The Sacred Myths of Liberalism - Eric Kaufmann
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 5 minutes
Words per Minute
177.96584
Summary
In this episode, we talk with Eric Eddings about his new book, Taboo: How Race Became Sacred about how we have made race and everything to do with race so sacred that it has created many of the cultural trends that we ve spent six years talking about on the show.
Transcript
00:00:03.680
and that can be stretched to gender, to sexuality.
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Your recent book that we're really looking forward
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that we've spent six years talking about on the show.
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that race is an issue that making it so, so important
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That seems to me like there's quite a lot of truth in that.
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12-Point Plan for Rolling Back Progressive Extremism,
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I can see why you chose that subtitle for America.
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Well, we'll get back to why it's The Third Awokening,
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and that's like the big bang of our moral universe.
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define what you mean by the anti-racist taboo exactly,
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the idea that we shouldn't be racist is pretty good.
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Right, so we definitely want a norm against racism,
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So that immediately means you can stretch the definition out
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around this particular norm, and that's what's important.
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you know, Paul Krugman did an article in the New York Times,
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where he said, you know, when he was growing up in Long Island,
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which had these little black coachman figures on their gates,
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and it happened almost like that, one summer, mid-60s.
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Just the way our universe is the aftermath of the big bang, right?
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And so similarly with the race taboo as a big bang,
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it then means you have this sacredness around race,
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and that can be stretched to gender, to sexuality.
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It can be, you know, pushed out to include microaggressions,
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such as, you know, saying anyone can make it in America,
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everything's whiteness, white supremacy, whatever.
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making sacred of historically marginalized race, gender,
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The making sacred bit comes from that big bang.
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from the original civil rights anti-racist movement,
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because I think this is a really interesting point
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so if I were to say anything that insulted the gods,
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if I say anything that might be perceived as offensive
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that could be construed by an ultra-sensitive person
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who's reading you in the worst way as racist somehow,
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or anything you do that might be construed as offending the gods,
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means you are excommunicated, i.e. canceled, fired, shunned,
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So it's the sacredness that sort of explains the overreaction,
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and the very black and white way of viewing it.
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So the difference being, if I say, I don't know,
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I don't like your trousers, that's a personal insult.
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then I'm blaspheming against the religion, if you like.
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And hence the very, very harsh reaction that you'd get,
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that I might not get if I insulted your trousers.
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And so, and the other thing is there's no proportionality.
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a second offense, there is, you know, how bad was the, you know,
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you stepped over the red line and now you're out
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And so, and there's no coming back, there's no redemption.
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So it's this very sort of black and white way of viewing the world,
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much more nuance, accepts the world's a complicated place.
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And that's why the sacredness thing is so important.
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It's kind of like kryptonite, you know, in the movie Superman,
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And so other identity groups want some of that power
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because then it becomes useful to use also against your enemies.
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And I think until we tame the power of this kryptonite,
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I would argue, we're not going to ultimately solve the problem of,
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let's say, pressures on free speech, for example, or on merit,
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or any of the problems that we associate with woke.
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We're not going to be able to address those until we start to
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sort of put that sacredness back in its box and say,
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no, let's actually have racism or sexism or any of these other
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They need to behave more like jurisprudence in law,
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where you have proportionality and rationality, not irrationality.
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Well, white guilt is absolutely key and absolutely central.
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And I should mention, by the way, Shelby Steele,
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of course, the African-American classical liberal
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stroke conservative, who was just brilliant, who had a book of that name.
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And Steele's argument was that in this mid-60s, you had a sudden shift
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in moral and cultural authority from white America to black America.
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He lived as a sort of black man through Jim Crow segregation
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Whereas before the black man had to defer to the white man.
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And now suddenly the white man is deferring to the black man
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And then he said, well, that actually means that the moral authority
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of the U.S., its entire constitutional history,
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And the whole game becomes trying to virtue signal
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You have some moral legitimacy by being an ally to the black people.
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And that's where affirmative action comes from.
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It's actually about virtue signaling that you're not racist.
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The whole policy is a big virtue signal, according to Shelby Steele.
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And the other thing I'd say is crucial about white guilt is
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It's got nothing to do with Marcuse and critical theory and any of that.
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LBJ, the civil rights movement, which is a liberal movement.
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And then very quickly, the white guilt comes in in the mid-60s,
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So this is about liberalism, and it is not about Marxism, actually, in the beginning.
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Because there's a lot of conservatives who've come on the show and made the point,
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look, this is just what happens with liberalism.
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Eventually, you get to this point, and there's nothing that you can really do about it.
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You've got liberal principles, classical liberal principles,
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And it's very important to understand that in the 20th century,
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what we get is a buildup of the liberal identity.
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And that identity, essentially, is largely about egalitarian myths,
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And so all of the myths that build up around liberalism
00:10:19.080
are about extending the virtues of liberalism to marginalized groups.
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Now, of course, that's hugely important, and I would support that.
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But what it means is that all of your heroes, your mythical episodes,
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it could be the civil rights movement, for example.
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It could be, you know, the Holocaust and slavery.
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So essentially, the way this set of myths is constructed is,
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It winds up in a place that says the majority is to be feared.
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It's always just one step away from Jim Crow and fascism
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and women back in the home and gays in the closet.
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And that, so you have a fear of the majority and you have warm,
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fuzzy feelings and a romanticized view of minority.
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So minority is good, majority is bad, is the mythic structure.
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It's a bit like nationalism where you have a certain set of myths and symbols and heroes.
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So the whole liberal identity is essentially egalitarian and has no bounds on how far it can go.
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And that's why it's gone in such a sort of extreme direction.
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And so liberalism has become virulent and has become extreme towards the left,
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But liberal principles, I think, are salvageable.
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But liberalism as a whole needs to be really reformed.
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And that kind of knee-jerk emotional reflex, which is really tied to the liberal identity and myths.
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The emotional reflex to attack and fear majorities and feel warm and fuzzy feelings
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towards minorities and see them as virtuous and more moral and have deeper spiritual insight than anybody else.
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That whole kind of emotional reflex needs taming.
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In order to get back to a liberalism that is in line with liberal principles.
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And when I say classical liberalism, I mean classical liberalism.
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This idea of John Stuart Mill, John Locke type of liberalism in which it's about,
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you know, you have your sphere, you know, my right to swing my fist ends at your nose.
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That kind of procedural liberalism, I think, is...
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And now Patrick Deneen and some of the post-liberals will say that once you have this
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emphasis on the individual, it'll automatically flip over into emphasizing,
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you know, ideals such as, you know, you have to like diversity and change and
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I think you can have a liberalism that has, it's a liberal structure and liberal procedures,
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but within that, you can have conservative values.
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Some conservative values and some more individualistic values in balance.
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So that's where I kind of depart from the post-liberals,
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like Deneen or Vermeule or some of these people who say that, you know,
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And I mean, I think even East Asia, you know, it is a version of liberalism that they have in
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And I just think it's a more sane version in many ways than where we're at in the West,
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where the culture has kind of metastasized in this very sort of,
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It's a point that I actually really agree with, because as somebody who used to identify as liberal,
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seeing what's happened to people that used to be in my tribe,
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essentially, it's like watching a train go off the tracks on fire.
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So if we're going to use that metaphor, how do we put the fire out and how do we put the train back
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on the track? Because to an outside observer, I'm like, it's hurtling towards a cliff at the moment.
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I'm not sure if we're going to be able to get it back.
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Yeah, I mean, clearly, we have some liberals who see the problems, you know, with cancel culture,
00:14:09.880
who see the problems with, you know, attacking everything as white supremacy and essentially
00:14:14.360
these moral panics, the most extreme of which, by the way, is the Canadian mass graves hoax of
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this idea that there were mass graves and that the entire Canadian nation state is genocidal.
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I mean, this is insane. And it's been embraced by almost the entire Canadian political class.
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But yeah, so people are kind of waking up to some of this. How do we reform it? I ultimately think
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we do need to, I think a Cold War framing is not a bad way of thinking about it. So in the Cold War,
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we had economic socialism and economic freedom. And even though liberals are behind a lot of the
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problems, they've kind of met the post-Marxist, post-cultural Marxist, if you like, on the same
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terrain. And all the EDI, all the sort of speech codes and cancellation is a result of the fusion of
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the sort of left liberals with the cultural Marxist. Now, what we need to do is have a sort of cultural
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version of the Cold War that says, we've got cultural socialism, right, which is about, you
00:15:17.480
know, we're going to have equal representation in the humanities curriculum, in history, in mathematics,
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on the stage, and everything's got to be equal, quotas, affirmative action. That's one view of the
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world. And then cultural freedom, cultural liberalism is the alternative view. So as with the Cold War,
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we have a cultural version of that conflict, which says, no, we prize beauty, excellence,
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rationality, objective truth, due process, equal treatment, all of that. And that's our vision.
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And I think really, it's about mobilizing this new reformed kind of liberalism that says,
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actually, what we want is human flourishing. And we don't just want to optimize for equality and
00:16:01.320
emotional harm protection for these groups. Now, there's some of that. We can do some of that.
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Just as with economics, we can have a welfare state. We can have some redistribution. That's
00:16:11.800
part of the good society. But we have to actually be able to criticize the excesses of quotas,
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the excesses of speech codes, the excesses of statute toppling and completely distorted
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readings of history in order to achieve the good society. So yeah, that is kind of,
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I think in terms of the post-woke ideal, it has to be that sort of society of human flourishing.
00:16:35.880
So just to use another metaphor, economists will often use this metaphor of, you know, you have a
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pie and it's cut up in a very equal way. The more equally you cut up the pie, the smaller the pie.
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The more you grow the pie, the more unequal the slices. You want to have some equality there,
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but you also want to allow that pie to grow. And in order to allow it to grow, you've got to allow
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the better people to accumulate capital and invest. Well, it's yeah.
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You've now used the trigger word, which is where I was going to take this conversation anyway, because
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you talk about the sacred myths of liberalism. I think that the most sacred now and the most,
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the one that causes the most impact and therefore the most problems is the idea of equality. Because
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the problem with that, and you just said there are better people, which is giving the game away,
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right? This is why I call it a trigger word because I think we live in a society, I think it's fair to
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say that has swallowed the idea that equality is a sacred objective, hook, line and sinker. Which is
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fine if what you mean by equality is people should not be impeded in their ability to realize their
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potential. But let's be honest, that is not what we mean by equality in modern society. What we mean is
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if different groups happen to have different outcomes, that means there's inequality going on.
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And that's how most people now think, whether, whether we like it or not. I mean, Thomas Sowell in his
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last book, Social Justice Fallacies, he talks about the fact, like, inequality between groups is not
00:18:12.520
the norm. It's like inevitable. So he, you know, he breaks down the fact that almost every major brewery
00:18:19.320
in the world was founded by Germans, including Tsing Tao, right? And, and groups have accumulated over
00:18:27.400
centuries and sometimes even millennia, certain aptitudes that happen to be a product of historical
00:18:33.000
and cultural and genetic factors. So, you know, white people are overrepresented in ice hockey and
00:18:38.760
black people are, and on and on. Canadians, by the way, as a hockey player myself. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.
00:18:44.920
So my point is this, as long as people are likely to be triggered by you using the phrase better people,
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which they will be. And as long as this myth of equality between groups, men, women, black,
00:18:59.560
white, whatever exists, I just don't see how you get out from under that to the point that you made
00:19:05.960
so well, which is we got to grow the, the bloody pie. Right. Well, I mean, I think that when it comes
00:19:12.760
to the economy, you know, the defeat of communism, I think people accept, you know, not every individual
00:19:18.840
must have exactly the same income and wealth. And, you know, of course we want to have some
00:19:23.240
redistribution. I actually think in the economy, people accept that there is this trade-off and
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they accept there's a certain amount of inequality that is normal and acceptable in an economy.
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I don't think people have made that connection to culture. So where they would accept inequality
00:19:39.960
amongst individuals economically, they wouldn't, will not accept inequality between men and women,
00:19:45.080
between different racial groups, for example. I mean, they will accept inequality between,
00:19:49.320
for example, West Africans and West Indians within the black group. That's fine. But, and actually,
00:19:56.360
that's interesting because if you go to Harvard or any of these Ivy League schools, you know,
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black Americans of slave ancestry are grossly underrepresented within the black population. And
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it's mainly people of immigrant origins, actually, or their descendants, like Claudine Gay would be an
00:20:13.560
example of that. No one cares about that. They care about certain categories, race, gender, you know,
00:20:19.960
how many men and women, that's the kind of category that they care about. And that's one of the problems,
00:20:25.480
I think, is because liberalism never, I mean, liberalism actually isn't, I don't think, friendly to
00:20:32.360
communism, command and control, everyone who must have the same. So liberalism recognizes limits on the
00:20:37.720
economic redistribution side. It doesn't recognize any limits on gender. You know, why aren't there
00:20:44.120
X percent, 50 percent women CEOs? Why aren't there 50 percent women engineers? It's always,
00:20:50.200
we're underrepresented and that's a problem. Affirmative action, same thing. Why is the African-American
00:20:56.200
share not where, not at 13 percent at Harvard or at any of these other institutions? So it's extreme and
00:21:03.160
radical, liberalism is radical and extreme when it comes to culture. And I think that's an important
00:21:08.520
distinction. It has not accepted that there is a natural rate of inequality. Just as there is a
00:21:14.360
natural rate of inequality in the economy, we don't expect everyone to have the same wealth. They do not
00:21:19.720
accept that there is a natural inequality when it comes to groups being represented in different
00:21:24.680
endeavors, particularly high status occupations or universities.
00:21:29.160
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Wales Theatre. Get tickets at Mervish.com. Well, where I might disagree a little bit is I do think,
00:22:02.200
I don't think it's true in the US because the US idea of free markets is so strong still. But in the UK,
00:22:08.440
I think increasingly, and to some extent in the US, the idea that people are poor because they've been let
00:22:15.240
down by the system is universally believed. And so that's why we have the highest tax burden for
00:22:21.960
God knows how many years under a conservative government, etc. Because anytime anything goes
00:22:27.160
wrong, and you've seen this over the last few years, if there's a global pandemic, you know,
00:22:31.560
why hasn't the government done more? If the gas prices go up, why hasn't the government done more?
00:22:35.880
If this has happened, why hasn't the government done more? And that's because I think increasingly,
00:22:40.280
even on the economic side, now, we're buying into this idea that inequality is unnatural.
00:22:48.120
I mean, I don't know if I agree with you. I mean, I think that if you look at the survey data on this
00:22:52.440
stuff... Tell us. Well, I mean, for example, younger generations are not especially
00:22:58.440
redistributionist economically, the way they are woke culturally. So it's really the cultural stuff
00:23:04.440
that's gone radical. I mean, I'm not actually that worried about us moving to a sort of command and
00:23:09.160
control economy. I mean, if you just look in this country, for example, when, you know,
00:23:13.720
I just think that markets, you know, the rating agencies for government borrowing,
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those are all things that'll keep a check on some of these things. People don't want to pay,
00:23:22.680
you know, that yes, they want more government spending on themselves, but they also don't
00:23:25.640
want to pay more tax. Yeah, but half the country doesn't pay tax.
00:23:28.680
I know they don't, but... And they're the ones that want more tax.
00:23:33.400
Well, no, in fact, if you run surveys, there aren't a lot of people favoring higher taxes.
00:23:39.240
So I don't really, I'm not that worried about the economic stuff. I mean, it may,
00:23:42.920
we may go to slightly higher taxes or slightly lower. I think that struggle, people understand
00:23:48.520
that, you know, government crowds out investment and therefore crowds out growth and therefore
00:23:53.640
we need growth. I think people accept that we need growth so that there's kind of a debate
00:23:58.280
over how, where should the tax burden be to optimize the system? Okay, that's fine. That's the kind
00:24:03.000
of debate we need on the cultural side. We need to be able to say, essentially, if we go for cultural
00:24:08.280
equity, we're going to have cultural poverty. Just the same way if we go for economic equity,
00:24:13.720
we're going to have economic poverty. We don't have that debate on the cultural side. So if we actually
00:24:17.880
say there's got to be equal representation in every film, every movie, every book, every humanities course,
00:24:24.040
we're going to have worse quality literature and art. We don't have that debate, right? If we cast a
00:24:31.080
Shakespeare play or Shakespeare movie and the characters are, you know, racially unrepresentative
00:24:37.880
and the gender roles are completely all over the place, it's just going to be less powerful, less
00:24:41.880
evocative. No one has that debate. You're not allowed to have that debate. We need to be having
00:24:47.000
that debate about excellence and growth of the cultural pie versus equity on the cultural side.
00:24:54.280
You know, we can have a bit of equity. You know, we can have some equity and some mixing up of gender
00:24:59.560
roles, but not too much. And likewise, you know, we're going to have some female engineers, but it's
00:25:04.520
never going to be 50-50. We have to accept a certain level of inequality as optimal. We're not there yet.
00:25:10.360
And that's what I'm saying is that we need to be having that discussion about cultural wealth
00:25:14.760
and human flourishing on the cultural side. I'm not that worried about the economics, honestly,
00:25:19.880
but on the cultural side, we're just going crazy.
00:25:21.960
Eric, let's bring it back to the human element of it. And we're sitting here in a room and you're
00:25:28.120
making very good points and we're all nodding and we're all agreeing. However, you need courage
00:25:35.640
in order for these changes to be made, for these cultural movements to be slowed down, halted,
00:25:44.760
reversed, changing of direction. And what I see, and correct me if I'm wrong,
00:25:51.160
is a fundamental lack of courage in our society.
00:25:56.360
Yes. I mean, I agree with you. And I think that to the extent we can encourage people to take a
00:26:02.920
chance, I think we have to do that. People have to be pushing the boundaries. If there are new buzzwords,
00:26:08.360
words, PC buzzwords, differently abled, whatever. I mean, Latinx, push back against them.
00:26:15.640
So yeah, I definitely think people need to resist as much as they can, ask questions in your EDI
00:26:21.960
session. I am also realistic enough to know that people, you know, in the current dispensation,
00:26:28.520
where you stand to lose your job, your reputation, I don't expect people to make that kind of sacrifice.
00:26:34.680
There will be a few people who are able to do that, but in every era, I just don't think that's a
00:26:39.080
realistic necessarily way forward. Now, therefore, and I think this is probably where I differ from
00:26:45.320
people who I call classical liberals of the sort of David French, Greg Lukianoff,
00:26:52.120
many in the intellectual dark web actually, who would say, no, we can't use government. We have to
00:26:57.800
use the law and moral exhortation, and people can do things in their local area. All of which I agree
00:27:05.160
with, by the way, but I think we need to use government, because government is the only
00:27:09.960
institution that conservatives or classical liberals can hope to control. All of the other
00:27:15.880
institutions, especially the cultural ones, are captured, and that's foundations and universities and
00:27:21.240
schools and civil service, for example, government. So elected government needs to be used to try and
00:27:30.600
break into these middle-level institutions, whether that be quangos, the so-called deep state or blob,
00:27:36.840
whatever you want to call it, the kind of institutions, the schools. And so that means
00:27:42.040
a couple of things. I mean, one thing is political neutrality in all public sector institutions needs
00:27:48.840
to be enforced. So all of the critical race theory, EDI trainings, that's got to be gone. The schools,
00:27:56.200
you've got to enforce non-indoctrination and gender ideology, critical race theory. That's probably one
00:28:02.760
of the most urgent things we need to do, because one of the studies I did with Zach Goldberg at the
00:28:08.440
Manhattan Institute, we just showed the huge impact that this critical race and gender ideology is
00:28:15.720
having on young people in moving them in a woke direction. And they really are in a woke direction.
00:28:20.680
I mean, just to throw a couple of examples. One, should J.K. Rowling be dropped by your publisher?
00:28:26.440
The Zoomers are split on that. Anyone over 50 is like three or four percent at most. So there's a
00:28:32.760
big problem. What are the stats for Zoomers? Zoomers, it's 50 percent of those who have an opinion
00:28:38.040
think she should be dropped by your publisher. Another stat, well, let's just look at a few stats,
00:28:44.200
for example. If a professor says something that offends students, should that professor be reported to the
00:28:50.040
administration? Over 70 percent of students are saying yes to that question. James Damore,
00:28:57.480
should he have been fired? Two thirds in both Britain and America of the Zoomers say yes,
00:29:02.200
where it's only a quarter to a third of anyone over 45. So when people say, oh, well, you know,
00:29:07.560
woke has peaked and it's fading and all this sort of, it'll be like McCarthyism. No, you've got a
00:29:13.160
generation coming in that will be the medium voter, the median employee. Those people are going to upend the
00:29:18.920
classical liberal system. And I think we really, as a matter of urgency, have to be focusing on,
00:29:24.200
particularly K to 12, that school, those school years, reforming the system, getting the progressive
00:29:31.560
ideology out of the schools. That's got to be job number one. Really, at this point, by the time they
00:29:38.200
come to university, they're already indoctrinated. Universities don't actually make that much difference
00:29:42.520
anymore in terms of shaping young people, but the schools. And there, I would say, you know,
00:29:47.800
in the US, they're furthest out in front. But in Britain, they've completely, you know,
00:29:52.200
taken their eye off that ball. And they're going to pay for, really, the right and conservatives
00:29:56.600
and classical liberals are going to pay for that down the road. How have they taken their eye off
00:30:00.840
the ball? That's interesting. Well, you know, if you look at this country, for example, I mean,
00:30:06.520
Canada is another example I could talk about. There's just been no attention to schools. There's
00:30:12.520
been this view that, yeah, I mean, once they leave school and get a job and have a family,
00:30:17.640
they'll just be conservatives, you know? I mean, it's utterly naive, utterly naive. People's world
00:30:22.440
views are being shaped in part. Also, social media has got a huge impact, but schools are making an
00:30:27.800
impact as well as our study showed. You take the government in this country, you know, there is a law
00:30:33.480
in the books that says you cannot indoctrinate in schools. Well, the radical teachers say,
00:30:38.920
oh, that means we can't say vote for the Labour Party, right? But yeah, we can say that, you know,
00:30:47.160
your gender is a choice and sex is a spectrum and, you know, Britain is a racist country. That's not
00:30:53.160
political. You see, the way you would, if you were a serious government, you know, maybe if Ron
00:30:58.040
DeSantis was running Britain, you would have a 15, not a one or two paragraph set of guidance for
00:31:04.760
educators, but you'd have 15 pages and you would in fine detail specify that this is racism.
00:31:11.960
When you call somebody the N-word, on the other hand, saying, you know, saying the British Empire
00:31:17.400
did many good things, that's not racism. There's no such, systemic racism is considered political.
00:31:22.680
You can't teach that as fact. 15 pages so that you take out any of the ambiguity and you get rid of
00:31:29.240
any loopholes. That would be a serious government. And you would have a review, a report to Parliament.
00:31:34.840
You would embed this in the inspection system. You would look at teacher training and reform it.
00:31:39.560
All of that would have to happen if you were serious about changing the messages that
00:31:45.640
kids are getting. That hasn't happened here at all. I mean, the Tories are completely useless on this
00:31:50.440
stuff. It's very half-hearted. Yeah. And it's the same, by the way, I mean, in Canada where they're
00:31:57.160
just starting to sort of mention, well, you know, you should inform parents if the kid changes their
00:32:02.120
pronouns, you know, that's like a really radical thing. No seriousness in terms of school reform.
00:32:07.560
And I think it's good. And this idea of school choice that that's going to fix it, I think it's a
00:32:11.080
pipe dream, by the way. Most people choose schools on the basis of, you know, how well they do in
00:32:17.240
various rankings. And they don't have any information about what's being taught. So I think
00:32:21.800
some conservatives think, oh yeah, we're just going to have more school choice and that's going to
00:32:25.720
fix it and people will vote with their feet. I don't believe that at all. I think you're going to have
00:32:29.960
to get your hands dirty. You're going to have to use government intervention the way people like
00:32:34.680
DeSantis are in Florida. I think that's the only way to address this. And look, we're talking about
00:32:40.120
government intervention. And I agree with you. I think, for instance, universities that don't
00:32:45.320
uphold the principles of free speech should be defunded because they need that level of threat
00:32:51.240
in order for them to actually implement some changes. The problem comes, Eric, is we're looking
00:32:56.360
at the general election. What are you going to do? Well, I think Britain obviously is going to,
00:33:05.960
Labour's going to win. I think that's, I've been on a number of, in a number of venues where
00:33:10.440
it's all Tories and they're all saying Labour's going to win. So yeah, I think that's a foregone
00:33:14.280
conclusion in a way. Wokeism, I think, will be, I mean, the restraints will be off. And I think
00:33:21.880
in the institutions, it'll go even more extreme. And the schools will have, you know, no oversight.
00:33:28.200
And they'll, I mean, not that the Tories were doing much, but they were at least making noise and
00:33:32.280
exercising a small amount of restraint. I think those restraints will be off. So yeah,
00:33:36.920
I think Britain is going to have a tough five years, honestly. And I just don't know what you
00:33:41.400
do about that. But I do think that with the next turn of the wheel, the next government's going to
00:33:46.840
have, the next conservative government is going to have to be a lot more focused on culture,
00:33:51.800
a lot more serious, and a lot more focused on telling people why it matters. Because the everyday
00:33:56.120
person often only apprehends this at a distance, and it needs to be bound up. And this is one of
00:34:02.200
the points in my book is that if you want to explain higher crime rates, higher rates of homelessness,
00:34:08.600
the inability to control borders, falling educational standards, the inability to recruit
00:34:14.040
for the police and the military, all of these things are linked to the rise of woke. They're all
00:34:19.320
linked to the culture wars, right? Because if you can't discuss immigration because of taboos
00:34:23.640
that are politically correct taboos, which are connected again to the sacredness of race,
00:34:29.480
if you cannot discuss immigration properly, and you cannot then take the steps necessary in order
00:34:34.360
to control your borders and control the numbers. All of these things are connected. I don't think
00:34:39.640
politicians have yet done that. And I guess that's sort of the next step to see which leader is able
00:34:45.720
to make that link to those everyday issues and the culture wars. The way, for example, Farage in this
00:34:52.280
country made the link between the EU, something nobody cared about, and immigration, something people
00:34:58.520
did care about. Those kinds of links have to be made between the culture war, which is again a relatively
00:35:04.040
low salience, low priority issue for a lot of voters, and the high priority issues like immigration
00:35:09.560
and crime. They have to be brought together to actually get more serious focus from politicians
00:35:15.640
on things like the content of education. And Eric, and coming back to the subject of your book,
00:35:21.880
one of the things I was going to ask you about, you know, this idea that culturally we have trouble
00:35:29.400
finding the right response to certain transgressions. Jimmy Carr, when we had him on, said something very
00:35:37.080
interesting. He said, you can't forgive what you can't punish. And I find that an interesting way of
00:35:42.520
looking at it because, I mean, Me Too was a good example of this, right? There were certain people
00:35:46.680
who absolutely needed to be outed and dealt with. But even in many of those cases, there was no legal
00:35:53.160
recourse. And so some people ended up being like a Louis C.K. is a good example, right? A guy basically,
00:36:00.040
according to what's happened, doesn't commit a crime. Many of us would look at that and go,
00:36:05.240
oh, why are you doing that? But it's not a crime. Right.
00:36:09.480
And so he's then kind of stuck in limbo for a very long time. It's almost like he would have been
00:36:15.160
better off committing a crime for which he could be punished under the law. And then he comes out
00:36:20.360
and goes, well, I've served my time. Now let me crack on with my career. And it seems like with a
00:36:25.000
lot of these cultural conversations, it's like if you use the wrong word to describe a person of a
00:36:31.480
certain ethnicity or whatever, like you talked about how it's completely out of proportion. And do you
00:36:37.400
think it's possible that the reason that things are out of proportion is there is no agreed response
00:36:44.760
that we should have to somebody that says the wrong thing? Yes. I think that's a really good
00:36:50.280
point. I mean, one of the things I've argued for is a kind of almost like a task, online task force
00:36:57.000
that would be like a Supreme Court, right? That would have a kind of normative jurisprudence,
00:37:02.440
like legal jurisprudence that would say, well, this was a transgression, but it wasn't a bad one.
00:37:07.560
And it's a first offense. And so the appropriate punishment should be X or the way we should view
00:37:13.800
this should be X. I mean, that would be ideal because what we have is like a wild west of,
00:37:18.040
you know, people liking tweets and dogpiling people. And, you know, I mean, I think so many of these
00:37:23.560
problems come out of the fact that a lot of these, the thrust that eventually got us to woke,
00:37:30.760
a lot of these values were good ones, you know, liberalism, humanitarianism, egalitarianism,
00:37:35.480
you know, they are good values in a way, but it's like anything, they go too far. And there are
00:37:41.000
no limits. It's a bit, I can use the metaphor of hockey, which I like to play any Canadians who are
00:37:46.440
watching. But if you imagine, you know, if you call no penalties, you've got, you know,
00:37:53.960
a slapshot situation and people are going to be brawling and gooning. So you need to have some
00:37:58.120
penalties to make the game work. But what if the referee is calling everything and people are diving
00:38:03.080
and when there's nothing wrong, that's the other extreme. And so we actually have to have some
00:38:08.200
pushback to prevent over-policing, over-refereeing, over-penalizing. And we haven't got that,
00:38:15.720
really, on a lot of, particularly around racism, sexism, homophobia. We have no sort of limiting
00:38:20.600
principle the other way. So we can't get to an optimum. All we can do is move more and more and
00:38:25.560
more to the liberal left. And that's really what I, and the issue that I'm trying to raise is, well,
00:38:32.360
if we have more of a, more strength behind this idea of cultural wealth, human flourishing,
00:38:37.480
we can sort of say, well, for human flourishing to work and for cultural wealth to happen,
00:38:42.760
you can go this far and no further. You know, Louis C.K., you can wrap him, have his hand slapped,
00:38:49.480
but you can't actually cancel him. Because if you try and cancel him and not hire him,
00:38:55.240
you're actually leading us to a worse place in terms of, you're impoverishing the culture,
00:38:59.480
you're damaging human flourishing, that kind of narrative. Just the way, if someone said,
00:39:03.960
we want to hike taxes up to 90%, you would say, well, we're going to kill the economy. And likewise,
00:39:09.160
if you want to do extreme penalties for minor transgressions, you're going to kill the culture.
00:39:14.360
We need to have some kind of response like that to kind of, it's like the referee, oh no,
00:39:19.400
you're blowing too many penalties, or this guy's taking too many dives. Yeah.
00:39:23.560
Well, do you think that maybe has happened? And you probably have a study that disproves what I'm
00:39:27.880
about to say. That would be consistent with the theme of this interview. But I'm curious because
00:39:32.920
I guess the boy who cried wolf thing, particularly with the mainstream media, seems to me to have
00:39:37.880
definitely happened to some extent where you go, oh, someone's been, someone's been in the news
00:39:43.720
because they said, I don't give it. Like a lot of people are now just going, yeah, whatever. Like,
00:39:48.360
I don't, everyone's far right now. You know, do you know what I mean? Is that, do you think that effect
00:39:53.720
is taking place where people are sort of taking these allegations less seriously as a result of
00:40:00.760
them being just so spurious and so multiple at this point? Well, I mean, yes. And there's no question
00:40:07.000
that we've seen. We've seen that. We've seen also cutbacks in DEI and corporations and the
00:40:12.840
anti-ESG politics and all these sorts of things. But I sort of see that as pruning back the bush
00:40:20.200
the next time, maybe a few years down the line where we have a white cop killing a black person
00:40:25.240
caught on video or whatever it is. I think this thing can surge again. And I think actually one of
00:40:30.600
the reasons my book in the US is entitled The Third Awakening is because we really, what you see,
00:40:36.600
and we can track this in use of terms like racist and sexist, there's a surge of energy in the late
00:40:41.240
sixties around this, these terms, you can track it in big data. It then kind of goes down a bit and
00:40:46.120
then it settles out. And then we have political correctness, early nineties, late eighties,
00:40:51.320
early nineties, another surge, speech codes. And you know, we have, hey, ho, Western civ has got to go
00:40:56.600
and all of that. And then, oh, oh, political correctness. That wasn't at a joke from the
00:41:01.160
nineties, right? It went away. Well, it didn't go away. A lot of these things became institutionalized
00:41:07.640
and still continue to metastasize and grow. And then in the 2010s, boom, it's the third awakening.
00:41:13.400
I think we're now in a period where, yeah, it's had a sort of slight downfall, but it's still,
00:41:18.600
we've still got DEI bureaucracies. These are still the paramount values in high society and elite culture.
00:41:26.120
Those have not been displaced. So I think they are poised for another wave. And in any case,
00:41:31.400
I think that they're just too institutionalized in elite institutions. So we, if you look at
00:41:36.280
cancellation figures, they're down. The number of profits that are being attacked and fired is down,
00:41:41.880
but no platformings. They, they went down and they've gone up again. You know,
00:41:46.440
on the Israel, Israel, Palestine thing, suddenly they're back up again. I don't think for a minute
00:41:51.800
that woke has been vanquished. I think it's sort of somewhat in abeyance, but it's still at a much
00:41:57.000
higher level than it was even in the early two thousands. Uh, and I think again, the young
00:42:01.560
population are the carriers of these values. And when they become in 20 years, the median voter
00:42:07.960
and corporate leaders, I just, I, I shudder to think where we're going to be.
00:42:12.280
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00:42:43.000
Eric, so let me do a push back to you and let, let's talk about culture for a minute and music.
00:42:48.600
So if you take the music scene, you tend to, let's take prog rock, very overblown, very pompous,
00:42:55.080
very inward looking, seven minute, you know, electric keyboard solos. What comes after prog rock?
00:43:01.480
It's punk. And punk is very much, you know, everything pared down. Every, you know, things are,
00:43:07.800
songs are very short, sharp. They're very blunt. They're very profane as well. They challenge
00:43:13.160
cultural norms. Do you not think that we could see young people having a punk movement against this
00:43:20.360
kind of, against this extreme version of liberalism that we now see?
00:43:25.640
Yeah, I do. Absolutely. I mean, I think, and you're already seeing it, right? I mean,
00:43:30.040
one of the interesting things, of course, is that there's a big gender split, that young men are not
00:43:35.080
that different from older men. I mean, actually in their attitudes, there's not a lot of difference
00:43:39.720
there. It's the young women where we see a big difference. Now, so what is going on there is
00:43:45.480
going to be really interesting. I think you're already seeing that pushback. I mean, Gen Z,
00:43:48.600
they really don't like cancel culture. My worry though, is they haven't really been inculcated in,
00:43:54.760
or at least given a set of alternative values to equality and emotional harm protection for
00:44:00.280
minority groups. And that's, that's still the dominant value that, that most of them have.
00:44:04.600
So there is, now the, the young, particularly young men are rebelling against the overbearing
00:44:09.560
nature and the lack of freedom in this. And I think that's a good thing, but that's going to need
00:44:14.360
more flesh on the bones for it to actually become enduring so that it gets into our institutions and
00:44:20.040
into our high culture. And that's what I worry about is I just don't know that they have any
00:44:25.320
other values than those left liberal ones, which whose extreme version has landed us in this
00:44:30.680
predicament. Because if you look at cultural movements, a lot of the time, and we go back to
00:44:35.400
music or art, they kind of feel like they spring from nowhere. It's fringe and then it's mainstream.
00:44:43.720
So with this interview and we, and with you saying, I can't predict, or I don't know where
00:44:50.760
it's going to come from. Isn't that the way pushbacks movements have always worked? No one really knows
00:44:58.840
what the next thing is going to be. And all of a sudden it appears, and then people can look at it
00:45:03.240
retro, uh, retrospectively and go, oh, we can see now that blah, blah, blah, and dah, dah, dah, dah.
00:45:08.280
But at the moment, no one really could see the way the culture was going to move.
00:45:12.200
And by the way, there's, there's potentially a good example of this. If you look at
00:45:15.640
the comedians who are really going big in America, they're all pushing back against this stuff. You
00:45:21.720
know, Shane Gillis doesn't get on SNL because he said something offensive and now he's gone full
00:45:27.400
circle and he's back on, on SNL because they basically need someone of his caliber in order to
00:45:33.080
do it. Right. Uh, you know, Rogan, lots of other people that Theo Vaughn, et cetera, these are not
00:45:38.360
people who are like woke, you know what I mean? And they are the cool ones. So culturally it, I guess
00:45:44.600
is, you know, the question is, is there a possibility that there is this pushback now coming?
00:45:50.280
Yeah. I think you're right. And, and I don't know if it's male culture or it is, if it transcends the
00:45:56.360
gender, but yeah, I think you're right to some degree, but I guess I'm sort of looking in the
00:46:01.240
broader sweep in terms of what's taught in universities, what's in the theaters, what's in the movies.
00:46:07.160
Um, you know, I'd say really, if you, if you were to take the history of Western art and culture
00:46:13.560
from about 1900, I would say it's largely large, not entirely, but it's largely been a history of
00:46:21.880
liberal or left movements, um, starting with, I mean, World War I is a bit of a turning point,
00:46:27.080
you know, you still had some, you know, fascist intellectuals and actually in Europe, obviously
00:46:31.240
you did have, you know, conservative intellectuals right up until World War II. They had some obviously
00:46:35.880
pretty bad ideas, but on the other hand, certainly since World War II, but arguably even World War I,
00:46:47.160
you know, you read Orwell 19, he's writing in 1941, he's saying since 1930, the intelligence has been
00:46:54.360
on the left and this is a kind of leftist himself. So for a very long time, we've had the intellectuals
00:47:01.240
being on the left. I mean, really, you'd have to go back to the romantic movement,
00:47:05.160
romantic nationalism as a kind of major conservative movement in the culture. So we haven't really had
00:47:10.920
that, you know, yes, we've had the Islamic revival. We, you know, we've had cultural movements outside
00:47:15.720
the West that are clearly conservative, but not really within the West. And certainly if you're
00:47:21.400
talking about the high culture, it's been almost a hundred years or over a hundred years where it's
00:47:26.040
been moving in one direction only. Uh, and that's one of the reasons why I'm thinking, you know, I'm,
00:47:31.400
I'm skeptical of this sort of conservative direction. I mean, there may be a sort of
00:47:35.880
offshoot and there may be people that are pushing back in a certain way, maybe on the fringe, maybe
00:47:41.080
it's not fringe, but it's not the main thrust of the culture. The main thrust of the culture is,
00:47:46.040
again, equal, you know, equal outcomes, harm protection for minorities. That's the driver.
00:47:52.120
And it's been the driver for a very long time. I mean, before we were talking about race,
00:47:56.440
we were talking about European, like in the US case, it was about Catholics and Jewish ethnic
00:48:01.160
groups and pluralism instead of sort of WASP centrism. I mean, that was the discourse in the
00:48:05.560
sort of early to mid 20th century. So we've kind of, for a very long time, had the major values in
00:48:12.440
the culture being focused on, um, you know, liberalism, humanitarianism, egalitarianism. And I,
00:48:19.080
and I guess one of the questions I have is, are we really going to see a movement against that?
00:48:23.400
You know, it's been moving. At least that's my interpretation. I don't see too many backs and
00:48:28.840
forests. I see a largely unit direction. Yeah. And by the way, how many punks are
00:48:32.200
running big institutions ultimately? Right. Yeah. Yeah. Um, I mean, it's a good point. I don't
00:48:38.680
discount it. You know, it's not impossible. And maybe the, the left liberal juggernaut has come
00:48:45.800
to the end of the line after a hundred years and, and maybe it'll die on the hill called trans. I mean,
00:48:51.160
you know, maybe it's just become so absurd and that enough people see it. And, and that starts
00:48:57.800
the sort of movement back in the other direction after a hundred years. So I, that's, that's possible.
00:49:02.840
But if I just look at, at the attitudes of the kind of zoomers in the surveys that we see, I mean,
00:49:08.840
Have you got more data and stuff to share with us from the zoomers? Is there anything else you can
00:49:13.160
tell us? Um, well, I mean, we can take the fire, uh, survey 55,000 student surveys, um,
00:49:19.640
you know, should, you know, should somebody who thinks abortion should be banned
00:49:24.920
be allowed to speak on campus? 55,000 students are asked this. It's a representative sample.
00:49:31.480
Yeah. It leans to the top 20% perhaps of the student population, but still, um, only about, you know,
00:49:39.320
less than 20%, I think sort of 10 to 15% of students would say, I definitely agree
00:49:46.520
that someone who thinks abortion should be banned should be allowed to speak on a campus. 10 to 15%
00:49:52.760
with, and similarly, if we say someone who says that transgender is a mental disorder, should they
00:49:59.960
be allowed to speak on campus? You know, 85% would say no. Um, massive numbers. If someone says,
00:50:09.160
Black Lives Matter is a hate group, you know, 70% would be very against letting somebody who has
00:50:15.080
that view come onto campus. These are just a few examples, right? Um, and that sort of shows you
00:50:19.800
that the vast majority for these people, it's just taken for granted. Of course they, they're not
00:50:24.360
allowed to speak. I mean, isn't that hate speech? Isn't that harmful? It's not about, you know,
00:50:28.280
I can't be offended. If I'm offended, if a student is offended in class, of course they should report
00:50:33.160
the professors. 70% agree with that. So we've got a majority who are holding these very illiberal
00:50:39.880
views and, and we've now got data actually going back to the seventies. So six questions are asked
00:50:45.880
in the general social survey, you know, should a militarist be allowed to speak, homosexual allowed
00:50:50.840
to speak, a communist, a racist, you know, you've had these six questions asked since the seventies.
00:50:57.400
And what you see is for a long time, the greater toleration for all six speakers. And then sometime
00:51:03.240
in the sort of 1990s actually. So this starts quite early and it starts with the boomers actually.
00:51:08.440
It's the, the one about racist speaking diverges from the other five categories and that's continued.
00:51:15.160
So the identity categories on race, sex, sexuality have diverged from the others. And it's a divergence
00:51:23.240
that's got a lot of momentum behind it and it's just getting more and more extreme.
00:51:26.280
Um, and so that's my worry is that these long-term trends are not favoring anti-woke.
00:51:32.200
Racists are the new homosexuals is what you're saying. Uh, really interesting, Eric. Um, I suppose
00:51:39.480
the one question that many people will have listening, and I'm sure you have data on this as well, is,
00:51:45.160
aren't young people always a bit stupid and a bit extremist and a bit utopian and a bit blah, blah, blah.
00:51:50.680
And then as you said, you know, they, they, they go to, they go get a job, they get married, they have
00:51:56.040
kids and then they sort of become normal again. Right. Well, yeah. And I guess that the, the
00:52:00.680
retort to that is to say, well, we can look at 18 year olds in 1980, 1990, 2015, 2020, and comparing an
00:52:09.000
18 year old and even 2000 to 2016, asking them the same questions that we put to them in 2000 shows
00:52:17.320
an enormous shift from a pro-free speech orientation. Like if people should be allowed to say something
00:52:23.000
offensive. There's a study at Smith College, uh, for example, they asked exactly the same question in
00:52:28.120
2016 as in 2000. Completely different answers. So that's an 18 year old. So I'm, I guess my view is
00:52:36.040
that young people were very different in the past than young people today when it comes to offensive
00:52:42.360
speech. That today the priority is more not hurting feelings rather than being allowed to say what you
00:52:49.800
want. That balance has shifted. And as they take that, those mores into the workplace, I think they're
00:52:56.520
going to change society. I think it'll be massive and unless, and we really got to try and turn this
00:53:01.000
around at the school level when they're young, that's when you've got to get them. Whereas the cultural
00:53:06.920
socialists have got to them and have changed, you know, this is sort of, you know, what Rufo talks about
00:53:12.520
the critical pedagogy, but it's not just the critical pedagogy, all of this kind of microaggressions,
00:53:17.720
therapeutic stuff is part of that, that, that therapeutic totalitarianism as Rod Dreher calls it. I mean,
00:53:24.280
that's in the schools. And if we just let the schools go, then, you know, I'm not saying schools
00:53:29.000
are everything. Clearly there's social media and there's TikTok and there's Instagram and all these
00:53:33.320
things. But you've actually got to work on what you can change. And I just don't think
00:53:39.400
conservatives have been serious enough about focusing on culture and particularly focusing
00:53:43.720
on school reform. Eric, here's a provocative question. Do you think this has got something to
00:53:50.120
do with the feminization of society? The fact that the more young women than ever are going to
00:53:56.360
university, young women are more empathetic, more caring, et cetera, et cetera, which then can then
00:54:04.440
lead to, we need to protect people. These people are vulnerable minorities. You're using words like,
00:54:12.520
you know, you're using words, which I consider to be transphobic, racist, whatever it may be.
00:54:16.920
Yeah. I mean, really interesting question, right? And I think it was Corey Clark and Bo Weingart who
00:54:21.080
did a paper on that and went through that argument. And I think, you know, there's no question that
00:54:25.160
women are, you know, women are much more likely to say transgender shouldn't be allowed. Someone who
00:54:29.720
says transgender is a mental illness shouldn't be allowed on campus. And women are more likely than
00:54:34.440
transgender people themselves. They're more likely than transgender people themselves to say that.
00:54:45.720
Do I think this is because there are more women, you know, at university, in the workplace? Actually,
00:54:54.920
Hold on. But you said yourself that young men are not different to older men. It's the
00:54:59.880
women that are going off the rails. That seems to me a contradiction.
00:55:02.760
Well, the women are going more off, are much more off the rails. I sort of should rephrase that. Men
00:55:07.960
have also moved a certain amount in the progressive illiteracy. They're just not as much. And there is
00:55:12.520
some difference with older generations. So I don't want to say they're completely the same as older
00:55:17.320
men. But so there is this whole literature on feminization. So you could say, for example,
00:55:24.760
having table manners is a kind of, instead of just, you know, eating with your hand. And people used to just
00:55:29.640
go to the toilet right by the table. Not, you know, blow their nose in the tablecloth. There's
00:55:33.960
a book called The Civilizing Process. Or not dueling. You know, you could say these are all kind of
00:55:39.960
feminization, you know, not having a fight on the floor of the legislature. But so I think I would
00:55:48.040
distinguish between kind of an embodied feminization within ideas, right? Like not dueling. You know,
00:55:55.240
there weren't any women involved in legislatures at the time. And they, you know, they abolished
00:55:59.960
dueling. But it was kind of feminine idea. So it's a feminine idea without women actually driving
00:56:05.400
the change. I kind of think that's what's going on here is the ideas have moved in a feminine
00:56:10.680
direction. It's not been driven by women. And of course, it resonates better with women. But it's,
00:56:15.720
I think it's the feminization at the ideal level. This idea that, well, we should be,
00:56:20.520
you know, nice, feel people's pain, empathize. That's a kind of humanitarian idea. And, you know,
00:56:27.160
it goes back to the abolitionists and various people. When all the abolitionists were basically
00:56:31.080
male, I mean, they weren't all, but most of them were. So I just think it's more a feminization of
00:56:35.160
ideas. Now, the other thing about empathy, of course, as Paul Bloom's book Against Empathy,
00:56:40.520
I don't know if that might have come up in one of your talks here. But his argument is empathy is
00:56:46.440
always about who you're empathetic towards. You know, are you empathetic towards transgender people
00:56:51.320
accessing, you know, women's shelters? Or are you empathetic towards the women not wanting the
00:56:57.160
transgender to come into their shelters because they find that traumatic? You know, are you empathetic
00:57:02.120
towards the child who wants to undergo surgery or the parent who doesn't want their child to undergo
00:57:09.160
surgery? I mean, so it's all about who you're empathetic towards. You're empathetic towards,
00:57:13.400
you know, white people, when someone says all white people are racist, you know,
00:57:18.120
are we going to have any empathy for white people? You know, so I think this is not,
00:57:22.200
the empathy thing is on its own, doesn't explain a great deal. And it's interesting, like if you go to
00:57:27.000
the past, empathy for white women in the South by white women was a factor behind lynching. Right.
00:57:35.640
So a lot of this depends on where you're directing your empathy. And that's why I'm not as convinced that
00:57:42.360
just talking about empathy on its own is going to get us that far.
00:57:46.280
Let me ask you another provocative question before we wrap up. Because he talked about how
00:57:52.200
actually this is about liberalism going off the rails, as opposed to the cultural Marxism,
00:57:57.240
cultural socialism, whatever. Are you familiar with a guy called Yuri Bezmenov?
00:58:01.960
I've heard the name, but he is a Soviet KGB defector who came to the West and he gave a series of
00:58:08.040
lectures which have gone super viral on the internet many years after his death, in which he essentially
00:58:12.920
asserted that the KGB's primary foreign activities were not about industrial espionage or military
00:58:23.000
espionage or trying to get people into positions of power who were, I mean, they did all of that too,
00:58:29.880
of course. But the primary focus of their energy, manpower, money, et cetera, was spent effectively
00:58:38.040
introducing these cultural Marxist ideas into the education system, into various institutions from
00:58:45.640
below in order to demoralize the enemy, which was America, to take away the cultural underpinnings of
00:58:54.440
American society. And many people are now starting to kind of look at that and go, well, if you look
00:59:01.080
at the last 60 years, I mean, if that had happened, this is kind of the result you might have expected.
00:59:09.080
What do you make of that argument? Yeah, I mean, it's interesting and there's no doubt that,
00:59:13.880
you know, the Soviet Union and now Russia obviously has an interest in destabilizing
00:59:18.280
Western societies. I mean, my own view is similar to my view on whether, you know,
00:59:23.000
Putin affected the American election. I mean, my view is, no, I don't see much real effect of
00:59:27.720
that effort. I think this is largely an endogenous effort. You know, what is driving this is this race
00:59:34.440
taboo which suddenly emerges and, you know, the militant Black Panther movement and these other
00:59:39.400
movements that are making claims, you know, that's where the moral power was and that's what the system
00:59:44.200
was responding to. You know, the riots going on in the late 60s in ghettos in the US was a major spur
00:59:52.520
to affirmative action policy, for example. So yeah, I'm not really as much of a believer in that. Now,
00:59:57.800
of course, are there cultural Marxists in a way, you know, who are trying to get these ideas mainstream
01:00:05.800
in the education system? Absolutely. Chris Ruffo talks about this. Frere, for example, in the 80s in the
01:00:12.440
U.S. However, again, what my book is talking about very much is, well, you could have had these
01:00:18.920
kind of cultural Marxists pushing their ideas about, you know, there's oppressor and oppressed
01:00:23.800
and it's now about the race oppressor class and oppressed class. That would have gotten nowhere if
01:00:28.840
you had liberals who would say, no, that's actually very damaging and this is irrational and it goes
01:00:34.040
against the Enlightenment and stood up for their values. And the question I think that's more
01:00:38.840
interesting than, you know, I think the cultural Marxist story, as Ruffo tells it, is extremely
01:00:44.040
important, but I think they would have had very little impact. They wouldn't have been welcomed
01:00:48.760
with open arms into the universities, into the schools, if liberals had a different, had stuck
01:00:55.640
to classical liberal principles. Instead, those liberals were highly receptive. You know, they,
01:01:01.960
in radical chic, inviting the Black Panthers to, you know, was it Leonard Bernstein? I can't remember who
01:01:06.360
had, who was the inspiration for that Tom Wolfe book about radical chic, but yeah, they were fetid,
01:01:12.600
they were celebrated, they were romanticized because liberals loved it. They couldn't get enough
01:01:17.560
of it. Why? Because I would argue their myths and symbols were heavily overlapping with these
01:01:25.320
post-Marxists and those symbols were really all about, you know, fighting for the oppressed,
01:01:31.080
the Robin Hood myths about, you know, I'm on the side of the oppressed against the oppressor and the big
01:01:35.560
mean majority group, white, male, whatever it was, you know. And so, because those are the myths,
01:01:42.440
not just of the cultural Marxists, but of the liberals, the liberals were very receptive.
01:01:47.720
Black Lives Matter, I mean, if you actually looked at their manifesto, I mean, it is cultural Marxism,
01:01:52.040
it goes back to the Black Panthers and Ruffo's right about that, but why did 51% of the city of Seattle
01:01:58.680
vote to defund the police? I mean, were they all Marxists? No. They were kind of people who felt
01:02:05.640
guilty and compassionate and they just were manipulated in a way. And so, I think we have
01:02:10.120
to look at the big rump of these left liberals in order to understand the success of these cultural
01:02:16.520
Marxist ideas. Eric, it's been an absolute pleasure as always. I look forward to the 76th time you come
01:02:22.520
back. The question that we always ask to finish our interviews... Before we go to Locals, where we
01:02:27.560
ask you more questions from our audience... Okay, okay. Exactly. Subscribe now. Like and subscribe.
01:02:34.120
Is, what's the one thing we're not talking about that we really should be?
01:02:38.520
Before Eric answers, when the interview's over, make sure to head on over to Locals to see this.
01:02:44.440
Which books, articles, or websites does Eric recommend for people who are interested in
01:02:48.600
learning how to actually oppose wokeness? The media is mirroring academia now,
01:02:54.440
whereas they were very different in the past. And that's what's changed.
01:02:59.400
Well, I guess I'm going to be boring and go back two books ago to the book on Shall the Religious
01:03:06.920
Inherit the Earth, which was written in 2010. So, there's now more and more talk about population.
01:03:13.240
You know, I've been interested in this topic for many years, political demography, right? This idea
01:03:17.960
like, okay, we've got this population collapse. Who is left standing after we go through that bottleneck
01:03:23.880
and come out the other end? And so, in that 2010 book, I was saying, well, essentially world-denying
01:03:30.200
religious sets like the Amish and the ultra-Orthodox Jews, who have sort of five to seven kids on average,
01:03:36.200
or even regular religious attenders who have replacement fertility. You know, those are the
01:03:41.400
kind of people that are going to be sticking around after we go through the bottleneck. And
01:03:45.080
I don't think we've kind of talked enough about what that society is going to look like. Israel is
01:03:50.200
now that kind of a society where conservative religious groups through high birth rates are
01:03:56.200
slowly and surely increasing their vote share, increasing their influence. I mean, that is,
01:04:00.760
again, not something I hear talked about very much. I do think we need to have a talk about,
01:04:05.800
is liberalism demographically sustainable? And that's just, yes.
01:04:11.400
Very, very interesting. And it's a subject of many conversations we've had, including one with
01:04:15.640
Louise Perry talking about birth rates and all of that. Eric, join us as we head on over to locals,
01:04:22.040
and we ask your questions. Does humanity have a default level of authoritarianism?
01:04:29.160
It seems like the moment one belief system eases up, for example, Christianity,
01:04:34.200
becoming more tolerant, another belief system rushes in to fill the void.
01:04:39.400
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