Political Tribes review – an unreliable guide to the American Dream

To most readers who recognise the name, Amy Chua is the author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, the bestselling memoir about bringing up children under a strictly traditional regime of Chinese parenting. The book seemed to repel and inspire in equal measure. But leaving aside its personal testimony, it was a work that dared to tread on disputed and dangerous terrain: the advantage of certain ethno-cultural traits.

It’s an issue that can be found to varying degrees in all five of Chua’s books, including her latest, Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations. Chua, a professor of law at Yale Law School, believes that ethnic and tribal identity plays a more powerful role in national politics than has been previously acknowledged, at least by American foreign policy.

She cites the wars in Vietnam and Iraq as classic examples in which intranational differences were underestimated with catastrophic results. In Vietnam, she notes, “a hugely disproportionate number” of the country’s “capitalists” were ethnic Chinese, who were despised by the Vietnamese, both northern and southern.


Source :- theguardian