Book Review: Political Tribes: Group Instincts and the Fate of Nations

Amy Chua’s book, Political Tribes: Group Instincts and the Fate of Nations, explores the concept of tribalism and tries to link it with political landscapes, policies, and international relations. Tribalism means the strong and innate need for belongingness – to belong to a group and to have strong bonds within the group, and this often creates exclusionary tendencies towards people who do not belong to that group. For example, ethnicity is a strong group identity rooted in shared history, language, culture, and ancestry. The author analyses and critiques the historical oversight of the US foreign policy, where policymakers view international relations through the narrow lenses of ideological differences and nation-states while ignoring the importance of regional, religious, ethnic, or clan-based identities – a phenomenon that she calls “American Group Blindness.”

American group blindness results from American exceptionalism, where there is a belief that the United States is unique and different from any other country because of its history, values, and political systems. This belief comes from the American identity, which is more tied to the land and its shared constitution rather than its ancestry, culture, and ethnicity – it is rooted in the Civil War and the Fourteenth Amendment.

The core argument of this book is simple. If policymakers fail to acknowledge and recognise the basic human instinct of tribalism, then it could lead to conflicts, political instability, and misguided domestic and foreign policies.

Amy Chua used the case study of the Vietnam War as an example of how the Americans misunderstood the complexities of tribalism within Vietnam. Vietnamese nationalism had a significant anti-Chinese sentiment because Chinese immigrants wielded enormous economic and political power in Vietnam. As the Americans ignored the local group dynamics and Vietnam’s history when formulating its foreign policy, they could not navigate effectively through Vietnamese nationalism, historical grievances, and ethnic tensions. This led to miscalculated policies, which had a disastrous outcome for the United States. The author also gave the example of Afghanistan and its tribal dynamics to make the same argument.

Similarly, misunderstanding of the internal tribal and sectarian divisions of Iraq resulted in a lot of mistakes in Iraq, eventually leading to a lot of violence following the US-led invasion. The explosive sectarian divisions between the Sunnis and the Shias ignited once the Americans imposed democracy. To add to this, the De-Baathification order led to the dismissal of several individuals who were affiliated with the Baath party – a critical error because it exacerbated Sunni fears of disenfranchisement and stripped a country that is already in ruins of the much-needed expertise from these professionals. Overnight, hospitals were without qualified doctors, and ministries were without bureaucrats.

Amy Chua also touches on the tribal dimensions of terrorism, where she challenges the prevailing notion that terrorists are primarily psychopaths – like serial killers. Terrorists do not exhibit the traits that individuals with psychopathic personality disorders show. She argues that the judgment of terrorists is affected because of group membership and the pressure to conform.

To further her argument, Amy Chua examines how the failure to acknowledge and address the underlying tribal politics and social divisions has led to a “tragic” situation in Venezuela. She writes about the tensions between democracy and the market-dominant minority in Venezuela, and as a result, the country is sliding towards autocratic governance. She then argues that US foreign policy towards Venezuela has been ineffective.

The tribal chasm in the US is quite apparent – economic inequality has fuelled tribalism and social division as the rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Materially, there are different realities for white people and people of colour. Whites never face the discrimination, racial profiling, and blatant racism that non-white Americans face. Amy Chua criticises the major liberal philosophical movements in the modern USA, which were group blind and universalist in nature, like John Rawls’s theory of justice. Individual rights have been championed to protect the rights of individuals from marginalised groups indirectly – a form of trickle-down economics that perhaps never works.

The author’s views on the American Left and the American Right are interesting. She writes that at different times, both ideologies have stood for group-transcending values, but neither does that today. The American Left is getting distracted by its hyper-fixation on issues like cultural appropriation, so much so that they get into in-fighting with other left and progressive groups – a classic us-versus-them phenomenon could be seen within the left itself. As a result, today’s left is more divided than ever. The American Right has been taken hostage by white identity politics, which marks a shift from its traditional position of colour blindness – the right no longer can claim itself to be the bastion of individualism. Conservatives started to believe that society glorifies all things that are non-white and demonises everything white, and this has provoked a reaction among them to “fight back.” The tendency to define national identity in terms of “Anglo-Protestant culture” or “whiteness” will cause America to cease to be America. Amy Chua suggests that both the American Left and the American Right are being politically tribalist in nature, and they are playing with poison.

Democracy as we know it is not without its flaws, and Amy Chua highlights it by citing several examples where instead of neutralising conflicts, democracies sometimes exacerbate conflict where people start emphasising their differences, especially in societies where there are deep sectarian and ethnic divides. She argues that the US is not an exception to the political forces of tribalism, giving examples of the increasing divide between the identities of the rich and the poor, as well as the mobilisation of white identity politics by scapegoating the non-whites.

The US is in danger of losing its identity as a super-group because of tribalism seizing American politics. Political tribalism in the US is rooted in race, which is especially fraught because of the unprecedented demographic transformation that it is going through, placing a significant strain on the social fabric. Almost all the groups in the US feel threatened, and as a result, they resort to tribalism, becoming more insular in the process. The author argues that the elites in the US are oblivious to such group identities that matter a lot to large segments of the American population. The elites often express their distaste for things associated with lower-income Americans. In fact, even in progressive elites, one can observe their relative obliviousness – they exhibit more compassion for the world’s poor than America’s poor.

Many ordinary Americans view the elite as a distant minority that controls the strings of power from afar – they are ignorant and uninterested in “real” Americans. The author argues that this very phenomenon helped Donald Trump come to power. The most important tribal identity missed by America’s elite was the anti-establishment identity forming within the working class, which resonated with their support for Trump. Race has divided the American poor, and class has divided the American whites. The whites are divided in the sense that there is little to no interaction between rural/heartland/working-class whites and the urban/coastal whites. They start thinking of themselves as belonging to distinct and opposing political tribes.

Amy Chua’s academic attempt to explore tribalism hints at a form of “Tribalist-Reductionism,” similar to how critics would charge Marxists with class-reductionism. Her case studies about foreign interventions and arguments about political tribalism are not wrong, but she fails to consider the innate wrongness of invading another country to bring about “democracy.” In her critique of American Exceptionalism, she herself becomes a victim of American Exceptionalism, where she does not see anything fundamentally wrong with invading another country to impose the ideology of the US. The overemphasis on tribalism downplays the underlying economic and strategic interests that were the key driving forces behind these interventions.

To fix the problem of political tribalism, Amy Chua suggested that it is very important to understand the power of group identity, bridge group divides, and use the tool of one-on-one human engagement to help people see each other as human beings and understand the political “other.” However, her solutions are too simplistic considering the complexity of the problem, and they are presented with overconfidence and lack methodological rigour.