I got a chance to read Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations by Amy Chua of Tiger Mom fame. Her realm of expertise is globalization and ethnic conflict, which is a significant area of exploration in today’s world.
A big part of her argument in this book is that some of the great failures of American foreign policy have been driven by mistakingly approaching things ideologically as opposed to taking seriously the complex dynamics driven by ethnic conflict and the resulting tribalism that emerges.
Chua unpacks the underlying ethnic dynamics in Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Venezuela where the U.S. approached things with a naive or optimistic approach that democracy would lead to peace and prosperity because of an assumption that capitalism and democracy was the great good in the face of either communism or terrorism. Chua demonstrates convincingly how democracy sometimes only serves to inflame ethnic conflict and hatred and lead to further oppression.
Chua starts with foreign policy and the results of U.S. decisions and actions but works her way to the domestic landscape in the wake of the 2016 Presidential election. Her argument is that contemporary politics in the U.S. reflects some of the same dynamics of ethnic conflict and tribalism that led to democratic failure in other parts of the world. She highlights historically how America is unique in that the idea of what it means to be American is not tied to ethnicity in the same way as other countries – despite the realities of racism in society. She unpacks how growing tribalism is threatening America’s status as a “supergroup,” a group with an overarching identity that transcends tribalistic tendencies.
It’s a really interesting book that provides a historical look at some of the U.S. military conflicts and contemporary U.S. politics through the lens of ethnic conflict. I agree with Chua that people continually underestimate the power of ethnicity and the pull towards tribalism and it’s shocking how little these dynamics have been taken seriously in critical moments of global history and the implication for lives lost in military conflict.
As a final note – this would be a great book to read in tandem with Walter Brueggemann’s The Prophetic Imagination. Chua uses a concept called “group consciousness” which has some connections to Brueggemann’s “royal consciousness” and there’s some really interesting connection points between the two books.
