Humans are social creatures. We need the company of a group in order to feel a sense of belonging and purpose. In some cases, groups can also serve as important social safety nets. However, groups can serve both good and more nefarious purposes, creating uncomfortable gray areas in human relations because of the multiple identities people necessarily inhabit and the moral, ethical, political, social and perspective issues surrounding group identity and function. Enter politics, which makes these kinds of group or tribal dynamics much more complicated. In the current era of divisiveness in the country, it is hard not to feel like Donald Trump's election as president exposed many fractures among the different groups that make up the United States. Are these fractures going to get worse, to the point of unsustainability (e.g. a potential break-up of the country and a larger heralding of a decline of the current international order built upon universalist notions of individual human rights)? Dr. Amy Chua takes up these questions in her latest book Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations.
Because the book was published in 2018 after all of the chaos and tension surrounding the 2016 election and others around the world, which appeared to herald a new (or not so new) era of intolerant populism, Chua has a fascinating starting point from which to start her analysis of political tribes and their policy impacts and implications. Her book's anchor is the United States through the first part of the book, where she chronicles the impact of our universalist notions about human rights, democracy and free market economics on the implementation of foreign policy, to the second part where she takes a critical look at the homeland. Her main argument is that American foreign policy, from southeast Asia (Vietnam) to Latin America (Venezuela) and the Middle East (Iraq, Afghanistan) has failed to be effective because of the discounting of the role of tribal dynamics in these countries (and in our own).
Why has America been, to use Chua's terminology, so "group-blind" (Chua, 2018, p. 19)? According to Chua, it is because the United States belongs to a rare breed in group dynamics she terms a "super-group," in which group membership can be claimed by peoples of many different backgrounds without necessitating the sacrifice of such unique "subgroup identities" (Chua, 2018, p. 15). What holds a super-group together is a "collective identity" that binds these people together with common purpose, experiences, loyalties and values (Chua, 2018, p. 15). In the case of the United States, this social glue for American citizens is our common quest of working towards the achievement of the American Dream despite our backgrounds, as we are a nation of immigrants. Because the American citizenry is so diverse and bound by a relatively strong national identity, the U.S. has become both a world power and super-group.
But Chua sees this same strength as our Achilles heel, making policymakers overoptimistic about the ability of mostly developing countries to recognize and bridge salient group divides with a similarly strong, overriding collective national identity. This also means the U.S. sees foreign policy largely in grander, more ideological struggles (e.g. capitalism versus communism, democracy versus authoritarianism). In Vietnam it was our failure to recognize the centrality of Vietnamese identity as a larger anti-colonial struggle against countries like France and China (who held disproportionate power over the masses) rather than an embrace of communism. Similarly, in Iraq it was the story of Shia Muslim majorities being oppressed by a dominant Sunni Muslim minority. Dismissing the power of these group identities and their fraught histories and the way these animosities can be amplified rather than subsumed by democracy, Chua believes, has doomed U.S. foreign policy adventures in democratization and nation-building.
Similarly, policies by American political elite (on both liberal and conservative sides) of deliberate group-blindness at home have led to toxic political dynamics reminiscent of these developing countries U.S. foreign policy has tried to help, such as anti-establishment, ethno-nationalist brands of populism. It is the very same paradox that hampers our foreign policy: how to create an identity that transcends group divides but at the same time recognizes and seeks to ameliorate those inequalities. In America, the left and right have increasingly become polarized and with it, have embraced identity politics to problematic levels. The left has become enmeshed in what Chua sees as the increasing divisiveness from the misuse of the understanding of "oppression operating on multiple [and] overlapping axes of identity" simultaneously where it is used to drive even further wedges between people based on the very subgroup identities a collective identity is meant to smooth in binding people together (Chua, 2018, p. 230-231). Meanwhile, the right has retreated into anti-immigrant sentiment and embrace of white identity in response to the left's celebration of other non-white minorities' differences in popular and political culture and a perceived gradual loss of power to those same minority groups that by mid-century could supplant them as a majority in the United States. In summation, the rhetoric of inclusiveness and diversity on both sides can be hypocritical in its exclusion of certain groups in the process (on the left, marginalization of group rights in favor of individual rights; on the right, a rejection of affirmative action in favor of equal opportunity for all). Either way, it ends up being us versus them, a destructive dynamic in any political system, especially a democracy that depends on various groups finding common ground in order to effectively govern.
How then to get out of this vicious cycle of increasingly zero-sum politics (whether or not you agree with Chua's premise that it is primarily political tribes that have gotten us into this mess)? Chua does not explicitly conclude Political Tribes with a concrete answer to this question. Admittedly, I was disappointed by a lack of specialization after such an insightful (yet somewhat uncomfortable) analysis into the failings of both sides, in which she answers that we have to find a new American Dream that acknowledges the historical failings of the United States while keeping us all striving towards the ultimate ideal of a "promise of freedom and hope for every individual" (Chua, 2018, p. 264). Nevertheless, I did see her overall point in this deliberate lack of specificity in that we must all work to make our collective identity and the American Dream more inclusive and egalitarian in order to restore faith and efficiency in the democratic process.
Essentially, this process of redefinition as our nation gets increasingly diverse will take a lot of work. While I am not as optimistic as Chua in our chances of successfully bridging the divides (I am probably not alone in that), that does not mean we should not continue to strive towards achievement of the ideals of equality and freedom our country was founded upon.
Works Cited:
Chua, Amy. (2018). Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations. New York: Penguin Random House LLC.
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