republicans instead of democrats like hillary clinton. we will wait and see but i would not expect proof to be forthcoming. the former president obama was colluding with russians. although i realize there are right-wing outlets that suggest otherwise. >> guest: bloomberg businessweek political correspondent, political analyst on cnn. former editor of atlantic and author of book devil's bargain. steve bannon, donald trump, updated and out in paperback last month. thank you for being on booktv. >> guest: thank you i enjoyed this. it was wonderful.>> over the past year booktv has covered several books on the trump administration. including david horowitz on the priorities he thinks that the president should focus on. an investigative journalist david cay johnston critical look at the actions of the trump administration. you can watch these and other programs online at booktv.org.

type trump administration book in the search bar at the top of the page. [inaudible conversations] >> good evening. i am bradley graham. on behalf of everybody at the bookstore, and all of the staff here, welcome. thank you very much for coming. we are very excited to have amy chua with us this morning. she's a law professor at yale written and spoken extensively on matters of culture and identity. her new book, political tribes

addresses a theme that has become especially topical these days. with many the splintering of america into groups of one sort or another. but seemed to have little interest in uniting or compromising more even trying to get along. one of the founding notions of america of course, was as a democratic system. in which differences of race, ethnicity, religion and so on would be taken up in a shared identity. these days messages that appeal to shared values seem repeatedly trumped by messages intended to exploit narrow group identities. amy argues that in international affairs and domestic dealings, americans have fallen prey to tribalism. abroad we have all too often been blind to it. and at home, we have a debilitating tendency to revert

to it. among a number of positive reviews of amy's book, one of the "washington post" quoted quote - compact and insightful, yet ultimately hopeful. hopeful because for all of her critique, she herself is the daughter of immigrants. she sees signs of people trying to cross divides and breakout of their political tribes. whether all of these efforts actually amount to a definite seismic trend is debatable. but at least they are encouraging and psychological research shows that humans can in various ways break the tribal spiral. as an added attraction this evening, amy will be in conversation with jd vance. author of the best-selling hillbilly ology, a compelling memoir about growing poor in a family of appalachian values and habits.

amy and jd know each other pretty well. when j.d. was a student at yale amy took an interest in him and his background and help persuade him as his life and conclusions were worth putting down on paper. she even ended up introducing j.d. to the person who became his literary agent. we should all have such help with our literary undertakings. but amy has said that mentoring j.d. has been a two-way street for her. which she has learned a great deal from him about a world that she had known little about. ladies and gentlemen, please join me in welcoming amy chua and jd vance. [applause] [laughter] rex this.

>> this is my first ever interview as the interviewer. not the interviewee. i beg your forgiveness in advance because i've never done this and i might be pretty terrible at it. i felt that i would start by talking a little bit more personally about how we know each other. and of course it occurs to me that like you said earlier, my book is really at least partially because of you because the introducing me to my literary agent, give me confidence that the book was republishing and i guess the only thing that i'd ever really done to pay for it is come here in this beautiful synagogue and have a nice conversation. it has been a pretty one-sided relationship. maybe we should start talking a little bit about where the relationship came from for those of us in the audience who are not familiar with it and i

am curious, i've never asked you this question but, when i was a student at yale law school, what did you think about me and why did you encourage me to write this book? [laughter] >> i met j.d. is very first day of law school. he was one of maybe 70 students in my contract class. he sat in the very back row. he was a tall guy so he stood out. in the front row over here was a woman that is now his wife. and i think that we clicked from the very beginning. it's interesting. i've said this, superficially seem like we have nothing in common. i am a daughter of chinese immigrants get both my parents have graduate degrees. but i always felt like an outsider growing up. which is why am so interested in tribalism and identity and

culture. i've never fit in anywhere in some ways. not in this country. when i go to china certainly do not fit there. not in california, the midwest where i started. and not now on the east coast. so jd and i bonded. we had so much weird stuff in common. you know, a little bit of not liking pretentiousness, the eat all you can buffet, we both left impulse control. we just had lots of views in common.at the end of the story is quite interesting. i was -- in january 2011, i will never forget it was january 8, 2011. my leg completely changed. before then i was a mild-mannered professor writing about foreign policy and that is actually what i do. and i wrote this book and the wall street journal exerted it

with just incendiary title, why chinese mothers are superior. and it went you know, just completely viral. interestingly enough, in parallel, have jd's book went viral. but in my case it was very bad. i had no social media, no facebook. no twitter, i was not equipped for this. i was getting hundreds of emails, child abuser, it was terrible. i was on -- i still remember being in a hotel room by myself so upset and lonely. i think it was seattle. then i get an email from j.d.. i got two emails. he was studying for his contract exam. so the first email asked me some boring question of contractor able to house, three hours later, it is now one of the morning i get a second email from him. and i can tell he has had maybe a beer or two. [laughter] >> more than that.

>> what's amazing about j.d. is he is the least money of anyone at yale law school. part of the problem will get you. he is like the one guy with no money. somehow goes and he buys the book. and this is another thing we have in common. i mean a lot of people talk about books without having read them. j.d. read this. he read it and he wrote me a long email. and this, believe it or not, even in my own trauma, i read this when he said i can't believe you got in trouble for this. at least you were trying. and he told me a little about his own family that he had previously not told me. he was sort of more suggestive that his mother was a nurse. i mean you never said she was but -- and i saw this in the email and i said, you need to write the story. you just need to write the story. and what's funny is i do a book

party for him last year i think. i went in i dug up my old email because maybe a week, maybe a few days later -- no, it was that same evening he sent me something. 10 pages of his own thoughts. and i found them and they are the exact same opening as hillbilly ology. it is an immense amount january 13, 2011. almost unchanged pages of the book. anyway, that is the whole story. [laughter] >> i remember that in law school i was felt a little bit lost. you are such a good mentor. not just today but other students as well. i was felt i could rely on amy. i don't know troy don't know what job to apply to or which class i should take. i could always go to to say how should i behave in a social circumstance and you always very comfortable offering the

advice. i still remember, and i do not know if you remember this but i will try to jog your memory a little bit. there was this moment i think toward the end of our first year of law school where i thought that i had burned this bridge with you. and the reason i thought i burned this bridge is because we were going -- went out as a class or maybe in small groups but reasonably large groups. and we are out for drinks and i remember a dozen or so of us were talking about law school and life in you like to get to know your students. at the tableb& there was this incredibly belligerent drunk guy. i remember for two hours that we were sitting next to him, i kept thinking to myself, act like he has been there don't sit at the end you want to say and i kept going on. an attempt on sort of suggesting ridiculous things about the table and was criticizing the classmates and then finally i stood up and i think the exact what they ordered was, can i -- help you?

i said in a loud voice and i made it clear that i expected and needed confrontation with this person. it sort of immediately i thought to myself, this is a terrible mistake. i've lost my temper. this person has been incredibly kind to me for pretty much my entire experience here will never speak to me again. almost immediately thereafter, the prisoner stood behind me backing up was -- >> i husband! [laughter] yeah, we have a lot of stories. >> that was a fun experience. enough about that. let's talk about this incredible book. it really is excellent. i will read a bit from what i wrote in this. in the book amy chua argues tribalism and social dysfunction accommodate of the normal over the world with united states managed to escape

the impulses thanks to a shared sense of national identity. but there's trouble on the horizon. talk a little bit about the trouble. maybe we can just start for those imagine most have not read the book it's only been up for a few days. maybe you can just walk us through the basic thesis of political clients. here it is again. if you have not read this yet go and buy. then we can talk a little bit more. >> l the starting point is that human beings are trouble. really tribal. i mean biologically. some of my favorite parts of the book are actually not quite about the politics part but there are some fascinating studies. i will just tell you about one. recently, researchers took kids between ages of four and eight and randomly assigned them to the red team or the bleeding. and by given t-shirts for the corresponding color. then, they set the children for the computer the and show them computer edited images of

children. halfway included half wearing rent. then the researchers said ask the children for their reactions to these kids. the results were astonishing! even though these children had known nothing about the children in the pictures, they consistently and passionately said that they liked the children better who were wearing their colors. they wanted to allocate more resources to them. and i thought they were better in every way. smarter, more moral, nicer people. almost more troubling, these kids displayed a unconscious bias. when told stories about these kids, and then they asked the children about them afterwards. the children systematically remembered all of the good things about the people wearing their color. and all of the negative things about people on the other side. and there are studies like this

that show that we desperately want to belong to these groups and once we connect to a group it is almost like matter. want to see everything through the lens of that time and if you're presented with evidence that your tribe is doing something wrong, something back, your response is often to stick to your tribe. and you're feeling and doing that is nothing you are being stupid or irresponsible, it is that you are being loyal. that is the starting point. when i originally started writing the book it was going to be only a foreign-policy book. i will explain how it became the book that it is. three years ago, i was writing about how the united states, we, we go out in foreign policy we tend to think of the conflicts in terms of grand ideological battles. capitalism versus communism in the cold war.

then the next wave it was authoritarianism versus democracy. we were going to do the democracy. then after 9/11 it was evil versus freedom. it is always his grand principles. and we always think that democracy is going to be the panacea. when we go to a country like iraq or syria or afghanistan, we don't pay any attention to the group identities that matter most to people on the ground. and the reasons i get into in the book. but basically, part of it is because of our own extraordinary success with assimilation. the idea is if in this country, germans and hungarians and polls and irish and italian and japanese could all become americans, within a generation or two, then why can't the sunnis and chia and kurds?

we just need to have an election, that will take care of it. the problem is that if you understand the tribalism and you understand the demographics, democracy often catalyzes group conflict. so maybe i can talk later but i give an interesting example of vietnam. i know most people here know by now that the united states, we saw vietnam through a cold war lens and underestimated the extent to which the vietnamese people were fighting for their independence and sovereignty as opposed to cold war marxism. but here's something that i bet most of you do not know. and most experts in the field still do not know it. i have talked to them. and that is that there was a different ethnic problem that we completely missed. and completely undermine all of our efforts in vietnam.

that is, we could not for we did not care about the difference between the vietnamese and the chinese. it is funny i was going to go on t.v. and somebody in d.c. helping he said don't use this example because americans don't know the difference between vietnamese and chinese. they will think it's the same thing. so we always come out foreign policy we assume that vietnam was a pawn of communist china. if anybody, it is the mcnamara later talked about for just get a little attention to the history of vietnam, you would've seen that it is impossible. china is this gargantuan country.it is like a big genie sitting on a little lamp. with the lamp being vietnam. china has always been the number one enemy of vietnam. every hero has been fighting china.they had colonized at

1000 years. the idea that vietnam would be a pawn of china is foolish. more importantly, and then i will stop with this, inside vietnam, there was also this thing that vietnam has what i call, a market dominant minority. it is a tiny, one percent outsider chinese minority. they were not vietnamese. who controlled about 70 percent of the countries wealth. this is true of all the southeast asian countries. my point is that most of vietnam capitalists were not even vietnamese. and the us missed this. we come in and we're going to support capitalism. they failed to see that from the point of view of the vietnamese people, we are asking them to fight and die basically to keep this presented minority wealthy. the wreck was originally going to be about how our blindness

to these incredibly important tribal and group identities are responsible for some of our greatest foreign policy disasters. and how they get to the domestic partner? i will never forget last february i was teaching a class that i had taught for 20 years, jd was in it. a popular class called international business transactions. it is where talk a lot about my own ideas about democracy and ethnic conflict. and this was one month after president trump had taken office. i was talking to this large class. and i was doing the whole thing that i said for 20 years. because the developing country dynamics are so different from our own, we keep messing up our foreign policy. so in developing countries for example, we often get demagogic politicians with no political experience. hootsuite to power on anti-

establishment platforms. scapegoated minorities and sweeping to power on and ethically changed wave of populism and that was, reduction talk about hugo chavez. eddie eyes looking be thinking the same thing and one student from the city. it's that you're describing america. and that was last february. the book took on a life of its own. i had to rethink a lot of things but basically, a big point of the book that united states today, for reasons i can get into, for the first time in our history, we are starting to display dynamics much more typical of developing countries. things that we thought that will never happen to us. populist movements, authoritarianism. we are starting to see some of these exact same patterns.

and they are very predictable. right here in our own country. the book is an explanation. it is not random. i think a lot of people say how did we get here? once you start looking through the lens of democracy and tribalism and you look at the parallel to other countries, is actually very predictable and also why -- well, i will bet to that. class in a lot of ways it's interesting and certainly the most relevant and newsworthy with a lot of discussions we are having today. but scale back a little and talk about why and the why of, what is united states for at least where most people in the united states relatively blind to this happening?

this is a big part of the reason we do not understand the underlying dynamics of vietnam. there are some people, not majority voice by any means but some people argue the entire thing would end in disaster because we weren't giving proper understanding to these ethnic conflicts. it was also the arab thing in iraq and of course i remember a lot of folks that i served with in iraq were reading this book called the case for democracy. which is very influential in the bush administration. very differential among a lot of american foreign policy and the basic argument was, to bring democracy the people then vote for people that serve the best interest. these ethnic conflicts start to fade away and the good, decent, wise popular starts to take over peer but that obviously wasn't a convincing argument. and i think the reason i'm still curious and why you think americans are relatively blind to this is because if you look

at there are ways your argument is compelling that this has become an american phenomenon in a way that has not been in recent history. why are we so blind to this? why are we so blind to the fact that all over the world, ethnic identity, racial identity, religious identity matters more than national identity as the united states and its people often perceive. why does it matter more than we often give credit? >> three simple reasons that we tend to be very blind to these more primal identities. the first is that democracy really has worked very smoothly in this country for a very specific reason. america for most of the 200 year history was dominated, overwhelmingly, economically, politically and militarily and culturally by a white majority. obviously with white being a

moving target, not all groups were considered white but basically, the white dominated the country. so that, what happens is democracy is very stable from a political point of view. there are plenty of tribes and voices and smaller groups but they are all oppressed. so free-market democracy in a situation where you have one group that is overwhelmingly dominant economically and politically is very stable, so we felt like 11 people so why is it so much tribalism now? there is always been tribalism. there is always been these groups. it is just their voices were suppressed before. and they did not have a voice. point to israel recipient we have a very successful history of assimilation. our blindness is also rooted in some of our deepest best values.the enlightenment. the enlightenment was always

about overcoming these sectarian and religious and terrible ethnic things. the idea is principles, democracy, individualism, rule of law, these things will triumph. and america, the experiment was the great enlightenment experiment here will have markets that are neutral, democracy that is neutral, but i point out in the book is that democracy is not neutral. and markets are not ethnic neutral. they disproportionately benefit different groups. the final answer is, hit this term because i now think it is overused and part of the problem. but i think another reason we are blind to these differences is racism. in vietnam i got very kind endorsements from both general mcchrystal and david petraeus. i did not know them before. it is not an inside job. and they agreed with me that

this was, they, the united states did not pay enough attention to the tribal identities to the smallest sectarian identities. and in vietnam for example, it was the asians, the vietnamese, chinese, japanese, korean. just all the same, what is the difference? and general mcmaster did something very successful. he was the first person to really pay attention and he turned it around the time he was there. one thing he specifically said was if you use a derogatory term a racist term to refer to all arabs or all muslims, were basically handing the enemy a victory. i think that is another reason. they all look the same, we have some negative view of all of these brown people are chinese or asian people. >> and the domestic policy

realm. i remember being in new york city the night of the election. i was attending a party held by a number of republican party leaders who expected election not to go very well. around 9:00 we are all sitting around drinking and helping by 11 or 12:00 we have enough that we will not be so sad about the news. and of course there are many trump skeptics in the room. but this is not from the aspect of the lessons of the trump. and i remember getting a call at 930 or 10:00 from abc. they were doing their election covered with george stephanopoulos and they called me and said, we need you to come in. why? they said we need someone to talk about the white working class. because the election is not going the way we expected to go. and i said, interesting. i will come in. so i called a cab and i went to abc studios. i remember arriving there and

there were a couple of things i heard in the aftermath and also the experience i had that night at the election headquarters. the first is that you heard a lot of commentators say in the wake of the 2016 election, the white working class had for the first time in american history voted like an ethnic group. that they were always italian and irish and so on. the first time, you could say that the white working class, meaning white americans without a college degree seemed to be voting in the traditional way that traditional ethnic groups-united states. that is something i heard a fair amount. and it is on the thesis. but the flipside is that the folks who were working abc, just media folks, we were with producers and t.v. personalities and so forth. that could almost let someone

nothing really love had just been killed. and there was this sense of deep abiding grief at the studio that night. and it occurred to me that if the white working class was voting like an ethnic group, then this was, the group of people are spending time with on election night at the abc studios, they were kind of weaving together. they were reacting not just as if they lost an election but something really deep and culturally had happened. that experience is really what makes me so interested in the thesis of your book. i do sometimes wonder that we are behaving out political ideology in the united states, or political grouping in the us are behaving more like ethnicities than they are like traditional american political institutions. how lucky we think about that. >> great. so, first i will say that i was among the few people who were not surprised by the election.

and i can explain some of that later. that is why when i kept hearing westward underground. so here is what i think we are where we are. first, the massive demographic changes that we all know about. immigration and years hug when the flow has been much bigger and composition now before it was from europe not most is latin america, asia and africa. so that whites are for the first time, on the verge of losing their majority status. predictions are by 2044. so back to what i said. for most of american history, the whites were comfortably dominant. and when you're so overwhelmingly dominant you can do terrible things, slavery and oppressed. we can also afford to be more generous. what's happened now is, every

single group in america feels threatened. it is not just blacks and other minorities that feel threatened. whites feel threatened. a study in my book says i think 67 percent of the white working class feels that they are more discriminated against than minorities. it is not just muslims and jews and buddhists who feel threatened. questions now feel threatened. with the #me too movement. it is where every group feels threatened in every group faces tribalism they think that the other tribes claim to be persecuted and discriminated against are ridiculous. so that is common demographic change. the second reason we are really are has to do with why you are the expert on this j.d.. i think when you read a lot of stuff in the paper, it is

wrong. there is all of this white supremacy, white nationalism. it is simply not helpful to call half of the country white supremacist. it is not actually what's happening. what's happening is much more with j.d. referred to which is what i call my book, we almost have two white tribes. it is class, not just money but really educational levels and almost a cultural divide has split america's white majority. and it is interesting that j.d. uses the word ethnic because before my field was ethnicity. i had a footnote describing what ethnicity is. and it is very difficult and they are constructive and other views but the one feature of ethnic divide is if you don't intermarry with each other. that is, your ethnic, is not

perfect but if you can intermarry that goes away and this is something new in america because of this drastic decline in geographical mobility in the country. something else that j.d. is working on. i used to be that people from the midwest would to education whatever. you go to silicon valley and need to check out california or any of the cost and time back. now, it is so expensive. just to live on the poster silicon valley, new york, also education has no longer, it is no longer the writer was towards upward mobility. we, there is much less fluidity. the cultural elites, things are

not postal and they are also not all -- in the sense that they're not all wealthy. the term refers to professors and journalists and activists and coastal are not also all-white. they are often i think it is better to describe them as multicultural. pretty much everyone in this room. [laughter] people like me, we are -- by the republican or democrat, you are tolerant and you know lots of minorities and religious freedom and you have trouble and people around the world that you have seen. you probably think yourself is not tribal. because you believe in individual rights, human rights and cosmopolitanism. this group tends to be very tribal. i'm going back to the ethnic thing. there is so little intermarriage between this kind of multicultural postal, white

by mixing with, like my own family. my husband is jewish, that -- is like the ethnic divide between the two white tribes. it is much darker than with other ethnic groups. we should go to audience questions for a few minutes. i'll ask this question while amy answers. if you have a question for either of us about any topic, go to the microphone and will answer best we can. i wanted to throw a couple of provocative ideas out there. the first is from a friend of mine who you know recently -- the executive editor of national review. he is a son of immigrants and in some ways that they because of his experiences with his family, it is a deeply patriotic and ideological person. he sees america as a great melting pot.

he wrote a column that a good amount of attention. not as much of that there deserved to. it was something along the lines of white supremacist -- his point was that if you want to have an ethnically segregated society, we should support very high level immigration because that tends to lend itself to ethnic clustering. and so if you are white supremacist but you should want is a large immigrant population because it reduces the intermarriage rate between them. and to your point his argument was that what you want in the united states is a happy medium immigration rate. we have enough folks are able to come in and contribute to the economy and so forth but not so much that it leads to fostering. i think it is something at least relevant to the current immigration debate and conversation. and the second point i will out there. i would love to get your

response. a lot of folks who were very upset about the election of donald trump, there were two separate strands of thought that i heard. neither of which coexist with each other super well. one was that this is not what america stands for. donald trump is this or that. and the point they were trying to make is that america is the shining city and holds us up to 100 standard. that is what we call a liberal critique of the trump election in the wake of the 2016 election. in other critique i have heard what i might call the left as opposed to the liberal side of american politics is that this is precisely what the united states of america is. donald trump is worse than anybody says he is. he is just as bad as his harshest critics say and he is indeed in that terribleness, the embodiment of what america really is.

and i think that second argument is not just misguided, think it actually may lead the type of ethnic tension they talk about your book because if we do not have common idea of an american nation, we cannot at least appeal to the same shared value, if america is instead of a shining city up on the hill, just a turtle country that elects terrible people than what argument or look common idea, what common sense of purpose can be a kelsey will be arguing for political change but you like donald trump or not. and i do not know the answer to that. and i wonder whether you think that when i'm on the left side of the political debate is missing something about the way that human tribes perceive themselves when they make their argument. >> so -- first of all, it is

interesting. just the emails i am getting. in responses to books tend to be in the political tribalism. people quickly assess at the antitrust or -- you will see in the book that i am just diagnosing the problem. i did not pull any punches from either side. i'm answering this. i really think that how we got here, i do think there's any side blameless. i think both political sides have been complacent and playing with fire. i do think that it is very interesting. you know, the -- again, going back to my point that 11 elites do not understand supposedly the people trying to help, the poor people are low income people want and think. on college campuses, it is something goes very important to expose the american dream as

a sham. to show, and i understand where this comes from and i'm completely sympathetic and part of this, to show that we have always said this but in fact, so many people never had access. so many people were not a part of it. and a lot of people do not have a chance to climb, all of this is true and i should not say true but there's truth in the statements. for a lot of working class, struggling americans. not just working-class whites. they love the american dream where they do not -- they do not hate capitalism. most of the people i really like socialism are attracted to it or want redistribution tend to be pretty privileged. for more privileged. so just to finish this out and bring it full circle. i think what's happened over

and over in countries like venezuela and iraq, i have seen a small minority that is viewed as that smug minority like the sunnis, the 50 percent controlling powers from afar. we certainly have democracy and you also get this demagogic leader that says, you know what? those are not real americans in control of everything. let's take back our country. let's take back our country for the real americans. and that is the parallel. if you look at what donald trump did, make america great again. he said let's take back our country. and there is this battle right now who are the real americans? and the focus on both sides. because from the point of view of there is a lot of racism that is in there. the idea, why are these coastal elite not real americans? because they love minorities, the love immigrants, the africa

comedy it's like they are not real americans. let's take back the heartland. within the people on the coast are equally to blame. they often say, i agree with you that we can't be at this point where people who voted on the other side are not just people that we disagree with. but there actually, we use them as a -- not real americans and we really are -- i will stop there so we can take questions. >> we will start with you sir, on the left. ...

i think was a tiger mom in sense she demanded a certain. a assumed i was probably stronger and not weaker. one of the great hallmarks of battling a tiger mother, they assume that childrenning are stronger and not these weak things that need to be coddled, and at the end of the day she was colorful and very demanding, but she loved me and she look out for me and i think those are certainly -- when i read tiger mom i saw parts of my grandmother's story in the book.

the question of intersectionallity. >> so, i teach at yale law school and intersectionallity is a term of write about in the book and explain. it's one of the most important concepts in academia, coming from the left, and i actually think that it's brilliant and important point. i know the person who coined the term. and it simply refers to the fact that people can be outsiders or -- minorities or oppressed in different ways am woman, an hispanic woman, a disexpertens than make a -- a disexperience than a cause indication woman, gay asian man has a different experience, what happened -- i try to explain that's -- is that it's been used and exploited and spun attaint the public sphere, like everything else on social media and cable news, to mean

something it was never intended. now it means like exponential identity politics. it's two big questions but i will say the core insight is incredibly valuable, but like everything else, i mean, this the problem with tribalism. thing start off instant become instant symbols, tribal symbol, all lives matter. what could be wrong with that. that now stands as something. so almost impossible to have a discussion because you signal which tribe you're in by how you respond to something. >> a question for amy. ow route about countries that have gone through civil wars and when looking at rising tribal jim you talked about groups that feel insecure, the cleavages.

are you worried we could be moving to a civil war, not in offend or ten years. >> i am an optimist. i'm a chronic optimist. and part of this is because i really thing that both side have been behaving foolishly and irresponsibly. you can define how horrible things feel, i think you could use this as a wakeup call. bus here's my more bigger answer. a big concept in my book is that alone among the major powerses, america is what i call super group, and super group is a group, or country, with two characteristics. one is we have a very -- has to have a very strong overarching national identity. america. and the second characteristic of a super group is it has to allow individuals subgroup identities to flourish. this is a country where you could be irish-american,

libyan-american, japanese-american and intensely patriotic at the same time, and believe it or not this is extremely rare. so you take china. china has, one, the super strong overarching identity. all the individual group identities are squashed, even france is not a super group as i explained. it's got this very strong french overarching identity because of the popular -- you can't wear head scarves, even presidents said you have to eat, talk, and behave like a french person so they're not a supergroup either. think we have something that is baked into our system, that is baked in our constitution. we have an ethnically and religiously neutral constitution. it doesn't mean we lived up to

the constitutional ideals but, way haven't. but our identity is -- we have it. we have the formula and right now what i see is those two prongs, both coming under threat. jd referred to the -- the attack on the overarching identity. i happen to agree with jd, i get in trouble for saying this because i teach on a college campus. think there's a huge difference between saying, we have these great ideals but in the united states we have repeatedly failed to live up to them. we have shamefully betrayed our own ideals and must do better. that's what i believe. i think there's a huge difference between saying that and that this is a country built on hypocrisy, cat we have no real values, we're a land of oppression and it's such a fine difference because i think we have oppressed people. we have committed genocide but

it's that identity that i think -- as i say, if really america is nothing but a land of genocide, and white supremacist, why is is worth fighting for? it's not worth fighting for if that's all it is. i think we have it in our dna, and hopefully 2018, 2020 -- i myself see positive signses among the new politicians, but -- >> read both books, a critique of elites' understand offering american politics. one particular elite, political scientists, who are paid professionally, there's some 10,000, to understand the phenomena you're describing and also an implicit critique of those professionals, and the question, i if they got it so wrong the trump election, political scientist are just as

bad as the average cocktail party. how did that happen? the legal field and political science, i think yale's political science department was not much better, so one of the great political science departments and the average cocktail party, understanding of what was going on. how did it happen that those professionals, paid to understand what you have describe, seem to get it so wrong? >> i think it's because of tribalism. so, a lot of these political science and economic models are based on the people will act in rationally. to promote their rational self-interests. bill the way, there are a lot of great political scientists are questioning this, cognitive dissidence, motivated reasoning '. the latest studies show that people don't really necessarily vote for their self-interests or policy but they vote much more out of loyalty to their affinity

group or tribe. this partly explains donald trump. i mean, every day something more horrible happens. a new scandal, a porn star, every day all of us think, this is it. now this is it. and crazy things come out of his mouth and what happens is his -- while we say, my god, sounds racist or sexist, he has done a better job presenting himself as a member of a cultural tribe that many members of america relate. to when they see him getting in trouble for saying this and that, they just relate to it. they're always getting in trouble. people call them out for saying this and they like it he picks himself back up and like the world wide wrestling ring, they're a champion for that and especially for i think lower -- i have some stats but for poorer people, more from communities like where jd is from. their experience is such distrust of the establish.

it's like they have seen for generation, who carolina if a democrat or republican come in they're all elites, come in go out, nothing ever changes for us. if the policies -- you haven't seen them translating translatiy bent for you -- benefit for you, stick with your tribe. that's what political scientists missed, their bottles are built on rational choice that people maximizing welfare as tribalism it's much more primal. >> sky something to defense of the political science profession. i think it's actually as a profession has produced a lot of interesting stuff about what happened in the 2016 election. a very useful glitch if you're goal is to under the various data sets and how they explain the population. i don't think it's especially useful for prediction. not the goal of political science is to predict how elections will unfold, and that

way they failed. i wouldn't say is a so much a failure as a mischaracterization of their underlying purpose. why have elites missed the tea leaves and the 2016 election? well, a lot of what amy said i would agree with, but at a fundamental level, i think that it's hard for people to appreciate just how abysmal the alternative that people feel they health if you're a guy wrote grew up in my home town and seep globalization -- the best estimate suggests thin thencearm 90s the united states has lost 7 million working class judges. the white adjust mortality rate has been falling, and the opioid

addiction has affected mormons. and the sense that folks have back home that whatever is different is at least worth trying and the folks in power for a long time have really, really screwed up. i think if you're living in washington, dc, where the median income has exploded in the past 25 years, where the opioid epidemic is something you read in the papers and not something your neighbors experience every single day, it's hard to emergency why some people are so pessimistic about their political future. think people miss the folks boating paterns, and just to close that out, the academic political science lilt tour has produced a love -- literature has produced a lot of interesting thinking about why donald trump was elect. you read the pages of vox, you would be led to think that trump's voters were primarily racists or stupid or maybe some combination of the two, and there are a lot of academy

economic political scientists who have complicated that narrative. it's not so much the problem, i think news our varejao ways are miss -- air sayre you wases are missing what is going on in the country because we're not spending time with each other and consequently we're ignoring what is going on. of course i think that applies in the other direction i think folks from back home could be -- could certainly have a better sense of what is going on among certain communities that don't necessarily look or act or think like them. so it's not a one-directional problem but it's a problem. >> my question is pertaining to kind of instant communication and social media and maybe the exacerbation, rapid increase in kind of identifying tribes and also kind of giving them an ability to communicate and empower each other. in a way we have never seen

before. talking about it for years. high school reading the article about the elimination of bowling leagues and the problems that happens in neighborhoods since then as an example. but i remember in ostarted with the obama social media craze and how its changed communication and really kind of started to see a divide like we have never seen before. remember we're kind of hitting nome 2012. i'm a republican and a financially full of democrats, i posted something about probe probable at the time. i my mom called and said if you were not my son i would totally defriend your sass and she said that. said, anybody could. you could get someone of your life and never hear from them. what in your experience -- leave you seen a rapid increase or kind of an increase in speed in

this kind of transformation since social media became present. >> i'll answer. neil ferguson has this interesting book that came out called "the square of the tower" and talks about the way that the modern social metwork effect reinforces certain views and shuts office from other views, and i think the effect that you just mentioned, i see something that i don't like, therefore i unfriend that person, consequently i close myself off from views expressed by that person. i think that's a really significant problem and that's a way that our social media reinforces tribalism, but the problem i worry about more is that all of news this roo room, i seem are educated consumers of information and i'm guessing none of us has a really good understanding why facebook and twitter and other social media puts the information before us

that it does. in other words, while i worry about somebody's parents unfriending views -- unfriending people who hold views they don't like. worry more about the fact we don't understand that the basic institutional infrastructure that puts information in front of us we don't understand huh the algorithm goes from a to b to c to d to information in front of my face, and consequently i think we're all living -- i don't want to overstate this -- we're living in remarkably uncharted territory. most of us don't actually have a good appreciation for what we consume the information we do other than a bunch of people in silicon valley programmed to put it in front of us and we are just now dealing with the implications of that. >> we'll take -- i think we'll just keep take -- i agree. >> i have a shorter question and then one more that is in depth. the first one is, there is any way to in a sense reverse this

white national jim or racism or do we just have to wait for certain people to die? and then the second question is, this book was something you began writing years ago, so my question is, how did the rise of trump affect the content of your book and the differences you made to the book and your own personal opinion in tandem with the white nationalism and identity politic that came with the 2016 election. >> his book? >> yours. >> mine came out before the election. >> oh, okay. well, for lack of time, i think part of the problem is -- the reason i wrote the book is because people are so mad and up set and so hurt, it's hard to think clearly. don't think it's accurate to call 60 million people who voted on the other side white

nationalists and they've actually broken this down and their polls -- anyway, i do coin this term, ethnonationallism light. to kind of capture what i think is going on in the united states. i think that this is a land of -- people are proud it's a left-hand side of immigrants. -- land of immigrants so when you hear people hurling -- calling the other side terrible names, it's not helping anybody. but i think there are many, many, many americans, possibly a great majority, who are really terrified about the huge immigration changes and the demographic changes we're seeing. now, among elites and liberals, you can't express that anxiety. you have to be so excited about the browning of america. because that would suggest you're ary racist. but incredible huge demographic change is dislocating. it's human nature.

i am the biggest fan of immigration possible. i'm the daughter of immigrant us. i've written two books how immigration this country dr. life blood. at yale law school i'm involved -- i still think that we -- that americans have to be able to say, i'm worried about immigration and what our country is going to look like and who is going to be in and how do we make the rules and what are the limits, without instantly being labeled oh, xenophobia, race sim, islamophobe. what happens is that just pushes the conversation underground, and that is where extremism festers and what you do see white supremacist -- ugly, ugly stuff and that's a reason i wasn't surprised but the election. i saw what was going underground right at yale law school. during the election it was just -- sort of -- i there was was one acknowledged trump supporter in the entire yale law school and i knew for a fact that there were at least maybe

20 but more importantly, there were people who were against trump deeply, but who had parents, uncles, cousins, people from all parts of america, so when you just label all those people -- i could see that there was a lot -- just -- i think we -- i do think language is very important. think we need to be able to address terrorism. i teach at a law school, if you ever say, i'm worried about terrorism, coming from the middle east, oh, my god. would never say that. because that -- you know, that's islamophobia, that's suggesting that how but white terrorism, las vegas. but the point is that we need to allow people to express this anxiety because they're thinking it. they're thinking it anyway. so that's why i disgust the term ethno-nationalism light in the book. >> the only comment is the wire white nationalism that worries

me is the white nationalism that is expressed by a 22-year-old who came from relatively privileged background, who learned it on the internet and it's become a marcher in a rally at charlottesville or whatever the case may be and you can't just wait for that to die off. it's clearly gotten some foothold among some subset of young people, and not to sound like a sort of nationalist or a cheesy patriot here, but my thinking is that the antidote to that is some idea is recapturing some notion of the american project that a lot of people can share in, and to me, how you beat back the guys who are marching in charlottesville, 22-year-old idiots with nazi flag whose grandfather disease feeted feeted the nazis 40 or 50 years ago is to remind them that we

kicked he those people'lls asses and there's something meaningful about america is which is hard to do if all we're hearing from the other side is northwestern idea is fundamentally corrupt. >> i have a question for both of you. professor which rua, i read battle hymn of the tiger mother when i was 11th and i thought, i of the study the s.a.t.s more. but i remember also that with my parents and teachers were incredibly -- you were attacked for the books, about mormons and jews and i read that book and not what everyone was saying. but my question for you is being attacked like this helped you understand the strains of the liberalism on the left and now on the right as well? and also, how did you predict

the trump victory in. jd, rid your book and seems more look this auto buying agraph and then predicted the water shed momentment did you think you would become the voice of the white working class. >> i don't think i've become the voice of the white working class, but i really -- i wanted to write a book but modifies and also but the broader problem is saw in the community, and so i didn't mean to sort of scale out a little bit and take it slightly deeper and broader look, but i didn't intend for what happened to happen. how could anybody have intended for that to happen? >> very quickly, yeah, that was 2011, battle hymn of the tiger mother controversial complete he changed me and my family.

it was interesting to see tribalism and i learned a lot of things. parenting is tribalment people have different sides. just quickly, i we're just but out of time here. i think the -- how i could see that the trump thing wasn't as clear, is because there were so many people talking to me, maybe this is -- i like to talk to students. just like don't tell anybody but -- it's not that they wanted to but worried about this or that and also, almost all of -- hillary clinton is from yale law school. we love here. she has been back several times weapon had a day of mourning after. it was all the classes were cancelled. people were sobbing. i'm not kidding. everybody was crying we had my classes, students came to my house, practically slept over.

but i -- well, frankly, a lot of people working in the brooklyn office, wonderful people, some are here tonight, are actually from the same demographic. they later -- it was not a really well- -- kind of a coastal elite relatively privileged and hard to get a good information. america is a really big place. >> we just have time for two more questions. sorry to cut things short but i have that -- made me think of a funny store. a guy is 65 from back home who did not support donald trump but when the election results came in, he told me at the stir but a husband daughter who had a lead to-year-old and she said daddy what emi posed to tell his daughter. he said, shouldes three years old and tell her not to chew with her mouth open. your question, and then you

last. >> you briefly a moment ago talk about the need for overarching american identity. i wondered, does that time to another side of your thoughts on tribal glimpse there is a strength to tribalism? can it achieve things? perhaps we haven't heard about tonight. >> didn't hear the first part but i'll just say, again, i had some nice questions earlier that jd -- i get tribalism. i am a very tribal person. but i think that everybody -- that's why some he studies in the book are so interesting. one that i love shows that people will interpret facts and numbers to support their group's views. so you can show the same statistics and facts about, say, gun control, and same picture, same everything to a group of people and half of them will conclude from those same numbers are that's why we need more guns and the other half concludes

that's i would we need fewer. we have to think about that if we want to do something. they study, the smarter you are, the better you are at numbers, the better you are at manipulating the numbers to fit your tribe's world view. so -- again, i think i -- family is tribal. i'm a very tribal person. so i think -- i like to think of america as a tribe of tribes. you can think of -- that's going the super group idea. we should be proud of this big tribe. our identity, what makes us special is we allow individual smaller tribes to flourish. >> thank you. and last question, sir. >> i have a question for amy. i was confused about what you said about the vietnam war. the vietnamese were allied with colony and soviet union and the original impetus for the war to

stop the spread of communism and then to not be embarrasses for losing to the north vietnamese. >> the vietnam war was the north vietnamese were communisted alied with china and south vietnamese that we are were supporting were the capitalist part of it. there are two pieces to this. a lot of our decisions during this years were assuming that vietnam was just a pawn of communist china's, that is, just a puppet, and if you look through some of the later discussions with senator mcnamara, he say this is one of the biggest mistakes. but not seeing how important vietnamese sovereignty was, they would never -- the one country they would never be a pawn for. even if they were temporarily

alied, the opinion it was more about nationalism than this egg know nationalism than the ideology of communism. the second opinion is simply that -- the second point is most of the wealthy people in vietnam were not actually vietnamese. they were this chines chinese group. how do you get people to be exciting for a system that benefits this outsider group. remember the boat people? 1978. vietnamese came over, known as the boat people. 80% of the boat people in 1978 were actually ethnic chinese. not vietnamese. so i'll talk to students now and say -- they'll say aim vietnamese, i say are you ethnic chinese? and they say no, ire vietnamese, i say go ask your grandparents. they'll come back and say, my

grandparents -- there was ethnic cleansing after the vietnam war so anybody who admitted they were actually chinese would be killed or sent to labor camps so -- anyway, i explained the whole thing. i'm sorry, that's just a partial answer. >> sorry, guys. join me in thanking khuy. >> thank you for coming. [applause] >> and thank you all for coming. [applause] >> thank you all for coming tonight. if you're staying for the signing, please stay seated. for those not staying for the signing you can exit through the mainly and the cornily to my right. if you're nothing staying for the signing, exit to the lobby to my right. [inaudible conversations]

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>> up next, south carolina republicans senator tim cot and congressman trey gowdy discussion their friendship and time in congress. they're interviewed by former south carolina senator jim demint. >> thank you for joining usment senator tim scott, congressman trey gowdy, i love your book. i love your book. unified. i love the title. >> thank you. >> the best part is the picture on the cover, you two laughing at each other, tells the whole story. i want to talk about how you met and a little bit of the chaos involved when you got here. first thing i want to talk but it your campaigned. they're both notable in different ways. trey, you decided after never