Book Summary: Political Tribes by Amy Chua

This summary of Political Tribes explains the importance of group identities based on things like ethnicity, religion and skin colour. Most of Chua’s book discusses cases where the US failed to recognise this in its foreign policy. She uses examples from Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq and Venezuela to support her claim. The last chapter of the book then discusses the current political climate in America.

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Table Of Contents

Key Takeaways from Political Tribes
Detailed Summary of political Tribes
My Thoughts

Key Takeaways from Political Tribes

Many of America’s foreign policy mistakes are because it failed to understand the existing tribal groups and divisions in other countries.
Some of those divisions are caused by the presence of a market-dominant minority. A market-dominant minority is a minority who, under market conditions, hold a disproportionate amount of economic and institutional power. The majority tend to resent such a minority. Examples of market-dominant minorities include the Chinese in Vietnam, Tajiks in Afghanistan, Sunnis in Iraq, and lighter-skinned people in Venezuela.
When there is a market-dominant minority, free market policies tend to exacerbate inequality and increase resentment and potentially violence.
As a result, America made mistakes in supporting anti-communist sides (e.g. in Vietnam, Venezuela), failing to see how a transition to democracy would create more conflict.
In a democracy with deep existing tribal divisions, people will form political groups based on those tribal identities like race or religion rather than on rational policy proposals that transcend old tribal divisions. Poor, oppressed majorities will use their newfound political power to seek revenge against market-dominant and oppressive minorities, and those minorities retaliate. As a result, the introduction of democracy can end up increasing group conflict (e.g. Iraq and Yugoslavia).
Part of the reason for America’s foreign policy failures is its assumption that other countries are, or could be, similar to it. But Chua argues that America is pretty unique as a “super-group” which requires two things:
- a melting pot with people of lots of different ethnicities and countries; and
- a strong American national identity.
Chua explains it is very unusual to have both of these things. Some other countries, like the UK, are also multicultural melting pots but do not have the strong national identity.

Detailed Summary of political Tribes

General – Groups and Terrorism

People recognise differences between their in-group members but tend to see out-group members of homogenous.
Our brains reward us when our in-group members succeed.
Paul Bloom found that white babies tend to prefer looking at white faces, black babies at black faces, etc. Bloom did not find this result in newborns, but only in babies from about three months old.
No reliable evidence that terrorist individuals have unusually troubled childhoods or deviant personalities. Chua says this is because terrorism is a group phenomenon, rather than an individual one.
Gustave Le Bon, who essentially invented crowd psychology, said that individuals who are part of a group descend “several rungs in the ladder of civilization”. A person may be a cultivated individual but act spontaneously, violently, ferociously and with the enthusiasm and heroism of more primitive beings. Individual responsibility is merged into and corrupted by group identity.
More informed and educated people tend to be more polarised on politically controversial factual issues, and are better at manipulating facts to support their worldview.
Ian Robertson notes that group bonding tends to increase oxytocin levels, which spurs a greater tendency to demonise and dehumanise the out-group and reduces the empathy one might otherwise feel. Robertson thought groups are more capable of savagery than an individual.
According to terrorism expert Scott Atran, what inspires terrorism is not so much the Qur’an or religious teachings, but the group. Jihadis kill and die not just for the cause but for each other.

Vietnam

The Vietnamese (generally) hated the Chinese

In 111 BC, China conquered Vietnam and incorporated it into the Chinese empire. But the Vietnamese refused to become Chinese and kept their own language and culture.
In 938AD, Vietnam won independence from China but still paid tribute to China for another millennium. China repeatedly tried to invade Vietnam, unsuccessfully.
Before the Vietnam War, around 1% of the population was Chinese and they controlled as much as 70-80% of Vietnam’s wealth. The Vietnamese despised these “Hoa” Chinese and lived very separately from them. There were a number of anti-Hoa reprisals in Vietnam. Chinese shops were burned and Chinese civilians (including women and children) were killed.
In the 19th Century, the French used a “divide and rule” strategy and welcomed Chinese immigrants.
After the Vietnam War, the Vietnamese Government launched anticapitalist and “ethnic cleansing” campaigns, X1 and X2. There were mass killings of Chinese. Most of the “Vietnamese boat people” who fled Vietnam as refugees during this time were Chinese – around 85%.

The US viewed Vietnam through a capitalist/communist lens, instead of an ethnic lens

In 1954, the Vietnamese defeated the French. The Geneva Accords divided Vietnam in two, with Ho’s Communist government (DRV) in the North and the American-backed government (ROV) in the South.
The Geneva Accords allowed Vietnamese people 300 days to move North or South. About 5 times as many moved South than moved North. But these were mostly Chinese and Catholics who feared that Ho’s Communist government would persecute them.
For some reason, America thought North Vietnam’s leader, Ho Chi Minh, was a “puppet” of China. But in fact, Ho did not like China.
Capitalism was associated with the Hoa Chinese. So the Vietnamese saw pro-capitalism acts as helping the Hoa.
During the Vietnam War, many Chinese avoided the draft through bribery. This effectively meant that South Vietnamese were being asked to fight and kill North Vietnamese, in order to keep the Chinese and corrupt politicians rich. Obviously they didn’t want to and a lot defected.
America completely missed the ethnic dimensions of this until much later. Most Americans in Vietnam couldn’t even tell the difference between Vietnamese and Chinese.

Afghanistan

Afghanistan has many ethnic groups, the largest four being: Pashtuns, Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras.
There is a long history of animosity among these groups. The country was established in 1747 by a Pashtun. The Pashtuns dominated for more than 200 years. In 1992, a Tajik and Uzbek coalition seized control. In the early 1990s, a Tajik minority largely controlled Afghanistan but many Pashtuns still thought of Afghanistan as their country.

The US’s actions helped the Taliban rise

In 1978, a Pashtun Communist-led coup overthrew the Afghanistan president. Even though it was led by Communists, the Soviet Union didn’t know about it. The new Afghanistan Government was a disaster and created a lot of terror and turmoil. The Soviet Union therefore decided to invade Afghanistan in 1979.
The Soviet Union’s invasion alarmed the US, but they didn’t want to get directly involved because of their recent Vietnam War loss. So they covertly armed the anti-Soviet “mujahedin” (guerrilla fighters) through Pakistan and let Pakistan’s anti-Communist dictator, Zia-ul-Haq decide how to distribute money and arms. Between 1980 and 1992, US funnelled almost $5 billion of weapons through Pakistan to anti-Soviet mujahedin.
Pakistan is politically dominated by Punjabis. Punjabis are very ethnocentric and usually marry other Punjabis (often their cousins). The Pakistani Government saw the Pashtuns as a threat because there are also a lot of Pashtuns in Pakistan (around 15%), especially near the Afghanistan border. Their fears of Pashtun nationalism grew after Pakistani’s Bengalis violently broke away and established Bangladesh in 1971.
Pakistan used a divide and conquer strategy. It empowered Islamist extremist Pashtuns and split them off from moderate Pashtuns. It also set up Islamic schools to spread extremist and fundamentalist ideas amongst Pashtuns. One of these schools actually educated Mullah Mohammad Omar, who went on to found the Taliban (“talib” means religious students).
Pashtuns founded the Taliban. It arose due to threats to Pashtun dominance. The vast majority of its members are Pashtuns.
The Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989 and the US lost interest in the country.
Afghanistan went through years of civil war until 1996 when the Taliban captured Kabul and took over two-thirds of the country. The Taliban had some popular support because it provided some stability after years of civil war, and because of its Pashtun roots and its promises to restore Pashtun dominance. The Pashtuns had lost a lot of power in recent years and many feared they would become marginalised.
The Taliban never succeeded in unifying Afghanistan’s Pashtuns because their extremism turned off moderate Pashtuns (i.e. Pakistan’s divide and conquer strategy worked).

US invasion of Afghanistan

In 2001, shortly after 9/11, US invaded Afghanistan.
US quickly toppled the Taliban by joining forces with Tajik and Uzbek warlords. One of the Uzbek warlords (Dostum) was particularly brutal. Most Pashtuns, including moderates who did not support the Taliban, saw him as an anti-Pashtun mass killer.
American policy was to exclude anyone remotely associated with the Taliban. This meant excluding many moderate Pashtuns who were more loosely connected with it. Pashtuns therefore saw the US as favouring and helping their ethnic rivals (mostly Tajiks). The Tajiks grew wealthy from US support.
After the Taliban was defeated, the US again lost interest in Afghanistan and the country was thrown back into turmoil.
Over time, the Taliban was able to rise again through popular support – particularly in rural areas.

Yugoslavia

Yugoslavia didn’t get a whole chapter in Political Tribes. Chua just mentioned it briefly as a comparable for Iraq.
Like Iraq, Yugoslavia was a multiethnic country with a long history of ethnic conflict (Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Bosnians etc) as well as deep religious divides.
Yugoslavia had a market-dominant minority (Croats and Slovenes) who were a lot wealthier than the more populous Serbs.
It had a relatively weak national identity. Like Iraq, the country was only created after WWI.
Yugoslavia was held together by a dictator (Tito) until the early 1990s. When the country was democratised, there was a lot of ethnic warfare and violence – even concentration camps.

Iraq

Iraq is a multiethnic nation with ethnoreligious divides between Sunni Arabs, Shia Arabs, Kurds and Christians. Iraq’s population is about 60% Shias. A Sunni minority of around 15% had long oppressed the Shia majority.

Sunni dominance

Sunnis had dominated Iraq for centuries under Ottoman rule and later British. The British employed their divide-and-rule strategy by favouring Sunnis and marginalising Shias and Kurds.
In 1968, the Baath Party took control. In 1979, Saddam Hussein became president. Things for Shias and Kurds got much worse under Saddam Hussein’s Sunni Baathist regime. They killed or expelled hundreds of thousands of Shias and Kurds. When they tried to rise up in 1991, Saddam used chemical weapons against them.

US invasion of Iraq

In 2003, the US invaded and overthrew Saddam in weeks. The US greatly underestimated the Sunni/Shia divide. They thought Sunnis and Shias would be able to get along since they do in some other Arab countries.
The Sunnis fought against the US since they correctly foresaw that democracy would give the Shias power.
The US immediately made some terrible decisions in 2003 including:
- Issuing a de-Baathification order, which fired everyone in the top four ranks of the Baath party and prevented them from holding public office again. This reinforced Sunni fears of Shia dominance and also stripped the country of much-needed skills (doctors, public officials).
- Disbanding the entire Iraqi army. This produced around 300,000 unemployed and frustrated Sunni men with weapons and no marketable skills other than their military training. Many joined Sunni insurgency groups.
- Making moves to immediate democratisation. The political parties that emerged were all based on ethnic/religious groups – Sunnis, Shias, Kurds. There was a lot of violent conflict between these groups.
In 2005, Iraq had its national elections. The Shia majority gained power. The US backed Maliki, not noticing or caring that he was a devout Shia who had spent his life fighting Sunnis (as was his father and grandfather).
In 2007, there was a “surge” where the US sent 20,000 additional troops into Iraq. This surge was successful because the US tried to learn more about the locals and built alliances with tribal leaders from the ground up. They succeeded by getting moderates (both Sunni and Shias) to cooperate against extremists. Their focus was on Baghdad.

ISIS

ISIS was founded and led by Sunnis who felt threatened by the Shia-dominated government in Iraq.
It was an offshoot of al-Qaeda but, unlike al-Qaeda, ISIS explicitly targeted Sunnis. (Osama bin Laden apparently didn’t like ISIS. ISIS thought all Shiites should be killed, but bin Laden’s mother was a Shia.)
Even though many Sunnis hate ISIS, they often fear and hate Maliki and the idea of Shia dominance more.
ISIS was good at marketing, filling its social media with good-looking jihadists carrying weapons (which many women found attractive). They managed to make terrorism “cool”, making it feel “alternative” and “punk rock”.

Venezuela

Venezuela is obsessed with beauty pageants. But Miss Venezuela was always light-skinned with European features, even though most people in Venezuela are darker skinned.
Hugo Chavez did look like a “common” Venezuelan and was publicly proud of it.
Over the centuries, Venezuela’s elites blamed the country’s problems on the mixing of whites, Indians and blacks and actively encouraged immigration from Europe to “whiten” Venezuela.
Despite a myth that “there is no racism” in Venezuela, Chua argues there was “pigmentism”. Wealth was overwhelmingly concentrated in white hands.
In 1998, the country elected Hugo Chavez in a landslide victory.
Chavez’s anti-business policies caused a lot of harm to Venezuela’s economy. Chavez fired the head of the national oil company, PDVSA, and replaced him with a left-wing academic who had little business experience.
In 2002, a coup by the wealthy elites deposed Chavez. The US hailed this as a “victory for democracy”. But people had democratically elected Chavez and he was incredibly popular. A popular uprising quickly restored Chavez.
Chavez’s reality TV show, Alo Presidente, lasted from 4-8 hours each week and he made actual policy decisions on the show without advance warning.
Chavez’s government also spent more money than it raised. To stay afloat it had to borrow $55 billion from China and Russia. When inflation soared, Chavez imposed price controls which many think disincentivised manufacturing.
Chavez suddenly died of cancer in 2013. Chavez’s successor, Nicolas Maduro, tried to continue Chavez’s policies but was much less popular. Also, by the time Maduro was in power, Venezuela’s economy was in a much worse state as oil prices collapsed in 2014. By 2016, inflation hit 800%.

America

In America’s constitution, citizenship does not pass by blood (as it does in most of Europe) but by being born there (there are laws allowing citizenship to pass by blood but that’s not the constitution). Chua says birthright citizenship is extremely rare and suggests this is part of what contributes to the strong American national identity.

Even white people in America feel threatened today

Every group in America feels threatened today, even whites. [My guess is that this is because whites tend to compare their position today to how things were in the past, whereas minorities that feel threatened or oppressed may be comparing to an “ideal” baseline of equality.]

Relative to the overall population, working-class whites (particularly Christians from conservative states) are often the most underrepresented group at top US universities. They are also underrepresented in Congress.
There is an overall trend of “browning” of America, with whites being projected to be a minority in 2040-50s if current trends hold.
White identity politics has mobilised around the idea of whites as an endangered, bullied group.
When blacks blame today’s whites for slavery or ask for reparations, many whites feel they are being attacked for their ancestors’ sins.
The privilege that coastal elites have is very different from the privilege that rural, working-class whites have, but it is all lumped together under “white privilege”.
Society encourages non-whites to indulge their tribal instincts but this is not true for most whites. It’s okay to be proud of being black or Asian but not of being white.
Chua uses the term “ethnonationalism-lite” to describe the feeling that many whites feel of nostalgia for a times when minorities were not as demanding or loud, and were more grateful. But she points out that asking for gratitude is to ask for subservience – gratitude implies a debt owed to a benefactor.

“Coastal elites” are very different from working-class whites

Today there is so little interaction, commonality and intermarriage between rural/heartland/working class whites and urban/coastal/elite whites that the difference between them is similar to what social scientists would consider an “ethnic” difference.
Coastal elites have become like a market-dominant minority. Trump in terms of taste, sensibilities and values is more similar to the white working class than to coastal elites.
The white working class don’t hate inequality or rich people. They just want to be the rich people (e.g. prosperity gospel).
American elites, especially progressives, are often very judgmental. They dislike “tacky” things (e.g. fake tans, pro wrestling, patriotism) that people often associate with lower-income Americans. Being a cosmopolitan “citizen of the world” is its own exclusionary group.
Examples of things that non-elites like or follow that most elites don’t understand:
- sovereign citizen movement;
- the Santa Muerte religion;
- the prosperity gospel;
- NASCAR; and
- professional wrestling.

The progressive left today have become a lot more exclusionary than they were in the recent past

Chua argues that many on the left have turned against “inclusive” and universalist rhetoric and have become a lot more exclusive and divisive. Examples:

Often people claim that out-group members can’t understand because their experiences are different from those in the in-group member. For example, “you can’t understand what it’s like to be a woman of colour because you’re a straight white male”.
It is no longer acceptable to speak in favour of group blindness or universality (e.g. “I don’t see colour”, “All Lives Matter”)
Identity politics gave rise to the idea of intersectionality. Chua argues people commonly misinterpret and misuse “intersectionality”, dividing people into ever more specific subgroups.
Women’s March controversy. The organisers had originally called it the “Million Woman March”. But others attacked them for using the same name of an important 1997 protest for black women’s unity.
The idea of cultural appropriation stakes a claim over the group’s symbols, traditions, costumes, and denies out-group members the right to use or enjoy them. Not so long ago it was considered progressive and open for a white person to wear a sari or kimono or to have cornrows or dreadlocks. But now people criticise Beyonce for wearing something resembling a traditional Indian bridal outfit, students at Oberlin complain that someone modifying recipes without respect for certain Asian countries’ cuisine was cultural appropriation, and others criticise white women styling their eyebrows to look thicker.
Often, when someone is deemed “racist” or “sexist”, that’s considered irredeemable – even if they are otherwise decent people who generally treat minorities well.
Calling people who worry about terrorism “Islamophobic”; or calling those who worry about the US’s demographic shifts “racists” is unhelpful. Transformational population change can be worrying and diversity has costs – so it should be okay to speak openly about them.
Liberals have cried wolf too many times – if everything is racist and sexist, nothing is.

My Thoughts

I think it was a good book. Chua has an easy to read and compelling writing style. She explained the situations in Afghanistan and Iraq simply, in a way that was accessible for people like me with almost no prior knowledge of the history. Unfortunately my knowledge of foreign policy is pretty poor so I cannot evaluate the veracity of Chua’s claims. Political Tribes did make me want to learn more about history and geopolitics though, so that is a plus.

The last chapter of the book, which was about America’s divisions, felt like a different book that was shoehorned into Chua’s overarching framework. But I still found it an enjoyable read. She certainly is not afraid to state her opinions, even when they may be controversial. Based on what I have seen online and in other media, many of her criticisms of the left rang true although I am not American so am not in the best place to judge.

Some people have criticised the book for not offering many solutions to America’s tribal politics. That is true, but I don’t think that was really the focus of the book at all. Chua’s main focus, I thought, was on America’s foreign policy failures. In those areas, she did explain how a better understanding of the tribal politics would have helped and used the example of the 2007 Iraq troop surge.

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