Marshall McLuhan saw it coming.

Long before our present moment—before Trumpism, before social media wars, before the total erosion of rational discourse—he predicted that the rise of electronic media would undo the literate values of the Enlightenment, ushering in an era of pure tribalism. And here we are.

To understand what’s happening today, we need to look back at how McLuhan framed history. He saw civilization as shaped by its dominant media—oral culture, the rise of literacy, the printing press, and now, the electronic age. Each shift altered human cognition, reorganized societies, and changed what people valued. The print age gave us rationality, democracy, and capitalism—what McLuhan called the “literate values” of the Enlightenment. But electronic media, particularly television and now the internet linked smart phone, dissolves those values, returning us to something older: the pre-literate, tribal world.

Parallel Tribes: Nazis, Hippies, and Trumpism

Many think of Nazis and Hippies as polar opposites, but McLuhan understood them as two sides of the same coin. Both were expressions of the tribal instincts that emerge when an old media order collapses. The Nazis, rising in the wake of mass radio and cinema, built a hyper-nationalist, mythic tribe that rejected the rational, bureaucratic modernism of the 19th century. The hippies, fueled by rock music and television, formed a counter-tribe centered on collective experience, free love, and a rejection of the rationalism of their parents’ generation.

“Even if Hitler had delivered botany lectures, some other demagog would have used the radio to retribalize the Germans and rekindle the dark atavistic side of the tribal nature that created European fascism in the Twenties and Thirties.” – McLuhan, Playboy Interview 1969

“Some people are astounded that New Age hippies could have any overlap with extremist conspiracy politics. But it happens. This week, I want to look at another period when the New Age overlapped with far-right politics, with disastrous consequences for the world — Germany in the 1920s and ’30s.” – Nazi Hippies: When the New Age and Far Right Overlap, Medium, 2020

Neither was rooted in the literate, analytical mindset of the Enlightenment. The Nazis embraced mythic identity and spectacle, using mass rallies and propaganda films to unite the Volk. The hippies sought a return to a pre-modern, ecstatic tribalism through music, psychedelics, and communal living. Both, in their own ways, were rejecting the individualistic, rationalistic culture that print had built.

“The German Jew victimized by the Nazis because his old tribalism clashed with their new tribalism
could no more understand why his world was turned upside down than the American today can
understand the reconfiguration of social and political institutions caused by the electric media in
general and television in particular.” – McLuhan, same interivew

“Youth worldwide are mindlessly acting out their identity quest in the theater of the streets, searching not for goals but for roles, striving for an identity that eludes them.” – McLuhan, same interivew

And now, in the age of Trump, we see the final stage of this transformation. Trumpism is not an ideology in the traditional sense—it is a tribe, a movement built on belonging rather than belief. It does not operate within the framework of rational debate but through spectacle, emotion, and loyalty. Social media, the ultimate tribal technology, has amplified this shift, eroding any remaining Enlightenment structures.

“Because education, which should be helping youth to understand and adapt to their
revolutionary new environments, is instead being used merely as an instrument of cultural aggression, imposing upon retribalized youth the obsolescent visual values of the dying literate age. Our entire educational system is reactionary, oriented to past values and past technologies, and will likely continue so until the old generation relinquishes power. The generation gap is actually a chasm, separating not two age groups but two vastly divergent cultures. I can understand the
ferment in our schools, because our educational system is totally rearview mirror. It’s a dying and
outdated system founded on literate values and fragmented and classified data totally unsuited to
the needs of the first television generation.” -MM 1969

One of the most ironic symbols of this tribal continuity is the Volkswagen. Originally conceived as the Kraft durch Freude (Strength Through Joy) car under Hitler, the Volkswagen Beetle was designed to be the people’s car—a streamlined, affordable vehicle meant to unify and mobilize a nation. Yet, decades later, the very people who would have been persecuted by the Nazi state—counterculture hippies, draft dodgers, and radicals—embraced the same car as a symbol of their movement. The VW Bus became a rolling embodiment of anti-establishment, communal values, its aesthetic repurposed for peace rather than war.

This paradox perfectly encapsulates McLuhan’s idea that media, not ideology, drives cultural change and human perceptual-social transformation. The form of the Volkswagen—affordable, durable, communal—outlived its initial political context and was repurposed by a new tribal identity. The medium itself dictated the message, transcending ideology in favor of function. Just as the Nazis and hippies expressed different forms of media-driven tribalism, so too did their choice of transportation.

Now we have Roseanne’s Snoop-like procession of low riders, trucks, pick ups and the banners of all the damned of cancel culture–all come back to haunt the woke cutlure that thought of itself as so modern when it should have been focusing on something far more ancient.

The Collapse of Literate Values

McLuhan described literacy as a technology that reshaped the brain, fostering linear thinking, reason, and detachment. It enabled modern institutions—democracy, science, capitalism—to function. But as electronic media takes over, those institutions falter. The internet has dissolved the authority of traditional literate structures—newspapers, universities, courts—replacing them with decentralized, fragmented networks of belief.

Consider how today’s political discourse works: In the past, someone like Roseanne Barr would have been controlled by gatekeepers—editors, network executives, public intellectuals. Now, she can bypass all of that, speaking directly to her tribe. Her cancellation by the “woke left” was not an end but a transformation—she has been reborn as a folk hero of the new tribal order.

While “woke” liberals laugh at her, the new order winks back with its mosaic of instant perception trumping such outdated ideas as analysis and evidence, the old values of ‘science’ having superceded and obsolesced the former world. Liberals are largely unaware that their world need to be reinvented in the tribal image to continue. Well, they blew it with rejecting the only tribal candidate they had: Bernie Sanders! The same can be said for Trump, Kanye West, and countless other figures who thrive in the chaos of post-literate media.

Total Tribalism: The End of Enlightenment?

McLuhan suggested that we would move from an age of private, rational individuals back to an age of collective, emotional tribes. He saw this as neither good nor bad—it was simply the inevitable effect of new media. But the implications are massive.

For centuries, literacy held tribal instincts in check, channeling them into institutions that mediated conflict through law and debate. But what happens when those institutions collapse? When reason no longer matters? When belonging trumps facts? We are watching it unfold in real-time.

Trumpism, like the Nazis and the hippies before it, is a symptom of media change by cultural transformation. But unlike those earlier movements, it marks the end of the transition. There is no new print age on the horizon, no return to literate rationality. The process McLuhan described is complete. We are fully immersed in the new tribal era.

So, what happens next? Does democracy survive? Can Enlightenment values be adapted to this new world? Or are we, as McLuhan predicted, destined to live in a perpetual state of mythic conflict, with tribes endlessly warring in the vast, decentralized jungle of electronic media?

One thing is certain: the age of reason is over. The tribes have won.