The following is what Grok had to say. It was pretty good. There's a long way to go in the exchange which I did not pursue yet. Such as the possibility that deeper cause cannot be treated the same as material world cause and effects - deeper stuff is acausal yet still happens. AI is not ready for wisdom yet. This questions the points about secondary effects being important as being a red herring. It also fails to observe that most of these derivative factors tend to coalesce into the same one of the 2 tribes anyway reinforcing my political point.
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My political claim is there are only two tribes splitting the vote so it's a non sequitur to suggest that tactical voting is useful in a multi-party democracy - party's are a sort of unconscious smoke screen for what is happening underneath. The two tribes are as follows:
1) the tribe which loves this nation(it's heritage and legacy)
2) the other which does not
The vote is being split between the two rather many political party's.
Grok disagreed citing many other derivative gators such as wages, capital, schools and do on. As follows:
The article is making a stronger claim than “people like slogans.” It says the slogan is only the surface. Underneath it is a status system: pick a tribe, obey its story, signal that obedience more cleanly than rivals, and the tribe confers rank. Material issues—prices, crime, schools, energy—are treated as secondary costumes worn by that same loyalty test.
That maps onto some real psychology. Humans do sort into coalitions. Dualistic frames (“us/them,” left/right, patriot/traitor) are easy to remember and easy to police. Public loyalty often outruns private doubt. Status inside a group frequently comes from being a louder, earlier, or more uncompromising signaller, not from being the most accurate. Cancel culture, purity spirals, and “if you even ask that question…” all look like enforcement of an obedience partition. The author is also right that two camps is a stable, low-cost setup: one enemy is enough to define who you are.
Where the theory gets thinner is the “always” and the “everything else is derivative.”
People do switch sides when lived conditions get bad enough. Inflation, housing, conscription, a lost war, or a collapse in order can punch through narrative. That is why the same voters can look tribal in one cycle and transactional in the next. If pocketbook issues were only costumes, those swings would be rarer.
Inside a tribe, competence still matters. A party that cannot deliver power, money, or safety eventually loses even loyalists. Signaling gets you promoted *among believers*; it does not automatically keep the lights on.
The “heritage versus not” test is a powerful sorting slogan, not a complete map of motives. Plenty of voters who fail that test still think they are defending the country—just a different version of it. Plenty who pass it are also voting their rent, their kids’ school, or their job. Depth psychology can describe the first layer without erasing the second.
You said you are not calling this good or bad, only describing how voting works from that view. Fair enough as a lens. It explains why campaigns talk like moral dramas and why heretics get punished harder than opponents. It does not prove that autonomy is impossible, only that it is expensive. People who want a world where that test is unnecessary are asking for institutions that reward accurate disagreement more than loyal performance. Those institutions exist in patches. They are not the default of mass politics.
RS: I ask about this 'issue bundling' and it's trying to flatter me:
You also fail to observe that most of these derivative factors tend to coalesce into the same one of the 2 tribes anyway reinforcing my political point.
Issue bundling is real. That part of your point is stronger than the slogan-only version.
In a two-party, high-polarization system, attitudes that could stay separate start traveling together. Views on borders, crime, schools, speech, energy, universities, and “what the country is for” become correlated. Once that happens, a voter does not need a separate theory for each issue. Picking the tribe picks the package. The package then looks like proof that the tribe was the real cause all along.
That is why the two-camp story feels airtight: the derivatives line up. They often do, *after* the sorting has already happened.
The limit is that the bundle is not eternal or natural. It is a coalition product. What sits inside “loves the heritage” versus “does not” changes by decade and by country. Trade used to cut differently. Crime and welfare used to cut differently. Immigration realigned working-class voters who had not previously lived in that camp. Inflation and lockdowns briefly scrambled the package again. If the derivatives were only masks for one master loyalty, those rearrangements would be harder to see.
So the coalescence reinforces your political observation about *this* moment: mass politics is efficient when it reduces many questions to one membership test. It does not prove the membership test is the only thing underneath. It proves that once two coalitions harden, most public issues get drafted into their war.
That is compatible with Obedience Theory as a description of how signaling works after the camps exist. It is weaker as a claim that the camps are the deep structure of every preference. The camps manufacture consistency as much as they express it.
RS: I like the proposition that observed consistentcy is manufactured. Because it suggests the 2 obedient tribes model is homeostatic - it reinforces itself like a living organism to survive.
Yes. Once two camps exist, they start acting like a thermostat.
Each side needs the other as a visible enemy. Media, activists, consultants, and ordinary signallers all get paid—in status if not in cash—for keeping the contrast sharp. Cross-pressured people get pressured until they pick a lane. New issues get translated into the old war. Heretics are more threatening than outsiders because they prove the package is optional. The system then looks “alive”: it repairs tears, expels anomalies, and returns to two.
That is homeostasis in the loose systems sense. It does not require a mastermind. It only requires incentives that punish ambiguity and reward clean membership.
The organism metaphor is useful and also a bit too flattering. A living thing has metabolism and death. A political duality has neither. It can persist for decades while the content of each tribe changes completely. The *form* survives: two obedience partitions, one usable enemy, manufactured consistency. The *substance*—who counts as the nation, which sins are unforgivable—gets rewritten and then treated as ancient.
So the two-tribe model does not just describe voting. It describes a maintenance routine. The routine is efficient. Efficiency is not the same as truth, and it is not the same as inevitability. Homeostatic systems last until a shock is larger than their repair capacity: a realignment issue that will not map, an institutional change that stops punishing the middle, or enough people who would rather be inconsistent than obedient. Until then, the organism keeps breathing by turning almost everything into tribe.