John Mearsheimer (b. 1947) holds that humans are survival-driven social animals who live in groups, that groups need thick shared cultures to function, and that nationalism beats liberal universalism because the nation is the best survival vehicle on offer. David Pinsof holds that beliefs are alliance signals, that people adopt positions to advertise loyalty to their coalitions and to derogate rivals, and that persuasion runs downstream of alliance structure. Put them together and you get a diagnosis: America is disunited because its national identity has thinned while its internal coalitions have thickened, and every public question has become a badge in a two-coalition war. The prescription follows from the diagnosis.
First, lower the stakes of national politics. Pinsof implies that when Washington decides everything, every belief becomes a national loyalty test. If abortion, schooling, guns, and speech codes are settled state by state, a Texan and a Vermonter no longer need to treat each other as existential threats. Federalism reduces the signaling value of national positions. A leader who wants unity might push decisions down rather than win them at the top, even when his coalition holds the top.
Second, scramble the coalitions. Pinsof’s account says beliefs follow alliances, so the lever is alliance structure. The current sorting stacks race, religion, education, geography, and party into two megatribes, and stacked cleavages produce total war. Cross-cutting cleavages produce moderation because your ally on taxes is your opponent on schools and you cannot afford to hate him. Leaders can build cross-cutting alliances around material interests: an economic program that recruits Black church ladies and White factory workers into one coalition does more for unity than a thousand speeches about coming together. The speeches are coalition signaling in disguise; the payroll is real.
Third, thicken the national identity. Mearsheimer’s anthropology says a country held together only by proposition and procedure will lose to countries held together by story, ritual, and blood-adjacent loyalty. Leaders might invest in the machinery that manufactures Americans: a common civic calendar, national holidays celebrated rather than litigated, a canonical account of the country taught in schools that includes the crimes without making the crimes the whole story, English as the working language, and an immigration system calibrated to the country’s capacity to assimilate rather than to the labor market’s appetite. Mearsheimer might add that assimilation worked before because institutions demanded it. The demand can return.
Fourth, give the coalitions a common scoreboard. Nations unify around external competition and shared projects. A race with China over semiconductors, energy, and biotech gives both parties a reason to want the same numbers to go up. The risk runs the other direction too: leaders who inflate threats to harvest unity tend to buy wars with the proceeds. The project has to be real.
Fifth, stop feeding the signaling economy. Both frames imply that a president who spends his term on symbolic fights, on flags and statues and pronouns, is running a coalition-maintenance operation, whatever he says about healing. Material politics unifies more than symbolic politics because a bridge serves both tribes and a symbol can only serve one. Pick fights that end in concrete.
Pinsof says you cannot argue a country into unity, because argument is what coalitions do to each other. National conversations, fact-checking initiatives, and civility campaigns read as enemy maneuvers to whichever side did not launch them. Mearsheimer says that creedal patriotism alone cannot carry the load, which cuts against the favorite unity program of the American establishment. And both frames suggest the deepest constraint: leaders rose through the coalition war and owe their positions to it. Asking them to demobilize their own armies asks them to disarm first. The leaders most able to unify the country are the ones the current system is least likely to produce, which might be why the last several presidents each promised unity and each left the country more sorted than he found it.
What about realistic ways of maximizing what we have in common? How can we rejigger incentives to produce a more pro-social behavior and outlook? I don’t believe in much, but I believe in the power of incentives to increase good behavior and to decrease bad behavior.
Where does anti-social behavior currently pay, and how do you change the payout table?
Start with the attention economy, because that is where the worst incentives live. A politician, pundit, or professor earns more attention by attacking the outgroup than by any other act. Outrage travels farther than agreement on every platform, and attention converts to money and status. I’m not interested in throttling this.
Second, change what politicians need to win. Closed primaries reward the candidate who best signals hatred of the other tribe to the most committed ten percent of his own. Alaska’s system, a single open primary plus ranked-choice general, changed who won there: Lisa Murkowski (b. 1957) survived a censure from her own party because she could assemble votes across the line. Louisiana’s jungle primary has produced similar effects for decades. Multi-member districts with proportional allocation, which the Constitution permits and a statute currently forbids, might break the two-megatribe structure at the root, since a five-party system makes permanent total war arithmetically harder than a two-party system.
Third, pay for contact. The contact hypothesis holds up best under specific conditions: equal status, shared goals, cooperation, institutional support. Those conditions describe a job site, a military unit, a volunteer fire department, and a rec-league team, and they do not describe a comment section. Policy can subsidize the first list. National service scores again here, but smaller versions exist: AmeriCorps stipends large enough to compete with entry-level wages, employer tax credits for apprenticeships that pull the college-bound and the trade-bound into the same shops, zoning reform that lets the young cop and the young teacher live in the same neighborhood as the young analyst. Bowling leagues died partly because the economy stopped leaving room for them. Leave room.
Fourth, restore thick local institutions, because pro-social behavior gets learned in bodies, in rooms, among people who will see you again. The repeat-player condition does most of the work: a man behaves better toward people he will face next week. Churches, shuls, unions, Rotary, school boards. Government cannot manufacture these, but it can stop taxing and regulating them into the ground, and it can route services through them. Disaster relief through churches and civic groups, job training through unions and employer associations. When the state delivers everything through its own apparatus, it starves the middle layer where citizens practice cooperation on people unlike their cousins.
Fifth, make defection from your own coalition survivable. Pinsof’s frame says people hold tribal positions because the cost of breaking ranks exceeds the benefit of honesty. Lower the cost. Secret ballots did this for voting. Institutions can do the analogue: universities and firms that adopt real neutrality on contested public questions, in the style of the Kalven Report, give their members cover to think. A professor at a committed institution must signal; a professor at a neutral one may reason. The incentive design point: honesty is a supply curve, and it slopes. More people tell the truth when the price drops.
Sixth, use the tax code and the honors system. The state already shapes behavior through deductions and medals. It could weight both toward bridging rather than bonding. Charitable status might favor organizations whose membership crosses the party line over organizations that exist to fight the culture war under a 501(c)(3) flag. Presidential medals, national endowments, and public commissions could go to people whose work serves both tribes, and the selection would itself be a signal from the top about what the country pays status for.
Seventh, end immigration and incentives for American to not put America first.
Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919) attacked “hyphenated Americanism” and made the hyphen a mark against a man in public life. German Americans dropped their language, renamed their clubs, and buried a culture inside a decade. The machine worked through elite gatekeeping: newspapers, party bosses, university admissions, officer commissions. It should be publicly unacceptable to put any identity ahead of your American identity (with the exception of your religion).
Make the top of every ladder model the ranking. When the general, the CEO, the university president, and the senator each speak as Americans first and their tribes second, ambitious people below them copy the style, because ambitious people copy up. This costs nothing and requires no law. It requires elites who want to do it, which is the actual scarcity. The current elite incentive runs the other way: a corporate officer gains status in his professional class by foregrounding subgroup identity, and the awards, panels, and profiles reward it. Flip what the prestige economy pays. The Presidential Medal of Freedom, honorary degrees, magazine covers, keynote slots. These are the currency. Spend them on people who publicly rank America first, and withhold them from people who publicly rank it lower, and within a decade the style changes, because the style always follows the money and the honors.
Build institutions where the ranking is the price of entry. The military does this now and is the last institution majorities of both tribes trust. The oath, the uniform, the flag on the shoulder: a Marine may be Mexican, Mormon, or Sikh, and the Corps does not care, and it will destroy him for placing any of it above the unit. Expand the model. A large national service program extends the oath culture to millions who will never enlist. Naturalization already requires renouncing prior allegiances; the ceremony could become a bigger public event, celebrated the way college football is celebrated, so the country regularly watches people choose it over their origins.
Pinsof notes that secure status permits understatement. The men most able to mock identity ranking are members in good standing of the subgroups. When a Black comedian ridicules a White progressive for racial ventriloquism, or a Jewish writer needles a colleague for treating Israel as his home team in American debates, the shame lands without triggering the persecution alarm, because the shot came from inside. No government program produces this, but media gatekeepers decide whom to platform, and they could platform the counter-signalers instead of the identity entrepreneurs.
Mearsheimer would say some identity rankings are load limits you cannot shame away. Religious believers place God above the state, and a country that demands otherwise turns faith into an enemy and loses the believers, who are its most pro-social citizens by most measures. The workable demand is narrower: rank America above every earthly alternative, above the old country, the race, the party, and the diaspora, while leaving the vertical relationship alone.
Pinsof would say a shame campaign run by one coalition becomes a loyalty test administered by that coalition, and “America first in your identity stack” becomes a club for beating whichever minorities the administering tribe dislikes.
