Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations

Amy Chua, “Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations,” Penguin Press, 2018, 210 pp. plus 70 pgs. of notes

Amy Chua teaches law at Yale University and writes about how tribalism works.  American progressives define elitism in terms of money; but alt-Right supporters’ rail against the establishment that is culturally defined, not economically defined.  Elites don’t see how tribal their cosmopolitanism is perceived as its own highly exclusionary clan, with clear out-group members and boogeymen—in this case, the “deplorables.”   In any event, if the US doesn’t want to perpetually fight unwinnable wars, it has to come to grips with political tribalism abroad.  And if we want to save our nation, we need to come to grips with its growing power at home. (Pg. 13).

This book, as well as her other books, investigates culture and identity. Here Chua argues that just as American elites don’t understand sectarianism at home, they don’t understand sectarianism abroad. Members of our foreign policy establishment are so enamored of market reforms and democratization that they’re “spectacularly blind to the power of tribal politics.”

Chu shows how a combination of racism and obsessive anti-communism made for terrible strategy in Vietnam, where Americans underestimated Vietnamese nationalism, including resentment of an economically dominant Chinese minority. Our policies in Afghanistan and Iraq were similarly obtuse. The push for de-Baathification of the Iraqi Army created a pool of “unemployed, frustrated Sunni men who owned weapons and had no marketable skills other than their military training” — and happened to be ripe for recruitment by the insurgency and eventually the Islamic State.

My Notes:

Pg. 1f:  In many parts of the world the group identities that matter most are ones that Americans are barely aware of.  They are not national, but ethnic, regional, religious, sectarian, or clan based.

In US foreign policy, for at least half a century, we have been blind to the power of tribal politics.  We tend to see the world in terms of territorial nation-states engaged in great ideological battles—Capitalism versus Communism, Democracy versus Authoritarianism, the ‘Free World’ versus the ‘Axis of Evil.’

 We have repeatedly ignored the more primal group identities, which for billions are the most powerful and meaningful.  This blindness has been the Achilles’ heel of US foreign policy.

Pg. 2:  Inside Vietnam, a deeply resented 1 percent Chinese minority historically controlled as much as 80 percent of the country’s commercial wealth.  Thus, a hugely disproportionate number of Vietnam’s ‘capitalists’ were ethnic Chinese, despised by the Vietnamese, both northern and southern.  So, every procapitalist step we took in Vietnam was guaranteed to inflame popular resentment. 

Then in Iraq, although aware of the Sunnis and Shias divide, we repeatedly minimized its significance.  Author Amy Chua warned in 2003 that everything in Iraq has ethnic and sectarian ramifications.  Because Iraq’s Shias formed a 60 percent majority long oppressed by Hussein, democracy could actually catalyze historic enmities, with elections producing a sectarian Shia government that excluded and retaliated against the Sunnis.  That is exactly what happened.

Pg. 5:  Race has split America’s poor, and class has split America’s whites.  The tribal politics behind Trump’s election still baffles many.  What elites don’t see is that Trump, in terms of taste, sensibilities, and values, actually is similar to the white working class.  The tribal instinct is all about identification, and Trump’s base identifies with him at a gut level; with the way he talks (locker room), dresses, shoots from the hip, gets caught making mistakes, and gets attacked over and over by the liberal media for not being politically correct, for not being feminist enough, for not reading enough books.  They even identify with his wealth, because that’s what they want, along with a beautiful wife.  Working-class Americans are not anti-rich, just anti-establishment.

Pg. 6:  America’s elites today, especially progressive ones, often don’t realize how judgmental they are.  They disdain tacky things, and, not coincidentally, those tacky things—fake tans, big hair, pro wrestling, chrome bull testicles hanging from the back of a big truck—are usually associated with lower-income Americans.  America’s elites miscalled the 2016 election in part because they don’t understand—even look down on—what matters most to America’s non-elites.

Pg. 7:  The great Enlightenment principles of modernity—liberalism, secularism, rationality, equality, free markets—do not provide the kind of tribal group identity that human beings crave. They have strengthened individual rights and individual liberty, created unprecedented opportunity and prosperity, transformed human consciousness, but they speak to people as individuals and as members of the human race, whereas the tribal instinct occupies the realm in between.  In societies where people fear for their safety or some struggle just to survive, idealistic principles will often ring hollow. 

Pg.8:  For the first time in US history, white Americans are faced with the prospect (certainty) of becoming a minority in their ‘own country.’  Tellingly, a 2011 study showed that more than half of white Americans believe that ‘whites have replaced blacks as the ‘primary victims of discrimination.” Yet, 43 percent of black Americans are skeptical that America will ever make the changes necessary to give blacks equal rights.  Also, hate crimes have increased 20 percent since the 2016 election.  When groups feel threatened, they retreat into tribalism. 

Pg. 12:  Donald Trump has a startling parallel in Venezuela’s late Hugo Chavez.  Like Trump, Chavez was elected to the shock and horror of elites, sweeping to victory in 1998.  Like Trump, he had a reality TV show.  From this platform he attacked the mainstream media and a slew of enemies of the people.  He was a master at communicating directly to the populace, winning over millions of the country’s have-nots with unscripted rhetoric that struck elites as vulgar, outrageous, absurd, and often plainly false.  Finally, like Trump, Chavez’s appeal had a racial dimension.  But whereas Chavez’s base consisted primarily of the country’s long excluded darker-skinned masses, Trump’s base was white.  Americans need to recognize and come to grips with this growing political tribalism at home as well as abroad.

Pg. 20:  Relative to total population, other countries take in a greater percentage of immigrants than the US.  In 2014 Australia and Canada admitted 1.0 percent and 0.7 percent respectively, of their total population in immigrants, compared to just 0.3 percent in the US.  As of 2015, 28 percent of Australia’s population and 22 percent of Canada’s were born outside the country.  In America, the figure is 14 percent.

Pg. 27:  After the 1964 Civil Rights Act, America underwent a profound transformation: from a multiethnic nation into something even more unusual: a super-group: America is made up of every demographic group in the world.  This transition had its roots in the Fourteenth Amendment, establishing that anyone born in the US was automatically an American citizen.  (Most Americans may not realize it, but the rule that children of US citizens are also US citizens, even if they are born abroad, is not constitutionally mandated; it is the result of statutory provisions.)  In other words, being American is not a matter of ancestry, but rather a matter of connection to the land, and of being bound by a shared constitution. 

Pg. 34:  America’s status as a super-group has led us astray when it comes to assessing the tribal politics of other nations.  We forget how unusual it is to have both an extremely diverse, multiethnic population and a strong overarching national identity capable of binding the people together.  Libya, Syria, and Iraq are all, like the US, postcolonial, multiethnic nations, but none of them has a national identity anywhere close to as strong as ours.  In countries like these, it can be a catastrophic mistake to imagine that through democratic elections, people will suddenly rally around national identity and overcome their preexisting ethnic, religious, sectarian, and tribal divides.  On the contrary, democracy often galvanizes group conflict.  America has made this mistake over and over again. Also, the US is not immune to these same destructive forces of political tribalism, as we certainly see today.

Pg. 28:  Birthright citizenship remains extremely rare.  No Asian country grants it.  No European country grants it.  In fact, the US is one of only a very few developed nations to recognize birthright citizenship (Canada is another).  If anything the trend is in the opposite direction.  France eliminated birthright citizenship in 1993; Ireland, in 2005; New Zealand, in 2006.

Pg. 29:  The 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act abolished the racially and ethnically discriminatory national-origin quotas instituted in the 1920s.  Immigration rates exploded, from roughly 70,000 annually to about 400,000 annually by the early 1970s, 600,000 annually by the early 1980s, and more than 1 million in 1989.  From 1990 to 2000, the US admitted approximately 9 million immigrants.  The vast majority of these newcomers, moreover, were non-European, mostly from Latin America and Asia.  With these demographic shifts have come enormous cultural transformations Although white Protestants, especially male, continue to wield considerable influence all over America—with disproportionate representation in the US Congress, for example—their dominance has waned in recent years.  Many white Americans now feel the country is culturally and socially dominated by blacks and other minorities.  

Pg. 46f:  Market-dominant minority describes an ethnic minority that tends, under market conditions, to dominate economically the poor ‘indigenous’ majority around them, generating enormous resentment among the majority, who see themselves as the rightful owners of the land under threat from ‘greedy’ exploitative outsiders.  Market-dominant minorities are pervasive in the developing world  Examples include ethnic Chinese throughout Southeast Asia, Indians in East Africa and parts of the Caribbean, Lebanese in West Africa and parts of the Caribbean, Igbo in Nigeria, Bamileke in Cameroon, Kikuyu in Kenya, whites in South Africa and Zimbabwe and Namibia, Croats in the former Yugoslavia—the list goes on.  (We are talking about 1 to 5 percent controlling 70 percent of an economy).  Market-dominant minorities are one of the most potent catalysts of political tribalism leading to confiscation of the minority’s assets, looting, rioting, violence, and ethnic cleansing.  All this held true in Vietnam.

Pg. 54:  Materially, apart from a tiny upper crust, the Vietnamese people received no benefits from America.  From a tribal politics perspective, virtually every step we took in Vietnam was guaranteed to turn the Vietnamese against us.  The regimes we supported, the policies we promoted, the money we spent, and the attitudes we brought made the Vietnamese hate us, hate capitalism, and only enhanced the appeal and status of the charismatic Ho Chi Minh.

Pg. 57:  The US pulled out of Vietnam in 1973.  By late 1978, more than 250,000 ethnic Chinese had been driven out of Vietnam, and an estimated 40,000 had died at sea (we called them the Vietnamese boat people, even though 85 percent were Chinese).  Thus Vietnam’s Communist revolution was not only nationalist but intensely ethnonationalist.  Far from being a pawn of Communist China, as the US imagined, Vietnam would by 1979 be at war with China. 

Pg. 60:  As in Vietnam, the core reason for America’s failures in Afghanistan is that we were oblivious to the most important group identities in the region, which do not fall along national lines, but instead are ethnic, tribal, and clan-based.  The Taliban is not only an Islamist movement but also an ethnic, mostly, Pashtun movement.  We had not sufficiently studied Afghanistan’s peoples, whose needs identities and grievances vary from province to province. Consequently, as with Vietnam, nearly every move we made was practically designed to turn large segments of the population against us. 

Pg. 77:  When democratization came to Yugoslavia in the early 1990s, the result was not peace and prosperity, it was ethnic demagoguery, ethnic warfare, and ethnic cleansing.  Serbs killed Croats, Croats killed Serbs, and Serbs slaughtered Bosnian Muslims.  Yugoslavia, not Japan or Germany, would have been a far more instructive comparison for what to expect in Iraq.  Germany and Japan were tribal as well but they each had only one tribe within their borders after WWII.  In Iraq, on the eve of the US invasion, roughly 15 percent Sunni minority dominated the country economically, politically, and militarily.

Pg. 81:  Perhaps the worst decision the US made in Iraq was disbanding the entire Iraqi army.  Overnight, we produced a pool of some 350,000 unemployed, frustrated Sunni men who owned weapons and had no marketable skills other than their military training.  Many of these joined ISIS and al-Qaeda; over 60 percent of ISIS’s most prominent leaders were former Baathists. 

Pg. 84:  The 2007 surge worked but not because of the increased military pressure. Success involved a 180-degree shift in our approach to the local population pursuing explicitly group-focused, ethnically conscious policies on the ground.  The surge was won tribe by tribe, leader by leader, neighborhood by neighborhood.  We finally stopped fighting Iraq’s tribal structure and instead started to cooperate with it, building alliances with influential sheiks and both Sunni and Shia local leaders.

Pg. 93:  Then Obama took over and withdrew troops and praised the elected Shia leader of Iraq, Maliki.  Maliki was perceived by the Sunni’s as a puppet of the (Shia) Iranian government determined to exterminate the Sunnis.  Thus was born ISIS, a fantasy Islamic State, an offshoot of al-Qaeda, that rejects the nation-state.  ISIS is openly Sunni, as devoted to killing Shia ‘apostates’ as it is to killing Western ‘infidels.’  (Maliki was finally forced out in 2014 but Sunnis continue to feel disenfranchised and marginalized under his successor: Haider al-Abadi.  As late as 2016, some 25 percent of Iraq’s Sunni Arabs remain supportive of the Islamic State.)

Pg. 95:  The US spent over $1 trillion on the war in Iraq.  Yet, some fourteen years after toppling Saddam Hussein, Iran’s power is ascendant, with Tehran now wielding more influence over Baghdad than Washington.

Pg. 96:  Friedman’s view in The Lexus and the Olive Tree proposes that “the spread of free markets and democracy around the world is permitting more people everywhere to turn their aspirations into achievements,,,(erasing) not just geographical borders but also human ones.”  Globalization, wrote Friedman, “tends to turn all friends and enemies into competitors.”

That’s not what happened.  Instead of global peace and prosperity, the decade between 1991 and 2001 saw the proliferation of ethnic conflict; intensifying nationalism, fundamentalism, and anti-Americanism; confiscations, expulsions, calls for renationalization; two genocides of magnitudes not seen since the Nazis—and the greatest attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor.

America failed to take into account the potency of tribal politics.  Most important, we failed to see that democracy has ethnic, sectarian, and other group-dynamic ramifications.  In many parts of the word, far from neutralizing tribal hatred, democracy catalyzes it.

Iraq and Yugoslavia exemplify a pattern that has played out repeatedly in the developing world.  In countries with long-pent-up ethnic and religious divisions, especially where national identity is weak, rapid democratization often galvanizes group hatred.  Vote-seeking demagogues thrive in this environment.

Pg. 100:  The problem with attempts to profile the terrorist personality is that the effort focuses on the individual.  But terrorism is above all a group phenomenon: it’s a murderous expression of tribal politics.  Also, numerous studies have disproven the link between poverty and extremism.  The key to understanding extremism lies not in poverty as such, but in group inequality.  Every major terrorist movement of the last several decades arose in conditions of group inequality, group disempowerment, group humiliation, and group hatred.  Poverty alone does not create terrorism.  But when stark inequalities track deep, preexisting racial, ethnic, religious, or sectarian divides, intense feeling of injustice, resentment, and frustration will become widespread, catalyzed by group-psychological phenomena.  These are the breeding-ground conditions of terrorist violence. 

Pg. 133:  One of the most extraordinary features of Chavez’s presidency of Venezuela was his reality TV show, Alo Presidente, which aired every Sunday and went on for as long as Chavez wanted, usually four to eight hours.  Utterly unprecedented, Chavez’s persona—part entertainer, part head of state—may seem strangely familiar to Americans today.  When Chavez would point to a building and declare, ‘Expropriate it’, the live audience would burst into applause.  In 2010, Chavez joined Twitter to post missives ranging from criticisms aimed at other countries to what he had eaten for lunch.  Loathed by the elite, he was, until his death (2013), a man of the people.  (Today, Venezuela is practically a failed state.)

Pg. 164:  “Coastal elites” (in the US) have become a kind of market-dominant minority from the point of view of America’s heartland, and, as we’ve seen all over the developing world, market-dominant minorities invariably end up producing a democratic backlash.

Pg. 173:  For tens of millions of white Americans today, mainstream popular culture displays an un-Christian, minority-glorifying, LGBTQ, politically correct America they can’t and don’t want to recognize as their country—an America that seems to exclude them, to treat them as the enemy. Trump’s victory was in part a reaction from these tens of millions.

An interesting link: https://www.wsj.com/articles/when-the-twitter-mob-came-for-me-1524234850  WSJ 4/21/18