Like it or not, we’re all members of a tribe
Political Tribes is an even-handed account of the polarisation of US politics, writes Nicholas Reid.
As a professor of law at Yale, Amy Chua is in a reasonable position to measure the intellectual and populist currents in America today. Political Tribes is her fourth polemic about the state of the United States and its foreign policy, excluding one rather dodgy bestselling book she wrote about being a ‘‘tiger mother’’. Ethnically Chinese, but married to a Jewish husband, Chua clearly has a personal interest in the main theme of Political Tribes. It’s about how different social groups relate to one another.
She argues that, by basic instinct, we are all driven to identify with a group or ‘‘tribe’’. With few exceptions, she says, all nation states are really made up of separate ‘‘tribes’’ – racial, cultural, religious, ideological. Failure to recognise this fact has, in her view, led to disastrous mistakes in American foreign policy.
In the Vietnam War, the US failed to see that the essential Vietnamese struggle was a nationalist one, fuelled by huge Vietnamese resentment of China and of a thriving ‘‘marketdominant minority’’ of successful Chinese in their midst.American strategists mistook the war for a struggle between Communism and Capitalism.
They made the same mistake in Afghanistan, not realising that ideological labels had little to do with that country’s real tribal divides. As for Iraq, America nurtured the naive notion that free-market democracy would well up after the toppling of Saddam Hussein and his Ba’ath party. This ignored the tribal chasm between Sunni and Shi’ite Muslims, led to a prolonged civil war and ultimately produced ISIS.
But it is only when you reach the last third of Political Tribes that you get to what Chua really wants to discuss. This book’s most fundamental message is about the ‘‘tribal’’ state of the US today.
She considers the changing demography of the US as Hispanic and Asian populations grow and ‘‘whites’’ begin to understand that they could shortly be a minority. Connected with this, she notes the new, shrill polarisation of American politics, which was already on the boil before the very divisive Donald Trump was elected.
She is relatively even-handed in how she presents it. On much of the Right there is an undercurrent of racism. Reasonable and balanced conservatives find themselves uneasily paired with white ethno-nationalists. On the Left, is a refusal to recognise class realities and to admit that there is a deprived white underclass. Whites are often demonised as if they are all the same ‘‘tribe’’ and extreme identity politics makes reasoned debate impossible.
Chua concludes with a vision of social togetherness, which is admirable, but rather limp.
There is real point to this book, but regrettably much of it is once-overlightly and it sometimes reads like an extended editorial rather than a carefully considered study.