Tribal politics is how it is usually described, but it is too rigid and restrictive for "tribes" to be a useful term. It's more like cults--a relatively small, homogeneous group sharing a defining common belief or leader or both. Cults rather than tribes define everybody outside of it as wrong and as enemies.
We've seen the Republican party, including its leaders and official organization, become a cult. However you look at it--a Trump cult that believes everything Trump tells them, or a mostly social media created cult with a set of core beliefs that fixates on Trump--or, I suspect, both at the moment.
A major political party that is its own cult can hardly avoid being authoritarian and fascist. The party may exist only for itself--that's more or less what political parties have been, except at their best--but elected officials who exist only for the cult undermine democratic governance. When the cult demands this, it is not interested in representative democracy or in governance. It is interested only in the cult. That's Mitch McConnell, with or without Trump.
The media doesn't help clarify this when it gets lazy. For instance, in order to distinguish the infrastructure bill that some Republicans have worked with Democrats to fashion, from the infrastructure bill that only Democrats are working on and planning to pass with a party line vote, a media report referred to the latter as the "partisan bill." But it isn't partisan. The stuff it will pay for--the childcare, clean energy, expanded Medicare benefits etc.--will not go only to its partisans, other Democrats. They benefit Republicans and Democrats and nonpartisans, just as the other infrastructure bill does. Elected members of only one party may pass a big infrastructure bill, but members of both parties and no party will benefit, not because they are members of one cult or another, but because they are Americans. That's the job legislators are supposed to do.
The same can't be said of at least the intent of state level legislation to limit voting opportunities, and especially to allow partisans to intervene in voting to change the outcome. But these are now cults that claim an election was stolen without any basis for the claim, and that violence in the Capitol that everyone has seen on film didn't happen.
So to be in the Republican cult you have to deny demonstrable reality. And some of them openly admit that's exactly what they are doing--they repeat the Big Lies loudly and often, as a technique, especially using social media. Even Trump admits this is what he does. Just last week he admitted that when he doesn't like the outcome of a poll he says it's fake, and when he does like it, it's the best poll ever. He's done that with every election he's been involved in--if he or the people he supports win, it's a fair election. If he or they don't, it's a steal. There's not much more to it than that.
By their nature cults require uniform opinion, known to some of us as dogma, and cults exist to create enemies--everyone who doesn't agree and therefore are evil. Political cults are all about creating anger as a tool of solidarity and motivation. (That goes for political cults of every opinion.) This is what eventually becomes their weakness. For eventually, someone or some subgroup within the cult disagrees with something, and then anger is turned on them. Cults subdivide into warring factions.
They continue to do damage--that's basically all that cults do, wreck things. Eventually they start turning their anger on each other and destroying themselves. Whether the Republican cult destroys itself before it destroys American democracy is the question that will be out there until at least 2025, unless they self-destruct before then. Because they don't now have the votes to win elections. That's why they're working hardest at cheating the system. What we need is not cults on the other side, but political will to support fair elections.
There are other political cults out there. Recently UC Berkeley cancelled the founder of its anthropology department by taking his name off a building. They haven't renamed it yet. I suggest that Scapegoat Hall would be appropriate.
But when the public business is being controlled by a cult that is not at all interested in the public but only in its own survival, that trumps all.
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