This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2016, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.

[Video: Groucho shows us how wars start.]

Those of us who fear Donald Trump see his attitude toward different racial and ethnic groups as an embodiment of the worst of American racism, the Ku Klux Klan.

But it's not the Klan that matters. It's the clan.

The family. The church. The region. The team. The school. The party. The odd and sometimes arbitrary ways in which people sort themselves in search of some sense of belonging.

Novelist Kurt Vonnegut called them "granfalloons." They are "associations or societies based on a shared but ultimately fabricated premise." The examples Vonnegut gave in "Cat's Cradle" are: "the Communist Party, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the General Electric Company — and any nation, anytime, anywhere."

Such self-sorting can be helpful, providing everything from survival to fellowship while watching sports. Cheering for your favorite team — or any team — is much more likely to draw out the adrenalin rush that sports are for when you are doing it with — and against — other people.

Or it can be about the most harmful thing humanity has ever suffered, when the definition of "us" becomes centered on the fact that us is not "them." Because us is good and them is bad. Because, well, them ain't us.

I came to Utah non-LDS and a set-in-his-ways adult. I still am. It is clear to me that the oft-commented resentment of Mormons by those who aren't has absolutely and utterly nothing to do with whose image of God is correct.

It has everything to do with the unremarkable perception that, because Mormons are human, they naturally tend to share not only their worshiping time, but also their political efforts and their business dealings, with fellow members. The fact that church members dominate the Legislature and the political landscape outside Salt Lake City, that they torpedo Medicaid expansion and move prisons, is not due to any religious dogma. It's base human clubishness.

Right now Republicans, in Utah and everywhere else, are sorting themselves into the tribes that will never support Trump and those who will, either enthusiastically or kicking and screaming.

Those who won't, to our state's credit, include adopted favorite son Mitt Romney and Lt. Gov. Spencer Cox. Those who will, sadly, include Utah House Speaker Greg Hughes and, as of just the other day, Utah's U.S. Sen. Orrin Hatch. Mugwumps include, for now, Gov. Gary Herbert and U.S. Sen. Mike Lee. If, that is, Lee's description of Trump as someone who "scares me to death" can be called fence-sitting.

These Republicans, like many politically active people, are conditioned to support whoever is seeking any office under their banner. Real principles, ideologies and policies often have nothing to do with it.

Certainly not for a party that supposedly stands for small government at home and world leadership globally but now stands on the brink of nominating a pharaoh whose policies — expelling millions of one sort of person, excluding millions more of another sort, defaulting on the national debt, pulling away from treaty obligations and alliances — would require levels of government and executive activism never seriously considered in this nation before.

Except it wouldn't be big government. It would be big boss.

Politicians and functionaries who back Trump do so because party is all that matters. Anyone who can support, even passively, such a tin-plated caesar for the position of Leader of the Free World does so only because it means that they will get a better chance at government jobs, better seats at state dinners, more access as lobbyists.

Republican voters who will back Trump's cult of personality just want their team to win. So they can share the glory, wear the T-shirts and look down on the losers.

Except what's at stake here is more than bragging rights for sports fans. We're talking about choosing the person who is in possession of the NORAD go codes.

I'd say that people who cling so tightly to their own granfalloons would benefit from watching more Star Trek and appreciating the diversity valued there. Except that if I convinced anyone to become a Trekkie, the all-too-likely result is that they would start hating Star Wars fans.

That's how clanish, not Klanish, we are.

George Pyle, a Tribune editorial writer, was inordinately happy with himself when his Kansas City Royals won the World Series last year. As if he had anything to do with it. gpyle@sltrib.com