Alabama told “

A lot of things I could say until I see Doug Jones beating Roy Moore in the Alabama Senate race, but I'm just saying one: ”

Thank you most of the Alabamas who loved our country more than they hated the Democrats. Thank you for voting as citizens, not as members of the tribe. Thank you for realizing that determining to be representative of Alabama would not only denigrate your country but denigrate the entire legislative body. Thank you for seeing Doug Jones' kindness, although he's a Democrat, and for seeing Roy Moore's evil.

And thank you for sending a message to Donald Trump and Stephen Bannon that you're not as stupid as they think you are. That you can see in what they've been sullied into trying to use the divisive tweets and racism that make Americans forget about real problems, current candidates, national interests, or even personal interests, simply hating “ ”.

God bless you all. Your gesture was deeply patriotic.

It's too early to say it with full confidence, of course, if this is a national trend, but when the majority in a republican state like Alabama where anti-abort sensations are so large, making it impossible for a Democrat to choose by rejecting Trump and Bannon's attempt to turn us from a civic society into tribal society, and by offering hope for our nation. It's a good sign of health.

I speak from experience because I once became part of this tribal abyss. In the 70th, when I was covering the Lebanese civil war, a confession spread to Beirut that said Lebanese Christian fals had found a new way to discover Palestinians trying to cross one of the checkpoints. The falls would show the drivers a tomato, and they would ask: What is this? If the driver used the standard libanist, “bandura,” would be allowed to pass. If he used the gym to say “band,” would be taken out of the car and shot.

This is the tribal policy at its core: It doesn't matter how you live life, or what you aspire for your society. All that matters is your tribal or sect identity, revealed by the way you speak tomato.

Middle Eastern people have a saying about this thinking: “I and my brother against our cousin. Me and my brother and cousin against the stranger. ”

The race for the Alabama Senate reminded me of that story not the part where it was shot, of course, but the way the Alabamas were told who to let care for our precious country, someone they wouldn't let care for their children just because it wasn't from their Tribe, their tribe.

We've run into it in the past. But in the past moments of the tribal/cultural divisions, our system was always capable of producing leaders capable of bringing out the best angels to push us toward carrying out our daily duties.

But even with Jones' victory in Alabama, I worry that social networking technology in particular and archaic laws and prevent new players from entering politics is working against the emergence of such national leaders. I'm worried that the irreversible damage has been done to our standards and institutions from this poisonous Trump cocktail, Twitter and tribalism.

I wasn't surprised when I heard former Facebook executive director Chamath Palhapatiy telling him CNBC on Tuesday that social media is creating a society that cannot distinguish “population” from the true “.” The tools we have created, he explains, “are beginning to destroy the social factory that produces the way society works. ”

It's easy to forget, that at this time of Twitter, how many a leader who can hold people together can reach even in difficult times.

Think about Abraham Lincoln. Between the civil war and between our transition from agrarian society to industrial society, Lincoln and Congress approved the act of land plots in 1862, which opened the West for agreement; acts for the Pacific Railway of 1862 and 1864, which tied east and west to the rest of the nation, setting the stage for a true national economy; The 1862 Morrilla Act, which founded colleges to teach agriculture, science and engineering, qualifications that needed the country to enter the next level.

We are walking in a similar period of radical change today. The pace of climate change is accelerating; the world is going from inter-contact to interdependence; and cars and software are swallowing high- and medium-skilled pns. The country lost a plan for investment in recovery cities, learning systems for every worker and so forth. And what have we got instead? An extremely tribal republican tax bill that addresses none of these problems.

Perhaps, though, the narrow majority in Alabama have sent both Trump and the country a message. We're tired of your cynicism, we're tired of your efforts to turn us into tribes, we want a president who's united and not divisive, because we have a lot of work to do as a place now and she can only be together.

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