As you know, I’ve been wrestling with this election’s outcomes, and questioning how we got here, and how come it was such a big surprise. I’m less concerned with post mortems, however, unless they give us clues to how to move forward. The Republicans famously did a post mortem of their 2012 Presidential loss, then infamously ignored all of its findings. And then there’s Dat Guy, proving exactly what? I still don’t know, except that post mortems aren’t all they’re cracked up to be, I guess.

Nevertheless, we have to pick a way forward. We have to decide on an individual basis, on a community basis, on a state basis and on a national basis what we on the Left intend to do about all this, and how we can make it better.

But first, I think we need to ask some questions that are hard to answer. Clearly, there is an enormous divide in this country right now. Although I love me some Barack, and I agree that more unites us than divides us in the microcosm of our own communities, on a national level we are losing the argument as to the soul of our nation. The political divide is only widening.

Tribalism seems to be deeply rooted in our genetics. As a strategy of survival, the success of a herd/pack/pride/troop/etc of a species is well established.   Genetically, the life of an individual is always subsumed to the life of the species. With our evolved sense of selves, however, belonging to a tribe raises conflicting impulses, while also giving comfort. Rather than being a unit of the herd, humans conceive the tribe to be an extension of themselves.

Competition for limited resources among tribes has evolved along with technology to the point where the resources themselves are no longer casus belli. Suspicion of and antipathy towards the Other is no longer a vestigial survival mechanism, but rather a satisfying defense of the superiority of my tribe, because I AM my tribe, and my tribe is ME.

Hence, our politics.

In order to find the way forward, we have to try to understand what all that means. What does it mean to be an American? What does it mean to be a Democrat? What does it mean to be a Liberal?

I’ve shared my “progressive manifesto” with you before. What do YOU all think our shared values on the left are? What do YOU think it means to be members of those tribes?

In other words, what do we stand for? Once we understand that, once we’ve defined what our shared vision is, then we can ask the next questions of how we go about bringing that message to the rest of the Tribe, and then the nation.

Please: share your thoughts.