Political Tribes Read online

  This leaves the United States in a perilous new situation: with nearly no one standing up for an America without identity politics, for an American identity that transcends and unites the identities of all the country’s many subgroups.

  —

  Most European and all East Asian countries originated as, and continue to be, ethnic nations. In these countries, the population is overwhelmingly composed of a particular ethnic group, which typically supplies the country’s name as well as its national language and dominant culture. Thus China is politically and culturally dominated by ethnic Chinese, speaking Chinese; Germany by ethnic Germans, speaking German; Hungary by ethnic Hungarians, speaking Hungarian; and so on.

  By contrast, America’s national identity is not defined by the identity of any one of the innumerable ethnic subgroups that make up the U.S. population. Instead we are a tribe of tribes, with citizenship equally open to anyone born on our soil, no matter what their ancestry. It would be odd to refer to “Irish French” or “Japanese Korean.” But in the United States, you can be Irish American, Japanese American, Egyptian American, or whatever American, and intensely patriotic at the same time.

  Alone among the major powers, America is what I will call a super-group. A super-group is first of all a group. It is not universal; it does not include all humanity. It has a “We” and an “Everyone Else.” But a super-group is a distinctive kind of group: one in which membership is open to individuals from all different backgrounds—ethnic, religious, racial, cultural. Even more fundamentally, a super-group does not require its members to shed or suppress their subgroup identities. On the contrary, it allows those subgroup identities to thrive, even as individuals are bound together by a strong, overarching collective identity.

  America was not a super-group for most of its history. On the contrary, the United States became one only through a long and painful struggle, involving a civil war and a civil rights revolution. But America’s continued existence as a super-group is under tremendous strain today.

  America is beginning to display destructive political dynamics much more typical of developing and non-Western countries: ethnonationalist movements; backlash by elites against the masses; popular backlash against both “the establishment” and “outsider minorities” viewed as disproportionately powerful; and, above all, the transformation of democracy into an engine of zero-sum political tribalism.

  Donald Trump may seem utterly unprecedented in the United States, but there’s a startling parallel from the developing world. Trump was neither the world’s first “tweeter-in-chief” nor the first head of state to have had a reality TV show. Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez was. Like Trump, Chávez was elected to the shock and horror of elites, sweeping to victory in 1998 on an antiestablishment platform, attacking the mainstream media and a slew of “enemies of the people.” Like Trump, who catapulted himself to the White House 140 characters at a time, Chávez was a master at communicating directly to the populace, winning over millions of the country’s have-nots with unscripted rhetoric that struck elites as vulgar, outrageous, absurd, and often plainly false. Finally, like Trump, Chávez’s appeal had a racial dimension. But whereas Chávez’s base consisted primarily of the country’s long excluded darker-skinned masses, Trump’s base was white.

  Interestingly, Washington completely miscalled Venezuela too. Seeing Chávez through the usual anti-Communist lens, U.S. foreign policy makers in 1998 were oblivious to the deep racial tensions in Venezuelan society and the intense, tribal, antielite resentment building up just below the surface. As a result, we repeatedly made bad foreign policy calls—like hailing a 2002 coup against Chávez as a “victory for democracy”—undermining our legitimacy in the region and our ability to combat today’s real attack on Venezuelan democracy.

  If we want to get our foreign policy right—if we don’t want to be perpetually caught off guard, fighting unwinnable wars, and stuck having to choose between third- and fourth-best options—the United States has to come to grips with political tribalism abroad. And if we want to save our nation, we need to come to grips with its growing power at home.

  CHAPTER ONE

  American Exceptionalism and the Sources of U.S. Group Blindness Abroad

  America is God’s Crucible, the great Melting-Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming!

  —ISRAEL ZANGWILL, The Melting Pot

  Daddy once told me there’s a rage passed down to every black man from his ancestors, born the moment they couldn’t stop the slave masters from hurting their families.

  —ANGIE THOMAS, The Hate U Give

  Great Britain’s acute group consciousness during its imperial heyday contrasts jarringly with America’s group blindness today. The British were minutely knowledgeable about, almost obsessed with, the ethnic, religious, tribal, and caste differences among their subject populations. They studied and cataloged, harnessed and manipulated, often deliberately pitting groups against each other. They also left behind time bombs that are still exploding today.

  From a cold-blooded, strategic point of view, Britain’s divide-and-rule policies were astonishingly successful. In India, some forty thousand British officers and soldiers governed approximately 200 million Indians for nearly two hundred years. By contrast, America couldn’t hold Vietnam for ten years, couldn’t stabilize Afghanistan for five, couldn’t unify Iraq for even one.

  Why didn’t America follow the British model? Part of the answer may simply be timing. Great Britain’s shrewd divide-and-conquer strategies arose out of the practical necessity of colonial governance—of having to administer large numbers of colonial subjects with a relatively small occupying force. By the time the United States emerged as a Cold War superpower, supplanting Great Britain on the world stage, the rules of the imperial game had changed. Conquest and territorial occupation were out of favor. The challenges of governing tens of millions of foreign subjects never faced postwar America, which constructed its “empire” very differently—by engineering coups, installing friendly regimes, building military bases, opening up markets, and establishing spheres of influence, rather than actually occupying and ruling foreign territory.

  But the timing explanation is incomplete at best. There are deeper reasons for the group blindness of U.S. foreign policy, rooted in America’s distinctive history—at both its best and its worst.

  —

  In 1915, addressing several thousand recently naturalized citizens, President Woodrow Wilson said:

  You cannot dedicate yourself to America unless you become in every respect and with every purpose of your will thorough Americans. You cannot become thorough Americans if you think of yourselves in groups. America does not consist of groups. A man who thinks himself as belonging to a particular national group in America has not yet become an American. . . .

  This is a classic expression of American group blindness, and it is astounding that Wilson could make this comment at a time when many Native Americans were still denied citizenship, Jews were subject to quotas, Asian immigrants were barred from owning land in California, Mexican Americans were being lynched in the Southwest, and blacks faced violence, terror, and degradation throughout the country in almost every aspect of life. Wilson was claiming that “America does not consist of groups” when he was himself a beneficiary and practitioner of tribal politics: like every president before him, as well as nearly every holder of an important public office, Wilson was a white, Protestant male. It was Wilson, moreover, who oversaw the racial resegregation of the civil service.

  Racism is group consciousness at its most repugnant, built on the premise that human beings can be divided by skin color into innately superior and inferior groups. Yet, paradoxically, racism is also a form of group blindness. Racial categories like “black,” “white,” and “Asian” erase ethnic differences and identities. The original African slaves brought to America knew—and might have tried to tell their children�
�that they hailed from the Mandinka tribe or the Ashanti people, or that they were descended from a long line of Yoruba kings. But even as they were stripped of their rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, America’s slaves were also stripped of these ethnic identities. Slave families were deliberately broken up, and heritages were lost, reduced by the powerful to a pigment and nothing more. Even now, immigrants from, say, Ghana, Jamaica, or Nigeria are often stunned to discover that in America they are just “black.”

  Something similar can be said about Native Americans and Asian Americans. To see all Native Americans as “savages that delight in war and take pride in murder,” as Benjamin Franklin put it, is to not see or care about the differences among the Cherokee, Lakota, Ojibwa, Choctaw, and Navajo. (In the United States today, there are 566 federally recognized tribes.) One of the biggest objections Asian Americans have to the “model minority” stereotype is that it reduces them to a giant undifferentiated group of “abused, conformist quasi-robots,” running roughshod over the stark ethnic and socioeconomic differences among, say, Taiwanese Americans, Hmong Americans, and Cambodian Americans. This was part of our problem in Vietnam: one of the reasons we couldn’t tell the difference between the Chinese and Vietnamese was because they were all “Gooks” to us.

  But Wilson’s assertion that “America does not consist of groups” is remarkable not only because of how false it was, but also because of how much truth it holds, at least for certain major segments of the population. Of all the nations in the world, none has succeeded more than the United States in bringing together immigrants from diverse backgrounds and joining them in a new identity—American.

  This was true even in the founding era. “What then is the American, this new man?” asked Crèvecoeur in 1782. The American, he answered, was a “strange mixture of blood, which you will find in no other country. I could point out to you a family whose grandfather was an Englishman, whose wife was Dutch, whose son married a French woman, and whose present four sons have now four wives of different nations. He is an American . . . leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners.”

  This is what’s so peculiar about America. We have been both exceptionally racist and exceptionally inclusive.

  Alone among modern Western democracies, America had extensive race slavery inside its borders, which it did not abolish until 1865, nearly a century after a British court ruled slavery illegal inside England and thirty years after Great Britain abolished slavery in its colonies. We then replaced bondage with a legalized system of “separate but equal,” which was not equal at all, and which effectively implemented apartheid in many parts of the country. Even today, the aftereffects of slavery still haunt America in the form of systemic inequality and injustice.

  But America is exceptional in another, seemingly contradictory, way as well. Over the centuries, through the alchemy of markets, democracy, intermarriage, and individualism, America has been uniquely successful in attracting and assimilating diverse populations. The proverbial “nation of immigrants,” the United States has always been one of the most ethnically and religiously open countries in the world. Today, in terms of absolute numbers, the U.S. population includes 47 million people born abroad, hailing from more than 140 countries—a full 19 percent of the world’s migrants, putting us in first place by far. Germany, the next closest country, has just 12 million immigrants.*

  America’s distinctive history—its ethnicity-transcending national identity and its unusual success in assimilating people from diverse origins—has shaped how we see the rest of the world and has deeply influenced our foreign policy. It’s not just ignorance, racism, or arrogance that predisposes us to ignore ethnic, sectarian, and tribal divisions in the countries where we intervene. In the United States, immigrant communities from all sorts of backgrounds have become “Americans”; why wouldn’t Sunnis and Shias, Arabs and Kurds, all similarly become “Iraqis”?

  It’s in this sense that our blindness to political tribalism abroad reflects America at both its best and worst. In some cases, like Vietnam, ethnically blind racism has been part of our obliviousness. But American group blindness abroad is also rooted in some of our noblest ideals: tolerance, equality, individualism, the power of reason to triumph over irrational hatred, and the conviction that all men are united by their common humanity and love of liberty.

  THE RARITY OF SUPER-GROUPS

  America is exceptional in yet another way that has also dramatically shaped our foreign policy. Perhaps the best way to see this is to return not to the 2016 presidential election but to the two before that.

  In 2008, Barack Obama was elected president of the United States. In 2012, he was reelected. It’s worth pausing a moment to register just how exceptional this is. Obviously, Obama’s presidency was so striking in part because of America’s history of racism. Racial bloc voting, the systemic denigration of blacks, their relative exclusion from the country’s higher strata of power and wealth—all this was so deeply entrenched that only a couple of years before Obama’s rise, the election of an African American to the White House seemed to many Americans, as the New York Times put it in 2008, “unthinkable.”

  But especially in light of the 2016 presidential election, we should also remember what a testament to American exceptionalism the elections of 2008 and 2012 were from a world-comparative point of view. No other major power in the world has ever democratically elected a racial minority head of state.

  Just try to imagine the United Kingdom electing a black prime minister or Germany electing an ethnic Turkish chancellor. Or Russia, if it ever held real elections, electing an ethnic Korean as president.

  America was able to elect Barack Obama as president because this country is a super-group, a group in which membership is open to individuals of any background but that at the same time binds its members together with a strong, overarching, group-transcending collective identity.

  Historically, there have been super-group empires—Rome, for example, and, arguably, Great Britain. In theory, there have been super-group ideological movements (communism, for example) and super-group religions (Christianity, for example), although of course ideological movements and religions are not open to individuals with the wrong beliefs. But for a country to be a super-group is extremely rare.

  China, for example, is not a super-group. One ethnicity, the Han Chinese, represents 92 percent of the population and effectively defines the national identity. Minority cultures are routinely suppressed. Thus, the Muslim Uighurs are banned from wearing veils and long beards; children under eighteen are prohibited from entering mosques and must sometimes be renamed in order to attend school.

  None of the East Asian countries is a super-group. On the contrary, Japan and Korea are among the most ethnically homogenous countries on the planet, with powerful, ethnically defined national identities. For the same reason, most European nations aren’t super-groups either. Strongly ethnic nations, like Poland or Hungary, obviously aren’t super-groups. But interestingly, neither is France or the United Kingdom. Both countries have quite diverse, multiethnic populations; both are at least nominally constitutionally committed to minority rights and equal liberty. Yet neither is a super-group, although for opposite reasons.

  France has a powerful national identity, but insists that its ethnic and religious minorities must thoroughly assimilate, at least publicly. Even putting aside the openly anti-immigrant National Front party—which explicitly calls for a return to a “pure French” national identity—France strongly discourages the expression of subgroup or tribal identities. Modern French law disallows any “ostentatious” displays of religion, including religiously symbolic clothes and demonstrations, in public places such as schools and government offices. While Christians are permitted to wear crosses (apparently not “ostentatious”), Jews may not be allowed to wear yarmulkes (though that rule is rarely enforced), and Muslims have been banned from wearing head scarves
and face veils. Even the Socialist prime minister Manuel Valls said that Muslims must give up head scarves in universities in order to demonstrate that their religion “is fundamentally compatible with the Republic.”

  In other words, it’s laïcité—the French form of political secularism—or nothing. As former French president Nicolas Sarkozy declared in 2016, “If you want to become French, you speak French, you live like the French and you don’t try and change a way of life that has been ours for so many years.” The “burkini ban” made headlines in the summer of 2016. In the latest controversy, a number of French towns stopped providing pork-free meals in public schools; Jewish and Muslim children must “eat like the French” or not eat at all. Many believe that such attempts at forced assimilation have backfired with France’s Muslims, contributing to poor Muslim migrants feeling excluded from and hostile to the nation in which they now reside. In short, France has a strong national identity, but it doesn’t let ethnic or religious minority cultures freely flourish.

  Conversely, while the United Kingdom embraces several different “tribes” with their own intense subgroup identities—Irish, Scottish, Welsh, and so on—the grip of its national identity is surprisingly weak. In part, this is because “Britishness” is linked to “Englishness” (the English make up about 84 percent of the total population), and for obvious reasons an English-centered identity does not appeal to most Irish, Scots, and Welsh. At the same time, invoking a “British” identity based on Britannia’s glorious history would necessarily celebrate empire, which is anathema in polite circles. The result is on the one hand repeated secessionist movements—most of Ireland is already gone; Scottish independence was narrowly defeated in 2014—and on the other hand the recent emergence of a nativist Little England movement led by the UK Independence Party, which led the charge for Brexit.