00:00:27.000I wish in my soul, I wish that any of these people had a conscience.
00:00:34.620Ask yourself, what is my task and what is my purpose?
00:00:38.380If that answer is to save my country, this country will be saved.
00:00:44.680War Room. Here's your host, Stephen K. Band.
00:00:47.960thursday 20th of august and domini 2026 harnwell here at the helm on steve bannon's war room good
00:01:03.480evening um got a very special guest with us tonight philip pilkington author macroeconomist
00:01:11.540investment professional um host of the multi polarity podcast which you can also find on
00:01:18.580x i'll give those details out towards the end of the show at multi polar pod um and formerly of
00:01:25.900the danube institute run by the legendary john o'sullivan um in um in hungary philip we're
00:01:34.360going to start off today because you've written two books and i'd like to just mention a little
00:01:39.000bit of your insights, which has some overlap with the things that our audience takes to
00:01:49.680heart, especially the decline and collapse of the international rules-based order, whose
00:01:58.740precipitous collapse, in some ways, is largely responsible for the rise of the America First
00:02:05.920movement in the united states and the various populist nationalist iterations around the world
00:02:11.920let's start off with the book that you have coming out if i may in i think is it january of 2027
00:02:20.320bust the economics of population decline let's start off with that um i'll quote a little bit
00:02:28.320of it from the material that i have because you make the argument that once economics
00:02:35.920Once economics drove professional changes, but now demography is the most fundamental force shaping our economic future.
00:02:46.840Let me ask you, firstly, what do you mean by that, that demography is the most fundamental force shaping our economic future?
00:03:00.060well um as the book argues um the it used to be that the economy uh constrained population so
00:03:10.640if people are aware of the writings of say thomas malthus that's where the term malthusian comes
00:03:16.460from um the idea was that if you had i mean to put it in vulgar terms if you had too many if poor
00:03:21.980people had too many children they wouldn't be able to eat you know there was a fixed food supply
00:03:26.440too many kids won't be able to eat right so it's kind of like the modern um the modern
00:03:32.400malthusians are like the anti-birth people the anti-natalists the one that said that the
00:03:36.920there was uh there was too much population overpopulation in the 1970s and stuff but
00:03:41.700people who are behind many of the problems um that we have today and and we're this is the
00:03:48.880population this is what we call the population control agenda which is still very well represented
00:03:54.080in the united nations yes and uh was very well represented at the national institute of health
00:04:00.940in the united states around people like fauchy i don't think that's uh understood enough all that0.97
00:04:05.740stuff is real and calling it a conspiracy theory is really stupid like you can read their materials0.84
00:04:10.160and everything there was a big scare in the 1970s about population whether it was really about0.91
00:04:15.040population or not is a separate story but that's what they said anyway this goes back to the
00:04:19.760arguments of Thomas Malthus who was a British Anglican clergyman which is you could make some
00:04:27.200comments on that but he argued basically that population was constrained by the food supply
00:04:32.640basically I mean so by the economy and so if you had a slightly larger food supply because you got
00:04:37.880better farming influence or something then the population could grow but if you grew the
00:04:41.820population beyond the food supply people would starve now was this a realistic theory in my
00:04:47.480opinion it there was little evidence for it but you know it was it was true to some extent that
00:04:52.920the population was determined to some extent by the uh by the economy now we're in um thanks to
00:04:58.760the actions of this group of people that we just talked about um we're in a place where it's
00:05:05.020completely the opposite the uh western economies especially but it's not just the west do not have
00:05:11.260enough people we haven't we haven't had enough births in our societies to keep the economy
00:05:17.180growing there's two main components to economic growth as economists say in the long run one of
00:05:23.600them is productivity growth and that's when you know um things get better the office gets better
00:05:28.560organized or a better way to think about it is somebody's sitting at home on a spinning wheel
00:05:33.400spinning yarn in the 18th century and then they get the professional factory spinning you know
00:05:38.480spinning jenny or something like that and they they triple their productivity their output of
00:05:43.280of that good so one component is productivity growth now productivity growth is very difficult
00:05:48.200to influence it's mainly influenced by technology and so on there's not much we can do about it
00:05:52.640and the other issue is productivity growth has been slowing now for a very long time
00:05:56.320the second component of economic growth is population growth so basically you have the
00:06:01.760labor force grows the economy grows with it and then you get a little bit of a boost from the
00:06:06.500productivity growing on the on the on the growth on the labor force that they get more productive
00:06:12.160and now we don't have um replacement level um births effectively and for example the united
00:06:18.980states hasn't had replacement level births since uh i think it's 1973 and britain hasn't had it
00:06:24.580since 1971 so basically this is the cause of this is the main cause of the mass immigration that
00:06:31.900we're seeing and that people are getting so upset about rightly in my opinion um people are it's not
00:06:38.020the only cause but it's a very significant cause that businesses don't have sufficient labor force
00:06:43.940to keep the economy growing and because the nature of our economies we kind of need to keep them
00:06:49.040growing in some sense and so what they do is they they put an awful lot of pressure on government
00:06:54.960to import labor, to import new labor. And so this is by the intuition by the populist movement
00:07:02.640that these creepy anti-birth people from the 70s and the pro-immigration people are the same people
00:07:09.500because they literally caused the problem and then they use the immigrants as a solution for
00:07:15.200this problem. So that's basically what it means. So the economy can't grow now without making0.75
00:07:22.020demographic changes now we can either make those demographic changes with mass immigration which
00:07:26.580we've been doing now for 20 years or so america's been doing it longer than europe or we can raise
00:07:32.260birth rates and have natural population growth of our own populations those are the choices
00:07:37.040all right let me stop you there um if we have time i'm going to come back to the to the overlap
00:07:42.680um between the the ideology the proponents the ideological family between the same ideological
00:07:51.440family between those who are pushing population control and in fact if i might say this um women's
00:07:59.780liberation as well and a whole host of the original anti-family legislation and that is now the same
00:08:05.680ideological family that's put that is lined up behind the um the immigration crisis what we call
00:08:12.200here on the war room straight up an invasion i want to ask you something however because you made
00:08:19.680You made the suggestion just like a couple of minutes ago in your analysis that the present immigration crisis is wholly a response to the indigenous demographic decline in the West.1.00
00:08:42.300I agree with you because I have a very cynical view1.00
00:08:49.280over how the invasion is being managed.
00:08:54.040But it would suggest to be implicit what you're saying there, Philip,
00:08:58.380that we're not on the receiving end of boatloads of people arriving every day0.87
00:09:06.160because first and foremost, these people want to enter the country illegally.
00:09:11.780We're suffering this invasion because the powers that control the country see in that dynamic the solution, the resolution to the demographic issue.
00:09:26.640That is to say, it's not as it's being presented that our hands are tied in the West, we have the Dublin Treaty and all the rest of it, and we can't do very much about it if these people are coming across.
00:09:39.560It would seem to suggest that it's actually being coordinated as a solution to a problem, and therefore the actual solution from the part of the nationalist forces in the country, the population, the invasion, those who want to stop the invasion, the solution isn't necessarily to stop the boats coming across.
00:10:03.180that's part of it obviously it's a root and branch reform of how the country is run because it it's
00:10:10.940like people being pulled in to a vacuum in a certain sense they're being pulled in willed in
00:10:17.500driven in uh because we feel we have a demographic issue and that is the solution to that i'll ask
00:10:23.100you whether you actually even think because i still know the answer whether you actually think
00:10:26.860that is the solution um but is that what you're saying is that primarily what you're saying that
00:10:33.020people are coming into the country, not because they are, in the first instance, agents driving
00:10:39.660themselves into the country, but they're actually being pulled in behind the scenes as part of a
00:10:45.800concerted policy that the government, that the British establishment doesn't have the guts to
00:10:53.020come to the British people and explain what it's doing and why it's doing it. Boris Johnson admitted
00:10:58.980this he was asked in an interview i think with the telegraph might have been the spectator why
00:11:04.940he allowed the so-called boris wave in and he said that the treasury came to him and explained to him
00:11:10.680that the economy will collapse if he didn't the the economists at the treasury and they're not
00:11:15.960actually fully lying about this show that britain for example in america has similar problems a lot
00:11:22.220of europe has similar problems has this enormous debt load that it can't pay down and it can't it
00:11:28.460can barely afford to pay the interest on and in order to get that debt load to be stable you need
00:11:34.620to have at least some economic growth or at least you can't have negative economic growth and so
00:11:39.900what the treasury does is it goes the her majesty's uh the exchequer in britain i know that i mean i
00:11:46.460just i used to live in london for a long time and i was there in politics there and i kept trying
00:11:50.220to explain this to people that any prime minister that would come in the treasury the man in gray
00:11:54.860suits as they call them will sit down and they'll just show them the numbers and they'll say if you
00:11:58.620don't go along with our immigration agenda then uh then your economy's going to collapse and you'll
00:12:03.920have you know they'll say like you'll have an economic collapse similar to list trust these
00:12:07.640days that's what they'll say um boris johnson said said this i mean you can go it's on the record
00:12:12.600um in america it's slightly more complicated the issue is the same but it's not the civil servants
00:12:18.740or the i don't know what they call them government employees or whatever they call them there because
00:12:22.680they have a different system they don't have the embedded they have the political pointies at the
00:12:26.160head so it's not the permanent undersecretary of the treasury that comes to you in the united
00:12:30.560states it's businesses putting pressure on government to hire them so uh somebody can
00:12:35.580come in and say i don't want immigration etc etc and then the real estate industry the uh the food
00:12:41.520product the food industry the agricultural industry will will gin up their lobby groups and start the
00:12:46.380pressure campaign on uh on congress on the senate and eventually if they can on the white house as
00:12:51.840well and they'll they'll make the same case that the u.s treasury is making to the uh new newly
00:12:57.800appointed prime minister but they'll they'll do the same thing so this and it's all over europe
00:13:02.720so the europe has more of the civil servant political model and so that'll be some permanent
00:13:08.060bureaucrat who's never been fired who no one knows his name and he's the most second he's the most
00:13:13.120powerful man in britain um he'll be telling the prime minister directly and making kind of veiled
00:13:18.440threats to like you don't want to end up like liz truss or you know whatever and then in the united
00:13:23.420states it's the business lobby that does this um but they are responding to the same issue in a
00:13:29.500sense um they're responding to the fact that if you don't have sufficient population growth
00:13:34.840you can't have sufficient economic growth and in the case of britain for example if you don't have
00:13:40.040at least not negative economic growth you'll have a fiscal crisis you'll have a giant debt crisis
00:13:45.800so they've really digged i mean it's not a it's not a very positive message i'm giving here and
00:13:51.580i know that because it it does mean that the immigration policy is uh the immigration question
00:13:56.620is a little bit more complicated than people want to think but it's been 50 years of some of the
00:14:02.360forces that we've discussed at work politically and they've wrecked everything and yes of course
00:14:09.100you have these radical pro-immigrationists who just want immigration for the sake of immigration
00:14:13.720But I guarantee you, your average senior civil servant of the Treasury in Britain, or your average CEO of a chicken plant in the United States, they only care about the economic bottom line.
00:14:28.100And that's the main point of pressure that's being put on these governments.
00:14:32.120And I know this from, I know people working in the Trump administration, they've told me the same thing.
00:14:36.420The business lobby comes in and pushes back really hard.
00:14:39.740And they've, you know, donated to this senator or this congressman.
00:14:42.680that's how they do it and boris has admitted to the permanent undersecretary coming to him and
00:14:48.620telling him to to allow the boris wave in so i think people need to get wise to this it's not
00:14:53.780it's not a particularly pleasant message because it means it's a more complicated problem but i
00:14:58.060keep saying to people if you don't understand it you will keep getting fooled you will keep
00:15:03.140getting politicians that you vote in and they don't stop the problem and you'll never know why
00:15:07.700until boris johnson because he's just like this maybe he had a glass of wine before the interview
00:15:12.200and he just blurts out what he wasn't really supposed to say you know um a lot of people who
00:15:21.300follow this show and have followed this show for five years will have hoped when they voted for
00:15:27.040donald trump that part of the the magra agenda the america first agenda that that he was
00:15:32.880carried by their votes into power to achieve was the um was the removal as it were of the
00:15:41.520traditional GOP Chamber of Commerce alliance that was exactly one of the
00:15:47.680things he was supposed to grab by the horns and tackle Philip Pilkington stay
00:15:52.620with me just one moment I've got to give a quick shout out to the show's sponsor
00:15:57.080Axios last week put out an article suggesting saying that the annualized
00:16:07.920interest costs of America now had reached 1.2 trillion dollars that is a
00:16:16.1601.2 trillion dollars every year go towards servicing the the 40 now level
00:16:22.800of 40 trillion dollars debt and that 1.2 trillion that is only on interest
00:16:33.320repayments on the debt exceeds defense spending in America which is quite some
00:16:40.460achievement when you consider that America is the world's most successful
00:16:48.340military industrial complex even with all the defense spending going on in
00:16:53.820America America spending more money on servicing its debt than spending on
00:17:00.440defense stroke war so what is the federal government going to do about
00:17:06.200this well it's certainly not going to raise taxes to pay off the pay off the
00:17:12.560debt or meet the increasing interest repayments it's going to try to inflate
00:17:19.100that away and therefore the trends that we've all been seeing watching the the
00:17:24.680The asset inflation, that's going to continue.
00:17:30.060The value of your dollar is going to go down.
00:19:00.140Let's get back now and join Philip Pilkington.
00:19:03.700So, Philip, the other thesis, I think, in your forthcoming book,
00:19:11.760which is called Bust, The Economics of Population Decline, is this thesis.
00:19:17.460Unless we take radical action to bolster birth rates, we face a future of falling living standards, high inflation and low growth.
00:19:28.320This is the thesis that you've just been explaining out here on The War Room.
00:19:31.880What I want to ask is, what do you mean by the phrase radical action there?
00:19:37.900And perhaps, as I mentioned in your introduction, you've just finished a tour of duty in Hungary at the Danube Institute.
00:19:46.000The Hungarian government of Viktor Orban was probably the most, I think, successful in the world at promoting pro-family policies specifically aimed at raising the population of the indigenous citizens of that country, of Hungary.
00:20:11.060Hungarians were encouraged to have children.
00:20:16.000From your perch, tell me if you wouldn't mind what you mean by radical action to bolster birth rates.
00:20:23.920And did you witness anything in Hungary as a successful policy suggestion that you think can be effectively transposed over into the American or even indeed the British context?
00:20:39.340yeah so the hungarians um mainly focused on financial incentives so um for example the i
00:20:49.180think it was mothers of three children didn't have to pay income tax after they had their third child
00:20:54.880um i think they also introduced one toward the end that was women under 25 what one child didn't
00:21:00.840have to pay income tax and that was interesting because young people in hungary don't pay income
00:21:05.380taxed until they're 25 so it was a real strong incentive to like have a kid otherwise you're
00:21:09.820going to start getting taxed basically and they had other incentives like mortgage subsidies so
00:21:14.780if you wanted to buy your first house if a couple wanted to buy their first house for a family
00:21:18.840they'd get a mortgage subsidy I think they had subsidies for large automobiles for for children
00:21:24.820there was a whole host of these things and they ended up spending I think it was
00:21:28.460four percent of GDP or something on it a lot of money basically Hungary didn't have much of a
00:21:33.900welfare state it was very work first state and so instead of having a welfare state they had a family
00:21:39.540support network and the idea there was to uh disincentivize not working obviously like go get
00:21:45.860a job but you know if you want to have a family we'll give you all these benefits and so on
00:21:50.400wasn't successful um so uh there's a lot of debate on that um people look too much at like short-term
00:21:58.240movements in the birth rate in my opinion fact of the matter is hungary had us birth rates went up
00:22:03.580by about 30 percent abortions cratered which was really interesting there was no change to actual
00:22:08.620abortion legality but they they tanked after this after this thing marriages went up hungary went
00:22:14.660from the lowest rate of marriage in europe to the highest rate of marriage in europe which it still
00:22:19.340has and i kind of saw that on the ground young people especially women in their early 20s viewed
00:22:26.180marriage in a way that is unfamiliar now in the west now it wasn't always unfamiliar i'm sure to
00:22:31.460our parents generation it was quite normal but girls younger girls in Hungary like definitely
00:22:38.180wanted to get married and and they didn't they didn't have this kind of like high heels and1.00
00:22:42.720lipstick view of life where like you can put it off till you're in your 30s or whatever um and
00:22:48.680given the fact that the statistics show that it went from the lowest marriage rate in Europe to
00:22:53.400the highest that at the start of the OrbƔn administration at the end and that suggests to
00:22:58.800me that the monetary impacts were having a cultural impact and i think that's i've been
00:23:03.320trying to convince people to think of it in that way that's how the hungarian government thought of
00:23:06.700it they didn't think of it as like interest rate policy or anything like did the did the birth rate
00:23:11.840go up this year did it go up last year is it big compared to romania all of those things i think it
00:23:17.680did happen it didn't get it back up to replacement that's a very difficult task but you know it
00:23:23.020didn't go the Poland direction which is down to one one child per woman whereas Hungary is up at
00:23:28.9201.6 you know so it wasn't a perfect policy but it was having this gradual slow burn impact on the
00:23:35.060culture itself now sadly there's been an election in Hungary and I don't want to put too funny a0.63
00:23:40.880point on it but they've elected a bunch of crazy like really truly truly crazy people they've0.89
00:23:44.940undergone what my friends and I call a peasant revolution where you kind of burn down the barn0.87
00:23:49.820and then you realize there's no grain left it's a very strange phenomenon there was a lot of outside0.91
00:23:54.460influence interference and propaganda um and i think the hungarians are going to get through a
00:23:58.540very very difficult time because of the choices that they made that they were encouraged to make
00:24:02.940however you want to think of that and it is kind of turning into some sort of a liberal authoritarian
00:24:07.660dictatorship it's quite scary the guys are incompetent they're very strange people running1.00
00:24:12.140the country now like really clannish people but um i do hope that they can't do too much damage to1.00
00:24:18.620to the cultural progression that the Hungarians have had under the OrbƔn government.
00:24:23.800That said, as I said, they got up to 1.6, which is impressive for a Central European country.
00:24:47.9202.1 yeah so i mean it's always partially successful the marriage rate is the one that i really
00:24:53.340encourage people to look at though like imagine the imagine the cultural impact of doubling the
00:24:58.240marriage rate it means that every young people has to go to twice as many weddings and you know
00:25:03.420people especially young women they want to do what everyone else is doing right so if everyone else
00:25:09.060is going to the nightclub they want to go to the nightclub but if everyone else is getting married
00:25:12.500like they want to get married so um but you know it didn't get up to replacement level and i think
00:25:18.240the i think what i took away from the hungarian experience is is the i'm really in favor of the
00:25:24.240economic um incentives i just think it's the right thing to do as well even if it didn't get the
00:25:28.660birth rate up you you tax bad things and you you untax good things right that's why we tax cigarettes
00:25:35.300um so why wouldn't you give you know tax subsidies to families i mean it's the most important thing
00:25:42.060society reproducing the species is the most important thing in society right um so uh but
00:25:50.060you know i think it needs more of a cultural push too i think the kind of um you know not
00:25:55.100supposed to find a point on a hollywood degeneracy that's being spread all over the world and it's
00:25:59.300just like ruining people's lives frankly at this point it's got so disgusting um we need some sort
00:26:04.740of an alternative more positive vision of culture and the one criticism i'd have are the kind of um
00:26:10.360um conservative movement in the past couple of years is i think they've been way too ready to
00:26:15.640like um hop on this like hot patriot crap around like sydney sweeney or something like that like0.97
00:26:23.100we do actually need to go back to a more it doesn't have to be like full trad wife stuff0.92
00:26:28.540or anything like that but we need some sort of a like moderation of the culture it feels to me and
00:26:33.740and if those two things can link up that you have a an economy that encourages people to have
00:26:39.520families and at the same time you have um cultural it could be good philip pilkington stay with me
00:26:48.460i'll be back in two minutes after this short commercial break to continue the conversation
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00:31:34.060welcome back joining us still philip pilkington which changed over his uh his title for the
00:31:44.720second half of the show because he's written another book now that we're going to be diving
00:31:50.380into the collapse of global liberalism and the emergence of the post-liberal world order philip
00:31:59.320Let me just cite this thesis because I want to, it's exactly the one I want to discuss with you.
00:32:05.560You say the US and UK find themselves ill-equipped to compete with China and other non-liberal states within an emerging post-liberal order in which what really matters is industrial capacity, real politic and military strength.
00:32:26.600Only by abandoning our liberal delusions and advancing our own brand of hard-headed post-liberalism can the West survive.
00:32:39.800So I want to ask you then to expand on what you mean by that when you say that we're heading into an emerging post-liberal order.
00:32:51.340Obviously, everyone who follows the show will agree with the sentiments, but I want to hear you say it in your own words.
00:32:59.060And then I want to ask you what you intend when you say that we need to pursue a hard-headed post-liberalism in the West.
00:33:11.920Because some people will suggest if we do that, part of what the West is has, let's say, a 19th century definition of liberalism.
00:33:24.560If we ditch too much liberalism, then the good part of liberalism, but not the progressive woke part,
00:33:33.000if we end up losing some of the good part of liberalism, then the West will no longer be the West.
00:33:39.280So whatever it is we save isn't going to be the thing that we set out to save. But let's wind back a bit. In your own words, could you define what you mean by emerging post-liberal order?
00:33:51.840well to define that i think we have to have a better understanding of liberalism
00:33:56.940um i don't think liberalism is a good ideology at all i think it's a revolutionary ideology
00:34:02.060um quite similar to marxism in a lot of ways and that a lot of what we consider quote-unquote good
00:34:08.420and liberalism isn't liberal it's not from liberalism it's from some other tradition
00:34:12.700like the christian tradition mainly or from the roman legal uh tradition or from the classical
00:34:49.260The English Whigs were radicals. I mean, John Stuart Mill was a big Whig. He wanted feminism
00:34:54.920for everyone, destruction of the family, and so on. I don't think people understand what these
00:34:59.960ideas are. That's kind of my problem. 19th century Britain, for example, I keep trying to
00:35:05.720emphasize this to people, was not a liberal society. The average Victorian had Christian0.99
00:35:11.560morality. They were either a high church Anglican, or they were a low church Presbyterian or something
00:35:16.860like that um there was a revival obviously in britain uh in the victorian period of religious
00:35:22.200revival and what we associated with charles dickens novels and being nice to people and fair
00:35:27.300play and looking after the poor and all that and giving charity and all those nice things that we
00:35:32.360associate with victorian england were not liberal whatsoever they were christian principles the
00:35:37.540liberals of the period like john stewart mill were radicals who wanted to destroy family life and um
00:35:44.080and so on so we've we've become confused about this um partly because i mean the reasons are
00:35:50.520very complex but but liberals were until quite recently viewed as quite radical people um and
00:35:57.880that was certainly the case in in britain i uh so i don't i don't i mean i think the british
00:36:03.640victorian political tradition and so on of disraeli and and um lord salisbury and these
00:36:08.960kind of figures are quite interesting but they're not liberals they would have understood liberals
00:36:13.540to be John Stuart Mill, they would have understood liberals to be people who would associate
00:36:19.700themselves with socialist radicals. For example, Karl Marx got his first job writing for liberal
00:36:25.120newspapers in England. They were considered radical newspapers. They were spread around
00:36:29.580Europe trying to provoke what he would have called bourgeois revolutions and so on.
00:36:36.120That's how he got his start in journalism. He was working for a British wealthy liberal who
00:36:42.080who wanted to spread these ideas, who saw, you know, these characters in the 19th century would
00:36:46.960have seen the French Revolution as a great thing. They would have thought that, which was a liberal
00:36:51.080revolution. In fact, it wasn't a socialist revolution. So I think we've become very
00:36:54.920confused about these ideas. We've associated periods of time with an ideology. Another
00:36:59.780example maybe is America in the 1950s. Oh, well, that's a good liberal society. I don't think it's
00:37:04.680a liberal society. I think most of those people are Christians. They're definitely living in line
00:37:08.740with christian morality there is no liberal morality that's kind of an oxymoron it's not a
00:37:13.900it's not a moral based system it's a system about um contract theory with the state and um and so
00:37:20.280on and there's some even the economic aspects of liberalism predate liberalism the the original
00:37:25.680free market um arguments and so on come from uh catholic theologians of the salamanca school
00:37:32.660in the post-reformation period so this is the the counter-reformation where the catholic church
00:37:37.560steps back and tries to look at what went wrong in in in uh in europe after the reformation and
00:37:43.620one of the things they come up with is that the medieval laws on on very strict laws on usury
00:37:49.240and so on um and guild systems and so on maybe needed to be rethought a little bit you can read
00:37:55.020these early market ideas among this spanish school of jesuit theologians you know so um and the legal
00:38:01.920systems of course that that liberals used love to brag about you know we have um equality before
00:38:07.460the law or we have a jury of your peers and all this is a roman legal system all the all the laws
00:38:13.420used to be in latin right i mean i come from a legal family i remember when my grandfather would
00:38:17.940speak latin because he knew that it was a roman law based system and we forgot that and the
00:38:22.960liberals told us no this is a liberal system it's like it's not a liberal system it's roman law
00:38:27.640there were there were two things here that i i want to say firstly if you're coming at this
00:38:34.240from the point of view that fundamentally western civilization christendom is founded on christian
00:38:40.180values on the gospel i'm not you know i'm not gonna oppose that i absolutely agree that myself
00:38:46.040i've spent sort of 20 years in the field pushing precisely that that thesis um and in fact you
00:38:54.380know let's dig down on that you you mentioned the salamanca school that's often cited by
00:39:00.320Austrian school economists, and I know you're a macroeconomist
00:39:09.840specifically, but the Austrian school often highlights the Salamanca school
00:39:15.640as the earliest intellectual school promoting the ideas that would then
00:39:22.340be taken up several centuries later within the libertarian field.
00:39:27.240I do want to come back to you on this idea, however, that Whiggish liberalism was radical in the sense that we would mean it today.
00:39:37.840Because you could equally, I mean, you mentioned John Stuart Mill, you could equally argue, and liberals who thought that the French Revolution was a good thing,
00:39:47.860But you could equally cite someone like Edmund Burke, who was only ever, I mean, he's often considered to be the father of conservatism, along with Robert Peel.0.89
00:39:57.860Both of them were fundamentally Whigs.
00:40:01.800And I don't think Burke was a Whig.0.86
00:40:13.120Never sat in Parliament as a conservative.
00:40:17.860so i'm just saying that there is i don't think he was ideologically i don't think he was
00:40:23.160ideologically awake i mean burke's an interesting character and we could have a whole debate about
00:40:26.780him but i don't think he the the liberals the liberals had their philosophers and it wasn't
00:40:32.240burke it was the likes of john stewart mille it was john stewart mille's father um it was
00:40:37.460jeremy bentham it was um you know it was these guys and to my mind they're like creepy technocrats
00:40:44.200look i i'm not gonna yeah for sure but you know this is the separation of whiggism out
00:40:53.140into the basically conservative stream and the the formal political liberal stream right from
00:40:59.800from the 19th century i'm not gonna i i don't want to push back too much on on on this because
00:41:05.640it's somewhat of um of uh look and i and i would be happy to spend like an hour discussing this
00:41:13.640but i don't want to do that if because if doing that is going to mask the the point that you're
00:41:19.520that you're making that i that i think is um more fundamental to where we go right now as a culture
00:41:25.880and civilization that is to say western civilization is from if it is anything it is
00:41:31.620built on christian values um that's the important thing um that you one can argue whether there's
00:41:39.120anything redeemable from 19th century century liberalism i would probably suggest there's
00:41:46.600something redeemable and rescuable but it's not essential to the argument if if we if we lose the
00:41:51.580christianity as the basis of our culture um you know because that that is that is priority number
00:41:58.620one um but can you then okay so you said a little bit then about that about the emerging post
00:42:05.120liberal order because you know you want to reject the whole of liberalism and say it's it's a
00:42:09.860diversion not a diversion um it's it's um a corruption of the underlying christian christianity
00:42:21.040the basis of the culture absolutely fine let's accept that what do you um what do you intend
00:42:27.300Actually, let me do the second shout out to our sponsor. Then I'll come back and ask you about this hard headed post liberalism that the West needs to adapt in order to survive and compete against the anti liberal, the non liberal nations like China.0.83
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00:44:39.560usa.com forward stroke banner all right back to the final minutes of the show with
00:44:45.560philip pilkington philip um tell us then if if you wouldn't mind in the five minutes or so
00:44:53.540that we have remaining of the show what um what do you think the uk and or america needs to do in
00:45:04.580um adapting to the post-liberal order in order to compete against nations like china what what
00:45:14.360does this post hard-headed post-liberalism look like to you so the book has actually a lot of
00:45:22.360concrete policy proposals. I'm an economist. I've done policy work around government and so on. So
00:45:27.780it does have them, and I'd encourage people to read them. It goes into things about mental
00:47:11.620Do you subscribe to the view that, in fact, there's more ideological Marxism present in the West than there is in the Chinese Communist Party right now?
00:47:25.160At a day-to-day level, I've visited China a lot.
00:47:28.460There's clearly more leftist ideology in the West.
00:47:32.360China's a small C conservative society these days.
00:47:36.080It went through some turmoil, especially in the Cultural Revolution and so on.
00:47:39.520by the 2000s it had largely abandoned many of the the leftist things china's just a
00:47:45.000chinese people are very family focused they have this tradition of filial piety
00:47:48.900um it's not as individualistic a society as the west that's not the result of communism that's0.92
00:47:54.580always been the case in china and so they're reverting back to this confucian norm and it's
00:47:59.200becoming actively promoted now parts of it are getting included in the in the common in the
00:48:04.500official statements of the communist party and so on then you move to india and you have this
00:48:08.620rise of hindu nationalism india is a very complex country it was effectively run by the you know by
00:48:15.160muslims for for a number of years then it was taken over by the british and it has a very
00:48:19.280complex history but they're trying to put together some sort of an indian hindu thing which is the
00:48:24.440tradition of of india none of its realism it's really muslim and then finally turkey turkey
00:48:30.400is moving in this kind of neo-ottoman uh is it not islamist it's quite a light form of islam0.78
00:48:36.760That's always been the case in the Ottoman Empire.0.65
00:48:38.920The Ottoman Empire has never been kind of a radical Islamic civilization.
00:48:43.020It's a very moderate, sunny Islam.1.00
00:48:45.820And that's where they're moving back.1.00
00:49:02.580And the Erdogan crowd are winning out.
00:49:04.760that it's cool to be a moderate sunni muslim on on college campuses now and the and the old0.54
00:49:12.320secularist stuff from the 1920s is kind of viewed as sort of cringe so all of this is to say that
00:49:17.900the logical move for the west is to move in the same direction not to become sunni ottomans not
00:49:24.020to become confucians but to move in the direction of of dusting off our own civilization and saying
00:49:30.000hey look we lived like this for 2000 years right we've lived like well not fully but you know
00:49:35.980the people that we come from lived like this for 2000 years and then from the greco-remen tradition
00:49:40.720even longer than that well we have this tradition maybe it's time to re-embrace it i don't think
00:49:46.060this is particularly radical i think that this was this civilization was basically embedded in
00:49:51.700our societies up until you know less than 100 years ago so um so beyond the kind of policies
00:49:59.260and stuff like that and i would encourage people to look at some of the policies because sometimes
00:50:02.780the populist right is a little bit thin on policy i find but even beyond that the broader vision is
00:50:09.140more important we have to fit into this new world and it's going to be a very different world and
00:50:13.780and the power distribution in this world just because the geopolitical change that's going on
00:50:17.600right now is going to be very different but i think to find ourselves our place in that world
00:50:22.340we should revert back to our civilizational norm just as every other major civilization is doing
00:50:27.440And by the way, I think if we have a civilization, this has been my experience because I worked a little bit in track two diplomacy in Hungary, working for the Hungarian Institute of International Affairs.
00:50:37.680It's much easier for conservative Western Christians, basically, to talk to these other countries than for Western liberals.