Political Tribes Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations — Amy Chua

World vs the Axis of Evil we are often spectacularly blind to the power of tribal politics Time and again this blindness has undermined American foreign policy In the Vietnam War viewing the conflict through Cold War blinders we never saw that most of Vietnam s capitalists were members of the hated Chinese minority Every pro free market move we made helped turn the Vietnamese people against us In Iraq we were stunningly dismissive of the hatred between that country s Sunnis and Shias If we want to get our foreign policy right so as to not be perpetually caught off guard and fighting unwinnable wars the United States has to come to grips with political tribalism abroad Just as Washington s foreign policy establishment has been blind to the power of tribal politics outside the country so too have American political elites been oblivious to the group identities that matter most to ordinary Americans and that are tearing the United States apart As the stunning rise of Donald Trump laid bare identity politics have seized both the American left and right in an especially dangerous racially inflected way In America today every group feels threatened whites and blacks Latinos and Asians men and women liberals and conservatives and so on There is a pervasive sense of collective persecution and discrimination On the left this has given rise to increasingly radical and exclusionary rhetoric of privilege and cultural appropriation On the right it has fueled a disturbing rise in xenophobia and white nationalism In characteristically persuasive style Amy Chua argues that America must rediscover a national identity that transcends our political tribes Enough false slogans of unity which are just another form of divisiveness It is time for a more difficult unity that acknowledges the reality of group differences and fights the deep inequities that divide us synopsis may belong to another edition of this title