Review by New York Times Review
AMY CHUA IS an uncomfortable presence in American intellectual life. In both her important scholarly works and her candid personal writing, Chua approaches the nogo areas around which others usually tiptoe. The warning alarms burst into " WAH0H, WAH-0H" - and Chua greets the custodians with a mild, "Oh sorry, was that a taboo?" "Political Tribes," the newest book from this unconventional writer, is haunted by the events of 2016. Chua's message: Ethnocultural rivalry powerfully shapes both international relations and domestic policy. Ethnocultural rivalry will not be reasoned away. Its divisions are hard-wired into the human brain. The American reluctance to recognize this truth, Chua continues, derives from the country's own unique inheritance, which optimistically insists that the nation's internal divisions can and must be melted down into a shared ideology of Americanism. That inheritance, she argues, blinds Americans to the world around them - and even more ominously, deceives them about the most important trends within their own society. "For 200 years," Chua writes, "whites in America represented an undisputed politically, economically and culturally dominant majority. When a political tribe is so overwhelmingly dominant, it can persecute with impunity, but it can also be more generous. It can afford to be more universalist, more enlightened, more inclusive, like the WASP elites of the 1960s who opened up the Ivy League colleges to more Jews, blacks and other minorities - in part because it seemed like the right thing to do. "Today, no group in America feels comfortably dominant. Every group feels attacked, pitted against other groups not just for jobs and spoils but for the right to define the nation's identity. In these conditions, democracy devolves into zero-sum group competition - pure political tribalism." Chua professes no concern that America will be swept by outright white nationalism. But she does perceive that "a kind of 'ethnonationalism lite' is widespread among white Americans today. It does not dream of an all-white America; it opposes racism and celebrates tolerance and exults in the image of America as a 'nation of immigrants.' But it is nostalgic for a time when minorities were not so loud, so demanding, so numerous - a time when minorities were more grateful." Chua sees this, does not like it and hopes something can be done about it. She takes comfort from local efforts like a project in Utica, N.Y., where Bosnian Muslim immigrants and local Unitarian Christians watched a Super Bowl together. She applauds aggressive racial integration programs like those run by the American military. She cites her own teaching experience in small seminars at Yale, where students from divergent backgrounds overcame disagreements to achieve mutual respect, sometimes even friendship. Yet the scholar in Chua acknowledges that these individual experiences offer less of a social lesson than she would wish. "Studies show that minimal or superficial exposure to out-group members can actually worsen group division.... Negative interactions with people from other groups also increase group hostility. So merely putting members of different groups in the same space is not enough and indeed can aggravate political tribalism." In the end, Chua falls back on the very attitude to which she turned her sharply skeptical gaze at the beginning of the book: the conviction that the United States was, is and will remain an exceptional nation, different from all the others. In her introduction, Chua remarked that the United States as a supertribal entity indifferent to ethnicity and culture became at best a partial reality only a generation ago. By book's end, however, the battered ideal has been polished and refurbished. "With every wave of immigration in the past, American freedom and openness have triumphed. Will we, telling ourselves 'These immigrants are different,' be the weak link, the first generation to fail? Will we forget who we are?" That's inspiring, and even more so are the citations of Martin Luther King Jr., Lin-Manuel Miranda and Langston Hughes that finish the book. Inspiring - but not wholly reassuring. A lot of the interest of "Political Tribes" comes from the strong sense it emanates of an author arguing with herself. Chua both condemns tribalism and respects its power. She insists that the United States alone of nations among the earth has often transcended it - and then presents impressive contrary evidence from the past and the present. Chua reckons with the many tribalisms of the American past: ethnic, religious and racial. She hopes for a future in which tribalism fades - even as she mercilessly details its accumulating strength. AS CHUA NOTES, tribes can coalesce out of previously unrelated pieces. Immigrants to Europe from North Africa, the Middle East and South Asia - of different languages, ethnicities, folkways and religious practices - raised children who created for themselves a new identity as post-ethnic Muslims. ISIS, as Chua mordantly observes, is in its own way a melting pot, bringing together young men and women from across Europe, Asia and the Americas to fight for a new ideology. She quotes a New York Times article about young British girls lured to ISIS. For them, "Islam is punk rock." Tribes can be created by fission as well as by fusion. Chua suggests that in the United States, divisions that would once have been understood as class divides have been reinterpreted in our time as cultural, even when they are not ethnic. "White Americans often hold their biggest disdain for other white Americans - the ones on the opposite side of the cultural divide." These fast-evolving and ever-changing identities may look contingent from the outside. They feel overwhelmingly powerful to those inside. Chua repeatedly scolds American policymakers for underestimating the importance of ethnocultural identity in Vietnam in the 1960s, Venezuela in the 1990s and Afghanistan in the 2000s. Through her book pulses an evident worry that tribal claims are now overpowering national ones within the United States. If she cannot quite bring herself to make her own anxieties explicit - or figure out what if anything to do to address them - she is hardly alone. As the rise of Donald Trump over more conventional politicians has so emphatically proved: Worsening social divisions are much easier to exploit than to explain or redress. DAVID FRUM'S most recent book is "Trumpocracy: The Corruption of the American Republic."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 30, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
The late speaker of the House, Tip O'Neill, is credited for coining the phrase, All politics is local. Indeed, the human propensity for segregating into groups based on shared cultural, religious, or ethnic commonalities takes this notion to its logical conclusion. An awareness of this most basic tenet of human nature would have benefited American foreign policy during such conflicts as the wars in Vietnam and Afghanistan, but because officials tend to think in terms of big picture ideologies (e.g., communism versus capitalism), the key to resolving such crises was lost. In each case, a core understanding of tribal identities could have meant the difference between victory and defeat. An expert in the fields of ethnic conflict and globalization, Chua (Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, 2011) examines how a different perspective might have led to greater success and applies these same polarizing attitudes to current domestic political discourse. Presented with keen clarity and brimming with definitive insights, Chua's analysis of identity politics is essential reading for understanding policy challenges both at home and abroad.--Haggas, Carol Copyright 2017 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
A Yale Law School professor with expertise in ethnic conflict and globalization, Chua (The Triple Package) devotes her thoughtful, if overreaching, survey to the role of tribalism in politics and society in and outside the U.S. She concentrates in the book's first half on how U.S. foreign policy, to its considerable detriment, has ignored the role of "political tribes," especially those involving a socioeconomically powerful "market-dominant minority," such as ethnic Chinese throughout Southeast Asia. Chua spends the second half looking at tribal politics in the U.S., especially "white-against-white" animosity, and touches on such little-known phenomena as the conspiracy-minded Sovereign Citizen movement, as well as the far more mainstream NASCAR culture. However, there is too little here on the vital role of religion in the formation and functioning of American political tribes. In an epilogue, Chua decries the tribalist tendency to polarize the world into "a virtuous us and a demonized them" but offers little to help Americans move beyond such views besides an appeal for more outreach and dialogue. Although the book ends weakly and too soon for the ground it attempts to cover, this is still a thought-provoking, illuminating study on a hugely important political and cultural issue. Agent: Tina Bennett, WME. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Chua (law, Yale Law Sch.; Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother) educates listeners about human tribalism and the countless ways tribalism causes problems in the modern world. To most Americans, the idea of humans belonging to tribes seems reserved for ancient humankind or people from staunchly divided developing countries. This fundamental misunderstanding permeates to the highest elected officials and is a large contributor to U.S. foreign policy failures in countries such as Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Americans do not belong to tribes as obvious as the Sunnis or Shias, but they belong to several tribes, even on a sub-conscious level, that span race, socioeconomic status, religion, and political philosophy. Chua illustrates how various tribes have created the intensely divisive political culture seen in current U.S. society. This work challenges Americans and calls them to action, regardless of which tribes they belong to, to set aside differences and reunite as a single tribe devoted to America's values of freedom, liberty, and equality. Narrator Julia Whelan delivers Chua's deeply analytical text with a crisp tone that makes for easy listening. VERDICT A must-listen for those interested in sociology, political science, and history. ["Chua's inquiry is a potentially useful one in an era of violent, reactionary white nationalism": LJ 2/1/18 review of the Penguin Pr. hc.]-Sean Kennedy, Univ. of Akron Lib. © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
How tribalism causes problems at home and abroad.In a biting critique of American foreign policy and analysis of the nation's divisive culture wars, Chua (Law/Yale Univ.; Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, 2011, etc.) argues that tribal affiliation exerts a crucial, powerful force on individuals' behaviors and identities. Humans' need for "bonds and attachments," she asserts, fulfills an instinct to belong but also to exclude. People "will sacrifice, and even kill and die, for their groups." Reprising some ideas from her book World on Fire (2002) on the negative consequences of exporting free market democracy, Chua examines America's failed involvement in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Venezuela as well as responses to terrorist groups. The author blames blindness to tribalism for the disastrous outcomes. That blindness comes, in part, from America's unique success in assimilating diverse populations into its "ethnicity-transcending national identity." Assessing other countries, Americans have failed to recognize tribal affiliations and rivalries or the existence of a repressive "market-dominant minority" that controls major sectors of the economy. Instead, the U.S. has fixated on its mission to foil communism and export democracy. Focused on the Cold War, "U.S. foreign policy in Afghanistan never saw the potent anti-American, anti-Western group identity fueling the Islamic fundamentalist fighters." In Iraq, foreign policy was shaped by a belief in "markets and democracy as a universal prescription for the many ills of underdevelopment." In reality, the downfall of Saddam Hussein incited rivalries among tribal groups and the rise of ethnic conflict and fundamentalism. In Trump's America, cohesion has splintered "into ever more specific subgroups created by overlapping racial, ethnic, gender, and sexual orientation categories" that feel threatened by one another. Inclusivity, hailed by the left, has devolved into exclusivity as groups seek to exert "exclusive rights to their own histories, symbols, and traditions." Nevertheless, Chua is heartened by individuals' efforts to bridge divides and to undermine "purveyors of political tribalism" on the left and right.A persuasive call to rethink foreign policy and heal domestic fissures. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
