parallels between yours and theirs. announcer: friday at 9:30 p.m. eastern, advocate for what has been called trickle-down economics, arthur laffer. >> it is really true that there andconsequences to taxation those consequences are the same across the whole spectrum. you cannot tax an economy into prosperity. period. announcer: this week in primetime on c-span. ♪ q&a, amy: this week on chua discusses her book "political tribes: group instinct and the fate of nations."

brian: amy chua, author of "political tribes: group instinct and the fate of nations," what can we learn from your analysis of venezuela and hugo chavez? prof. chua: well, you might think of venezuela as being almost the opposite of the united states, but it's actually pretty striking the parallels between chavez and president donald trump and the rise of both men. so, back in 1998, a little-known man by the name of hugo chavez swept to power in venezuela to the horror of the elites. they were horrified. he was a former ex-con, paratrooper, no political experience, spoke very lackadaisically. said crazy things, for example, that maybe capitalism had killed

the life on mars. and yet, he swept of power and the elites, very much like the elites in this country, were completely stunned, taken aback, unprepared. so, how did that happen? here is the analysis. in venezuela, for hundreds of years, the economy and actually that the politics had been controlled by a very small kind of european-blooded, lighter skinned elite who control the oil wealth, which is vast in venezuela. they also control the media. and below that, most of the majority of the people in venezuela actually didn't look like those people. they were darker skinned, had more indian blood, a lot of african ancestry, because venezuela had slaves. but yet, those people wouldn't -- had no access to the wealth and they were completely shut out of politics. so, for years, this went on. and suddenly, because of democracy, when hugo chavez came in, he sort of played the race card. he actually said -- whereas

being darker skinned and indian-blooded was something bad before. he actually said, "look, i look like you. i'm poor like you. i speak like you. these arrogant, snobby people, they don't care about you," and people voted him in. and that is very similar now. he is not -- he is actually -- our president, donald trump, is not the first of america's -- first world leader to have had a reality tv show. hugo chavez is. and he actually had a reality tv show while he was president. he would go to a building because he was a big socialist. he nationalized everything. and with everybody watching, he would point to a certain building and say, "expropriate it," in spanish, and people loved it. so, flipping to the united states, it's actually quite similar, except for the obvious, which is donald trump's base is exactly the opposite. it's largely white. and donald trump is also not a socialist. he is a billionaire. but you still have the exact

same populace dynamic, that is, you have a group of people that are viewed -- i guess you might call them coastal elites. i mean, they're not all coastal. they live in cities and they're not all wealthy, but they are professors and journalists and bankers and lawyers who control , or seen as controlling the levers of power, washington, silicon valley, hollywood, and they're very multicultural and sort of liberal, usually -- not always, and very politically correct and very cosmopolitan, and you have all these people in the heartland, in the south, in working-class white communities, blue-collar communities who have felt shut out and looked down and excluded, "you're a racist. you're not speaking the right way. you're a sexist." they just have felt powerless. and somehow donald trump was able to tap into those people.

and it wasn't just economics. it was really the way they related to him culturally. he spoke like they do, you know, kind of casually, always getting in trouble, but they didn't mind that. they always got in trouble, gorged themselves on the dongles, worldwide wrestling. so, that's the parallel, a very charismatic demagogic politician who actually targeted the outside, that is that he said, "these people are exploiting you. they're controlling everything. let's take america back for you, the real people who own it," and that's exactly the message that chavez said. brian: let me ask you if there's a parallel here. and in page 135, you say in that chapter on venezuela, "today, venezuela is practically a failed state." prof. chua: yes. so, venezuela is a country that had a market dominant minority. this is again a small minority that controlled vastly disproportionate wealth.

in these countries, democracy can often be very destabilizing because you have this powerful minority that wants to cling to its power and then you have much larger poor, often less educated, frustrated majority. and what i say in the book and explain is in this clash of the poorer numbers and the wealthier minority, the results are often deadly because people will fight, as i say, sometimes to the death of the country. sometimes you'll see lurches towards authoritarianism, and you're seeing a lot of that now. you see typically an erosion of trust in our institutions. i hate to say it, but this is something that we are talking about a lot in the united states, these institutions that used to be so revered are now -- we don't trust them. we don't trust electoral outcomes. and this is critically important. it's what has made us special. unlike developing countries, we always respect our elections as

much as we hate the result. we don't have a coup. we don't overturn it. so, there are some signs now that we need to be careful. we need to get back to who we are. but for the first time in our history, we are starting to have some dynamics that were historically more associated with developing countries. brian: in your book, you talk about vietnam, iraq, and afghanistan. and i want to show you a clip of some video of john foster dulles, who used to be secretary of state in the united states. this goes way back to 1954, and have you comment on this. [begin video clip] john foster dulles: i saw everywhere that there were people who were frightened and worried at the evidence either within their own country or in very close proximity to it, at aggressive chinese communist intentions. it would seem as it was quite possible that the chinese

communists are not content to stop until it is apparent that they are stopped by superior resistance. [end video clip] brian: what's your reaction when you hear that from 1954? prof. chua: well, my reaction is really the thesis of the book, which is that the united states has been -- we tend to think of our foreign policy in terms of great ideological divides, capitalism versus communism, for example, as in the vietnam war. and what we missed is we failed to see the importance of the group identities that actually matter most to people on the ground. so, in vietnam, the united states missed two things, and it's really the ethnic dimension. by now, i think most americans realize that we missed the role of nationalism that in a way with the vietnamese people were fighting for was their freedom, their sovereignty. and you know, communism was in there, but that was just an, almost secondary to how much

they wanted their freedom. but here's something that most americans, even experts still don't know today. there was an ethnic angle. the united states made a terrible mistake assuming that vietnam was just a pond of communist china. they just thought, "you know what? the chinese are going to take over. the vietnamese are right there"" what they didn't realize is that vietnam and china are mortal enemies. china colonized vietnam for a thousand years. every myth of the vietnamese people, every hero, is always fighting the big chinese enemy. and remember, vietnam is tiny. china is huge. it's like a giant 500-pound genie, which is china, sitting on the equivalent of little lamp, which is vietnam. so, the idea that we -- that we missed the history, if we had looked at the history of long-standing suspicion and distrust, we might have realized that vietnam was not the pond of

china. more importantly, we missed an inside element too. inside vietnam, vietnam had what i call a market dominant minority. that is, historically they had a tiny ethnic chinese minority and the chinese are different from the vietnamese. to a lot of us americans, same thing. not the same thing for them. the chinese minority came from when they originally colonized the country, but they were only 1% of the population. think about that, 1% is tiny. and yet, historically, they controlled about 70% to 80% of the private economy, all the commerce, all the financing, all the middlemen networking. and when the french colonizers came in, they made the chinese richer. they dealt with that little chinese minority. so, the point here is that the capitalists in vietnam were not

even the vietnamese people. they were all part of this hated outsider group. it would be like in america if only -- the only rich people belong to -- they were all from another country, pick a country, china, lebanon, and there were no ordinary americans who were rich. that's how they felt. so, here we come in the united states saying, "we're promoting capitalism," and we completely miss the idea that these vietnamese people are seeing that we're promoting policies that only help this chinese minority. when we came in, they serviced our troops. they did all the financing, the black market, the prostitutes. they got richer and richer. the regimes that we put in were viewed as in cahoots with these corrupt chinese businessmen. the chinese were also -- it wasn't just that they were wealthy. they stuck with their own. they were insular. they intermarried with their own. they spoke their own language. and they didn't even fight in the war. they dodged the draft. so, from the point of view of

the vietnamese, america -- we thought we were fighting for freedom. we couldn't understand why the vietnamese wouldn't support us. and that's because we missed the most important group dynamics that were operating. it wasn't about communism versus capitalism. what the vietnamese saw is, "oh, these americans want to help this tiny little group of greedy outsiders. there's nothing in it from us. and they are bombing our houses. everybody we know is dying. our sons and husbands are dying." so, no wonder we didn't get that support. brian: the war was over in 1973. we pulled out in 1975. 20 years later in 1995, here is the former secretary of defense talking about the very thing that you're bringing up. [begin video clip] >> we totally misjudged the threat. we believed that vietnam, as eisenhower said in 1954, was a domino. and if the soviets and the

chinese controlled it, the rest of southeast asia would fall, cambodia, laos, malaysia, thailand, indochina, and maybe india, and the communist strength would be so increased that western europe would be endangered. and that's what we thought. we were totally wrong. [end video clip] brian: how could we have missed this? prof. chua: first of all, i give him so much credit for acknowledging that. and the answer actually lies in both the best of america and the worst of america. part of the reason that we're so blind to these ethnic divides and tribal divides is because we have had such exceptional success in our own country, and it's really true. we are special. the idea is if germans and poles and hungarians and jews and japanese could all become americans within just one or two generations, you know, why can't sunnis and shias and kurds all become iraqis.

and oh, these people in vietnam if we just put in freedom, they'll come together, you know, who cares about this little distinction between the vietnamese and the chinese. that's america at its best, contributing to our inability to see these, you know, kind of smaller, more primal identities. and then on the more negative side, i hate this term because it's overused, but part of it is this legacy of racism. i think for a lot of americans, they couldn't see the difference between the vietnamese and the chinese because they all looked alike. you know, there are some quotes, "no, they are all gooks and slants." and that's just something that we're all getting better at. and you know, i mean, to be fair, there weren't very many asians in this country back then, so they don't know the difference. but part of it is that we just didn't study the history of these countries. we didn't know how deep those divides were. and they just all kind of looked oriental to us. brian: to catch up quickly from

the last interview, i haven't seen you since 2002. your parents were born in china, moved to the philippines, moved to the united states. you were born in champaign, illinois -- prof. chua: yes. brian: -- spent some time in indiana and then went to harvard? prof. chua: yes. i went to harvard. brian: and you got your law degree at harvard. prof. chua: also harvard law school. brian: and how long have you been teaching at yale law school? prof. chua: since 2002, right about the time that my first book, "world on fire," came and when we first met. brian: our world has changed so much since 2002. and here's another example. this is from 2003 and you write about this in your book. it's former president george w. bush. [begin video clip] george w. bush: there was a time when many said that the cultures of japan and germany were incapable of sustaining democratic values. well, they were wrong. some say the same of iraq today. they are mistaken. [end video clip] prof. chua: so, well, he was right about germany and japan, but here's the problem.

they were the wrong models for iraq. germany and japan after the second world war were about as ethnically homogeneous as you could get. i mean, japan has always been homogeneous, almost 97% just ethnic japanese. and germany, because of the holocaust, was also ethnically homogeneous. so, it was a bad comparison. the better comparison actually for iraq sadly is the former yugoslavia. like the former yugoslavia, iraq when we went in was a deeply divided country. there was the schism between the shias and the sunnis, but also the kurds. and all this has been bottled up, kind of held in check by saddam hussein, who just compressed everything. and iraq, like venezuela, like vietnam, also had a market dominant minority, the roughly 15% sunnis.

so, the sunnis are the same group that saddam hussein belonged to. they had controled that country, politically, economically, militarily for hundreds of years, first under the ottomans, then under the british who favored the sunni minority, ruling through them indirectly, and then most egregiously under saddam hussein, who favored the sunnis, and not just that. it wasn't just that they allowed the sunnis to get wealthy -- control the wealth. he persecuted the kurds and the shia majority. so, once again, you have the same dynamic, a long dominant hated minority. in this case, it's the sunnis, a different sect. and then suddenly, we're -- our idea, we come in, the united states, and we think democracy is the panacea. we don't pay any attention to the tribal divisions, the sunnis or shias. we just think if we just have elections, we're going to produce a wonderful free-market democracy. nothing like that happened.

instead, what happened is exactly what you would predict. when you suddenly give majority rule to a country where the majority was so long suppressed, the shias, whom we empowered, immediately used their votes to revenge -- to take revenge on the sunnis, understandably, who had persecuted them for so long. there was suddenly the rising of demagogues, fundamentalist leaders who said we have to kill them, we need to pay back time with the anti-u.s. and in the end, the sunnis all didn't want democracy because they saw their numbers were so small. so they resisted, and they went into al qaeda. they went into what is now isis. they didn't want democracy because they saw it in the cards. and the shias just implemented only pro-shia policies. and so, the result is not as we hoped, that our invasion would produce this beacon of stability in the middle east.

instead, we produced a situation where the country soon dissolved into really the brink of civil war and it was like that for years and years and years. and we then produced isis, which i don't know if americans realize is a sunni movement. it's not just a fundamentalist movement that wants to unite a lot of islamists and fight the united states. they also want to exterminate the shias. brian: before iraq in 2003 march, with the invasion was afghanistan in 2001. and here is zbigniew brzezinski, who was jimmy carter's national security advisor in 1979. [begin video clip] zbigniew brzezinski: we know of their deep belief in god. and we are confident that their struggle will succeed. >> [spoken in foreign language] zbigniew brzezinski: that land over there is yours.

you'll go back to it one day because your fight will prevail and you'll have your homes and your mosques back again, because your cause is right and god is on your side. [end video clip] brian: talking to mujahideen, but right next to him was warren christopher, who went on to be secretary of state. prof. chua: yes. so, once again, we see the same pattern, which is we had the best of intentions. we were -- we thought we were fighting communism. but once again, we fought in terms of these grand principles and we were blind to the actual group dynamics that mattered. we actually armed the taliban. we -- it was our dollars, our guns, our weapons, that gave rise to the taliban. we thought that we were dealing with freedom fighters who were going to help our side. but we didn't realize that we were getting played by pakistan, which is very punjabi dominated, and they wanted to radicalize the pashtuns. the pashtuns are the largest ethnic group in afghanistan.

we missed all of this. we didn't know what pashtuns and punjabis and tajiks were. they were nobody. in the state government, they didn't even speak those languages. we were just thinking about the cold war. and because of this, we allowed pakistan to play us. it gave life to the taliban. but what's interesting is even fast forwarding to today, right after 9/11, we sent troops in and we made the same mistake. now we had a different lens. we weren't thinking about the cold war anymore. now we were thinking about the fight against terrorism, but we switched ideological lenses. we just divided the world into terrorists and democracy lovers, the united states. what we missed is that the taliban is not just a fundamentalist religious fundamentalist religion movement. it is that, but it is also an ethnic movement. to back up, afghanistan is full

of different ethnic groups. the biggest four includes the the biggest four includes the pashtuns and the hazaras. pashtuns were always dominant. some think that afghan and pashtun are dominant. right before this, the pashtuns were fearing that their power was declining a there were under threat from the rival groups. we missed it all. we saw everything against the axis of evil. we did not know about the tajik. when we invaded we allied ourselves with the pashtuns biggest and hated enemies. we were viewed as favoring them. we set up a government and we put them in key positions, not realizing that this was shooting

ourselves in the foot. that we were never going to get a majority of the afghan people on our side if you look like we were favoring the other ethnic groups. we missed that. that is why we are still there. we spent so much, some any lives lost, even now, now there are several books. many books called the pashtun problems, the pashtun dilemma. it is about 15 years too late that we are realizing this. brian: you did something i have never seen before. you told us where the name "pakistan" comes from. "p" for punjab, a for afghan, k for kashmir, s for sindh, and tan for blachistan. amy: yes, pakistan is made of all these different tribes. each letter represents the tribes in the p stands for the

most powerful militarily, the punjabis. it is the a that stands for the pashtun's. in the name, we should've studied these the ethnic identities that matter so much to people in that region. brian: venezuela, vietnam, iraq, afghanistan is just a part of your book. there is a lot more about the united states. about a year ago, jd vance, he had a very successful book, "hillbilly elegy," he was here. let's listen to what he had to say. [begin video clip] >> what happened was i had a professor named amy chua and she said, "this is a really interesting story, you're making interesting arguments, you should consider publishing a book." i said, whatever -- i will think about it. a few months later, i was still

in law school, she connected me with friends of hers in the publishing industry and one thing led to another. i had a book deal. [end video clip] brian: why did you recognize his story as being significant? amy: i am so proud of him. it looks like we have nothing in common superficially. i'm a chinese immigrant, my parents were graduate students, he is from a poor family, his mother was an addict but we have a lot in common. we are both from the midwest, we were sort of outsiders. i grew up, not poor, but we only went to a restaurant once a year. my dad wore the same. shoes for eight years. they were thrifty immigrants without much. jd and i were always outsiders, never part of the elite. we talk about that you'd all you can buffets. that i recognized something in him.

something honest and pure. i guess people call them hillbillies or white trash and he understood that community. that is a community that has made a huge impact in the 2016 election. brian: how have i gotten to know it? amy: living here, loving the country. brian: have you traveled a lot, reading? amy: i grew up seven years in the midwest, then my father moved us to berkeley. i spent seven years in high school there, so it felt like a different planet. indiana and california. then i moved to the east coast where i went to school. even somebody like me, i still don't know all of america. i do not claim to be an expert on parts of appalachia.

i learned that from reading jds book and talking to him when he was my student. i said, i had no idea there was this much poverty and frustration and exclusion. that was another reason i felt he had to write the book. we tend to think of minorities being disadvantage, but there are fewer poor working-class whites law school. brian: there is 75 million people in the united states of all nascar. what does that mean? amy: it means that america is very divided. there is mutual arrogance on both sides. we really need to remember what makes us americans. right now there is a big divide. it is not just black and white. it really is not. people focus on this, but america's white majority is now divided. loosely speaking, there are what you might call coastal elites.

i mean, they are not all coastal. they also live in the cities and they are not all wealthy, but they tend to be very multicultural and progressive. they have traveled around the world, may be more than they have traveled in the united states. they tend to not really know the people in the middle of the country. they tend to have an arrogant attitude about nascar, you know -- these flag-waving bumpkins. they tend to use harshly which is about knowing people. they are all races and sexist because they do not talk in a

politically correct way. if you are in college you know how to speak. vocabulary is changing all the time. how can ordinary americans possibly know what the right word is to use. but if you say that wrong thing you are xenophobic, racists, and anti-islamic. we have to elevate ourselves. a lot of people in the middle of the country think of these coastal whites as being so pro-minority. why do they like immigrants a much? why are they always trying to help the poor in south africa? you see dialogue like they don't love real americans, they just want to help foreigners. that is bad too. who are real americans? we are all real americans. this is what is special about america. we are what i call a supergroup. we are alone among the major powers. the united kingdom is not. france is not. china is not. let me define.

a supergroup is a country that has two characteristics. the first is a very strong overarching national identity. we are americans, it is very strong. the second requirement for a supergroup is it has to be a country where individual subgroup identities are allowed to flourish. you can be irish-american, libyan american, croatian american, japanese-american. i'm chinese-american, yet intensely patriotic at the same time. that is so rare. you mentioned china. china has one but not the other.

it has a very strong overarching chinese identity but does not let its individual minorities flourish. the tibet ends, their cultures are suppressed. you cannot speak these languages. very strong identity, but they are having problems with the muslim community because there was the burkini ban. one leader said you speak, eat and talk like a french are you cannot live in this country. we are special and i think we need to get back to that without saying, that half of the country who voted for the other side, they are not the real americans. we have to realize that our national identity is built-in to our constitution. we have a special constitution where our national identity is not defined by any ethnic subgroup. it does not belong to the irish-americans are the german-americans. it is ethnically and religiously neutral. we need to get back to that. host: i want to show video of a young woman who is in her mid-20's at most, her name is tammy lorna and i wanted to ask

you why you cited this in your book. this has been seen by 66 million people at a minimum. >> i support the first amendment and your right to freedom of speech. go for it. it is this country, the country that you have so much disdain for that allows you to speak your mind and protects your right to be an attention seeking crybaby. it protects my right to shred you for it. the national anthem and our flag or not symbols of black america, white america, brown america or purple america. there are patriots of every race who fought and died for this country and we honor the flag as a reminder. prof. chua: she is very charismatic. there are parts of what she said that i think are right. we are an ethnically neutral country. that is the best about america. the think about that clip that is dangerous is without her realizing it, she is sort of doing an us versus them. she is tapping into these fears that a lot of people have in parts of the country where they are used to america being a country that, for 200 years, was

economically, politically and culturally dominated by european whites. that is a fact. right now with the browning of america, where whites are on the verge of losing their majority status, by 2044, whites may load -- may no longer be a majority. that is an anxiety producing status. we should acknowledgment without calling people racist. we should be able to talk about the economic anxiety. somebody like tommy lauren is tapping into that anxiety. while she is right that america should be colorblind, she is getting people upset in the other direction. against the minorities, and against the people who will not stand. in general, my book calls for overcoming political tribalism. we need to be able to talk to each other as americans again and not just say, you are the evil ones. he used to be the people on the

either side of the lyrical divides were people that we disagreed with. now, it is like the people who voted for the other candidate are immoral, our enemies, not even real americans anymore. this, because i studied democracies around the world in places like libya. what is the difference between libya and the united states? libya is a multiethnic country. it is a failed state. it has disintegrated because it does not have that overarching sean libyan identity. strong enough to hold the country together. we do. this is what makes us special our national identity is different. we all need to try to live up to the ideals and our constitution. the people who are anxious about minorities with colors in

america, let's talk about it. you are allowed to be anxious. every generation has seen a new round of immigrants. we are always suspicious. don't let them come in. italian, those are going to be criminals. the japanese-americans, no. each time we have overcome that initial fear in xenophobia. each time we have become our better selves and we can't be the missing link, the weak link. host: two charts i want to put on the screen. the first one was from 1960 and it shows u.s. foreign-born residents. at one point 2,000,900 told his germans, 953,000 canadians, it 830 3000 people from the u.k.

u.k.3,000 people from the and poland, 738,000. look at that for a minute and see how this changes as you put up in your book, a check of the year 2000, just 40 years later. mexicans, 7.8 million, chinese 1.3, philippines 1.2, india 1 million and cuba almost one million. why did you put that in the book? prof. chua: because it is true. i feel like our politics in this country are so divided that you just have people talking to themselves. it is like some people are wildly pro-immigration and they bash the other side. the other side is very fearful of immigration and they bash the other side. it is true that the composition of our immigrants have changed. it used to be mostly from europe, now they are principally from latin america, asia and other parts of the developing world. there is a change, the browning of america.

the numbers are much, much bigger. 7 million compared to 100,000. this is something we need to talk about. right now we are not getting anywhere. what has taken over our politics is preventing us from having conversations that we need to have about immigration. we cannot just have no rule for immigration. i am the child of immigrants and i have written books about how important immigration is for the country. we need limits, rules, a debate about who can come in, what are the qualifications, every country should have that. on the tribalism that has paralyzed our country is making it impossible for us to talk to each other. people should be able to say, i am anxious. are these numbers right? is this the way it should be? without instantly being called some terrible name.

on the other side, people should not just immediately look at the skin color of who is coming in and say, we have to block them. we have to look at these people as human beings and open your hearts. we need to get back to where we have been at our best. host: here are two human beings that you know well. this is a photograph you have seen, i'm sure many times from 2011. these are your daughters sofia and lulu. when you were here before they were 10 and six. how old are they now? prof. chua: they are 25 and 22 now. i am incredibly proud of them. they survived all my shenanigans. i am proud that they are thoughtful people. always trying to bridge differences. host: where are they now? prof. chua: my oldest daughter graduated from harvard and is in her last year at yale. she did rotc.

next year she will devote three years to the u.s. military. the army. i am very proud of her. my younger daughter is a senior at harvard and she is my free spirit. she is very smart. who knows what she will do. she is doing incredibly well. she is a social leader. host: how did they survive your tiger mom book? prof. chua: i honestly did not know how that was going to go. suddenly they are teenagers and they are in the media and i could not be more proud of them. this is the strength of family. not just my children, but my own parents who are 82 and still going strong. they supported me, they knew i was being misunderstood, and

they knew that i was just championing american parenting values. there is all the stuff about sleepovers and we could have differences, but it is about high expectations. let's believe in our children, let's hold them up to a high standard. not just academically but morally. my children survived, and amazingly. they also had a bunch of interviews and i did not know what they would say. if you find the clips, they were very generous to me. host: why did they misunderstand you? prof. chua: a lot of people feel comfortable talking about books without having read them. the book is not a how-to guide, it is really about the change in my own mentality. i started off as a very strict parent with both kids and i am still very proud of that. why younger daughter was very different. -- my younger daughter was very different. at 13 she rebelled. i don't want to play the violin, i don't like this math stuff.

one of the big lessons of the book is you have to pay attention to the individual personalities of your child. there are different. american individualism. i had to learn it the hard way. youngerame time, my sister got leukemia and had to have a bone transplant. it is a much more thoughtful book about what is important in life? how can we raise our children to be excellent students but also citizens and caring people who have the right values and know what matters? my sister made it through but it is the combination of her horrible illness and trauma in my family watching that. she had very young kids at this time. my younger daughter rebelling made me re-think what was important in life. host: one of your daughters, i read this in an article that she wrote, said that she really feared your husband more than she feared you and she did not want to disappoint him.

what was that all about? prof. chua: if you read the book, a lot of people do not get the tone. it is supposed to be tongue and cheek. i love books with unreliable narrators. where the narrator is a bit of a character. once you see that you realize the book is a little goofy. it is almost like a circus. there were times where i was immature as a mother. i describe myself as huffing and puffing with steam coming out of my ears and my younger daughter describes me as lord voldermore from harry potter. my husband was always big on serving your country and high moral standards and giving back to the community. i think he was a little bit more judgmental and revered that way. -- and severe that way. the wonderful results are probably why my younger daughter decided to serve in the

military. host: how much of your own politics do you reveal? prof. chua: i am happy to reveal them. i am an independent. i do not fit in anywhere because i think america's political parties, as i tried to describe in this book, are all wacko. they don't make sense anyway. you have the republican party with evangelicals and poor working people with the neocon people who want to invade iraq. it is almost arbitrary. for me, i just want to choose the leaders who speak to me. who seem like jd vance, honest and maybe do not care what other people are saying. as an immigrants daughter i will always be somebody who doesn't like victim blaming. that is just the way my parents

raised me. take responsibility. don't blame others, always start with yourself. as an immigrant's daughter i will always believe that it is part of the blood of this country. the people who came over in waves. i tend to always not like people who scapegoat and target each other. often these are opportunistic politicians who are trying to get votes for themselves. i actually do not think that most americans -- this is what i say in the last chapter -- i don't think most americans like all of the shrill name-calling that we see on cable news, social media, followed the targeting. i think people are weary of it and really wanted change. i think there will be a change. host: there is a new start rehab -- there is a news story we had from kauv in austin in 2017. let's watch this and you can fill in the blanks. >> despite many churches stance

against it, this is the fastest growing religion in the world. a pastor with the christian church calls it witchcraft. >> it is exactly what the bible calls it as witchcraft. it is against god's words. >> the followers say that anything they ask for, she provides. >> she has become an icon for drug traffickers. they believe she has a tolerance for dark deeds, a prayer keeps them protected, allowing them to be more bold. prof. chua: this is one of the most interesting parts of my book. i spend a chapter showing that a lot of america's elites miss the group identities that matter most to people. so many people in america, especially lower income struggling americans want hope. a lot of progressives on college campuses are trying to do the right thing but they are trying to expose the american dream as a sham. we have had a slowing and upward mobility.

we do need to make the american dream real for more people. they often trash it and say it is all hypocrisy, our values are all hypocrisy. that shows that many, many poor mexican americans who do not have jobs, they are not relating to all of the stuff they hear in washington. it just seems like a bunch of elites, god knows what they are doing in washington. they find their own groups that speak to them. this is very sad. this is the goddess of death offering them hope, but they pray. host: 10 million people follow them? prof. chua: yes, a huge number of americans. they are praying for prosperity and health. the prosperity gospel in the united states, another huge movement that i discuss, most of the elites in new york and d.c. never heard of these groups. they are more interested in the activist groups, but they do not

realize that even though these activist groups like occupy a coming from a place where they want to help people but do not include poor people. this is partly why i wrote the book. there is a huge gap between the haves and have-nots, or just middle america. people on the coast kind of like doing their own they and live in their own world but they do not know about the lives and what is meaningful to so many people. whether it is poor latino americans, people in appalachia or starving americans anywhere. host: for those who have never seen this, this is a little clip of you and your husband back in 2014 where you wrote a book together. >> one of the most striking findings became upon in our research was that asian americans who are doing so well academically today,

asian-american students who get sat scores 140 points higher than the rest of the country, not a stereo type a fact, the researchers have found that third-generation asian-americans had no difference in their academic performance between them and the rest of the country. host: can you give us more on that? prof. chua: i don't know why this is so controversial. there is so much political correctness that if you say if these people change their behavior or learn to study this way, or learn from other groups that are actually rising. we hear about the death of upward mobility all the time. it is true. parts of the economy are completely stagnant. if you break down the statistics, there are still many poor groups, often immigrants from nigeria, poland, that still go from nothing, rags to riches. we need to restore upward mobility in this country.

this is one of the ways that we can connect the heartland back to the coast. right now it is what i describe in political tribalism. we have americans that do not speak to each other. we can learn from the groups who have a lot of input, very good work habits, a lot of self discipline and learn why some groups are rising when others are not. convey that information, teach our schools how to do it. i am also favoring in the book ways of having more geographical mobility. it used to be that people from the midwest, where you and i are from, would move to a coast. study there, come back and be very fluid. now the coast is so expensive. silicon valley is impossible, nobody can live there. new york city you have to be a multimillionaire.

education has gotten so expensive that it is no longer that channel of mobility that it was for so many years in this country. that is what i discussed near the end of the book. the solutions, what we need to do to get back to be america. it is not scapegoating minorities. not demonizing the people in the other half of the political spectrum. it is really not. we only do that because it is easiest to do that. it feels good to have an enemy. i show all the studies in the book that humans are tribal. we feel pleasure when we target the enemy and see them suffering. we actually feel good. we have to overcome this. studies show that if we make an effort, it is not our default mode. our default mode is tribalism. if we make an effort we can overcome these instincts and come together. that was always what the

american experiment was. it was to be something bigger than our small individual tribes. host: if i had been in your classroom back in 2001 or 2002 at yale up to today, what would i notice about the students? prof. chua: i would say it has gotten much, much more diverse ethnically and religiously. i don't even know if it is the national average. there are still a lot of under representations of latino americans. there are so many asian-americans. when i was in law school i was the only asian-american, maybe there was one person out of a class of 200 people. now we have many asian-americans. what we are struggling with right now is trying to get more economic diversity. we do not have that many people from working-class families.

that is part of the problem. there are groups that are excluded from this higher education. jd vance writes that he was an extreme exception. nobody else in his community made it out of poor kentucky, ohio. host: what kind of student was he? prof. chua: excellent. not only incredibly bright but curious, open-minded, willing to argue but in a nice way. he would always reach out to the people of the opposite of the political spectrum. he is an open republican, one of the few at yale and everybody loved him because he was willing to talk to people. host: what do your students think of our president? prof. chua: yale law school is not a fan. that is where hillary clinton went to school.

like most ivy league schools yale law school is extremely , progressive and we have many clinics that are bringing lawsuits, many of them incredibly important standing up for the rule of law. people can disagree about the merits, but we always want to make sure that the rule of the is in place. i think they have done a magnificent job. the judiciary is such an important institution here. as long as we still have our separation of powers and three branches of government, you might disagree with one branch are at this branch of a certain time, but this is part of the magic of the american constitution. host: let me go over statistics. we will get what you think of this. you say in the book there are 566 federally recognized native american tribes in the united states. you say that from 1999 until

2008, 13 of the 780 members who had been elected into congress only spent more than a quarter of their lives in blue-collar jobs. you say in 50 years, 59 million immigrants have arrived here in the united states. you say there are 65 mega churches and there are 27,000 street gangs. that is a lot of statistics, but why did you include those in and what is the picture you are painting? prof. chua: america is changing. we have another important divide. it does not mean that we cannot overcome them. we have the ethnic change. the demographic change that is very seismic and we need to address it. we have many more immigrants that we ever have coming from different parts of the world. we have tremendous inequality, which we have always had in this country, but the magic to that was we had upper mobility. americans have never really

minded wealthy people or capitalism, a my countries of europe who have had strong socialist parties. people always felt that if they justd hard and saved and got a little bit lucky, they could rise. we need to get back to that. if we don't, we see people moving into these movements. mega churches where they are praying for money. that is the principal, if you pray hard enough god will give you money. there is nothing wrong with that, but we also don't want it to be a situation where people feel so hopeless with the system. so unable to get education that they feel the only thing they can do is pray for money. that is not what america was about. america was always about the work ethic, self responsibility and the combination of that. i think that the big shirt is a -- i think that the big picture

is a lot of the so-called elite are not letting them off the hook either. they have not only overlooked a lot of the important americans outside of america, they have also been high-minded and smug about all of the less wealthy and less privileged people in this country, making assumptions and not really understanding them. and not seeing what matters to them, which is why you saw the 2016 election. that election swept to power a president that took everybody back. all the news media, nobody called it. by the way, i was one of the few people not surprised by that election. you just have to talk to people and you could see what is going on. host: one last question. if you had not become a law professor, what would you have done?

prof. chua: oh my gosh. i am so interested in -- when i was younger i would say i am going to be a diplomat or an ambassador. i am interested in tribalism but i tend to be an optimist. i like bridging people. maybe i would've been an ambassador or diplomat bridging differences across countries. either that or -- host: the name i don't know. of the book is "political tribes" and our guest has been amy chua. thank you. prof. chua: thank you for having me. ♪

>> for free transcripts or to give us your comments about the program, visit us at q&a.org. q&a programs are available at c-span podcast. expelled 60 trump russian intelligence officers today and closed the russian consulate in seattle as the u.s. and its allies work together to punish moscow for the nerve agent attack on a former double agent in england. here is the announcement that 14 european union member countries would join the u.s. and other nations.