RadixJournal - Bowden! - 1 - Essence of the Left

00:00:00.000 you're listening to alt-right radio the official podcast of alternative right.com

00:00:18.800 an online magazine of radical traditionalism here is your host richard spencer hello everyone

00:00:26.940 today it is a great pleasure to welcome to the program jonathan bowden jonathan probably needs

00:00:33.920 no introduction for alt-right readers as they know him through his internet commentary at places

00:00:40.600 like countercurrents.com as well as many of his lectures on various subjects that are available

00:00:48.040 at youtube jonathan is a veritable renaissance man in our movement he not only is a commentator

00:00:55.160 but he's also a novelist and a painter and perhaps his greatest gifts are for oration so jonathan

00:01:03.200 uh welcome to the program i'm glad you're here thanks very much for having me on well how is the

00:01:09.400 weather in mid-december over in england it's not too bad at all where i am in the south of england

00:01:16.060 in the north of england in scotland it's uh pretty perishing by all accounts but down here it's none

00:01:21.500 too bad well that's good well today we're going to talk about the essence of the left uh that is

00:01:30.300 what is it what is its meaning what is its history where is it where is it going and and related

00:01:36.740 questions and i don't think we should pussyfoot around i want to ask two big questions to begin

00:01:44.780 the conversation and then i'm sure we can take this we can follow different strands that will

00:01:51.420 that will lead off from these two big questions but um the two big questions are these the first is

00:01:57.620 uh what is the left in its essence or at its core i think most europeans and americans know when they

00:02:06.920 hear the word left they think of a variety of topics or issues and and thus the the left supports

00:02:15.340 regulation of business or it believes in global warming or it um is uh more likely to to support

00:02:24.740 a welfare system or or feminism or so on and so forth but i think both of us agree that the left

00:02:31.880 is something much deeper and much bigger uh than just a a kind of related set of issues and um the

00:02:39.500 second question which is directly related to that one is is the left a new phenomenon of the modern

00:02:49.380 world say is it is it a product of the french revolution or uh or the french uh enlightenment or is

00:02:56.080 it a product of say industrialization uh and things like this or is the left again something bigger and

00:03:05.380 deeper is it is it a kind of eternal temptation um in the western world and maybe the the world in

00:03:12.640 general uh so so jonathan let's uh what do you have a whack at at those two biggies um what is the left

00:03:19.400 at its core i think the left at its core is the belief that equality is morally good and almost

00:03:27.240 everything that can be done in order to sanction and achieve equality is morally efficacious uh the

00:03:33.760 left is in all of its guises because there are multiplicity of lefts including various forms of

00:03:40.580 liberalism at the present time that very much go under the general rubric of left of center orientations

00:03:47.380 but all of them are very moralistic the left loves to moralize issues love to think of itself

00:03:53.540 as morally on the right side and love to think of itself as the sort of harbinger of human liberation

00:03:59.740 in various ways and it all stems from the belief that equality is a good that must be maximized and

00:04:08.000 legislated for whenever possible and this means perforce that inequality is a bad that anything that's

00:04:15.060 of etus it's anything that's hierarchical anything that sets man against man or versions of human

00:04:21.940 beings against each other in any shape or form needs to be if not done away with then legislated for

00:04:30.100 deconstructed shifted about a bit and changed so that the uh rising tide of equalness is always a

00:04:39.300 apparent and a coming uh coming even more broadly into view do you think this originated in the

00:04:47.300 enlightenment period or or the french revolution itself which of course announced equality fraternity

00:04:54.420 and um uh what else did they announce one more i forget liberty liberty equality and fraternity right

00:05:01.940 which are of course in some ways the three branches of uh of the modern world that we see now i mean in many

00:05:08.260 ways one could say that the current so-called right is the kind of liberty branch battling against

00:05:14.660 that's right equality branch but but let's go i think we can go into that more uh later but first let's

00:05:20.020 let's start here um uh talk a little bit about the historical manifestations of the left what was it

00:05:27.060 was it created in something like the french revolution or the enlightenment or uh industrialization

00:05:31.780 so on and so forth yes i think in its modern form it's definitely codified i think ideas can be

00:05:38.820 nebulous and can have a very long and even archaic history and you could argue that some of the slave

00:05:44.260 revolts in the in the ancient world had elements about them that could be regarded as leftist in modern

00:05:50.340 terms and certainly have been interpreted by classic communism and ideologies of that sort as they're

00:05:56.580 having such affinities but the enlightenment and the french revolution at the end of the 18th century

00:06:02.980 codified the left gave it a modern stamp put a form on it that can be recognized stretching from then to

00:06:09.060 now so that it's it's got a quite definite history as a phenomenon uh the ideas of equality of social

00:06:17.460 impact of using a government to legislate on behalf of citizens in order to achieve greater equality of

00:06:24.260 outcome and aims those all pre-existed the 1780s and 1790s but that period of radical reorganization of

00:06:34.260 the states as an idea certainly brought them into a sharper focus but it's important to realize i mean

00:06:40.900 socialism as such in the french revolution was almost non-existent there were sketchy ideals about

00:06:47.140 liberating the slaves in the west indies under the french dispensation but that didn't really come

00:06:52.340 about and the emperor who emerged in the revolutionary period napoleon was opposed to that um there was

00:06:59.300 no talk about the emancipation of women that was regarded as absurd by the jacobin and cordillier

00:07:05.460 and the other big sort of sort of masonic type revolutionary clubs that dominated the early phase of the

00:07:12.980 revolution and when it comes to equalizing property there was no concept of doing that at all

00:07:20.820 the only property that was sequester sequestered and sort of nationalized if you will

00:07:26.900 in modern terms was that of emigres who'd gone into the rhineland and were associated with foreign

00:07:32.260 princes who wanted to overthrow the revolution and were part of the counter-revolution and some of their

00:07:37.300 property was reorganized using something called the law of the 22nd priorial which was a french revolutionary

00:07:44.020 calendar date and that legislation would later be taken up by socialists in the 19th century

00:07:50.660 in terms of expropriating property by the state intervening in the market to take property from one

00:07:55.860 set of citizens and give it to another but those ideas very much post-dated the french revolution

00:08:02.260 so the french revolution was much more limited in its leftism than people imagine but the ideas of the

00:08:07.940 left and the left itself comes from the french revolution i do believe though that left-wing

00:08:14.420 ideas as distinct from the left have always been with us in one form or another um usually as sort

00:08:21.700 of radical and utopian ideas that the whole world and the whole circumstances of man could be different

00:08:28.900 that men and women could live radically different lives and it's always been a sort of a dream

00:08:33.620 a dream a dream that's um part and parcel of certain religious urges as well that are very strong

00:08:41.700 heretical utopian dreams during the middle ages heretical utopian dreams during the ancient world 0.54

00:08:48.580 and heretical and utopian dreams at the margins of protestantism as well and various forms of non-conformism

00:08:56.340 that seep into the modern left over the last 200 years the belief that everything can be different but in a

00:09:03.220 way man is cursed by biology that biology shouldn't matter to the degree that it does

00:09:09.540 and this takes various forms refuting the importance of biology for man's existence on earth

00:09:15.140 or denying certain verities of human nature mortality conservatism due to age genetic and

00:09:23.460 biological differences between humans biological differences between the sexes and so on wishing

00:09:30.500 that the world was other than it is that human beings weren't hardwired to be egotistical territorial

00:09:37.140 and violent for example as it's quite clearly our species is hardwired to be all of those things

00:09:43.140 and many other things as well but um this utopian claim the belief that things can be different

00:09:51.780 um that god meant the world to be different and from what it's turned out to be

00:09:56.420 i think that's always been a recurrent motif but it was never taken up and standardized and put into

00:10:03.620 rigorous format until the left got going during the french revolution do you think in some ways we're

00:10:10.740 hardwired to have such utopian visions i mean i i i was thinking of um say even early christians and um

00:10:18.980 paul uh who had a an apocalyptic vision i mean he thought that the second coming would occur within his

00:10:25.860 lifetime you know if not next week or or things like that that there there's maybe some aspect of

00:10:32.260 of european or or or probably man in general that that has this this longing to transcend himself or

00:10:40.740 or or or or something like that yes i think i think it's a recurrent dream i think it's strongly

00:10:46.820 associated with adolescence and strongly associated with um early sort of stirrings of social and

00:10:55.620 political belief it's remarkable the number of people who end up with all sorts of very diverse

00:11:00.260 positions who have a radical left face right at the beginning yes which they often repudiate pretty 0.96

00:11:07.620 quickly because they tend to regard it as infantile or sort of slightly stupid but an enormous number of 0.87

00:11:14.980 people who come to prominence in the literary political philosophical artistic and other 0.91

00:11:21.220 related areas social science as well have this sort of leftist phase just for a moment it's like a sort

00:11:28.660 of a it's like a sort of a wet dream fantasy in a way that the whole world can be constructed along

00:11:33.940 other lines right did you have did you go through this phase not really i've always been a bit too um

00:11:41.060 cynical for that really um it's sort of uh although uh i've anarchism as an idea through people like

00:11:54.180 max sterner to one-sided nietzsche did interest me when i was very young so i had a look at those sort

00:12:01.780 of utopian currents and that's a that's a creed of the left is to the left of almost everything else

00:12:06.500 uh-huh but um and you can reach that through extreme forms of individualism um so i had a look

00:12:16.420 at that partly to get hold of sterner's book which you could only get from anarchist outlets at that

00:12:22.100 time there's a cambridge university press edition of the ego on its own now but uh there wasn't when i

00:12:28.500 was young and uh but no i've never had those views in that way because i've always regarded them as

00:12:37.380 adolescent views essentially as the views which are not um tempered by the rigor of age and maturity

00:12:45.220 and our immature attitudes towards life yeah well i have a couple of different questions to ask you

00:12:51.700 on this topic but let me start with one that came up um that came to me when you were speaking of the

00:12:57.060 french revolution and uh and that is the strong masonic element and i don't i don't think we need

00:13:03.620 to really get into conspiracy theories and all that kind of stuff as fun as that might be uh but one

00:13:09.700 thing that i think is peculiar about our current elite um is that it it operates through a leftist

00:13:18.980 mentality at least in terms of its civic religion its ideology that it wants to instill and and most

00:13:26.420 everyone living under its regimes and outside them as well um and so what is talk a little bit about

00:13:33.540 the relationship between the elites and the left how you know groups like uh the you know the the

00:13:41.940 illuminati and and masons and so on and so forth obviously had clearly had um you know these groups

00:13:47.300 existed it's not just a some you know wild conspiracy theory clearly had some view a utopian view of a

00:13:54.020 secular heaven on earth or something like this um and and then also the that peculiar aspect of our

00:14:01.540 current elites in the western world um how basically leftism uh which is you know a little it's kind of

00:14:11.460 inherently subversive and inherently leveling and so on and so forth um can be a part of

00:14:18.180 of the people who now are enormously wealthy and enormously powerful

00:14:26.260 yes that's one of its interesting paradoxes of course when humans take ideas up they can morph

00:14:31.700 and change their format in all sorts of ways and socialism and extreme wealth often go together

00:14:38.500 i must remember gore vidal standing for u.s president on behalf of one of the tiny american socialist

00:14:44.980 parties that was then in existence and he spent his entire campaign trail talking to very small

00:14:51.540 ultra elite groups of near millionaires or actual millionaires because that's what the american

00:14:56.740 socialist party consisted of at that time they had no mass base at all they were almost an invisible

00:15:02.340 sort of club and the idea of the club the revolutionary club rather than the sort of conservative

00:15:10.180 self-satisfied club comes back to the masonic idea the masonic idea has remained in circulation

00:15:17.060 because it works it's a way of putting people in contact with other people that you need to meet

00:15:22.740 it's a way of rubbing shoulders with people that might be useful to you in the future

00:15:28.340 and all of these things if you want to run a regime of any sort that doesn't really rely on coercion

00:15:34.420 but relies on adaption and usage and the mechanism of form whereby people meet and greet and have the

00:15:43.140 same values and go to the same watering holes and are members of the same clubs it's a very useful

00:15:49.620 way of gathering people together and directing various energies and all of these groups about which

00:15:56.020 certain people on the right obsess are actually just the they're just the new right groups they're

00:16:01.620 just the talking shop groups of the elite that runs the world they have their own little groups

00:16:08.100 they have their own talent spotting outfits they have their own groups where they decide some upcoming

00:16:13.860 swiss banker who's got the right sort of ideas needs to be given a bit of a push and is therefore

00:16:20.020 invited to some conference with all expenses paid and he comes along and gives a promotional talk

00:16:27.140 and he's taken up a network by various people and then goes away again and he'll be found later for

00:16:33.860 some sort of um other event now that's um that's what happens at things like the cms conference and

00:16:42.740 that sort of thing but the the people who run the world at the present time use that way of organizing

00:16:48.500 amongst themselves because it's a very open-ended loose and reflexive way of doing it which is still hard

00:16:55.140 enough to contain various energies and put the right people together for various projects

00:17:01.860 and i think that type of clubbable organization goes back to the french revolution when there were

00:17:07.860 no parties as such right there were just revolutionary clubs and committees of people

00:17:13.300 that came together for specific purposes and often allowed quite a few loose ends they allowed quite a

00:17:19.380 lot of debate within themselves until the terror got going there wasn't an attempt to systematize

00:17:26.180 opinion um so a million flowers were allowed to bloom in a way until the heads of many of them would be

00:17:33.300 cut off by the revolutionary guillotine at a later date and the idea of the club the idea of sofa

00:17:41.460 government which is what we had over here under tony blair where traditional cabinet government was

00:17:46.420 bypassed for this rather sort of cozy world of informal new left chats therapy groups and social

00:17:55.220 clubs that the blairite elite favored and which i'm sure the obama elite replicates maybe in a slightly

00:18:02.420 more stiffer way well let's talk a little bit about left and right and at the beginning of this

00:18:12.340 conversation you mentioned that the core of the left is the more the the a vision of them or a sense of

00:18:21.140 the moral importance of equality and in many ways the the the core of the right is a sense of the moral

00:18:29.780 importance of inequality um i i also i i like also the the definition of the right which i um associate

00:18:38.100 with uh paul godfrey but he certainly he's probably not the first one to say it that uh the real

00:18:43.060 conservative conserves something he he conserves a social order and a hierarchy um oftentimes an

00:18:50.260 aristocratic elite um but what we have today is in in america and in europe much of the modern world

00:19:00.180 is a kind of battle between two lefts and on the left side let's say we we have people who are

00:19:08.660 interested in in the the the avant-garde of of the leftist worldview of multiculturalism uh global

00:19:16.180 equality you know not just on the national scale some promotion of non-whites within multinational

00:19:23.060 corporations so on and so forth and that's being battled by a kind of older outmoded version of

00:19:31.140 the left um which is classical liberalism and individualism in the sense of uh uh let the you

00:19:38.500 know the free market that will distribute resources um we shouldn't treat people as groups we should

00:19:44.100 treat them as individuals and all those ideals are fine and fine and good but uh in in a way you you

00:19:51.620 have the battle of two different lefts and thus the world keeps shifting leftward progressively and

00:19:59.220 inevitably and inexorably um so what do you think about that in terms of our our current situation

00:20:06.500 where the people who claim to be conservative and claim to be rightist uh really aren't at all and are

00:20:14.420 are impotent and and powerless and truly combating uh the forces of the left

00:20:21.620 yes i think that's a good analysis um it's it's almost as if the talk needs to be about the death

00:20:27.700 of conservatism rather than the reality of the left um i think conservatism has lost its um

00:20:35.940 its right-wing credentials throughout the 20th century if you were the average attitudes in a

00:20:41.460 conservative or center-right party in 1920 would get you expelled from a center-right party in 2010 11.

00:20:50.500 maybe the average parts of the western world maybe the average attitudes in the center-left

00:20:56.020 or communist party might get you expelled i'm sure a uh a social democrat from the uh first half

00:21:02.660 of the century would be horrified at the notion of gay marriage or or women you know yes of course 1.00

00:21:08.900 because many of them came out of methodism right and came down to forms of radical protestantism

00:21:14.100 and also had sort of plebiscitary working class democrat sort of elements that were often deeply

00:21:20.980 normative and deeply socially conservative uh whether they have a christian stamp or not

00:21:26.500 so yes that's that's indeed true um the marginalization of all forms of conservatism forms

00:21:32.260 of upper class middle class and lower or working class conservatism throughout the 20th century

00:21:37.940 is part of the triumph of the left and triumph of various versions of the left if you consider

00:21:44.740 libertarianism which has taken over the right of most center-right parties certainly in the anglophone

00:21:50.660 world in britain in the united states and canada to a degree the right of the accredited conservative

00:21:57.540 party the republicans in the states is now virtually co-determinist with what used to be and is still

00:22:03.860 called libertarianism but libertarianism isn't really socially conservative at all in almost

00:22:09.460 any respect although as an individual you can choose to be socially conservative if you if you wish

00:22:15.380 in accordance with that ideology but the ideology itself is deeply socially liberal and indeed at

00:22:21.220 times is to the left of people who are further left on socioeconomic issues um so the the triumph of

00:22:29.860 the left is the death of the right but you you also have to factor into this situation the european

00:22:34.420 angle which is which is slightly different to the united states because unlike the us there were very

00:22:41.780 large and very successful socialist and communist movements in western europe through most of the 20th

00:22:47.540 century the communist movements only died out in the last 20 years of the 20th century you know

00:22:53.780 there were communists in the french government in the early 1980s um there were only minister of

00:22:59.060 transport and that sort of thing but mitchin had to include them in order to get a parliamentary

00:23:03.220 coalition together and that old left that sort of dinosaur left in contemporary terms is in despair

00:23:12.660 because they think the whole world's gone against them and everything's right wing and capitalism which

00:23:17.780 they associate university with the right is triumphant and every form of socialism and progressivism

00:23:24.020 has sold out to capitalist interests and that they're nowhere and that they you know the tide has

00:23:29.940 receded and gone out on the beach and they're basically historically bereft huddled together

00:23:36.180 not as great masses anymore but as tiny shriveled little groups that no one bothers even to debate

00:23:41.220 with anymore and that's also true the old communistic left socialist current has died it died in the united

00:23:51.700 states in the middle of the 20th century except in relation to certain issues like black rights and

00:23:57.780 that sort of thing where it always had a certain currency but it it took another 50 years for it to

00:24:04.100 die in western europe eastern europe of course didn't have a choice because it was ruled by

00:24:09.300 stalinist satellite parties of soviet occupation until the collapse in 1990 but you've got this paradox

00:24:17.780 that the left has lost one definition of it has lost completely the belief in state socialism the

00:24:23.860 belief in the nationalization of the means of production distribution and exchange the belief

00:24:28.980 in extreme intervention in the market to so skew the market that it has a different outcome completely to

00:24:34.580 what was envisaged by the market founders those ideas have gone and yet the left is triumphant in relation

00:24:42.020 to the forces of the old right in almost all areas of social and cultural policy i think this is the big

00:24:50.580 this is the big issue at our time really why the traditional right associated with christianity

00:24:57.060 and conservatism in many people's minds has so utterly failed and it's been outmaneuvered by the

00:25:02.980 forces of the center-left and effectively neutered and destroyed by them

00:25:06.740 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

00:25:16.020 recognized that it's not always a good idea to literally nationalize business in the sense that

00:25:22.180 um these bureaucracies are usually aren't as efficient as you know an enterprise but they they do want to

00:25:28.420 control it and they want to inform it and to make sure that capitalism kind of bends in their direction

00:25:35.940 uh so to speak and they've been wildly successful at that um so in in some ways that older that

00:25:41.860 dinosaur left the you know outright communist um they they you know they they think they've lost

00:25:48.180 everything but they they just haven't recognized that the left keeps you know reinventing itself every uh

00:25:54.340 every decade or so and that they've actually uh uh been quite triumphant uh but you know keeping

00:26:00.500 keeping that in mind um what are ways that we can confront this within our own as rightist uh within

00:26:10.660 our own historical situation uh ie we're you know we're out of power and we're uh scribbling on various

00:26:17.380 websites and things like that you know i i'm reminded of uh of one thing about the conservative movement

00:26:22.900 in the united states which always bothers me um which is that they they like to attack their enemies in

00:26:29.380 terms that don't really make sense and one of them that particularly bothers me is this notion that

00:26:34.500 um the left are moral relativists that they have no morals or something like that and i i've always

00:26:40.420 thought this was uh utterly uh incorrect uh that the the left is based on some kind of deep powerful

00:26:49.460 morality um and and moreover i think there's a kind of relativism to a a true conservatism in the sense

00:26:58.100 that you conserve and defend you and your own uh your people your civilization your way of life and

00:27:05.540 and it it your way of life you might think it's better and rational but you be at the end of the

00:27:10.020 day you conserve it because you live there uh it's yours and uh i i've always thought that that that

00:27:16.260 really because the right articulates its criticism in this wrong manner that it's it's kind of rendered

00:27:23.060 powerless but but but keeping something like that in mind how do we how can we in our own limited

00:27:30.420 means in our own small way um how can we really confront um the the the left writ large

00:27:41.060 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

00:27:47.460 one moment and look at why the the traditional conservative right in the united states chose

00:27:52.580 moral relativism as the ground upon which to fight rather sort of slippery sort of shale and sad like

00:27:58.900 and sandy ground as you say and the reason for that was because it wanted to base its own rejection of

00:28:05.620 the left in all of its forms on something which it thought was hard something which it thought would uh

00:28:10.900 would yield good fruit something which it thought wasn't relatively minded and that was the christian

00:28:16.740 religion because if you have a metaphysically objectivist view and you have an absolute view

00:28:22.740 of the christian revelation particularly in the protestant sense in the text of the bible you have

00:28:28.340 something that's hard you have something that's sort of um not to be trammeled over that you can

00:28:34.420 confront all the forms of wishy-washy liberalism with going on out through to the harder more sort of uh

00:28:40.980 uh structured forms of the left that exist alongside it and to its left side and in a way of course by

00:28:49.780 defining themselves as a christian conservatism uh they've done themselves a disservice now you could

00:28:58.260 say that's an intelligent tactic in a society where unless you are pronounced christian it's probably

00:29:03.300 impossible to get elected to a mainstream platform in the united states whereas in in western europe uh

00:29:11.780 outside of catholic countries um to be a professing christian is an extreme electoral disadvantage

00:29:19.220 because the religion has collapsed to such a degree in in a society like my own

00:29:24.420 where people go out of their way to deny a christian inheritance uh the complete opposite of the united

00:29:30.980 states even though the politics of the two areas are very similar in many ways i think uh the question

00:29:38.260 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 0.90

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

00:36:39.540 good expression of of the right wing

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

00:41:30.100 the future yes any time thank you

00:41:37.780 thank you

00:41:53.220 All right.

RadixJournal - January 15, 2018

Bowden! - 1 - Essence of the Left

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