Jonathan Rauch, a libertarian writer (now a fellow at
the Brookings Institution) who made the conservative case for gay marriage in
the 1990s with his own book (“Gay Marriage: Why It is Good for Gays, Good for
Straights, and Good for America”) offers a provocative review of Amy Chua’s new
book “Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations”, from Penguin
Press (2018). Chua is a law professor at Yale.
Rauch jumps on the hard-wired aspect of
tribalism. I don’t experience it as much
as others, as I resist “joining in” with demonstrations or showing a lot of emotion
over single-issue campaigns – and claimins of group oppression. To my mind, it’s a little shameful – yet at
74 I won’t wear shorts in public either.
Rauch also notes how easily we can be fooled by the
political rise of anti-intellectual tribalism even in a stable democracy. We have been warned.
Amy Chua has an op-ed in the New York Times “The
Destructive Dynamics of Political Tribalism” today. She warns that free market capitalism can lead
to disasters in some developing countries because wealthy minorities become targets,
and she thinks this is happening in the US today. Chua notices the aloofness of
coastal elites and their disinterest in personal communication with people whom
they see as uneducated and intellectually inferior. This has ramifications for the individualized
speech on social media, as if becomes suspect from those “without their own
skin in the game.” Does this boil down to expecting more personal community engagement before having a voice?
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