00:01:33.000His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:01:41.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:01:54.000Brought to you by the Loan Experts I Trust, Andrew and Todd at Sierra Pacific Mortgage at andrewandTodd.com.
00:02:03.000Very important guest, someone that has taught me a lot the last, I think, six months.
00:02:08.000I'm taking several classes enough to make your head spin with the amazing Claremont Institute.
00:02:14.000They have these online evening courses that push you intellectually, and they're just amazing.
00:02:20.000And right now I'm doing with Michael Anton on Machiavelli, if you can get a word in edgewise.
00:02:24.000But the guest is the man behind all of that with a very, very important book called The Narrow Passage, Plato, Foucault, and the Possibility of Political Philosophy by Glenn Elmers.
00:04:21.000The problem is in a way, Plato, following his great teacher Socrates, introduced the idea of bringing reason into political life.
00:04:28.000And in a way, that's perfectly sensible, right?
00:04:30.000We don't want to be governed by superstition and mindless, barbaric traditions.
00:04:35.000We want to be able to make intelligent distinctions.
00:04:38.000We don't want to live according to deranged, disgusting, primitive religious idolatries, right?
00:04:48.000And so we want to think reasonably and rationally about how we should conduct ourselves and organize our politics.
00:04:53.000And Plato is in a way the first to do that, to think about bringing reason and rational thought into politics.
00:04:58.000But in a way, that's also the source of our problems, because in a way, that's now become deranged, especially in the course of modern philosophy, introducing the idea that experts should rule us without our consent.
00:05:11.000That you can have people who are so wise, so smart, so well-trained, that they can become philosopher kings, and we no longer need the consent of governed.
00:05:19.000We can get rid of limits on the government, and the wise expert class will simply rule us for our own good.
00:05:27.000So Plato, in a way, is the source of the problems, but in a way, I would also say points us to the solution, which is to get back to taking political philosophy seriously.
00:05:36.000So let's focus on the philosopher king aspect of this.
00:05:39.000There has been this repeated incantation in the media, trust the experts, trust the experts, trust the experts.
00:05:45.000I can't help but think that this is in some ways an extension of the administrative state.
00:05:49.000And I do want to get into that because I think that is what happens when you have this group of people that almost could be, say, they have the secret gnosis, the secret mind, the secret society that they know better than us.
00:06:02.000There's a fair amount of pride or hubris, but also Plato said this is how politics should be formed, that you have people that know better because they've been trained and because they went to the right schools.
00:06:16.000And in some ways, Glenn, the problem with the American project as it is today, we're living under the tyranny of experts living in the clouds who call themselves philosopher kings.
00:06:26.000Now, it's important to remember when Plato wrote this famous book, The Republic, where he talks about the philosopher kings, he makes it so extreme, so radical, so outrageous and unreasonable that a lot of intelligent scholars say he was being ironic.
00:06:41.000He was trying to show you just how crazy it would be to live under this regime of philosopher kings in order to point to the limits of politics, precisely to show you the limits of trying to make all political life rational, right?
00:06:54.000And in a way, then to show we have to be more moderate in our expectations from politics.
00:06:58.000We have to be sensible about what we can actually achieve in political life.
00:07:03.000And so it's a lesson in moderation if you understand the philosopher king as sort of an ironic, outrageous idea, which points to something then more sensible.
00:07:13.000But in modern philosophy, the idea of the philosopher king is taken seriously.
00:07:18.000And why that happens, and why that happens is an interesting story.
00:07:23.000It partly has to do with this idea of the end of history.
00:07:25.000You know, Charlie, you're just in class with Fukuyama and this German thinker, Hegel.
00:07:31.000And the idea is history is unfolding in a process, right?
00:07:35.000There's an element of that that leads to Marx.
00:07:38.000And we now are much wiser than the people in the past.
00:08:39.000You know, people complain about the corrupt city machines of the 19th century, you know, Mayor Curley and the big city policy.
00:08:47.000But, you know, they built bridges and libraries and roads and things worked and they actually got a lot done during this so-called era of corruption.
00:08:55.000Oh, I mean, I'm a child of the Chicago suburbs.
00:08:58.000I've always said that I would rather have the corrupt politician than the ideological one.
00:09:02.000And our audience attacks me for saying that.
00:09:04.000I would rather have Mayor Daly who sells out for a buck with the unions, but there was low crime.
00:09:24.000So, this petty corruption, in a way, you know, it's the idea that if you can make politics perfect and get rid of all the corruption, you make matters worse.
00:09:32.000This utopian idea that we can achieve perfection, we can achieve heaven here on earth, it doesn't solve the problem of corruption because people are still self-interested.
00:09:43.000What it does, though, is introduce these vast, unrealistic schemes that leave ordinary day-to-day function behind.
00:09:52.000And so, we can't, our bridges and our roads and our schools don't work anymore while we're trying to achieve diversity and economic justice and all these ridiculous things.
00:10:02.000And basic infrastructure falls by the wayside.
00:10:04.000Yeah, I mean, our military, unfortunately, is falling apart.
00:10:09.000And basic infrastructure, basic things like getting your kids to read, having your young people not kill themselves at record rates, like really kind of basic indicators that your society is healthy.
00:10:20.000Almost every single one of those is going in the wrong direction.
00:10:23.000And yet, the lecturing we receive is about viva la revolution.
00:10:29.000We will bring forth diversity and equity.
00:10:31.000There's this amazing clip, which is Hegel.
00:10:46.000And meanwhile, you know, the observer that is walking around the cities these people govern is like the people are defecating, they're doing drugs, the kids aren't in school, but they're like, hey, no, but the revolution is what matters.
00:10:58.000There's a lot there that I want to unpack.
00:11:00.000The book, I want you guys to read it, the narrow passage, Plato Foucault, and the possibility of political philosophy.
00:11:06.000And oh boy, we are going to get to Michelle Foucault because he was a trickster.
00:12:28.000You know, I think so much about, I talk about, you know, we talk about the arc.
00:12:35.000I think about it as also like a relay race and those who carried the baton and were measured by what they did when they had it, and then they passed it to us.
00:12:46.000And the point will be, what do we do while we're carrying the baton?
00:13:13.000But so they're in a way very watered-down version of what this philosopher, German philosopher Hegel was talking about, that history has a process, right?
00:13:23.000And this is what the left has believed for a long time.
00:13:24.000This is where the idea progressive comes from, that history is a progressive unfolding, becoming more and more advanced.
00:13:42.000And since now we've figured things out, we can just have the experts treat politics as a kind of a technical problem, just use their expertise to solve various administrative issues, since we already know that all the basic questions of life are answered.
00:13:59.000So just, you know, get rid of consent and allow the experts to administer things.
00:14:04.000That's the implication of that idea of history.
00:14:07.000And you hear them talk about, I mean, Obama says this too, the arc of history.
00:14:12.000And so tie this in then with your book and the argument you're making, the narrow passage.
00:14:18.000And so the byline, Foucault, I want to spend a fair amount of time on him now or whenever you want, but now is appropriate.
00:14:26.000How does Foucault get on the front page of the title of a book by Glenn Elmers?
00:14:34.000So listen, if you were my age, you'd remember, in fact, in the 80s and 90s, when people on the right, like me, we all made fun of Foucault and Derrida and these other French paternists, French postmodernists, with their ridiculous jargon and their opaque language.
00:14:52.000But to say that, I have to step back for a minute and mention another guy who I'm sure you know, Nietzsche.
00:14:57.000So one of the things that makes the left so crazy now is, on the one hand, they believe in the end of history, which means the rational state, the rule of the experts, science, since we've got everything figured out, we can just administer politics as a form of social science.
00:15:11.000And so you get people like Fauci saying, I represent science.
00:15:15.000You get the whole bureaucratic apparatus, Environmental Protection Agency, and the FBI.
00:15:20.000I'd say, we have the labs, we have the expertise, we have the technology.
00:15:35.000Marx and the others promised us the final utopia, the workers' paradise, the solution of all human problems.
00:15:42.000And yet, World War I, World War II, the nuclear bomb, for all these things, the left said, well, wait a minute, progress turns out, you know, where is it?
00:15:52.000Why haven't we solved all these problems yet?
00:15:53.000And so there's been a disillusionment by the left that has led to this postmodernism that you get from Nietzsche, which says, you know, you know what, progress is a lie.
00:16:04.000And it turns out there is really nothing to believe in.
00:16:07.000We live in a meaningless universe since history doesn't lead to anything.
00:16:11.000And since they reject God, and since they reject the idea of objective morality, and since they reject the idea of transcendent truth, they're left with literally nothingness, this idea of nihilism, that human beings just live in a world empty of all meaning.
00:16:25.000And so this postmodernism, which says, you know, truth is a construct.
00:16:29.000It's, you know, comes from the power narrative.
00:16:34.000There's no such thing as objective chemistry.
00:16:36.000That, you know, you have European chemistry and African chemistry, and who's to say what's right and wrong, right?
00:16:41.000But this idea of postmodernism obviously conflicts with the idea of the role of the experts and science.
00:16:48.000And this conflict is part of what makes the left so crazy now.
00:16:51.000And part of the reason I wrote my book is to point out that there's this internal contradiction on the left, which wants to say science and the role of the experts.
00:17:00.000Also, postmodernism and all truth is just the power structure, the power narrative.
00:17:06.000And the conflict between those two things is one part of the craziness of our politics today.
00:17:11.000In some ways, they're embracing those contradictions because at least they can say we agree that we need to oppose the neo-fascist right or whatever nonsense that they have.
00:17:20.000They actually don't actually have to have those contradictions face themselves and iron them out.
00:17:25.000Glenn Elmers, author of The Narrow Passage, Plato Foucault and the Possibility of Political Philosophy.
00:17:30.000You probably wonder, Charlie, where did the woke come from?
00:18:55.000He and some other thinkers, mostly from France, Derrida Jacques, Derrida, and Lacan and others, they were these, they were called postmodernists.
00:19:05.000And Michel Foucault was one of the smarter ones among them.
00:19:10.000Why am I interested in these weird French postmodernists?
00:19:13.000They show what society is like after the death of God or the rejection of God, the rejection of the Bible, the rejection of objective truth, the rejection that there's any ground for determining right and wrong, the rejection of nature as a standard.
00:19:27.000All of these things that come out of modern philosophy, and especially Nietzsche, which define the way the ruling class, the way the left thinks.
00:19:35.000Now, the left is in charge of all of our major institutions, from the government bureaucracy to popular culture and the media, certainly academia, more and more corporations, even the military.
00:19:48.000And so, since they reject God, since they reject objective morality, since they reject the idea that there's permanent truth, since they reject nature, what do they believe it?
00:19:57.000They believe in this phrase that you used a moment ago, Nietzsche's will to power.
00:20:01.000Power just exists for us to get whatever we want, to impose our wishes, to manipulate nature.
00:20:06.000If we want to turn little boys into little girls, who's to stop us, right?
00:20:10.000The world just exists to satisfy our wants and desires and our needs.
00:20:16.000And what does that actually mean for how the institutions of society function?
00:20:20.000And Foucault and the other French postmodernists were very insightful in this.
00:20:26.000They said, okay, what happens in a world like that, where you reject truth, where you reject God, where you reject morality?
00:20:33.000How does the will to power actually function in the institutions?
00:20:37.000And Foucault was very good at showing how the structures of power, how the idea of truth is manipulated to become a weapon or a tool for the power structure, how our identities are co-opted into the institutions of power.
00:20:53.000And the reason that's relevant now, and the reason I'm bringing this up to try to show to people on the right why this is relevant is because when Foucault wrote, it was the left that was the anti-establishment.
00:21:04.000And it was the left that saw itself as opposing the structures of power, opposing capitalism and free enterprise and liberal democracy and constitutionalism.
00:21:13.000But now the tables have turned in half a century, right?
00:21:18.000And one of the things I'm always emphasizing to people on the right is we have to get our minds around the idea that we're the counter-establishment.
00:21:28.000We're the counter-revolutionaries, right?
00:21:29.000We can't think of ourselves as normal supporters of the establishment because the establishment is now in control of fanatics who don't believe in natural rights or limited government or consent or the rule of law or any of that.
00:21:43.000And Foucault, because he was this weird counter-revolutionary in the 70s, understood some things that I think are very useful that we need to understand today about how to battle these anonymous, oppressive structures of power that the left now manipulates and uses.
00:22:00.000It also runs against who we are as conservative, because naturally we want to just say no and defend.
00:22:06.000And oh, you know, also built into the word conservative is almost this idea that you're in charge, that you control the institutions, right?
00:22:15.000What you're saying is, no, we have to recapture, we have to think like dissidents in our own country.
00:22:21.000It's very difficult to try to, let's just take the word conservative side, just on people on the normal side that believe in natural law and believe in physics not being something of white supremacy.
00:22:38.000I mean, do we have to go as far as what Marx would say, the ruthless criticism of all that exists?
00:22:43.000I mean, is it time to pick up our Alinsky and to find the target, freeze it, polarize it, isolate it, keep the pressure on and do a tactic that your people enjoy doing?
00:22:55.000Well, you know, that's a very tricky question, what exactly we should do.
00:22:59.000And it's, you know, you have to be careful nowadays.
00:23:02.000The left now, since they no longer believe in due process and the rule of law, and they believe in weaponizing the FBI and the Justice Department, means people like you and me have to be careful about what we say.
00:23:12.000And let me emphasize I'm not encouraging anyone to do anything outside the bounds of the law.
00:23:18.000But these thinkers of the left are useful just to think about how things work, you know, how to oppose these power structures, but to also just think through the problem.
00:23:30.000Once you see the problem, the solutions, you start to think for yourself what the solutions might be.
00:23:36.000And so, for instance, Foucault talks about how power structures co-opt your identity.
00:23:41.000Now, I have a lot of friends who went to Ivy League schools, and I don't want to bash them, but I'll mention one little point is Foucault is very good at showing if you have high status, if you're invested in the society because of your degree from an Ivy League university, because you work at a prestige law firm or a prestige corporation, your identity is invested in the stability of the regime, right?
00:24:04.000You don't want to overturn the status quo because your status, your credentials, you know, I've got a Harvard degree and I work at this prestigious law firm.
00:24:14.000And so you're invested in maintaining the status quo.
00:24:16.000And Foucault is very good at showing the subtle ways that the power structure co-opts people and prevents you from opposing the power structure because your status and your identity are tied up in it.
00:24:27.000So things like that, I think, are very useful for people on the right to understand.
00:24:31.000So one of the things you mentioned is this forced marriage, this contradiction in the woke regime between the ruling class philosopher kings and let's just say the infantry, right?
00:24:41.000The shock troops of people that they believe in egalitarianism or just, I think it's just weaponized complaining.
00:24:50.000And yet they're kind of in this left-wing coalition because they hate the right so much.
00:24:54.000Is that something that is going to eventually manifest in a schism in the woke coalition?
00:25:02.000Yeah, you know, it's on the one hand, you'd say, well, it can't last forever, right?
00:25:07.000On the other hand, you know, people on the right have been saying, oh, the left, they went over their skis now.
00:25:13.000You know, once we started doing, you know, gender reassignment surgery on little kids, you'd think, oh, well, they've definitely gone too far now.
00:25:23.000Yet the big reaction from middle America never seems to come, which shows you in a way, again, that these power structures operate in very insidious indirect ways.
00:25:32.000And they, in a way, they sap the energy out of people.
00:25:36.000They make it seem like it's impossible to oppose the power structure.
00:25:40.000So, you know, it's very unclear exactly what we should do in these circumstances.
00:25:46.000But certainly understanding the problem is the first step.
00:25:49.000What largely keeps, I mean, I alluded to it earlier, what keeps it together?
00:25:53.000If there are philosophical contradictions building a political community, what does keep these two together if there are these inherent contradictions?
00:26:03.000Yeah, so for right now, they're on the top, right?
00:26:05.000And so for the time being, it's just basically a marriage of convenience.
00:26:10.000You know, the Silicon Valley people believe in a sort of global oligarchy.
00:26:14.000They obviously don't have the same agenda as the radical anarchists in Antifa, who also seem to have a separate agenda from the racial grievance-mongering faction.
00:26:28.000All of these now have an uneasy alliance.
00:26:32.000And because they're in control, they're working together.
00:26:37.000Certainly, as you say, simply a hatred of traditional old-fashioned American constitutionalism.
00:26:44.000But it's unclear how long this can last.
00:26:48.000One of the things I say is, again, none of us want violence.
00:27:11.000Because if there is going to be a crisis or some kind of catastrophe that comes and things fall apart, it'll be very useful to have thought about these basic questions of, okay, how do we come together as people?
00:27:24.000What are we trying to accomplish here?
00:27:26.000Yeah, I mean, these are basic fundamental questions.
00:27:29.000So let's talk about this kind of will to power, which I think some people find hard to believe.
00:27:34.000Is it fair to say that one of the animating forces of the political philosophy on what we would call the left is really a disregard for any sort of objective truth, you know, let's just say understanding of their place in the logos or the cosmos.
00:27:49.000All there really is for power, for power's sake.
00:27:52.000Is that a summation of a large faction of what we would consider the political community on the left?
00:27:57.000Sure, because what happens when you reject God, when you reject the idea of nature as a standard and a limit on what we can do in life, when you reject the idea of transcendent truth, what's left, right?
00:28:09.000There's literally nothing to limit the fulfillment of your desires.
00:28:13.000And so you use science and technology to simply manipulate the world to satisfy whatever you might want, whether it's changing your gender or economic redistribution or whatever.
00:28:24.000And so you simply use power to exert your will.
00:28:27.000That's literally what Nietzsche meant by that.
00:28:30.000And I think that does characterize the left because they don't believe in any higher standards that would limit their exercise of power.
00:28:37.000What limits the exercise of power for people on the left?
00:28:50.000This is a creepy undercurrent of some of the medieval witch doctors that call themselves pediatricians, where they think they can actually reconfigure the raw material of nature, change man to woman, or even change the species.
00:29:05.000So for most of human history, human beings respected nature.
00:29:08.000And I don't mean environmentalism or going out for a hike, but in the sense that there's something outside of human will, right?
00:29:16.000There's, even if you don't necessarily believe in the God of Bible, the God of the Bible, the idea that we're born into a world we don't create.
00:29:22.000And so the natural world imposes limits on what we can do.
00:29:25.000And it actually provides some guidance.
00:29:27.000Our human nature tells us what it means to have a fulfilling life, right?
00:29:32.000We're built in a way that leads us in a certain direction to find our happiness.
00:29:36.000The modern left, in the pursuit of radical, unlimited freedom, rejected the idea of nature, rejected that it imposes any limits on it, rejected the idea that human nature is any kind of standard.
00:29:49.000And so they want to use science and technology to manipulate nature, including human nature, to just make us into whatever we want to be.
00:29:58.000An absolutely uncontrolled radical freedom to transcend human nature and use science and technology to fulfill our wildest fantasies, our most utopian longings.
00:30:07.000And that's in a way what we're seeing.
00:30:09.000And the most egregious case, as we mentioned, is gender reassignment on surgery.
00:30:14.000But you see it all transhumanism, the pursuit of immortality, all of these things.
00:30:18.000Well, and even going back, this is one of the issues that is not always talked about in the 20th century, right?
00:30:24.000So the way that the academics or the media talks about the Holocaust or Stalin is they say it was just racism or whatever.
00:30:33.000That's part of it, is the racial part.
00:30:34.000But it also was man's willingness to try to control nature.
00:30:37.000It was this idea of a small group of man scientists that wanted to exert their will.
00:30:42.000And I just hope everyone understands we're not talking about like the forest and the trees and the rivers.
00:30:46.000We're talking about this like Latin phrase, natura or whatever.
00:30:49.000It's the order that is outside of man, right?
00:30:52.000Oquiness would call it the natural law.
00:30:58.000The idea that there is an objective order to the universe, a moral order to the universe that is independent of our will, the left rejects that.
00:31:06.000And that means they reject any limits on their power and their wants and their desires.
00:31:11.000And that's the society we're living in now.
00:31:14.000And so the way back is what we're trying to do in our evening classes, understand how we got here, right?
00:31:20.000Understand that there is a natural law.
00:31:23.000And I hate to oversimplify things, but that's part of what we do here is that if you think that there is a logos or a harmony to the cosmos or a natural law, you do get a little bit of humility and maybe awe or wonder.
00:31:35.000And I believe what Aristotle said, wonder is the beginning of philosophy.
00:31:41.000But if you don't think there's any design, and I don't mean that even in a metaphysical way, just there's anything here, then you get awfully cocky rather quickly, especially in your own ability to change the natural world.
00:31:55.000You'll remember, of course, the famous phrase from the Declaration of Independence, the laws of nature and nature's God.
00:32:01.000It imposes both a direction, a framework, and a limit on what we can do in our own lives and what the government should do.
00:32:09.000But when you reject that, when you reject the laws of nature, when you reject the idea of there's an independent order outside of our will, then there's literally no limits.
00:32:18.000And this unlimited pursuit of absolute unfettered freedom is the root of the very dangerous fanaticism that now rules our intellectual class.
00:32:29.000In some ways, it will be reality that saves us because it's reality they're declaring a war on.
00:32:53.000I mean, the one example I'll use, which will make people chuckle, is that you have the CDC saying that men can take lactating-inducing drugs to breastfeed young children the same ways that women can.
00:33:08.000Yeah, riff on that, Glenn, and we'll close it up.
00:33:11.000And that's a perfect illustration also of what Foucault is talking about.
00:33:14.000In this postmodern world, in this Nietzschean world, the world that Foucault described and tried to help us understand, words lose all their meaning because there is no objective ground of reality.
00:33:23.000We impose our own will on the world, and truth and language and power just become what we declare them to be.
00:33:34.000And that radical rejection of nature is the very dangerous fanaticism that's on the verge of destroying this country.
00:33:44.000But if you understand that words represent things and they are not what you want them to be, then all of a sudden you start to think that's the war on speech, the war on reason.