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Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations by [Amy Chua]

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Amy Chua

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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.

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Editorial Reviews

Review

“An important book ...[I] strongly agree with Chua’s argument that America’s liberal elite has contributed to Trump’s rise by failing to acknowledge its own sense of tribalism." — Financial Times

“True to form, Amy Chua presents a provocative prescription to cure our political ills. She challenges us to cross the chasm between groups—not by denying differences, but by celebrating them.”
—Adam Grant, New York Times bestselling author of Give and Take, Originals, and Option B with Sheryl Sandberg

“Presented with keen clarity and brimming with definitive insights, Chua’s analysis of identity politics is essential reading for understanding policy challenges both at home and abroad.” — Booklist

“Amy Chua’s insightful, provocative and deeply troubling book is the place to begin our long overdue national discussion on how to repair the deep divisions in the American political landscape. Political Tribes is a wakeup call to the dangers of surrendering national unity to a fractured landscape of feuding and narrow interests.”
—Tom Brokaw, author of The Greatest Generation

“Brilliant, timeless and timely. Political Tribes concisely explains the forces that made our experiences in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq so maddeningly difficult to comprehend, and brings that same thoughtful analysis to America today. Amy Chua provokes thought – and we need that.”
—General Stan McChrystal, US Army (Ret)

“Political Tribes is a beautifully written, eminently readable, and uniquely important challenge to conventional wisdom. In it, Amy Chua argues that tribalism—and the social dysfunction and violence that comes along with it—is the norm all over the world, but the United States managed to escape its worst impulses thanks to a shared sense of national identity. But there's trouble on the horizon: identity politics on both the left and right threaten to unravel that consensus. Chua's book is a clarion call, encouraging us to reject the primal pull of identitarianism and return to that most radical of ideas, that Americans share something bigger than race or ethnicity or ideology: common citizenship and purpose.”—J. D. Vance, author of Hillbilly Elegy

“Another wonderful book by Amy Chua! In Political Tribes, she demonstrates once again that she ranks with the keenest observers of the contemporary landscape, establishing convincingly that “Humans are tribal,” and that this reality holds significant implications for America if we truly are to achieve a ‘more perfect union.’” —General David Petraeus, US Army (Ret), former commander of coalition forces in Iraq and Afghanistan and former Director of the CIA

“Amy Chua speaks hard truths that no one can ignore. We are, as Chua makes clear, living in denial about the power of tribalism over our domestic and foreign policy -- blinded, it seems, by our own optimism and distaste for essentialism. A page turner and revelation, Political Tribes will change the way you think.”
—Tim Wu, author of The Attention Merchants and The Master Switch

About the Author

Amy Chua is the John M. Duff, Jr. Professor at Yale Law School. She is a noted expert in the fields of ethnic conflict and globalization, and the author of the bestselling titles World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability, Day of Empire: How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance -- and Why They Fall, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, and her most recent book, The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America, co-written with Jed Rubenfeld. She lives in New Haven, Connecticut, with her husband and two daughters. --This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

Review

“An important book ...[I] strongly agree with Chua’s argument that America’s liberal elite has contributed to Trump’s rise by failing to acknowledge its own sense of tribalism." — Financial Times

“True to form, Amy Chua presents a provocative prescription to cure our political ills. She challenges us to cross the chasm between groups—not by denying differences, but by celebrating them.”
—Adam Grant, New York Times bestselling author of Give and Take, Originals, and Option B with Sheryl Sandberg

“Presented with keen clarity and brimming with definitive insights, Chua’s analysis of identity politics is essential reading for understanding policy challenges both at home and abroad.” — Booklist

“Amy Chua’s insightful, provocative and deeply troubling book is the place to begin our long overdue national discussion on how to repair the deep divisions in the American political landscape. Political Tribes is a wakeup call to the dangers of surrendering national unity to a fractured landscape of feuding and narrow interests.”
—Tom Brokaw, author of The Greatest Generation

“Brilliant, timeless and timely. Political Tribes concisely explains the forces that made our experiences in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq so maddeningly difficult to comprehend, and brings that same thoughtful analysis to America today. Amy Chua provokes thought – and we need that.”
—General Stan McChrystal, US Army (Ret)

“Political Tribes is a beautifully written, eminently readable, and uniquely important challenge to conventional wisdom. In it, Amy Chua argues that tribalism—and the social dysfunction and violence that comes along with it—is the norm all over the world, but the United States managed to escape its worst impulses thanks to a shared sense of national identity. But there's trouble on the horizon: identity politics on both the left and right threaten to unravel that consensus. Chua's book is a clarion call, encouraging us to reject the primal pull of identitarianism and return to that most radical of ideas, that Americans share something bigger than race or ethnicity or ideology: common citizenship and purpose.”—J. D. Vance, author of Hillbilly Elegy

“Another wonderful book by Amy Chua! In Political Tribes, she demonstrates once again that she ranks with the keenest observers of the contemporary landscape, establishing convincingly that “Humans are tribal,” and that this reality holds significant implications for America if we truly are to achieve a ‘more perfect union.’” —General David Petraeus, US Army (Ret), former commander of coalition forces in Iraq and Afghanistan and former Director of the CIA

“Amy Chua speaks hard truths that no one can ignore. We are, as Chua makes clear, living in denial about the power of tribalism over our domestic and foreign policy -- blinded, it seems, by our own optimism and distaste for essentialism. A page turner and revelation, Political Tribes will change the way you think.”
—Tim Wu, author of The Attention Merchants and The Master Switch
--This text refers to an alternate kindle_edition edition.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B073NP3YD8
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin Books (February 20, 2018)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ February 20, 2018
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 987 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 302 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #585,938 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
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Amy Chua

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Amy Chua is a professor at Yale Law School and author of debut novel THE GOLDEN GATE, coming 9/19/23. She is also the bestselling author of several nonfiction books, including World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability (2003), Day of Empire: How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance--and Why They Fall (2007), The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain The Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America (2013), Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations (2018), and her runaway international bestselling memoir Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother (2011), which has been translated into over 30 languages.

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The importance of primal group identity

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on August 22, 2018

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Amy Chua, in this brilliant book, brings to light how we are blinded by our ideological prisms. We ignore primal group identities to our peril. Yet for billions of people the world over, these identities are very powerful and meaningful; they drive political upheaval throughout the world. And unfortunately for U.S. policy, it has been the Achilles’ heel.

Here in the U.S., we are what she calls a super-group; we have many member subgroups that are not required to suppress their identities. We can share an overarching collective identity. But we are unique among the world’s great powers. We have failed to realize this with are actions in other nations. A classic example is Libya. Obama spoke of the future being in the hands of the Libyan people after the fall of Gaddafi, but failed to realize that those “people” consist of some 140 different tribes. They did not come together to build a nation. It has become obvious to the author that political tribalism is the most powerful form of group identity. Another good example that the author elaborates upon, is Vietnam. There we had what she called a “market-dominant minority.” A Chinese minority dominated the poor indigenous majority around them. The Chinese had a stranglehold on Vietnam’s business and commerce. It appears the U.S. knew little to nothing about these ethnic realities when invading the country. So “from a tribal politics perspective, virtually every step we took in Vietnam was guaranteed to turn the Vietnamese against us.” The author next describes our efforts in Afghanistan. Here again American leaders and policy makers missed the ethnic realities in this country. Indeed it was our ignorance of these realities that lead to the rise of the Taliban. As the author notes, “as with Vietnam, nearly every move we made in Afghanistan was practically designed to turn large segments of the population against us.”

The author now turns our attention to Iraq, where we minimized the importance of the Sunni-Shia divide. We can now look back at the mistakes made, such as the “de-Baathification” that occurred early on. In 2015, one expert estimated that over 60 percent of ISIS’s most prominent leaders were former Baathists. This is an interesting story, which the author covers in detail. It is just astounding. In the end, what have we accomplished? Tehran now wields more influence over Baghdad than Washington, and we paid the price in money and lives. And just as with the Taliban, how much did we contribute to the rise of ISIS? One thing that twists an individual’s psyche, turning them to terrorism, is what the author discusses next – group psychology. Group identification and tribal instinct can have a dark side: a tendency to dehumanize outsiders and derive satisfaction from doing so. We see that becoming a terrorist involves a “gradual process of socialization, indoctrination, and radicalization.” I need to quote the author directly on this, as she puts it, “Against a backdrop of stark group inequality, the most successful extremist groups offer their members precisely what existing societal institutions do not: a tribe, a sense of belonging and purpose, an enemy to hate and kill, and a chance to reverse the group polarity, turning humiliation into superiority and triumph. This is the formula that al-Qaeda and ISIS have exploited.”

Next our attention turns to Venezuela. Here we see the rise of Hugo Chavez to power, someone seen as a dictator by the U.S. but the poor barrios saw someone who looked and spoke like them. The author shows us how from a tribal politics point of view, his rise is simple to explain. This is an interesting story that is covered in detail. From here we segue to the tribal chasm in America. Covered are the Occupy movement, Sovereign Citizens, street gangs, narco-saints, the prosperity gospel, NASCAR nation, and WWE. Also, there is so little interaction between rural/heartland/working-class whites and the urban/coastal whites that the differences between them are, practically, what social scientists would call an ethnic difference. These “coastal elites” are seen as a market-dominant minority from the point of view of America’s heartland. The discussion covers the tribal left and the tribal right along with the impact of identity politics on these tribes.

The author wraps things up noting the heartfelt efforts of people to “reach across the aisle” to understand and empathize with each other’s humanity. But the evidence shows “that when individuals from different groups actually get to know one another as human beings, tremendous progress can be made.” Let’s hope we succeed at this.

14 people found this helpful

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Gary Moreau, Author

Patterns are everywhere. But are they causal or coincidental?

Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on February 22, 2018

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Amy Chua doesn’t mince her words. But she is very insightful and this is a good book that will make a significant contribution to the debate over the state of America and our collective future.

For me, actually, it is really two books. In the first book she does a meticulous job of articulating and analyzing America’s many foreign policy blunders, starting with the Vietnam War. Her basic thesis is that American foreign policy has consistently ignored the perils of tribalism, and, specifically, the inevitable powder keg that is a society in which power has been allocated asymmetrically between the tribes. Specifically, when a tribal minority controls the wealth of a country, the tribal fault lines will ultimately seek to release the pent up resentment.

And she’s right. And she’s right that from Vietnam on American foreign policy has been misguided by the false notion that the oppressed people of the world want nothing quite so much as they want the right to vote. They don’t. (Having lived in China for nine years I am constantly amazed that American journalists are still writing about what they imply is this unrecognized groundswell of Chinese that yearn for American style politics. There isn’t one.)

The second half of the book, for me, was a little dicier. It is here that she gets more deeply into the current American political landscape. And she continues to make some great points. But…

Humans have a fundamental desire to see patterns in reality. I think it’s evolutionary. After all, the ability to plan ahead contributes to the ability to stay safe and perpetuate the species. And you can’t plan ahead if you have made no attempt to interpret the past and present – to find patterns that you can learn from and apply to the future.

Tribalism is all about patterns. However you define what it means to be an American, you are defining a pattern. And there are always plenty to choose from because the fabric of reality is rich with them. The context of life and the universe is defined by an almost limitless number of data points existing in a multitude of dimensions all at the same time.

And that’s both the beauty and the challenge of patterns. They’re everywhere. And they are all “real”, and that makes them meaningful. But which are the most meaningful? Which are truly causal and which are more coincidental?

Everything in life is a duality. For every pro there is a con, for dark there is light, for yin there is yang. A pattern, in other words, can be both causal and coincidental at the same time. Or at different times.

And that’s where the book lost me a little bit. If she didn’t take tribalism too far she peered over the precipice. Sovereign citizens, narco-saints, the prosperity gospel, NASCAR nation, WWE, and other tribal identifiers are obviously real, but are they causal or coincidental? And are they impactful enough that it matters? (NASCAR nation is huge, but is it singularly defining for its many fans?)

My only other observation is that she doesn’t spend much time on technology and the role it has had in defining and aggravating tribalism. She does reference the impact of “echo-chamber social media,” and perhaps that would be too much to expect for one book. I just think we’re just now beginning to understand how tribally divisive, if you will, technology has been.

Ultimately, the author is right when she concludes, “America’s ideals always far exceeded its reality.” And she’s right that whatever we think those ideals are, if we simply walk away from them we walk away from who we are. (Again, as always, true and not true at the same time.) Whether we think that is the right thing to do or not we at least better think it through before we set out. Ultimately the author is right, wherever we want to go, acute and exclusionary tribalism is unlikely to take us there.

12 people found this helpful

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Gonzalo Bauer

Fantastic book!!!

Reviewed in Mexico 🇲🇽 on April 25, 2018

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This is a wonderful book if your aim is to understand conflicts both past and present around the world. I have never been so enlightened!

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Alida Stanley

fantastic

Reviewed in Australia 🇦🇺 on October 6, 2019

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puts you in a whole new picture totally believable so sad it is not common knowledge we could learn a lot

Michael Duerden

An excellent thought provoking analysis of human tribal instincts backed up with real life examples.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on June 12, 2019

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An eminently readable book which although written very much from an American perspective, has insights which are far more than just exclusively American. Although the book advances an analysis based on the tribal divisions in society it backs this up with some convincing examples where lack of tribal awareness has led to some disastrous foreign interventions by the USA.

In summary the book is based on a number of assertions which run through the storyline of the entire book.

1. The human race is psychologically adapted to acting in tribes.

“Insanity In individuals is something rare - but in groups it is the rule.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

The impulse to form group identities and favour in-group members had a neurological basis. Experiments using fMRI to identify which sections of the brain “light up” when shown photos of rivals and team-mates suggest that our brains are hardwired to identify, value and individualise fellow in-group members. “Outgroup” members who do not belong to our group are processed as interchangeable members of a more general social category, making it easier to negatively stereotype them. Even more striking is that seeing other members of our own group prosper seems to activate our reward centres even if we receive no benefit ourselves. Under certain circumstances our brains’ reward centres will activate when we see members who do not belong to our group failing or suffering misfortune.

The psychology of groups has even more far reaching effects. Groups not only shape who we are and what we do. They can also distort our perception of objective facts. The pressure to conform to group beliefs through a cascade of self-reinforcing social pressure results in false realities being accepted as true, while truth tellers are punished.

An individual who acts together with others in a group acquires a sense of invincible power which allows him to yield to instincts which, had he been alone, he would have kept under restraint.

In the case of militants, bonding creates a bio-chemical high from a combination of the oxytocin and testosterone hormones. This spurs a greater tendency to demonise and de-humanise the out-group, and physiologically “anaesthetises” the empathy which might otherwise be felt.

What is also evident is the tendency to self-delusion among more highly intelligent people. The smarter you are with numbers, the more likely you are to manipulate evidence to conform to your group’s core beliefs. The better informed people are, and the better educated, the more polarised they tend to be on politically controversial factual issues, and the more stubbornly they manipulate new facts to support their tribe’s world view.

And so members of a group can publicly enforce a group consensus norm they do not actually agree with at an individual level. They can also lose restraints at an individual level and act as a group in ways that would have been intolerable as individuals.

2. The second thread that runs throughout the book concerns the “market-dominant” minority. This is defined as an ethnic minority that tends, under market conditions, to dominate economically, often to a startling extent, 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.

Groups can be market dominant for very different reasons, some completely unrelated to economics, including colonial divide-and-conquer policies or a history of apartheid.

In the context of a developing country with an impoverished majority and a market-dominant minority, ethnic resentment leads frequently to confiscation of the minority’s assets, looting, violence and often to ethnic cleansing. In these conditions, the pursuit of unfettered free-market policies increases the minority’s wealth, provoking yet more resentment and populist anger at the regime pursuing such policies.

The author explores this idea of resentment much further into her analysis of the effect of group inequality, both actual and perceived.

In the context of terrorism:

Every major terrorist movement of the last 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, then intense feelings of injustice, resentment, and frustration will be catalysed by the group psychology phenomena described in (1) above.

And within Western communities:

This idea of group resentment is also present in societies like America where every group (including working-class whites) feels attacked, pitted against other groups not just for jobs and spoils but for the right to define the nation’s identity.

3. The third major thread which underpins the failure of America’s foreign interventions is Americans’ assumption of what works in America should work elsewhere. It is as follows:

Market capitalism is the most efficient economic system the world has ever known. Democracy is the fairest political system, and the most respectful of individual liberty. Working hand in hand, markets and democracy can transform the world into a community of prosperous, peace-loving nation’s, and individuals into civic-minded citizens and consumers. In the process, ethnic hatred, religious zealotry, and other “backward” aspects of underdevelopment will be swept away.

However, American and Western interventions have in the main resulted in proliferation of ethnic conflict, and genocides of magnitudes not seen since the Nazi Holocaust.

The fundamental reason for these failures is the failure to see that democracy has ethnic, sectarian, and other group-dynamic ramifications. In many parts of the world, far from neutralising tribal hatred, democracy catalysed it. In countries with long pent up ethnic and religious divisions, especially where national identity is weak, rapid democratisation often galvanises group hatred. Poor majorities use their new political power to take revenge against resented minorities, while minorities, fearful of being targeted by the newly empowered majority, resort to violence of their own.

4. The final thread explains why America has been blind to the significance of tribal politics in its foreign interventions.

The author asserts that America’s distinctive history - its ethnicity-transcending national identity and its unusual success in assimilating people from diverse origins - has created the only country which is a super-group. This a group in which membership is open to individuals of any background but that at the same time bonds its members together with a strong, overarching, group-transcending collective identity. The author claims that, for instance, China, France and Great Britain for different reasons are not super-groups.

This, according to the author, has shaped how the US sees the rest of the world and has deeply influenced its foreign policy. It’s not just ignorance, racism or arrogance that predisposes the US to ignore ethnic, sectarian, and tribal divisions in the countries where it intervenes. If immigrant communities from all sorts of background have become”Americans”, why shouldn’t Sunnis and Shias, Arabs and Kurds, all similarly become “Iraqis”?

The book then describes why American interventions failed because of blindness to tribal divisions, and that even in America itself society is suffering from group identity crises.

In Vietnam the major factor was the dominance of a Chinese minority not about Communism.

In Afghanistan it is about Pashtuns versus the Tajiks and Uzbeks rather than just about radical Islam. And closely allied to this is the fact that Pashtuns in Pakistan still Identify themselves as Afghan and are viewed as a threat by Pakistan.

In Iraq the US failed to understand the Sunni Shia divide and made the situation worse through de-Baathification.

In Venezuela wealth was overwhelmingly concentrated in white hands while the country’s impoverished underclass consisted primarily of darker-skinned Venezuelans with more indigenous and African ancestry.

In America itself there is a chasm between the tribal identities of the haves and the have-nots. Great swaths of the US have come to regard the “establishment” as foreign and threatening. Even though America’s poor are far less politically engaged, they are nevertheless intensely tribal, with deep feelings of patriotism, even if they feel they’re losing their country to distant elites who know nothing about them.

And so we find there are a plethora of groups, some seemingly outrageous, within which America’s alienated poor find a sense of belonging and dignified self-image.

Tribalism propelled Donald Trump to the White House. Inequality has driven a wedge between America’s whites. “Coastal elites” have become a kind of market-dominant minority from the point of view of America’s heartland, and this situation has produced a democratic backlash.

Having asserted that America is a super-group, the author also asserts that the destructive, fracturing tribalism that is seizing American politics is putting America’s national identity in jeopardy. Many whites feel anxiety in today’s America, but blacks feel an existential threat that seems never to end. Muslim Americans also feel threatened in today’s US. Today, no group in America feels comfortably dominant.

And so Identity politics is gaining momentum, leading inevitably to ever-proliferating group identities demanding recognition. And in this maelstrom there is a war on “cultural appropriation” which is rooted in the belief that groups have exclusive rights to their own histories, symbols and traditions.

This has ramifications for white Americans. For while black Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanic Americans, Jewish Americans are allowed to feel solidarity and to take pride in their racial or ethnic identity, white Americans have been told they cannot.

Many Americans just want to celebrate their country’s history and greatness without having to dredge up its racist past every single time. They are beginning to fear that when minorities become a majority in America, history books will be rewritten to depict America as a land of oppression, racism and imperialism.

And so author ends on a pessimist note: we’re in a vicious circle. Is there any way out?

To try and redress the balance by ending on a note of hope the author includes an epilogue.

Although it is not apparent from the news there are signs of people trying to cross divides and break out of their political tribes. Face-to-face contact between members of different groups can dismantle prejudices and build common ground. But merely putting members of different groups in the same space is not enough and indeed can aggravate political tribalism. It is when people from different tribes see one another as human beings who at the end of the day want the same things - kindness, dignity, security - that hearts can change.

The author ends the book with this exhortation: “What holds the United States together is the American Dream. But it must be a version of the dream that recognises past failure instead of denying it. Failures are part and parcel of the story line of a country founded on hope, a country where there’s always more to be done.
Dreams are not real, but they can be made so.”

3 people found this helpful

yossi ben shnaor

Do you want to know what is happening in America today? Read this book and you will understand

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on September 15, 2020

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Amy Chua is an immensely brilliant woman who has written a powerful book that is easy to understand. This is because she writes in an accessible style that makes complicated ideas easy to grasp.
Chua explains why American foreign policy forays into Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya have created chaos. This is because they have ignored the tribal nature of the societies that they have intervened in, obsessed as they have been by ideologies (e.g Communism V Capitalism), which were less significant than the tribal nature of these societies which were not understood by US strategists. Therefore, they created hostility among the very people that they came to help.
She then goes on to explain how tribalism is undermining respect for American democracy and is polarising the nation in a way that could undermine the very existence of the USA as a liberal and democratic country.

One person found this helpful

Othniel Lewis

Very Insightful

Reviewed in the United Kingdom 🇬🇧 on July 5, 2021

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The book was very informative on group dynamics and took a diverse international perspective to tribal politics. However, much of the book was focused on diagnosing and explaining the phenomenon of political tribes rather than how to address them. Nevertheless, the Epilogue offered a hopeful, optimistic way forward to bring us all together around our common humanity. Also, really well written & all round easy, enjoyable read.

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