In this episode of Trigonometry, we're joined by Eric Kaufman, a professor of politics at Birkbeck College, the University of London, and the author of White Shift, which is, as he tells me now, out in paperback.
00:00:00.000Hello and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantin Kissin.
00:00:08.560And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.
00:00:14.240Our brilliant guest this week is a professor of politics at Birkbeck College, the University of
00:00:18.780London, and the author of White Shift, which is, as he tells me now, out in paperback,
00:00:23.500Eric Kaufman. Welcome back to Trigonometry.
00:00:25.760Delighted to be here again. First in the new year, apparently.
00:00:28.160Yes, you are. You're the first interview we're recording since the new year. And since not the first since the election, but the election was very recently. And before we dive into that, and some of the, I mean, one of the reasons we wanted to have you back is some of the stuff you've been talking about for quite a while was predictive in terms of what's happened recently and what may happen in the future. But just before we get into that, remind everybody, who are you? How are you where you are? What has been your journey through life?
00:00:52.720Yeah. So I'm a professor of politics at Birkbeck University of London. I've studied questions of nationalism, particularly majority ethnic groups. So when we talk about white majorities, that's the kind of thing that I've been studying for over 20 years. And I think that sort of politics has become increasingly important, and particularly with the post-2014 populist wave.
00:01:16.320So a lot of the elections since 2014, I think, have been characterized by the rise of this new form of populism and also by polarization.
00:01:25.560So both of these phenomena, populism and polarization, are important.
00:01:28.900The other thing I would say is I've also done a lot of work on the history of the cultural left going back into the 19th century.
00:01:36.340And I think that's another part of this story which is really important, which is how the cultural left has changed over time and become now a dominant force in the culture and what that's doing to our politics.
00:01:47.440So I'm kind of interested in the intersection of the, if you like, the cultural left and this new majority group nationalism and how these two things are interacting.
00:01:57.600And the polarization that comes from that.
00:02:00.200And so they feed off each other. Right. So the populism is in some ways caused by the success of the cultural left, which then in turn reacts to the success of populism.
00:02:10.100And you get this, you know, polarization in the culture and also increasingly in electoral politics.
00:02:16.400Sounds like a justification for Nazism. Anyway. All right. Anyway, Eric.
00:02:20.440So we mentioned about the election. So let's start there. What do you think happened? And why is it that the left still can't admit that they lost?
00:02:31.240Well, exactly. So I think this election is a perfect example in Britain of what I'm talking about, which is the rise of cultural conflicts to prominence instead of the old left versus right economic.
00:02:43.680I'm not saying that's gone, but that issue of redistribution versus free markets, which was so big with Reagan and Thatcher, is increasingly being superseded by questions around identity, immigration, Brexit, and so forth.
00:02:55.680And we saw in this election that the Conservative Party was able to consolidate that sort of Brexit vote around itself, including a lot of Brexit voters who were to the left economically, historically come from labor voting families.
00:03:09.800They happen to live in the kind of constituencies you need to win in order to swing because most of the constituencies in England and Wales are leave voting constituencies.
00:03:18.500So in a way, the rise of this cultural politics, the way the conservatives were able to speak to that Brexit voting group allowed them to win this election.
00:03:27.720Since then, of course, as you mentioned, yeah, what has been the left reaction?
00:03:33.500Because in a way, the proper reaction would be to say, given the electoral map, given the seats, the fact most seats are leave voting seats, the fact that we can pile up votes in the college towns and in London and we're never going to win an election.
00:03:46.960So the reality is we should be focusing on winning back those seats in the North and Midlands, which means we have to at least make some pitch to the culturally conservative left-wing voter.
00:03:59.360Instead, what there's been is this kind of doubling down and this belief that somehow, well, now that Brexit is gone, that issue is out of the way.
00:04:08.260We can get back to our same old message, and then we'll get these people back.
00:04:11.780Because, yeah, okay, Brexit was an anomaly.
00:04:20.760My view is that's wrongheaded, that what's happened is much deeper than this, that what has occurred.
00:04:27.280I mean, if we take a step back and we go to the Brexit vote, what you could see is that a lot of longtime labor voters who voted Brexit were a specific kind of voter.
00:04:53.780What's happened, I think, in 2017, Corbyn was still able to do reasonably well because these low information voters had not yet twigged to make the association between labor and kind of anti-Brexit and kind of pro-immigration and some of these things which they reflexively oppose.
00:05:11.480But now, by 2019, the penny had dropped, and they came to view them as, oh, they're trying to stop Brexit, and the other guys actually want to get Brexit done.
00:05:21.580So I think that it takes longer for the low-information voter to make this equation.
00:05:28.200We're in the kind of political sphere.
00:05:30.300We're on Twitter, whatever, so we think, how could anybody not make the association between labor and being sort of anti-Brexit?
00:05:38.000However, it does take longer for low-information voters.
00:05:41.100The same thing happened in the U.S. Obama's presidency actually was an important symbol for a certain kind of low information white voter, often in many cases a racist voter, who didn't realize where the Democrats were on these issues.
00:05:56.060And I'm not saying I don't endorse that by any means, but for some voters, the cues, the kind of ordinary party cues, which are sophisticated, et cetera, will go over their heads.
00:06:07.500And I think what's happened now is these voters have turned, and it's going to be very hard for them to go back into the labor column, unless labor makes an offer like the Danish Social Democrats, which is more conservative on the issues these voters care about culturally.
00:06:22.320Which would be Brexit, which would be immigration, in particular identity issues, national identity, patriotism.
00:06:29.260So these sorts of questions, perhaps security, but those sorts of questions I think labor is very uncomfortable with.
00:06:36.440I think David Goodhart, and I know Matt Goodwin's mentioned this, has mentioned that a lot of social democratic parties or left parties are very uncomfortable moving to the right on culture, whereas a lot of conservative parties are more comfortable moving left on economics.
00:06:52.160That's more true, especially if you look at Johnson, moved left in terms of the minimum wage and spending on the NHS and a number of these issues, deficit, etc., he's really broken with Thatcherite orthodoxy relatively easily, and that's been accepted.
00:07:07.180It's been a little bit harder going in the United States.
00:07:09.680Trump has done some of that on Social Security and the deficit.
00:07:12.420He hasn't gone the full distance in terms of infrastructure spending and minimum wage,
00:07:19.780That sort of gets to that point that it's easier for the right to move left on economics
00:07:24.600than the left to move right on culture, which was Goodhart's point.
00:07:27.640And that kind of, I think, also speaks to these questions of wokeness and political correctness,
00:07:32.880which are caging in the left, preventing it perhaps from moving to an area where, you know,
00:07:39.100in terms of their own self-interest, they probably do need to move, which is, you know,
00:07:43.440to a more conservative position on culture. Sorry.
00:07:46.260No, I was just going to say, because that is the point. David Goodhart raised it. Matt Goodwin
00:07:51.640raised it, saying, you know, that it's very difficult for the left, as they are now, to move
00:07:56.000to a more socially conservative point of view. And I just would like to know, why do you think
00:08:00.260that is? Well, it's mainly because these sort of activist cadres are influenced by the intellectual
00:08:05.640currents in the universities, where there's been something called the cultural turn of the left
00:08:10.200since the 60s, which is away from class and away from this idea of the working class and historical
00:08:16.080materialism and these sort of Marxist ideas towards the new identity politics, race, gender,
00:08:22.760more recently sexuality, that these kinds of tropes have become more important. So those
00:08:27.280issues are their sacred issues now for the intellectuals and who are influential at the
00:08:32.460upper layers and amongst activists, right? So that then, if that's what's motivating these people
00:08:37.080to work for the party, to come into the party, the last, you know, they will die on this hill
00:08:42.540before they kind of give up those aims. And so that simply locks the party in and prevents it
00:08:49.180from essentially backing off on those issues. So it's really, this is an example of where
00:08:55.040people always say, well, wokeness, political correctness, it's a storm in a teacup on campus.
00:09:00.820Actually, it has very far-reaching effects when it percolates down into outside the campus. So
00:09:06.900one of the examples is left-wing parties. If it constrains their ability to move rationally in a
00:09:15.240political marketing space towards where the market is, then you've got a problem. And I think that
00:09:23.920It's very hard for parties to overcome.
00:09:25.900The Scandinavian left has been able to do it better, partly because I think those are smaller societies where the polarization is less extreme.
00:09:35.300And I think there's more of a sense that, well, actually, we have to listen to our base a little bit more and so on.
00:09:41.200But I think in Anglo-American societies, there is much more of a disconnect between the kind of elite metropolitan group on the left who are influenced by these intellectual currents, the new left, etc.
00:09:59.680And it's not just captured by activists who have an agenda, but it's also what's really important about the wokeness is the ability to intimidate.
00:10:08.940So it's not just that a whole bunch of people believe these ideas.
00:10:12.540It's also that they can enforce a code, a taboo, that if you decide to challenge that taboo.
00:10:20.400I mean, Len McCluskey did this a little bit talking about immigration just prior to the election, the union leader here.
00:10:27.500And, you know, that is something that you're going to get hauled over the coals for, attacked as a racist for.
00:10:36.780So, again, this ability to wield taboos is a kind of force multiplier for the new left.
00:10:43.280And so it's not just the power of their ideas, but it's the power they hold over reputations and over public morality that allows them to expand their power.
00:10:53.400But what that does is it sort of locks in the left.
00:10:56.280And so I think Matt Goodwin tweeted a whole series of countries in Western Europe where the main left-wing party has had its worst result ever since the 30s.
00:11:07.600The same results that we see for labor occurring in a whole range of European countries.
00:11:14.160And that's, again, as a result of this, I think anyway, inability to move right, if you like, on culture.
00:11:20.680The left-wing agenda economically is reasonably popular.
00:11:38.520And where that goes will be very interesting.
00:11:40.660Before we dive into that, which is political correctness, which is an area that you've been researching, I wanted to pick up a couple of things.
00:11:46.400Like, I mean, in terms of moving the right, moving left on economics, I looked at the news websites this morning and there's something, there's a government minister talking about how some kind of rail company will be nationalized immediately.
00:11:58.580And I literally thought I'd woken up in a great Bradbury novel and someone stepped on a butterfly.
00:12:03.300It seems a very smooth process for the right to move left on economics.
00:12:08.700They don't seem to have a problem losing their base because their base is now the socially conservative, largely working class people, you might say.
00:12:17.760Yeah, and I think the difference is that there isn't – for the right to move left on economics doesn't break a taboo as much.
00:12:25.740It doesn't mean you're going to be attacked as a morally deficient monster.
00:12:32.980You're not going to be shamed. And it's this whole sort of shaming enforcement of policing of virtue, policing of language, all these sorts of things which are identified with that left side of the ledger, which don't exist as much on the right.
00:12:46.940Now, of course, there are entrenched interests so that in the United States, for example, in the Congress, there are still a lot of members who grew up on Reagan and Ayn Rand and believe in free money.
00:12:59.340So it's harder to, you know, for example, to raise taxes or to redistribute would be a harder road to hoe, I think, there because of the, you know, these sort of libertarian ideas probably are more entrenched.
00:13:13.380But I do think that moving away from that doesn't quite carry the same sting, the same stigma, I guess, that someone on the left moving right on culture would.
00:13:23.340And before Francis takes us into the political correctness, I just wanted to clarify, because it's a very triggering term for some people when you talk about low information voters.
00:13:55.680Their opinions are equally valid, but maybe they pay less attention to the warp and wef of politics.
00:14:00.740They're not in the Westminster bubble then.
00:14:03.320So, I mean, in a way, that's a good thing.
00:14:05.720It is correlated with not having a degree, for example, but it's not hard and fast.
00:14:11.240So there are people with degrees who are not interested in politics and vice versa.
00:14:15.700And I think what's occurred, there's a long U.S. political science literature on this
00:14:20.380that essentially if you looked in the 1970s and 80s at the states and you categorize them
00:14:26.400by how liberal or conservative their electorates were on one axis and then whether they voted
00:14:31.700Democrat or Republican on the other, there was no relationship at all, right?
00:14:35.900So most people were conservative and they were Democrat by partisanship.
00:14:42.380There just wasn't this link between ideology and party, which we think of so automatically because we, again, we think in these ideological terms.
00:14:53.700It's something you get maybe from your parents or friends.
00:14:55.860And then the ideology is just an inchoate bunch of views that you've kind of come to.
00:15:01.180What's occurred in the U.S., of course, is now, if you take state ideology and partisanship, it's like a straight line, you know, 0.9 correlation.
00:15:10.840And that's why you get this polarization.
00:15:13.020So those sorts of processes, I think, were occurring here, too, where the kind of more, you know, less participatory voter who didn't necessarily understand which ideology went with which party, that equation is starting to be made more and more, particularly on these kind of cultural issues.
00:15:28.820And as that happens, actually it locks in a sort of more deeply rooted partisanship amongst conservative voters, or if you're liberal-minded, moving towards the left.
00:15:41.140Although the liberal-minded voters, because they tend to have higher education, are more likely to have already made that move, right?
00:15:47.560So to be able to identify which party represents which ideology.
00:15:51.380Basic stuff, but that alignment of ideology and voting is very important.
00:15:57.120explaining some of the patterns we see, particularly the polarization.
00:16:01.340That's very interesting. And you're talking about polarization.
00:16:03.660And one of the factors that has really contributed to polarization is political correctness.
00:16:09.380Now, I suppose a counter argument to that would be, Eric, what's wrong with political correctness?
00:16:13.960Doesn't it mean that I just not allowed any more to hold racial epithets of people outside in my white van?
00:16:20.520You know, isn't that what political correctness is?
00:16:25.340Well, I think as you and I probably know, the devil is always in the details that if political correctness means don't call a black person the N word, you know, we're all for political correctness. It's when you define racism in an expansive way, right? So it's when you say, if you're in class reading from a 19th century text where someone used the N word, that you are essentially the same thing as using the N word yourself.
00:16:48.040Now, I mean, that's kind of ridiculousness of expanding.
00:16:51.040Or when you say if you're against affirmative action, you are as bad as someone in the Jim Crow cell.
00:16:58.640So that's really, I think, what we mean by political correctness is expanding the...
00:17:03.960Overreach is what you're talking about.
00:17:04.760Yeah, overreach, sort of this elasticity and bending of what Orwell said, you know,
00:17:09.980two plus two equals five, and not only will you agree to that, but you will be made to believe it.
00:17:14.160This is essential when the meaning of words becomes political and not what ordinary people, how they categorize things in a social scientific way, which is based on the scientific method, which is to do with measurement and clusters of differences.
00:17:29.680And that's how we categorize the world if it instead is about, no, racism is what I say it is.
00:17:36.620But what this then means is the expansion of concepts like harm and racism and sexism and so on means that more and more people are – we could talk about British politics, for example, if you say that this whole issue about the wind rush, which was about essentially administrative error and not mess-ups at the home office, which was not racially motivated,
00:18:04.200but which subsequently people like Clive Lewis and Afua Hirsch and one of these commentators
00:18:10.600are very quick to try and identify that as racism, right?
00:18:15.140But what that does actually is there's been about four experiments which show quite clearly.
00:18:20.560And I've actually done one of these studies myself, whereas if you take the same statement
00:18:25.940and you call it racist, you will get a blowback in public opinion.
00:18:30.960People react negatively to that, particularly conservative-type voters.
00:18:34.880We know from the public opinion research, for example, that most white Trump voters are actually fairly warm towards African-Americans and Hispanics.
00:18:44.320It's not that they are particularly—they're not cool towards those groups.
00:18:48.520They're just not as cool towards white people as white liberals are.
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00:20:52.960And there's been a number of experiments where I think in one case
00:20:58.220they were talking about taking down Confederate statues or something
00:21:03.000and they said that this is a bad policy.
00:21:05.700And then the next time they said, well, we don't want this policy because it's racist, or maybe the wall was the example.
00:21:14.620And in all these cases, you could see that when they threw the term racist in there, there was a lot more resistance to the statement, right?
00:21:21.380So a number of these experiments have kind of found that there's this direct reaction amongst a chunk of voters.
00:21:29.440Another paper that I'm involved in now with some other people, they've done most of the work.
00:21:40.480It was a sort of an example where, you know, Kirsten Gillibrand, the kind of very woke U.S. Democratic candidate.
00:21:48.500And we had the statement saying, you know, if my kid wore a hoodie and was black, he would be arrested.
00:21:54.740And it's only the fact my kid has white skin that he.
00:21:56.660So we had this sort of paragraph in there.
00:21:59.360And you can see the support for Gillibrand amongst people who read that paragraph simply dropped quite dramatically compared to when they didn't have that same wording.
00:22:08.880And again, it's an example of this reactivity that this sort of expanded use of the term racism invokes in people.
00:22:15.420Now, in the election here, again, I don't have any—I'm not going to—I always want to see the data and the research, so I can't say this for sure.
00:22:22.940But there is certainly a perception that there was amongst some voters this idea that the Labor Party in some ways looked down on them and thought of them as being a bit racist for voting for Brexit.
00:22:35.080I don't want to jump ahead of the data.
00:22:36.360But if that was the case, that would be another example of this phenomenon where there is this blowback effect from political correctness.
00:22:42.720Of course, what happens is if populists then are successful, you get a sort of reaction on the other side, which is like, oh, my God, these people, Trump is so awful.
00:22:52.280And so I'm going to be even more opposed to these people and vilify this government or Trump or Johnson or somebody as a monster.
00:23:01.140And so you actually get this back and forth.
00:23:03.380So in the last European elections, the 2019 European elections, you could see both the populist right parties increasing, but also some of the kind of more cultural left doing well.
00:23:14.640Now, of course, green also involves obviously the environment, which is a somewhat separate question.
00:23:19.460But there is also a kind of, I think, a reaction to the rise of the populist right on the cultural left as well in the college towns and some of the larger cities that have larger professional populations.
00:23:30.540So you're kind of seeing this dialectic going on, which is sort of polarizing.
00:23:36.080But another example of particularly this question of political correctness impacting on populism really has to do with the question of immigration, right?
00:23:44.640So if restricting immigration is defined as racism, or if, for example, deporting people who are in the country illegal is defined as racism, then all of a sudden that is a massive shift.
00:23:58.460So a voter, you know, a party cannot go, like the Democratic Party could not talk about enforcing the border anymore if that is now seen as a racist thing.
00:24:09.260Well, it emboldens, you know, it allows market share for somebody who is going to talk about this problem.
00:24:15.280So in the case of Sweden, for example, the only, the two main parties were kind of agreed that we're not going to talk about reducing immigration levels because that would be kind of racist.
00:24:25.420And this is an example of the power of politically correct norms to constrain the discourse, what we call the Everton window of acceptable debate, and to take certain questions off the table of democratic contestation.
00:24:39.440Well, what that does is it's – I think I may have used this metaphor last time of the Soviet department store where it's one pair of pants.
00:24:46.980We're only going to sell this style and that's it.
00:24:50.560Okay, well, then people want actually a range of other things.
00:25:12.600But that's an example of how this political correctness, the downstream effect of it was to create a marketplace for the populist right by shutting out the mainstream parties because they couldn't cross the red lines.
00:25:24.940Or another example would be Tommy Robinson and the English Defense League.
00:25:31.160If the local authorities had dealt with the Asian grooming scandal, as normal local authorities would never have expanded into this big issue.
00:25:41.380But because of political correctness, because it happened to be Asians, which is most Asians were not involved.
00:25:48.540And we're talking about a very small number of people here, but the fact that they happened to be Muslim Asians was something that made this very difficult to address by these local authorities, which then meant the problem kind of metastasized out of control and then opened up space for Robinson and others to exploit, right?
00:26:05.980So again, if you were going to explain the rise of Tommy Robinson, it's very hard to do that, I believe, without political correctness.
00:26:11.980Political correctness is really oxygen to that kind of a figure.
00:26:15.700So if we're going to, we can't just think of political correctness as something that happens on campus and restricts somebody from speaking on the campus.
00:26:24.080It has these very important kind of downstream effects, which are leading to populism and polarization.
00:26:30.580And I think that's kind of one of the key messages of my book, too, is to say, well, we have to look at how these things interact in the round.
00:26:38.980And you've talked about a lot of the stuff that's since happened, which is why we're delighted to have you on.
00:26:44.700Oh, so I just want to make it clear. And I'm a little bit slower than everybody else in the room.
00:26:49.520So yeah, I just want to. So calling someone racist doesn't persuade you to vote for them.
00:26:55.540Is that is that is that correct? Something like that. Yeah.
00:26:59.260OK, lovely to know. And so what you're essentially saying is that the issues of freedom of speech and political correctness are linked.
00:27:07.400And what you have with political correctness, once it sort of grows out of control, is it affects people's ability to express themselves, which doesn't it sort of give credence and emboldened unpleasant views because it gives them a certain glamour that they never had before.
00:27:23.660Yeah, absolutely. I think once you kind of debase the currency of racism, then somebody who genuinely is a racist can say, well, you know, they're calling you racist for wearing a Chinese prom dress and they're calling me racist. Well, hey, we're the same.
00:27:38.200And so it kind of makes it impossible to make what are actually very important distinctions, right, because there really are nasty racists out there that we need to be able to call out.
00:27:47.800And even within an individual like Donald Trump, some of the things he says really are, you know, something like insinuating that Mexicans are rapists is an awful racist thing to say, whereas talking about a wall is not.
00:28:00.060And yet those two things are completely meshed together in this narrative of, you know, like the wall is racist and deporting people is racist.
00:28:07.720Well, no, actually it isn't. But saying Mexicans are racist is. We have to be able to kind of make those fine distinctions. And that becomes impossible when this charge is being lobbied, being lobbed time and time again.
00:28:19.660So the free speech question, of course, is, you know, that is a sort of separate arm.
00:28:26.260So all of these kind of effects, one is that polarization is a result of political correctness.
00:28:31.980But another effect, of course, is, you know, the effect on free speech, say, in universities or in comedy, as you guys are probably familiar with.
00:28:40.780And how do you tackle this issue of free speech on campus?
00:28:44.560because it seems to have been, so going back to when we were at university, which was the turn
00:28:48.920of the century, which makes us sound incredibly old. I don't remember that being as much of an
00:28:54.620issue, but it seems to, in your own words, metastasize and it's got worse. How do we
00:28:59.740tackle that? So we have balance. So we have two sides of people discussing, debating.
00:29:05.800Well, I mean, I actually, and people have different views on this. I think this is not as new
00:29:11.400as people think, that when I was at the university, this kind of shows my age,
00:29:16.220this is kind of in the early 90s, late 80s period, that a lot of the same kind of things were going
00:29:24.240on, perhaps at a smaller scale. There wasn't social media, but there were speech codes. There
00:29:29.020was political correctness. There was a lot of these. I think what's happening now is to some
00:29:34.280degree, there is more of a challenge to these things, and that's bringing out more of a reaction.
00:29:41.400To some degree, the social media, I think there was some good work by Zach Goldberg, who's in the United States,
00:29:46.100who shows that the rise of online news services like BuzzFeed and Vox, but also...
00:29:54.540But also social media, it doesn't explain the rise of the populist right,
00:29:58.860but it does a pretty good job in terms of the great awokening, to use Matthew Iglesias' term,
00:30:04.040this kind of sudden emergence of this very radical cultural left sensibility.
00:30:09.120sensibility. Now, how do you address that on campus? So the question is, you have the Heterodox
00:30:14.220Academy, you have people on the internet, the Jordan Petersons of this world, and they are
00:30:19.540creating a counterculture, which I think is very important. But ultimately, I don't think that's
00:30:24.000going to be able to penetrate these institutions because the institutions are actually captured.
00:30:30.320Now, speaking in terms of the universities, which I know well, most people are perfectly
00:30:34.220nice and rational and normal. You have a small group of very committed, very highly networked,
00:30:40.500radical, authoritarian leftists. And they are very important because they also know
00:30:47.640how to exploit the procedures and the policies of the university to their advantage to, say,
00:30:55.100shut down speakers, to get people fired. And I've locked horns with these people on a number
00:31:00.060of occasions. I think I'm on my third internal investigation. So yeah, what they try and do is
00:31:09.120to hit you with a trumped-up charge, let's say racism or sexism. And in the policy, it says,
00:31:16.940we want an environment that is safe for people and no one's going to be discriminated
00:31:21.700against on the basis of race and sex. And they say, whatever, maybe he read out from a paragraph
00:31:29.540that had the N word on it. And therefore, he is in the same category as the racist that you
00:31:35.380mentioned in your policies. And therefore, he must be removed from the university. Or maybe
00:31:40.620there's a speaker who shouldn't be allowed in, right? So it's that twisting of the meaning of
00:31:44.280words. Increasingly, my view is that the only way to tackle this is going to be to actually have
00:31:50.800more government regulation of these sectors in terms of specifying in very, very fine detail
00:31:57.860what the meaning of words is, what the meaning of racism is.
00:32:01.720So if someone actually does call somebody the N-word in class,
00:32:04.880then yes, that is an offense, and there's no way free speech trumps that.
00:32:10.340But on the other hand, if somebody is in a nuanced way reading a passage
00:32:14.800or if they are expressing a view on Brexit or whatever in class,
00:32:20.860then that cannot be interpreted and stretched into meaning they violated college policy.
00:32:25.480So this is going to require very kind of targeted forensic policies from governments, actually, I think, in order to – what this is about is it's not about – and, of course, I know some liberals who would say – some real liberals who would say, well, institutions have to have autonomy.
00:32:45.460Isn't it illiberal when we get the government involved?
00:32:47.520The problem with that reasoning is that if you have a kind of a vigilante or a kind of a spontaneous form of authoritarianism that is kind of emerges in a sort of not disorganized but sort of peer-to-peer way.
00:33:03.100It's not an official institution that marches in and takes over the university, but it might be a network that self-organizes and is able to exert power that way over who gets invited in, over the content of the curriculum, etc., and can essentially lobby and pressure and coerce the university into doing its bidding.
00:33:23.240So what you then actually need to do is you have to deal with this spontaneous authoritarianism that's taken root, and you have to actually marginalize it.
00:33:32.100And that's actually going to create a freer, more liberal university.
00:33:35.820So it is actually about furthering the aims of liberalism.
00:33:39.720You're not actually constricting liberalism through government action.
00:33:43.080We're not there yet, but I think that is increasingly going to have to happen because I don't think that simply setting up an association of people who support free speech and so on is going to do it.
00:33:54.520Because when you have the institutions that are essentially controlled, not controlled, but where the red lines of what you're allowed to talk about are essentially policed by a sort of self-organizing network, you have to find a way of actually getting at that very small but very influential network and to minimize their influence.
00:34:15.500So I think we're kind of going to need more intelligent, targeted strategies that are kind of within institutions and not just general debates, which are important.
00:34:25.640The culture is still important, but we're not going to get the change we need unless we are actually able to apply more targeted policy tools.
00:34:33.820And actually, on that very subject, the question I was going to ask you is, I was hopeful, maybe just because it was Christmas and New Year, and I thought, it's a new year, maybe things will change. But that now that, you know, the Boris Johnson government has an incredibly strong mandate from the public, huge majority for a party that's been in power for nine years now, or 10 years, almost.
00:34:58.360Um, is there any evidence that, you know, the overwhelming victory of, of his party and the platform that he's stood on is going to get people to go, okay, well, you know, like with Brexit, most people now accept that Brexit is going to happen, right?
00:35:16.280Is there a sense in which elections like that, election results like that, will actually potentially reduce polarization as people are given a kind of wake-up call that going so far off the deep end isn't going to work?
00:35:45.860I think that, and certainly not, I mean, if you take the intellectual heart of, you know, the cultural left, which is in the cultural industries, including university, there's not going to be much, you know, that election is not going to change many minds.
00:36:41.520They get the importance of kind of having a readjustment in the culture, right?
00:36:47.520And sort of reining in this excess that's been going on.
00:36:52.780The problem in a way is that the senior, I think there was a generational divide, so that the senior Tory people in the conservative government are still in the old kind of Thatcherite mold.
00:37:03.960And they're still mainly concerned about things like Brexit and, you know, economic free trade and things like that.
00:37:10.920Their focus is very much still on high politics and economics.
00:37:16.040It's the younger people within the party who I think get the issue much more.
00:37:21.600And you can actually see that in survey data.
00:37:23.680If you look at people under 30 or particularly under 25, political correctness is a much bigger concern for them than it is for people who are kind of over 55.
00:37:35.100Yes, the over 55s are against political correctness, but they don't really care that much about it as an issue.
00:37:39.860It's not a major thing. Whereas amongst the younger people who are against political correctness, it's like one of their most highest issues.
00:37:48.780I think that kind of shows you where this culture conflict is much more salient to the kind of under 30 population.
00:37:56.260Maybe because they're online more, maybe because they see it more in their institutions.
00:38:00.600And I think the question in this government will be whether those younger voices actually have an influence or not in setting policy.
00:38:12.220Some people, they really get the issue and some, it just completely goes over their head.
00:38:17.120When they think of universities, all they think about is, oh, we've got to reduce the number of people going to university and it's costing a lot of money.
00:38:24.400I mean, that's that's the extent of their worldview, rather than maybe we can actually enact some reforms to improve some of the quality of some of the issues that that people are concerned about.
00:38:35.240And Eric, aren't we actually in quite a dangerous situation? Because we've got these two polarized camps. Most people are with, you know, sort of the Boris Johnson model, anti-PC. We've got the left who are sort of, you know, digging down and not really engaging or listening.
00:38:51.100And effectively, what we've got is an opposition that are useless and provide no real opposition.
00:38:56.920And isn't that a dangerous place to be in politically?
00:38:59.040It is a dangerous place because what happens if the conservatives bungle things?
00:39:04.180You know, they mess up on the NHS or they aren't, you know, maybe economically they're pursuing austerity or whatever it is.
00:39:11.160You do need to have an opposition that is able to credibly threaten them in power.
00:39:16.680So, yeah, I think this is another casualty, really, of political correctness, that if that hamstrings the Labour Party and makes them unelectable for a generation, then some very real policy concerns which they bring to the table are going to go unaddressed.
00:39:32.060And there just isn't going to be the, you know, the Tories' feet isn't going to be held to the fire on some of these questions as effectively.
00:39:39.320So that's, again, another of the downstream effects of this quite pernicious ideology.
00:39:44.240Well, that's why people always talk to us about like, why are you constantly going on about what's wrong with the left is because we like Francis is old school lefty. I'm very much in the center. We need a strong opposition. That's right. We need an opposition that can challenge this government and potentially once this government gets old and tired and whatever, to replace them. Right. And have a sensible platform, which they offer to the public.
00:40:07.520But it worries me what you're saying because, you know, as I said, I was very hopeful that people might start to wake up.
00:40:21.640Well, it'll be really interesting to see the U.S. election in 2020.
00:40:25.180This is what I was going to take it to.
00:40:26.000Yeah, because what you see is in the Democratic primary, the kind of wokeness, it's got some power.
00:40:32.620Some of these radical new Congress people and some of the candidates, Gillibrand, for example, and Beto O'Rourke and some of these people, a lot of them are trotting out issues like white privilege and reparations and so on.
00:40:50.700So you can see a situation if all of these candidates sign up to reparations, for example, that could make the Democrats unelectable, right, if they have to tip their hat to that.
00:41:00.420Now, they have still got some moderate candidates, Joe Biden, and to some extent Bernie Sanders as well.
00:41:07.120So these are at least moderate on the culture issues.
00:41:12.560One of the reasons is the African-American vote, which is actually a moderating influence because they're less politically correct and they're less likely to go for this new style of politics.
00:41:21.460So Biden may get in on the strength of that vote.
00:41:24.160And again, that gets to a lot of this survey data showing, you know, white liberals are much more likely to say that the reason blacks can't get ahead is racism, that diversity, you know, diversity is bad.
00:41:34.880They know better than black people, white people can't get ahead.
00:41:38.040So kind of much more than black people.
00:41:39.640So it's sort of, but there is still that old, you know, older Democrats and black Democrats are still there to kind of more or less provide a moderating force.
00:41:48.840And so it may be that Biden squeaks through.
00:41:52.920As the nominee, in which case I think he's got a very good chance of beating Trump. But if, let's say, if it's Elizabeth Warren or if it were to be one of these other candidates, again, because of that politically correct pressure to be woke, that could make the Democrats unelectable.
00:42:08.040And then you could get, again, another four years of Trump. What does that mean? I mean, with all kinds of attendant risks of what's going to happen in foreign policy. So all I'm saying is, again, it's a version of the same problem where this, and in the context of all these left-wing European parties that are having their worst results ever.
00:42:29.060You know, and one major reason for that is that inability to shift to where the voters are because of these artificial barriers laid down by an ideology, which is the same political correct ideology you talk about.
00:42:42.920I'm curious that you make this point that you think Joe Biden would have a good chance because I think in terms of his platform, he's certainly – but I've been watching him.
00:42:52.640I mean, I'm not sure he's still all there.
00:44:46.560But I think with Biden, he is more of a kind of unifier.
00:44:51.960He's seen as more not somebody who is as hostile.
00:44:55.840He's not somebody who's likely to think that, you know, all Republican voters are a bunch of deplorables, right?
00:45:00.560So he doesn't kind of – I don't think he awakens the kind of hostility that a Hillary Clinton would or that an Elizabeth Warren or a Beto would, you know.
00:45:13.320I think it's a different type of beast.
00:45:15.160So I think he actually has that potential to be, I won't say a unifier, but more in the Obama mold, more somebody who is going to be less offensive to that kind of voter.
00:45:25.880And that's why I think they would be well advised to select him.
00:45:29.300And they may well select him simply given the dynamics of the different primaries that, you know, particularly the more African-American heavy states like South Carolina are likely to support him.
00:45:41.660He's very popular with African-Americans.
00:46:12.180It's always possible that it could consolidate massively behind, say, Warren or another candidate.
00:46:19.640I don't think Buttigieg is likely to make it through, even though I don't mind his policy offer.
00:46:25.340But I think that the real risk, I think, for the Democrats is if Warren, if the progressive vote swings behind Warren and she gets the nomination, I think then they're in trouble.
00:47:55.660But essentially taking on Brexit, taking the mantle of Brexit on from the Brexit party or from UKIP, making it part of a center-right offer.
00:48:05.740So the center-right has been quite successful in absorbing the energies of the populist right.
00:48:11.160Now, the question of how you overcome polarization is a different one, right?
00:48:14.620So this is more the center-right moving into the center of where the votes are by adopting parts of the populist right platform and not the sort of other parts of it.
00:48:24.560But in order to overcome polarization, I think, again, we get to this problem of the stickiness of the cultural left, which is related to political correctness, which is preventing the left-wing parties from moving to the center.
00:48:39.160Because if they move to the center and the right moves to the center, we're then moving into a more unified situation, right?
00:48:44.880And the politics of the center and of the swing voter becomes much more possible rather than the politics of appealing to the fringes and the base.
00:48:54.560or the activists. But there are two problems here. One is, and I mentioned this in the book,
00:49:01.280is this backdrop of demographic shifting, which I think is very important. The US case,
00:49:06.660roughly 80, 85% non-Hispanic white in 1960, and it's now about 60%, and it's going to be below
00:49:13.50050% by 2050, let's say. That kind of process is well underway in, say, Canada, New Zealand,
00:49:19.700Australia. It's not taking place quite as fast in Europe, but certainly we're going to probably see
00:49:25.640ethnic majorities in the minority by the end of the century in the main immigrant receiving West
00:49:30.960European countries. So we're at the beginning of a process where these more diverse electorates,
00:49:36.980what this means is you are starting to get a kind of response from voters who say,
00:49:43.660we want this change to occur not as quickly. We want to have time to assimilate people. And
00:49:48.640probably through intermarriage in a deep way versus the people who say, you know, diversity
00:53:00.260and goes we're going to stick with our economic policies
00:53:02.380Right. But we're going to be more sensitive to the fact that our traditional base working people up north, outside the big metropolitan cities, the university towns, what they want is, you know, reduced levels of immigration for a period of time.
00:53:17.580So people can come, they can settle down, they can learn the language, they can be assimilated.
00:53:22.620Someone like that, according to what you're saying, is in the current environment, could not be successful in, let's say, the Labour Party or the Democratic Party because they would be called racist, as Joe Biden has been.
00:53:35.140Right. That's what you're saying, which is that is the monkey wrench, as you put it. That is the constraining fact in the system that prevents a credible left of center alternative to what we now see as a kind of center right politics infused with elements of right wing populism.
00:53:52.800Yeah, exactly. And of course, immigration is the key issue, but also there are questions around national identity. I mean, is the United States defined by slavery and the sins of conquering the land from the Native Americans? I mean, if you are going to take that approach to the American past and reparations.
00:54:11.300So it was also about the question of patriotism, of national identity. Is Britain just defined by sins to do with colonialism, for example? There has to be a leader that resists that and says, yes, that is part of the past, but there are all these great things and this is what I'm going to talk about is more the great things.
00:54:29.980That would be the kind of emphasis that you would need to break through to kind of be that unifying figure that would say, of course, we're going to admit the sins of the past, but that's not what we're going to focus on when we get up in the morning as a country.
00:54:43.360And that's not what defines us, right?
00:54:45.380Just that kind of a tone that would be more unifying and that would sort of speak to different groups in the population.
00:54:52.560That would also accept that not wanting the culture to shift as quickly is a valid thing.
00:55:01.500I mean, I try to imagine that kind of politics occurring very difficult, right?
00:55:05.460I mean, it's very difficult because the nature of the high culture, which through the universities,
00:55:10.600through influencing the top levels of the parties and the activists is very powerful.
00:55:15.020And it is all essentially about excavating these grievances and focusing on injustices of the past and essentially magnifying the meaning of terms such as racism because that gets you sort of points as being a virtuous person.
00:55:30.400Somehow we've got to break that in the high culture, move it back towards something that still calls out real racism.
00:55:36.480We are, of course, going to focus on real instances that are evidence-based and definitionally tight, but we're not going to just broad brush.
00:55:44.600And of course, the right does this too, to some extent with anti-Semitism, where the Labor Party, there are anti-Semites in the Labor Party, and perhaps at the very top, there may be some anti-Semites, right?
00:55:56.900But to say that the Labor Party is anti-Semitic, I just don't agree with that sort of framing.
00:57:12.960So you're always going to get the nuts.
00:57:15.060But at the same time, I think they were effective.
00:57:17.500And you could see it in their election victories that a lot of people voted for them.
00:57:21.980What happens, however, I would say is that in the last couple of years of the Obama administration,
00:57:27.900he sort of succumbs to pressure from the more...
00:57:31.500people who want to defy, who want to get out on the streets and protest when you deport people.
00:57:36.020And he sort of... Now, you could argue that it was because the 2014 immigration reform package
00:57:41.700failed that the Republicans didn't buy into the package of stronger enforcement with path to
00:57:46.940citizenship. And then he said, okay, well, if I haven't got this, I'll just go for it. I might
00:57:51.080as well please my base. But regardless, it was the base that kind of pushed the Obama administration
00:57:56.740in the direction of lax border enforcement, which is sort of the backdrop for the rise
00:58:02.400of Trump, of course, which is post, you know, mid-2014 with the first big wave of Central
00:58:07.920American mothers and children coming to the border, again, and quite smartly, I would
00:58:14.220do the same thing as them, that they know that the laws are such that if you come as
00:58:18.520a mother or child, you've got a much better chance of staying in.
00:58:22.380But essentially not addressing the loopholes in the legislation that allowed that serve as a kind of magnet for these people to come in larger and larger numbers was kind of a backdrop for allowing Trump then to exploit that issue.
00:58:37.080So the salience, the importance of the immigration issue for Republicans was at an unprecedented high level between mid-2014 and when Trump was nominated.
00:58:48.660And also in the general election, you could see a lot of the non-voters or Obama voters who were concerned about immigration.
00:58:56.820Those were the people that switched to Trump, right?
00:58:58.960So he really drew in people on that issue.
00:59:03.460But that was only made possible, I would argue, in part because of the pressure from the—you call them woke activists or people who wanted to define border enforcement as racism or as beyond the pale.
00:59:15.540I mean, they really sort of handcuffed Obama and made it, you know, essentially opened the field for somebody on the other side who was willing to break the taboo.
00:59:25.180Because there was a taboo on the Republican side, too.
00:59:27.300And in the right-wing media on Fox News, they didn't want to talk about immigration as the central thing either.
00:59:33.400And so Trump had a wide open field, 17 candidates.
00:59:37.480He was the only one who was willing to make this the central feature of his pitch.
00:59:41.800And so that is, you know, this is the key reason why he's in power.
00:59:45.540So a lot of these things are connected to, again, these limits on public discourse, the Everton window of what's acceptable to talk about and not to talk about.
00:59:54.440Of course, we'd still need the Everton window, right?
00:59:57.400So there was a politician called George Wallace in the 60s who wanted segregation.
01:00:02.700So there, of course, we need a—the main parties should not go there.
01:00:08.360But something quite different with an issue like immigration and enforcement of the border, which is a perfectly reasonable thing from a liberal point of view to enforce.
01:00:19.200It's the kind of, again, the expansion of the meaning of racism from something like segregation, which absolutely falls very clearly within the meaning of not treating people equally on the basis of race to something like immigration, which is something completely different.
01:00:31.660It has to do with the relationship of the nation to the world outside it, which is a very different relationship.
01:00:38.360Well, as someone who works with the Venezuelan, I have to say, not Latin, Latinos, that's a great idea.
01:00:44.920So let's make sure, build a wall is what I'm saying.
01:01:21.720What's going to happen to polarization on the right?
01:01:26.020Especially, you know, so I think that I would like to see someone think about that question of what is the Republican opposition going to be like in a world where they're out of power?
01:01:38.360especially if they're out of power multiple elections for demographic reasons,
01:01:43.700what does that mean? And what might that mean in terms of the risk of terrorism, for example?
01:01:49.200Now, there may be no risk of terrorism, but I think it's something that I haven't seen anyone
01:01:52.880write about and would be interesting to see. And what do you think would happen if he was to lose?
01:01:57.040I think what would happen is if he was to lose, especially if for demographic reasons,
01:02:03.960the Republicans, and particularly the kind of border control Republicanism that Trump
01:02:08.760represents, if that were to be sidelined almost permanently, then I think you've got a more
01:02:15.420risky situation. I think that what will happen is that the Senate, which is based on territory and
01:02:21.380therefore favors more white-dominated states, would become the kind of center of this kind
01:02:28.320of resistance. And then the Fox News and the right-wing media would be kind of taking it up
01:02:33.360a notch in terms of attacks. I think it would be a very unhealthy situation where I think the
01:02:38.840polarization would get even worse. Go Trump. All right.
01:02:44.040We're going to put that right across there.
01:02:46.820Not that I want Trump in, but I'm saying that a situation where they are permanently out of
01:02:52.840the president's agenda is potentially a dangerous one. And I think Yasha Monk, who's clearly on the
01:02:57.840left has said something similar, that it's not enough to attack this guy. You actually have to
01:03:03.660have a vision that is unifying. And that's lacking. So we're going to call this episode
01:03:09.480Eric Kaufman, Make America Great Again. No, but you're right. I think that's what we need. We
01:03:17.000need people to start finding a way of coming together because this is not sustainable. And as
01:03:21.540you hint at the consequences of this polarization at some point potentially could go from
01:03:28.860conversations to actual physical confrontation. And that's very dangerous.
01:03:33.740Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And I think that... I mean, I don't want to overdraw this. I think
01:03:38.760fear-mongering is not a good idea either. But I think that...
01:03:40.840You've got to play the move forward, Eric.
01:03:52.280We know, for example, that there is an inverse relationship between how well populist right parties do and how many sort of white nationalist terror attacks there are.
01:04:01.040This is a kind of inversely related phenomenon.
01:04:03.380So we might expect there to be more such attacks when the populist isn't doing as well, which is not by any means a reason for the populist to be in power.