https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/10/the-threat-of-tribalism/568342/
Here's an article discussing the threat of the tribalism. It does a decent job exploring the tribalism problems both sides of the aisle deal with. Here's a quote from it I like:
"Americans on both the left and the right now view their political opponents not as fellow Americans with differing views, but as enemies to be vanquished. And they have come to view the Constitution not as an aspirational statement of shared principles and a bulwark against tribalism, but as a cudgel with which to attack those enemies."
That evidence presented by that article doesn't really support that assertion at all, except in the sense that it could be used to describe the way parties have always worked since literally Jon Adams was president. De Tocqueville wrote at length bemoaning how the parties in his day had devolved into petty and unprincipled squabbling, unlike how it used to be. The article observes that the left and the right believe different things. Of course, by its very nature, a political party is a "group identity," where you associate with others who share at least some of your beliefs. But that doesn't in no way is proof that both sides partake in some absolutist form of "tribalism" that supersedes everything, even those beliefs that brought them together in the first place. Observing that "both sides" have their own beliefs, which is all this article shows, is a contentless tautology.
And yes, we are talking about the exact same thing. And frankly that article is breathtaking in its audacity. The fact that
Amy Chua and Jeb Rubenfeld wrote a paean to "both sides" and "why can't we be less partisan," the very month their good friend and alleged rapist Brett Kavanaugh was being railroaded through by a unitary partisan Republican party, the culmination of years of partisan norm shattering re: the Supreme Court by that same party, is hilarious.
I also disagree with one of the central premises of that article. I actually believe parties are a
moderating influence, if they are allowed to function correctly. The more recent rise of polarization has correlated pretty well with the loss of party control over its members, due to the way campaign finance has been designed. Parties are actually limited in the spending they can do re: elections. But outside actors are not. That's how end up with the Republican party being taken over by its own fringe element. It used to be that big donors gave to the parties and the fringe had to associate with one of the main big-funded poles of discourse in order to have any chance of effecting politics. But now, party spending is limited, and donors just spend it themselves through their own surrogates. That's part of why, for example, the Republican party has been taken over by the heavy-outside-funded Tea Party revolution.
Now this phenomenon of centralized party strength dilution does, of course, apply to both sides of the aisle. But the effects are much stronger on the Republican side because, to get back to the point... loyalty is a conservative value. Once the party is shifted by outside influence, all members are more strongly required to toe the new line. That's why you've got Congressmen on FoxNews who can't see any difference between Romney and a Democrat - Loyalty is a fundamental conservative value, and conservatives are more likely to think straying from the exact party line is a mortal sin.