Bowden! - 1 - Essence of the Left
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Summary
In this episode of Alt-Right Radio, host Richards spencer sits down with writer and commentator Jonathan Bowden to discuss the meaning of the left, its origins, its meaning, its history, where is it going, and related questions.
Transcript
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you're listening to alt-right radio the official podcast of alternative right.com
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an online magazine of radical traditionalism here is your host richard spencer hello everyone
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today it is a great pleasure to welcome to the program jonathan bowden jonathan probably needs
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no introduction for alt-right readers as they know him through his internet commentary at places
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like countercurrents.com as well as many of his lectures on various subjects that are available
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at youtube jonathan is a veritable renaissance man in our movement he not only is a commentator
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but he's also a novelist and a painter and perhaps his greatest gifts are for oration so jonathan
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uh welcome to the program i'm glad you're here thanks very much for having me on well how is the
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weather in mid-december over in england it's not too bad at all where i am in the south of england
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in the north of england in scotland it's uh pretty perishing by all accounts but down here it's none
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too bad well that's good well today we're going to talk about the essence of the left uh that is
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what is it what is its meaning what is its history where is it where is it going and and related
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questions and i don't think we should pussyfoot around i want to ask two big questions to begin
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the conversation and then i'm sure we can take this we can follow different strands that will
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that will lead off from these two big questions but um the two big questions are these the first is
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uh what is the left in its essence or at its core i think most europeans and americans know when they
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hear the word left they think of a variety of topics or issues and and thus the the left supports
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regulation of business or it believes in global warming or it um is uh more likely to to support
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a welfare system or or feminism or so on and so forth but i think both of us agree that the left
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is something much deeper and much bigger uh than just a a kind of related set of issues and um the
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second question which is directly related to that one is is the left a new phenomenon of the modern
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world say is it is it a product of the french revolution or uh or the french uh enlightenment or is
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it a product of say industrialization uh and things like this or is the left again something bigger and
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deeper is it is it a kind of eternal temptation um in the western world and maybe the the world in
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general uh so so jonathan let's uh what do you have a whack at at those two biggies um what is the left
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at its core i think the left at its core is the belief that equality is morally good and almost
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everything that can be done in order to sanction and achieve equality is morally efficacious uh the
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left is in all of its guises because there are multiplicity of lefts including various forms of
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liberalism at the present time that very much go under the general rubric of left of center orientations
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but all of them are very moralistic the left loves to moralize issues love to think of itself
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as morally on the right side and love to think of itself as the sort of harbinger of human liberation
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in various ways and it all stems from the belief that equality is a good that must be maximized and
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legislated for whenever possible and this means perforce that inequality is a bad that anything that's
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of etus it's anything that's hierarchical anything that sets man against man or versions of human
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beings against each other in any shape or form needs to be if not done away with then legislated for
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deconstructed shifted about a bit and changed so that the uh rising tide of equalness is always a
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apparent and a coming uh coming even more broadly into view do you think this originated in the
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enlightenment period or or the french revolution itself which of course announced equality fraternity
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and um uh what else did they announce one more i forget liberty liberty equality and fraternity right
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which are of course in some ways the three branches of uh of the modern world that we see now i mean in many
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ways one could say that the current so-called right is the kind of liberty branch battling against
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that's right equality branch but but let's go i think we can go into that more uh later but first let's
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let's start here um uh talk a little bit about the historical manifestations of the left what was it
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was it created in something like the french revolution or the enlightenment or uh industrialization
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so on and so forth yes i think in its modern form it's definitely codified i think ideas can be
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nebulous and can have a very long and even archaic history and you could argue that some of the slave
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revolts in the in the ancient world had elements about them that could be regarded as leftist in modern
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terms and certainly have been interpreted by classic communism and ideologies of that sort as they're
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having such affinities but the enlightenment and the french revolution at the end of the 18th century
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codified the left gave it a modern stamp put a form on it that can be recognized stretching from then to
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now so that it's it's got a quite definite history as a phenomenon uh the ideas of equality of social
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impact of using a government to legislate on behalf of citizens in order to achieve greater equality of
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outcome and aims those all pre-existed the 1780s and 1790s but that period of radical reorganization of
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the states as an idea certainly brought them into a sharper focus but it's important to realize i mean
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socialism as such in the french revolution was almost non-existent there were sketchy ideals about
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liberating the slaves in the west indies under the french dispensation but that didn't really come
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about and the emperor who emerged in the revolutionary period napoleon was opposed to that um there was
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no talk about the emancipation of women that was regarded as absurd by the jacobin and cordillier
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and the other big sort of sort of masonic type revolutionary clubs that dominated the early phase of the
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revolution and when it comes to equalizing property there was no concept of doing that at all
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the only property that was sequester sequestered and sort of nationalized if you will
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in modern terms was that of emigres who'd gone into the rhineland and were associated with foreign
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princes who wanted to overthrow the revolution and were part of the counter-revolution and some of their
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property was reorganized using something called the law of the 22nd priorial which was a french revolutionary
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calendar date and that legislation would later be taken up by socialists in the 19th century
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in terms of expropriating property by the state intervening in the market to take property from one
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set of citizens and give it to another but those ideas very much post-dated the french revolution
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so the french revolution was much more limited in its leftism than people imagine but the ideas of the
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left and the left itself comes from the french revolution i do believe though that left-wing
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ideas as distinct from the left have always been with us in one form or another um usually as sort
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of radical and utopian ideas that the whole world and the whole circumstances of man could be different
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that men and women could live radically different lives and it's always been a sort of a dream
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a dream a dream that's um part and parcel of certain religious urges as well that are very strong
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heretical utopian dreams during the middle ages heretical utopian dreams during the ancient world
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and heretical and utopian dreams at the margins of protestantism as well and various forms of non-conformism
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that seep into the modern left over the last 200 years the belief that everything can be different but in a
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way man is cursed by biology that biology shouldn't matter to the degree that it does
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and this takes various forms refuting the importance of biology for man's existence on earth
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or denying certain verities of human nature mortality conservatism due to age genetic and
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biological differences between humans biological differences between the sexes and so on wishing
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that the world was other than it is that human beings weren't hardwired to be egotistical territorial
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and violent for example as it's quite clearly our species is hardwired to be all of those things
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and many other things as well but um this utopian claim the belief that things can be different
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um that god meant the world to be different and from what it's turned out to be
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i think that's always been a recurrent motif but it was never taken up and standardized and put into
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rigorous format until the left got going during the french revolution do you think in some ways we're
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hardwired to have such utopian visions i mean i i i was thinking of um say even early christians and um
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paul uh who had a an apocalyptic vision i mean he thought that the second coming would occur within his
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lifetime you know if not next week or or things like that that there there's maybe some aspect of
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of european or or or probably man in general that that has this this longing to transcend himself or
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or or or or something like that yes i think i think it's a recurrent dream i think it's strongly
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associated with adolescence and strongly associated with um early sort of stirrings of social and
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political belief it's remarkable the number of people who end up with all sorts of very diverse
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positions who have a radical left face right at the beginning yes which they often repudiate pretty
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quickly because they tend to regard it as infantile or sort of slightly stupid but an enormous number of
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people who come to prominence in the literary political philosophical artistic and other
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related areas social science as well have this sort of leftist phase just for a moment it's like a sort
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of a it's like a sort of a wet dream fantasy in a way that the whole world can be constructed along
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other lines right did you have did you go through this phase not really i've always been a bit too um
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cynical for that really um it's sort of uh although uh i've anarchism as an idea through people like
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max sterner to one-sided nietzsche did interest me when i was very young so i had a look at those sort
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of utopian currents and that's a that's a creed of the left is to the left of almost everything else
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uh-huh but um and you can reach that through extreme forms of individualism um so i had a look
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at that partly to get hold of sterner's book which you could only get from anarchist outlets at that
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time there's a cambridge university press edition of the ego on its own now but uh there wasn't when i
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was young and uh but no i've never had those views in that way because i've always regarded them as
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adolescent views essentially as the views which are not um tempered by the rigor of age and maturity
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and our immature attitudes towards life yeah well i have a couple of different questions to ask you
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on this topic but let me start with one that came up um that came to me when you were speaking of the
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french revolution and uh and that is the strong masonic element and i don't i don't think we need
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to really get into conspiracy theories and all that kind of stuff as fun as that might be uh but one
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thing that i think is peculiar about our current elite um is that it it operates through a leftist
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mentality at least in terms of its civic religion its ideology that it wants to instill and and most
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everyone living under its regimes and outside them as well um and so what is talk a little bit about
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the relationship between the elites and the left how you know groups like uh the you know the the
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illuminati and and masons and so on and so forth obviously had clearly had um you know these groups
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existed it's not just a some you know wild conspiracy theory clearly had some view a utopian view of a
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secular heaven on earth or something like this um and and then also the that peculiar aspect of our
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current elites in the western world um how basically leftism uh which is you know a little it's kind of
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inherently subversive and inherently leveling and so on and so forth um can be a part of
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of the people who now are enormously wealthy and enormously powerful
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yes that's one of its interesting paradoxes of course when humans take ideas up they can morph
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and change their format in all sorts of ways and socialism and extreme wealth often go together
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i must remember gore vidal standing for u.s president on behalf of one of the tiny american socialist
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parties that was then in existence and he spent his entire campaign trail talking to very small
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ultra elite groups of near millionaires or actual millionaires because that's what the american
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socialist party consisted of at that time they had no mass base at all they were almost an invisible
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sort of club and the idea of the club the revolutionary club rather than the sort of conservative
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self-satisfied club comes back to the masonic idea the masonic idea has remained in circulation
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because it works it's a way of putting people in contact with other people that you need to meet
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it's a way of rubbing shoulders with people that might be useful to you in the future
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and all of these things if you want to run a regime of any sort that doesn't really rely on coercion
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but relies on adaption and usage and the mechanism of form whereby people meet and greet and have the
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same values and go to the same watering holes and are members of the same clubs it's a very useful
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way of gathering people together and directing various energies and all of these groups about which
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certain people on the right obsess are actually just the they're just the new right groups they're
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just the talking shop groups of the elite that runs the world they have their own little groups
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they have their own talent spotting outfits they have their own groups where they decide some upcoming
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swiss banker who's got the right sort of ideas needs to be given a bit of a push and is therefore
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invited to some conference with all expenses paid and he comes along and gives a promotional talk
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and he's taken up a network by various people and then goes away again and he'll be found later for
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some sort of um other event now that's um that's what happens at things like the cms conference and
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that sort of thing but the the people who run the world at the present time use that way of organizing
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amongst themselves because it's a very open-ended loose and reflexive way of doing it which is still hard
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enough to contain various energies and put the right people together for various projects
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and i think that type of clubbable organization goes back to the french revolution when there were
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no parties as such right there were just revolutionary clubs and committees of people
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that came together for specific purposes and often allowed quite a few loose ends they allowed quite a
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lot of debate within themselves until the terror got going there wasn't an attempt to systematize
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opinion um so a million flowers were allowed to bloom in a way until the heads of many of them would be
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cut off by the revolutionary guillotine at a later date and the idea of the club the idea of sofa
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government which is what we had over here under tony blair where traditional cabinet government was
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bypassed for this rather sort of cozy world of informal new left chats therapy groups and social
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clubs that the blairite elite favored and which i'm sure the obama elite replicates maybe in a slightly
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more stiffer way well let's talk a little bit about left and right and at the beginning of this
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conversation you mentioned that the core of the left is the more the the a vision of them or a sense of
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the moral importance of equality and in many ways the the the core of the right is a sense of the moral
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importance of inequality um i i also i i like also the the definition of the right which i um associate
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with uh paul godfrey but he certainly he's probably not the first one to say it that uh the real
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conservative conserves something he he conserves a social order and a hierarchy um oftentimes an
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aristocratic elite um but what we have today is in in america and in europe much of the modern world
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is a kind of battle between two lefts and on the left side let's say we we have people who are
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interested in in the the the avant-garde of of the leftist worldview of multiculturalism uh global
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equality you know not just on the national scale some promotion of non-whites within multinational
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corporations so on and so forth and that's being battled by a kind of older outmoded version of
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the left um which is classical liberalism and individualism in the sense of uh uh let the you
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know the free market that will distribute resources um we shouldn't treat people as groups we should
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treat them as individuals and all those ideals are fine and fine and good but uh in in a way you you
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have the battle of two different lefts and thus the world keeps shifting leftward progressively and
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inevitably and inexorably um so what do you think about that in terms of our our current situation
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where the people who claim to be conservative and claim to be rightist uh really aren't at all and are
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are impotent and and powerless and truly combating uh the forces of the left
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yes i think that's a good analysis um it's it's almost as if the talk needs to be about the death
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of conservatism rather than the reality of the left um i think conservatism has lost its um
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its right-wing credentials throughout the 20th century if you were the average attitudes in a
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conservative or center-right party in 1920 would get you expelled from a center-right party in 2010 11.
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maybe the average parts of the western world maybe the average attitudes in the center-left
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or communist party might get you expelled i'm sure a uh a social democrat from the uh first half
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of the century would be horrified at the notion of gay marriage or or women you know yes of course
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because many of them came out of methodism right and came down to forms of radical protestantism
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and also had sort of plebiscitary working class democrat sort of elements that were often deeply
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normative and deeply socially conservative uh whether they have a christian stamp or not
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so yes that's that's indeed true um the marginalization of all forms of conservatism forms
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of upper class middle class and lower or working class conservatism throughout the 20th century
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is part of the triumph of the left and triumph of various versions of the left if you consider
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libertarianism which has taken over the right of most center-right parties certainly in the anglophone
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world in britain in the united states and canada to a degree the right of the accredited conservative
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party the republicans in the states is now virtually co-determinist with what used to be and is still
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called libertarianism but libertarianism isn't really socially conservative at all in almost
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any respect although as an individual you can choose to be socially conservative if you if you wish
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in accordance with that ideology but the ideology itself is deeply socially liberal and indeed at
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times is to the left of people who are further left on socioeconomic issues um so the the triumph of
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the left is the death of the right but you you also have to factor into this situation the european
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angle which is which is slightly different to the united states because unlike the us there were very
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large and very successful socialist and communist movements in western europe through most of the 20th
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century the communist movements only died out in the last 20 years of the 20th century you know
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there were communists in the french government in the early 1980s um there were only minister of
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transport and that sort of thing but mitchin had to include them in order to get a parliamentary
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coalition together and that old left that sort of dinosaur left in contemporary terms is in despair
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because they think the whole world's gone against them and everything's right wing and capitalism which
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they associate university with the right is triumphant and every form of socialism and progressivism
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has sold out to capitalist interests and that they're nowhere and that they you know the tide has
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receded and gone out on the beach and they're basically historically bereft huddled together
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not as great masses anymore but as tiny shriveled little groups that no one bothers even to debate
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with anymore and that's also true the old communistic left socialist current has died it died in the united
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states in the middle of the 20th century except in relation to certain issues like black rights and
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that sort of thing where it always had a certain currency but it it took another 50 years for it to
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die in western europe eastern europe of course didn't have a choice because it was ruled by
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stalinist satellite parties of soviet occupation until the collapse in 1990 but you've got this paradox
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that the left has lost one definition of it has lost completely the belief in state socialism the
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belief in the nationalization of the means of production distribution and exchange the belief
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in extreme intervention in the market to so skew the market that it has a different outcome completely to
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what was envisaged by the market founders those ideas have gone and yet the left is triumphant in relation
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to the forces of the old right in almost all areas of social and cultural policy i think this is the big
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this is the big issue at our time really why the traditional right associated with christianity
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and conservatism in many people's minds has so utterly failed and it's been outmaneuvered by the
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forces of the center-left and effectively neutered and destroyed by them
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i agree i i think um just to add on one one note to that i i think the uh the forces of the left have
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recognized that it's not always a good idea to literally nationalize business in the sense that
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um these bureaucracies are usually aren't as efficient as you know an enterprise but they they do want to
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control it and they want to inform it and to make sure that capitalism kind of bends in their direction
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uh so to speak and they've been wildly successful at that um so in in some ways that older that
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dinosaur left the you know outright communist um they they you know they they think they've lost
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everything but they they just haven't recognized that the left keeps you know reinventing itself every uh
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every decade or so and that they've actually uh uh been quite triumphant uh but you know keeping
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keeping that in mind um what are ways that we can confront this within our own as rightist uh within
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our own historical situation uh ie we're you know we're out of power and we're uh scribbling on various
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websites and things like that you know i i'm reminded of uh of one thing about the conservative movement
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in the united states which always bothers me um which is that they they like to attack their enemies in
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terms that don't really make sense and one of them that particularly bothers me is this notion that
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um the left are moral relativists that they have no morals or something like that and i i've always
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thought this was uh utterly uh incorrect uh that the the left is based on some kind of deep powerful
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morality um and and moreover i think there's a kind of relativism to a a true conservatism in the sense
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that you conserve and defend you and your own uh your people your civilization your way of life and
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and it it your way of life you might think it's better and rational but you be at the end of the
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day you conserve it because you live there uh it's yours and uh i i've always thought that that that
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really because the right articulates its criticism in this wrong manner that it's it's kind of rendered
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powerless but but but keeping something like that in mind how do we how can we in our own limited
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means in our own small way um how can we really confront um the the the left writ large
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i think you've got to um that's a very big topic but i think you've got to just step back from it for
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one moment and look at why the the traditional conservative right in the united states chose
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moral relativism as the ground upon which to fight rather sort of slippery sort of shale and sad like
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and sandy ground as you say and the reason for that was because it wanted to base its own rejection of
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the left in all of its forms on something which it thought was hard something which it thought would uh
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would yield good fruit something which it thought wasn't relatively minded and that was the christian
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religion because if you have a metaphysically objectivist view and you have an absolute view
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of the christian revelation particularly in the protestant sense in the text of the bible you have
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something that's hard you have something that's sort of um not to be trammeled over that you can
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confront all the forms of wishy-washy liberalism with going on out through to the harder more sort of uh
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uh structured forms of the left that exist alongside it and to its left side and in a way of course by
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defining themselves as a christian conservatism uh they've done themselves a disservice now you could
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say that's an intelligent tactic in a society where unless you are pronounced christian it's probably
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impossible to get elected to a mainstream platform in the united states whereas in in western europe uh
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outside of catholic countries um to be a professing christian is an extreme electoral disadvantage
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because the religion has collapsed to such a degree in in a society like my own
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where people go out of their way to deny a christian inheritance uh the complete opposite of the united
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states even though the politics of the two areas are very similar in many ways i think uh the question
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about how the right fights back is one of morals and values uh what the left has done in successfully
00:29:44.740
morphing into endorsing and trying to manage a form of left-wing capitalism because all of the modern
00:29:51.620
west societies are largely left-wing capitalist societies now what they've done is that they've retreated to
00:29:58.500
their core values and said that the form of the society that you adopt naked state ownership and
00:30:05.140
proprietorialism is out but coercion of business uh in order for it to adopt the correct values if it
00:30:13.620
isn't prepared to adopt the correct values itself is in um those sorts of ideas are based upon
00:30:20.820
the primary notion that equality is morally good and needs to be enforced and you can do that civically
00:30:28.740
culturally psychologically um sociologically um as well as just through blunt socioeconomic instruments
00:30:36.420
like nationalization which now don't work most state socialist parties in western europe have engaged
00:30:42.580
in one or more privatizations in recent lifetime that's no longer the issue now the issue is what you
00:30:49.380
enforce on the civic space and you enforce on the civic space the the moral notion of equality is
00:30:56.100
goodness and the right does not have a coherent fight back on that because partly because of
00:31:02.820
christianity itself a large number of people on the conservative brand way of roster or way of looking at
00:31:11.060
things do not feel comfortable about arguing for naked inequality do not feel comfortable about
00:31:19.060
arguing for naked hierarchy do not feel comfortable in arguing from an upper bourgeois or aristocratic
00:31:26.980
position as it once was and in a democratic society feel there's an increasing deficit
00:31:33.460
to anyone who argues for rank uh in egalitarianism and it's because the right is being morally defeated in
00:31:41.780
its mainstream forms that it's powerless and quivering in relation to the left
00:31:47.940
yes i i think just to add on to that i think one quite unfortunate phenomenon is the
00:31:53.540
leftward transformation of christianity um you can see that uh to be frank in the catholic church you can see
00:32:00.420
that in in mainline protestantism you can you can see uh uh even that and in the kind of you know
00:32:07.780
evangelical more emotional product protestantism which is popular in the in the american south and
00:32:14.180
and midwest um that they take they they they swallow the leftist uh you know pill and and they they think that
00:32:24.020
their bible is the ultimate foundation of equality and things like that despite the fact of course that
00:32:30.180
written within it are instigations for slaves to return to their masters and so on and so forth
00:32:35.060
um but i i think in in many ways the christianity over the past 50 years and maybe even longer
00:32:40.900
um has has become a essentially a kind of left-wing religion in a way in a very unfortunate yes
00:32:49.540
yes very much so most christian groups in western societies where the influence of the religion is much
00:32:54.820
lesser than the united states resemble socialist clubs with the religion added on yeah if you go to
00:33:01.140
an anglican church which is a cfc church church of england establishment here in britain um episcopalian
00:33:08.740
would be the sort of um synonym in the u.s right uh it will all when you go in it will all be about the
00:33:15.380
third world it will all be about the need for equality it will all be about the rights of refugees
00:33:19.780
it will all be about um the agenda of political correctness and that's before you get through the
00:33:26.420
lobby or the anteroom of the church to the to the to the place where the worship is to take place
00:33:31.620
so there is a sort of um a socialist spin without the atheism and materialism that's part of the
00:33:40.020
socialist attitude as soon as you go in i think if this all comes back to the issue of uh debate about
00:33:46.100
morals and values and this is where the right has been fundamentally unclear and hesitant and has felt
00:33:52.980
itself to be morally defeated uh i think john has to bring in the reality of the second world war here as
00:33:59.140
well um the morality of the far left was never defeated the far left was defeated in all sorts
00:34:06.500
of ways and the morality of state socialist and communist societies were defeated because of the
00:34:12.020
atrocities that they went in for primarily against dissidents and against those they reduced to slave labor
00:34:18.900
and against uh enemy nationalities as they were perceived in terms of the structures that were
00:34:24.820
built up across nations within the various communist and state socialist blocs uh when i was a student
00:34:32.580
say 30 years ago there would be an enormous plethora of far left organizations in almost every university
00:34:38.900
and college in this country you know freshest fair there would be trotskyist groups there would even be
00:34:45.780
the odd stalinist group not many then but there would be the old one there would be sort of left
00:34:52.180
socialist groups that were just the one side of them before you reach the british labor party's left
00:34:56.820
wing and so on those none of those organizations exist now that's only 20 to 30 years that entire
00:35:03.300
area has been mocked up but what's happened is that the values that the left has stood for have not been
00:35:09.860
defeated they've actually become stronger the left the far left has collapsed into liberalism
00:35:15.540
has lost its harsh stalinist and brutal features and has become part of a hazy continuum of the belief
00:35:24.020
in love and equality which cannot be gainsaid and the center right feels it can't gainsay that and
00:35:32.900
that's why each generation that's passed it's given ground to the forces of the center left to such a degree
00:35:39.380
now that it's become slightly indistinguishable from it it's just a slightly more conservative form of
00:35:44.980
management of what exists right well jonathan just to to bring this really fascinating um discussion to
00:35:55.220
a close how can we on the right articulate ourselves what what should we be saying and and i and obviously
00:36:02.820
we're we're both well aware that we have limited means at the moment and um things like that but
00:36:09.620
how should we be articulating our world view uh for people that that makes it attractive and and that
00:36:16.260
also calls upon that eternal essence of the right that that was there long before certainly the um the
00:36:24.900
happenstance of the uh the the right and left seating in french revolutionary parliament how do we
00:36:30.100
evoke uh that that real right that eternal energy that that that that animates every every true and
00:36:44.660
that's a difficult one i think the i think the way to do it is to confront the left on their own ground
00:36:50.420
where the center right and the forces of conservatism have largely given up unless the forces of conservatism
00:36:56.820
are so conservative that they're not even regarded as part of establishmentarian conservatism any longer
00:37:03.460
um and i think that is to confront political correctness which is the linguistic grammar
00:37:09.300
of um the contemporary left you have a large swathe of opinion now from the center of conservative
00:37:16.100
parties like the republicans all all the way over to the far left and back again that morally are in
00:37:22.260
agreement on politically correct matters yes the right has all more or the moderate right has all
00:37:27.220
sorts of problems with that but it nevertheless stops the cap and touches the forelock to political
00:37:32.980
correctness but you have to oppose political correctness in a manner which is seen to be morally efficacious
00:37:39.060
if you were to attract into your ranks people other than the usual suspects and the people who were
00:37:45.300
always going to be right wing come no matter what yeah i think if you should achieve large-scale social
00:37:50.740
conversions um to an extent that is required at this time and going forward into towards the middle of
00:37:58.180
this century you will need to do what the left did when they provided a grammar for their own sensibility
00:38:04.820
that political correctness is a is a is a cappy-clappy quite tight-knit set of uh encoded and rather
00:38:12.260
puritanical ideals about what's wrong and what's right in a secular morality and in some ways the
00:38:19.780
right needs to create a political soundness a political correctness of its own it needs to create
00:38:26.340
uh sort of two legs good for sort of four legs good two legs bags of animal farm scenario in reverse
00:38:34.020
it needs to think quite deeply about moral philosophy which is where the left started their purging of
00:38:40.580
the institutions they decided a long time ago what are the essence of our ideas how can they be boiled
00:38:48.420
down to a compost which is assimilable by enormously large and disparate numbers of people and how can the
00:38:55.940
right be dished by making its own ideas appear archaic or authoritarian or old-fashioned or unpleasant
00:39:06.980
or against the grain of the age or not nice to people or unduly exclusive and intolerant and so on and
00:39:18.260
they've done pretty good job in demonizing not just the far right which is regarded as a demonic force
00:39:24.820
in western society now but in demonizing conservatism itself and it's it's partly because of the fear of the
00:39:34.660
far right the fear that if the right actually fights against the left it will have to use ideas which
00:39:40.100
are radically right-wing at least philosophically it will have to touch those ideas at least
00:39:45.860
philosophically and if it does that it becomes embroiled again with all of those issues that go
00:39:51.940
back to the second global war of the 20th century and that's the last thing conservatism masquerading as
00:39:59.060
anti-communism amongst other things ever wanted to do but um it's deeper even than that a sort of
00:40:05.380
squeamishness about all that the deeper thing is the morality of it and the fact that um
00:40:14.100
that moral inequality is a goodness yeah that individual inequality is a goodness that group-based
00:40:20.980
individual inequality is a goodness that group inequality is a goodness is something that almost
00:40:26.980
no mainstream conservative politician could put in unadulterated terms and that's because they feel
00:40:33.300
the moral pressure of not doing so they feel the moral pressure from the other side is so intense
00:40:38.820
that they can't live or get away in the media space we're doing so only when they feel comfortable
00:40:46.180
with doing so will be that will there be a turn away from the morality that came in in the 1960s across
00:40:54.420
the western world when the sort of soft left power reached its zenith and then marched generationally
00:41:01.860
through the institutions i agree jonathan and i i think you're going to have a major role to play in
00:41:09.060
the formation of this new grammar and vocabulary of inequality of the right so i would i would like to
00:41:18.340
thank you for being on the program i'd certainly love to do it again i know there were a um a number
00:41:23.700
of other topics that i'd love to uh talk with you about so i hope you can come on the podcast again in