan and Pennsylvania were the same.

___

As for the term itself, a scientist defends it:

As a biologist, I take a different connotation of the word “tribal”.  We are, like our closest primate relatives “tribal” animals in that we tend to live in small selective groups. Chimpanzee and ape tribes exhibit many of the same behaviors seen in human tribes, including the often instant and irrational violence against outsiders.  For those of us who see humans as one of an evolutionarily related group of animals rather than divine creations, describing our social behavior as “tribal” is simply stating the obvious.

A member of an indigenous nation disagrees:

Only today, for the first time, did I see your article on the use of tribalism. I was interested, as I have thought about this for awhile.

I am a member of a ‘tribe’ - an enrolled citizen of a small indigenous nation from the west coast (Confederated Tribes Coos, Lower Umpqua & Siuslaw). I have not liked the use of tribalism, tho’ not for reasons of cultural appropriation. It isn’t a Native American word and not one I don’t think any of us would have chosen for ourselves. I don’t like it because - as with so many things Europeans and Euro-Americans put on us - has negative connotations. Yes, even in the 21st century there is a lot of prejudice against Native Americans, a deep contempt. I have my own thoughts on why that is, but at the moment that is neither her nor there.

Suffice it to say, tribalism has negative connotations, and Natives are one of the people’s that ‘tribe’ is applied to, and we are still viewed with great contempt and suspicion by the 98 percent of Americans that are not indigenous.

I don’t know of a word that work better than tribalism in these political contexts. My solution would be, stop applying ‘tribal’ to Native Americans. I confess I quite like the Canadian phrase First Nations. I suspect, however, that that would not go down well with Americans - especially the Trump fans. It’s too ‘politically correct’, of course, for their liking.

In similar anti-“tribal” spirit, from someone with a different background:

'Tribalism' does not resonate, does not 'signify', with many people at all, I think.

I understand (I suppose) what is meant, but in explaining it to the multitude of relatives and acquaintances perhaps less educated or less aware, I either have to explain the concept at about the length you have required or - more commonly - I drop back to the immediately understood term 'team', as in "Tell me, is there any principle involved here or is it just 'my team against your team'?"

After hearing from your Southwest correspondent, I now recognize that there is a pejorative odor in our use of 'tribalism', as it suggests there is a sense that extreme partisans reflect an identification by birth, not by reasoning or analysis or even simple emotionalism. Most of us would say it is good, or at least not bad, to identify with a tribe that reflects our cultural and genealogical heritage, but there is only dismissal and disapproval implied in the term 'tribalism' as you use it.

At first reading, my 'gut response' was that it is unfortunate that 'tribe' has been misappropriated for our native peoples, but on reflection - and with a bit of research - I have to conclude instead that a simple meaningful concept has been misappropriated and distorted in the political usage. The unfortunate part is that there is no natural formation 'teamism' in the language for loyalty to a self-selected clique or faction or club or ... oh wait ... PARTY.

Could it be that we cling to the notion that the term PARTY implies some honorable characteristic of idealism that we want to distinguish from something baser, a team or a club or a cabal? Are we being naive there? *Especially* after seeing the day-night up-down changes within the Republican Party in just a year or two? Ought we to use 'party' appropriately - instead of 'tribe' - and appropriate some other word to identify a party that is organized around ideals?

Which, inevitably, I’ll follow with someone making an extended defense of this freighted term, and returning to biological arguments:

I think tribalism is the right word—precisely because the usage of the word carries the very connotations that critics of the word object to.

Tribe is the appropriate word because it is the word applied in science for groups of prosocial mammals gathering in a group larger than one might reasonably consider a pack or colony. We speak of a tribe of monkeys, or a tribe of apes, or a tribe of guerillas, chimps, bonobos, etc. We speak of multi-colony groups of rats as tribes.

Tribe is scientifically important because it does not infer relation by blood, whereas a clan or colony implies shared lineage through mating or otherwise. Tribe implies a larger group bonded by social relations more complex than mating associations, but smaller than describing the species, and recognizing that these large groupings can share large geographical ranges with other such groupings.

This usage of the word tribe understandably creates an image of the primitive, the primal, the animal. In other words, it invokes the savage, and we should all understand why invoking the savage is debasing to those who are thus demarked as closer to savage. It is one group of people assuming that they are more socially developed than the other, and therefore superior.

***

Whether it is Romans and Greeks assuming the light of civilization had made them more dignified than the tribes of those they termed barbarians, or later Christendom assuming that godliness and piety had raised them above the base nature of a humanity tainted by original sin, or later Age of Reason intellectuals constructing a social Darwinist model wherein 'tribalism' is a precurser to 'nationalism' and 'civilization,' Western civilization (and Eastern too, if we are to look to other worldy empires and hegemons) has a long history of finding ways of asserting that the ruling culture is superior to others on the basis of development and a concept of cultural maturity.

Herein, however, lays the root of the problem: this construction is itself just an exercise in the root fact that human beings are prosocial mammals, specifically prosocial primates, and that our nature as mammals is not as well reasoned as we would otherwise like to pretend. It is a construction that places social value and status on reasoned decision making, or at least the perception thereof, and therefore ascribes superior reasoning to the dominant culture on the basis of that dominance.

This is, we are finding out, just a way for our particular species of primate to assert social dominance. The Age of Reason, it turns out, is just a complex excuse for one socially dominant group of primates to assert dominance over the other.

In point of fact, as we apply reasoned thinking to ourselves, we have discovered the human animal is host to a collection of cognative biases and prone to a number of logical fallacies when it comes to our fragile constructions of self-identity. We have developed a toolbox of methods to manipulate those biases we call marketing, which we use to influence others into purchasing decisions. Today, we find ourselves in a place where those tools have been applied to influence the decisions of voters through billions of dollars in campaigning.

This is what the Framers failed to account for, deep in Age of Reason thought: the base nature of humanity-- its animal origin-- is in fact more potent than reason itself when it comes to political hierarchy. The Framers assumed that reasonable men would always be able to come to reasonable compromise, deep in the conviction of thier self-identification as reasonable men. So what happens when irrational human voters choose irrational human leaders on a basis divorced from deliberate thought?

We know today that while an individual may be reasonable on a case by case basis, all peoples are susceptible to cognitive blind spots, particularly when it comes to self-identity. So now we find ourself in a polity where large voting blocks with common social identity have ceased to care about the reasoning or veracity of their political leadership, where reasoned compromise has become anathema to those who prefer to assert the dominance of their shared identity.

So yes, the appropriate word for this is tribalism, because tribe describes a social grouping of primates larger than a colony. The irrational behavior we specifically wish to discuss manifests at this scale and is a product of the animal instincts at the heart of human nature….

And finally for today: the resonance of both word and concept in classical terms.

I think you’re trying to do too much with a single word.

You are looking for a word to capture a relentless preference for me and my kind: what’s good for us is what’s right.

One issue in this what to call ‘our kind’ or ‘us.’  “Tribe” may be the right word, but why not race or nation or clique or faction?  Is there some general word we can use for ‘my kind?’  Whatever word we chose, we’re likely to give that word a pejorative cast, and some may take exception because they want to use that same word for “us” in a more positive way – like ‘nation’ or ‘tribe.’

Another issue here is what we make of the claim of rightness in the preference for me and my kind.  This is a question of justice, not terminology, and it’s far the more important issue.

***

In The Republic, Thrasymachus argues that ‘justice is the interest of the strong.’  There is, he asserts, no deeper or transcendent sense of justice.  This is precisely the proposition that you want to hold us to scorn.  A preference for me and my kind is also an undisguised claim that we (me and my kind) are the strong, and that we will prevail.

Socrates/Plato didn’t think much of Thrasymachus’s understanding of justice, and you and I don’t either.  It’s pernicious, and yet it is a very common weed in human understanding.

You’re looking for a way to capture that growing acceptance in the United States of justice as the interest of the strong – that belief that any talk of justice having a higher moral foundation is just foolishness.  

Trump embodies that Thrasymachus-ian understanding of justice.  He didn’t give birth to it in modern American politics; he simply has found a way to gather a following -- including a disturbing number of Republican leaders – around that conception.  (It's all the more remarkable that this ugly conception of justice is often dolled up in Christian evangelical terms.)

I don’t know a single word that captures this.

That is all for now. Thanks to readers who have written in from around the world.

I agree with you that the connotations of “tribal” conveys exactly what is being evidenced by the GOP in the House and Senate (not to mention the 34% … or whatever the number is now) But other suggestions that might meet some of the connotations (but, admittedly, not all) could be

·         They are exhibiting the “herd mentality” that is expected from a group that is suffering from an almost incomprehensible amount of cognitive dissonance (or they should be, if they have even the slightest vestige of a conscience)

·         They are falling prey to the “group think” that one thinks of when imagining shoppers succumbing to the latest fad or sale … or to the lemmings that blindly follow the leader off the cliff (of moral responsibility, etc.)

Also from Canada, about its aboriginal nations:

I'd like to offer a somewhat different perspective on the usage of "tribalism". We would never say "Stop using 'redskin' to mean violent and terrifying barbarians because this is upsetting to redskins", because the obviously correct remedy is to stop referring to people as redskins.

"Tribalism" is, of course, far less problematic than "redskin" because it has a legitimate, independent meaning, but the general idea is the same. The real issue is not that we are insulting aboriginal cultures by using the word "tribalism" to describe behaviour that we don't like, but rather that we are assuming that their is something inherently tribal about aboriginal people.

Here in Canada, this is part of the reason that we often refer to aboriginal people as belonging to nations rather than tribes. (e.g. the Cree nation, the Ojibwe nation, etc.) "Tribe" is still used occasionally, especially when speaking colloquially, but using "nation" acknowledges both the rich cultural traditions of aboriginal peoples and the sophistication of their political systems whose histories long predate contact with European explorers.

Which leads to Orwell and nationalism:

In his 1945 essay “Notes on Nationalism,” George Orwell examined a phenomenon much like the one you describe. He too could not find a precise word to define the thing. “As the nearest existing equivalent I have chosen the word ‘nationalism,’” he wrote, “but…it will be seen that I am not using it in quite the ordinary sense, if only because the emotion I am speaking about does not always attach itself to what is called a nation — that is, a single race or a geographical area.""

Or, the emotional connotations of clannishness:

One thing that 'tribalism' gets right is that it involves a heavy sense of identity.  How many Republicans voted for Trump over Clinton not because they thought he was better or more competent or even more closely aligned with their abstract interests but simply because he was the Republican nominee and they were Republicans?

Political science (at least in my reading which comes filtered through the news media) suggests that one outcome of political polarization (and other exacerbating factors) has been the incorporation of political party as a central part—an organizing principle—of people's identities.

'Clannishness' also conveys this—at least colloquially it seems like the same term except used to refer to a different people and therefore with different historical and cultural baggage. 'Factionalism' doesn't - interest groups are not necessarily identity groups.

Or identitarian?

I was going to suggest both factional and partisan politics, but I just saw your more recent article discussing the shortcomings of those terms. A few other suggestions:

• Groupish, in-group, or kin-group politics: I quite like the term "groupish" as an antonym to "selfish" - I first saw it in Jonathan Haidt's "The Righteous Mind" but I'm not sure if he coined it. It feels a little more value-neutral to me than tribalism, but it suffers from the fact that it sounds a little made-up and childish.
• Identitarian: This is a term that has been used more frequently on the right to describe identity-oriented liberal politics, but I do think it is a useful way of thinking about a certain political style closely associated with tribalism. On the downside it has an unpleasant jargony feel to it.

For what it's worth, I quite like factional, sectarian, and partisan as alternate terms, but I understand your objections.

Or the Japanese concepts of uchi and soto, us and them:

Harking back to your days in Tokyo, I wonder if the Japanese words “uchi” (内) and “soto” (外) might be a good fit. As you may remember, “uchi” doesn’t just mean “inside”—it refers to the collective “us” versus “them,” whether that’s your family, your company, your village, your country. . . or your party. “Soto” isn’t just outside—it’s “them,” whose needs, desires, issues are secondary to ours. It’s okay to sacrifice the common good if it’s necessary to support the “uchi.” And that would lead to placing party over country, as Republicans are doing now (and Democrats have done in the past).

Of course, teaching people both the denotation and the connotation of these words is probably harder than simply using “tribalism.”

Or the Japanese concepts of baseball fanatic-fans:

For the "tribal" thread on the Atlantic at the moment, I'd like to suggest a Japanese term that captures the sports-fanaticism with which you will probably be familiar from your time there [yes]: consider ōendan (応援団). Nothing says "over the top" like the cheering squad for the Hiroshima Carp at a game.

Or the sect?

I wonder if the word "sect" might work in place of the word "tribe". In his book From the Maccabees to the Mishnah, Shaye Cohen describes a sect like this:

"A sect is a small, organized group that separates itself from a larger religious body and asserts that it alone embodies the ideals of the larger group because it alone understands Gods will." (Page 120)

I grant that the Republican Party hasn't exactly separated itself, given its entrenchment throughout our government. However, given the ways in which the Republican Party only looks out for itself, and that it is unwilling to compromise on any beliefs and believes that other groups are entirely wrong about theirs, the term seems to fit. The religious nature of the term also seems particularly apt these days.

Back for a moment to tribes:

I am ignoring the issue of modern hypersensitivity.

In my generation in New York City, the question “Is he a member of the tribe?” meant simply, is he Jewish?

And similarly:

Did any Jewish people write in (twelve tribes of israel)? Any Italians protest that tribe derives from tribus, naming the three tribes of Rome? Any Baconians write to make sure you know, as you certainly do, where that title [of Andrew Bard Schmookler’s book, Idols of the Tribe] comes from, and to assure you that Bacon did not have Native Americans in mind, but was using a word with, by then a 300-year history?

I teach in a university English department, so I’m used to such linguistic policing and purifying, and all the ignorance of language and history that comes with it. I still like to think that education, in this case, in word history, is a proper response.

I’m probably kidding myself.

And more on the origin of tribe:

I've actually been debating for the last week writing a piece about the word "tribe" inspired -- if that's the right term -- by my recent visit to my undergrad alma mater, where I discovered this article in the Brown Daily Herald.

Here you have Native American students insisting that Anglo use of the word "tribe" represents inappropriate "cultural appropriation," which is a major issue at Brown.

I "get" finding offensive some references to Native Americans (or, for that matter, any ethnic group)—not just the Redskins, but the horrible Cleveland Indians mascot, etc.  I "get" finding the Atlanta Braves' Chief Nokahoma and his guttural chants to be not only offensive but also (very poor) cultural appropriation.

But "tribe"?  First of all, it's an English word, not a Native American word, dating from the 13th century—long before Anglos even knew Native Americans existed—and is believed to derive from the Latin word tres, to refer to the three "tribes" into which the Roman people were originally divided.  The concept has a long history in the political science literature, having nothing to do with Native Americans.

In case you hadn't heard, the ancient Israelites were divided into 12 tribes (and most of us Jews still refer to each other as MOTs, or Members of the Tribe...).

Tribes are an overwhelming component of African and Middle Eastern politics—although there is a legitimate debate as to whether many African peoples referred to by whites as "tribes" are better classified as ethnic groups, a term I keep to in discussing Africa because the use of "tribe" to describe African peoples is seen as pejorative where similar European groupings (like, say, Catalans) are not similarly referenced.

"Tribe," however, is a form of social organization lying somewhere, historically and complexity-wise, between "bands" and "states."  In that sense, many Native American peoples—for instance, the Iroquois, with their sophisticated state structure and constitution—cannot be said truly to be "tribes."

Conversely, the Hopi don't really regard themselves as one people, at least for purposes of social organization and government, but rather as distinct villages (which all have different ceremonial calendars, dialects, and governance structures); the Hopi "tribe" is actually a federal government construct—one might then say that some Native American groups are not tribes but are less organized social constructs.

In any event, neither the word nor the concept of "tribe" or "tribal" originated with or pertains exclusively to Native Americans.  Perhaps its use pejoratively is an indirect pejorative aimed at Native Americans (although it could be just as easily dismissive of all peoples around the word who didn't develop state structures and are thus viewed unthinkingly by us white folks as less advanced).  But the one thing you can't say is that the word, insulting or not, represents a "cultural appropriation" from Native Americans—or anyone else except, to a degree, the Latins (who are always described as an Italian tribe...).

“You have my permission”:

"Tribal" is, by a country mile, better than the alternatives offered by your correspondent. I can think of no more apt word, though there may well be some. In any event, it serves your intended purpose very well and no-one could properly think that a negative connotation would attach by its use to anyone outside of those referred to in your article.

You have my permission to continue using it!

No, you don’t: from a reader who warns against the use of “tribalism”:

Wittgenstein already yet!  If we are going in for heavy thinkers - heavier
than Madison and Montesquieu?!—then I commend to you a collection of essays,"Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics" (2009) (from a symposium held at Bard College on the centenary of her birth).

Arendt thought long and hard about the problem of differentiated communities  within the American mosaic, and how they could be reconciled with a democratic system and ethos.  She came at it from a distinctive but very useful perspective:  that of an American Jew, active in political thought and action.

Her fundamental point is that we/she should  not have to give up our
"tribal" identity to be full participants in American democracy.  She
reserved the right to feel fully her distinctive Jewishness, without that in any way disqualifying her from the right of full participation in American democracy.  She had seen first-hand a grim alternative, having emigrated from Germany in 1933.

Much the same approach could be said of the feelings of black Americans, who are recently (and again) asserting their right to blackness and indeed a very hard-earned right to a sense of historical grievance with the ethos and the system, without assenting to being labeled outsiders or alien because of that stance.  Your colleague Ta-Nehisi Coates well illustrates this in his trenchant series of tweets in response to General Kelly's unreconstructed "Southernism."

Bottom line I urge you to turn away from the use of "tribalism" for the rhetorical purpose you are pursuing.

And to wrap up this installment, two messages on the role of “tribes” in a diverse society. First, a nation of tribes:

I still think tribalism is the best term.

And aren't we really a nation of tribes?  And aren't some of our tribes more powerful than others?  And some more benign than others?  And don't many of the tribes align with others of similar interests to form 'nations?'   At least that was the term we Europeans labeled the indigenous of this country when they aligned.  

I subscribe to the notion that Climate Change is going to 'undo' Western Civilization.  (Hopefully, thee and me will be pushing up daisies before that happens.)  The fragility of the distribution system in this country will see a collapse in the norm (i.e., power and food will be scarce).  Survival will rely on tribal association, just as it exists in prisons today.

And, finally for today:

Of all the words which have been suggested, “tribal” is the only one which seems to me to capture the profoundly regressive nature of the present situation.

During the middle years of the last century some Harvard sociologists were at the forefront of attempts to identify the ways in which modern and pre-modern societies are fundamentally different. For example, in modern societies social identities which have been “achieved” tend to be valued more highly than “ascribed” identities, while “universal” norms which are seen as applicable to everyone are generally considered more important and relevant than the norms which only apply to the members of “particular” groups.

To those sociologists, this “package” of distinctively modern values and norms has to a significant degree been responsible for the competitive advantage which, other things being equal, highly modernized societies have enjoyed relative to more “backward” societies.

Owing partly to the “presentist” bias of [Talcott] Parsons and his colleagues, along with the powerful historical forces which were unleashed by the Vietnam War and the 60s generally, attempts to separate the modern sheep from the pre-modern goats fell badly out of fashion.

While that proved to be a good thing in many ways, some very healthy babies wound up being thrown out with the dirty bathwater, including the basic idea that highly modernized societies in which ‘tribal” values and impulses are forced to play subordinate roles have some important advantages over societies in which constant internal strife between factions (to use the term preferred by some other correspondents) drains away energies which could otherwise be put to better, more productive uses.

There are about 50 more messages in the pipeline. I’ll plan to do another highly selective highlight-sampling in a day or two. Thanks all around.

There is some literature on the obnoxious sports fans ... football hooligans and the like. For example, there is an article on "dysfunctional fans"—surprising to see just how many characteristics overlap with the most hateful elements of the extreme political partisan.

Here’s a very long argument in favor of a new term, Pareto-ism, drawn from the namesake of the economic concept of Pareto efficiency. (In essence: a Pareto-efficient or Pareto-optimal situation is one where you can’t make any participant better off, without making someone else worse off.) Over to the reader:

I would suggest the word “Paretoism.”

I know that to those with an American Indian heritage, the word "tribal" has a very specific, technical and positive meaning. I also know the other perfectly legitimate meaning of the word that has a negative meaning to it, along with a distinct whiff of cultural superiority.

It would be nice if one could find a perfectly unambiguous word for which ever meaning one wanted. But science points to the fact that that is usually not possible.

Wittgenstein, of course, tried to prove that individual words had atomic absolute meanings. Immediately after claiming to prove that, however, he realized that they don't.  A few years ago a team at MIT looked at the matter from a technical measurable sense. The summary is that the most efficient and powerful language possible is one in which all of the words are ambiguous, and the meaning is only in the context.

Briefly, instead of having a separate word for every possible present and future meaning, you use combinations of words to define any given meaning.  (The same thing is done with letters to make words.) That is basically what Wittgenstein came to understand, but the new point being that that is not just some inherent defect of language, but a hallmark of an efficient and powerful language.  As the study said:

"Basically, if you have any human language in your input or output, you are stuck with needing context to disambiguate.”

If everybody simply understood that all meaning is only in the context, then things would be a lot simpler. One could use the word "tribalism" in different contexts, and everyone would be happy with their different meanings….

If you want a word that has no historical or cultural baggage so that you can use it to represent your own meaning, then, like Shakespeare himself, you should invent a new word. For what is going on now I would propose the new word "Paretoism", after Vilfredo Pareto, the originator of the "80/20" "Pareto Principle": the empirical observation that 80% of the effect is the typically the result of just 20% of the causes.

He claimed, among other things, that the world is always run by the "20%", and that the membership of the ruling 20% rotates through time. To the extent that that is true, and to the extent that one knows it, then the logical conclusion for someone seeking political power is to be in the next 20%.

The task is then not to take your preexisting group into power, but to kick and scratch and punch and get on the new 20% bandwagon that is headed there. In this endeavor, excluding the other 80% isn't a fault, but it is the aim in this strategy...

Improbably but for real, another note on Wittgenstein:

I disagree that the words tribe/tribal/tribalism, as homophones, are somehow to be discouraged because alternative meanings of the words may carry a negative connotation in referring to a specific population.

This is a familiar impulse to select one meaning for a word and then to homogenize all uses of that word to align to your selected interpretation, but it simply isn't meaningful (see: Anthony Federico's "chink in the armor,"; David Howard's use of the word "niggardly).

This is fundamentally different than using terminology which grew out of some lexicon used specifically towards a specific group (i.e. "war paint," "pow-wow," "vision quest"). My Wittgenstein is pretty rusty, but I think the "use is meaning" as you employed the term here is perfectly appropriate.

What's more, the term "tribalism" is a well established construct in sociology and psychology!  

There's a large body of research about how we behave towards in-group and out-group members.  This is, as I understood it, precisely what you were referencing - congressional republicans extend to in-group members these benefits and advantages that they would never extend to out-group members (Democrats). All this post-modern debate about 4th-order hypothetical effects of language usage just obscures what your original point was.

And from a critic of “PC tribalism”:

I had to chuckle reading your article “On the Many Connotations of Tribalism” as the retired teacher’s politically correct response shows a different tribalism. The PC tribe.

The Trump tribe and PC tribe despise each other. If you want to pull a Trump tribe member into a reasoned discussion, don’t bring along a PC tribe member, all you’ll get is fireworks.

For the Trump tribe, fake news, manufactured outrage, America apologizing, being wishy-washy and overall moral weakness comes from the PC tribe.  Most people want nothing to do with either tribe but if the politics make you choose between one or the other … which one do you choose? If you don’t discuss politics, which one do you watch the game with over a cold beer? I don’t think Democrats understand how they have this PC brand on their foreheads and how it affects their success.

Finally for today, “scorn for tribalism is an American tradition.” Over to the reader:

I too have spent some time amongst the Native American tribes and have long-time Native American friends…

In summary, Tribalism was a waypoint on the road to civilization and it works/worked well when a group was closely bound by a shared experience, a small footprint, and familial relations.  Tribes have a tendency to value and pay attention to things relevant to the tribe to the exclusion of the big picture outside their purview….  

So yes, in the modern ambition of multi-national diversity and E Pluribus Unum (I love and use that phrase often, as do my Jamaican friends!), we adopt Tribalism to our political convenience and great national risk.

We are not a tribal people anymore. We have assembled into complex communities and have adopted complex systems to weave our shared interests together. To the extent that we adopt Tribalism we are reaching back to an atavistic method of civilization that draws hard lines between us and seeks to divide us by design.

Example: When I look at middle eastern people I see Semitic people, virtually indistinguishable and clearly of a common ancestry. Yet those same people seem culturally and politically intent on holding their tribal identity in front of themselves and use it to distinguish their separateness and rationale for rejecting unity.

I believe it took the cauldron of tyranny and rebellion for us to break the bonds of Tribalism.  And they still exist in my Scots-Irish tradition.  I just choose to give them low emphasis, a vestige of a brutal time. By endlessly revisiting the insults and injuries of 600 years, our clan got itself pretty much wiped out in useless conflict. My Croat family showed much the same proclivity in the war with Serbia and has only recently found a new path with the EU...

America has been a success because as a people we have moved beyond our old world identities to become one people. We have traditions but we live in the here and now. We even change our Surnames if it makes us fit better. We have no real use for tribes beyond their quaint reference to a time when the Hatfields made war to the McCoys over the next ridge. And we have even found a way to make the whole spectacle into a tourist attraction.

We are a funny possibly shallow people, we Americans, but we grow and prosper by avoiding the obvious tribal mistakes we evolved from.

Scorn for Tribalism is an America tradition.  Wear it proudly.

Actually, just one more for now:

It's unfortunate that so many people get triggered by the word 'tribal', but I'm struggling to think of a better broad term for that incessant and destructive trait of our species.  

We divide ourselves into "us" versus "them" groups which can be aligned along almost any axis—politics, race, religion, language, nationality, sports and so on. "We" are virtuous, well-meaning, peaceful, and humane. We may have our flaws but they're perfectly understandable and we're making rapid progress toward fixing them. "They" are corrupt, contemptuous, lazy, and violent. Their flaws are many and proof of their poor character.

The problem with words like partisan, sectarian, or faction is that they are limited to just a narrow feature of human life, such as politics or religion.   But our tribalism underlies our divisions in all these areas.   It's a persistent and pernicious feature of Homo sapiens and it seems to be wired into us.  I wish we could find a way to tone it down.    

I’ll give the theme a rest for a day or two, from my new locale of Amsterdam, and then will distill some of the dozens of other suggestions that have arrived. Thanks to all for the thoughts and back-and-forth.  

Madison's analysis of the problem of faction—and why the U.S. constitutional system should reduce it—assumes that the most common factional impulse is interest.  The constitutional system currently ill-serves us because factions today are principally of the passion-driven sort.  

I admire Madison greatly, but every leg of his claim that the Constitution solves the problem of faction has been shown deficient by the rise of Trump: Democracy as majority rule did not prevent his election, nor has the diversity of interests in the country ameliorated the disease, and, as your prior article argued, neither does the system of institutional checks and balances.

By the way, the push-back you received—a hyper-sensitivity to the term “tribe,” merely because it is sometimes associated with Native Americans—is also a sign of faction based on passion. Although I perceive factional feeling to be less intense on the left, it is clearly there as well, albeit exacerbated by Trump's rhetoric.

I spent enough time reading and writing about Federalist 10 in college to recognize the mot juste nature of “faction.” The main argument against using it is that it’s unfamiliar to most modern readers. Many people might think it was just a typo for “fraction.” Another reader notes the plus and minus of the term:

Despite having largely fallen into desuetude, "factional" has the advantage of resonating with founders' fears.

No kidding, desuetude is a word I’ve been trying to work into a web post for quite a while. (So is apposite, which you’ll find below.)

Similarly on factions:

Re: "tribal" and what to use in its place, Hamilton uses "factious" pretty frequently in the Federalist Papers. Lifting language from the ultimate defense of the Constitution in an effort to describe people abducting their constitutional duties would resonate, I think.

Sectarian and other possibilities. A range of suggestions:

I suggest "sectarian" vs. "ecumenical."  No better place than religion, after all, to seek the core vocabulary of both destructive divisiveness and blessed reconciliation.

… and clique

One possibility is "clique," which has both lovely high-school in-group overtones, as well as a long-standing tradition in social network analysis to talk about an island of individuals with little to no outward edges.

… and a dive into jargon

I am not a sociologist, but I'm pretty sure the academic term of art for the phenomenon you describe is "ingroup favoritism."

That is academic jargon and not plain English like you asked for, but I don't think it's particularly difficult to comprehend or offputting in the way jargon can often be. And the usage is common enough that this non-sociologist is familiar with it.

… and if we’re talking jargon

I share your puzzlement about what a better word is, although I do take the point from your reader from the southwest.

At least going back to the latin, maybe something like cogitare-coetus. Or maybe Omasnomizo Doesn't exactly role off the tongue.

For what it’s worth, I have no idea what these terms mean.

And we have pack

Obviously, you could sacrifice a tiny bit of cultural consensus for cultural sensitivity by replacing ‘tribal' with ‘pack', attaching ‘mentality’ for extra clarity.

.. and cabal

The word is Cabal

I think it is more accurate than tribe, the way you mean it.

… also gangs

There IS a better noun: Gangs

.. and finally in this vein, see for yourself:

"Klan" is over the top, but seems better to me.

And a more extended version of the case for Klan:

If the idea here is to use a negative sense of "tribal identities," why be afraid that clan may be mistaken for THE Klan? The intent is to say we are all a part of a better, higher, more idealistic group than the many clans we're a part of - and that loyalty to that idea, to that republic, should be stronger than loyalty to the clan.

In this day, in this moment, where a group called "Black Lives Matter" is willing to take a lot of heat for the rights of a wronged minority, I've no problem with being oversensitive to another wronged minority of Americans whose Tribal community makes them sovereign and culturally distinct.

In short, I'd rather make folks uncomfortable by inadvertently associating them with the Klan or making the old Scottish clan system seem dated and obsolete than make them uncomfortable by associating them with tribes in a way that makes American Indians uncomfortable and feel obsolete.

To wrap up for now, two arguments for the word partisan:

I can’t believe that neither you nor the reader who complained suggested what I believe to be the better word: partisan.

I actually think that’s what you intend to communicate. It avoids the potentially offensive connotations which she pointed out. It also avoids the added semantic implications of “tribal“ which I’m pretty sure you don’t mean; there are really no culturally or socioeconomically significant connections between Donald Trump and Paul Ryan, not in the sense of “tribal.”

And the ties that are – unfortunately – binding timid establishment Republican office holders to the Trump base certainly seem to me to be more partisan than tribal.

I didn’t volunteer partisan because its connotations in modern usage don’t seem quite as fervid as the behavior we’re talking about. Like faction, to me it seems the right word at slightly the wrong time. But I recognize that technically it is an apposite term. Another reader makes a more extended case:

The word 'partisan' didn't occur to you?

You ask me, it carries the general derogatory connotation of "an in-group loyalty [distinguished] from the E pluribus unum American ideal" even better than "tribalism" does, and seems particularly more accurate in the context of "The Broken Check and Balance."

In a more generic context, you could use "factionalism." But I do find it surprising that you're trying to pack that specific contrast into a word at all--as if it's enough of an obvious distinction that we can all just accept it as given. I find it difficult to accept such a contrast. I think some of our most respected founders and civic heroes would have readily admitted greater loyalty to God than to country, and we so readily recognized the political insurmountability of our religious differences that we enshrined our freedom to those differences in the first amendment.

On a more human level, I'd say practically everyone has some group to which they are more loyal than they are to America, more likely friends and family than any particular organization. E pluribus unim does not connote that our many ultimate loyalties cede to America; rather, I think our motto is bragging about our unity given our many ongoing ultimate loyalties. I agree that our ability to maintain that unity seems strained at the moment;  I think plenty of folks across the political spectrum would agree with that. I even agree that Republicans in congress could and should be doing more.  But I've seen enough of the left wing of this country argue, legislate and adjudicate as if we should subsume our "tribal" identities to our American identity that I understand why so many folks push back against their vision of unity.  We're many tribes, one country. That's always been the ideal. We need to make our country work with our diverse loyalties, maybe despite them, but I wouldn't expect much inter-tribe support for working against them.

Thanks to all; more ahead.

Thanks for reading, I do understand your point.

But, seriously: what word would you suggest I use? "Clannish" is similar, but has too heavy-handed a Klan-type connotation.There's a whole literature on the significance of what I'm calling “tribal” loyalties, with nothing to do with Native American nations or  tribes. For instance, the classic by Harold Isaacs, Idols of the Tribe.

Non-catty and non-hostile question: what word would you use, in normal English parlance, for this concept?

She replied:

Just off the cuff: club, inbred, pact, lineal, exclusive, narrow minded, unaware, provincial, cult …

I guess I feel like a priority should be placed on being respectful for populations who have not always been afforded that, even if it means using a word like klan, which Republicans have a lot more in common with than Native American tribes, in my view. Respecting Native American culture is a huge healing issue.

I understand the reader’s point. But  I don’t think any of these other terms conveys the meaning that “tribalism” does in standard English, entirely apart from any Native American connotations.

Who has a better idea? Suggestions welcomed. For now, I think tribal does a job for which no other word quite suffices.

His first tweet, at the top of this item, dramatized his inability to conceive of any event, glorious or tragic, in terms other than what it means about him. People are dying in Puerto Rico; they have lost their homes and farms; children and the elderly are in danger. And what he sees is, “nasty to Trump.”

That was followed by:

This is an outright attack on the mayor of San Juan, Carmen Yulin Cruz, whose passionate appeals for her citizens would evoke compassion and support from any normal person — and from other politicians would stimulate at least a public stance of sympathy. I can think of no other example of a president publicly demeaning American officials in the middle of coping with disaster. There were nasty “God’s punishment!” remarks about New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina, but they did not come from the White House or George W. Bush.

And then:

They “want everything to be done for them.” It is impossible to tell whether this is a conscious racist dog-whistle by Trump—these people! always looking for a handout—or whether it is instinctive. Either way, it is something that no other modern president would have said in public, and that no one who understood the duties of the office could have done.

***

A man who can say these things—from a golf course, while millions of his fellow citizens are in dire straits, and during an emergency that is worse because of his own narcissistic inattention—does not understand the job.

This has not happened before. It is not normal. It should not be acceptable. The United States is a big, resilient country, but a man like this can do severe damage to it and the world — and at the moment, he is leaving many Americans in mortal peril.

During the campaign, I argued that the greatest responsibility for Trump’s rise lay not with the man himself—he is who he is, he can’t help it—but with those Republicans who know what he is, and continue to look the other way. Their responsibility for the carnage of this era increases by the day, and has grown by quite a lot this weekend.

As it happens, I wrote and published that preceding paragraph a week ago.  The Republicans’ responsibility is all the graver now, and deepens by the day.

• Devil’s Bargain, a story about Steve Bannon and Donald Trump by my friend (and former Atlantic colleague) Joshua Green. It is fascinating, well-researched, and of lasting interest, despite Bannon’s ouster from the White House, because of his ongoing Breitbart- role.
• Hillary Clinton’s own What Happened, as I argued 10 days ago, is much more interesting and edgy than the standard politician’s book. And while it places central responsibility for last year’s results on Hillary Clinton itself, it raises important questions about—and asks for similar introspection from—other participants, notably the “what about her emails?!?!” press.

Here are two more campaign-related books very much worth reading:

Unbelievable, by Katy Tur

I watched the campaign through its ups and downs over the past two years; I often saw Katy Tur on her MSBNC and NBC broadcasts; I thought I’d heard, or could guess, pretty much what she would have to say.

In fact, this is also a quite revealing and powerful book, in addition to being very entertaining. Its details of Tur’s experience with the Trump campaign, from the start when she following what was assumed to be a brief novelty/vanity effort, to the fateful conclusion last November 8, amplify the strangeness of what we have been through—and the darkness.

Two themes are worth noting. One is the genuinely ugly menace of Donald Trump’s in-person dealings, especially with a young, attractive female reporter in whom he displayed an unsettlingly personal and intense interest during the campaign. (“There’s little Katy back there!” he would say randomly at rallies. In a famous episode, he gave her a backstage kiss before he went onto a TV show.) I won’t quote her whole description of an early interview with him, but it is disturbing, as are several of her other accounts. (She also talks about it, and the overall tone of menace, both from the candidate and from his supporters, in a Fresh Air interview with Terry Gross.) Sample:

His face is tight. He spits out answers. He glares at me during the questions. He never smiles. Now I see [watching a replay of the interview] what my producer saw. Trump is angry….

“It’s a wrong statistic” he spits back [after a question]. “Go check your numbers! It’s totally wrong.”

He’s trying to steamroll. Intimidate. Talk down.

“It’s Pew Research,” I say.

Now he’s fuming.

Wow.

His rage didn’t register in the moment. I thought it was all part of his schtick. The reality show star. But watching his face on-screen, it’s clear Trump isn’t playing.

The other theme that impressed me was Tur’s explanation of why she decided that she would be leaving the world of Trump coverage when the campaign was over, no matter how it turned out. If he won, it would have been natural to follow him to the White House press pool, but she decided that she would rather not:

That’s a reality of beat reporting. When the people, places, and businesses you know well do well themselves, you’re in demand. If they’re a big deal, your work is a big deal. If they take off, you career can take off, too. This is especially true if you not only have access but knowledge.

I’ve been thinking a lot about access lately. Access is seductive. Access means good nuggets from the campaign … And somewhere along the way, out here on the trail, wherever it is I am right now, I decided that access journalism isn’t worth it.

Tur doesn’t pretend this is some heroic sacrifice—she’s now a TV anchor—but she is thoughtful about the tradeoffs involved in “access” reporting.

She also makes a point of saying that she doesn’t vote, “because I think it’s fairer that way.” I think that’s crazy, for reasons I laid out in Breaking the News (when Len Downie of the Washington Post announced a similar policy back in the 1990s). But that’s an argument for another time. You’ll enjoy and learn from this book.

* * *

Thanks, Obama, by David Litt

Thanks Obama is a very different book from these other three, starting with its focus on the 2008 and 2012 campaigns rather than 2016. Litt was a 20-something precinct worker in Obama’s 2008 campaign, and eventually became part of his White House speechwriting staff. He had worked for The Onion before trying political speechwriting, and his specialty at the White House (in addition to some heavy-weather policy work) was Obama’s comedy riffs. Among these were Obama’s last few White House Correspondents Dinner appearances, including his celebrated “Luther, the Anger Translator” routine at the 2015 dinner.

The book is genuinely charming, and perceptive. You can get an idea of Litt’s tone from his very effective Fresh Air interview last week.

White House speechwriters, as a class, are—well, writers. This makes it the more noticeable that the collection of effective memoir-books by them is thinner than you would expect. Walter Shapiro, mentioned above, was a speechwriter during the Carter administration—as was I, and Hendrik Hertzberg of The New Yorker, and the novelist Jerry Doolittle, and the newspaper editor Griffin Smith, and the now-Congressional candidate Bob Rackleff, and the newspaper reporter Achsah Nesmith, and others.

You could find a similar lineup for most administrations (until this one). But graceful, instructive, wry speechwriter memoirs like Litt’s are the exception rather than the norm. I think Thanks, Obama will join the ranks of lasting works about the culture and texture of political life, and of coming-of-age accounts by staffers who grow up personally and politically at the same time. (This is a category whose towering examples range from literary memoir-essays like The Education of Henry Adams, to romans-a-clef like All the Kings Men by Robert Penn Warren and The Gay Place by Billy Lee Brammer, to serious policy-essays like A Political Education by Harry McPherson. Please read them all!)

Staff memoirs are easier to write, or at least more fun, if you’re describing a meltdown or race-to-the-bottom political disaster—as in John Podhoretz’s mordantly comic Hell of a Ride, about his experience with George H.W. Bush. (I don’t agree with Podhoretz on much, but this is a funny, interesting book.) When I wrote about the Carter administration long ago in this magazine, it was also with a “how did that happen?” tone.

Litt takes on a much higher degree of difficulty by being mainly positive and respectful of Obama and his achievements. But he avoids a pious or reverent tone by directing many of his comic talents at himself. He’s aiming for, and mainly achieves, a self-presentation as a barely-skirting-disaster naif who gradually learns what he is supposed to do. The hoary Hollywood joke is that once you can fake sincerity, everything else is easy. The political counterpart involves being able to feign self-deprecation. It’s appealing in a speaker—one reason Donald Trump simply could not perform as a Correspondents Dinner-style after-dinner humorist is that self-deprecation is a necessary part of the schtick, but is wholly outside his range—and it’s appealing in an underling’s memoir like this.

For example:

Perhaps there are some people who, summoned to the Oval Office for the very first time, walk in there like it’s no big deal. Those people are sociopaths. For the rest of us, attending your first Oval Office meeting is like performing your own bris.

To make matters worse, when you have a meeting in the Oval Office, you don’t just go into the Oval Office. First you wait in a tiny, windowless chamber. It’s kind of like the waiting room in a doctor’s office, but instead of last year’s Marie Claire magazines they have priceless pieces of American art. And instead of a receptionist, there’s a man with a gun. And in a worst-case scenario, the man with a gun is legally required to kill you.

It turns out this little room is the perfect place to second- guess every life choice you have ever made… I was on the verge of losing it completely when one of the president’s personal aides emerged.

“Okay. He’s ready for you.”

To my credit, the first time I walked into the Oval Office, I did not black out. In front of me I could see a painting of the Statue of Liberty by Norman Rockwell. Behind me, out of the corner of my eye, I could see the Emancipation Proclamation. Not a photocopy or poster. The. Emancipation. Proclamation. I didn’t turn to look at the document, but I could feel the message it was sending through the room.

“I’m here because I freed the slaves,” it seemed to say. “What are you doing here?”

And, when it comes to the But Seriously Now part of the book, Litt says:

Eight years in Obamaworld taught me focus. Each news cycle—already shrunk to twenty-four hours when POTUS took office—lasted mere seconds by the time he left. He faced constant pressure to approach every issue with the frantic, hair- on- fire urgency of a tweet. More than once, I found myself frustrated by the president’s patience. To me it seemed more like delay. But nine times out of ten, Obama was right. The secret to solving big problems, I learned, is knowing which little problems to ignore.

The list of things Obamaworld Taught Me could go on for several pages. I learned that decisions are only as good as the decision-making process. That generosity is a habit and not a trait. That all human beings, even presidents, look goofy chewing gum.

But here, beyond a shadow of a doubt, is the single most valuable lesson I learned in public service: There are no grownups, at least not in the way I imagined as a kid. Once you reach a certain age, the world has no more parents. But it contains a truly shocking number of children. These children come in all ages, in all sizes, from every walk of life and every corner of the political map.

And this is the reason I’m most grateful for my time in Obamaworld. For eight formative years, often against my will, I was forced to act like an adult….

I read the book cover-to-cover in one evening. Very well done.

* * *

It’s a dark time, with some positive notes. These are worth your attention.

Here’s an example of the kind of thing I had in mind: the blow-out front-page treatment in the Times, just 10 days before the election, of the “Comey letter” on Clinton’s emails:

And here’s an example of the effect that media over-coverage of email had:

Crucially, the point is not that likely Trump voters were carefully reading the Times. Rather it’s that the Times has an enormous steering and legitimizing effect on the rest of the media, notably including cable TV news. If the Times is treating email “questions” as worth continued coverage on its front page, something must be going on there.

And the email coverage was notoriously followed by this item, the week before the election:

* * *

Am I saying this is a vendetta? I am not, and have not—though I unwisely used that word one time, back in the summer of 2015 when the Trump campaign had barely begun, in a tweet about a letter the Clinton campaign had sent to the Times. (You want to see an argument that the Times has an anti-Clinton vendetta? I give you The Daily Howler. For what it’s worth, I’ll note that the Howler is no fan of my own work. Or, from someone I’m on better terms with, see Joe Conason in The National Memo, here and here.) I have no inside info about the newsroom deliberations that went into what I consider hugely excessive coverage of the email “issue”—which, for the record, occurred after Abramson was out of her job at the Times. I haven’t written online or in-print articles contending that the Times was purposefully anti-Clinton. I understand why conservatives laugh at the idea that the Times was against the presidential candidate its editorial page so strongly endorsed.

What I have emphasized is effect: the prominence the Times so memorably gave the email story, rather than any assumption about the underlying cause. In most news organizations, the vast majority of things the public complains about arise from haste, from honest error, from decisions that seemed sensible at the time. For instance: this weekend, meeting a deadline, I said about the 1968 Olympics what I thought I remembered: that the American sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos had been stripped of their medals, after their medal-ceremony protest against U.S. racism. In fact, as many readers wrote in to point out, Smith and Carlos were expelled from the games—but didn’t lose their medals. It was a mistake of haste on my part, which we’ve recognized and corrected.

I don’t know why the Times covered Hillary Clinton’s emails the way it did. But I believed then, and do now, that its emphasis was excessive. I stand by what I wrote last week, in the item about Hillary Clinton’s book:

No sane person can believe that the consequences of last fall’s election—for foreign policy, for race relations, for the environment, for anything else you’d like to name (from either party’s perspective)—should have depended more than about 1 percent on what Hillary Clinton did with her emails. But this objectively second- or third-tier issue came across through even our best news organizations as if it were the main thing worth knowing about one of the candidates….

The press is among the groups that messed this up, badly, in particular through the relentless push in New York Times coverage that made “but, her emails!” a rueful post-campaign meme. With this book, Hillary Clinton has gone a considerable distance toward facing her responsibility for the current state of the country. Before any news organization tells her to pipe down or stop explaining herself, I’d like to see them be as honest about their own responsibility.

* * *

Imbalanced and credulous Times coverage of the WMD (weapons of mass destruction) threat from Iraq, in 2002 and early 2003, was not the only or even the main reason the George W. Bush administration went ahead with its disastrous invasion. But it was a legitimizing and enabling factor. To its credit, afterwards the paper approached this as a mistake deserving re-examination. (For instance, here and here and here and here.)

Imbalanced and credulous (in my view) Times coverage of the Clinton email “issue” was not the only or even the main reason that Donald Trump carried the Electoral College. But it was a legitimizing and enabling factor. In contrast to their response to the Iraq problems 15 years ago, Times editors now seem to resist the very idea that they have anything to re-examine in their approach to the 2016 campaign. I think they do, and that it would enhance rather than diminish their standing in the public eye as our leading national news organization to be open in discussing what went right and wrong, and why.   

On Friday morning I read the accounts of the Alabama debate wherein Strange [appointed incumbent “Big Luther” Strange, whom Trump was backing] accused Moore [the Bannon-favorite challenger, Judge Roy Moore] of proposing that Trump was being manipulated by McConnell.

I wondered that Moore did not respond that Trump the deal-maker was not being manipulated, but instead was consciously fulfilling a commitment to McConnell in pursuit of the Trump agenda. More could have said that Trump did so fully expecting Strange to lose anyway, and that he, Moore, even approved of that deal by the savvy President because, on the day after the election, Alabamians could be sure Trump would thank them for choosing Moore, the true Trumpian.

Or something like that.

But how validated I felt when on Friday night Trump did not even go through the motions of waiting for Tuesday. Instead already—at the very rally where he was “supporting” Strange— he semi-endorsed Moore, while claiming for himself credit that Strange was [getting as much support as he did]. Clearly, if Strange wins it will be because Trump is awesome—and if Strange loses it will be because Trump is awesome but couldn't carry *such* a feeble candidate across the finish-line.

Perhaps this will fit well in your next piece later this week when Trump responds to two glaring failures: the Alabama election and the final attempt to repeal Obamacare. All politicians hedge, but not all are able to *pre-hedge* like this one, are they? My supposition is that 'the great deal-maker' has never in his life before had an ally - or even a friend - with and for whom he makes a commitment. Hell, I guess I'd even add here a *wife*, recalling his history of infidelity and especially his boast that he's never heard Melania fart. A strange and very sad man.

* * *

America’s Original Sin

In my piece I said that even a president as divisive as Richard Nixon had tried to avoid explicitly inflaming racial tensions in his public statements. “Law and order” dog-whistles are a different matter. Along the way I said that the history of slavery was “America’s longest-standing injustice and wound.” A reader suggests this adjustment:

I would argue only one point, and it is that our nation's longest standing injustice is to the Native Americans. It is not only a point of chronology, but of an intentional and systematic destruction of the Native people. The systematic enslavement, import, breeding  and trafficking of humans is no less egregious. But by killing off the First Nations, and inhumanely dealing with the remaining population, we have millions fewer disenfranchised to have to "deal with."

As a Scots American woman I understand fighting wars that aren't "one's own", tribal differences, cultural separation, social nuance, and political embarrassment. How Donald Trump manages to package it all into one weekend of human offense and carnage is a reflection of a deeply disturbed mind. That the party of old white men refuses to care for the welfare of their constituents boggles and deeply disturbs my mind.

* * *

‘Girl in the Well’

Twenty years ago, in my book Breaking the News, I wrote about the “girl in the well” media frenzy of the late 1980s. In Midland, Texas, a toddler who became (at the time) world-famous as Baby Jessica fell into a well. For several days the nascent cable-news industry focused round-the-clock attention on the drama of whether Baby Jessica could be saved. (She was.) For a wonderful and incredibly dark movie that presaged this drama, which itself presaged this era’s disaster-centric media coverage, check out Billy Wilder’s underappreciated 1951 classic, Ace in the Hole.

A reader applies girl-in-the-well logic to the current president:

I think you wrote about [Baby Jessica] in your book on the media. The current administration is so awful in so many ways that it would be boring if it weren’t so dangerous.

Hence, the escalation of outrageousness by the head of state. Trump is "the girl in the well" and he has to keep digging himself into the well to keep the attention on himself. The worse he is, the more coverage he gets. I don’t know if there’s a solution but I hope somehow something changes and soon.

* * *

Smith and Carlos

In my item I mentioned the world-famous raised-fist salute that American sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos, both black, gave while being awarded their gold and bronze medals (respectively) for the 200-meter run. In the original version of the note, I said that an infuriated Avery Brundage, the conservative and very controversial head of the International Olympic organization (he had strongly opposed efforts to boycott Adolf Hitler’s 1936 Olympics, in Berlin), had stripped them of their medals. Track experts, especially an Olympic historian named Bill Mallon, say that’s not right: Smith and Carlos were expelled from the games but kept their medals.

A reader in New York suggests another correction:

I was pleased, although not happy, to read your essay. (I suppose the distinction between “pleased” and “happy” can, alas, join that which you identified between “surprised” and “shocked”.)

For all that, I do feel compelled to express a reservation about one detail in the essay. In describing Tommie Smith’s and John Carlos’s gesture in their podium demonstration, during the 1968 Olympics 200-m. medal ceremony, you state that,

“they raised their black-gloved fists in what was then known as a “Black Power” protest salute.”

Such raised-fist gestures were, of course, frequently described as “Black Power salutes”—and that often reflected the purpose of those who made the gesture. And if that were indeed what Smith and Carlos had intended, then that description would be fine.

But Smith and Carlos have written and said, clearly and emphatically, that they were not making a “black power” salute, but a human rights salute. (E.g., Tommie Smith, David Steele, Silent Gesture: The Autobiography of Tommie Smith, pp. 16-17 (Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 2007).) They were protesting a complex set of issues in athletics, and in politics and society beyond athletics. Racial injustices were absolutely a major element among those issues, but race was not the sole, or even predominant, focus of their protest that day.

Smith and Carlos have been clear about what they were doing, for almost 50 years, and proper respect to them requires that our descriptions of their actions accurately reflect their stated intent.

By the way, I have also seen video of interviews with both men, over the years, in which they address the accounts that state they were stripped of their medals. They have consistently said that no one took away their medals, and the medals remain in the possession of them or their families.

And, from another reader in California:

Your mention of John Carlos and Tommie Smith in your recent article about President Trump’s recklessness prompts me to write you to encourage you, if you are ever in San Jose, to visit the statue on the campus of San Jose State University commemorating their stand on the medal ceremony.

When I first came across the statue a few years ago I was taken aback by how emotional it made me feel.  There was a sense of pride I never would have anticipated, arising in large part I suppose from having grown up in Santa Clara County, graduating from San Jose State University, and being a part of the CSU system, but more than that a sense of gratitude for their protest.   You can stand on the statue with Carlos and Smith, if you wish, as Peter Norman’s spot is unoccupied, but if you do so you are physically dwarfed, appropriately, by Smith and Carlos.

It’s a reminder of how large their protest was and is in the public mind.  Their moment, though, though calculated, was short, and it was so simple, but it has resonated so much for so many people since then.  It’s a great reminder that we don’t have to try to do great things – we just have to remember to keep trying to do good things.

* * *

A Dissenting View

For completeness, this is a representative—yes, representative—sample of a dissenting note. Like 99 percent of notes with this tone, it came without the sender’s real name. From Russia? From someone aggrieved in the United States? I don’t know.

From: j40oaks@….

Subject: Fuck off

Damn you mother fucking feckless fuckers !

Trump was spot on in his remarks about these elitist arrogant bastards of the NFL!

If these fucking assholes wish to not honor the flag and the National Anthem of this country  they can all go to hell and we will see that they get there!  

Game Over!  These over paid self absorbed son of a bitches make me sick! So .... get over it you lame brain leftist.  The good people of this country have had enough !

THE DAME JO

No kidding: I would publish a better defense of Trump’s tweets if one had come in. But this is the kind of thing that arrives.

Minutes before posting, this more-polite version of a supportive argument for Trump came in:

I’m not a big fan of Trump but I do believe that these very well paid athletes who spurn the pledge of allegiance should think about where else they could be so well off . They are able to go to great schools with B averages and yet still chose to be disrespectful to a symbol that many people died for .

You work for the Atlantic which an old friend worked for . His only flaw was that he like to complain about our system because he was a devout marxist underneath it all . You seem to be on the same track which is probably why you also work for that rag . The republicans abolished slavery but I guess you never learned that at HARVARD .

Enough of this crap !