...but, I don't think the whole thing is driven by White Tribalism because many of the people, I would say people in the circles more toward the center, know that can't be their only appeal. So, I see the white tribalists as just in some of the circles...maybe some overlapping in a Venn diagram way, but that's not a path to "winning" for them because it excludes too many people. Basically, like the gun issue, there is no way to get all or most of the guns back, there is no way to change the racial make-up of the country in a radical way without killing a lot of people...in a final solution way. I don't think most people in this country want to go down that path. I think, and maybe I am just comforting myself with this, that it is a small and really vile bunch that want to do that.
I agree with your evolutionary biology points, I think Richard Dawkins said basically the same thing. It is the basic law of the jungle and why certain species survive and evolve. As humans we have our own set of circles we will protect, we sit at the center, then our family is our next ring, then friends, then yes, it basically goes out to a ring of people that look like us. So, it is basically a natural thing for these people to be white tribalists but yes, we have the ability to think and reason so we hope that people can move past that. Some can, some can't. I think it also comes down to what we are exposed to in life, and how that developed or changed us. I heard something the other day with a guy saying that we are all still in part an 8 year old child and whatever trauma or rewards we were exposed to as an 8 year old, our brains are still locked into and it deeply impacts us as an adult.
I thought about that a lot because we know Trump and his followers often act like 8 year old children, as if they can't help themselves...maybe they can't. Maybe that behavior appeals to them so deeply because of their past, their childhood, the ideas they have built based on those experiences. People that know Trump often say he was exposed to some kind of severe trauma as a child and from that we get the man he is today. Roy Cohn, an apparently self-loathing gay man, deeply influenced Donald as well, and perhaps he was so vulnerable to Cohn because of his crappy relationship with his father. We know for sure, the life Trump led, bred a monster.
Don't you think it is curious that the leader of Stop the Steal was a gay black man, Ali Alexander, that was trying to hit on and have sex with teen boys while he was running Stop the Steal? And yet, the MAGA people followed him, cheered him, thought he was fantastic. Trump praised him quite a bit and called him his Sammy Davis.
Trump seems to have no issue with gay men, Cohn was his mentor, and he loved him, he loved Ali and brought him into his inner circle. He said the child molester Jeffrey Epstein was a great fun guy. I think his followers, some of them, know all this...it does not bother them.
Some probably really like these aspects of Trump, that he will embrace the depraved and cruel. Those people, yeah...major questions about them. The problem with MAGA is, they are not all on the same page. While a guy like Ali Alexander was praised by Trump and Trump did not care about him chasing teen boys and being a gay black man, some of Trump's followers would kill the guy and put his head on a pike given the chance. I just see MAGA as a ticking bomb itself, and these people will destroy each other.
