Dr. Paul Gottfried has done a lot of work looking at the origins of liberalism, its evolution over time, and the type of political ideologies we are looking at today. He is the author of After Liberalism, a book that challenges the idea that late liberalism even exists.
00:09:11.960I should be saying this, but, you know, I've been influenced by German historians like Fritz Hartung,
00:09:19.460who argues that, you know, absolutism ends in absolutism.
00:09:23.980You know, I mean, Prussia has Frederick the Great.
00:09:27.120It only sort of grows towards some kind of liberal alternative much later.
00:09:31.640Portugal has excellent absolutist rule in the 18th century.
00:09:36.460And it sort of moves beyond that until sometime in the second half of the 20th century.
00:09:43.380So, you know, of course, in Russia, you have absolutism, and it does not really lead to a bourgeois, modern liberal order.
00:09:50.880So that generally, I really don't see absolutism moving in that direction.
00:09:56.320I think it's characteristic typically of sort of Catholic counter-reformation societies, or in the case of Prussia, you know, it sort of manifests itself there.
00:10:11.720But, you know, again, it's sort of an agrarian military society in which you have, Sweden is another place where you have absolutism,
00:10:20.260but it doesn't necessarily develop into a parliamentary liberal regime.
00:10:26.420You mentioned some of what I think we could probably identify as the core aspects or pillars of liberalism.
00:10:35.520What would you identify as kind of the hallmarks of a liberal order?
00:10:39.860Well, I would think it would be bourgeois dominance, one thing.
00:10:43.520Although, you know, you could have, well, have a risk of aristocracy and so forth, but these would be almost epiphenomenal by the time you get to a liberal order.
00:10:55.720And all things considered, I think, for religion, Protestantism sort of fits much better than Catholicism.
00:11:01.520You know, the United States and Iran are not exceptions in that regard.
00:11:08.300I mean, the idea of, you know, of individual justification by faith sort of fits with the liberal stress on individualism.
00:11:18.200And sort of the person sort of doing things for himself and sort of exploring its own possibilities.
00:11:25.720At the same time, liberal society is not atomistic.
00:11:28.720You know, you still have stress on community, individuals participating in society, a very strong sense of the family and the sanctity of marriage, much more so than among the early aristocratic rule.
00:11:44.760And certainly national identity is very important, although I think people like Hassoni are correct in saying that, you know, democracy, democracy properly understood is also national, you know, otherwise degenerates into the world kind of mass democracy under which we are suffering or languishing right now.
00:12:08.040So I think all these things are aspects, a free market economy understood, you know, within the bounds, one might say, of national interest and some inherited sense of the common good.
00:12:21.880But as I always point out, libertarianism is not classical liberalism, libertarianism, libertarianism is 20th century libertarianism.
00:12:31.360It's quite different from what liberals typically, but typically, by the way, favorite tariffs, except in England, which was in the economic leader in the 19th century.
00:12:40.940So that, you know, tariffs were very characteristic of liberal political parties.
00:12:47.780So a lot of kind of modern, as you point out, libertarians, but also a lot of kind of center-left, well, I didn't leave the left, the left-left-me types, they like to call themselves classical liberals.
00:13:02.500And one of my favorite things is to point out that they don't believe a single thing that classical liberals actually believed.
00:13:08.340Why do you think there's been this appropriation of that term by so many people who really don't fall into that understanding at all?
00:13:16.680Because liberal is a nice word, right?
00:13:19.640I mean, to call somebody liberal is not an insult, unless you're listening to Fox News.
00:13:24.080And, of course, you know, the people who are conservatives, they are really, you know, moderate wokesters or something.
00:13:30.240But, no, the term liberal is very nice.
00:13:33.700I mean, that's why John Dewey, you know, in creating a socialist quasi-Soviet or trying to repass quasi-Soviet kind of society, described himself as liberal.
00:13:43.360I mean, you know, in my book on liberalism, I was, I ceased to be shocked at all of the authoritarian leftists who drive themselves as liberal.
00:13:51.420I know I got into a sort of a heated exchange with James Lindsay, who insisted that I was an idiot, you know, an unfit to be read.
00:14:05.280I think this discovered my writing because I did not consider him a true liberal, which I don't.
00:14:10.940Nor do I consider Barry Weiss a liberal or Douglas Murray or the people at the University of Austin for the most part.
00:14:16.340They're not liberals. They are sort of, you know, what I call sort of moderate woke leftists who are being dissed by people who are further on the woke left, you know.
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00:15:00.260Well, if you've been denounced by James Lindsay, then we're both in good company on this show.
00:15:05.700But honestly, I'd be shocked if he's read more than five pages of your actual work, you know.
00:15:12.660But, you know, one thing that you focus on in the book that you talk about a good bit, and you've mentioned a couple times here, is the democratization of the liberal project, which I think is a really critical aspect.
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00:16:42.180So I think if most people were to bring one thing forward out of liberalism, if they were going to identify one thing with it, it would probably be democracy.
00:17:10.460Even if you read John Locke in the Second Treatise, he's constantly appealing to the majority and the will of the majority as the justification for power.
00:17:19.420And yet you point out that actually a mass franchise is not particularly liberal, which I think would, you know, be a little bit of cognitive dissonance to some people.
00:17:40.400And in the Second Treatise, he's appealing to a particular readership, which were the, which were the levelers, religious sect.
00:17:52.020But even they weren't Democrats in the modern sense.
00:17:55.360The belief in universal suffrage comes rather, comes rather late in time.
00:18:03.500And most liberals in the 19th century did not, but they mostly opposed giving women to vote, you know, even upper class women.
00:18:11.920And, you know, they thought that only the, you know, in French, la place capacitaire, the people who had the capacity should be allowed to vote, which meant the people who had property and education.
00:18:24.660And that was something almost all liberals insisted on in the 19th century.
00:18:29.560By the way, even John Stuart Mill, who was a social Democrat and a feminist, believes in a limited franchise.
00:18:37.360He did not believe that people who were living under Dole or illiterate should be allowed to vote.
00:18:42.840He also had other criteria for voting.
00:18:45.300So the notion you do not have a liberal society unless everybody votes, you know, comes, comes very late.
00:18:52.320And by then, of course, we're living in a post-liberal age.
00:18:54.600In many ways, of course, the granting of universal suffrage opens the door to the end of the, you know, to a post-liberal age, because you have pretty much, you have the administrative state coming along and controlling wealth, controlling education, social attitudes and all kinds of other things.
00:19:15.360And then you get what both of us have written on, because managerialism, which managerialism claiming to rest upon a democratic consensus.
00:19:25.880So there is nothing intrinsically liberal about about universal suffrage.
00:19:32.980Now, do you feel like this transition from liberalism to a more managerial mindset is a natural progression?
00:19:42.800Is there is there a genealogy that we can follow here or is this a radical break in some way?
00:19:50.060I mean, it is a radical break, but it's also a natural progression, a social progression, because, you know, the bourgeoisie depends economically, you know, upon the proletariat, upon a working class.
00:20:02.660And these people are going to demand political rights.
00:20:05.020You know, my argument is that granting them political rights does not create a second, you know, reign of terror.
00:20:11.360What it does is create a managerial dictatorship, because they give these rights away to state administrators who claim to be scientifically trained to administer them, which, of course, is nonsense.
00:20:22.040It's sort of science as they understand it, like Marxism being science as Marxists understand it.
00:20:29.580But there is it is a natural progression.
00:20:34.740But what democracy does is very different.
00:20:36.980I think there's also an important break that has to be or division that has to be understood between mass democracy and national democracy.
00:20:45.560You know, like Carl Schmitt says, you know, democracy is always folks' democracy.
00:20:50.980It's popular democracy of a folk, of a people.
00:20:54.680And I think at one time, even, you know, even in the 19th century, Democrats in various countries, someone like Mazzini or Garibaldi in Italy or other Democrats would insist they were national Democrats.
00:21:10.540And in the 20th century, we have is multicultural or it sort of starts with pluralistic democracy and then turns into multicultural democracy.
00:21:20.100But our notion of democracy becomes uncoupled from national identity, national identity in the real sense, not, you know, successive propositional nationhood concepts, but rather of people in the physical, ethnic, linguistic, historical sense.
00:21:39.940And that is one of the points, if you notice, I kept raising about the national conservatives, that they're not describing the United States as it now exists.
00:21:52.440They're describing the Latvians or maybe the Israelis or Lithuanians or Poles.
00:21:57.480They're not describing us because these other countries are national democracy, which is a strong national component.
00:22:02.720And most so-called Western democracies, liberal democracies, have ceased to be, well, they've ceased to be liberal or democratic, except in this mass democratic administrative sense.
00:22:14.740Important that you point out there that so many of these pillars of liberalism were considered in a national context.
00:22:24.320They were territorialized to the interest of particular peoples in particular ways of life.
00:22:29.640Yes, free markets, but in the service of a people.
00:22:32.680Yes, democracy, but only because it reflects the understanding and way of being of a people.
00:22:38.380And do you feel like the kind of escape from that, the fact that this process seems to have escaped, that territorialization has to do with something innate in liberalism?
00:22:52.240Do you think it has something to do with scale and managerialism?
00:23:00.520Yeah, of course, Carl Schmitt made it made precisely the argument you're making that liberalism contains the seeds of its own destruction because it's universalistic and apolitical in the end.
00:23:13.540It's concerned about economic, world economic relations.
00:23:16.980And I think there may be some truth to that accusation, but from what I've seen of historical, read of the historical past, most liberals did have a strong sense of national identity.
00:23:30.320And in many cases, the nationalism was stronger than the liberalism, which in some ways leads to the First World War.
00:23:39.280So that, you know, I think I think this is an idea inherently, you know, the one connection I do see is people say, well, I believe in the liberal concept of universal free trade, which, by the way, in the 19th century is not a liberal idea.
00:24:47.300Which has replaced Christianity as the, you know, the new Western religion.
00:24:53.500So perhaps managerialism focuses on the aspects of liberalism that would allow it to then globalize it while discarding that which is not useful.
00:25:02.860So it's still still still still calling on some of these symbolic aspects, but implementing them in ways that are not really inside the liberal tradition.
00:25:13.480Liberals in the 19th century were certainly not against bureaucracy.
00:25:17.880They supported bureaucracy because they saw it as an instrument by which the nation state would be able to run well.
00:25:24.860And these would that would be disinterested people, you know, who would who would serve the common good.
00:25:31.960And you've got this in most 19th century liberals.
00:25:34.800I mean, they're very they're very high on bureaucracy properly.
00:25:37.660I, you know, as I pointed out in my my talk at the National Conservative Conference, you know, they're high on liberals, high on bureaucracy as within the limits, you know, that they imposed on on public administration.
00:25:51.300Now, let's talk a little bit about that transition then to what we could probably call the civil rights regime.
00:25:58.740Right. We have a managerialism that enters into the United States.
00:26:04.400You identified, you know, you mentioned there with John Dewey that he was looking more for a socialistic United States.
00:26:12.100But however people want to define, you know, the FDR regime and these kind of things, it wasn't it had not quite taken on the aspects of, I think, kind of the civil rights revolution.
00:26:21.760But do you see the civil rights revolution as a shift for kind of the justification underlying managerialism?
00:26:29.820And do you see any connection between that and, of course, what a lot of people would think of as the rights that are claimed inside of the liberal tradition?
00:26:37.260Yeah, I definitely see the the managerial class as being the necessary instrument by which the civil rights revolution gets gets carried out.
00:26:48.940And I don't think they were, you know, they were playing a purely neutral role because by then by then the the managerial class had become very politicized on the left.
00:26:58.940You know, you know, and the fact that the managerial class, certainly public administration today is overwhelmingly, you know, in the left wing of the Democratic Party, very few conservatives who are engaged in that in that vocation, you know, suggested they were not unwilling partners in the civil rights revolution.
00:27:21.760But there, of course, the claim is to equality, which is a democratic virtue.
00:27:28.300And and also, I would say to universalism that, you know, once you say all all people are created equal, the whole language of natural rights, I think, sort of points in the way points in the direction of mass democracy.
00:27:43.320Although the people who use that language in the 18th century were in some cases local.
00:27:49.680But I think that that does that does provide a kind of conceptual bridge to what comes afterwards.
00:27:57.020And and certainly certainly with the civil rights movement, what you have is the beginning of a managerialized anti-discrimination regime under which we are still living.
00:28:06.320We're living under it in a much more advanced form than the one that existed in the 1960s.
00:28:13.320Well, I'm very interested to talk about how this, of course, transitions to our modern understanding of the woke ideology.
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00:30:00.940Now, you have gotten into a tussle with James Lindsay and others, as you mentioned, over your assertion that the current ideology that we see reigning over the managerial system, the kind of the woke ideology is not specifically Marxist.
00:30:18.500But for a lot of people, they'll say, oh, but you were talking about John Dewey and his desire for a socialist United States, you know, almost 100 years ago.
00:30:26.520So what do you think is, if not Marxism, what is the origin of this current wokeness?
00:30:33.800And how did we transition to it as the ruling ideology of what was supposed to be a liberal democracy?
00:30:40.540Well, of course, I think the word liberal democracy already contains this explosive ideological dynamite, which is which results in destroying whatever existed of the liberal order.
00:30:53.480But I think the argument that I make that Lindsay objects to is that liberalism itself becomes post-liberalism or gives way to post-liberalism.
00:31:03.460And what we're seeing are, you know, the last manifestations of a dying post-liberalism, which, you know, is sort of given up on whatever aspects of liberalism it carried over and tried to preserve.
00:31:18.440And which is now becoming woke totalitarianism, as far as I can see, and sort of building on mass democracy in a managerial state and doing this so that this is not Marxism.
00:31:34.280It's a very different development that we're seeing.
00:31:36.280I argue that Marxism, you know, really deals with socioeconomic revolution.
00:31:47.420It is not about giving sex change operations to illegals.
00:31:51.540It is about creating a socialist economy managed from the top, a revolutionary socialist economy.
00:31:59.280The morals of so-called Marxist societies have been rather conservative by comparison to what's going on in Western countries today.
00:32:09.000And I think the insistence that, you know, whatever people don't like is Marxist is there for two reasons.
00:32:18.220Number one, because people who are conservatives are used to anti-communist rhetoric.
00:32:23.640They've been getting it since the 1950s.
00:32:25.560National Review, you know, provided that kind of language, especially during the Cold War.
00:32:34.520And the enemy was communism and Marxism was seen as some kind of demonic force.
00:32:40.080So certainly among the older generation of conservatives, people my age who are still around, they're used to hearing Marxism being denounced.
00:32:51.560It's just that, you know, they're not the bad guys anymore.
00:32:54.120Or it's like, you know, running after Albigensians or trying to find some other, you know, malign force around and trying to blame them for things, the Spanish Inquisition or something like that.
00:33:06.300But the second reason I think is more sinister, it is that people who are culturally, socially radicalized, like some of the friends of James Lindsay, want to pretend they're fighting Marxism.
00:33:20.600So meanwhile, you can accept a certain, you know, a certain amount of woke revolution and still insist you're conservative because you're fighting Marxism.
00:34:15.720So you don't have to think about all these things that happened under the banner of the previous revolution.
00:34:20.540So that brings us to an interesting point because, you know, you're getting to the end of this.
00:34:27.040And I wonder how much of the problem that we face now is that we have continued to be obsessed with the monikers of these ideologies that perhaps gripped the world in the 1930s.
00:34:41.380You know, everyone is still running around screaming fascist or communist or I'm a classical liberal, even though none of these ideologies truly exist in their current form today.
00:34:52.080Do you think there's a reason that we in particular, like even academically, it seems like we have not really addressed the shift in these ideologies?
00:35:03.640We just continue to perpetuate those same ideas as dominant.
00:35:09.000You know, I think in the case of fascism, what we really mean is Hitler.
00:35:12.420And we really mean Auschwitz and the final solution for Jews.
00:35:16.000I mean, I think that's basically meant by fascism.
00:35:18.760So, you know, as I argue in my book on anti-fascism, if you disagree with some wrinkle, you know, of the woke leftist agenda, you'll immediately become Hitler.
00:35:28.360I mean, Trump is now Hitler, too, right?
00:35:29.940And that means you, of course, are planning to enact the final solution against somebody.
00:35:36.280And yeah, I think I think all of this anti-fascism stuff is utter nonsense.
00:35:41.100And it's obviously being used, you know, it's being used in an even more sinister fashion in the communist state.
00:35:47.440The communists are just to fight capitalists or to fight the United States.
00:35:51.440These people are doing it to shut up any opposition to the woke agenda.
00:35:54.520You know, and if you stand in their way, you're a fascist and fascist means Hitler and Hitler means Auschwitz.
00:36:04.780I mean, this is basically what you're being told by implication.
00:36:08.540Of course, the conservative movement goes after, too.
00:36:10.860So we have Donald Trump, Mark Levin and others saying that the other side are fascist.
00:37:00.980So do you think then that, you know, what would you identify then as the political ideologies of our modern era?
00:37:11.320If we're not looking at liberalism, we're not looking at fascism, we're not looking at communism.
00:37:15.120We've both talked about managerialism, but that's a form as much as it is an actual ideology.
00:37:21.240What do you what do you see as the competing ideologies today?
00:37:24.140The competing ideologies are a woke left left, which is left because it claims to be universal and it emphasizes equality and compensatory equality for those people who are the victims of inequality in the past.
00:37:38.720You know, they just have more groups that are put together in that category than let's say that, you know, the Marxist only had the oppressed working class.
00:37:49.660Now we have the oppressed transgender, the victims of white male Christians all over the world and so forth.
00:37:56.780So it's a much more radical kind of egalitarianism than earlier left.
00:38:02.400But but it is, you know, it is part of the left.
00:38:04.760It is not anti-capitalist because corporate capitalism is one of the important foundations of what we're now saying.
00:38:13.060I mean, I don't buy I don't buy this anti-capitalism at all.
00:38:16.140I think I think you might say it's crony capitalism that they want, but they certainly are not going to nationalize anything.
00:38:23.400The left is going to lose all these these benefactors if they people like Soros and Larry Fink of BlackRock and so on, the Disney World people, you know, who are payrolling the left.
00:38:35.320Right. But it is it is a cultural, a culturally radical, nihilistic left that seems to be doing very well in every so-called liberal democracy.
00:38:46.920And then the people on the other side who are opposing that, I suppose, are the right by default, because the right is always opposing my view of the world.
00:39:13.420It does not look like, you know, the early 19th century counterrevolution, but then it is not conservatism in that sense.
00:39:20.460It is it is a right, which by its very nature is reacting against against the other side and trying to, you know, trying to limit, trying to limit on the left.
00:39:30.240Yeah. So I think that I think those are the major forces that I see.
00:39:34.880I don't think I could really speak of conservatism, you know, on the right.
00:39:42.520I mean, there is no people of cultural, religious conservatives.
00:39:46.400I mean, they're around people who, you know, who read classics, who read the Bible and so forth.
00:39:51.360But I don't see political conservatism, really.
00:39:54.020I mean, I think that's something that belongs to an earlier age.
00:40:00.100And in the United States, that rightist reaction is centered right now on Trump and the people support Trump.
00:40:05.680Whether or not he is a true man of the right, you know, may not be that important.
00:40:11.160And because I believe, like Tegel, that, you know, there is a kind of Tegel spoke of the kind of reason that people are driven by private passions, but they serve world's historical ends.
00:40:23.740And I think this may be true of Trump.
00:40:26.240I don't find it particularly admirable.
00:40:28.080I mean, he is a courageous man, but, you know, I don't find his views particularly coherent.
00:40:32.600Andrew, I'm not quite sure what they are, but the people who surround him, obviously, are reacting against the left, you know, and doing this very vigorously right now.
00:40:44.020He certainly does feel like a man gripped by history, whether worthy of it or not.
00:40:51.700And there was the, Hegel was speaking about Napoleon, you know, that he's driven by private passions, but he serves the world's spirit nonetheless.
00:40:59.640The same thing is true of Donald Trump.
00:41:04.700There's this concept of closing the hermeneutic circle in which you get to the end of a book or something and retroactively, you know, the entirety of it kind of comes together.
00:41:17.540Now that you're looking at the end of liberalism, you're identifying as there's a real end to that, you know, that historical phenomenon and it becomes something else.
00:41:27.440Do you feel ultimately that the destination was inevitable?
00:41:32.380Do you think there were key moments that drove it in one direction or another or did the ideology itself require us to kind of arrive at the moment that it did?
00:41:42.540No, I, I, one of the things I've always argued is that, you know, history is characterized by contingencies and things did not necessarily have to go in that direction that, you know, you could have had managerialism, but it could have been linked to nationalism as it was at one time.
00:41:59.920The national identity, the fact that it became mass democracy, pushing universalism and so forth, that you also could have had Christian Democrats who were truly Christian, you know, and believed in maintaining biblical virtues and so forth.
00:42:18.120So that, that even with managerialism and the coming of democracy, things could have gone in a different direction.
00:42:25.120Again, I think that this is the operation of accident contingency.
00:42:30.220I think the, the role of the United States, you know, as a world power is very important.
00:42:35.840It's a managerial mass democracy in the end, you know, and it's now pushing wokeness as a state religion.
00:42:42.840Somebody asked me, the, somebody in Hungary, you know, do I think Orban is, is sort of a bad man because he uses anti-American rhetoric and appealing to his electorate.
00:42:54.360And I said, if I were Hungarian, I would use anti-American rhetoric all the time.
00:42:58.960You know, why should you like a country that's, you know, sticks LGBT flags on its embassies, pushes wokeness, gay marriage?
00:43:07.940You know, if I were traditional Hungarian, I would, I would not like that at all.
00:43:13.680But I don't think the United States necessarily had to go in that direction.
00:43:16.880I think, you know, we traced the steps by which that happened.
00:43:20.640I think one can arrive at the view that things might have happened differently.
00:43:24.200Now, I, I think liberalism giving way to something like democracy may have been inevitable because of the socioeconomic context in which liberalism develops, you know, and the operation of, of an industrialized society and urban society.
00:43:45.940And when I see the, the, the, the, the, the demand of the working class for political rights, political rights that will then, you know, cede to the managerial class over time, which is the argument after liberalism.
00:43:59.680I, I, I, I, I think that may have, to some extent, have been, you know, determined or, or over-determined.
00:44:08.600You know, the, the French Marxist, Al-Khuzel, uses the word sur-determiner, like over-determined.
00:44:16.300And I think that may have been over-determined that, that would have necessarily happened.
00:44:20.860But I, I think many of the things to which I've lived and the things to which I've lived in the United States were not, were not inevitable.
00:44:29.680One of the things that I think was, what may have been inevitable is the movement in which the civil rights movement went.
00:44:38.000That, you know, by, by empowering the managerial class, by pushing the idea of, of equality, creating an expanded leftist electorate.
00:44:48.600The, you know, that, that the outcome of what happened should not really have been in doubt.
00:44:53.920Although, you know, things might have just stopped with women.
00:44:56.520I mean, I guess they're not certain, they said, but going on to gays and transgenders and so forth.
00:45:02.140But, but I, I think people underestimate the revolutionary impact, even of the early civil rights movement.
00:45:09.600Particularly once it becomes linked to big government and to the managerial class.
00:45:14.540Yeah, I have this thought that scale really puts incredible emphasis on institutions.
00:45:22.440Of course, they always are critical to any civilization, but the wider that civilization's influence becomes, the more they try to project power, the more institutions become critical to that.
00:45:33.920And you pointed out in your speech that you feel like most of the institutions inside the United States and the wider Western kind of liberal democracy blocks, if we're going to use that term, have, have gotten to the point where they may be unrecoverable.
00:45:49.920That, that, that, that may not, you know, the idea that the conservatives can just long march their way into the institutions or that even a guy like Donald Trump could just remake the institution simply by appointing some personnel in there.
00:46:04.520We, we may be beyond that point. If that is the case, then do you, what do you see as the path forward for those that are opposing kind of the woke left? Is it parallelism? Is it the, is it the attempt to recapture institutions? Is it the need to radically rethink social organization itself?
00:46:24.960Are, are, are we just in this moment of kind of the, the apocal transition that no one can see through? You know, what, what do you think is the, is the path forward for those if they can't recapture those institutions?
00:46:36.420Well, I, I think that's utter opportunity. One has to be opportunistic about this. Well, you have a chance to recapture institutions. You go for it. Um, if you can't do that, you have to create a parallel society.
00:46:48.600And I, I think in the case of the United States is different from a country like Germany. We're outside of Eastern part of Germany. There are, there are nobody but, you know, uh, woke robots. They just go along with anything the government does.
00:47:02.700In the United States. We have, you know, well over 40% of the population don't like what's going on, even if they lose an election, which may in fact be rigged. Um, you know, there, there, there is a very, very large minority that doesn't like what the, uh, the, uh, the woke totalitarians are doing.
00:47:20.460And the managerial class is doing. And the, the, uh, Kamala Harris, uh, front, uh, administration would not be able to deal with all these people. There's just too many out there.
00:47:32.460So I, I think there are opportunities for the, the good people. You know, the Germans have an expression, the good nation, the good people, you know, to, uh, to separate themselves, uh, and to move into red areas where they can survive and where they can practice, you know, um, judicious
00:47:50.400disobedience to the federal government. Uh, I have no doubt that if the Democrats take over, uh, they're going to, uh, nationalize the franchise, which means you're going to have all rigged elections, uh, whatever national elections. Um, they're going to push, uh, open border stuff, whatever they're doing now, the, the, uh, uh, the woke ideology, the woke state religion, they'll do all these things.
00:48:14.500Because there'll be absolutely nothing to say, nothing, nothing that's going to stop us. But, um, I, I think they are going to create more dissatisfaction in the end if they do that. Um, I don't know whether the, the good side, you know, will ever produce enough people to counteract this. And they certainly, yeah. But, you know, there are all kinds of things that history is, is an open book. I mean, you might have a military revolt at some point. The military may not go along with this,
00:48:38.500even if the people to top are all, uh, woke leftist stooges. Um, uh, you know, the, uh, the, uh, the, look at the attempt to impose a totalitarian society in other countries failed and might fail here as well. Um, but, uh, you know, I, I think any opportunity to frustrate, to thwart the government should be taken. Um, one of the things
00:49:02.500that absolutely, uh, that absolutely, uh, dismayed me is that we have not had massive boycotts. You know, I mean, uh, uh, uh, these war corporations should be, we've had a few of them. We've done this with, with, with Bud Light and so forth, uh, Disney World. But I, I think that it should, the right should announce this and then go ahead and do this. I think one, one of the reasons that we have not had, uh, anything like a proportionate reaction to what the left is doing is the conservative movement, which keeps everybody quiet.
00:49:30.700You know, we just, uh, we have to be nice, uh, sort of the bread bear approach. We have to have common ground. We all have to get along, you know, and we're all Americans and so forth. Uh, this doesn't get you anywhere. I mean, you have to be aware of the challenge that you're facing. Um, you have to also act prudently. You don't want to destroy yourself, but you shouldn't deceive yourself about, you know, all of us are friends and you should take whatever action is possible. Uh, you know, within one might say, uh, reasonably,
00:50:00.700reasonable bounds, uh, to toward the administrative, the leftist administration.
00:50:05.420Yeah. You have this outlook from so much of a conservative establishment that, well, there's really just a small amount of disagreements, a tax policy here or there, and we'll, we'll fix this whole thing as where the other side understands they're in some kind of existential battle. And so, uh, the, the disproportionate tactical responses is, is unfortunately all on one side there.
00:50:25.040Yeah. Uh, but I, I, uh, think that this has been a great discussion and I'm, I have a couple of questions from the audience that I want to, uh, to ask you real quick, but before we do, uh, guys, make sure that you're of course, uh, checking out, uh, Dr. Godfrey's work. A lot of what we're talking about here was covered in his book after liberalism, uh, which you, you should definitely read. If you haven't, it's, it was, you know, written what, 20 years ago at this point or more.
00:50:49.040Yeah, there you go. And, and, and still has, of course, you know, uh, foresaw so much of this and still has a lot of valuable insights. So, uh, make sure that you're checking that out, but let me go to our questions here.
00:51:02.040Uh, Mufasa says, if only conservative states deported immigrants, uh, won't they lose votes in the electoral college because of population count and ultimately lose power? Isn't this self-defeating?
00:51:15.040So a lot of people have asked why aren't, uh, Republican governors deporting, you know, just, just taking the action. If you can send immigrants to Martha's Vineyard, surely you can send them to Mexico. And, you know, it's been kind of the argument. Uh, do you think there's, there's any value in, uh, the attempt by, uh, kind of Republican governors to, uh, do a level of deportation at least inside their own states?
00:51:38.040You know, I, I, I think, you know, there's a temporary benefit in some places because they, thanks to the Democrats, we now count the, uh, the illegals, you know, toward, uh, uh, toward population, which then determines congressional representation and so forth. The reality is that if these people ever get to vote, these red areas will become blue very quickly. Uh, so, you know, I think you should cut your losses and just send them back. Uh, they're going to vote. They're going to vote against you, you know, vote.
00:52:07.040Yeah, no, that makes sense. Uh, KN here says, is white nationalism DEI for Slavs and Irish people, meaning a political formula to get themselves into a similar status as Anglo-Protestants? I mean, my reaction to that would be, it's been quite a long time. I don't think there's a, uh, you know, whether you feel that's good or bad, there's probably not a, a high level of definition between those communities for most people at this point. And fortunately, race has become the salient factor for,
00:52:37.040a lot of people in, in voting blocks for politics. No, I think it's true. And, uh, I can't think of any white nationals who are saying, you know, what will Czechs get from doing this or, uh, Serbs or something like that, or balls. Um, I, the white nationalists I've met generally see all white people as, as a unified group, which they're not, you know, at all.
00:52:59.480But, you know, there is a sort of simplistic perception that, uh, you know, that all whites have in a stand with us, uh, by which I find comical since most of these woke leftists are white.
00:53:10.180You know, they'll say, well, they're not really white or they have Jewish mothers or grandmothers or something like this. But, you know, the reality is, no, they're white.
00:53:17.940And, uh, this is one of the reasons why white nationalism is a dead end.
00:53:23.400Uh, I guess kind of along that line here, he asks, an interest in applying elite theory to the right. So if anything, uh, if everything is a political formula, who benefits from the political formulas such as the JQ?
00:53:36.400So for a lot of guys on, I guess, kind of the white nationalist side, they bring up the Jewish question as a, you know, a, a, a key part of kind of their understanding or what they're pushing back into. Do you have any thoughts on why that is so central to those groups?
00:53:52.400You know, I, I, I, I think the reason it is so central to these, the white nationalists, uh, is that one has to explain why Jews, or at least the majority of Jews are politically on the left.
00:54:04.400And, uh, what you say is, it sees these, these Jewish, they're not really white. They just, they look white, but they're not white, you know, and, uh, they're, they're, they're the bad white people, whether people claim to be white, but are not really white.
00:54:18.400Uh, and I think, I think a lot of this is a rationalization for why, why the white is not really the, what the, the, the, the, the white race is not cohesively, um, or, you know, near unanimously behind the white nationalists.
00:54:34.400You said, you know, there are people pretending to be white, but are not really white and they're really the cause of the problem.
00:54:40.400So like an attempt to explain why that voting behavior is not the same, say, as the African American voting bloc, you don't have that, that level of monolithic support.
00:54:50.400Yeah. And then of course you do get Jewish leftists to say, we're not really white. We're like blacks or something like that, which isn't, which is, you know, biological nonsense.
00:54:57.400But, uh, uh, but they will say this because they're, there's so much allied with, with the left, but of course they are white and there are many non-Jewish white people who support the left as well.
00:55:07.400But it's, it's some, it's something, it's something that white nationals, I think have trouble explaining.
00:55:13.400Robert Weinsfield here says, uh, who is the successor to Trump populism MAGA on the right?
00:55:20.400JD Vance, Tucker, DeSantis, Vivek, RFK, uh, any current unknowns or, or is it back to Normie Conland?
00:55:27.400Do you see any promising figures beyond Trump?
00:55:30.400We've already talked about the possible limitations of Trump, but do you, do you see any leaders on the right that you think point us in a positive direction?
00:55:37.400Yeah, I think Vance is probably better than Tucker Carlson.
00:55:44.400You know, I mean, like he, uh, he has strange people on his show.
00:55:47.400Sometimes he makes very strange statements, uh, that I can't quite comprehend.
00:55:52.400But, uh, I think, uh, I, I think, I think Vance is much more, um, uh, much, much more balanced, disciplined representative of, uh, of the populist right.
00:56:04.400Even if at one time he attacked Donald Trump, uh, you know, has found his way to the populist right.
00:56:11.400But I think he has become an eloquent, consistent spokesman.
00:56:15.400I do like DeSantis, but he doesn't seem to catch on with voters outside the state of Florida.
00:56:23.400He's an excellent executive, but he's not, he, he does not have that something that, that really grips the popular in that imagination.
00:56:30.400You know, you know, somebody attacked me, uh, uh, unheard, you know, uh, attacked me for, for, for supporting DeSantis.
00:56:39.400Or I think it was attacking DeSantis through me that he had this crotchety paleo conservative theorist, uh, said something nice about DeSantis.
00:56:47.400This was actually a warning that, you know, people should back DeSantis.
00:56:51.400Uh, well, they, they, they, they didn't really have to cite me, you know, in order to turn off voters to DeSantis because, uh, I, I, I was quite disappointed by the reaction to him in the presidential race.
00:57:29.400Yeah, no, I think it's absolutely correct.
00:57:31.400Uh, and, you know, there are many, many Republicans say, you know, I'm, I, I'm economically or fiscally conservative, but I'm socially liberal.
00:57:38.400You know, there are a lot of, some of them, but, you know, they, they typically vote for people like, uh, like George W. Bush or Nick Romney, uh, uh, you know, or, or Nicky Hill.
00:57:54.400Uh, Hey, Max McDonald says, uh, where does the GOP go post Trump?
00:57:59.400Oh, we kind of already, or, uh, we kind of already discussed that.
00:58:03.400Does it stick with JD Vance and appeal to more white voters?
00:58:06.400Or does it try a neocon multiracial alliance with Nicky Haley?
00:58:10.400Uh, yeah, like, like Paul said, I think that, uh, that JD Vance is probably much more likely to be, I don't know a lot of people who aren't, um, very heavily invested in the neocon, uh, ideology that are fans of Nicky Haley.
00:58:25.400There's just not, not a lot of grassroots support there, let's say.
00:58:31.400I, you know, during the primaries, there were people who were recognizably Democrats who were voting for her, uh, who may not have even voted for her in the general race, but were just hoping to stop Trump.
00:58:43.400And he follows up saying, Paul, does Paul feel that self-hating whites at the top are not, uh, sacrificing themselves, but lower class whites?
00:58:53.400But Romney or Bill Gates would never say that rich whites are evil.
00:58:57.400Would they take these positions if it did affect them?
00:59:00.400Yeah, the second part, I don't understand, but I, I do think there's very much of a class war, uh, in which the, uh, uh, the, the woke whites, uh, see themselves as socially superior to the working class whites.
00:59:14.400I mean, it's the, the attitude which, uh, was reflected in Hillary Clinton's statements about, you know, these massive deplorables.
00:59:22.400And I, I, I think there was somebody else who recently made a similar comment.
01:00:01.400And the one thing they seem to uniformly do is kind of spit on middle America because that's the only thing they identify as an elite trait.
01:00:09.400They don't, they don't really know anything else about leadership.
01:00:10.400They just know that the one thing you're supposed to do is, you know, just hate, you know, middle-class whites.
01:00:16.400That, that, that's really the critical feature of an elite.
01:00:19.400So that's what they do, even though they're theoretically on the right.
01:00:21.400It's, it's a very bizarre, but, but observable phenomenon.
01:00:24.400No, I think it's very kind of, you know, neo-reactionaries.
01:00:27.400I think are, uh, do that the most often that, uh, you know, they see themselves as, as, uh, the current versions of Joseph de Ness or these, you know, aristocratic conservatives of the early 19th century.
01:00:41.400And, uh, you know, they're, uh, they, uh, they flaunt their loathing, you know, for the, uh, for the lower orders.
01:00:48.400I think, of course, these people are going to go absolutely nowhere.
01:00:50.400So, uh, you know, they're, they're, they're just a historical curiosity at this point.
01:00:55.400All right, guys, I appreciate the questions, but we're going to make this the last one because I don't want to keep Dr. Gottfried forever here.
01:01:00.400We have antebellum who says, do you think it's possible for paleo conservatives to stop liberals like RFK and libertarians to merge together as a new right movement?
01:01:13.400I mean, not, not for any length of time.
01:01:15.400I mean, they, they might, you know, vote the same way in, in election.
01:01:18.400I mean, you can maybe get them all to vote for Donald Trump right now, but they're, they're, they're not going to form a permanent movement.
01:01:25.400Because I, I think the, the moral intellectual differences are very obvious and, you know, it's, at some point they're, they will undo an attempt to create an alliance among these groups.
01:01:36.400Um, I could see an alliance, you know, as an alliance between paleo conservatives and the populist right, uh, which, which itself is, uh, uh, is, is, you know, a cause of wonder since paleo conservatives do begin as elitist.
01:01:52.400Oh, and a lot, a lot with the European aristocracy, the antebellum Southern gentry and so forth.
01:01:58.400Uh, and here you see them, you know, all, all running to embrace the, uh, uh, the, the car mechanics, uh, you know, or, or the other, the other sort of, uh, uh, we're, we're working at working class, uh, grudges.
01:02:11.400I mean, they've now become the, and saying nice things about them, which I don't think was true of paleo conservatives that, you know, when, when that group was formed, you know,
01:02:20.400was formed, you know, back in the 1980s.
01:02:23.400Well, you know, you have to serve someone, you know, there, there has, that's, that's the essence of politics.
01:02:27.400And so, you know, the understanding also that so many, I think the insights that paleo conservatism, uh, brought to the table do ultimately benefit the, you know, the, the, the populist classes, even if they aren't directly in, uh, you know, glorifying or exalting, uh, certain parts of that existence are ultimately.
01:02:47.400Ultimately, those are things that would, uh, create a positive outcome for those groups.
01:03:03.400There aren't, there aren't many choices they have and they can go with George will and support Kamala Harris, you know, or, uh, embrace, embrace the position of Bill Kristol or one of these others.
01:03:14.400Uh, who are defending elitist Republicanism, you know, as they go into the, uh, the woke camp.
01:03:20.400So, uh, you know, I, I think, I think paleo conservatives have made the right practical choice.
01:03:27.400Well, make sure to check out all of Paul's work.
01:03:30.400Uh, it's been great speaking with him.
01:03:32.400He's got a weekly column over at the blaze as well.
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