Quote:
Originally Posted by grizy
Amy Chua is almost certainly toward left side of the political spectrum, especially by today's standards.
I don't think so. She pretty clearly an ardent free marketer and as others have pointed out, she's notable for 1) writing a book about crushing your kids' spirits and now 2) telling law school students to dress slutty so powerful menfolk will like and appreciate you.
And in fact, that second thing is pretty close to the **** she's always been arguing for decades now, which is fundamentally a deeply conservative argument, something like: majoritarian cultural values should be respected and left wing tribalists are really upsetting the right by looking down on white culture and hectoring white people about structural racism, and it's really the same thing as right-wing tribalism, apox on both houses.
As I noted, I think she's at least *interesting* to listen to (but still largely bad) because she acknowledges that capitalism does much the same -- that a lot of frustration around changing culture that's really motivating a fascist backlash can really be laid at the feet of capitalists, not uppity liberals.
As best I can tell, she's not leftist at all but is a really rare breed: a fundamentally Burkean, small-c conservative. Like the Yale professor breed of right-winger that knows better than to browse Breitbart openly and is at least engaging in a smarter set of arguments.
I'm pretty confident her fundamental politics are still pretty ghoulish and regressive but as I noted, I think she's hard to pin down precisely because the right wing is now so sufficiently radicalized that actual old school conservatives are basically completely foreign species to us. She's a law professor at Yale, is a decent-enough writer and her arguments are coherent enough, and don't exist merely to gin up white people resentment. And since we're conditioned to recognize that all contemporary right-wingers think Ben Shapiro is some intellectual giant, and he's actually a moron, we assume any non-morons like Chua must be leftist by default. But I think it's a bit dangerous.