I waited with anticipation for the release of Ibram X. Kendi’s latest book, Chain of Ideas: The Origins of Our Authoritarian Age. As a prominent voice in anti-racist scholarship whose ideas have shaped important conversations, Kendi has had a significant influence on popular beliefs about racial inequality.
In the weeks since its March release, I watched several of his interviews and public conversations. What stood out was that his discussions were exclusively with sympathetic voices—aligned scholars, moderators, and supporters. The tone was collaborative and message-focused rather than exploratory on one of our most complex and divisive social issues.
Having spent years in social justice work and later in the academy, I understand the deep impulse to advance a moral message. Yet I’ve come to embrace a different approach: a “post-tribal” mindset. As I suggested in an earlier post, the first step is introspection—seeing our political opponents as fellow humans and perhaps finding common ground. That sounds simple, but it’s surprisingly difficult.
Political psychology shows we are all wired for tribalism. People on the left and right don’t merely disagree on ideas—we often experience emotions, morality, and belonging in fundamentally different ways. For many of us, politics isn’t primarily about discovering the best policies. It’s about signaling belonging. There’s deep satisfaction in “knowing” that one’s side is not only correct but morally superior. Researchers describe dopamine rewards from in-group validation, moral certainty, and the imagined approval of others for standing on “the right side of history.” That pull is powerful, and many people are reluctant to let it go.
I’m not claiming I’ve fully escaped tribalism myself. It remains more of a lodestar than a destination. Yet striving for a more post-tribal mindset carries real costs. You forfeit those dopamine hits and the warm glow of moral righteousness. There’s also a quieter price: Loneliness.
When you stop reflexively signaling loyalty to one political team, you lose the validation and camaraderie that come with it—those satisfying “Yes! We’re the ones standing up for what’s right!” moments. Even harder, people on both sides begin viewing you with suspicion. If your views don’t fit neatly into either tribe’s script, you can seem unpredictable, odd, or even untrustworthy. Over time, many independent thinkers experience a subtle but persistent sense of social isolation.
Despite these costs, the rewards are profound. It feels genuinely liberating and deepens your wisdom in meaningful ways. Flashy debates lose their appeal; honest conversations become far more compelling. You stop instinctively dismissing thinkers because they’re on the “other side.” The drive to “win” arguments fades, replaced by openness to the possibility that you might be wrong. Tribal righteousness gradually yields to epistemic humility. Best of all, you develop a real thirst for learning from perspectives that differ from—and sometimes unsettle—your own.
The less we depend on kudos from tribal righteousness, the less incentive we have to demonize intellectual adversaries. Ideally, humility supplants hubris, and we begin to crave constructive disagreement.
Of course, to anyone deeply invested in their team’s moral superiority, this can sound like an abdication of principles. You can almost hear the Godwin’s Law retort: “So you’re saying we should have been ‘post-tribal’ in Weimar Germany and not opposed the Nazis?”
But post-tribalism is not a political stance—it’s an intellectual aspiration. The social theorist Max Weber clarified this distinction in his famous ‘Vocation’ lectures: the realms of politics and scholarship demand different ethical orientations. While politics entails the ethics of ‘conviction’ and ‘responsibility’ for one’s actions, the intellectual’s duty is to the truth alone. For Weber, it is incumbent on educators to set aside personal value judgments and actively pursue ‘inconvenient facts’—truths that may unsettle our beliefs or the dogmas of our tribe.
The humble truth is that every moral framework, shaped by our differing political instincts, both illuminates parts of reality and blinds us to others. Like the classic parable of the blind men and the elephant, each of us grasps only a portion of the whole. From this vantage point, there is always something valuable to learn from others—especially when their viewpoint differs sharply from our own.
Here is a different voice who, in my view, embodies the post-tribal spirit in practice: the heterodox thinker and podcaster Coleman Hughes. Hughes addresses the same divisive issues of race but from a quite different perspective, advocating strongly for colorblind public policies and opposing race-based reparations. What stands out is his method: Hughes regularly invites dialogue with voices from across the spectrum, including Noam Chomsky and Glenn Greenwald on the left, and Niall Ferguson and Ben Shapiro on the right. He has even publicly extended invitations for conversation with Kendi in the past.
I write this not to belittle Kendi nor to endorse Hughes’s specific ideas. What I find compelling is Hughes’s consistent willingness to engage substantively with criticism—even (and especially) when it challenges his own views. In today’s polarized climate, ideas as influential as Kendi’s deserve the widest possible hearing—among supporters and skeptics alike. Cultivating genuine openness to dialogue with those who see the world differently remains one of the most powerful ways to reduce polarization and sharpen our thinking. Approaches that prioritize such productive friction can help us all move closer to a fuller understanding of seemingly intractable problems like racial inequality.