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Title details for Political Tribes by Amy Chua - Available

Political Tribes

Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations

by Amy Chua
Julia Whelan
Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
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1 of 1 copy available
The bestselling author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, Yale Law School Professor Amy Chua offers a bold new prescription for reversing our foreign policy failures and overcoming our destructive political tribalism at home
 
Humans are tribal.  We need to belong to groups.  In many parts of the world, the group identities that matter most – the ones that people will kill and die for – are ethnic, religious, sectarian, or clan-based.  But because America tends to see the world in terms of nation-states engaged in great ideological battles – Capitalism vs. Communism, Democracy vs. Authoritarianism, the “Free 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.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    February 20, 2018

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9780525528883
      • File size: 203245 KB
      • Duration: 07:03:25

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      This intriguing audiobook looks at how the U.S. has failed to recognize the power of tribalism, the propensity of societies to break down along ethnic, religious, or clan identities, in its foreign policy and its domestic politics. The author prescribes a healthy dose of unity and common purpose as the cure and says that this will not be easy, but it is essential to our survival as a democratic republic. Julia Whelan narrates with seriousness, using a breathy voice and a tone of urgency to keep listeners engaged. Whelan is also remarkably consistent in her approach to this audiobook, but that also means that most of it sounds the same. Nonetheless, she paces herself effectively and pronounces every word with clarity. R.I.G. © AudioFile 2018, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      December 11, 2017
      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.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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