TRIGGERnometry - The Sacred Myths of Liberalism - Eric Kaufmann

00:00:00.920 You have this sacredness around race,

00:00:03.680 and that can be stretched to gender, to sexuality.

00:00:08.040 When you say making sacred,

00:00:10.240 what do we mean by that exactly?

00:00:12.200 So because they are sacred,

00:00:14.200 any speech that, or anything you do

00:00:16.480 that might be construed as offending the gods

00:00:19.120 means you are excommunicated, i.e. canceled.

00:00:22.040 So minority's good, majority's bad, 1.00

00:00:24.480 is the mythic structure.

00:00:26.640 As somebody who used to identify as liberal,

00:00:29.960 essentially it's like watching a train

00:00:32.360 go off the tracks on fire.

00:00:34.720 How do we put the fire out,

00:00:36.280 and how do we put the train back on the track?

00:00:39.440 Eric, welcome back to the show.

00:00:40.760 We've had you on about 74 times,

00:00:42.720 because we love you so much.

00:00:44.760 Your recent book that we're really looking forward

00:00:47.280 to talking to you about is called Taboo,

00:00:49.600 and it's all about how making race

00:00:52.640 and everything to do with race so sacred,

00:00:55.480 as you say in the subtitle of your book,

00:00:57.880 has created many of the cultural trends

00:01:00.280 that we've spent six years talking about on the show.

00:01:03.720 And that is something that we discussed

00:01:05.840 with Richard Hanania recently as well,

00:01:09.120 that race is an issue that making it so, so important

00:01:14.240 has caused a lot of this.

00:01:15.840 That seems to me like there's quite a lot of truth in that.

00:01:18.320 Flesh out the argument for us.

00:01:19.920 Okay, I will, and just before I do that,

00:01:21.560 I should say that the U.S. title is entitled

00:01:23.840 The Third Awokening,

00:01:25.640 12-Point Plan for Rolling Back Progressive Extremism,

00:01:28.040 and that sort of releases a bit earlier,

00:01:29.640 but okay, let's deal with the-

00:01:31.080 I can see why you chose that subtitle for America.

00:01:33.600 Yeah, right, right, exactly.

00:01:36.040 Well, we'll get back to why it's The Third Awokening,

00:01:39.040 and I think that's important as well.

00:01:40.240 But anyway, in terms of taboo, yeah,

00:01:42.840 so I'm sort of arguing that taboo,

00:01:45.880 the idea of the anti-racism taboo,

00:01:49.360 which is in many ways a good thing,

00:01:50.600 but that emerges in the mid-60s in the U.S.,

00:01:53.280 and that's like the big bang of our moral universe.

00:01:56.800 So you should, yeah.

00:01:57.680 Sorry to jump in, just for clarity,

00:01:59.400 define what you mean by the anti-racist taboo exactly,

00:02:03.280 because to most people,

00:02:04.720 the idea that we shouldn't be racist is pretty good.

00:02:08.160 Yes.

00:02:08.520 I would hope.

00:02:09.640 Right, so we definitely want a norm against racism,

00:02:12.840 but a taboo, which evokes a disgust reaction,

00:02:16.800 which doesn't have a bounds as to what,

00:02:19.000 how you define racism, right?

00:02:20.680 So that immediately means you can stretch the definition out

00:02:25.960 to include, now we're at where,

00:02:27.840 if you mispronounce somebody's surname,

00:02:29.480 or if you are hiking, for example,

00:02:31.920 and everybody's white, that's racist.

00:02:33.560 So we have this unbounded sacredness

00:02:37.520 around this particular norm, and that's what's important.

00:02:40.640 Not that you have a norm against racism,

00:02:42.640 but what's interesting is the suddenness.

00:02:45.360 You know, I write in my book about,

00:02:46.600 you know, Paul Krugman did an article in the New York Times,

00:02:50.360 where he said, you know, when he was growing up in Long Island,

00:02:53.000 you know, suddenly all these houses,

00:02:54.720 which had these little black coachman figures on their gates,

00:02:58.320 you know, suddenly repainted them white,

00:03:00.160 and it happened almost like that, one summer, mid-60s.

00:03:04.400 That is kind of like a big bang moment,

00:03:06.480 and what we're living through is, I think,

00:03:08.600 the aftermath of that explosion.

00:03:10.760 Just the way our universe is the aftermath of the big bang, right?

00:03:14.200 Everything's kind of moving outwards.

00:03:16.360 And so similarly with the race taboo as a big bang,

00:03:20.320 it then means you have this sacredness around race,

00:03:23.200 and that can be stretched to gender, to sexuality.

00:03:27.920 It can be, you know, pushed out to include microaggressions,

00:03:32.920 such as, you know, saying anyone can make it in America,

00:03:35.920 or going skiing or whatever,

00:03:38.920 or attacks on white people, white culture, 0.82

00:03:43.640 everything's whiteness, white supremacy, whatever.

00:03:46.760 That is therefore, I think, the key,

00:03:49.800 and it's this sacredness.

00:03:51.160 So when I define woke, for example,

00:03:53.000 my argument is that the definition,

00:03:54.920 one-sentence definition of woke,

00:03:57.160 making sacred of historically marginalized race, gender,

00:04:00.840 sexual identity groups.

00:04:03.360 The making sacred bit comes from that big bang.

00:04:06.840 Now, feminists borrowed this sacredness 1.00

00:04:08.880 from the original civil rights anti-racist movement,

00:04:12.400 and then homophobia, transphobia,

00:04:15.240 sort of becomes part of that.

00:04:17.480 They tried with fatness and deafness,

00:04:19.360 didn't really work, but yeah.

00:04:22.080 Just again, to define things,

00:04:23.680 because I think this is a really interesting point

00:04:26.560 to flesh out.

00:04:27.600 When you say making sacred,

00:04:29.800 what do we mean by that exactly?

00:04:31.880 Well, making sacred means that this is sort of

00:04:34.840 an object of devotion that,

00:04:36.640 so if I were to say anything that insulted the gods,

00:04:42.520 if I say anything that might be perceived as offensive

00:04:45.600 to a member of a totemic group, right?

00:04:49.760 If I say one of those microaggressions,

00:04:51.800 such as anyone could make it in America,

00:04:54.600 that could be construed by an ultra-sensitive person

00:04:57.720 who's reading you in the worst way as racist somehow,

00:05:00.960 or offensive to, say, an African American.

00:05:04.600 So because they are sacred, any speech that,

00:05:08.000 or anything you do that might be construed as offending the gods,

00:05:11.520 means you are excommunicated, i.e. canceled, fired, shunned,

00:05:16.160 your reputation is smeared.

00:05:17.600 So it's the sacredness that sort of explains the overreaction,

00:05:21.760 and the very black and white way of viewing it.

00:05:23.760 So the difference being, if I say, I don't know,

00:05:26.280 I don't like your trousers, that's a personal insult.

00:05:29.320 Whereas if I say something along these lines,

00:05:33.000 then I'm blaspheming against the religion, if you like. 0.64

00:05:36.120 And hence the very, very harsh reaction that you'd get,

00:05:39.880 that I might not get if I insulted your trousers.

00:05:42.040 Right, right.

00:05:42.920 Or even if you made fun of, you know,

00:05:45.080 a French person or an Italian.

00:05:47.000 And so, and the other thing is there's no proportionality.

00:05:49.960 So in law, you know, there's a first offense,

00:05:52.440 a second offense, there is, you know, how bad was the, you know,

00:05:56.440 the offense, that doesn't exist with this.

00:05:58.200 You know, there's just racism.

00:05:59.560 It's not worse racism.

00:06:01.640 It's not second, third offense racism.

00:06:03.800 It's just, you know, you contravened,

00:06:05.560 you stepped over the red line and now you're out

00:06:08.520 and you're ostracized.

00:06:09.640 And so, and there's no coming back, there's no redemption.

00:06:12.040 So it's this very sort of black and white way of viewing the world,

00:06:15.960 whereas the law is much more shades of gray,

00:06:18.680 much more nuance, accepts the world's a complicated place.

00:06:21.720 And that's why the sacredness thing is so important.

00:06:24.120 And that's why it's so powerful.

00:06:25.240 It's kind of like kryptonite, you know, in the movie Superman,

00:06:27.960 where you've got this very powerful stuff.

00:06:30.920 And so other identity groups want some of that power

00:06:33.720 because then it becomes useful to use also against your enemies.

00:06:37.480 And that power that comes out of that big bang

00:06:40.440 is now spreading through our moral order

00:06:43.160 and defining our moral order and ordering it.

00:06:45.720 And I think until we tame the power of this kryptonite,

00:06:48.440 I would argue, we're not going to ultimately solve the problem of,

00:06:52.360 let's say, pressures on free speech, for example, or on merit,

00:06:57.160 or any of the problems that we associate with woke.

00:07:00.680 We're not going to be able to address those until we start to

00:07:03.880 sort of put that sacredness back in its box and say,

00:07:07.560 no, let's actually have racism or sexism or any of these other

00:07:12.360 isms that grow out of that big bang.

00:07:14.680 They need to behave more like jurisprudence in law,

00:07:17.720 where you have proportionality and rationality, not irrationality.

00:07:22.840 Eric, how much of this is white guilt?

00:07:28.360 Well, white guilt is absolutely key and absolutely central.

00:07:31.400 And I should mention, by the way, Shelby Steele,

00:07:35.080 of course, the African-American classical liberal

00:07:37.160 stroke conservative, who was just brilliant, who had a book of that name.

00:07:41.000 And Steele's argument was that in this mid-60s, you had a sudden shift

00:07:45.720 in moral and cultural authority from white America to black America.

00:07:51.480 He lived as a sort of black man through Jim Crow segregation

00:07:55.880 and through the civil rights period.

00:07:57.240 And he just noticed this sudden change.

00:07:59.640 Whereas before the black man had to defer to the white man. 0.96

00:08:02.520 And now suddenly the white man is deferring to the black man 0.94

00:08:06.040 because their moral authority.

00:08:08.120 And then he said, well, that actually means that the moral authority

00:08:10.600 of the U.S., its entire constitutional history,

00:08:14.200 all of a sudden gone overnight.

00:08:15.880 And the whole game becomes trying to virtue signal 0.96

00:08:20.600 that you're not one of the bad white people,

00:08:22.120 that you are actually not fallen. 0.97

00:08:25.800 You have some moral legitimacy by being an ally to the black people.

00:08:29.640 And that's where affirmative action comes from. 0.95

00:08:32.200 It's actually not about helping black people.

00:08:34.760 It's actually about virtue signaling that you're not racist.

00:08:38.280 The whole policy is a big virtue signal, according to Shelby Steele.

00:08:42.120 And I think that's crucial.

00:08:43.080 And the other thing I'd say is crucial about white guilt is 0.50

00:08:45.960 this is not actually a cultural Marxist thing.

00:08:49.320 It's got nothing to do with Marcuse and critical theory and any of that.

00:08:53.560 This is coming out of liberalism.

00:08:56.680 LBJ, the civil rights movement, which is a liberal movement.

00:09:00.360 And then very quickly, the white guilt comes in in the mid-60s,

00:09:05.640 and it kind of becomes part of liberalism.

00:09:08.120 So this is about liberalism, and it is not about Marxism, actually, in the beginning.

00:09:13.880 Eric, where do you stand on this argument?

00:09:15.960 Because there's a lot of conservatives who've come on the show and made the point,

00:09:19.080 look, this is just what happens with liberalism.

00:09:23.480 Eventually, you get to this point, and there's nothing that you can really do about it.

00:09:28.200 And that's why conservatism is brilliant.

00:09:32.120 Obviously, I'm being slightly facetious.

00:09:33.720 Yeah, yeah.

00:09:34.120 But you get to it.

00:09:36.280 James Orr, for example.

00:09:37.160 Yeah, so that's the argument.

00:09:38.440 Where would you stand on that argument?

00:09:40.200 So my take is somewhat different.

00:09:41.960 I think you've got two things.

00:09:43.960 You've got liberal principles, classical liberal principles,

00:09:47.480 which I think are sound and to be aspired to.

00:09:51.160 And then you have the liberal identity.

00:09:53.560 So I think these are separate things.

00:09:55.320 And it's very important to understand that in the 20th century,

00:09:58.760 what we get is a buildup of the liberal identity.

00:10:02.520 And that identity, essentially, is largely about egalitarian myths,

00:10:07.320 fighting against racism, sexism.

00:10:12.360 Earlier, it was maybe anti-Catholicism.

00:10:14.760 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.

00:10:23.800 Now, of course, that's hugely important, and I would support that.

00:10:26.440 But what it means is that all of your heroes, your mythical episodes,

00:10:32.600 it could be the civil rights movement, for example.

00:10:34.760 It could be, you know, the Holocaust and slavery. 0.83

00:10:38.440 So essentially, the way this set of myths is constructed is,

00:10:41.640 you are a virtuous person.

00:10:43.160 You're fighting for more or less equal rights.

00:10:45.960 That means more equality.

00:10:47.400 It winds up in a place that says the majority is to be feared.

00:10:53.560 It's always just one step away from Jim Crow and fascism

00:10:56.680 and women back in the home and gays in the closet. 1.00

00:11:00.200 And that, so you have a fear of the majority and you have warm,

00:11:04.280 fuzzy feelings and a romanticized view of minority.

00:11:06.600 So minority is good, majority is bad, is the mythic structure.

00:11:11.400 It's a bit like nationalism where you have a certain set of myths and symbols and heroes.

00:11:15.480 So the whole liberal identity is essentially egalitarian and has no bounds on how far it can go.

00:11:22.920 And that's why it's gone in such a sort of extreme direction.

00:11:26.920 And so liberalism has become virulent and has become extreme towards the left,

00:11:33.320 where it's met the cultural Marxists.

00:11:35.480 But liberal principles, I think, are salvageable.

00:11:38.440 But liberalism as a whole needs to be really reformed.

00:11:41.880 And that kind of knee-jerk emotional reflex, which is really tied to the liberal identity and myths.

00:11:48.040 The emotional reflex to attack and fear majorities and feel warm and fuzzy feelings

00:11:54.600 towards minorities and see them as virtuous and more moral and have deeper spiritual insight than anybody else.

00:12:00.680 That whole kind of emotional reflex needs taming.

00:12:05.320 In order to get back to a liberalism that is in line with liberal principles.

00:12:10.760 And when I say classical liberalism, I mean classical liberalism.

00:12:13.560 This idea of John Stuart Mill, John Locke type of liberalism in which it's about,

00:12:19.320 you know, you have your sphere, you know, my right to swing my fist ends at your nose.

00:12:24.040 That kind of procedural liberalism, I think, is...

00:12:27.880 And now Patrick Deneen and some of the post-liberals will say that once you have this

00:12:31.880 emphasis on the individual, it'll automatically flip over into emphasizing,

00:12:37.240 you know, ideals such as, you know, you have to like diversity and change and

00:12:43.400 multiculturalism.

00:12:44.440 I don't think that's necessarily the case.

00:12:46.360 I think you can have a liberalism that has, it's a liberal structure and liberal procedures,

00:12:52.280 but within that, you can have conservative values.

00:12:55.800 Some conservative values and some more individualistic values in balance.

00:13:00.680 I think that's very much possible.

00:13:01.880 So that's where I kind of depart from the post-liberals,

00:13:06.040 like Deneen or Vermeule or some of these people who say that, you know,

00:13:09.240 there's no salvaging liberalism.

00:13:10.840 I think there is.

00:13:11.640 And I mean, I think even East Asia, you know, it is a version of liberalism that they have in

00:13:17.080 Korea and Japan.

00:13:18.200 And I just think it's a more sane version in many ways than where we're at in the West,

00:13:24.280 where the culture has kind of metastasized in this very sort of,

00:13:28.280 you know, well, I guess maladaptive direction.

00:13:33.080 It's a point that I actually really agree with, because as somebody who used to identify as liberal,

00:13:39.400 seeing what's happened to people that used to be in my tribe,

00:13:44.600 essentially, it's like watching a train go off the tracks on fire.

00:13:49.560 So if we're going to use that metaphor, how do we put the fire out and how do we put the train back

00:13:54.920 on the track? Because to an outside observer, I'm like, it's hurtling towards a cliff at the moment.

00:14:00.200 I'm not sure if we're going to be able to get it back.

00:14:02.040 Yeah, I mean, clearly, we have some liberals who see the problems, you know, with cancel culture, 0.87

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

00:14:19.800 this idea that there were mass graves and that the entire Canadian nation state is genocidal.

00:14:25.000 I mean, this is insane. And it's been embraced by almost the entire Canadian political class.

00:14:30.040 But yeah, so people are kind of waking up to some of this. How do we reform it? I ultimately think

00:14:36.200 we do need to, I think a Cold War framing is not a bad way of thinking about it. So in the Cold War,

00:14:41.960 we had economic socialism and economic freedom. And even though liberals are behind a lot of the

00:14:49.560 problems, they've kind of met the post-Marxist, post-cultural Marxist, if you like, on the same

00:14:57.080 terrain. And all the EDI, all the sort of speech codes and cancellation is a result of the fusion of

00:15:05.000 the sort of left liberals with the cultural Marxist. Now, what we need to do is have a sort of cultural

00:15:11.800 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,

00:15:24.440 on the stage, and everything's got to be equal, quotas, affirmative action. That's one view of the 0.66

00:15:30.040 world. And then cultural freedom, cultural liberalism is the alternative view. So as with the Cold War,

00:15:36.680 we have a cultural version of that conflict, which says, no, we prize beauty, excellence,

00:15:42.600 rationality, objective truth, due process, equal treatment, all of that. And that's our vision.

00:15:49.000 And I think really, it's about mobilizing this new reformed kind of liberalism that says,

00:15:55.160 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.

00:16:06.440 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,

00:16:18.760 the excesses of speech codes, the excesses of statute toppling and completely distorted

00:16:25.800 readings of history in order to achieve the good society. So yeah, that is kind of,

00:16:29.880 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

00:16:41.480 pie and it's cut up in a very equal way. The more equally you cut up the pie, the smaller the pie.

00:16:49.080 The more you grow the pie, the more unequal the slices. You want to have some equality there,

00:16:53.880 but you also want to allow that pie to grow. And in order to allow it to grow, you've got to allow

00:16:59.320 the better people to accumulate capital and invest. Well, it's yeah.

00:17:02.760 You've now used the trigger word, which is where I was going to take this conversation anyway, because

00:17:08.600 you talk about the sacred myths of liberalism. I think that the most sacred now and the most,

00:17:15.800 the one that causes the most impact and therefore the most problems is the idea of equality. Because

00:17:22.280 the problem with that, and you just said there are better people, which is giving the game away,

00:17:28.200 right? This is why I call it a trigger word because I think we live in a society, I think it's fair to

00:17:34.040 say that has swallowed the idea that equality is a sacred objective, hook, line and sinker. Which is

00:17:42.040 fine if what you mean by equality is people should not be impeded in their ability to realize their

00:17:48.600 potential. But let's be honest, that is not what we mean by equality in modern society. What we mean is

00:17:55.400 if different groups happen to have different outcomes, that means there's inequality going on.

00:18:01.160 And that's how most people now think, whether, whether we like it or not. I mean, Thomas Sowell in his

00:18:06.440 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 0.56

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,

00:18:52.920 which they will be. And as long as this myth of equality between groups, men, women, black, 0.78

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 1.00

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 0.97

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

00:19:28.600 they accept there's a certain amount of inequality that is normal and acceptable in an economy.

00:19:34.760 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,

00:20:02.360 black Americans of slave ancestry are grossly underrepresented within the black population. And

00:20:08.360 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 0.92

00:20:44.120 X percent, 50 percent women CEOs? Why aren't there 50 percent women engineers? It's always, 1.00

00:20:50.200 we're underrepresented and that's a problem. Affirmative action, same thing. Why is the African-American 1.00

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.

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00:21:54.760 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,

00:23:18.520 those are all things that'll keep a check on some of these things. People don't want to pay, 0.95

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. 0.54

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.

00:23:37.160 Really? No. Okay. Interesting.

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 0.98

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 0.85

00:24:59.560 roles, but not too much. And likewise, you know, we're going to have some female engineers, but it's 1.00

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. 1.00

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 1.00

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 1.00

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, 1.00

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 1.00

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 0.99

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 0.98

00:40:25.240 caught on video or whatever it is. I think this thing can surge again. And I think actually one of 0.97

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 0.99

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.

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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, 0.99

00:43:48.600 they really don't like cancel culture. My worry though, is they haven't really been inculcated in, 0.98

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. 0.90

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 0.97

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. 0.94

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, 0.99

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, 1.00

00:49:08.840 Have you got more data and stuff to share with us from the zoomers? Is there anything else you can 0.99

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 0.97

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 0.88

00:49:59.960 be allowed to speak on campus? You know, 85% would say no. Um, massive numbers. If someone says, 0.94

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 0.99

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. 0.66

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, 1.00

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. 0.99

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 0.99

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 1.00

00:53:56.360 university, young women are more empathetic, more caring, et cetera, et cetera, which then can then 0.88

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 0.98

00:54:29.720 says transgender is a mental illness shouldn't be allowed on campus. And women are more likely than 1.00

00:54:34.440 transgender people themselves. They're more likely than transgender people themselves to say that.

00:54:40.680 That's great.

00:54:41.960 It's astounding. But...

00:54:44.840 That's so funny.

00:54:45.720 Do I think this is because there are more women, you know, at university, in the workplace? Actually, 1.00

00:54:52.280 I don't think that's the main reason.

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. 1.00

00:55:02.760 Well, the women are going more off, are much more off the rails. I sort of should rephrase that. Men 1.00

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 1.00

00:55:59.960 dueling. But it was kind of feminine idea. So it's a feminine idea without women actually driving 1.00

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, 0.98

00:56:15.720 I think it's the feminization at the ideal level. This idea that, well, we should be, 0.94

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 0.94

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, 0.51

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. 0.90

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 0.59

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 0.84

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 0.87

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 0.96

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.

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TRIGGERnometry - June 09, 2024

The Sacred Myths of Liberalism - Eric Kaufmann

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