In an episode of “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” the enterprise crew was transporting a famous diplomat who was tasked with ending a war on a planet.

When the crew tried to provide the diplomat with a briefing on the reasons for the war, the diplomat said he did not need it because it did not matter.

When asked why, he said they have been fighting for centuries. His point, they long since forgot why the war began, they were fighting because of the fight itself.

The existence of the other side, alone, was enough reason to fight. The war was tribal.

Tribal warfare, first and foremost, is not about ideals or principles or policy disputes.

Tribal warfare is about not letting the other side win and the existence of the other side is enough of a reason for war.

American politics has descended into tribal warfare. The two parties, Democrat and Republican, no longer present different ideological ideas and policies.

They represent labels of two sides that operationalize total war. Each represents to the other all that is evil in mankind and society.

Read Facebook posts or watch Fox, MSNBC and CNN prime time. There is no quarter for the other.

American politics has always been rough. Thomas Jefferson and John Adams in the election of 1800 established what party politics would bring to America.

Each had bought press coverage to accuse the other of being Monarchists or Francophiles. Each accused the other of violating the principles of the Constitution and were agents of foreign powers to put America under the heel of either Great Britain or France.

The 1828 election between Andrew Jackson and President John Quincy Adams was nasty by today’s standards and was a rematch of a worse election in 1824.

Jackson blamed the death of his wife on accusations made by the Adams’ supporters that she was not a virtuous woman.

The election of 1860 led to the Civil War because the freedom loving, states’ rights, individual liberty, slave owning Southern Democrats would not accept Lincoln’s election when he won without Southern support.

In the modern era, the election of 1960 had Kennedy using his influence to free Dr. Martin Luther King from an unlawful arrest in the south and made it look like Nixon was not only against civil rights but that Kennedy was a wholesale supporter of it.

This was a political move older Republican operatives resent to this day.

Then, between 1964 and 1972, Barry Goldwater and segregation today, segregation tomorrow and segregation forever George Wallace and Richard Nixon transitioned Southern Democrat voters to the Republican Party on the train of crime and law and order.

With the Democratic Party expelling social conservative Democrats from the party in 1972 the two tribes, represented by the two parties, were set.

The first of many battles occurred in the 1980 election in which Reagan prevailed. Carter was called weak and Reagan an ignorant choice for an ignorant racist voter base.

The 1980 election gave birth to the moral majority and the rise of white evangelical Christians using politics to save the American soul from the immorality of Democrats.

The battle lines between conservatives and liberals entered a new level of tribalism when the membership of the Supreme Court came into play.

After the blood wars over Robert Bork in 1987 and Clarence Thomas 1991, Sen. Mitch McConnell dedicated his political life to seeking revenge for the treatment of Bork and then Thomas and the resulting wars over Garland in 2016, Gorsuch in 2017, Kavanaugh in 2018, and Barrett in 2020 have destroyed a culture and tradition in how the U.S. Senate operates that will not be reversed.

The 1988 election, in which Republican social conservatives used the Willie Horton ad to stoke white fears that black rapists would run wild if Democrats were elected, would not be soon forgotten by blacks or Democrats.

The 1992 election of Bill Clinton over George H.W. Bush, the scorched earth politics of Newt Gingrich (1994-2000), and Clinton beating Bob Dole in 1996, followed by the failed impeachment of Clinton in 1999 all laid new seeds of the resentment of the Republican voting base against both the Democrats and the Republican establishment. That resentment would later birth the Tea Party resulting from a black man moving into their White House in 2009, at least, that’s how Democrats saw it.

Which brings the election of 2016 with Hillary Clinton against Donald Trump.

Trump won and the Democrats revolted and made up assertions of mass election fraud, theft, voter interference and claimed white nationalism had prevailed.

For the first two years of his presidency, they opposed Trump and accused him of being, at best, a Russian stooge and, at worst, a Russian operative.

It did not help that Trump came in and separated children from parents at the U.S. boarder who were running from MS 13 drug and rape gangs that were running wild in South America.

Trump called others coming from Mexico, murders, rapists and thieves.

The image of kids in cages, which infuriated Trump voters as being made up, was never lived down.

Tribal resentment of Trump’s narcissistic shenanigans, with his Twitter account compounding Democrat rage over the wall, and his one vote failure to get his party to vote to repeal Obamacare, was made all the worse when a gang of Klansmen and white nationalists walked down Main Street, Charlottesville, and Trump could not in a clear unambiguous sentence condemn them.

The tribal sides were set when Fox News prime time commentators defended Trump and said the anti-racist protesters were equal in blame for the street fight that occurred with the armed Klansmen.

In 2018, the Republicans lost the House and after three years of asserting Trump was a Russian stooge who stole the 2016 election, Trump was impeached in December 2019 for trying to bribe a foreign leader to get dirt on Joseph Biden, who was by then the main threat to Trump’s reelection.

Although the Democrats failed to convict in the Senate in February 2020, both sides had hard feelings especially when his lawyers argued that the president can’t be impeached for offering bribes in foreign policy.

To make matters worse, the COVID-19 pandemic hit the world in spring 2020 - right after the failed impeachment trial - and Trump voters said COVID-19 was a political hoax to hurt Trump.

They resented the focus of liberals and Democrats on the number of people killed by the virus and asserted more people died from the flu and more babies were killed by abortions than all the people who died worldwide from COVID-19.

By the middle of summer, a full revolt among Trump voters occurred, and not wearing masks became a symbol of their resistance to government fascism against freedom loving Americans.

In the 2020 election, the seeds and cultivation of tribal politics bore full fruit.

It was an election not about policy disputes but a base turnout battle in which the focal point was Trump himself.

To Democrats, Trump is a small narcissistic man who was in an office bigger than him.

To Trump voters, he is the savior of America and Western civilization from the dictatorship of political correctness elites.

Trump is the symbol of America and to oppose Trump is to oppose America herself.

And with such, Trump voters make clear, there shall be no compromise.

Conservative talk radio and Fox News without restraint reflected Trump voter beliefs that Biden was a pawn of godless heathens who would impose on America fascism and socialism.

Equally matched in rhetoric, MSNBC, without doubt, asserted the election was a battle against white nationalists and fascists who were seeking to take away health care and who stole two Supreme Court seats in order to steal the election for Trump.

In the 2020 election, the tables were turned. It is now Trump and the Republicans who are whining and moaning and making up stories about mass election fraud, false ballots and a stolen election.

American politics has descended into a tribalism with no way out. We no longer debate policy.

The other side is now evil per se. Read what people write on Facebook. Friendships and families decades old have broken up over Trump. Politics has replaced religion as a value base that is without compromise.

In the “Star Trek” episode, the parties end with both sides faced off at each other with the diplomat forcing both to learn sign language to give both sides a common ground they had to share before anything else could get done.

America has no such luck.

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Editor’s note: Dr. Arthur Garrison is a professor of criminal justice at Kutztown University and author of the book, “Chained to the System: The History and Politics of Black Incarceration in America.”