Political Tribes
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With respect to immigrant groups, Great Britain today takes a hands-off, or “multicultural,” approach similar to that of the United States—but without the strong overarching national identity. Unlike France, Britain has no restrictions on religious clothing or other public expression of cultural identity. Indeed, Britain often bends over backward to accommodate religious minorities. To the dismay of some community members, for example, a growing number of schools have actually removed pork from lunch menus altogether—banning traditional sausages, ham, and bacon—out of deference to Muslim and Jewish students, even when they represent only a minority of the student body.
Unfortunately, instead of promoting cohesion, the result has been what David Cameron in 2007 (three years before he became prime minister) called “cultural separatism.” Comparing Great Britain to the United States, and specifically addressing the problems of Muslim assimilation, Cameron said:
[America] does succeed in creating, to an extent far more evident [than] we have achieved here, a real sense of common identity—about what it means to be an American. . . . It is this strong sense of inclusive identity that has helped make so many people feel part of American society. In Britain, we have to be honest: we have failed to do the same.
Growing numbers of Muslims in Great Britain live in largely Muslim neighborhoods and, as Clive Crook puts it, “feel little sense of community and solidarity with their fellow Britons, and vice versa.” Second- and third-generation Muslims in Great Britain seem to be more religious and more alienated from British society than first-generation immigrants. Many worry that this state of affairs is fueling the growth of homegrown jihadis. The 2017 Manchester suicide bomber was born and raised in the city he later terrorized. Similarly, as Crook puts it, “The July [2005 London] bombers were not foreigners who had sneaked in from abroad. They sprang from local Muslim communities.” As of 2015, more British Muslims had joined militant Islamic groups than were serving in the British armed forces.
For similar reasons, the European Union also fails to qualify as a super-group. Some people, mostly elites and well-educated students, do feel a strong sense of collective “European” identity and pride. But as Brexit and the explosion of anti-EU, Far Right nationalist movements all over Europe show, a great number of Europeans, particularly in the working class, feel little allegiance to or identification with Brussels. As Italy’s populist leader Matteo Salvini declared: “It is not for a European bureaucrat to decide our future, and that of our children.”
Even America, for much of its history, was not a super-group, excluding large numbers of people from citizenship (and freedom) on the basis of race, ethnicity, and gender.
THE EMERGENCE OF AMERICA AS A SUPER-GROUP
America was founded by mainly white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants, who dominated the country politically, economically, and culturally for most of its history. Until the late nineteenth century, the vast majority of immigrants to the United States were people we would today consider “white”—with “white” always a moving target. The Irish, Italians, Hungarians, Jews, Greeks, and Poles were all groups not considered fully white when they first arrived.
From the nation’s founding until 1920, immigration from Europe continued almost unrestricted. Whether fleeing persecution or drawn by America’s freewheeling capitalism, waves of immigrants of increasingly diverse backgrounds—Danes, Swedes, Czechs, Slovaks, Finns, Ukrainians, Serbs, Syrians, Basques, Russians, Armenians, Lithuanians—continued to pour in, often intermarrying within a few generations. The total numbers were breathtaking. Between 1820 and 1914, more than 30 million people arrived in the United States—the largest human migration in the history of the world. For purposes of comparison, between 1871 and 1911, some 20 million immigrants arrived in the United States, while over the same time frame, Argentina and Brazil together received 6 million immigrants, Australia and New Zealand 2.5 million, and Canada fewer than 2 million.
Yet during this period, for all its openness to immigrants, the United States continued to build ethnic and racial exclusions into every aspect of society, from the education system, where quotas were pervasive, to our immigration and citizenship laws, which explicitly discriminated against nonwhites. But as the twentieth century unfolded, and especially after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, America underwent another profound transformation: from a multiethnic nation into something even more unusual: a super-group.
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This transition had its roots in the Civil War, when America not only abolished slavery but passed the Fourteenth Amendment, establishing that anyone born in the United States was an American citizen. The significance of birthright citizenship cannot be overstated. It means that as a constitutional matter, citizenship—being American—does not pass by blood, as it does in most of Europe. (Most Americans may not realize it, but the rule that children of U.S. citizens are also U.S. citizens, even if they are born abroad, is not constitutionally mandated; it is the result of statutory provisions.) As far as the U.S. Constitution is concerned, if you’re born on American soil, then you are equally a U.S. citizen, whether your parents were born in Mexico, Libya, or Iowa. In other words, being American is not a matter of ancestry, but rather a matter of connection to the land, and of being bound by a shared constitution.
The Fourteenth Amendment was not only revolutionary in its own time. Birthright citizenship remains extremely rare even today. No Asian country grants it. No European country grants it. In fact, the United States is one of only a very few developed nations to recognize birthright citizenship (Canada is another). If anything, the trend is in the opposite direction. France eliminated birthright citizenship in 1993; Ireland, in 2005; New Zealand, in 2006.
But it would take another century for the United States to begin dismantling the legalized racism that continued unabated after the Civil War. In the 1954 landmark case Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court struck down race-based school segregation, rejecting the doctrine of “separate but equal” in public education. A decade later, Congress passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which enacted sweeping voting reforms and prohibited discrimination on the basis of race in employment and in public places such as hotels, restaurants, and theaters.
Around the same time, the Ivy League universities—historically the grooming grounds for America’s leaders—embarked on unprecedented institutional reforms aimed explicitly at building more diverse student bodies. Yale, for example, eliminated geographical factors for admission—which had been a way to limit Jewish students—and reduced preferences for alumni legacies and prep school students. This resulted in a spike in the percentage of Jewish students (from 16 percent in the freshman class in 1965 to about 30 percent in 1966) and students from public schools. The number of minority students accepted to Ivy League schools also rose dramatically. In 1960, the “Big Three” had collectively just 15 African American freshmen; in 1970, there were 284 (83 at Yale, 98 at Harvard, and 103 at Princeton). Overall, between 1970 and 1980, the number of African American college graduates increased by 91 percent.
The changing face of U.S. higher education was part of a much more radical transformation of American society. The 1960s and their aftermath did not end the primacy of white Anglo-Protestant men in the corporate world or in Washington, but women, blacks, and other minorities made impressive inroads in American business, politics, and culture. At the same time, new immigration policies dramatically changed the demographics of American society.
The 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act abolished the racially and ethnically discriminatory national-origin quotas instituted in the 1920s. Immigration rates exploded, from roughly 70,000 annually during the quota years to about 400,000 annually by the early 1970s, 600,000 annually by the early 1980s, and more than 1 million in 1989. From 1990 to 2000, the United States admitted approximately 9 million immigrants—more than any other country in the world, and more than in any other decade of U.S. history except the heyday of Ellis Isl
and at the turn of the previous century. The vast majority of these newcomers, moreover, were non-European, mostly from Latin America and Asia. The rise in legal migration was accompanied by an increase in illegal entries. In 1960, foreign-born residents of the United States were distributed principally as follows:
Italy
1,257,000
Germany
990,000
Canada
953,000
United Kingdom
833,000
Poland
748,000
In 2000, the distribution was very different:
Mexico
7,841,000
China
1,391,000
Philippines
1,222,000
India
1,007,000
Cuba
952,000
With these demographic shifts have come enormous cultural transformations as well. Although white Protestants, especially male, continue to wield considerable influence all over America—with disproportionate representation in the U.S. Congress, for example—their dominance has waned in recent years. For example, white Protestants are today disproportionately underrepresented at our institutions of higher learning. A 2014 Pew Research Center study found that around 46 percent of Americans were Protestant, but at Harvard University—named after Puritan pastor John Harvard—only 20 percent of the class of 2017 described themselves as Protestant. Although most U.S. Supreme Court justices since 1789 have been white Protestants, after Justice John Paul Stevens retired in 2010, the court became entirely comprised of Catholics and Jews, and remained so until the 2017 appointment of Neil Gorsuch (who was raised Catholic but who now worships with an Episcopal congregation).
Perhaps most strikingly, on the day of this writing, Billboard’s top 10 musical artists included only one singer and one duo of white Protestant descent (Taylor Swift and Twenty One Pilots). This brings us back to the heart of today’s tribal politics—the fact that every group in America today feels threatened, whatever the reality. Although it may seem preposterous given the persistence of racism in the United States—and the fact that nonwhites continue to be underrepresented at the highest levels of many fields—many white Americans now feel the country is culturally and socially dominated by blacks and other minorities. They experience their world as being swallowed up by a popular culture that equates coolness with multiculturalism and lionizes hip-hop music and movies like Moonlight (about a gay black man). Needless to say, many on the left deride this view, pointing out that Hollywood is still very male and very white (the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite went viral during the 2016 Academy Award season) and decrying the fact that Adele instead of Beyoncé won Album of the Year at the 2017 Grammys.
Nevertheless, from the point of view of many white Americans—ones who think the world of Mad Men wasn’t necessarily all that bad—they’ve lost their cultural primacy. Now, it seems, everything they see—TV programming, commercials, pop music, ads on the subway—is influenced and increasingly flavored by minority culture.
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America’s national identity is no longer exclusively defined by WASPs, nor by whites more generally, nor by any of America’s countless other ethnic subgroups. The 97 percent white population of Kennebunkport, Maine, is of course part of American identity and culture, but so are Cuban Americans in Miami’s Little Havana and Iranian Americans in L.A.’s Little Persia. Americanness embraces everyone born in this country, from the children of Jamaican immigrants to the grandchildren of Vietnamese immigrants to the great-great-grandchildren of Jewish immigrants, from Mayflower descendants to the descendants of slaves.
American society remains shot through with racism, and things may be getting worse, not better. A super-group is not a perfect group; it is not “postracial”; it can be full of violence and inequality. But no one can doubt that Barack Obama, Oprah Winfrey, and Derek Jeter are American. Indeed, they are all symbols, faces of America. What it means to be American is not the preserve of any particular racial, ethnic, or religious subgroup.
In a 1990 speech, Ronald Reagan gave eloquent expression to the extraordinary expansiveness of being American—and how that makes the United States different from other countries:
[Y]ou can go to live in France, but you can’t become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Italy, but you can’t become a German, an Italian. . . . [But] anyone, from any corner of the world, can come to live in the United States and become an American. . . . [I]f we take this crowd and if we could go through and ask the heritage, the background of every family represented here, we would probably come up with the names of every country on [E]arth, every corner of the world, and every race. Here, is the one spot on [E]arth where we have the brotherhood of man.
By the twenty-first century, however imperfectly and haltingly, the United States of America had become a super-group—the only one among all the world’s great powers.
FOREIGN POLICY IMPLICATIONS
Precisely because it’s so unusual, America’s status as a super-group has led us astray when it comes to assessing the tribal politics of other nations. We forget how unusual it is to have both an extremely diverse, multiethnic population and a strong overarching national identity capable of binding the people together. Libya, Syria, and Iraq are all, like the United States, postcolonial, multiethnic nations, but none of them has a national identity anywhere close to as strong as ours.
In countries like these, it can be a catastrophic mistake to imagine that through democratic elections, people will suddenly rally around a national identity and overcome their preexisting ethnic, religious, sectarian, and tribal divides. On the contrary, in sharply divided societies, democracy often galvanizes group conflict, with political movements and parties coalescing around these more primal identities. America has made this mistake over and over again.
Thus American exceptionalism, in its different facets, both at its ugliest and most inspiring, lies at the root of our obliviousness to the tribal identities that matter most intensely to people abroad. Sometimes racism blinds us. But most fundamentally, we tend to assume that other nations can handle diversity as we have, and that a strong national identity will overcome more primal group divisions.
This mentality suffers from two fatal flaws. First, it’s a naïve view of the world. After a U.S.-led coalition toppled Colonel Gaddafi in 2011, President Obama declared, “[O]ne thing is clear—the future of Libya is now in the hands of the Libyan people. . . . [I]t will be Libyans who build their new nation.” But “the Libyan people” hail from some 140 different tribes, and they did not come together to “build their new nation.” On the contrary, the country began a slow descent into fragmentation and eventually a bloody civil war. As Obama would later say, “The degree of tribal division in Libya was greater than our analysts had expected.” In 2016, the top U.S. general in Africa declared Libya “a failed state,” and it is now a hotbed of radicalism. Obama himself has said that “failing to plan for the day after” in Libya was probably the worst mistake of his presidency. If we are to get things right in our foreign policy, we need to be much more alert to the destructive potential of the group instinct abroad.
Second, it’s a naïve view of ourselves. The belief that other countries can handle diversity as well as America assumes that we can handle our own diversity. But the United States is not immune to the destructive forces of political tribalism—the forces that have repeatedly torn other nations apart and turned our foreign interventions into catastrophes.
> CHAPTER TWO
Vietnam
Vietnam is too close to China, too far from heaven.
—VIETNAMESE PROVERB
We will drive the Americans into the sea.
—PHAM VAN DONG, North Vietnamese premier
In Henry Kissinger’s words, “No war since the Civil War has seared the national consciousness like Vietnam.” Even as the war was unfolding, Hans Morgenthau, one of the leading international-relations experts of the twentieth century, wrote: “We are humiliated in the eyes of the world. What is worse and graver is that we humiliate ourselves in our own eyes because we betray the moral principles, the ideals on which this country was founded.” Arguably the first war lost in American history, the Vietnam War was, to quote George McGovern, “an utter, unmitigated disaster.”
Fifty years later, the question remains: how did superpower America, with its formidable military, lose to what Lyndon B. Johnson called “a piddling, piss-ant little country”—or, actually, half that country?