How America’s celebrity obsession weakens the fight against inequality | Amy Chua | Big Think

How America’s celebrity obsession weakens the fight against inequality

New videos DAILY

Join Big Think Edge for exclusive video lessons from top thinkers and doers

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Deepening inequality is escalating a tribal conflict between the haves and the have-nots in America. But it's not playing out in the most obvious way: the beef of working-class, blue-collar Americans isn't with Manhattan-born billionaires and Instagram influencers—it's with garden variety professional elites. "If you look at the surveys, Pew Foundation studies, you find that most Americans, including working-class Americans, actually love capitalism," says Yale professor Amy Chua. "They don’t want socialism. They still want a system where if you can work hard you can strike it rich, and they want it to be fine to be rich." Why did low-income America elect a billionaire president? It's no puzzle, says Chua. Despite the data on inequality and the dismal stats on upward mobility, Americans are still sold on the American Dream. It's the narrative peddled by American Idol, the Kardashians, and jet-setting celebrities—that you too can somehow climb the ladder. The richest of the rich are adored, not scorned. Chua points out a glaring irony: while the overly privileged Occupy Wall Street movement was trying to raise up America's poor, America's poor were flocking to the enormously popular prosperity gospel. Its creed? That God blesses the wealthy, and if you pray hard enough the money will come. "The desire for the American Dream is so powerful that people will cling to it even when they have no chance," says Chua. It's that dream that sustains inequality from the bottom up. Amy Chua is the author of Political Tribes: Group Instinct and the Fate of Nations.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

AMY CHUA:

Amy Chua is the John M. Duff Professor of Law at Yale Law School.  She was born in 1962, the Year of the Tiger, in Champaign, Illinois.  She lived in the Midwest (Go Purdue!) until she was eight, when her father Leon Chua became a professor at UC Berkeley, and her family moved to California.  Amy graduated from El Cerrito High School (Go Gauchos!) in 1980.

In 1980, Amy headed East.  She graduated from Harvard College in 1984 and Harvard Law School in 1987.  While at Harvard Law School, Professor Chua was executive editor of the Harvard Law Review. After graduating, she clerked on the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit for Chief Judge Patricia M. Wald, who was a wonderful mentor to her (and who performed the marriage ceremony for Amy and her husband Jed!).

Amy practiced for four years with the Wall Street firm of Cleary, Gottlieb, Steen & Hamilton, where she worked on international transactions throughout Asia, Europe, and Latin America.  In 1994, she joined the Duke University Faculty of Law.   Amy and her family loved North Carolina!  The only problem was that Jed was teaching at Yale.  Amy joined the Yale Law School faculty in 2001.

Amy’s first book, World on Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

TRANSCRIPT:

Amy Chua: Well, I happen to be a fan of democracy. I think it has flaws, but there was just no other better system for one simple reason and that is: you can often get a beneficent dictator. A lot of people think that Lee Kuan Yew in Singapore was such a person. He was not corrupt. He actually alleviated a lot of the ethnic conflict.

But here’s the problem: You can never ensure that the dictator will stay beneficent. The better thing about democracy is that, eventually, you can vote them out. If you don’t like the policies, if you don’t like the leaders, you can vote them out.

So, on balance, I think that democracy is the best system. What I think is wrong is that America treats democracy like a panacea. We romanticize it. We think somehow that oh, there’s all this civil war and tribalism and sectarian warfare there—let’s just have some elections! What they don’t realize is that in very divided countries—ethnically divided, tribally divided—democracy can sometimes catalyze group conflict rather than softening it.

A lot of people have puzzled over how so many blue-collar and working-class Americans could possibly have voted for a billionaire born to wealth, born in Manhattan. But it’s actually not a puzzle at all. What a lot of working-class Americans resent is the idea that there’s a rigged system.

That there are these people—arrogant people—controlling the levers of power from afar, somewhere in D.C. and on Wall Street and Silicon Valley.

If you look at the su...

For the full transcript, check out