Trash or Treasure: Political Tribes by Amy Chua

Political Tribes by Mrs. Chua has a simple thesis: America is different, but the identity politics being played by both the Right and the Left jeopardize America's future. I think most people are willing to accept this in principle. But they will disagree over specific examples.

America, Mrs Chua claims, is different because America is a super-group. A super-group is a tribe or tribes, allowing its members to keep their other tribal identities. She goes on to claim that America differs from other countries that are defined on ethnic and linguistic lines.

Because Americans have grown up in a super-group, which downplays the importance of tribal differences, we are blind to the importance tribes play in other societies.

In short, political tribalism poses a double threat. Our failure to recognize the importance of tribalism abroad results in foreign policy blunders. And tribalism's growing power at home threatens our inclusive institutions.

As interesting as these ideas may be, I don't think any of them revolutionary. If you read this book, read it for the examples, not the theory. [I have decided to only rate between 10% to 20% of the books reviewed as Treasure.]

Verdict: Trash
Read Instead: Albion's Seed or American Nations

Quotes and Analysis

• Race has split America's poor, and class has split America's whites.

This is an interesting claim. Do Americans use race to differentiate themselves more than other Americans? How could we measure that? I am endeavoring to find out.

• For many working-class Americans, being anti-establishment is not the same as being anti-rich.

This strikes me as quite true. I remember first hearing about the prosperity gospel as modern phenomena in high school. Coming from a Catholic background, the prosperity gospel struck me as peculiar. But I found it curious just how infuriated it made some of my teachers and professors.

This is a point that Leftists don't understand. In England, according to Freeman Dyson, there was an academic middle class and a commercial middle class. These two camps, fought it out, and the academic middle class dominated the system until Thatcher. I think the same is true in this country.

There is an academic elite, people that make their living as professionals but mostly as wage-earners. But there is also a commercial elite, who aren't wage-earners. These commercial elites make their wealth by risking their own capital. Quite a few working-class Americans sympathize with these risk takers but have very little sympathy when the academic elite complain about how unfair life is.       

• For well-educated, well-traveled Americans, cosmopolitanism is its own highly exclusionary class, with clear out-group members and bogeymen[...]

Mrs. Chua goes on to say that patriots are the bogeymen, but this is only half the story. I've spent almost my entire adult life living overseas, working in international schools. The American expats working in this school, particularly the ones that spend just a few years in a country before moving to the next, often strike me as slightly racist. Oftentimes, they look down on the local staff. They often only make superficial attempts to meaningfully engage with the host culture. Indeed, in my experience Americans, because their packages are usually more generous, tend to be worse at this than even the English...

These expats, what I'd call mobals, borrowing a term from Harm de Blij's The Power of Place, loath in almost equal parts the poor [locals] and the rich [globals].