The Tribal Trap: How Wokeness and Identity Politics Are Undermining the Glue That Holds Our Communities Together
- Rex Ballard
- Jul 12
- 5 min read
Opinion | Shasta Unfiltered
Walk into a coffee shop in Redding, attend a school board meeting, or scroll through local social media these days, and you can feel the shift. Conversations that once bridged differences now carry an edge. Neighbors who used to disagree agreeably sometimes eye each other with suspicion. It’s not just “politics.” It’s something deeper — a cultural drift that data shows is fraying the everyday trust and cooperation we rely on in places like Shasta County.
Two ideas sit at the center of this drift: wokeness and identity politics. They sound sophisticated, but at root they’re simple — and the evidence suggests they’re making things worse, not better.
What We’re Actually Talking About
Wokeness started as slang for being alert to injustice, especially racial. Over the last decade or so, it has evolved into a full worldview. It teaches that society is best understood as a hierarchy of groups locked in power struggles. The key lens isn’t an individual's character or behavior — it’s your race, gender, sexuality, or other identity markers. “Equity” (forcing equal group outcomes) replaces equal rules for everyone. Lived experience trumps evidence. Dissent can be re-framed as harm.
Identity politics is the organizing strategy that goes with it. Instead of building coalitions around shared ideas or the common good, it builds them around group identity. Your “team” is defined by immutable traits. Politics becomes a contest between identity blocs.
Put them together, and you get a framework that takes humanity’s oldest wiring and turns the volume way up.
In-group vs. out-group thinking is part of human nature. When culture constantly activates it along identity lines, cooperation suffers.
We’re Wired for Tribes — That’s Not New
Evolutionary psychology is clear: humans spent the vast majority of our history in small, tight-knit groups competing with other groups. Loyalty inside the circle and caution outside it helped our ancestors survive. That wiring is still in us. It shows up in sports rivalries, family loyalty, and yes — modern politics.
Psychologist Jonathan Haidt puts it plainly in short clips worth your time: we’re a tribal species. The Bedouin proverb he often quotes captures it: “Me against my brother; me and my brother against our cousin; me and my brother and cousins against the stranger.”
The healthier alternative: building unity across differences through shared effort and individual respect — not identity silos.
The question isn’t whether tribal instincts exist. The question is what culture does with them. For generations, American culture — with its emphasis on individual rights, merit, color-blind rules, and a shared national identity — worked to channel those instincts toward broader cooperation. “E Pluribus Unum” — out of many, one.
Wokeness and identity politics do the opposite. They make group identity the main character in every story. They sort people into oppressor and oppressed categories. They treat disagreement as evidence of bad character or systemic harm. That doesn’t dampen tribalism. It supercharges it.
The Data Tells the Story
Look at the numbers. They’re not subtle.
Social trust — the simple belief that “most people can be trusted” — has been falling for decades. General Social Survey data shows it dropped from roughly 46% in the early 1970s to about 34% by 2018. In more diverse communities, people don’t just distrust “the other.” They hunker down and trust less even within their own groups. That’s the finding from sociologist Robert Putnam’s research on diversity and social capital.
Affective polarization — the emotional dislike of people on the other political side — has risen sharply. Pew Research shows majorities in both parties now hold very unfavorable views of the opposing party’s members, not just their ideas. Self-censorship is widespread. Surveys from Heterodox Academy find around 60% of students reluctant to speak on controversial topics for fear of social or academic consequences.
Youth mental health metrics worsened dramatically after 2012 — the same period when identity-focused frameworks gained heavy traction in schools, media, and institutions. Happiness and life satisfaction among young adults have declined across multiple datasets.
These trends have many causes. Technology, family breakdown, and economic changes all play roles. But the data lines up with a cultural shift that constantly spotlights group grievances and identity hierarchies rather than shared humanity and personal agency.
Two Kinds of Identity Politics
Not every focus on group experience is destructive. Psychologist Jonathan Haidt draws a useful line:
There’s a version that says “my group has faced real challenges — let’s work to remove unfair barriers so everyone can compete as equals.” That’s compatible with a free society.
Then there’s the version that says “my group is defined by its oppression, your group by its privilege, and the solution is to reorder society around identity power dynamics.” That version, Haidt notes, often turns into “common enemy” politics that deepens division.
What This Means for Shasta County
We’re not immune here. National cultural currents reach local schools, workplaces, churches, and civic life. When institutions adopt trainings or policies that frame everyday interactions through identity power lenses, they risk replacing the practical cooperation that built this community with grievance and score-settling.
The alternative isn’t ignoring real problems or pretending differences don’t exist. It’s doubling down on what actually works: judging people as individuals, upholding consistent standards, building relationships across lines, and anchoring in shared values — including the faith traditions and personal responsibility that have long strengthened places like ours.
A Practical Way Forward
The research doesn’t doom us to endless division. Robert Putnam’s work showed that successful diverse societies can build new cross-cutting identities and institutions that bring people together, but that it doesn't happen automatically and requires deliberate effort.
Locally, that can look like:
Supporting schools that teach critical thinking and character over identity essentialism.
Favoring policies based on individual merit and need rather than group quotas.
Prioritizing community events, churches, and civic groups that emphasize what unites us.
Modeling adult conversation that treats disagreement as normal, not moral failure.
We evolved to live in tribes. The genius of the American experiment was creating a culture that let us cooperate far beyond tribal limits. Wokeness and identity politics, in their current dominant forms, are pulling us backward — turning the volume up on instincts that make large, diverse communities harder to sustain.
The data is clear. The choice is still ours.
