It distresses me that so many educated people embrace tribal politics, regardless of what tribe affiliate with. The Founders of the U.S. rightfully feared that factions would be our undoing as a country. For many people, it’s as though the Enlightenment never occurred. Sarah Pruitt offers the historical background:

Today, it may seem impossible to imagine the U.S. government without its two leading political parties, Democrats and Republicans. But in 1787, when delegates to the Constitutional Convention gathered in Philadelphia to hash out the foundations of their new government, they entirely omitted political parties from the new nation’s founding document.

This was no accident. The framers of the new Constitution desperately wanted to avoid the divisions that had ripped England apart in the bloody civil wars of the 17th century. Many of them saw parties—or “factions,” as they called them—as corrupt relics of the monarchical British system that they wanted to discard in favor of a truly democratic government.