The Auron MacIntyre Show - The Evolution of Liberalism ｜ Guest： Paul Gottfried ｜ 9⧸25⧸24

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00:00:30.000 Hey everybody, how's it going?

00:00:31.720 Thanks for joining me this afternoon.

00:00:33.640 I've got a great stream with a great guest that I think you're really going to enjoy.

00:00:38.120 Political ideologies are something that people are obsessed with.

00:00:41.200 They want to understand, where did things like wokeness come from?

00:00:44.720 How did we get this?

00:00:45.880 Is it a mutation of Marxism or liberalism?

00:00:48.980 Is it something new entirely?

00:00:51.580 My guest today, Paul Gottfried, has done a lot of work looking at the origins of liberalism,

00:00:57.040 its evolution over time, and the type of political ideologies that we are looking at today.

00:01:03.420 Paul, thank you so much for coming on.

00:01:05.320 Oh, thank you for having me on again.

00:01:07.680 Absolutely.

00:01:08.420 We were both at an event, the National Conservatism Conference, and we were both on a panel about

00:01:15.000 late liberalism, and you had the great approach of immediately dismantling the idea that late

00:01:20.840 liberalism even exists.

00:01:22.200 And you have a great book on this called After Liberalism, which kind of goes after a lot

00:01:28.780 of these ideas.

00:01:29.580 Oh, got it there.

00:01:30.320 Yep.

00:01:30.920 So I wanted to dive into this with you today, because I think you made a very good case as

00:01:36.220 to why what we're facing is something that is very different.

00:01:39.400 And it's important to not just lazily throw these terms around, but to understand where

00:01:43.880 they come from and what they're defining so that we can better grasp the type of movement

00:01:48.760 that we are facing now.

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00:03:20.620 So, Dr. Gottfried, in your speech, you kind of blew back the hair of some people by saying

00:03:26.200 that John Dewey was the first post-liberal, which I think shakes up a lot of people's timeline

00:03:31.820 in trying to understand that a lot of people think of the post-liberal moment as something

00:03:36.060 that we're just approaching.

00:03:37.700 But you laid it out as something that has perhaps been with us for about 100 years at this point.

00:03:44.860 So, I think a lot of people will be confused about that statement.

00:03:48.260 But could you explain a little bit of what you meant there?

00:03:50.960 Because, again, I think most people say,

00:03:54.240 oh, we are still a liberal society.

00:03:56.380 We are still well within this framework of classical liberalism or some evolution of liberalism.

00:04:01.660 Yeah, I see liberalism or argue liberalism is the worldview of the 19th century bourgeoisie.

00:04:11.600 And it comes with such features as parliamentary government, but also a limited franchise,

00:04:19.840 defense of the free market insofar as it was compatible with the interest of one's nation,

00:04:27.180 a strong sense of national identity.

00:04:29.080 And most of the so-called features of liberalism that occur in the 20th century, I argue,

00:04:36.600 are post-liberal, universal suffrage, women's rights, women's political rights,

00:04:43.640 and the development of the modern welfare state, I would argue, are all post-liberal developments,

00:04:50.400 which are characteristic of what I call mass democracy.

00:04:54.800 And the one feature of mass democracy, one characteristic,

00:04:59.240 is that it does preserve certain aspects of an older liberal heritage.

00:05:03.800 Unfortunately, these aspects become more and more vestigial over time.

00:05:08.060 So, what we're seeing now is simply the end of what I see as the post-liberal age.

00:05:12.780 But, I mean, to treat this, you know, post-liberalism that we see now as being the essence of liberalism,

00:05:21.980 I suppose would be something like saying the essence of Christianity is Christian Marxism.

00:05:27.120 It's like we're sort of coming at the end of a process.

00:05:30.200 And, you know, what you argue is the main current, intellectual, ideological current,

00:05:36.520 is by now so watered down in other things that I prefer not calling it liberalism,

00:05:42.080 but rather something else.

00:05:43.880 And, of course, I've notoriously done the same thing with conservatism.

00:05:47.480 I suppose I've dissected the term and made the argument that what today we call conservatism

00:05:55.840 has very little to do with conservatism, which, again, is an early 19th century ideology

00:06:01.140 or worldview that's associated with the reaction to the French Revolution.

00:06:06.740 I should say my own defense here that I do defend terms like right and left,

00:06:10.820 which I think are not as historically delimited as conservative and liberal.

00:06:18.980 And although my arguments about what the right and left are, I suppose, have also gotten me into trouble

00:06:24.360 because I dare to suggest that the right is a defense of inequality in particularity

00:06:31.020 and that universal rights are totally inconsistent with the identity of the right.

00:06:38.180 And the left, of course, is about universalism and equality.

00:06:41.620 That's the argument I make.

00:06:42.920 But what I try to do is separate them from conservative and liberal,

00:06:46.900 which I think are more historically delimited terms.

00:06:49.280 A lot of people will trace modernity and kind of the birth of modernity back to, say, Machiavelli or to Hobbes.

00:06:58.160 But when do you feel that liberalism becomes its own distinct understanding?

00:07:04.040 Where do you think that that train of thought really begins?

00:07:07.160 Yeah, I think it sort of comes into its own in the 18th century with certain aspects of the Enlightenment,

00:07:16.380 the age of rationalism, and above all, with the political economic rise of the bourgeoisie,

00:07:24.720 which is the bearer of liberal ideology.

00:07:27.660 And it becomes dominant in the Western world in the 19th century.

00:07:33.000 In some places, it becomes more dominant than in others.

00:07:36.560 For instance, in a place like Germany or Austria-Hungary,

00:07:41.300 liberalism is less dominant than it is, let's say, in the United States or England.

00:07:47.060 But nonetheless, I think it does become the regnant worldview of the 19th century in the West.

00:07:54.540 And most modernizers in Russia and Eastern Europe are already looking to the Western world

00:07:59.380 to see the kind of changes that their own society should undergo.

00:08:05.020 I think we speak sort of the modern age, you know, and I'm here, I'm thinking back to my own education and college by history.

00:08:12.500 There is, in fact, you might say, sort of the beginning to modernity,

00:08:16.120 which comes with the Renaissance in the 16th century and the Protestant Reformation and so forth,

00:08:21.740 all of which I think are modernizing forces.

00:08:26.100 And as I point out, you know, much of the anti-clericalism among liberals is occurring in Catholic countries,

00:08:31.340 not in Protestant countries, because many liberals are devout Protestants.

00:08:35.900 They really have no trouble with religion, because the religion emphasizes the individual,

00:08:41.860 which is basic to the liberal world view.

00:08:45.320 So liberalism, by its nature, is not always anti-clerical.

00:08:50.720 It's anti-clerical generally in Catholic countries, although much less so in Protestant ones.

00:08:57.460 Bertrand de Juvenal looks at the phenomenon of absolutism as kind of a stepping stone to the birth of kind of the bourgeois order.

00:09:09.160 Do you feel like there's any truth to that?

00:09:11.680 No.

00:09:11.960 I should be saying this, but, you know, I've been influenced by German historians like Fritz Hartung,

00:09:19.460 who argues that, you know, absolutism ends in absolutism.

00:09:23.980 You know, I mean, Prussia has Frederick the Great.

00:09:27.120 It only sort of grows towards some kind of liberal alternative much later.

00:09:31.640 Portugal has excellent absolutist rule in the 18th century.

00:09:36.460 And it sort of moves beyond that until sometime in the second half of the 20th century.

00:09:43.380 So, you know, of course, in Russia, you have absolutism, and it does not really lead to a bourgeois, modern liberal order.

00:09:50.880 So that generally, I really don't see absolutism moving in that direction.

00:09:56.320 I 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.

00:10:11.720 But, you know, again, it's sort of an agrarian military society in which you have, Sweden is another place where you have absolutism,

00:10:20.260 but it doesn't necessarily develop into a parliamentary liberal regime.

00:10:26.420 You mentioned some of what I think we could probably identify as the core aspects or pillars of liberalism.

00:10:33.500 But can you lay those out just again?

00:10:35.520 What would you identify as kind of the hallmarks of a liberal order?

00:10:39.860 Well, I would think it would be bourgeois dominance, one thing.

00:10:43.520 Although, 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.

00:10:55.720 And all things considered, I think, for religion, Protestantism sort of fits much better than Catholicism.

00:11:01.520 You know, the United States and Iran are not exceptions in that regard.

00:11:08.300 I mean, the idea of, you know, of individual justification by faith sort of fits with the liberal stress on individualism.

00:11:18.200 And sort of the person sort of doing things for himself and sort of exploring its own possibilities.

00:11:25.720 At the same time, liberal society is not atomistic.

00:11:28.720 You 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.

00:11:44.760 And 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.

00:12:08.040 So 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.

00:12:21.880 But as I always point out, libertarianism is not classical liberalism, libertarianism, libertarianism is 20th century libertarianism.

00:12:31.360 It'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.

00:12:40.940 So that, you know, tariffs were very characteristic of liberal political parties.

00:12:47.780 So 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.

00:13:02.400 Right.

00:13:02.500 And one of my favorite things is to point out that they don't believe a single thing that classical liberals actually believed.

00:13:08.340 Why 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?

00:13:16.680 Because liberal is a nice word, right?

00:13:19.640 I mean, to call somebody liberal is not an insult, unless you're listening to Fox News.

00:13:24.080 And, of course, you know, the people who are conservatives, they are really, you know, moderate wokesters or something.

00:13:30.240 But, no, the term liberal is very nice.

00:13:33.700 I 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.

00:13:42.160 Right.

00:13:43.360 I 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. 0.99

00:13:51.420 I 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. 0.95

00:14:05.280 I think this discovered my writing because I did not consider him a true liberal, which I don't. 0.96

00:14:10.940 Nor do I consider Barry Weiss a liberal or Douglas Murray or the people at the University of Austin for the most part.

00:14:16.340 They'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.

00:14:26.720 And I can sympathize with their plight, but they're certainly not liberals.

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00:15:00.260 Well, if you've been denounced by James Lindsay, then we're both in good company on this show.

00:15:05.700 But honestly, I'd be shocked if he's read more than five pages of your actual work, you know.

00:15:11.460 Yeah, I would too.

00:15:12.660 But, 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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00:16:42.180 So 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.

00:17:01.780 At least for the modern person.

00:17:03.840 When they think of liberalism, they think popular sovereignty, the voice of the people, you know, being represented.

00:17:09.340 This is what matters.

00:17:10.460 Even 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.

00:17:19.420 And 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.

00:17:29.060 No, I think you're absolutely right.

00:17:30.680 But, you know, it's also a question of whether John Locke really believed in, you know, everybody in society being given the franchise.

00:17:38.540 I doubt that he did.

00:17:40.400 And in the Second Treatise, he's appealing to a particular readership, which were the, which were the levelers, religious sect. 0.55

00:17:52.020 But even they weren't Democrats in the modern sense.

00:17:55.360 The belief in universal suffrage comes rather, comes rather late in time.

00:18:03.500 And most liberals in the 19th century did not, but they mostly opposed giving women to vote, you know, even upper class women.

00:18:11.920 And, 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.

00:18:24.660 And that was something almost all liberals insisted on in the 19th century.

00:18:29.560 By the way, even John Stuart Mill, who was a social Democrat and a feminist, believes in a limited franchise.

00:18:37.360 He did not believe that people who were living under Dole or illiterate should be allowed to vote.

00:18:42.840 He also had other criteria for voting.

00:18:45.300 So the notion you do not have a liberal society unless everybody votes, you know, comes, comes very late.

00:18:52.320 And by then, of course, we're living in a post-liberal age.

00:18:54.600 In 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.

00:19:15.360 And then you get what both of us have written on, because managerialism, which managerialism claiming to rest upon a democratic consensus.

00:19:25.880 So there is nothing intrinsically liberal about about universal suffrage.

00:19:32.980 Now, do you feel like this transition from liberalism to a more managerial mindset is a natural progression?

00:19:42.800 Is there is there a genealogy that we can follow here or is this a radical break in some way?

00:19:48.760 Well, I think it's both.

00:19:50.060 I 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.

00:20:02.660 And these people are going to demand political rights.

00:20:05.020 You know, my argument is that granting them political rights does not create a second, you know, reign of terror.

00:20:11.360 What 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.

00:20:22.040 It's sort of science as they understand it, like Marxism being science as Marxists understand it.

00:20:29.580 But there is it is a natural progression.

00:20:33.020 It's a social progression.

00:20:34.740 But what democracy does is very different.

00:20:36.980 I think there's also an important break that has to be or division that has to be understood between mass democracy and national democracy.

00:20:45.560 You know, like Carl Schmitt says, you know, democracy is always folks' democracy.

00:20:50.980 It's popular democracy of a folk, of a people.

00:20:54.680 And 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.

00:21:10.540 And in the 20th century, we have is multicultural or it sort of starts with pluralistic democracy and then turns into multicultural democracy.

00:21:20.100 But 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.

00:21:39.940 And 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.

00:21:52.440 They're describing the Latvians or maybe the Israelis or Lithuanians or Poles.

00:21:57.480 They're not describing us because these other countries are national democracy, which is a strong national component.

00:22:02.720 And 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.

00:22:14.740 Important that you point out there that so many of these pillars of liberalism were considered in a national context.

00:22:24.320 They were territorialized to the interest of particular peoples in particular ways of life.

00:22:29.640 Yes, free markets, but in the service of a people.

00:22:32.680 Yes, democracy, but only because it reflects the understanding and way of being of a people.

00:22:38.380 And 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?

00:22:52.240 Do you think it has something to do with scale and managerialism?

00:22:55.720 What do you think made that process?

00:22:57.540 Was it inevitable?

00:22:58.300 How do you feel about that process?

00:23:00.520 Yeah, 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.

00:23:13.540 It's concerned about economic, world economic relations.

00:23:16.980 And 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.

00:23:30.320 And in many cases, the nationalism was stronger than the liberalism, which in some ways leads to the First World War.

00:23:39.280 So 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.

00:23:56.560 It's a radical democratic idea.

00:23:58.560 And then I think people like John Bright and others who told us were radical Democrats or James Mill, John Stuart Mill.

00:24:06.320 There were radicals in the 19th century.

00:24:09.440 But I think this this does have some connection to this this political universalism.

00:24:17.340 But I think I think you've made the argument that managerialism by its very nature is universal.

00:24:22.320 But I mean, it's we're not talking about the Prussian bureaucracy of Frederick the Great.

00:24:26.800 We're talking about modern managerialism.

00:24:28.920 And that that does have a universalist aspect.

00:24:31.660 The managerial class is similar wherever you go.

00:24:34.260 Right.

00:24:34.780 It's it has a rather weak sense of of of nationalism.

00:24:39.840 And in the in the current situation, it is a major vehicle of woke ideology.

00:24:46.580 Right.

00:24:47.300 Which has replaced Christianity as the, you know, the new Western religion. 0.98

00:24:53.500 So perhaps managerialism focuses on the aspects of liberalism that would allow it to then globalize it while discarding that which is not useful.

00:25:02.860 So 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.

00:25:12.100 Yeah, that's correct.

00:25:13.480 Liberals in the 19th century were certainly not against bureaucracy.

00:25:17.880 They supported bureaucracy because they saw it as an instrument by which the nation state would be able to run well.

00:25:24.860 And these would that would be disinterested people, you know, who would who would serve the common good.

00:25:31.960 And you've got this in most 19th century liberals.

00:25:34.800 I mean, they're very they're very high on bureaucracy properly.

00:25:37.660 I, 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.

00:25:51.300 Now, let's talk a little bit about that transition then to what we could probably call the civil rights regime.

00:25:58.740 Right. We have a managerialism that enters into the United States.

00:26:04.400 You identified, you know, you mentioned there with John Dewey that he was looking more for a socialistic United States.

00:26:12.100 But 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.

00:26:21.760 But do you see the civil rights revolution as a shift for kind of the justification underlying managerialism?

00:26:29.820 And 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?

00:26:37.260 Yeah, I definitely see the the managerial class as being the necessary instrument by which the civil rights revolution gets gets carried out.

00:26:48.940 And 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.

00:26:58.940 You 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.

00:27:21.760 But there, of course, the claim is to equality, which is a democratic virtue.

00:27:28.300 And 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.

00:27:43.320 Although the people who use that language in the 18th century were in some cases local.

00:27:49.680 But I think that that does that does provide a kind of conceptual bridge to what comes afterwards.

00:27:57.020 And 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.

00:28:06.320 We're living under it in a much more advanced form than the one that existed in the 1960s.

00:28:13.320 Well, I'm very interested to talk about how this, of course, transitions to our modern understanding of the woke ideology.

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00:30:00.940 Now, 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.

00:30:18.500 But 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.

00:30:26.520 So what do you think is, if not Marxism, what is the origin of this current wokeness?

00:30:33.800 And how did we transition to it as the ruling ideology of what was supposed to be a liberal democracy?

00:30:40.140 Yeah.

00:30:40.540 Well, 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.

00:30:53.480 But I think the argument that I make that Lindsay objects to is that liberalism itself becomes post-liberalism or gives way to post-liberalism.

00:31:03.460 And 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.

00:31:18.440 And 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.

00:31:34.280 It's a very different development that we're seeing.

00:31:36.280 I argue that Marxism, you know, really deals with socioeconomic revolution.

00:31:43.080 It is not about culture.

00:31:44.920 It is not about abolishing genders.

00:31:47.420 It is not about giving sex change operations to illegals.

00:31:51.540 It is about creating a socialist economy managed from the top, a revolutionary socialist economy.

00:31:59.280 The morals of so-called Marxist societies have been rather conservative by comparison to what's going on in Western countries today.

00:32:09.000 And I think the insistence that, you know, whatever people don't like is Marxist is there for two reasons.

00:32:18.220 Number one, because people who are conservatives are used to anti-communist rhetoric.

00:32:23.640 They've been getting it since the 1950s.

00:32:25.560 National Review, you know, provided that kind of language, especially during the Cold War.

00:32:34.520 And the enemy was communism and Marxism was seen as some kind of demonic force.

00:32:40.080 So certainly among the older generation of conservatives, people my age who are still around, they're used to hearing Marxism being denounced.

00:32:47.260 The Marxists are the bad guys.

00:32:49.700 And I think at one time they were.

00:32:51.560 It's just that, you know, they're not the bad guys anymore.

00:32:54.120 Or 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.

00:33:06.300 But 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.

00:33:19.160 This is the real enemy.

00:33:20.600 So 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.

00:33:28.560 Right.

00:33:28.660 And I see this very much at work.

00:33:32.880 You know, I remember, you know, watching a program on Fox News, and I will confess to my sin of actually watching Fox News.

00:33:42.200 But they had Caitlyn Jenner and someone introduced Caitlyn Jenner, who is a Republican transgender as a conservative. 0.80

00:33:52.120 And then they immediately began denouncing Marxism.

00:33:55.020 So, I mean, this tells you something about why conservatives have decided, you know, to resurrect Marxism.

00:34:03.500 Marx and Marxism is the enemy.

00:34:06.980 That's very interesting to think of that dynamic as, you know, this is a cover of kind of smuggling in a lot of the Cultural Revolution.

00:34:14.240 We can unite against this enemy.

00:34:15.720 So you don't have to think about all these things that happened under the banner of the previous revolution.

00:34:20.540 So that brings us to an interesting point because, you know, you're getting to the end of this.

00:34:27.040 And 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.

00:34:41.380 You 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.

00:34:52.080 Do 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?

00:35:01.320 We don't notice any real transition.

00:35:03.640 We just continue to perpetuate those same ideas as dominant.

00:35:09.000 You know, I think in the case of fascism, what we really mean is Hitler. 0.72

00:35:12.420 And we really mean Auschwitz and the final solution for Jews. 0.90

00:35:16.000 I mean, I think that's basically meant by fascism.

00:35:18.760 So, 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.

00:35:28.360 I mean, Trump is now Hitler, too, right?

00:35:29.940 And that means you, of course, are planning to enact the final solution against somebody. 0.51

00:35:36.280 And yeah, I think I think all of this anti-fascism stuff is utter nonsense.

00:35:41.100 And it's obviously being used, you know, it's being used in an even more sinister fashion in the communist state.

00:35:47.440 The communists are just to fight capitalists or to fight the United States.

00:35:51.440 These people are doing it to shut up any opposition to the woke agenda. 0.67

00:35:54.520 You know, and if you stand in their way, you're a fascist and fascist means Hitler and Hitler means Auschwitz.

00:36:04.780 I mean, this is basically what you're being told by implication.

00:36:08.540 Of course, the conservative movement goes after, too.

00:36:10.860 So we have Donald Trump, Mark Levin and others saying that the other side are fascist.

00:36:15.300 No, they're not fascist.

00:36:16.340 They're dangerous to totalitarians, but they're not fascist.

00:36:19.980 I mean, they're much more dangerous than generic fascists in the 1930s.

00:36:24.680 You know, I think a Kamala Harris regime would be much more dangerous than Mussolini's government in the 1920s.

00:36:32.400 I mean, you know, I don't need any comparison.

00:36:34.040 But, you know, the left are not fascist.

00:36:38.660 There's something else.

00:36:40.320 But it's, you know, to me, I think there is obvious political points to be made by those people who are using those terms.

00:36:49.140 In the case of the right, they keep saying you're a fascist because you're just throwing back at the left.

00:36:53.300 You remember that horrible book by Jonah Goldberg on liberal fascism?

00:36:57.340 I mean, it's just like, you know, you called me this name.

00:36:59.200 I'm going to call you this name back.

00:37:00.780 Right.

00:37:00.980 So do you think then that, you know, what would you identify then as the political ideologies of our modern era?

00:37:11.320 If we're not looking at liberalism, we're not looking at fascism, we're not looking at communism.

00:37:15.120 We've both talked about managerialism, but that's a form as much as it is an actual ideology.

00:37:21.240 What do you what do you see as the competing ideologies today?

00:37:24.140 The 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.

00:37:38.720 You 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.

00:37:49.660 Now we have the oppressed transgender, the victims of white male Christians all over the world and so forth.

00:37:56.780 So it's a much more radical kind of egalitarianism than earlier left.

00:38:02.400 But but it is, you know, it is part of the left.

00:38:04.760 It is not anti-capitalist because corporate capitalism is one of the important foundations of what we're now saying.

00:38:12.400 Right. Right.

00:38:13.060 I mean, I don't buy I don't buy this anti-capitalism at all.

00:38:16.140 I think I think you might say it's crony capitalism that they want, but they certainly are not going to nationalize anything.

00:38:23.400 The 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.

00:38:35.320 Right. 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.

00:38:46.920 And 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.

00:38:57.660 The right organizes against the left.

00:39:00.500 Right. And and defines itself in the struggle against the left.

00:39:03.840 Right. So we have all the people who are fighting it, mostly, mostly the white working class, from what I can see.

00:39:10.860 And it's a populist revolt.

00:39:13.420 It does not look like, you know, the early 19th century counterrevolution, but then it is not conservatism in that sense.

00:39:20.460 It 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.

00:39:30.240 Yeah. So I think that I think those are the major forces that I see.

00:39:34.880 I don't think I could really speak of conservatism, you know, on the right.

00:39:42.520 I mean, there is no people of cultural, religious conservatives.

00:39:46.400 I mean, they're around people who, you know, who read classics, who read the Bible and so forth.

00:39:51.360 But I don't see political conservatism, really.

00:39:54.020 I mean, I think that's something that belongs to an earlier age.

00:39:57.160 But I do see a rightist reaction.

00:40:00.100 And in the United States, that rightist reaction is centered right now on Trump and the people support Trump.

00:40:05.680 Whether or not he is a true man of the right, you know, may not be that important.

00:40:11.160 And 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.

00:40:23.740 And I think this may be true of Trump.

00:40:26.240 I don't find it particularly admirable.

00:40:28.080 I mean, he is a courageous man, but, you know, I don't find his views particularly coherent.

00:40:32.600 Andrew, 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.

00:40:44.020 He certainly does feel like a man gripped by history, whether worthy of it or not.

00:40:48.420 Yes, exactly.

00:40:49.260 And so he finds himself in that moment, yeah.

00:40:50.840 Yeah, no, he is.

00:40:51.700 And 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.

00:40:59.640 The same thing is true of Donald Trump.

00:41:04.700 There'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.

00:41:14.100 It all makes sense.

00:41:15.100 Its true purpose is revealed.

00:41:17.540 Now 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.

00:41:27.440 Do you feel ultimately that the destination was inevitable?

00:41:32.380 Do 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?

00:41:42.540 No, 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.

00:41:59.920 The 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.

00:42:16.800 Things did not go that way.

00:42:18.120 So that, that even with managerialism and the coming of democracy, things could have gone in a different direction.

00:42:25.120 Again, I think that this is the operation of accident contingency.

00:42:30.220 I think the, the role of the United States, you know, as a world power is very important.

00:42:35.840 It's a managerial mass democracy in the end, you know, and it's now pushing wokeness as a state religion.

00:42:42.840 Somebody 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.

00:42:54.360 And I said, if I were Hungarian, I would use anti-American rhetoric all the time.

00:42:58.960 You know, why should you like a country that's, you know, sticks LGBT flags on its embassies, pushes wokeness, gay marriage? 0.99

00:43:07.940 You know, if I were traditional Hungarian, I would, I would not like that at all. 1.00

00:43:13.680 But I don't think the United States necessarily had to go in that direction.

00:43:16.880 I think, you know, we traced the steps by which that happened.

00:43:20.640 I think one can arrive at the view that things might have happened differently.

00:43:24.200 Now, 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.

00:43:45.940 And 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.

00:43:59.680 I, I, I, I, I think that may have, to some extent, have been, you know, determined or, or over-determined.

00:44:08.600 You know, the, the French Marxist, Al-Khuzel, uses the word sur-determiner, like over-determined.

00:44:16.300 And I think that may have been over-determined that, that would have necessarily happened.

00:44:20.860 But 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.

00:44:29.680 One of the things that I think was, what may have been inevitable is the movement in which the civil rights movement went.

00:44:38.000 That, you know, by, by empowering the managerial class, by pushing the idea of, of equality, creating an expanded leftist electorate.

00:44:48.600 The, you know, that, that the outcome of what happened should not really have been in doubt.

00:44:53.920 Although, you know, things might have just stopped with women. 1.00

00:44:56.520 I mean, I guess they're not certain, they said, but going on to gays and transgenders and so forth.

00:45:02.140 But, but I, I think people underestimate the revolutionary impact, even of the early civil rights movement.

00:45:09.600 Particularly once it becomes linked to big government and to the managerial class.

00:45:14.540 Yeah, I have this thought that scale really puts incredible emphasis on institutions.

00:45:22.440 Of 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.

00:45:33.920 And 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.

00:45:49.920 That, 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.

00:46:04.520 We, 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?

00:46:24.960 Are, 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?

00:46:36.420 Well, 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.

00:46:48.600 And 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.

00:47:02.700 In 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.

00:47:20.460 And 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.

00:47:32.460 So 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 1.00

00:47:50.400 disobedience 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.

00:48:14.500 Because 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,

00:48:38.500 even 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

00:49:02.500 that 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.

00:49:30.700 You 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,

00:50:00.700 reasonable bounds, uh, to toward the administrative, the leftist administration.

00:50:05.420 Yeah. 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.

00:50:25.040 Yeah. 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.

00:50:48.040 25 years ago.

00:50:49.040 Yeah, 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.

00:51:02.040 Uh, 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?

00:51:15.040 So 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?

00:51:38.040 You 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. 0.64

00:52:07.040 Yeah, 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, 0.97

00:52:37.040 a 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.

00:52:58.980 Right.

00:52:59.480 But, 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.

00:53:10.180 You 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. 0.69

00:53:17.940 And, uh, this is one of the reasons why white nationalism is a dead end.

00:53:23.400 Uh, 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?

00:53:36.400 So 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?

00:53:52.400 You 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.

00:54:04.400 And, 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. 0.90

00:54:18.400 Uh, 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. 0.91

00:54:34.400 You said, you know, there are people pretending to be white, but are not really white and they're really the cause of the problem. 0.97

00:54:40.400 So 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.

00:54:50.400 Yeah. 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.

00:54:57.400 But, 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.

00:55:07.400 But it's, it's some, it's something, it's something that white nationals, I think have trouble explaining. 0.71

00:55:13.400 Robert Weinsfield here says, uh, who is the successor to Trump populism MAGA on the right?

00:55:20.400 JD Vance, Tucker, DeSantis, Vivek, RFK, uh, any current unknowns or, or is it back to Normie Conland?

00:55:27.400 Do you see any promising figures beyond Trump?

00:55:30.400 We'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?

00:55:37.400 Yeah, I think Vance is probably better than Tucker Carlson.

00:55:42.400 Tucker Carlson is erratic.

00:55:44.400 You know, I mean, like he, uh, he has strange people on his show.

00:55:47.400 Sometimes he makes very strange statements, uh, that I can't quite comprehend.

00:55:52.400 But, 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.

00:56:04.400 Even if at one time he attacked Donald Trump, uh, you know, has found his way to the populist right.

00:56:11.400 But I think he has become an eloquent, consistent spokesman.

00:56:15.400 I do like DeSantis, but he doesn't seem to catch on with voters outside the state of Florida.

00:56:20.400 And he's an excellent administrator.

00:56:23.400 He's an excellent executive, but he's not, he, he does not have that something that, that really grips the popular in that imagination.

00:56:30.400 You know, you know, somebody attacked me, uh, uh, unheard, you know, uh, attacked me for, for, for supporting DeSantis.

00:56:39.400 Or I think it was attacking DeSantis through me that he had this crotchety paleo conservative theorist, uh, said something nice about DeSantis. 0.51

00:56:47.400 This was actually a warning that, you know, people should back DeSantis.

00:56:51.400 Uh, 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.

00:57:02.400 I was hoping he would do better.

00:57:05.400 Citi all the way says, how do liberals, uh, seem to always dictate or shape our society?

00:57:10.400 A Gallup poll shows 23% of Republicans say that racial inequality against blacks is a critical threat to the United States.

00:57:17.400 How illogical.

00:57:19.400 I would just guess it's because of, you know, their control of the media and control of educational institutions.

00:57:24.400 They shape public opinion, even of those who think they're in opposition to.

00:57:28.400 I would agree.

00:57:29.400 Yeah, no, I think it's absolutely correct.

00:57:31.400 Uh, 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.

00:57:38.400 You 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.

00:57:49.400 But, but there are such Republicans.

00:57:51.400 Let's see here.

00:57:54.400 Uh, Hey, Max McDonald says, uh, where does the GOP go post Trump?

00:57:59.400 Oh, we kind of already, or, uh, we kind of already discussed that.

00:58:03.400 Does it stick with JD Vance and appeal to more white voters?

00:58:06.400 Or does it try a neocon multiracial alliance with Nicky Haley?

00:58:10.400 Uh, 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.

00:58:25.400 There's just not, not a lot of grassroots support there, let's say.

00:58:29.400 Yeah, yeah, not grassroots support.

00:58:31.400 I, 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.

00:58:43.400 And he follows up saying, Paul, does Paul feel that self-hating whites at the top are not, uh, sacrificing themselves, but lower class whites?

00:58:53.400 But Romney or Bill Gates would never say that rich whites are evil.

00:58:57.400 Would they take these positions if it did affect them?

00:59:00.400 Yeah, 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.

00:59:14.400 I mean, it's the, the attitude which, uh, was reflected in Hillary Clinton's statements about, you know, these massive deplorables.

00:59:22.400 And I, I, I think there was somebody else who recently made a similar comment.

00:59:26.400 I don't know, it was Kamala Harris. 0.99

00:59:27.400 You, you always heard this from the, uh, the ladies on The View. 0.93

00:59:30.400 I mean, they're full of contempt, uh, for, uh, for working class whites. 1.00

00:59:35.400 And I, I think that, that is a major impulse behind, uh, behind the wokeness of, of rich white people.

00:59:42.400 Uh, so social, um, social content.

00:59:47.400 Yeah.

00:59:48.400 That, that, and, and it's funny because some of the people who are, uh, how do we say on the dissident right or the internet, right?

00:59:54.400 They, they, you know, they want to, they see themselves as potential elites.

00:59:58.400 They see themselves as possible leaders.

01:00:00.400 Mm-hmm .

01:00:01.400 And 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.

01:00:08.400 Yeah.

01:00:09.400 They don't, they don't really know anything else about leadership. 0.84

01:00:10.400 They just know that the one thing you're supposed to do is, you know, just hate, you know, middle-class whites.

01:00:16.400 That, that, that's really the critical feature of an elite.

01:00:19.400 So that's what they do, even though they're theoretically on the right.

01:00:21.400 It's, it's a very bizarre, but, but observable phenomenon.

01:00:24.400 No, I think it's very kind of, you know, neo-reactionaries.

01:00:27.400 I 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.

01:00:41.400 And, uh, you know, they're, uh, they, uh, they flaunt their loathing, you know, for the, uh, for the lower orders.

01:00:48.400 I think, of course, these people are going to go absolutely nowhere.

01:00:50.400 So, uh, you know, they're, they're, they're just a historical curiosity at this point.

01:00:55.400 All 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.

01:01:00.400 We 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?

01:01:12.400 Probably not.

01:01:13.400 I mean, not, not for any length of time.

01:01:15.400 I mean, they, they might, you know, vote the same way in, in election.

01:01:18.400 I 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.

01:01:25.400 Because 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.

01:01:36.400 Um, 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.

01:01:51.400 Yeah.

01:01:52.400 Oh, and a lot, a lot with the European aristocracy, the antebellum Southern gentry and so forth.

01:01:58.400 Uh, 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.

01:02:11.400 I 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,

01:02:20.400 was formed, you know, back in the 1980s.

01:02:23.400 Well, you know, you have to serve someone, you know, there, there has, that's, that's the essence of politics.

01:02:27.400 And 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.

01:02:47.400 Ultimately, those are things that would, uh, create a positive outcome for those groups.

01:02:52.400 I think ultimately.

01:02:53.400 No, I agree.

01:02:54.400 And, uh, you know, the, uh, well, might say the populist right is the closest thing to the right.

01:03:01.400 Right.

01:03:02.400 Paleo conservatives.

01:03:03.400 There 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.

01:03:14.400 Uh, who are defending elitist Republicanism, you know, as they go into the, uh, the woke camp.

01:03:20.400 So, uh, you know, I, I think, I think paleo conservatives have made the right practical choice.

01:03:25.400 Absolutely.

01:03:26.400 All right, guys.

01:03:27.400 Well, make sure to check out all of Paul's work.

01:03:30.400 Uh, it's been great speaking with him.

01:03:32.400 He's got a weekly column over at the blaze as well.

01:03:35.400 So make sure that you are reading that if it's your first time on this YouTube channel, make sure you subscribe, click the bell notifications.

01:03:41.400 So, you know, when we go live and if you would like to go ahead and get these broadcasts as podcasts, you need to subscribe to the or a Mac entire show on your favorite podcast platform.

01:03:50.400 Thank you everybody for watching.

01:03:52.400 And as always, I will talk to you next time.

01:03:54.400 We'll see you next time.

The Auron MacIntyre Show - September 25, 2024

The Evolution of Liberalism ｜ Guest： Paul Gottfried ｜ 9⧸25⧸24

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