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This podcast is supported by FX's English Teacher, a new comedy from executive producers of What We Do in the Shadows and Baskets. English Teacher follows Evan, a teacher in Austin, Texas, who learns if it's really possible to be your full self at your job, while often finding himself at the intersection of the personal, professional, and political aspects of working at a high school. FX's English Teacher premieres September 2nd on FX. Stream on Hulu.
I'm Barry Weiss, and this is Honestly. Sometimes I wonder if there's any institution in America that's more broken than higher education is. Universities have abandoned core liberal principles like free speech and due process and open inquiry with the liberal demands for censorship and safetyism.
Perhaps the most striking feature of all of it has been the silence and the acquiescence of so many tenured professors in the face of this hostile ideological takeover. Amy Chua is not one of them. Amy has been an extraordinarily popular professor at Yale Law for more than 20 years, but it hasn't always been a smooth ride.
One of the most controversial figures of 2011 was not a politician or a celebrity, but a mom. Amy Chua ignited a firestorm by sharing... From the cover of Time magazine to the bestseller list, Amy Chua's book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, about strict Asian parenting has exploded. She first rose to national prominence and national controversy in 2011 when she published a massively successful book called Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother.
a memoir that compared permissive, soft Western parenting with her tiger mom style, strict,
relentless and demanding. Amy Chua doesn't believe in play dates, sleepovers. She even threatened to burn her daughter's stuffed animals if she didn't play the piano perfectly. Why Chinese mothers are superior, that's what the Wall Street Journal put over excerpts from the memoir of Amy Chua, who calls herself a tiger mother because of her strict parenting methods. It was a type of parenting rooted in the way she was raised, as the daughter of Chinese immigrant parents.
Ms. Chua points out where Western mothers have it all wrong, writing, "If a child comes home with an A-minus on a test, a Western parent will most likely praise the child. The Chinese mother will gasp in horror and ask what went wrong. If a Chinese child gets a B, which would never happen, there would first be a screaming, hair-tearing explosion. And if they get an F, they become part of the bodies exhibit." Now, that's where they get the bodies.
It was impossible to read that book without coming to two conclusions. One, this woman is extremely intense. And two, this woman is unafraid of what other people think of her. You've been pounded with criticism in the one year since this book was released. Some people might say you actually berated your children into excelling. If you had to do it over again, would you write this same book?
I think I would. You know, I'm—the book is a memoir, and— And Amy's been showing up that way ever since. She wrote a book about why certain cultural groups succeed and others fail, and was criticized for so-called "cultural racism." She refused to recant an op-ed she wrote supporting Brett Kavanaugh and was called a misogynist.
She had two students over at her house during the pandemic and was accused of hosting drunken super-spreader parties. None of that was true. Anyway, the list goes on and on. Amy says that at this point, some 80% of her colleagues won't talk to her anymore. And still, she refuses to shut up.
Today I talk to Amy about the issues that have gotten her in trouble over the years and why she won't succumb to the mob. We talk about how her more recent work predicted the rise of Donald Trump and how political tribalism is tearing at the fabric of society, including at the institution where she has devoted and continues to devote so much time and energy.
The eternal optimist, the mother who denied her daughter's sleepovers, and as New York Magazine called her, a Yale Law pariah. Here's Professor Amy Chua. Hey guys, Josh Hammer here, the host of America on Trial with Josh Hammer, a podcast for the First Podcast Network. Look, there are a lot of shows out there that are explaining the political news cycle, what's happening on the Hill, the this, the that.
There are no other shows that are cutting straight to the point when it comes to the unprecedented lawfare debilitating and affecting the 2024 presidential election. We do all of that every single day right here on America on Trial with Josh Hammer. Subscribe and download your episodes wherever you get your podcasts. It's America on Trial with Josh Hammer. Amy Chua, thanks so much for talking to me today. Oh, thanks so much for having me. So, Amy, let's start with the battle hymn of the Tiger Mother.
The book was a massive bestseller that made you a household name. But it was also a catalyst for all kinds of debates, some of them that were a little nasty. There were people who said you were essentially celebrating parenting that was borderline child abuse. Others said you were perpetuating Asian American stereotypes. And I think some misunderstood the book as some kind of how-to-parent guide, which is ridiculous because there are scenes in the book of you threatening to burn your daughter's stuffed animals. Yeah.
I think one of the reasons they believe that is because of this crazy viral Wall Street Journal article. So for those who haven't read your book, what were you trying to do with it and why do you think it was so controversial? Great. So the opening, like literally the first page, it was supposed to be kind of tongue in cheek. And I think once people know me, they realize it is. But it opened basically with,
here are some things that my kids were never allowed to do. And it was like, attend a sleepover, have play dates, get any grade less than an A, play any instrument other than the piano or the violin. So it was kind of like making fun of the way that a lot of immigrant parents, and specifically Asian immigrant parents, raise their kids. And I got to tell you,
In addition to the hate, I got so many emails like, oh my God, you're describing my life. This is so funny, you know. And believe it or not, also from like Nigerian immigrant kids and Jamaican immigrant kids. But yeah, and it's this, my mom really did say when I was little, I was raised this way. You know, if I'd come home with a 98 out of 100, it would be like, so what happened to the two missing points? I mean, that was literally how I was raised, right?
And very, very little praise. And what I wrote in the book is, look, we have totally different conceptions of raising kids. In the West, you're trying to support them and make them feel good about themselves. But my view is I'm training them for the future. This is like a training session because life is hard out there and I'm going to prepare you. And
instead of taking obstacles away and doing work for you and writing your essays for you, I'm going to put obstacles in your way and make you overcome them. So it was a very, very different approach. And I think the book took on a life of its own. I actually think that taking me out of it, it ended up being a very useful debate. It wasn't great for my family all the time, but I think that...
There were a lot of interesting conversations that came out of that. It was fascinating. Well, just to set the record straight-
Did your kids actually have sleepovers and playdates or generally not? Way, way less than other people. I was totally not into sleepovers. I mean, I didn't like them. I would let them go like once in a while, but I would hate the way they would come back. And honestly, Barry, to set the record straight, I forced them to play a ridiculous amount of piano and violin. Three hours a day? Yeah. By the end, definitely. Sometimes like five. I went crazy.
So what was your reaction to this controversy at the time? I read in an interview you did in 2011 that you said it was easily the most intense and surreal time in your life up to that point.
I was so unprepared for the controversy and to be honest, so was my agent and so was my publisher. I did not have a Facebook page. I didn't have a website. It was such a different time. This is 2011, almost exactly 10 years ago. So I think what happened is my timing was accidentally perfect.
It was when fear of parenting hit fear of China at exactly that moment. Because right before the book came out, these PISA scores came out. I don't know if you know what those are. They're like these international tests that rank all the countries across the world, like reading and math and science. And that year, like literally a week before my book came out, Hong Kong, Singapore, China, Japan, and Korea, and Taiwan all came out like
first, you know, and then Finland, then Canada, and most of the European countries, all of them were ahead of the United States. The United States was like 34 and 38, you know, like, and when it came out, it was, it was terrifying for a lot of people. Because again, we were way behind. And at the same time, I think I was just a catalyst. I think that
That at that moment, a lot of Western parents maybe subconsciously, you know when a pendulum swings too far? Yeah. It's like, I think a lot of people were starting to worry like, wait, have we gone too far? Are, you know, everybody's getting a trophy. Right, too indulgent. Right. So at the beginning, I was furious of the Wall Street Journal. I was going to sue them because I thought this is- Were you actually considering suing them?
I was so upset. I remember getting invited to a party, actually, at Rupert Murdoch's house. And it was that night that the book came out, and I had been on the Today Show. I'd never been on mainstream TV before. Are You a Monster was, I think, the first question that was asked me. All of the child abuse questions.
and I just felt like I didn't know what I was doing. But I remember going to this Wall Street Journal party, and they were like, congratulations, champagne. And I did not know what they were talking about. I mean, they were just looking at how much
play the book was getting. And, you know, I think that article was the most cited in the history of the Wall Street Journal. It was. Yeah. Certainly that year it was. I remember everyone was discussing it. And, you know, just from the perspective of the paper and journalism, everyone was talking about it.
And in China, too, what's weird, it was this house happening all over the world. In China, they quickly threw out this trashy translation, got everything wrong. I mean, like, literally got everything wrong. And they put the title, in English, is Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. In China, the title they slapped on was...
parenting by a Yale law professor, how to raise kids in America. Oh my God, that's amazing. And it was a huge thing there too. It was huge. It was big in Israel, Germany, and I was controversial everywhere. And, you know, after about two months, everyone said, this is when it dies down. And it just didn't. It went on for like six months. Um,
And I've really changed a lot. I mean, I remember being in England and everywhere I went, I was defensive and it's a memoir. I didn't really mean it. And at one point somebody said, you know, I think you should just own this. And I remember thinking, oh my God, that's going to make things so much easier. And I just learned, I just stopped trying to say it was all a misunderstanding, which it actually was. But I just thought, you know what?
There are aspects of this way that I parented that I made some mistakes, but I am proud of it. I stand by it. I do think that self-esteem is not something that you could just gift your children. So yeah, it's been interesting.
Okay, let's get a little deeper into the thinking behind this very, very deliberate parenting strategy. You mentioned your mom before, Amy, and asking why you got a 98 and where the extra two points were. And it seems to me that a lot of your parenting tactics came primarily from your experience as the daughter of Chinese immigrants. And...
There are just all of these statistics about the success of immigrants and their children in the country. You know, immigrants and their children are more likely to get college degrees than other Americans. They're more than twice as likely to start a new business. They're among the most successful members of our society. So if you would, can you walk me through some of the features of your own childhood that you think...
help explain this phenomenon? What did your own parents do to set you up for success and that you tried to echo in the way that you raised your two daughters? So they did two seemingly contradictory things. One is they instilled me with huge thoughts
of specialness. They were super strict, but I was daddy's girl. Like, it was always like, we come from the greatest civilization. You know, Chinese invented everything. You know? So if I would get bullied at school or whatever, they're like, who cares? All these people, like, they're just...
if they don't know about how great our civilization is, who cares? Like a total non-sequitur. A little bit like the chosen people thing, you know, a little... Yeah, I was going to say I know some Jews that raise their children this way. Yeah, not everybody, but a little bit like a sense of pride in family and culture. But at the same time, what I call in a different book, a sense of insecurity. Now, that sounds funny because why would you want to instill your kids with a sense of insecurity? But what it is is this kind of feeling like, okay...
We believe in your potential. You are amazing, but you can be better. And that's always how it was for me. It's like my mother never praised me. I'm very close to her now. She's 85. Both of my parents are. But I can't remember her ever complimenting me. And some harsh words. Only once when I disrespected my mother once.
My father got very angry at me. It wasn't about grades. It was for disrespecting my mother. And he used this term that can be translated into garbage, but it kind of means like useless, like you're useless. The idea was like, I don't care what a good student you are or whatever. If you can't respect your mom, then you're good for nothing. That's kind of the...
best translation I could give. And Amy, were you an only child? No. I'm the oldest of four and we were all raised this way. And here's the thing, Mary, we're all really close and we all adore our parents. And have your siblings raised their children in the same way that... Pretty much. Pretty much. But one of the things that I have learned is that you cannot replicate the immigrant experience. I would say that was one of the big bruising lessons that
I was like, hey, I'm going to do the same thing my parents did. And it's just impossible. It's just impossible because when my parents came over from Asia, they had nothing. So when they said, Amy, you've got to get an A because if you don't, you may not be able to survive. Like I could see that they meant it. You know, like we got to eat out in restaurants once a year, you know, and I had like these –
fake Adidas with the four stripes and the fake Levi's from Walmart. And I think
there's a Chinese phrase that says, prosperity can never last three generations. Like this issue of generational decline, it goes to American society today. Like you have all these parents that often, maybe they grew up as immigrants kids, but finally they make it, like they're successful and they can afford to put their kids in private school and give their kids the clothes that they never got to have. That's exactly what I did. And along with that, I think comes with
this inability to replicate the experience. Like what I would say to Lulu, you can't get a B+. She's like, why? Like, what's wrong with that? And I didn't, if I searched deep inside me, I didn't really have a great answer. Well, it reminds me a little bit of a phrase that, you know, in the Jewish community, sometimes people joke like a little bit of antisemitism is a good thing. In other words, like- Oh, I never heard that. It keeps you like-
keeps you on your toes. It gives you a little bit of the feeling of insecurity that makes you want to strive, that doesn't make you feel just completely at ease and comfortable, that can lead to perhaps a kind of decadence. You write, Amy, about this idea that was central to your upbringing and also your parenting. Can you explain to me what the virtuous circle is? Amy Quinton
Yeah, I think I said that nothing is fun until you're good at it. And the idea is that...
By themselves, kids are never going to want to drill math or memorize vocabulary words or practice the violin. It's very painful. It's very boring. They would much rather be running outside. So if you just let them stop, then, you know, they can have fun temporarily, but that's it. Whereas if you kind of force them a little bit to...
get good at something, like put in the effort it takes to actually, oh my God, I won a prize or I'm good at math. My teacher said I'm good at math. I got the top score in something. Suddenly, the whole thing is a lot more fun and you feel like you're good at it and you feel like you might even be naturally good at it. There are just very few things I think in life that are just naturally fun that last forever. Right.
I mean, what I hear you saying is, you know, really hard work leads to excellence and excellence leads to pride, contentment, satisfaction, which leads to the willingness to do more hard work and like the cycle goes on.
Yeah, and I think I was misunderstood a lot. People would often say, what do you care about more for your children, happiness or success? Like thinking, I gotcha. And I was like, I think that is just not a smart question. It's a false dichotomy. Absolutely. Like if I could choose a magic button, of course I'd pick happiness. That's like the end game. But the thing is, happiness is so elusive. Yes. And if you let your kids do absolutely anything
anything they want and they will be happy, then of course I would pick that. But it's not the case. One of the things also that stuck out to me is there's this idea that just the brute force really of grinding it out can overcome any obstacle. There's a story you tell about trying to break into academia and you talk about, Amy, applying to a hundred law schools. Tell us about that. Yeah.
Yeah, I actually applied to 100 law schools and I got 100 rejections, eight of them on the merits after actual full day interviews. So not only did they reject you on paper, they didn't like your personality. Exactly. So when you told this to your parents, what did they say? Oh, so I was like practically sobbing. I was like, dad, I know you always wanted me to be a professor, but I just don't think it's going to happen. I mean, I got 100 rejections and my dad was like,
Wait a minute. Let me get this straight. You applied to a hundred schools and you got a hundred rejections and you want to quit? Barry, he thought that was a low number. Okay. He was like,
Because he thought you were being lazy. Oh, my God. This is a man who crossed an ocean to come to a country he didn't know anybody. He's been rejected by everything a billion times, taken slights. And yeah, he just thought like he just couldn't believe it that I thought that that was like a hardship that I was going to give up. So he was right. I applied to like more, change it. And I did get one offer from the University of Buffalo Law School that I will love forever.
And I almost was going to go there. And at the last second, the Duke Law School, which had previously rejected me, this is for a teaching job, unrejected me. And that's where I started my career. But somebody else had canceled. So I always tell my students, like, it doesn't matter how you get it or how ugly the process is. All you need is one good offer. So...
Amy, a few years after Tiger Mom, you wrote a book with your husband, Jed Rubenfeld, and it hit on a subject that in some ways was even more controversial than parenting. And that book was called The Triple Package, and it was an attempt to understand why some cultural groups have found more success in America than others. Can you talk about what The Triple Package is? What are the three things in the package? Amy Quinton
Yeah. The first is what I call a superiority complex. And that's what I was referring to as a sense of exceptionality. And this could even be, you know, actually Justice Sonia Sotomayor mentions it. It's like a grandmother that says, you are really special. There's something about you. And so just the sense of exceptionality. The second component is a sense of insecurity.
And it's the combination of those two features, the sense of exceptionality with the sense that I'm not quite good enough yet, that I think is what creates drive. And I cite a whole bunch of psychological studies
that kind of demonstrate that. It's actually kind of like, you know, I have all this potential, I'm special, but like people don't recognize me yet. People are looking down on me. I need to prove myself. I think that creates motivation. And the third feature is, I think I call it impulse control, this kind of self-discipline. And
I also don't understand why this book was controversial at all. I think like a lot of things, people don't read it. They just get kind of sound – they just have a sound bite. I sort of ran into this buzzsaw when I was a freshman or sophomore at Columbia. And they said, you know, wait, are you telling me that it's bigoted to say or suggest that some cultures are just better than others? Is it wrong to suggest that a culture where –
women are free, gay people can marry, I can wear a tank top, is better than a culture where women are forced to wear burqas or there's female genital mutilation. And people said, yes, that is wrong. So if that's wrong, if it's wrong to suggest that some –
or some mores are better, then yeah, you can understand why the triple package was controversial, right? Right. And I was even not going as far as that. Because what I found was that
Point one, the groups that are successful at any given moment in America change over time. So I wasn't even saying that, oh, this group's practices are better. It was like, you know, it kind of varies. Like when I was looking at it, the groups that we found that were better
being very successful just according to certain very conventional metrics like education and income. And I was very clear that I'm not, I wasn't saying that that's all there is to life, but they were included Nigerian Americans, you know, Jewish Americans, Cuban Americans, Lebanese Americans, Iranian Americans, and I think, I guess, Taiwanese, I mean, some Chinese Americans, but, and Indian Americans. But I said, this is a snapshot and these are,
Features are what allow groups to excel academically and to outperform others at any given time. So I was saying these cultural traits lead to these outcomes, but anybody can have these traits, even individuals. Exactly. It has nothing to do with genetics. It has to do with a cultural choice. Right. But why do you think it's so taboo to try and understand what it is about some groups or subcultures that makes them thrive and to examine...
which ones hold others back? Like, why is that taboo? I think it's related to a lot of the idiocy that we're seeing on universities. Like, you can't state just, like, certain facts or certain statistics.
whether you're talking about COVID or criminal law or vaccination or academic performance or, I don't know, just a statistic that is well accepted by the Pew Foundation. I'm not talking about a controversial one. I don't know if there's this sense like, oh, are you victim blaming? And sometimes I feel like, Barry, there's no amount of explanation, no amount of caveats, no
can fix it. It's just like some conversations just have to be shut down. Like I also tend to find that it's the most privileged people that have trouble with this. Like I got so much positive feedback on the triple package from, believe it or not, historically black colleges and universities. I was asked to give tons of talks everywhere because they were like- I completely believe that. Yeah. They were like, we love this. Wait, this is exactly what we're talking about because we want to instill a sense of superiority in our own
our own students here. They should be so proud of who they are. And, you know, we have insecurity in the African-American community. We don't need that. But like, you know, let's think you're giving us things that we can do to improve. And I didn't get any pushback actually from a lot of communities you'd be surprised about. But it was often very, very privileged people that were just, I don't know, maybe they were like accused of cultural racism, whatever that is. Yeah. Yeah.
So you were both a child abuser and a cultural racist from two books. Love it. So one place where I think this debate is coming to a head, has been coming to a head and continues to be in the news is the question of admissions to elite universities and prep schools, several of which have been sued because of allegations of Asian American discrimination, including Harvard. Right.
For the classes at Harvard of 2000 through 2017, as I'm sure you know, Asian American students admitted to Harvard had the highest average SAT score of any racial group, 22 points higher than the average white student admitted to the school. But they also had the lowest acceptance rate of any racial group. So before we get into this, I'm just curious, as the mother of two Asian American girls, what do you make of these dynamics?
Yeah, I have surprisingly complicated views on this topic. I've been asked, as you can imagine, about this lawsuit. And I've actually been pretty quiet about it because I have a huge mess of complicated views. Let me try to just say a few things. I do think our educational system is broke.
It's way worse than it was even when you were in college and even when my kids went to college. I think my colleague Daniel Markiewicz is right. He wrote The Meritocracy Trap that everybody's miserable. There's just too much competition. This race to get all these tutors, it's just messed up.
Having said that, I'm against getting rid of these SAT scores. I don't think it should be the only metric, but for a lot of people, including people, low-income immigrant families, it's their only way to have a chance. And it's actually, I think, equalizing because there are lots of poor Asian immigrants who are illiterate, who own laundromats, whose kids end up being able to go to
good schools because of these scores. But I'm also in favor of affirmative action. So this lawsuit, I just didn't love the way it was all packaged. I think that there's a, I would love to be able to separate out anti-Asian discrimination, which I definitely think there is,
from issues of affirmative action. And I think that that whole lawsuit in some ways pitted, it made it so difficult for everybody. Asian Americans, if they wanted to speak in favor of the Asian American communities bringing the lawsuit, then they were immediately pegged as being against African Americans. And it just, the whole dynamic was so deadly. And I've seen this happen over and over where things get simplified in a really dumb way. And
There are just so many complicated issues. You know, there are obviously a tremendous number of stereotypes about people of Asian ancestry being great at math or great at tests. Of course, Andrew Yang made his slogan math and made lots of jokes about it when he was running for president. Right, and got in trouble. Right. But they do score higher than other groups. And
I wonder why. How does it relate to the triple package? Well, some of it's very simple. If you go back to – if you trace it, Barry, you will find it's almost always first generation. So if you look at not the Indian Americans but Chinese Americans and Korean Americans, it's just –
Like when my parents came over, how are they going to do anything in English? It's like math is the universal language. So for those people who, the Asians who came over in the 60s and 70s and 80s,
kind of my parents' people, it just made sense that math and science was going to be where they could excel. And I bet, again, if you look at Asian American statistics and look at like second and third generation, you will find that many of them hate math. They're terrible at math. They're stand-up comics. They're writing poetry. I definitely see that in my own students. I can tell from just...
a 10-minute conversation with my Asian American student, whether they're first generation, second generation, or third generation. Really? Yeah. I'm like 95% accuracy. Let's talk a little bit about, if we could, Yale and also what Yale represents. You've been teaching for 30 years, I believe, the past 20 of them at Yale Law. Yeah.
Talk to me, if you would, about how the culture has shifted since you began teaching at your first gig at Duke, you know, over the past few decades for better and I fear mostly for worse.
Totally for worse. It's horrible. It used to be so fun, you know, to have these, I mean, Barry, the reason so many of us became academics and my favorite thing was I would have a class filled with some conservatives, obviously a lot fewer because you're in the Ivy League, but lots of super progressives and minorities of all different kinds. And we'd have like these big debates and everybody would be fighting but laughing. And then afterwards, everybody would go out for a beer. Right.
I mean, it's unrecognizable. Everybody's terrified. I had a class where I asked everybody to give me a response paper every week. I'd assign some provocative readings.
And again, it would include critical race theory, but also conservative pieces, libertarian pieces, law and economics. And I would ask everybody to write a one-page response paper. So interesting. It's like, oh my God, they're still brilliant and interesting. But then when I would ask them to share it, I would get emails like, Professor Chu, is it okay if you don't ask, if I don't say that? Like, is it okay if you don't call? Is it okay if I say this instead? Yeah.
Their closet. Oh, completely, completely. What are they scared of? Being shamed and losing all their friends. So today, if you are a liberal person, you cannot even be friendly with somebody in the federal society. If somebody notices that you, not just talk to them, but like let's say you just liked something they said, right?
you will be called FedSoc adjacent. There's a term. There's like white adjacent, FedSoc adjacent. And people will literally stop talking to you. When students told me this, I was like, that's impossible. You're exaggerating. No, they will just stop talking to you. And just to be clear, the Federalist Society being...
The Federalist Society is a conservative student organization that has a national network, and liberals absolutely hate them because they've been responsible for a lot of the politics in this country that they are so upset about. One of the things, though, that I have found so interesting, I mean, I heard the other day from a bisexual Hispanic student at a leading school,
American Law School who was a member of the Federalist Society and she was not a conservative. And I said, wow, like am I the Federalist Society? She was like, yeah, it's like the only place left at my law school where we can actually debate about ideas and I'm not scared there. Oh, completely. I have a student who came in very left wing and she accidentally made the horrible mistake in the first class of defending the American dream.
And even though she was a minority, she was labeled a white supremacist. So she's the Federalist Society. You can't believe how absurd it is. Okay, well, let's talk a little bit about a specific story that I think well illustrates how absurd it's really gotten.
This fall, a Yale law student named Trent Colbert, he emailed a cheeky party invitation to the Native American Law Students Association. And he was inviting them to a Constitution Day bash at a, quote, trap house in collaboration with the Federalist Society. Colbert is a Native American, and he is a member, from my understanding, of both groups.
That's what happened. And campus absolutely exploded. His classmates took offense, reading trap house as racist because the phrase originally meant crack house. And what was particularly unbelievable in this instance wasn't just that other students freaked out. It's that the administration took their allegations of racism seriously.
They tried to force Trent to apologize, and they argued that his membership in the Federalist Society was an aggravating factor, which is a pretty unbelievable example of ideological discrimination. So, Amy, what is going on here?
It was just craziness. Like, I immediately, like everybody else, looked up Trap House. Like, is this... I thought, does this have to do with slavery or something? And it's hard to explain even to anybody the multiple... I mean, the link back, you know, to what makes it controversial. I think it just refers to, like, a frat party. And...
Yeah, I think the worst part of it really was how the administration handled it because they basically were saying, if you don't apologize, who knows, people report things to the ABA and you might not get certified for the bar. And he didn't want to apologize because he didn't feel he had done anything racist. And then they wrote an apology for him.
And then there was a message circulated to the entire two-ball class by the administration denouncing and condemning the racist statement. And then since then, they've been walking it back. And it's just been insane. It's like a circus.
So, Amy, you've also been dragged during your time at Yale and for various things. But the incident that I remember most for sure by far was what happened around Brett Kavanaugh's nomination for the Supreme Court. From the moment that he was announced as Trump's pick, the noise about how he was a right winger, how he was going to repeal Roe v. Wade, it was unbelievably intense.
And you stepped in right into the middle of that debate and basically wrote this op-ed pushing back against all of it, saying that, in fact, he had a stellar reputation as a mentor for women, including some of his clerks. Why did you decide to write that piece?
So I've actually sent so many fabulous students to clerk for him over a period of, I'm going to say, maybe 10 or 15 years. And right after he was nominated, some former students of mine reached out and asked if I would write an op-ed. And at first I was sort of saying, you know, I'm not sure, but they were like, look, it can be very limited just about his mentorship. And I said, sure. And they said,
So it actually includes lots of quotes. And I also mentioned in that piece that my daughter was going to be clerking for him. Remember, the clerkship was just for the D.C. Circuit, not the Supreme Court. She had been hired actually by him before Donald Trump was even elected. I had nothing to do with that.
But I wrote the op-ed, and I have to say, Barry, I stand by every word in that op-ed. I mean, it doesn't talk about his jurisprudence. It's just simply how his...
In particular, many minorities and women just absolutely found his mentorship invaluable. And you can kind of see that nobody's really, I don't think anybody's challenged that. I mean, this was all before the Christine Blasey Ford accusations came out. So I went back and reread this piece and here's...
He comes off in the piece as just this eminently decent and fierce champion of women. As you mentioned, you quote lots of his former clerks. But a few weeks, maybe it had been a month after the op-ed came out,
So did these sexual assault allegations against Kavanaugh by Christine Blasey Ford. And I remember so distinctly that you came under enormous pressure from your colleagues and your peers to recant the op-ed. Yes. I want you to tell us about what that was like and why you refused to do so. It was truly horrible. What happened is...
Yale Law School exploded. I mean, a lot of people don't remember this, but I was by no means the most passionate defender of Brett Kavanaugh, our dean, and many, many other faculty. As soon as he was nominated, it went on the school site. They championed him as this wonderful alum. And it's going to be hard for people to believe now, but he was a Yale Law School darling for like a decade. He was...
the moderate Republican. Every year during admitted students weekend, the dean would bring him in and he would talk to the Women's Law Association and the Black Students Association and the first generation professionals. And he would guest lecture for many of my colleagues. And he was very close to at least a dozen people, probably closer than I was to them.
But then come September when these allegations came out, everything just exploded. And there were protests at Yale and students were incredibly upset. And I actually understand that. I mean, you know, this is what's interesting. I completely sympathize with how they felt. They didn't know him. They heard these things. And my colleagues, many of them were upset. And every single person
who had supported him basically recanted under pressure, even close friends of his, I think. And I think I might have been the only professor not to. And to answer your question, Barry, I mean, I don't even want to defend myself. It's just personal. I...
I just don't turn on my friends. I mean, I had known him for 15 years, had nothing but an incredible relationship with him. You know, this one allegation from high school came out, and I understand the other position. I know why people recanted.
Nobody that I knew, none of my students, every single one of my former students stood by him. So it was a terrible thing and it changed my relationship to the school forever. I mean, to this day, I think that there will be a significant portion of students who will just never take a class with me.
who think that I'm complicit in misogyny and white supremacy, all these terrible things. And I actually understand them. I don't even fault them. And I think it's too bad that they hate me, will never take my class. But, you know, that's kind of the best I can do. Well, I remember in my own life how intense that time was. I had gone on TV and I said something along the lines of, I believe Christine Blasey Ford—
But even if Brett Kavanaugh did everything that she accused him of, and this was a question I asked on television, should the things a person does as a drunk 17-year-old matter in their adulthood?
And just for asking that question, the backlash was kind of unbearable to me. And the reason was because it ran through a lot of my closest friendships who felt like he was irredeemable and that I wasn't on the side of women and felt that, of course, he shouldn't be confirmed. I remember that. You know, I mean, I didn't even—
take a position on that question. For me, it was just that I wrote a very limited op-ed about the person that I knew, and I just wasn't going to recant... It felt to me like the Cultural Revolution. I mean, even the term recant. So, yeah, I think we went through something very similar, and that's exactly it. I mean, many of my closest friends, even now, it's definitely really fraught and pretty horrible. Yeah, I guess I wonder...
With the perspective of a few years now, I wonder if there was anything to be learned from that whole really fraught and emotional experience. Well, I definitely feel that due process is absolutely crucial, especially when your stomach is most turning and when you most...
you know, just want to throw bricks at something because you can't just let it slide once in a while. I think due process has to be kind of all or nothing. And people just don't realize it until it happens to them. After the break, how the culture of universities has changed since Amy began teaching 30 years ago, why her colleagues won't talk to her, and how she thinks we can get out of the mess of political tribalism. That's next.
You were involved in a controversy this past year during COVID that honestly I couldn't even totally follow. It seemed like you were getting accused of hosting two students at your home. And to be honest, reading it from afar, here's how I read it.
Amy has a target on her back and has since 2018, but really maybe for the past decade, because she is unorthodox, because she doesn't fall in line, because she refuses to ascribe to every aspect of this new ideology. And because of that, her enemies are looking to bring her down in any possible way they can, including by accusing her of like having chicken pox parties.
That's how I read it. Is that pretty accurate? It's pretty accurate. It's actually even more Kafka-esque than that because it involves secret recordings. So the original accusation was that I was having drunken dinner parties with tons of secret students and federal judges. I
That was actually the original accusation that the dean herself made and said this to the entire faculty. And so the only reason I fought back was because my daughter Lulu, my rebel daughter, said, Mom, in this day and age, like, we get our truth from social media. Like, if it's not true, you have to fight back. So I did something I have never done. This is what a younger generation would do. I told the truth. I wrote a letter to my entire faculty, and I tweeted it. And I never...
that it would end up being covered by the New York Times, the Atlantic, and the New Yorker. But I fought back. It was so unpleasant. Like 80% of the faculty stopped talking to me. But I feel vindicated that in the end, the version that you're getting now is what finally came out. Okay, there were no dinner parties. There were no drunken things. There were no federal judges. Two students came over and left after an hour and a half, and Amy Chua had a fresca. That's what happened.
And then they changed it to the COVID violation. Moving target like an authoritarian regime. After they were embarrassed and they realized there were no drunken parties, they said, well, it was a COVID violation. So, okay, I know a little bit about what it's like to be in a hostile work environment. And considering how successful you are, I wonder why you stay at Yale. Yeah.
I definitely think about it all the time. A part of it is just hardheadedness. Like I'm not, it goes back to the grit thing that my parents instilled in me. Like I'm not going to be run out of town, you know, like I'm just not going to cave. I'm not going to give up. But I do think about it all the time. Like life is really different here. It's a very different experience. I don't even like to go downtown. I put my house on the market and then took it off the market after
So, no, you ask a good question, Barry. I mean, I think the short answer is that there are still amazing students that are fascinating and talented and just are as sick of this as you are and I are. And I'm still in it for that. I've been very lucky in that.
Throughout all the scandal, my classes are filled with progressives. Like my classes are not just conservatives. I have tons and tons of, I guess I specialize in immigrant kids, but I have like a silent majority. I think I get to tap into people that are just rolling their eyes at the situation and aren't going to speak out. They don't want to take a public position, but they actually do want to hear multiple perspectives because my classes are well-known and
to be pretty much the only ones now where you still have debate across political divides. It's gotten harder and harder. I don't want to sugarcoat it. It's really hard now. Like, I'm tense now instead of it being fun. I have to be so much more careful in how I teach. Even in office hours now, I'm much more cautious and guarded. Like, I don't ask, I would never, never ask a student, so where are you from? Right?
Wow. Isn't that, oh, gosh, I'm not going to, that would be, that could be a microaggression, you know. It's so dumb, but I'm not going to do that anymore. I'll wait for them to volunteer it because.
Because are you nervous that- It will explode. Or some comment you make will be put up on social media and taken out of context. And like, what's your fear when you're tense and standing in front of the class? Is it your own students in the room? Yeah. So just something that happened to another professor who was way to the left of me. She was teaching a big class and talking about the 14th Amendment. And a student, a first year student stood up and said, that is such a white woman thing to say.
And that is the kind of situation I'd really love to not be in, something where a student calls on a professor to denounce another student. Like, I just don't want to get to a situation. So it's, and I've never had that. Like, I've been very lucky. So on my syllabus, I put this big, giant label that says, essentially, in this class, I'm
The goal is to promote lively debate across every possible political perspective. So it's like your version of a trigger warning. Kind of. Like, you know, if you were going to be expected to – I think I say every student is entitled to a perception of good faith, even if you don't like what they say.
And it's actually kind of worked. Like, it's not friendly, but I have these debates. But it's really different. Like, it used to be so fun. Like, we'd all go out for beers, you know. Now it's like, my stomach is twisted. Is this going to explode? People seem like they're about to cry. I mean, it's just different. Yeah.
But I'm doing it. And I think that's why my wait lists are still so high. Like I had a 100-person wait list on top of 80. So I feel pretty lucky. Like I feel like this gives me a weird hope that people are just sick of it. They're really sick of it and that the tide will turn. If you had a beloved student who came to you, similar worldview to you, right? Like not easily pin-downable, definitely not.
leftist, you know, orthodox person. And they said to you, Amy, I think I'm going to go into academia. Would you advise them not to do that at this point? I just, it's going to kill me. I just don't think I should say yes because I don't want to cede the entire territory. You know, it's like, why should entire things be ceded to crazies? I mean, obviously I agree with that.
The question, right, is have they already been lost territory? And is it more effective to sort of strike out into the West and build anew, right? Like, is it already lost is really the question I'm trying to get at here. I'm the eternal optimist. Like, I think there's, we were talking about pendulums. I think it's going to swing back. I think you just go too far. Too many people are lost.
People can't talk. It's like, you know, I'm interested in how concepts get cannibalized by political tribalism, right? So cancel culture, two years ago, I would have used that term. Now, if you use that culture, you're signaling which group you're in, you know? So it's like, you can't talk. You can't, woke used to be a term we could all use. Now, if you even use that term, then, and COVID got cannibalized. For me, even a year ago to get real facts buried, like does ivermectin work?
I would have to switch back and forth between Fox News and MSNBC, right? Like, it's just... And you listen to the two stations, and it's like you're hearing completely different things. And science doesn't solve it, because you have different experts on different sides, so...
I'm a little hopeful there too, because I think the absurdity of where we are now is also creating more line crossing. Yes. I feel like the dam is breaking on that right now as we're speaking. Yes. I think a lot about the question of conformity. And I think one of the big things that I've gotten wrong in my life is believing that people were more free thinking than they actually are. Like I think most people are...
conformist by nature. And I'm pretty convinced that there may be no more conformist group in America than tenured professors, which is ironic because they have total job security to say anything they want. And you're like a zebra. You are bizarrely nonconformist and it's gotten you in trouble and it's caused you heartache, I know. So I'm curious where that comes from
that nonconformity and how intentional it's been. Was it a conscious choice? Like you saw the stream going in one direction and you're like, nope, I'm going in the other way. Never, never. Oh my God. I was a shy Asian kid. I was raised with obedience being the highest value. So I don't know what happened to me. Yeah. What happened?
You know, every single time it's been an accident. When I wrote the Tiger Mom book, Neil Ferguson emailed me and he's like, brilliant. And I was in a hotel room myself, like sobbing in the dark, being called a child abuser. I was like, you know what I mean?
Everyone hates me. Well, I really appreciate that you shared that. I think it's important for people to understand that you're not made of steel, even though to me you appear to be. But also I'm curious about, so like I think a lot of times, right, someone would have the preliminary media experience that you had, getting sort of shoved out onto the national stage and just taking a tremendous amount of heat and
cry alone in the hotel room, and then shut up for the rest, have a private life. Tell me about the decision not to do that. I think this loops back to the first thing you started with, the parenting and why I wanted to raise my kids the same way that my parents raised me. I do think that for some of the bad side effects of this tiger parenting, if you do it right,
grit is one of the positive things you can instill. I think my parents definitely gave me grit, which is this idea that if you just live another day, just hang in there and just keep fighting, at some point things will turn. And I have found that in every single case. I am a firm believer of this what doesn't kill you thing. And this other immigrant thing, Barry, is like
my dad was like, take advantage of every opportunity because you may never get another one.
And it's a very immigrant-y thing to think, you know, that every opportunity could be your last one. But I would take every interview, everything. And so I think I did develop a kind of grit and idea from Tiger Mom that you can ride out these firestorms. And I think the current system or the way the country is right now rewards all
cowardice and conformity and turning in your friends. It just, all these terrible things that I think run against human nature. Like I think human beings value bravery. Look at all the stuff that's on Netflix. I think we don't like cowardice. And I don't know, I just feel like there's something really wrong with the current moment.
We've talked in this conversation, and you've written in your writing, about the sort of like two rising tides in university settings, but beyond that, which is anger and polarization on the one side, and also the almost excruciating sensitivity, right? Which maybe is best exemplified by that explosive 2015 ground zero video of –
Yale students berating, right, Nicholas Christakis over a Halloween email. And on first glance, these two things, right, the rage and the sensitivity seem contradictory. Like you would think maybe that increased sensitivity would lead to an environment that's like more gentle or understanding. But I wonder if it's more accurate to say that they kind of feed off of one another. Yeah.
Totally. Like the sensitivity has led to this heightened awareness of every tiny misstep. You know, you suggesting you won't ask a student where they come from because you don't want to be accused of a microaggression. And that maybe this over-awareness and over-sensitivity creates a sense of being embattled and therefore makes people more belligerent in response. Does that make sense? Yeah.
It makes total sense. And I think it's a brilliant insight. This is another big overgeneralization, but I've noticed patterns. And I have so many students who are people of color and they're immigrants kids, like Iraqi American students, Egyptian American students,
Colombian-American students, and they don't tend to be the fragile ones, and they also don't tend to be the ones that have hypersensitivity. They actually probably wouldn't care if I asked them where they're from. And I've had a Mexican-American student whose dad was undocumented, extremely anti-Trump, super progressive. He was like,
who cares about wearing sombreros? It was like, why should that be cultural appropriation? It's like, they're just being friendly. You know, they like, you know, it's like, so, you know, all of these topics are so tied together back to this meritocracy thing and why I think the system's broke.
There's a lot of untenable self-contradiction at elite places like Harvard and Yale, and actually everywhere, you know, because a lot of students are very fragile and they're against elitism and hierarchy.
But they're at Yale. Like you came to Yale, right? And so I think there's so much like ambivalence about success. This is the thing you started off with about like all this pressure and it's related to the fragility, but I'm miserable. I'm so stressed and I don't want to feel this way. But wait, all these other people are working so hard. They might get a Supreme Court clerkship and I...
I don't want them to get it if I can't get it. And I just think it's all balled up together, this kind of like anxiety and rage. And people are competitive, but they don't want to be competitive. And I just hope it will pass.
Yeah, I was going to say, how do you see the fever breaking, or if you do? You know, I have never seen my students so miserable. On the left, on the right, the people even doing the perpetrating. I mean, they're not happy. Nobody's happy. Something is just not working. It's so funny because I was thinking today about just, and this connects to this question of conformity and why it feels so rampant right now. And it just like,
It's like a heavy blanket over anything creative or joyful or different. And what's weird to me, right, is that the most conformist people in the culture seem to me to be young people. And if you think about like, you know, the free speech movement in the 60s, places like Columbia and Berkeley, it's like, where are those students being like, no, I'm not going to go along with what everyone else is saying? Right.
That's so funny. I'm actually, among the different books that I'm working on, one is comparing this moment to the 60s because in some ways there are some parallels. I think there's a lot of massive cultural transformation, but the thing I've noticed is exactly what you're noticing. It's like there's so much conformity and that was like this kind of free love. And I think people were, I don't know, I don't want to romanticize it, but it seemed kind of fun. They were doing all these things.
things. Right. But at least they were rebelling, right? Yes. Yes. And I think, but maybe the difference is that in the 60s, the students were rebelling against the older people, their parents. Right.
the current rebellion would require them to rebel against their own peers. Maybe? Maybe. But also, there's no liberation in what's happening right now. None. In the 60s, there, I think, really was. There was the sexual revolution, whatever you think of it, you know. And I think the things that people are protesting right now, and I just, I don't think people feel liberated. It's like shackles, if anything. You know, something is just
It's just off. Well, let's zoom out a bit more, Amy, about the stakes of what it means, right? The stakes of what the insanity means. So...
I've spent a lot of time in my work talking about rising liberalism in elite spaces, universities, private schools, obviously the press. And one of the main criticisms I get is those places don't represent America. They represent a very small part of American life. And what they do doesn't really matter that much.
And my response has always been, well, of course it matters what they do because the ideas that are popular and ascendant and dominant in those spaces have an inordinate effect on American life because that's where we source, or at least have historically sourced, leaders in business, tech, politics, finance, academia, and so on.
And your most recent book talks about that, right? Yeah. It's titled Political Tribes. And you talk about the national dysfunction that comes from political tribalism. And that book has given me a better understanding of this dynamic I'm describing, of this dynamic of why the behavior of elites is...
is so consequential. And you really helped me understand this through this concept of the market-dominant minority. Can you explain what the market-dominant minority is?
So my very first book, way before Tiger Mom, was a book called World on Fire that I wrote in 2003. And I coined this term actually to refer to really economically successful ethnic minorities. For example, the Chinese and countries like Indonesia. Like the Chinese and Indonesia are only 3% of the population, which is tiny.
but they control about 70% of the private economy. And, Barry, you can imagine people like, oh, my God, you're stereotyping. But no, it's just true. That's just a statistic. Yes, and it's the same with Chinese in the Philippines or Thailand and Malaysia.
It's actually not true of Jews in current countries, but in certain Eastern European countries between the First and Second World Wars, Indians in East Africa, Lebanese in West Africa. It's a really interesting phenomenon that we don't have or are not familiar with in Western countries where you have a tiny minority that seems to have a stranglehold on all the power because if you have that much economic power, you can often control politics.
So I have been writing about this and how democracy in these circumstances can lead to ethno-nationalist movements and a lot of hate against this like resented minority. And I had been saying for 20 years, we do not have a market dominant minority in this country. That's what makes us different. That's what makes us not dysfunctional like developing countries.
And right after President Trump was elected, like a month later, I was teaching my big class. I was reading from my old book. I was actually talking, believe it or not, about a developing country. And I said, under certain circumstances, a political outsider with no economic or political training can sometimes sweep to power on a populist wave, tapping into deep social and racial resentments to the horror of elites, right?
And I was actually talking about Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. Oh, my gosh. And a student raised their hand and said, Professor Truro, that sounds like exactly just what just happened here. So looping back around to your question, what I've noticed, and I wrote about this recently because at that point I was like, I need to change this book. The world is different now.
I think that just in the last five years, we have seen in the United States the emergence of our own form of a market-dominant minority. Now, it's very idiosyncratic because this is not an ethnic minority. It's not a religious minority. But I'm talking about the group sometimes disparagingly referred to as coastal elites or cosmopolitan elites. And if you do the numbers, it is in fact true that...
a wildly disproportionate amount of this country's wealth is either on the West or the East Coast. You know, if you think that it's concentrated in Wall Street and Silicon Valley and Hollywood and the Ivy League and, you know, Washington. And this little group that you were saying you were right to focus on, I mean, they actually are enormously influential and they are viewed by large parts of society
Yeah.
They like immigrants better than they care about real Americans. They care about the poor in Africa more than they care about the poor here. They're being led by Jews. I mean, the whole thing is so, but it's like this group of outsiders, they're globalists. But the language and the pattern of the rhetoric is very similar to what you hear in developing countries where you have a populist leader targeting a market-dominant minority. Right.
But there are truths, right, to the fact that there is such thing as a coastal elite, right? Yes. Just as it's true that the Chinese in Indonesia really do dominate these sectors. And I think one of the differences of this group that we're describing as cultural elites or coastal elites is they view themselves as tolerant, right?
Exactly. And so they view themselves as tolerant, as cosmopolitan, as non-tribal. And what I wrote in Political Tribes is that they don't see how insular they are. Yes, and how exclusive, how hard it is to get into this group and how snobby. Like they all send their kids to the same schools and vacation in the same places. They have their own language. This is going back to the PC, like if you say Latinx or all this—
very difficult to remember vocabulary on the gender side. Who can talk like that? Like if you're from a small town in Appalachia, how can you possibly talk in a way that can satisfy this group? Well, explain why it's a problem. Beyond enraging lots of people in other parts of the country, why is it a problem to have a market-dominant minority in a democratic country? Well, there are tons of problems.
One is that it's really easy fodder for demagogues. Like if you can see this little group and they actually do have a lot of power, it allows demagogic people to kind of just really dig in and go too far. And I do think that President Trump really was a master at this. We're going to take back the country. We're going to make America great again. Secondly, it tends to lead, and I predicted this,
I'm kind of tragically proud of this. I predicted this back in 2018 when the book came out. I said that it leads to an erosion of trust in institutions and electoral outcomes. Let me read it. Let me read it to you because I also pulled that line and it was really amazing to see that you wrote this in 2018. You wrote this. Seeing coastal elites as a market-dominant minority is sobering. In my research, I found no examples of countries successfully overcoming this problem.
On the contrary, all over the world, when this dynamic takes hold of a nation's politics, a result has been an erosion of trust in institutions and in electoral outcomes.
You've never seen a country successfully overcome this problem. That's what you wrote in 2018. Yeah, because what happens is that each side just thinks the other side is an illegitimate evil outsider. And it's scary. I mean, you can see this when Donald Trump was elected. Of course, it was Russian agents. It was really...
that going on. And now, if you just look at the statistics, what percentage of Republicans think that Biden was legitimately elected? I mean, it used to never be true of Western countries. This is something that happened in countries like Kenya and Zimbabwe and Indonesia and the Philippines. And for the first time, we're seeing it here. Now,
I think it's important, since I am the optimist, to say that it is our own version of a market-dominant minority. It's not a perfect analogy.
Zimbabwe was really the whites were a 1% minority that did control everything due to apartheid. They were horrible for centuries. And people, demagogues like Robert Mugabe were able to mobilize the people by saying, let's get the whites out of here. But that was very explicitly racial. This category we have of cosmopolitan elites or coastal elites is much more fluid because
And I'm just hoping that if we can get back to our origins, which is the fact that this is an ethnically neutral country in our constitution, like our founding documents are actually ethnically and racially and religiously neutral, that we maybe have a leg up and can get out of this. So just to distinguish what you're saying from what a lot of people I think say, I
Most people would look, not most people, let's say a lot of liberals would look at the erosion of trust in our institutions and point at Trump and Trumpism and say that's the reason. And you're suggesting that the reason is deeper. You're saying that Trump was sort of, yes, a catalyst, but also maybe more so a symptom of an erosion that had already happened before he came to power. I am saying that. I know it's not a popular view, but if you're somebody like me who has studied politics
politics and democratic elections in dysfunctional developing countries for 30 years, you see it as a much bigger pattern. Like in countries like the former Yugoslavia, the exact same thing between the Serbs and the Croats. You know, it's like, yeah, so I think you put it perfectly. I think this is something we have to worry about going forward. You know, it's how do we get out of this? Is it going to be better in the next set of elections? Yeah.
Well, what do you think, Amy, is the way forward for those of us who agree with you and who recognize this erosion of trust as a problem and see it as way deeper than any cult of personality or political party? What do we do?
I don't know what the immediate answer is to this, but I sometimes feel like maybe if we just hit rock bottom, I mean, don't you feel like everybody you know, just so many people are exhausted? Yes. You know, and the fact that if you look at like all the, was that piece that showed the Joe Rogan's podcast being so popular compared to all these other things? Yeah, like dwarfs every single news network combined, it felt like. Yeah, I think that people are squandering
quietly escaping in ways that don't get them in trouble. And at some point, I think that if you just take two people together and just like don't talk about politics, like take a Trump supporter, an anti-Trump supporter, just let them get to know each other as individuals first and find other axes of commonality, which human beings have about dogs, pizza, ice cream, football. And maybe this is the most important thing, and the American dream and wanting...
to give their children and their grandchildren a better life than they had, which is what your parents did for you. Yeah. And I, again, based on all the little whispers I get, okay, not the students who are willing to see it, but students who come from underprivileged backgrounds and these are people of all racial backgrounds, they're like, yeah, you know,
Of course my parents believe in the American dream, and that's why I came to Yale Law School, but don't tell anybody ever that I said that. So this ludicrousness, if that can just pass, I do. I think that there's got to be a significant silent majority that believes in that. And I don't know, maybe somebody brave will say it in a way that doesn't get heard.
to use an earlier term, cannibalized by political tribalism. I think that's the problem right now, that everything is a trigger. Like if you say that you favor the American dream on a college campus, that signals that you are somehow a white supremacist. And that link has to be broken because that makes no sense. Well,
Amy, if we don't manage to find courage and restore upward mobility and be able to say out loud that we still believe in the American dream, if we fail to do that, what do you think's at stake? Everything. I think the whole...
an experiment of America is at stake. And I just don't think that's going to happen. You know, it's also really taboo, crazily enough, to describe America as an exceptional country. I mean, that's crazy because you can say that it is
repeatedly and shamefully fail to live up to its own principles that we have to try harder. But I just, you know, I've written about this too, but I think that we do have a very unique founding story and we have a founding document that obviously wasn't perfect. It didn't apply to like most people, but in principle, we have this document and we
So I don't even want to get there, Barry. I think that, you know, I think if we are unable to get back to being able to believe in the Constitution and the American dream, that we will lose the country. But I just don't think that will happen. I really don't. Amy Chua, thank you so much. It's been such a pleasure. Thank you, Barry. This was so much fun. Thank you.
Thanks so much for listening. As always, if you have a question, a tip, or a guest idea, email us at tips at honestlypod.com. And please, go read Amy's latest book. It's called Political Tribes, Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations. See you next time. Hello, Honestly listeners. Are you or someone you love an audio nerd? Maybe you're a podcast producer who's joined the Great Resignation and is now looking for new work.
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