James Lindsay and Colin Wright have been making noise with their use of the term "Woke Right" as a political weapon. Why do they think this term is a useful tool to attack nationalism and tribalism? In this episode, I take a deep dive into their motivations behind the term and compare it to Stalin's anti-nationalism.
00:00:43.040You guys are probably familiar with the conflict at this point.
00:00:46.560I don't want to rehash the drama on here because ultimately I think I've said my piece
00:00:51.560and it's just be better if everybody kind of moved on and forgot about the guys who are throwing this term around.
00:00:56.820That said, there has been some interesting discussion centered here, not just on the term which is vacuous and obviously a political weapon,
00:01:05.900but the people who are pushing it have revealed some of the goals that they have, some of the thought process behind what they're doing.
00:01:14.800One of the things that happened is that James Lindsay and Colin Wright here, who is one of the other kind of new atheist, radical centrist guys who's trying to push the term and force the term,
00:01:27.240is that both of them have identified nationalism as a problem.
00:01:31.600In fact, James Lindsay said that national conservatism is the final boss of the woke right.
00:01:38.380So what are these guys doing attacking nationalism?
00:01:44.460Well, Colin revealed in some of his discussions, I think some interesting thought process as to why they're going after nationalism in general.
00:01:54.960He was having a back and forth with my buddy Carl Benjamin, Sargon of Akkad, who's been on the show very many times.
00:02:04.640And Carl was asking him a pretty reasonable question.
00:02:08.100Colin was saying we have to get rid of tribalism.
00:02:10.380We have to get rid of the idea that people care more about the people they're related to or the people next to them or the people that they share a culture or tradition with.
00:02:21.840And Carl Benjamin says, OK, but like, how are we actually going to de-tribalize these communities?
00:02:29.620How are we going to get rid of the fact that people have a natural tendency to prefer other people like them?
00:02:35.960That sounds like it would be pretty involved.
00:02:39.180And Colin went into a kind of diatribe about how important it was that we get rid of this.
00:02:45.180We're never going to get rid of it entirely, but that we have this large social shaming campaign about the idea that you would have any loyalty or understanding that you are connected to people who share things in common.
00:02:59.400And I think that's interesting because Stalin, Joseph Stalin of the USSR, also had some interesting things to say about the need to get rid of tribalism and ultimately nationalism for the ascent of communism.
00:03:15.680Now, I'd like to be clear at the outset, I'm not calling Colin or James Lindsay communists.
00:03:21.280They're just liberals, which are is an inevitable step on the road to communism, but is not itself definitively Marxist.
00:03:28.840That said, there's often an overlap in the goals of these two ideologies.
00:03:33.260And I don't think oftentimes the classical liberal, and I'm saying that ironically because neither Colin Wright nor James Lindsay are approaching classical liberals.
00:03:44.000If they spoke to any classical liberal in the 1700s, that person would probably throw them off the boat they were sitting on, right?
00:03:52.180Like these are not that, you know, John Locke said that an atheist should not be trusted, should not be allowed in public, should not have public influence, should not be allowed to to hold a public office because they cannot be trusted, which would make guys like James Lindsay and Colin Wright immediately disqualified from hanging out from with the father of classical liberalism.
00:04:11.560That said, people who have adopted that moniker often don't realize the level of social engineering they're actually advocating for.
00:04:19.560And so I wanted to take a look today, what did Stalin actually say about nations?
00:04:24.920He wrote an essay in, I believe it was 1913, called Marxism and the National Question.
00:04:31.820And obviously we're against Marxism here, so we're going to be critical of it.
00:04:35.940But I think it would be interesting to compare and contrast with some of the demands being made by guys like James Lindsay and Colin Wright.
00:04:43.680Because ultimately, while these guys might not have the same exact ideology, what they are interested in is scale.
00:04:52.400They want to be able to operate the empire at scale.
00:04:56.800And both the liberals and the communists recognize that to do that, they must get rid of local, tribal, and national identities.
00:05:06.160And so I'm going to dive into that essay today and see what Stalin had to say and why it bears a not-so-passing resemblance to some of the demands now being made by the ye olde classical liberals.
00:05:19.220But before we get into that, guys, let's talk about today's sponsor.
00:05:23.160This episode of The Oren McIntyre Show is proudly sponsored by Consumers Research.
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00:05:43.360Their work and its consequences have been profiled by The Washington Post, New York Times, and most recently, Fox News business reporter Charlie Gasparono wrote a whole chapter in his book,
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00:06:16.020All right, so like I said, we're going to take a brief look at what Joseph Stalin had to say about the idea of nationalism and kind of the issue that he is taking with it.
00:06:29.780Now, you have to understand that this was written prior to Stalin taking power.
00:06:35.680Again, I believe this essay was written in, yeah, 1913.
00:06:38.580Now, it becomes rather significant because obviously Stalin will take control later on of the Soviet Union, and when he does, the way that the Soviet Union approaches nationality is very much altered, right?
00:06:55.300Beforehand, they had kind of recognized ethnic minorities, whether or not that there was a need for recognition of different national identities and whether there should be some kind of centralization around that as to how they organize the USSR.
00:07:11.600But that kind of went away with Stalin.
00:07:15.320Stalin had a different vision for how the USSR should approach the nationalist question.
00:07:22.140And like I said, what this reveals is something that's true about Marxism, but is also true about any ideology that is looking to universalize, anyone who is looking to scale up civilization rather significantly.
00:07:36.420We've talked about this in different ways and from different angles a number of times, but when you are seeking to manage a large group of people, you have to break down the things that make them individualistic, the things that make them unable to cooperate with the system as it exists now.
00:07:55.580And so you have a scenario where if you want to centralize power, you have to get rid of things like tribal identities or national identities.
00:08:05.320Now, there might be some situations in which you want to break down some of the smaller identities.
00:08:12.120There might be some justification for it.
00:08:15.740But ultimately, we need to understand that this is a critical part of the process.
00:08:20.040And that's why we see it in any society that is attempting to centralize power, is attempting to manage more and more people through its central bureaucratic process.
00:08:29.180Now, the interesting thing in this particular essay is that at this point, at least, Stalin does recognize that there is going to have to be some level of regional autonomy inside this collective communist empire, basically, right?
00:08:45.260This federation of communist republics.
00:08:48.360And so he recognizes that you can't just do everything from the capital the whole time.
00:08:54.700You will have to allow different areas to have some level of individual autonomy.
00:09:01.720However, he's worried about the way the autonomy will be characterized.
00:09:06.380He's worried that if people are allowed to continue to see themselves as nations and are allowed to understand themselves as organized by nations, they will not be as easy to control as we'll look into this.
00:09:20.120Obviously, we're not going to be reading this whole essay.
00:09:24.320It takes like two hours, I think, to get through out loud.
00:09:27.520So I'm just going to be picking a few quotes from it so we can get a general idea of where Stalin was going with this.
00:09:36.200But ultimately, I think it is helpful because it helps us to grasp kind of the mechanism that is being deployed in this scenario.
00:09:45.620So if we look early on, I'll just read the first few lines here.
00:09:48.720So he's saying that there was an ideological,
00:10:18.720unity, but as soon as that ideological unity broke, as long as there was no longer this kind of ideological future that you could focus on, people reverted back to national identity.
00:10:32.300Their first reflexive loyalty was to their nationality.
00:10:36.440And this is something that Stalin and communists don't like.
00:10:39.540They don't like that you're falling away from the class struggle.
00:10:42.500You're falling away from the ideological center that instead you're reverting back to your classic loyalties as a person of a particular nation.
00:10:51.380And so he's saying, OK, how do how do we deal with these problems?
00:10:54.760At the same time, a profound upheaval was taking place in the economic life of the country.
00:11:02.840One more blow had been struck at the survival of serfdom in the countryside, the series of good harvests, which succeeded the famine years and the industrial boom, which followed further the progress of capitalism.
00:11:14.620Class differentiation in the countryside, the growth of towns, the development of trade and means of communication all took a big stride forward.
00:11:21.840This applied particularly to the border regions, and it could not but hasten the process of economic consolidation of nationalities of Russia.
00:11:30.320They were bound to be stirred into movement.
00:11:32.960So many people don't recognize this because they're not really familiar with more of what kind of Marx taught.
00:11:39.100But for Marx, capitalism was a critical step in the process towards communism.
00:11:44.980It wasn't just a competition between capitalism and communism.
00:11:48.680Marx understood capitalism as necessary because ultimately Marx wanted this economic consolidation and unification so that the communists could take over the structure and flip it towards their socialist ends.
00:12:04.020And so he's actually fine with capitalism up to the point where it breaks down what he thinks are the barriers to communism.
00:12:11.660And what are some of the barriers to communism that he's identifying here?
00:12:15.040Well, national identity, people living in the countryside instead of living in cities.
00:12:20.700These are behaviors that make it difficult for communists to take over.
00:12:24.940If you look at pretty much every communist movement, it tends to be pushed by the city centers.
00:12:31.280It tends to be pushed by alienated workers inside of factories, right?
00:12:39.320In fact, farmers have a nasty habit of being pro the king.
00:12:43.160You know, if you look at something like the French Revolution, it's the it's the Parisians that are the ones that are pushing the French Revolution.
00:12:50.840It's the it's the farmers who are still loyal to the monarchy out in the sticks.
00:12:56.700And so Marx sees capitalism as this tool to break down these like particular feudal loyalties, these different national regional identities, these tribal identities, and instead to forge a nation.
00:13:11.820He just thinks then it needs to become communist.
00:13:14.280So the national project to him is a necessary step in the breakdown of things that will be barriers to communism.
00:13:21.900But they are not themselves where he wants to see everything in.
00:13:26.040The constitutional regime established at the time also acted in the same direction of awakening the nationalities.
00:13:33.000The spread of newspapers and literature generally, a general freedom of the press and cultural institutions, and increase the number of national theaters and so and so forth, all unquestionably helped to strengthen national sentiment.
00:13:45.280The Duma, its elected campaign, if you don't know, that's like a kind of like a parliament for for Russia, with its election campaign and political groups have fresh opportunities for greater activity of the nation and provided a new and wide area of their mobilization.
00:14:01.120So again, he's looking at all of these different factors and saying, this is how you're going to get the destruction of these particular regional identities, and it's going to drive people towards this national identity.
00:14:13.580And he identifies nationalism as the same thing as capitalism, like capitalism is part of the nationalistic process or nationalism is part of a capitalistic project.
00:14:25.960And so these things kind of run together, and so he sees both of them as a necessary step.
00:14:31.300He's not against the fact that they break down the identities he also wants to break down.
00:14:35.720However, he sees them as a transitional thing, not a goal, not a place you want to get stuck.
00:14:41.900Obviously, that's why he ends up being very hostile to both capitalism and nationalism at the end.
00:14:47.660We're going to talk a little more about why, like what he thought about this process, why he opposed it, and why ultimately he was so emphatic about breaking down national identity.
00:15:00.540But before we do, guys, let's get to or let's talk about Blaze TV.
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00:16:02.360All right, so again, he goes into all these different possible nationalistic movements from Zionism, the Poles, the Tartars, Armenians, Georgians, all these different peoples that might have possible nationalistic ambitions.
00:16:18.480And he says the wave of nationalism swept onwards with increasing force threatening to engulf the mass of the workers.
00:16:25.180And the more the movement for emancipation declined, the more plentiful nationalism pushed forth its bosom.
00:16:32.320So we have this class consciousness, but this nationalism keeps getting in the way of it.
00:16:37.060It's a boundary to this class consciousness.
00:16:40.620People keep reverting back to these stupid national identities instead of forging themselves into these worker collectives across this international coalition.
00:16:49.560At this time, at this difficult time, social democracy had a high mission to resist nationalism and to protect the masses from the general epidemic.
00:17:00.160For social democracy and social democracy alone could do this by countering nationalism with a tried weapon of internationalism with the unity and indivisibility of class struggle.
00:17:12.100So he sees nationalism as this very serious barrier, an epidemic, he calls it, for the masses accepting social democracy and ultimately communism.
00:17:25.160And so there has to be a way to fight back against the nationalism that is being pushed.
00:17:30.520And he says, obviously, we need an international solution, right?
00:17:34.180The key is to keep things international, not national.
00:17:37.780And how do we create international unity?
00:17:40.160How do we move beyond the national identity class struggle, right?
00:17:43.760That's how we're going to actually bind these people together.
00:17:48.040The more powerful the wave of nationalism is and the louder had to be the call of social democracy for fraternity, unity among the proletariats of the nationalities of Russia.
00:17:59.540And this connection particularly, and in this connection, particular firmness was demanded of the social democrats of the border regions who came into direct contact with the nationalist movements.
00:18:12.060So, again, here we see that it is evident that a serious and comprehensive discussion of the national question be required.
00:18:21.940Consistent social democrats must work solidly and indefatigably against the fog of nationalism no matter what quarter it proceeds, no matter from what quarter it proceeds.
00:21:47.240And culture shows this, like, shared psychology, the shared understanding that people have.
00:21:53.100But it's surprisingly abstract language for a materialist.
00:21:58.520He's kind of recognized, even though those are kind of his core beliefs, he can't move beyond the fact that there seems to be this emergent, shared understanding that a people have, that a nation has, that gives it particularities.
00:22:13.180And one of the things he attacks over and over again, one of the things that he really does not like, is particularities.
00:22:20.720That communism needs to destroy the particularities that different tribes and nations have.
00:22:27.160Because those are barriers to the consolidation of communist power.
00:22:31.520And so for Stalin, the existence of nations and the existence of subgroups, like tribes within nations, is a barrier to the application of communist identity.
00:22:42.420And so it has some pretty serious limitations on the way that you can operate the country if it allows us to stay in place.
00:22:51.040And so this is why I wanted to point to kind of Colin Wright's assertion that we need to have this, like, intense detribalization and him maybe not understanding the level of social engineering that he's demanding.
00:23:05.340Or if he does understand the level of social engineering he's demanding, why he thinks that's okay.
00:23:11.540You know, when you're talking about the top-down elimination of people's natural instincts, you need to be doing that for a pretty good reason, right?
00:23:19.560Like, we recognize that people steal, that people do all kinds of things that naturally that aren't great.
00:23:27.620They kill, they steal, they cheat, they do all these kind of things that we don't like.
00:23:31.920And so it's not like there aren't laws to correct those behaviors.
00:23:36.300But at the same time, we recognize that there are limitations to human nature and what you can change.
00:23:43.000And that you have to be careful about destroying natural systems lest you find out that they were undergirding some critical aspect of society, that they actually create a support system that you didn't understand.
00:23:57.260And the communists are famous for doing this, right?
00:23:59.960They destroy everything from religion, to the nation, to the tribe, all the way down to the family.
00:24:06.580They want parents and children to be more loyal to the party than they are to each other.
00:24:12.160They want to make sure that you are so unparticular, that you are so universally loyal to your class and its struggle,
00:24:19.540rather than to any natural, biological, or spiritual tie that you might have to family or tribe or nation,
00:24:27.580that they are willing to destroy everything all the way down to the family.
00:24:31.120And so there's a large propaganda campaign, a massive top-down manipulation of social engineering
00:24:37.500in an attempt to break those bonds, get rid of those national, tribal, and even familial loyalties and particularities.
00:24:46.580Because when you have a preference for your own nation or your own tribe or your own family,
00:24:54.180then you aren't going to follow all the communistic dictates.
00:24:57.540You're not going to go for all this equity.
00:24:59.620You're not going to go for this completely uniform distribution that never occurs anyway because communism is a lie.
00:25:06.160But you need to break down those loyalties because if you don't, you can't operate the system at scale.
00:25:11.640You can't force the artificial ideology that you want down onto people.
00:25:16.160And so it's critical that you break down every one of the loyalties all the way from the family up to the tribe, up to the nation, right?
00:25:24.240Now, tribe is a difficult thing at the moment, right?
00:25:28.480We have a difficult conception of this because at the same time in the United States,
00:25:33.540we're attempting to keep the national identity, right?
00:25:39.060And we also want to keep the family identity.
00:25:42.440But we have a problem with the intermediate identities, right?
00:25:46.440And a lot of people in America, including apparently guys like James and Colin, have a problem with national identities as well.
00:25:54.000However, you know, in the United States, at least on the right, on the actual right, you know, actual people who are trying to conserve the country in some meaningful sense, we recognize that nationalism is actually good.
00:26:19.780We do care enough about our nation to create a level of particularity that exists at the national level.
00:26:25.240At the same time, we also want a level of particularity that exists at the familial level, because what we've recognized is that this destruction of identity and this destruction of community is also leading to destruction of families.
00:26:57.840When you create surrogacy and this kind of stuff where people are literally purchasing children from others, like you're breaking down the basic of what makes a family strong and necessary.
00:27:09.260And so a lot of people are recognizing that the loss of identity at the familial level is a huge problem.
00:27:15.240The thing that we're having trouble with is this intermediate level of identity, right?
00:27:20.060How do you deal with the fact that you, at least on the right, you know, people who I think are ultimately correct about human nature, want to preserve a national identity?
00:27:28.760And you want a familial identity that's robust, but you also have this middle layer that you could call tribe or community, right?
00:27:38.860Those are different, but not so different.
00:27:42.880You know, tribe tends to be people who are related together.
00:27:46.160And extended community is really just the tribes that have interrelated, right?
00:27:53.340It's different tribes that have worked together and they've forged an identity that is not entirely tribal.
00:27:58.820It's no longer completely trapped in that kind of original ground of ethnos, but is not itself be moved beyond to like a more national identity, right?
00:28:10.100This is what Stalin would have said is almost a futile understanding, right?
00:28:14.020And so in the United States, we're having a little bit of trouble with that because if you look at, say, de Tocqueville, right?
00:28:20.740You look at Alexis de Tocqueville and Democracy in America.
00:28:23.480He recognizes that America entering in to these voluntary associations, these intermediate institutions, somewhere between the family and the wider nation is really the key to America's continued existence.
00:28:39.540He says, this is what's going to make America, America, actually, funny enough, a lot of people who, who, you know, bring up de Tocqueville in this reference, don't bring up the fact that in that chapter, he says that America's individualism is itself a little bit of a problem.
00:28:53.420And that what will solve this problem, which will, what will create this, this layer of identity somewhere between the family and the nation are these associations, these voluntarily voluntary associations.
00:29:05.500But the key is that those associations are voluntary and they tend to be drawn into some kind of tribalistic line.
00:29:13.960You know, you have these voluntary associations of churches or voluntary associations of civic clubs, and they tend to come, people coming from a background of a particular religious community or a particular, you know, geographical area, people with the shared heritage, they tend to have some kind of binding artifact like this.
00:29:34.620Now, many of them move and adopt multiples of this, right?
00:29:38.420There's, there's multiple tribes allowed into this religious association.
00:29:42.320There's multiple groups that are allowed into this civic organization, but it is certainly not a nationalistic identity, right?
00:29:50.580This is their, the kind of the in-between step as your identity scales up.
00:29:56.160And these are natural and positive and organic creations.
00:30:00.420They do a good job of standing between the national identity's desire to dissolve the region, but also allow for something to move beyond just the most basic familial and basic tribal identity.
00:30:14.100Now, the question we want to ask ourselves, and I think a question that's probably difficult and thorny, but needs to be addressed, is kind of what you want, what level of organization you want to be available in your country.
00:30:29.120Because as we're going to see here, the last part is, of this essay is, you know, the national question in Russia.
00:30:35.220And he asks, what are we going to do about this, right?
00:30:37.840Like he goes, he goes through this whole essay.
00:30:39.820And again, forgive me for not reading the whole thing.
00:30:43.120Oh, not very long, but it's too long for, for, to read through the whole stream.
00:30:46.640But he talks about the, you know, what is a nation and how is it constituted?
00:30:51.300And there's a lot of background there that's interesting, but thoroughly academic and nerdy.
00:30:55.560And I don't want you to, you know, to, you know, to glaze your eyes, to glaze over as I read through all of the ethnic dynamics of Russia in the 1900s.
00:31:03.740That said, we in the United States need to start thinking about like what we're comfortable with when it comes to identity and how we want to organize.
00:31:13.660Because we need to recognize that originally the United States itself was something of a collection of nations, right?
00:31:22.400And these 13 states were 13 individual places where people had cultural particularities, where oftentimes entire tribes, key families, aristocratic families would have large swaths of power.
00:31:39.420And for a very long time in the American system, we had a federal system that allowed these different peoples in these different states to operate under one unified federal government, but still have a large degree of autonomy to where they could express their individual understanding.
00:31:59.360You know, many of these places had state churches.
00:32:01.840Maryland was originally Catholic, right?
00:32:04.240They had definitive communities with particularities that the region had to deal with.
00:32:10.620And they were still able to participate in the wider United States for the most part, but they were allowed to keep that level of familial, tribal, communal, and then state autonomy before kicking it up to the federal government.
00:32:25.900That's how we understood this question in America.
00:32:31.440He says, because again, he recognizes that you can't centralize everything, but he says that having a national autonomy is just like a backwards program of nationalism.
00:32:42.880That, like, if you allow people to be, even if they're under the communist government as a general rule, if you allow them to maintain national loyalty and national identity in the classical sense, then they will always ultimately defer to that loyalty before they defer to their communist loyalty.
00:33:03.360And so this will serve as a barrier to communism.
00:33:07.060And so he says this is a very bad thing that we need to go ahead and get rid of, right?
00:33:11.140And so this is a very similar sentiment to the one we're seeing from some of our disgruntled liberal friends, right?
00:33:18.060Like, we need to destroy the loyalty, all intermediate loyalties.
00:33:24.020Like, you may be allowed to keep the family.
00:33:25.780Like, they seem to be kind of okay with that.
00:33:27.360They recognize that they can't go directly after the family.
00:33:30.560But anything else, up to and including loyalty to the nation, is the final boss, as they've said.
00:33:36.940And so why do they need to destroy it?
00:33:39.680Why do they share this goal with the communists?
00:33:41.600Because, again, I don't think that they're communists, but I think that there is a lesson we need to understand about power and its consolidation and what is necessary and what level of social engineering is being demanded by people who are ultimately pushing that understanding of human nature.
00:33:59.100So, like I said, in the United States, we had a little bit of a solution to this problem, mainly because of the federalism and the level of regional autonomy that we were allowing.
00:34:09.680We weren't enforcing an ideological belief on every single person in every single nation, and in this case, every single state.
00:34:18.020And so we didn't need a large program of social engineering to force everyone to follow this.
00:34:23.800We didn't need to centralize power to the level that the communists obviously were planning to do.
00:34:28.380We didn't need to enforce ideological control onto every region.
00:34:32.680We didn't need to destroy tribal or communal or state loyalties.
00:34:36.880In fact, state loyalties continued to be a big deal up until the Civil War, where guys like Robert E. Lee, who were obviously, he was offered the command of the Union Army.
00:34:48.640He was somebody who's the greatest general available at that time.
00:34:52.260But his loyalty was to his state, to his people, to his tribe, before it was to the nation.
00:34:59.020And this is where I think you see some differentiation, right?
00:35:03.040Because for many people, especially modern liberals, that's a very bad thing.
00:35:08.560The fact that Robert E. Lee was more loyal to a subsidiary level of identity below the unified universal nation, that itself is a problem.
00:35:21.440That's just on the nationalistic level.
00:35:23.420But the Civil War, make no mistake, is ultimately the final war for American nationalism.
00:35:29.940And once it's resolved, the kind of inevitable move of America was going to be towards the victory of this unified kind of imperial nationalism over the regional federalism that had been a huge part of the American identity previously.
00:35:46.560And so what we have to look at now in the United States is what level of subsidiary identities are we comfortable with?
00:35:58.520Because I want to be clear, there are downsides to hardcore tribalism.
00:36:02.860Like there are very big downsides to intense tribalism.
00:36:07.160If you've ever watched Lawrence of Arabia, that movie is about many things.
00:36:12.180But one of the things it's about is the fact that the Arab tribes simply cannot work together, right?
00:36:17.320They don't have this idea of kind of the larger institutions that sit between the tribe and kind of the caliphate.
00:36:27.540For in a lot of Islamic political structure, like you either have the large Islamic empire and then you have tribes.
00:36:34.820And the idea of like the nation state in between doesn't really stick, which is why it was so easy for like Britain and these other countries to kind of carve up the Middle East when they took control of these mandates is because ultimately there wasn't really a lot of national identity as in our modern understanding among many of the Middle Eastern peoples.
00:36:57.760And so you have this scenario where you have these these massive states that are drawn up by the British.
00:37:03.040And in some sense, is it because they don't understand the culture of Arabs at the time?
00:37:08.860But also it's because kind of the Middle East itself, that Islamic culture just did not have identity that was available to them that created organization at that level.
00:37:19.500And so if you watch Lawrence of Arabia and kind of the story about the British and, you know, the war between them and the tribes of of the Middle East at the time, one of the problems that T. Lawrence really runs into, T. Lawrence rather runs into on a regular basis is that he can't get the tribes to work together.
00:37:37.220That ultimately they might unify for like one of the these like strikes against the British.
00:37:43.440Right. But ultimately they can't organize in a way that would allow them to stay together and stay as a significant political force to strike about back against this unified British empire.
00:37:55.780And so because the Muslim tribes have such a serious problem with coordination, they're too tribal, they're so tribal that they can't cooperate, they end up failing.
00:38:05.720Right. And if you've ever listened, you know, there's a guy, Ed Dutton, I've been on his channel and I'm pretty sure I've had him on this channel as well.
00:38:12.040But Ed Dutton has this theory that one of the evolutionary advantages of Christianity was the fact that it allowed for higher levels of cooperation between peoples.
00:38:22.840And so you could have these wider European empires that that that operated because it allowed for like different levels of identity.
00:38:31.240People could have a familial identity. They could have a tribal identity.
00:38:35.280They could have a kind of like a state identity and then they could have like a wider identity of Christendom.
00:38:40.640And those things didn't have to be in conflict.
00:38:43.420There was a level of cooperation that was allowed across these barriers that normally were pretty big deals for human organization.
00:38:51.560And that's what allowed a large amount of European countries to kind of win the race, as it were, not that they didn't worry against each other.
00:38:59.220They often did, but not to the degree they were able to cooperate, coordinate, trade, create alliances to a higher degree because of that level of cooperation.
00:39:09.420So there is a level of tribalism that we want to avoid because it makes it impossible for us to function at certain levels of organization.
00:39:18.860And it makes it hard for us to compete with others that are able to cooperate.
00:39:23.860Right. So there's a downside to over tribalization.
00:39:26.680That said, there is also clearly now we're discovering the other end of this problem.
00:39:32.180Right. Because it's not just a one sided problem.
00:39:34.380There is too much tribalization. Right.
00:39:37.020But there also seems to be at some level not enough.
00:39:40.620You can reach a point where if you have completely lost your particularity, you've completely lost your identity.
00:39:47.220You've completely lost your ability to prefer your nation and its people and their well-being to others.
00:39:53.360Then all of a sudden you become one of these universalist leftists.
00:39:56.660Right. You can't say no to mass immigration.
00:39:59.640You don't know how to say, actually, we should care about the well-being of America before we care about the well-being of Ukraine or Israel or Zimbabwe or any other nation.
00:40:08.800You don't have the ability to isolate the well-being of your people and say, this is going to be a priority.
00:40:16.560And so there's a balance somewhere. Right.
00:40:19.500There's a we recognize that there are two sides of this that can be not ideal.
00:40:24.980Right. We can have over tribalization where it makes any kind of cooperation impossible.
00:40:30.660And it reduces the scale of civilization to the point where you aren't able to compete with those who are operating at a higher scale of civilization.
00:40:37.340However, if you go to the open-ended model, the open society model, where we're all going to be a global government and we're going to have the Star Trek future and we're going to have this gay race communism that's international and doesn't care about your identities in any serious or traditional way, that creates this open-ended suicidal culture.
00:40:58.960Which is why James Burnham said liberalism is ultimately the ideology of Western suicide, because it erodes the ability of the people to prefer itself to others.
00:41:11.500And that's ultimately what, unfortunately, I think many of the disgruntled liberals don't understand about their own ideology.
00:41:18.720They aren't communists. They don't agree with the communists on certain points.
00:41:22.840In fact, in some cases, they can make entire careers about preaching against the dangers of communism.
00:41:28.640However, their ideology is a stepping stone. It is a stop on that ride.
00:41:34.380Now, we can have a debate as to whether or not liberalism inevitably leads to communism.
00:41:38.340I think that's its own discussion. But the point is, they share these features, right?
00:41:42.540They need to break down these identities at some level.
00:41:44.960And so, unfortunately, whether they recognize it or not, the nationalist is the natural enemy of the liberal.
00:41:53.540And the liberal is the enemy of the nationalist.
00:41:55.720Because they recognize nationalism as a danger to their project of deracination of people.
00:42:02.440To breaking down those barriers that allow for higher levels of organization.
00:42:06.140And as the United States became more ideological and as the United States needed to compete with other states that are organized at a high level of complexity, at a ideological level of uniformity, we created more and more organizations and institutions and legal apparatuses to control the ideology of the American people.
00:42:28.380To wear away their particularities, their willingness to operate in tribes or communities or even states, right?
00:42:35.100We needed to destroy state rights because, you know, you even turn this around.
00:42:39.660Talk to a liberal and talk to him about the state rights.
00:42:41.980And often they'll say like, oh, a state's right to do what, right?
00:42:45.920Because they're implying slavery or Jim Crow.
00:42:48.260Because you're not allowed to have that regional autonomy to make decisions.
00:42:51.760You have to be forced by the state to go in and change the way that you behave.
00:43:00.100But ultimately, that is still a unification of identity, a unification of ideology under, or rather identity under ideology by the state.
00:43:10.220And the way it does that is to destroy the particularity, to destroy the regional understanding and its autonomy because they recognize the danger that this holds.
00:43:19.140And that's ultimately what Solon says here at the end of the national question.
00:43:23.020He says, hey, you know, the national autonomy does not solve this problem.
00:43:31.300We want the only correct solution is regional autonomy, autonomy for such crucialized units as Poland, Lithuania, Ukraine, the caucuses, et cetera.
00:43:40.120He wants to get rid of the classical understanding of national identity.
00:43:44.460And he says he wants these regions to be governed as like basically economic zones, right?
00:43:49.500They don't have particular identities.
00:43:52.380And later on, remember, Stalin would support like the deportation of ethnic minorities to create to avoid the type of conflicts he was worried about.
00:44:03.440He would talk about the need to rucify everybody and make sure that they destroyed any of their regional identity and instead had some kind of shared Russian identity in many cases.
00:44:16.480He supported some pretty harsh treatment of people in order to advance this project, ultimately, of kind of this we need to get rid of these regions as being any kind of classic national identity, tribal identity, anything like that, any kind of ethnic identity.
00:44:35.860And instead, we just kind of want zones or regions that we operate, right?
00:44:41.040And he says the only cure for this is the organization on the basis of internationalism, right?
00:44:47.960This is the key to unite locally the workers of all nationalities of Russia, Russians into a single integrative collective body to unite these collective bodies into a single party.
00:45:10.740We cannot allow the continuation of these particular national identities.
00:45:15.660They need to be dissolved so that we can have this unified ideological identity across all of the different sections of this vast Soviet empire.
00:45:24.420And so the thing you need to recognize, kind of the point of this at the end, is whether it be liberals against nationalism or communists against nationalism, they may not have the exact same end goals.
00:45:38.820Because if you want to operate government systems at scale, you must get rid of particularity.
00:45:45.100Particularity is your enemy when you want to operate large systems.
00:45:49.160And so federalism, states' rights, separate identities for separate groups inside of the United States, these are all things that must be annihilated.
00:45:58.540They must be annihilated if you were to have one rule across all of them, right?
00:46:03.260You can't have a state operating as if, you know, Florida has a significantly different identity than California or New York.
00:46:10.260Florida needs to conform to California and New York, which therefore dictates the entire nation's identity.
00:46:17.680And when you have that outlook, when you are basically you are ideologically opposed to federalism, then you are ideologically opposed to, I think, ultimately the spirit of the United States.
00:46:29.300Because the spirit of the United States is not the elimination of peoples.
00:46:33.920It's not the elimination of identities.
00:46:37.740It's not the ethnic cleansing of Americans until you generate this one homogenous bunch that you get to use, you know, through the Civil Rights Act or whatever, that you get to dictate ideology to.
00:46:49.600It's the idea that people can live and work in this federated system and still find common ground and identity as Americans while caring for their communities, their families, right?
00:47:03.580Stalin specifically talks about the need in this essay to destroy national institutions that create those intermediate institutions between the family and the ideological state.
00:47:16.980And if we're fair, that has also been the project of America for the last 50 at least years, right?
00:47:23.800It is destroying, you know, the fraternal organizations, the churches, the community organizations, the groups that once were the backbone, the ones that Alexis de Tocqueville recognized as the most critical part of the American identity.
00:47:38.660We have decided to break those down and say, no, every institution must be open to everyone.
00:47:46.920Every institution must align with the ideology of the state.
00:47:50.480And so in that, we have followed Joseph Stalin's national question prescriptions.
00:47:57.800And this is the kind of stuff that unfortunately, one of the disgruntled liberals want to continue because they see identity as something to be destroyed.
00:48:06.580I think instead we need to recognize that that understanding is what created the opening for wokeness in the first place.
00:48:13.520The type of identity politics, the gross, coarse, completely racial politics that were created by wokeness are themselves bad.
00:48:23.420I think that's pretty easy for everyone to recognize.
00:48:26.220But the answer is not the entire elimination of identity.
00:48:29.340The answer is a cultivation of healthy identity.
00:48:33.200Because the only thing that's going to push back against this ideological creation of artificial identity is real, healthy, organic, human understandings of well-being.
00:48:42.280And that comes from our friends, our families, our communities.
00:48:45.400Some people might even call it a tribe from time to time.
00:48:48.340But these things all build on each other.
00:48:50.460And as Jonathan Peugeot was saying on Twitter, and I think this is a really good insight,
00:48:54.380the key to bad identity is not the elimination of identity.
00:48:57.160The key to beating bad identity is creating a properly ordered subsidiarity of identities.
00:49:07.780I belong to a specific family and a specific religion, a specific sect of Protestantism.
00:49:13.300I belong to an extended family that moves well beyond my immediate nuclear family.
00:49:20.040And I have loyalties to them and priorities to them.
00:49:23.320But I also recognize that that larger tribe is integrated into community, one in which I also hold loyalties to and I have duties to.
00:49:33.340If we can create these natural layers of identity, not only do they make us happier people,
00:49:40.020but they also insulate us from ideological corruption, the kind that I think both Marxists and, frankly, the current crop of liberals are trying to push down on people.
00:49:50.940So I just wanted to explore that, guys.
00:49:53.180I thought it was an interesting contrast between kind of what Stalin wrote about here,
00:49:59.060what is being pushed in the American mainstream as an answer,
00:50:02.380and what I think is ultimately the better answer to both, that we need to be looking at these things as identity as something that is layered,
00:50:11.840multifaceted, not something that is to be heightened to the point of hyper-tribalism and making it impossible to cooperate,
00:50:18.820but also cannot be eliminated in some kind of top-down social engineering project.
00:50:24.520And I think that while I'm not trying to be the carefully nuanced fence-sitter bro,
00:50:29.420I do genuinely think that that is the way to proceed forward.
00:50:32.760I think that is an understanding that fits in a Christian framework,
00:50:38.320an understanding that fits in a framework of American tradition with the federal system
00:50:43.360and the recognition of regional autonomy that we have here.
00:50:47.420And I think ultimately this is probably the way that we should address this,
00:50:52.000rejecting both the communist project and definitions,
00:50:55.620but also the modern liberal ones as well,
00:50:58.660as I think both of them are ones that ultimately, as James Burnham points out,
00:52:22.880Again, the idea of nationalism, whether it should be your ultimate enemy.
00:52:27.680If you're pursuing nationalism as your ultimate enemy, what are you doing?
00:52:32.020The fact that guys like Lindsey, Wright, seem to think that pursuing nationalism will lead to dictatorships is a little bit telling on themselves.
00:52:39.660But perspicacious heretic says, I assume elites will use some level of social engineering in this in this sometimes is this sometimes a necessity?
00:52:50.020And if so, what forms and how much is acceptable?
00:52:53.280It seems to me that they need to be a gentle guiding force.
00:53:32.460Everybody went to the same cathedral that allowed a certain level of cultural uniformity.
00:53:37.200Now, you could say that social engineering, but I think that's a more organic and scaled down understanding of actually just cultural creation.
00:53:45.620When it becomes social engineering, I think, is when you attempt to do very inhuman things to people at a mass scale.
00:53:52.960Now, is that necessary at the scale that we now operate society?
00:53:59.440And so does it mean we're always going to be engaging at it on some level?
00:54:03.600Yes, unfortunately, that's going to be true.
00:54:05.960I think part of this is rethinking how we understand operation at scale.
00:54:10.180Can we return to a version of federalism that allows our country to operate and compete,
00:54:16.020but does not mean that the central government constantly gets to dictate ideologically what people will believe and how they live their lives?
00:54:22.200I am hopeful that we are heading that direction.
00:54:25.340I think actually the benefits of scale are breaking down, and so therefore the benefits of mass social engineering are starting to break down.
00:54:31.840That said, there is always going to be some interaction with the elites, and they are always going to shape culture to some degree.
00:54:38.480And so if you would like to call that social engineering, then yes, you're correct that that will always exist at some level.
00:54:43.180But I think the level we have it at right now is very unhelpful.
00:54:46.180And as you point out, gentle guiding force is definitely the way to go.
00:54:50.820Tiny Stupid Demon says, I'm confident that under the correct circumstances, James and Colin will quickly pivot to classical liberalism in one country.
00:54:59.760Oh, okay, so I guess like nationalism, so renaming nationalism.
00:56:55.440I don't think that the Protestant Americas is ultimately a rebellion against the church because I believe Protestant America is part of the church.
00:57:05.620If you just mean against Catholicism, again, I would point out that the most Catholic countries in the world aren't necessarily always doing the best right now.
00:57:15.540But that said, you know, I wish once again the best for my Christians and brothers and sisters, whether they be Catholic or Protestant.
00:57:24.340Alex again says, thanks as always for the great educational content.
00:57:35.000Dave has a level of patience that is perhaps superhuman, perhaps too patient for Dave Green.
00:57:42.420That said, he's a fantastic guy, very thoughtful, has pretty much roundly destroyed every single person from that camp he has been in a conversation with.
00:57:52.760Not because he's hostile or, you know, just brings a great rhetorical force, but simply because he's right and thoughtful.
00:58:00.200And so I'm sure he would be just as effective in a discussion with James Lindsay as with the other interlocutors he's had.
00:58:08.340All right, guys, we're going to go ahead and wrap this up.
00:58:10.700Once again, thank you, everybody, for watching.