Tribalism is bad. Or, Why I'm Not a Republican

A few years ago, California voters passed legislation saying we wanted "open primaries," meaning that non-partisan voters should be able to vote for the nominee of the party of their choosing in the primary elections. Good plan, eh? Means people that don't fully subscribe to the tenets of either party but who like one particular candidate can still vote.

The GOP freaked out and went to court with the people's will, insisting that it has the "right" to a closed primary- only registered Republicans can vote for the GOP candidates. The DNC did no such thing. It embraced the open primary, knowing that it would receive more voters for its candidates. Why the GOP wants to keep its primary closed when the DNC is wide open is beyond me, but it's an interesting analogy for the stereotypical mental state of the parties: GOP remains exclusively closed-minded while DNC is so open-minded their brains fall out.

Sucks for the GOP, many people said. They just lose votes.

Talk about angering the voters, though. See, the GOP has to announce ahead of time whether its primary is going to be open or closed. Its deadline is in December, which normally isn't a problem because the California primaries don't happen until June. Except... Oops.

Remember when we moved our primary up to February? Yeah, about that... someone forgot to change the GOP's deadline and although they did announce their closed primary this year, there apparently wasn't enough time to filter through all the mail and change partisanship in many conservative counties. So the problem we had was hundreds of people coming up to the voting booth asking for a GOP ballot and not being allowed to vote because they are still registered Non Partisan. Sure, they could vote on local matters and propositions, but not on the important things. This, needless to say, pissed a lot of people off.

Let's flip the coin and look at the other side for a moment.

I live in Kenya now, and the political situation here reeks of corruption. Years ago the then-President was pressured by the world community to introduce a multi-party system to Kenya's election process. This man, being rather intelligent, decided that if he was going to have to create opposition to his rule, he might as well do it in a way that benefited him most. So he created multiple political parties, but divided them not along ideological lines, but rather along tribal lines.

He eventually overplayed the tribal card and people began to catch on. So they voted in another president. And now they complain that the most recent elections were rigged to return that president to office. There are over 100 political parties in Kenya, and most of them have the same ideological principles. Meaning people vote for their tribe, regardless of the candidate's record.

It sounds familiar. I know far too many people in the US who will vote with one party, regardless of the candidate. I, frankly, can hardly tell the difference between Republican and Democrat anymore. Republicans are barely conservative in their records and Democrats pass themselves off as moderates to get votes. It's not about change anymore. It's not about the issues. It's about what tribe party you're with.

Remember when voting meant that you cared about who got into office, not just who didn't get in?