Amy Chua and J.D. Vance: Can Americans resist the pull of tribalism?

J.D. Vance and Amy Chua addressed a question posed at the 2018 Aspen Ideas Festival: "Can Americans resist the pull of tribalism?"

Amy Chua is a Yale law professor who's written a best-selling memoir and a new nonfiction book. She's paired up with her former law student J.D. Vance, whose memoir about growing up poor in the south topped the best-seller lists for quite some time. It's called "Hillbilly Elegy."

Chua says there has always been tribalism and we have a fundamental need to belong to groups. Tribalism isn't always bad, Chua says, "but when it takes over a political system, things get very dangerous because at that point everybody starts to see things only through the lens of their group, and then facts and arguments don't matter."

She added, "It's just like, whatever your side is saying, you just repeat it, and the other side is completely wrong, even if what they're saying is what your side was saying last year!"

Vance and Chua are concerned about the inordinate influence of an insular group they call "the coastal elites." The divide between the coastal elite and the middle is "so deep and acrimonious now," Chua said. "There's so little interaction now between the coastal, more urban, more multi-cultural whites and the group that J.D. is intimately familiar with: call it rural, working class, southern."

Chua said this is what social scientists classify as an "ethnic divide."

Vance said there is a "palpable sense of anger at coastal elites," and considerable cultural and social isolation. He added, there is "a potential antidote to the extreme subgroup tribalism in the country: a notion of an American nation, a little bit more robust and a little bit more inclusive."

Chua does not believe we need to "extinguish all these subgroup identities," but we do need to keep in mind the core principles of our country while acknowledging the "stains on our history."

"Our founders were flawed but visionary," Chua added.

Vance is white and southern, and said his wife is of Indian ancestry. They have found a "robust and durable way to experience patriotism, the sense that where I came from and who my parents and grandparents were really matters, but we're all still part of the shared national community."

Vance argued against "scorched-earth progressivism," and urged Americans to live up to America's ideals. "It's not fundamentally corrupt," he added. "There's something worth aspiring to, even though it's had its historical problems," including genocide of Indians and enslavement of African people.

In conclusion, Chua said there is something that we each can do: "narrow in your own heart who the enemy is."

Chua and Vance spoke June 29, 2018 at the Aspen Ideas Festival in Aspen, Colorado.

To listen to their discussion, click the audio player above.