Tribalism as inherited culture: the Latin American case
In an episode on Venezuela, Fergus Hodgson attributes Latin America’s failure to liberalize partly to the tribal and collectivist character of its indigenous populations. He notes that on the Economic Freedom of the World Index only Chile has ever cracked the top 10, while Argentina, Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador sit near the bottom. Hodgson describes the region’s founding inheritance as a Spanish-imposed “mercantilist and feudalist approach,” layered onto native peoples he calls “extremely collectivist or tribalist,” who remain a strong minority or even a majority in countries such as Guatemala, El Salvador and Bolivia. In his account the tribal customs get in the way of a more liberal or open society, and protectionist, anti-competition rhetoric is simply par for the course in the region. He ties the resulting lack of development to crime, noting that seven or eight of the world’s most murderous countries are Latin American and that Venezuela has displaced Honduras and El Salvador as the most murderous nation on the planet. Venezuela on the Brink with Fergus Hodgson (2017)
Bob Zadek frames the same question from the American side, asking whether immigrants from countries with a long collectivist tribal history can readily adopt a free-market, rule-of-law outlook, and whether that is because they are a self-selecting group or because the traditions are easy to un-teach. Hodgson calls the topic sensitive and answers that he does not in general believe immigrants from Latin America adopt the American way of thinking. He cites Gallup data, and data he says Reason recently published, showing that people who self-identify as Latin Americans are almost twice as likely as native US counterparts to call for bigger government. He also points to Gloria Álvarez, a friend from Guatemala, who made a video asking people not to resurrect what they fled, and observes that even Venezuela’s opposition holds socialist values and so offers no clear ideological alternative. Venezuela on the Brink with Fergus Hodgson (2017)
Tribalism as irrationality: the immigration argument
Jayant Bhandari, appearing on an episode about capitalism and morality, advances a harsher version of the claim. He tells Bob Zadek that most early immigration to the US came from Europe, which he calls the only rational societies he has known, and that East Asia is increasingly becoming rational, while the rest of the world is “extremely irrational, superstitious, and tribal.” In his account such people cannot easily be changed — the process takes at least a millennium, the time he says it took Europeans to become rational from savages. He offers India as an example of a multi-ethnic, multi-lingual, multi-religious society whose members hate each other, arguing that rational people are a precondition for overcoming tribalism and superstition. Capitalism and Morality: Twin Pillars of the West (2017)
Bhandari extends the argument to voting. He says migrants from Africa, the Middle East, South Asia and Latin America come predominantly for material benefits, lack the moral compass to understand why America is wealthy, and eventually get the vote; a vast majority of people of non-European background vote for the left, he says, so that public policy has shifted left over 50 to 70 years and the Republican Party today is probably more leftist than the Democratic Party was in the 1950s. Asked by Zadek about middle-class Indian professionals, Bhandari replies that Indian migrants are among the richest subgroups in the US, making more than ethnically European Americans, yet a huge proportion voted for Obama — evidence, he says, that becoming rich does not make people rational or anchor them to morality and reason. He describes middle-class Indians as indifferent to the poor and interested only in their own families, calling their culture tribal and superstitious. Capitalism and Morality: Twin Pillars of the West (2017)
Tribalism as political team-sport: Boaz
David Boaz, Executive Vice President of the Cato Institute, gives the term a different sense. Asked by Bob Zadek to explain tribalism and why it threatens libertarian beliefs, Boaz says that historically tribalism was the idea that you can only trust people close to you and like you — family, village, community, nation, religious or racial group. What he calls modern American political tribalism is different: people line up as the red team or the blue team, watch Fox News or listen to NPR, and neither trust nor like the other side. That, he says, makes informed political conversation difficult because both sides demonize the other, and it is especially hard for libertarians, who reject ideas from both right and left, to get a hearing. David Boaz on the Libertarian Ethos (2018)
Boaz dates the worsening to the Monica Lewinsky scandal and the attempted impeachment of President Clinton around 1998, followed by the 2000 election and the Florida vote, which he says required everyone to line up for Bush or Gore. He adds the Bush years, what he calls hysteria against Obama and the rise of the Tea Party, and then the rise of Trump, all of which he says intensified tribalism. Zadek adds that the media has become equally polarized and that people listen to echo chambers. In the same episode Boaz defends private property as an important part of civilization, arguing that no one plants a crop or builds a shack without knowing the property is theirs, and that societies which abolished private property — notably the Soviet Union and other communist countries — became economic basket cases, with Venezuela as a current example. David Boaz on the Libertarian Ethos (2018)
Tribalism in media: the Covington case
A 2019 episode pairs Bob Zadek with Robbie Soave to discuss the Covington Catholic incident of 2019 and a 2014 UVA rape hoax as illustrations of media tribalism and the rush to judgment. The episode summary states that Soave’s investigation into the full video footage of the Lincoln Memorial encounter debunked the initial viral narrative, and it highlights the role of social media and what it calls the “Trump lens” in modern journalism. The excerpt supplied for this episode is a summary rather than a transcript, so the participants’ specific arguments are not recorded here. On Crowds and Tribalism (2019)
Across episodes: no single account
The excerpts show the topic treated in four episodes, but not as one developing argument. Hodgson (2017) and Bhandari (2017) both treat tribalism as a cultural inheritance that travels with people and shapes their politics, though Hodgson confines his claim to Latin America and hedges it as sensitive while Bhandari generalizes it to Africa, the Middle East and South Asia. Boaz (2018) treats tribalism instead as a political alignment that has worsened since the late 1990s, and Soave (2019) treats it as a media dynamic. The later treatments do not revise the earlier ones; they use the same word for different things.
What the sources do not cover
The excerpts do not define tribalism in any settled way, and no guest responds directly to another’s account. The Covington episode survives only as a summary, so its argument cannot be reconstructed from the material here. Nothing in the sources indicates whether any of the speakers regards the cultural and political senses of the term as connected.