The first thing she advises is to be wary of the movement for economic justice, which she depicts as a fanciful cause driven by the “well educated and relatively privileged” kids of Occupy Wall Street. “Populism in America is not anticapitalist,” she writes. Her argument might have been more persuasive had she actually argued it; instead, in a bid to show elites how little they know, she provides page upon page about fringe phenomena like the sovereign citizens movement and Santa Muerte, but makes only a solitary and passing mention of the near-presidential nominee Bernie Sanders.

Her skepticism toward economic justice is joined by an antipathy toward identity politics. “Once identity politics gains momentum,” Chua writes, “it inevitably subdivides, giving rise to ever-proliferating group identities demanding recognition.” In support of her point she trots out the conservative complaint that “white identity politics has also gotten a tremendous recent boost” from the left’s “relentless berating, shaming and bullying.” Chua may be refreshingly attuned to the distemper of our times, but the annals of American history show that white identity politics has a robust record of doing just fine without any help from the left. Redlining, school segregation and minority disenfranchisement long preceded debates over whether serving bad banh mi sandwiches in a college cafeteria amounts to cultural appropriation.

Americans, Chua says, used to think of the United States as a “super-group,” with an identity “that transcends and unites the identities of all the country’s many subgroups,” because civil rights leaders like the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. “captured the imagination and hearts of the public and led to real change.” This kind of gauzy sentimentality runs counter to the pointed analysis in the rest of her book. Leaving aside the sanitized reading of King, who was a more radical and divisive figure in his time than Chua lets on, she doesn’t square how the flourishing of this “super-group” ideal happened to coincide, at least in her telling, with the onset of the American foreign-policy “blindness” she so diligently chronicles.

“I have also seen with my own eyes over and over the very best of America, practically miracles,” Chua writes about unlikely friendships that have bridged divides … in her seminars at Yale Law School. She praises the musical “Hamilton” — where a choice seat costs as much as a mortgage payment, and where Vice President Mike Pence was booed — as the kind of unifying cultural touchstone Americans so desperately need right now. Considering how much she’s thought about tone-deaf cosmopolitan elites seeming hopelessly out of touch, she would have done well to heed the moral of her own book: When changing lanes, check your blind spot first.