Conservatism as Tribalism

Why conservatives don't cooperate across borders

It’s no secret that the left has a track record of transnational cooperation. The Comintern coordinated activities between communist parties in different countries during the early twentieth century, and progressive activists today rally under the same banners with the same slogans in support of the same causes around the democratic world. The rainbow flag is a symbol of LGBT whether you’re in Toronto or Tokyo. During America’s racial reckoning in the summer of 2020, BLM was reawakened in France where demonstrators chanted “sans justice, pas de paix,” a direct translation of the cry of the 2014 protestors in Ferguson. Yesterday leftists around the world organized under the motto “Workers of the world unite,” and today they do so under “Black lives matter,” “Protect trans kids,” and “Climate crisis.” Even places as remote as West Papua—a mostly Melanesian Christian province of predominantly Muslim and Austronesian Indonesia—have imported the progressive mantra.

In stark contrast, the right globally is fractured and in certain cases even prone to infighting. Rightist movements in the Islamic world are hostile to Israel whose right is, in turn, more hostile to such movements than its left. Hindu nationalists in India regard Western imperialism as a historic wrong, while Western rightists are the most eager to defend its legacy among political actors in their countries. Recently there have been some attempts to build bridges between conservative parties in the democratic world. For example, CPAC has hosted European counterparts such as Marion Le Pen and Viktor Orban and has held conferences in Brazil, and the National Conservatism Conference in DC featured British and other foreign speakers. Nevertheless, there’s far less coordination and common cause among rightists than leftists transnationally.

The reason for this relative lack of uniformity and cooperation on the right internationally is that conservatives are more tribal than ideological. In other words, leftists are almost unanimous in their commitment to certain principles and object-level policies such as socialism, environmental standards, workers’ rights, civil rights, recognition of LGBT, secularization, adherence to international law et cetera. Conservatives, on the other hand, are primarily concerned with supporting their own country’s material and ontological interests and preserving its social foundations.

As a result, conservatism’s contents not only differ across borders but can be outright incompatible between jurisdictions. When Trump implements tariffs against other countries, the response a foreign government of similar political leanings is likely to take isn’t, “Based Trump putting America first.” Rather, it will naturally retaliate with its own trade protections to get leverage in negotiations because it wants the same outcomes as the Trump administration but for its own country. In a world of zero-sum competition between countries, nationalists are the most prone to playing hard ball with each other. When relations deteriorate, the nationalist’s first instinct is to blame the external party because one’s own country is right and just by definition. For instance, Trump spoke in the eighties of Japan screwing over America through unfair trade practices designed to shield the Japanese domestic market from foreign competition while exploiting America’s relative lack of trade barriers to drown the US market with artificially cheap products.

The issue Trump raised wasn’t one of justice or moral desert but rather one of self-interest, which is a matter of perspective and not a matter of objective moral principles. Leftists indulge in thought experiments designed to strip away as much of the world’s contingencies as possible, such as John Rawls’s veil of ignorance which asks us to imagine ourselves as disembodied, pre-gestational psyches unsure of the conditions into which we will be born. Progressives find such imaginative scenarios to be appealing justifications for their politics because their politics is designed for everywhere and everyone. Such ungrounded intellectual exercises fail to register with conservatives because conservatives are generally unconcerned with how a society should be engineered in an ideal world and instead wish to assuage the in-group grievances they have right here and right now. Conservative politics presupposes a first-person plural, whereas progressive politics is universalistic.

The incompatibility of different societies’ conservative politics isn’t confined to the realm of material interests but extends into the world of ideas, beliefs, and identity. I recently visited Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo, a memorial for those who died between 1853 and 1945 in service of Imperial Japan’s armed forces. The shrine’s museum contained exhibits on all of the nation’s wars during that period, and the narrative it advanced was surprisingly patriotic. The Russo-Japanese War was highlighted as being an inspiration for Asian nationalists for whom the war’s outcome shattered the myth of European invincibility and racial hierarchy. The World War II or Greater East Asia War exhibit included a display which noted that although Japan lost the war, its overthrow of Western imperialism across Southeast Asia spelled the end of European colonial domination in Asia and enabled other Asian countries to attain independence. The depiction of the Asia-Pacific War as a fight against Western imperialism for Asian liberation and the portrayal of the US as a victimizer that criminally introduced nuclear warfare into the world in strikes against civilians are coded as conservative in Japan but sound hard-left in America. This is due to the tribal psychology of conservatives. Conservatives believe their country is ultimately benign and just. Consequently, American conservatives see their country’s actions in the Pacific War as necessary and morally grounded (even though during the war conservatives were skeptical of unconditional surrender and favored a settlement with Tokyo), and Japanese conservatives think the same of their nation. Because their countries were opponents, the American and Japanese conservative have an irreconcilable interpretation of history.

Yushukan Museum

This psychological pattern is evident in more mundane political discourse. When Australian conservatives argue with leftists about whether their country is racist, they’ll often say it isn’t because black Americans are supposedly treated worse than minorities in Australia. American and European conservatives say the same about each other’s countries when dismissing claims of discrimination. When American conservatives counter liberal claims of the purported inhumanity of deporting illegals, they’ll sometimes allege that Japan and Eastern Europe treat alien migrants worse and unhesitatingly deport those who aren’t authorized to be there. The implicit idea in this line of reasoning is that one’s own country is too humane or altruistic for its own good and that it should therefore be more willing to behave like supposedly morally inferior nations. The ironic element in the “We’re not bad. If you want to see real bad, look at this other country” argument is that it reinforces left-wing principles. Saying that your country’s not evil by progressive standards because some other country less closely conforms to the progressive’s moral criteria upholds left-wing precepts by suggesting that it would be better if the other country more closely adhered to them. Nevertheless, conservatives tend to ignore this implication because their attachment is to tribe, not to ideology.

Despite this tendency towards parochialism among conservatives, the age of globalization provides an unprecedented opportunity for cooperation between like-minded rightists. Tribal and ideological interests now have greater overlap than they did in previous generations because the same political and economic forces are acting on different nation-states in the same way. In the developed world conservatives share an interest in retaining national sovereignty from supranational bodies, controlling their borders, and preserving a national mainstream. Conservatives can help their counterparts to realize these goals by combatting attempts to impose “universal values” on other countries and endorsing a global pluralism in which every country is recognized as having a right to difference in terms of its values and self-governance. While ordinary people will inevitably continue to rhetorically throw other countries under the bus when defending their own nation, the right’s political class should avoid this and instead attack the underlying principles that their political opponents are invoking.