Political Tribes

Yale law professor Amy Chua argues that loyalty to groups can matter more than ideology, applying it to American foreign policy and to politics at home. Because America tends to see the world as a contest of nation-states and ideologies, she contends, it has often missed the ethnic, religious, sectarian and clan identities that, in many places, people will kill and die for. In Vietnam it failed to see that most of the country's capitalists belonged to a hated Chinese minority; in Iraq it was dismissive of the hatred between Sunnis and Shias. Turning inward, Chua finds identity politics seizing both left and right, with every group feeling under threat, a pattern the rise of Donald Trump laid bare.

Doug McMillon named it in a Facebook post about the books he read that year.