Review of Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations. By Amy Chua. Penguin Press. 293 pp. $28.

In 1999, Thomas Friedman predicted that the spread of free markets and democracy around the world would allow “people everywhere to turn their aspirations into achievements,” erase human as well as geographical boundaries, and turn friends and enemies into “competitors.”

Friedman was wrong. In the twenty-first century, Amy Chua, a professor at the Yale Law School, reminds us, nationalism, fundamentalism, and ethnic conflict have intensified. Far from neutralizing tribal hatred, Chua adds, free markets and democracy have often catalyzed it.

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In Political Tribes, Chua argues that the United States has been “a super-group,” the only major power to forge a national identify that accepts and holds together a diverse population. This otherwise virtuous quality, she indicates, has blinded Americans to political tribalism abroad; it explains, in no small measure, foreign policy failures in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and our inability to understand that terrorism is a group phenomenon. Chua maintains as well that the United States is beginning to display political dynamics at home that threaten to transform our democracy “into an engine of zero-sum political tribalism.”

Like Chua’s previous books – World on Fire; Day of Empire; Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother; and Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America – Political Tribes is informative, lively, provocative, and, at times, prone to oversimplification.

The impulse to form group identities, Chua emphasizes, has a neurological basis and is bolstered by notions of shared blood, heritage, and history. When randomly assigned to a red or blue group, she points out, children between the ages of four and six liked members of their group better, shared more resources with them, and tended to remember (or invent) positive actions of their “kin” and negative behavior of individuals in the out-group. Moreover, Caucasian babies like to look at Caucasian faces; Chinese babies Chinese faces, etc. And, according to Chua, the better educated and informed people are, the more likely they are “to manipulate facts to support their tribe’s worldview.”

We should not be surprised, then, that through a gradual process of socialization and indoctrination, group and dynamics play essential roles in the making of terrorists. ISIS, Chua writes, offers young, alienated, economically and politically marginalized, (but not necessarily poor or uneducated) Muslims “excitement, romance, a link to a grand history, and a chance to be part of a winning team.”

Political Tribes also provides valuable insights about the demography and ideology of 21st century America. These days, she notes, the United States is home to 47 million people born abroad (in more than 140 countries). In 1960, most foreign-born residents had come from Italy, Germany, Canada, the United Kingdom and Poland. In 2000, the leading producers of emigrants were Mexico (a whopping 7.8 million), China, Philippines, India, and Cuba.

This new mix is at “the heart of today’s tribal .” For the first time, Chua claims, “no group in America feels comfortably dominant.” The left now embraces ethnic, racial, and group identity, group consciousness, and group claims. The right has also abandoned color-blindness, mobilizing around the ideas of “whites as an endangered, discriminated against group” and the need to secure America’s borders against Mexican deadbeats, drug dealers, and rapists, and Muslim terrorists. We have come a long way, Chua emphasizes, from the super-group politics of inclusion.

Chua’s tough love perspective deserves the of anyone interested in American policies and politics. That said, with its confident, combative style, Political Tribes does not always provide the context necessary to clarify (and, yes, complicate) her analysis. Chua reminds us that Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq have been foreign policy disasters. However, she ignores, exaggerates, and distorts to make her point. The “core reason” we lost in Vietnam, she insists, was a failure to understand the ethnic dimension of nationalism. The Bush Administration was “oblivious to” and “entirely missed” ethnic, tribal or clan-based identities in Afghanistan. Policy-makers, politicians and thought leaders concluded that the Sunni-Shia divide in Iraq was “no big deal.”

In fact, with some notable exceptions, policy makers were aware of ethnic and sectarian divisions in these countries. They supported Hamid Karzai to lead Afghanistan’s government because he was a Pashtun; and insisted that Jalal Talibani, a Kurd, become Vice President of Iraq. American officials did not come up with satisfactory solutions; but neither does Chua.

Chua does not adequately define the term “tribe.” She implies, for example, that poor people are members of a tribe. She does not sort out multiple, perhaps conflicting allegiances to ethnic, racial, religious and class-based identities. She does not address situations in which members of tribes lived together in relative harmony. She acknowledges, but only in passing, that, despite its official ideology of inclusion, the United States has witnessed inter-group conflict throughout its history. She does not mention that the of Anglo-Saxon “race ” at the turn of the twentieth century resulted in drastic restrictions on immigration from all countries outside of Western Europe, one of many episodes that casts doubt on her claim that we are now experiencing an “unprecedented” moment of white tribal .

Nonetheless, Chua is right to raise concerns about the domestic and global implications of identity politics. Despite its benefits, identity politics can – and has – subdivided, stigmatized, and excluded people, with lethal consequences. She is right as well to end her book with a plea that in these troubled times we somehow find a way “to see our tribal adversaries as fellow Americans, engaged in a common enterprise.” And to join the poet Langston Hughes in affirming that we should – and can – “let America be America again/ The land that has never been yet/ And yet must be – the land where every man is free.”