The Tribes of Colour: From the Circus Maximus to the Death of the Citizen

The Arena in the Living Room

Every Easter Sunday in Britain, the chariots thunder across the nation’s television screens in the ritual airing of Ben-Hur. The living room settles into comfortable ancient spectacle. We watch the factions collide in the dust of the arena, safely convinced that such primal, blood-soaked tribalism is a relic of a dead empire.

But as the credits roll and we reach for our phones, the circus simply migrates from the screen to the palm of our hands.

We have not outgrown the Hippodrome. We have merely digitised it. The visceral roar of the Roman crowd lives on in the social media pile-on and the whataboutism of the party faithful. We have traded the physical dust of the Circus Maximus for the psychological tribalism of Westminster and Washington, turning ourselves from citizens who hold power to account into fans who defend their team regardless of the score. Beneath the colours of our chosen factions, the same ancient machinery of control is turning. While we fight over the red of the rose or the blue of the flag, we remain blind to the colour that truly governs us: the unchallengeable authority of corporate and institutional power that never appears on any ballot.

Why does a modern voter, faced with the undeniable ethical collapse of their own chosen party, react not with indignation but with a defensive crouch? Why does the person who would rightly condemn corruption in a political opponent suddenly discover a bottomless reserve of charitable interpretation when the offence is committed by their own side?

Spend an hour on social media and you will find the answer playing out in real time: a torrent of whataboutism, deflection, and manufactured grievance. Point out that your government has broken a promise, and the response is not acknowledgement but a counter-accusation. What about the other lot? As if the failures of the opposition somehow inoculate the governing party against accountability.

This is not, as the political class would have us believe, a sign of a healthy democracy vigorously debating its future. It is a symptom of something far older, far more dangerous, and far more useful to those in power. It is tribalism. And it is the mechanism by which ordinary people are turned from citizens into fans, from participants into spectators, and from the natural opponents of power into its most reliable instruments.

II. The Dust of the Circus

The Circus Maximus was not merely a sports venue. In an age without mass media or universal suffrage, it was the arena in which the Roman public expressed its political will. The spectators were divided into four primary factions: the Reds, Whites, Blues, and Greens.

These colours were not arbitrary. They were embedded in a cosmological framework that mapped human experience onto four quadrants. The light blue of the Blues referred to air, sky, and water. The green of the Greens was connected to the earth and the goddess Venus. The red of Mars carried the weight of blood, war, and sacrifice. Supporting a colour was an act of alignment with the forces of nature and the gods themselves.

This symbolic mapping gave moral weight to factional loyalty. One was not merely a fan of a team; one was a partisan of summer or a devotee of the sea. When a modern political party adopts a colour today, it attempts to hijack these same ancient associations. It speaks, as it always has, not to the reasoning mind but to something older and considerably more obedient.

The charioteers became the world’s first superstars, and their fans organised accordingly. Structured groups known as claqueurs emerged: professional enthusiasts whose function was to lead the chanting, manufacture consensus, and ensure their faction dominated the noise of the stadium. These were not simply supporters; they were operatives. They intimidated opponents, protected their own, and appealed directly to the Emperor on matters of policy. The claqueur was the ancient equivalent of a coordinated social media pile-on: organised, disciplined, and designed to make manufactured enthusiasm indistinguishable from genuine public opinion.

Nero surrounded himself with a claque of five thousand trained applauders. The ratio of paid enthusiasts to genuine audience members has remained strikingly consistent across two thousand years.

III. The Byzantine Crucible

As the imperial capital shifted to Constantinople, the circus factions evolved from sports clubs into the primary vehicles for religious and political expression. The four factions consolidated into two dominant powers: the Blues and the Greens. Their rivalry was potentially lethal. The historian Procopius observed with cold precision that the factions fight against their opponents knowing not for what end they imperil themselves.

The ultimate expression came in January 532 AD. The Nika riots began when the Emperor Justinian ignored pleas for clemency for arrested members of both factions. In an unprecedented moment, the rival Blues and Greens united under a single chant, Nika, meaning victory, and turned their collective fury against the state. The city was set ablaze. The original Hagia Sophia burned. Thirty thousand people died when the general Belisarius sealed the Hippodrome and massacred those trapped inside.

As Justinian prepared to flee, Empress Theodora anchored him with the declaration that the royal purple is the noblest shroud. The Tyrian purple, extracted at extraordinary cost from sea snails, was the colour of empire itself, reserved exclusively for the sovereign. All the passion of the Hippodrome, all the violence of the factions, existed beneath and ultimately in service of that purple authority. The tribes were returned to their place. The purple remained secure.

When the institutional channels of genuine democratic expression are closed, the passions of the arena overflow into the streets. And when they do, the state has its answer ready.

This is the warning the Nika riots carry for every age that comes after. The storming of the United States Capitol on 6 January 2021 was, among other things, the charge of a sporting crowd told its team had been cheated. The language was the language of fans: the rigged game, the corrupt referee, the stolen trophy. The violence was not ideological in any coherent sense. It was tribal. It was the Nika riots in baseball caps. And like the Nika riots, it ultimately served the interests of the very system it claimed to oppose.

IV. The Death of Ideology and the Birth of the Brand

There was a period when British and American politics were organised around something that at least resembled ideology. The arguments were real, the stakes understood. The Attlee government and its Conservative opponents disagreed profoundly about the organisation of society, but they largely agreed on what the questions were: Who owns the means of production? Who bears the cost of industrial civilisation? Who decides?

That consensus collapsed in the 1970s and was buried by the monetarist revolution of the 1980s. What replaced it was a managed absence of ideology: a politics in which the major parties competed over the administration of a capitalism whose fundamentals were declared beyond democratic debate. Into the vacuum left by the evacuation of genuine political contest, something older and more primal flooded in. When there is nothing real to argue about, you argue about belonging.

The British Labour Party provides the essential case study. Founded as a mass movement for the industrial working class, the party originally flew the plain red flag of revolutionary solidarity. By the mid-1980s, reeling from electoral failure, the party began a transformation that was less about policy than aesthetic management. Under Neil Kinnock and Peter Mandelson, the red flag was replaced by the emblem of the red rose. Policy became secondary. The brand was the point.

What followed was New Labour: a project that accepted the rules of the global market while maintaining the aesthetic of a social-democratic tribe. Tony Blair completed the transformation by modifying Clause IV, removing the commitment to common ownership that had defined the party’s socialist identity for three-quarters of a century. The colour remained red. The content had been quietly evacuated. A party built to challenge the concentration of economic power had been rebranded into a vehicle for managing it more humanely. And the tribal loyalty of its voters ensured that this transformation was absorbed without the rebellion it deserved.

In the United States, the now-familiar division into red and blue states began as something mundane. Before the 2000 election, television networks used no uniform colour coding. The 2000 election changed everything. Because the result was delayed by the Florida recount, electoral maps remained on screen for weeks. NBC’s Tim Russert popularised red state and blue state during the coverage. The choice of red for Republicans was, by one account, essentially typographic: red begins with R. What began as a logistical convenience has calcified, in little more than two decades, into a psychological and geographic barrier, a shorthand for entire moral codes, cultural identities, and the full weight of a person’s sense of self. The Roman factions took centuries to acquire their symbolic weight. The Americans managed it in a single election cycle.

V. The Fan, the Claqueur, and the Death of Accountability

Heavy physical work, the care of home and children, petty quarrels with neighbours, films, football, beer, and above all, gambling, filled up the horizon of their minds. To keep them in control was not difficult.

George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four

The psychological mechanisms that underpin political tribalism are not mysterious. We are biologically predisposed to seek belonging in a collective. Sports psychology has documented how fans experience genuine physiological highs when their team wins and real distress when it loses. In politics, this translates into something that looks like passionate democratic engagement but is, in substance, the suspension of judgment.

The fan’s function is to support. The citizen’s function is to hold to account. These are not the same thing, and the confusion between them is not accidental. A fan who demands accountability from their own side is, within the logic of fandom, a traitor. A citizen who refuses to demand accountability from their own side is, within the logic of democracy, an abdicator. What we are witnessing across the Western world is the systematic and largely successful replacement of citizen-logic by fan-logic.

The Commons expenses scandal of 2009 demonstrated this with laboratory precision. Tory voters were outraged by Labour members’ claims. Labour voters were outraged by Tory members’ claims. Both sides were substantially correct. Both sides were substantially blind to their own. The fraud was bipartisan. The tolerance was tribal.

The pattern has only hardened since. Boris Johnson’s government presided over a procurement scandal of comic brazenness, channelling public money through PPE contracts to associates and donors for goods that failed or were never delivered. The reaction of a significant portion of his support was not outrage but rationalisation: he was their player, you do not drop your own player for one bad game. When Keir Starmer’s government cut the winter fuel payment for millions of pensioners while protecting the interests of the financial sector, much of his support responded with deflection: they inherited a mess, give them time, the other side would have been worse.

These are not political arguments. They are the arguments of fans justifying a poor performance on the basis of a loyalty that predates and overrides all evidence. And every time those arguments succeed, accountability dies a little more. The public trust that democratic governance requires is quietly drained away, and those who drained it face no consequence, because their own supporters handed them the bucket.

VI. The Tyrian Purple: What the Tribes Protect Without Knowing It

From a socialist perspective, the most cynical dimension of modern political tribalism is not the corruption it enables in individual governments. It is the deeper structural service it performs for the system as a whole.

The four colours of the Roman circus all existed beneath the overarching authority of the Tyrian purple, the colour of empire itself, the one colour that was never on offer to any faction. In the modern world, the red and blue tribes both operate within the narrow confines of a neoliberal consensus that is similarly never on the ballot. Whether the red team or the blue team wins, the fundamental power of corporate influence, the erosion of the public sphere, the concentration of wealth, and the capture of public institutions by private interests remain largely unchallenged. The tribes provide the heat and the noise that distract the public from this reality. The noise is the point.

This is not an accident of political culture. It is a function of the system, operating through the deliberate suppression of class consciousness. A united working class, aware of its shared material interests, is the one force historically capable of threatening the Tyrian purple of any age. Tribalism is the antidote to that threat. By dividing the population into warring camps based on aesthetic identity and cultural allegiance, the underlying economic structures of power are rendered invisible. The fight that matters, over who owns what, who decides, and who bears the cost, is displaced by the fight that does not: red versus blue, leave versus remain, the culture war of the week. The working class is kept busy fighting itself, and the class above it goes about its business undisturbed.

New Labour demonstrated this with particular clarity: a party that used the branding of the left to implement the policies of the right, successfully turning the movement for working-class emancipation into a brand that was safe for the global market. Blair’s modification of Clause IV was a declaration that the party had accepted the Tyrian purple of global capital as a permanent and unchallengeable authority. The colour remained red. The class interest it represented had changed beyond recognition.

The Romans were kept quiet with bread and circuses. We are kept quiet not by bread, which is increasingly unaffordable, but by the circus alone.

A population that experiences its politics as tribal sport is a population that cannot act as a class. And a population that cannot act as a class is a population that cannot threaten power. Now the political system offers still more options: more parties, more colours, more teams to support. Reform, the Greens, the Liberal Democrats, each a new faction jostling in an expanded circus. This is not the end of tribal politics. It is its perfection. More tribes, same purple.

VII. Citizens or Fans: The Question That Decides Everything

Every authoritarian state in modern history has been preceded by a period of managed tribalism, in which the standard of political judgment shifts, by increments too small to notice, from is this right to is this good for our side. The party faithful do not, as a rule, consciously choose tyranny. They choose, in sequence, a series of individually defensible positions: this scandal is being exaggerated by our enemies; the media is biased against us; the institutions arrayed against our leader are corrupt; the opposition would be worse; extreme times require strong leadership. By the time the arc of that logic becomes visible, it is generally too late to reverse it.

This observation carries a warning that applies without regard to party or colour. The claqueurs of Nero’s concerts were not his friends. They were his instruments. They served his performance rather than their own interests, and history does not record their names. It records the name of the emperor. The loyal supporter who excuses everything their side does is not protecting democracy. They are performing a service for those who manage it.

To recover democracy, we must recover the distinction between the fan and the citizen. This means evaluating policy not on the colour of the person proposing it but on its measurable impact on the common good. It means holding your own side to a higher standard than the opposition, not a lower one. It means resisting the whataboutism reflex, and understanding that demanding accountability from your own government is not an act of betrayal toward your side. It is an act of fidelity toward your country.

The passion and loyalty that tribal politics has co-opted are not inherently corrupt. The working class did not invent solidarity as a form of weakness. The trade union movement, the Chartists, the early labour movement built a solidarity organised around shared material conditions: wages, hours, safety, and collective power. That was solidarity in the service of the people who held it. What we have now, in its place, is a performed loyalty in the service of the people who manage it.

The Blues and the Greens of Constantinople fought with genuine courage for their colours across centuries. Their struggle ultimately served the imperial order. Even when they united in the Nika riots, the most dramatic expression of popular anger the ancient world had ever seen, they could only imagine a world ruled by a different emperor under a different colour. The purple remained. The circus ran. And the people returned to their seats.

We are, at this moment, in a modern iteration of that Hippodrome. We wear our colours, chant our slogans, and engage in digital street fights with our rivals, and all the while the Tyrian purple of corporate and institutional power remains perfectly secure. Orwell understood it in 1949: football, beer, and gambling filled up the horizon of their minds. What has changed is that the football is now politics itself, carrying the same visceral loyalty, the same tribal fury, the same willingness to excuse anything your team does and condemn everything the other side does. The circus has not left town. It has moved onto a screen in your pocket.

The question each of us must answer is the same question the Romans never adequately answered. Are you a citizen, or are you a fan? If you find yourself defending the indefensible because it wears your colour, you are not exercising democratic loyalty. You are acting as a claqueur for someone else’s performance.

The real divide in this society is not between red and blue, or any of the newer colours now competing for our tribal allegiance. It is between those who own and control wealth and power, and those who work and produce. Tribal politics exists, in large part, to prevent that recognition from ever becoming organised. It has been remarkably effective.

The working class has always had the numbers. What it has periodically lacked is the clarity. Citizenship is that clarity. It is the refusal to be managed, the insistence on asking who benefits, and the willingness to hold your own side to the same standard you demand of the enemy. It is, in the end, the only form of loyalty that history has ever rewarded.

The party faithful are not the last line of defence against tyranny. Unchallenged, they are its most reliable supply chain…

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