Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations Audiobook (Free)

The bestselling writer of Fight Hymn from the Tiger Mom, 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

Human beings are tribal. We need to belong to groups. In many parts of the globe, the group identities that matter most – the ones that people will kill and expire for – are cultural, religious, sectarian, or clan-based. But because America will start to see the about Politics Tribes: Group Instinct and the Destiny of Nations world with regards to nation-states involved in great ideological fights – Capitalism vs. Communism, Democracy vs. Authoritarianism, the “Free of charge Globe” vs. the “Axis of Bad” – we tend to be spectacularly blind to the energy of tribal politics. Over and over this blindness offers undermined American international policy.

In the Vietnam Battle, viewing the conflict through Cold Battle blinders, we under no circumstances saw that a lot of of Vietnam’s “capitalists” had been members from the hated Chinese language minority. Every pro-free-market move we produced helped switch the Vietnamese people against us. In Iraq, we had been stunningly dismissive of the hatred between that country’s Sunnis and Shias. If you want to get our foreign policy right – in order to not be perpetually captured off safeguard and fighting unwinnable wars – the United States has to arrive to grips with political tribalism abroad.

Just like Washington’s foreign plan establishment has been blind to the power of tribal politics beyond your country, so as well have American political elites been oblivious towards the group identities that matter most to ordinary Americans – and that are tearing the United States apart. As the beautiful rise of Donald Trump laid bare, identity politics have seized both the American still left and right in an specifically harmful, racially inflected way. IN THE US today, every group feels threatened: whites and blacks, Latinos and Asians, men and women, liberals and conservatives, etc. There’s a pervasive feeling of collective persecution and discrimination. Around the left, this has given rise to more and more radical and exclusionary rhetoric of privilege and ethnic appropriation. On the proper, it has fueled a troubling rise in xenophobia and white nationalism.

In characteristically persuasive design, Amy Chua argues that America must rediscover a nationwide identity that transcends our politics tribes. Enough fake slogans of unity, which are just another type of divisiveness. It is period for a more challenging unity that acknowledges the reality of group differences and fights the deep inequities that divide us.