American Thought Leaders - How Multiculturalism and Post-Nationalism Failed the West: John O’Sullivan

Episode Date: February 14, 2025

In this episode, I sit down with John O’Sullivan, a former policy and speech writer for British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and former editor-in-chief of National Review and executive editor of Radio Free Europe. Today, he’s the president of the Danube Institute, a Hungary-based think-tank.A “unified national identity is an absolute essential for a successful democracy,” he says. “If we continue on a multicultural path, it’s a path which is going to go in the directions of ever more aggressive and hostile identity politics, and people will feel that their neighbors are their enemies.”O’Sullivan’s latest book is titled: “Sleepwalking into Wokeness: How We Got Here.”“The idea of post-nationalism is unachievable if you’re a state. You don’t remain just a post-national state, what you become is something else,” he says.Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

a unified national identity is an absolute essential for a successful democracy. In this episode, I sit down with John O'Sullivan, a former policy and speech writer for British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and former editor-in-chief of National Review and executive editor of Radio Free Europe. Today, he's the president of the Danube Institute, a Hungary-based think tank. His latest book is titled Sleepwalking into Wokeness, How We Got Here. If we continue on a multicultural path, it's a path which is going to go in the directions ever more aggressive and hostile identity politics, and people will feel that their neighbors are their enemies.

This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek. John O'Sullivan, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Jan, very nice to be here. Thank you for inviting me. Well, let's talk about from the European perspective, what happened in this recent election in America? I think the reactions in Europe are an exaggerating version of the reactions in America. If you think about the three or four months before the actual election, everyone, everyone in scare quotes, assumed a Kamala Harris victory, thought it was likely, thought a Trump victory would be a reversal of nature like water running uphill, and was accustomed to thinking that it was a backward, Trumpism was a backward-looking philosophy, no longer relevant to a modern world.

And then in America itself you sensed a huge feeling of relief when Trump actually won. And of course there were none of the riots or violence reactions that had been anticipated if he were to win. None of them happened. Those two things told you a great deal. There was virtually no one who expected a Trump victory in Europe, whereas quite a number of people did actually think he could win in America.

And secondly, when he did win, people were surprised at the American reaction, but also I think began to adjust their own responses in response to that reaction. And suddenly, although they were nervous of Trump, and still are, because after all, he's gone out of his way to make people nervous by suggesting he might take over Canada and Greenland despite the kind of, I think, intentional bomb throwing that he rhetorically that he goes in for. I think people are thinking and beginning to say, well, actually, look back at his first term.

It wasn't so bad. His economic policy, it was a success. His new proposals, well, deportations are not a dramatic new development in immigration policy. A lot of deportations took place under Obama and no one thought the world had come to an end. So quite a lot of the things she's proposing are in accord not only with what's happening in America but with what's happening in Europe. Immigration in Europe has gone from being a

moderately important issue to being by far the most important issue. Multiculturalism, which was regarded as absolutely not just common sense, but a mixture of common sense and high ethics, has gone to being a scare policy because it's plainly introduced all kinds of tensions into European societies. And they're looking at Trump for that reason, among others, as somebody who may be coming along saying something useful and important. Fascinating. And multiculturalism, I grew up, of course, in Canada, and we have a huge viewership for this show in Canada.

What you're describing seems a little bit like the Canadian response too. Well, multiculturalism was invented in Canada. It was invented by Pierre Trudeau and his son. He has taken multiculturalism to its illogical conclusion. He's gone some way to ensuring Canada won't have a core culture, a core identity. You won't be able to say what is a Canadian. You are a Canadian. I lived in Canada for almost three years. I loved Toronto. I loved Canada. I think they're a great people. They don't think themselves as a great people. Indeed, the Trudeaus have gone out of their way to make sure they don't think of themselves

as a people at all. I think that multiculturalism, as it's played out in Canada, has produced an unsuccessful society. It's many respects. Canada is a wonderful country, as I think we probably both would agree. And I certainly know from my time when I was working at Radio Free Europe that a lot of the people who came out of Eastern European countries and indeed the world of the Stans, a lot of them chose to settle in Canada when they could because of its welcoming

character to them. But you have to be something more than simply not American. And when I was living in Canada I had the sense that when you asked a Canadian what he says, well, I'm not an American. That was the first stage. That's why perhaps Trump is trying to roll a stone uphill when he says Canada will become the 51st state. Of course, I don't believe he means it, and I think it has elicited a kind of a general skeptical hostile reaction in Canada.

Justin Trudeau has called Canada the first post-national state. Well let me put it this way. The idea of post-nationalism is unachievable as if you're a state. You don't remain just a post-national state. What you become is something else. A state which holds together lots of different nationalities is called an empire. And the problem with an empire is if it's full of different nationalities, they're going to tend to quarrel and to argue and debate and sometimes to take up arms against each other. So you're going to have to have a class of people who run the society and negotiate bargains between these different nationalities and police those bargains and that will mean that the police,

the literal police and the civil service, they're not regarded by the citizens of the country as brothers. We are not in power. It's this class of people who don't belong to any of the squabbling tribes who are running things and we don't think they treat us well. That is what everyone will say. Now, what you have in England and what you have in Canada and what you don't yet have here to a serious extent is the phenomenon of people fighting ancestral battles.

That's why a unified national identity is an absolute essential for a successful democracy. I may have Polish roots, I may have Indian roots, but I'm an American first and my loyalty is to this country or to Britain or to whatever. And then the people who run the country are your representatives. You could be one of them. They will join you maybe after the next election in being a citizen and not a member of the government. That's very important for long-term harmony. Multiculturalism is designed to persuade us it's not so.

If we continue on a multicultural path, it's a path which is going to go in the directions ever more aggressive and hostile identity politics. And people will feel that they're neighbors, that they're enemies in large parts of the country and not themselves. Of course, identity politics is one of the central themes in your new book that I've been reading, you know, with great fascination, Sleepwalking into Wokeness. You know, and this is a very interesting treatment because you've, I mean, you've been on the scene. Why don't we

actually start with this? You've been on the scene looking at politics. I mean, you started with Margaret Thatcher in the 80s. Just tell me a little bit about your background and how you ended up in Central Europe. Well, my background is that I grew up in England. My parents were an English mother and an Irish father. In those days, remember, I was born in 42, so my adolescence, youth and adolescence, occurred when Britain was feeling relatively contented with itself because it had won the Second World War and everybody felt that war was justified and something to be proud of on our side. So although I had an Irish father and I went to a school, a Catholic school, in which virtually

all the boys had names like Murphy and O'Brien, we didn't think of ourselves as Irish. We thought of ourselves as British with Irish relatives, and many of whom, of course, had come over to Britain to help fight the Germans in the Second World War. So the kind of ill feeling that you now often think of in relation to the English and the Irish, that developed really in the late 60s and early 70s. Now I was always involved in politics. I think I'm the only person maybe in the Guinness Book of Records sometime who actually lied about his age in order to join the young conservatives.

And the conservative agent whose job it was to recruit people advised me not to do this. He said, look, you're young. Have a good time. Don't get involved in politics. But through my university years I was involved in politics, university politics. My first job I worked for the Conservative Party. I was given the responsibility of editing a magazine, small magazine. And I took it seriously and turned it into a real magazine. You know, it had a boutique success. Not many

people knew about it, but it was well regarded. And that led me into journalism. And so after a brief time, I went from that job to a job at the Daily Telegraph. While I was at the Telegraph, I was offered the job of working for Irish television and radio. And I really got my journalistic training in both of those places. And I'm grateful to both of them for that because my bosses were some very brilliant, clever, lively and aggressive journalists. And they never taught me to be aggressive, but they did teach me the rules of the game and the tools of the trade. And then I was for ten years the Telegraph's parliamentary sketchwriter. That's a job which is unique. What it is, it's kind of like a dramatic critic's account of what happened in Parliament yesterday and you're allowed to be satirical, you're allowed to make it lively and fun. And it's quite a powerful job because no MP really worries about

whether people read a condensed account of his speech in the parliamentary report, but they do worry about whether he's mocked in the sketch. I was a strong supporter of Mrs Thatcher when she ran for the leadership of the Conservative Party. I was kind of and became somebody who the Telegraph hoped would remain in touch with her. And I did until she won the election and then I came to America to work at the Heritage Foundation. And when I returned, she asked, Mrs. Thatcher asked me to join her team in Downing Street as a special advisor on several topics but also after hours, you know, the job ended but a new unpaid job was available

which was that of speechwriter. And of course that was a great privilege because the prime minister, Margaret Thatcher used to do a lot of her political thinking when she was writing speeches. By that I mean a minister when they're doing the civil service job so to speak, the ministerial job, they develop a ministerial outlook. They don't think politically. They have the department has its own objectives. They become the servants of those objectives.

When you actually have to think, how am I going to sell all of this to the British people? What must I change in it in order to make it more acceptable? What should I emphasize? Then you start to think politically. And that's why Mrs. Thatcher did a lot of her political thinking when sitting around the table

with the four or five other people who worked with her on this too and so I was kind of involved in that kind of thinking about politics. Just very very briefly was she the we kind of have a very stereotypical, almost mythical view of Miss Thatcher. Was she like that in reality? You're thinking of her Bodicea act, right? She was a mixture of that and of ordinary English housewife. If you were coming around to interview her, she would be very worried about whether or not you were sitting in a draft, were you comfortable, would you like a cup of coffee. She would revert at once to being a nice middle class English woman who was thinking of her

guests' comfort. And she never lost that. She never lost that. Where her staff used to say of her, she kicked up and she kissed down. She kissed the people who did the humble jobs. Nothing was too good for them, particularly the detectives whom she knew would take a bullet for her. But the ministers, the top civil servants, well, she felt they got paid a lot of money, they're treated very well. We've got to make sure that they do the job that the British people pay

them for. And I think that was something that over time, not only did the civil servants come to respect that, but the British people came to know about it. They came to sense it. Mrs. Thatcher went through periods of unpopularity. But at no point, I think, after the first year or two, at no point did the British public not think that she was on their side. She knew, they knew, sorry, she was batting for them.

And that's a big difference to the situation today. And in what way? Because they don't feel that the government is batting for them. Oh, you mean in the UK specifically or in general? Yeah, and it's true, I think, across Europe. They think that there is a governing class, there is a political class, and that is a kind of oligarchy that is looking out for its own interests. Now, you might say that from the oligarch's point of view,

those interests are important political principles and the welfare of people. But that is not how they are seen. And I think that that skepticism about them is correct. They have come to feel that large numbers of their constituents are, well, backward-looking. The term deplorables comes to mind. Exactly, that kind of thing. No governing class, no political party, no political leader can think of people in that way and expect to do well. They have to respect their constituents even when they disagree with them. And I would say one of the most, if you are dealing with someone

who you realize doesn't agree with you, you're asked a question. I think a good way to begin a reply is to say, I'll give the answer to that, but I'm going to tell you now, you won't like it. Now when you then give the answer, the person then in a sense says, okay, well that's fair enough. I see, I don't agree, but we can quarrel, we can quibble. And I don't think that that kind of basic insight is something that a lot of modern politicians grasp.

Mrs. Thatcher did grasp it. When you were sitting down with her, one of the most frequent things she said was, but what will Mrs. Buggins think about this? But Mrs. Buggins being the mythical ordinary voter. And when Mrs. Thatcher said about somebody we were thinking of hiring or somebody she was going to mention in the speech, is he one of us? Is she one of us? She meant, does he or she share our general outlook?

Do they like us? Do we like them? Not are they part of a small coterie, but are they part of a large group of the British public who are concerned about this? You said something to me, I noted down when we were talking about your book. Violence enters the bloodstream of societies when governments treat criminals as if they're politicians. In the context of both Ireland and in particular, sympathy for terrorism or a belief that the terrorists are the people who in some sense have got the key to solving the problem.

I don't mean their key, but if we treat them right, we can get the problem solved. Governments must remember that people are not represented by armed groups. And the majority of people in almost all cases, I can't say in everyone, do not believe in supporting people who are murdering their neighbours and one day might murder them for some political objective, even one they share. So it's a very bad thing when in a domestic context that we don't turn to the elected representatives of the people. I'm talking here about, let's say, people on local governments and local councils.

We tend increasingly, particularly where there are racial and religious divisions in society, to select a group of people whom we think we have to deal with. In Ireland, of course, that was the IRA, and Sinn Féin was their political face. But remember, Sinn Féin, which is as a result of our giving more and more of our attention to Sinn Féin and less and less to the Social Democratic and Labour Party, which was a larger representative

of the Catholic minority. The SDLP shrank further and further in importance and Sinn Fein grew larger and larger. And as a result now, Sinn Fein is a major political party in the whole of Ireland and we are faced with a distasteful situation in which a political party that is controlled by a private army, a secret army might be part of the government in every election and that is a very disturbing thing. That's true there. I think it's also true when we come to look at the way in which again and again some of our institutions have flattered and promoted the most extreme elements in racial and religious conflicts because they thought well these are the guys who can riot. Why

should we talk to the respectable people who are simply presenting a decent moral case? These are the ones we have to deal with basically. We're the ones we have to deal with and I don't think we do have to deal with them and I don't think we should deal with them and I think the less we deal with them… I'll quote you what Connor Cruz O'Brien said. He said that giving television interviews to terrorist leaders is an incentive to murder because they know that they would not appear on television programs or be quoted favorably in a newspaper if they weren't prepared to murder people and in effect are always

poised to threaten to do so. I mean this is interesting because I guess this applies at a kind of a I mean a lesser level of escalation right as well if you're just talking about you know riots or this kind of thing. I certainly do think that, yes. And we see it, of course, again in the very topical context of the support that Hamas is getting across American university campuses. I am amazed sometimes at the lack of knowledge of what Hamas is. It murders, obviously, as we know from October the 7th, innocent Jewish and Israeli citizens.

But it also murders its political opponents. It commits horrendous offenses against human rights. It is, in a sense, murder incorporated, to pretend that it has legitimate political objectives which can be satisfied. The charters of these organisations are genocidal. That's certainly true of Hamas. You could argue it's implicitly true of the PLO. And of course we completely forget, as Bill Clinton has rightly been reminding us, and I pay tribute to him for this, he has gone around making speeches recently pointing out that the Palestinians were offered a state. They were offered a great deal when he was in the White House, and it was agreed. But Yasser Arafat went back. He was cheered because he was in the White House, and it was agreed. But Yasser Arafat went back.

He was cheered because he was turning it down. What about how this increase in violence is playing out in our societies? Like here, I'm talking about large Canadian cities, large American cities, pharmacies, the 24-hour pharmacies, you actually have to kind of go behind lock and key to get everything. The various rates of crime have gone up substantively. Well, what has happened is that in a series of riots, parts of the establishment, generally speaking, the Democratic part, has not wanted to crack down, not wanted to keep order,

make the keeping of order its principal activity, which it's got an obligation to do, in my view. George Soros has provided huge amounts of money in order to elect people who release prisoners or didn't prosecute personal crimes. When the value of crime rises to steal anything you want under a thousand, and the penalty is zero because you won't even be prosecuted, are we surprised that there's more theft?

And when eventually companies find that there is no way they can make a profit or indeed avoid a serious loss unless they move out of communities in which crime is rampant. Crime, protecting people from crime is probably the single most valuable service government could provide to the poor and particularly to those poor who are hardworking and trying to get by. And so that has been forgotten. The Democratic Party has lost touch with its working class supporters including its black and Hispanic working class supporters and more and more of them are turning away to

the Republicans because the Republicans are promising to treat the provision of law and order as a first order social service, which is correct. I mean, traditionally, this is sort of the, you know, there aren't a lot of roles the government was supposed to play in the original conception. But this is one of them. This would certainly be one of them. Oh, yes. Well, you mean in the night watchman state of the 19th century, essentially you protected people against foreign invasion and against domestic crime.

Now, that's true. But that view has not really been making ground since about 1880. So I think quite a lot of the rhetorical posturing of parties on the left is a promise to do things that have been done for a long time. Done well? No. I absolutely agree with that. They're not done well. And one of the things we have not succeeded in doing is providing aid to people in a way.

And I'm talking about concentrating here on the poorest. And elevating the poor is a hard thing to do and is tough on the poor as leaving them in situations in which they feel desperation and lead lives that they are not proud of and that they want to get out of themselves. I mean, I think these are difficult problems, and I'm not suggesting I have any easy answers. But social work, plainly, is not working. And we really have to look at that. So you chart in sleepwalking into wokeness, this sort of process. And of course, we talked about identity politics already. What were the sort of significant moments from this time that you're saying,

since the 1880ss things started to shift? I would recommend an interesting book by a distinguished English, well Welsh I should say, sociologist, Christie Davis. He died about two or three years ago but he was a really formidable mind and his book is called The Strange Death of Moral Britain. And he really begins his story at the moment of success for the Victorian social reformers

and then he traces what went wrong to bring about some of the changes which produced, for example, in Britain a kind of a social underclass which is every bit as devastated by drink, drugs, sexual promiscuity, the collapse of families, the rise of crime. We went from a highly respectable working class in 1880 to a working class which was still five-sixth, nine-tenths respectable, which had this underclass. Christie Davis pointed out that there is the two things tracked in common. One was illegitimacy, having children out of wedlock among women and among men, a petty crime.

Now nobody likes to talk about that because they don't want to either because obviously we now appreciate the plight and the virtues of single mothers. But it's probably better for the single mother not to be single and it's certainly best for the children to live in a two-parent household. And in a sense we've become too tender, we've become too sensitive. We don't want to propose good policies and we don't want to promote decent virtues in case we demoralize the people who don't possess them in an extravagant way. Well, most of us do not possess all the virtues. And indeed, we don't possess nearly enough in any life.

But I think that it's a good thing for us to have high moral ideals and to try to carry them out. And that's true in social policy as much as it is in everyday life and in family upbringing. I think, for example, we're talking about questions here. I'd like to get back to the book a bit because, for example, there are a number of things like the degree to which democracy is being undermined by the taking of power from democratic countries and democratic institutions and transferring it to institutions which are not democratic and not subject to the voters. And this is happening both at a domestic level in most Western countries.

It accounts for Brexit. It accounts for the rebellion against this in Europe. And secondly, it's happening at the international level as well. There seem to be these populist movements that are rising up all over the world where there's this divergence of, you know, what the people perceive to be, you know, what they want and what the governing structures are wanting to do. This is what you're talking about. I'm talking about that, but I'm also talking about a situation in which let us take one institution, an important one, the United Nations.

Okay. The United Nations is three things. It's the U.N. Security Council, an old-fashioned arena in which the great powers can debate ways in which they can jointly help to solve international crises before they get too strong. Then you've got the General Assembly, which as Connor Kruse O'Brien described it, is a theatre for the great psychodrama of Western guilt and third world grievance. That's not such a good thing, but its powers are limited. And then you have complete invention of the last 20 years, which is the UN Secretariat as being

the provider of what I call a world political agenda and then getting everybody to try to sign on to this and then essentially try to impose it via a series of international conferences. Now, you might make an argument that climate change is a legitimate purpose for this. It certainly is not, however, a legitimate purpose for any of the kind of economic and political ideas which it's trying to enforce on ESG and that kind of thing at all. International institutions which are not rooted in democratic accountability. They should be the agents of democratic nation states, but they're not. What they are is they are international elites, post-national elites,

who attempt to use nation states and national governments as their agents in promoting a series of these political ideas. Now that is something which I do examine in the book and I argue that increasingly it's intrusive and anti-democratic. The budgetary decisions of Western governments are challenged by the UN on the grounds that they conflict with some revised treaty that no one thought applied to welfare policy in domestic states and shouldn't apply and yet the UN sends in people to domestic governments and says that you're not obeying some particular aspect of international law in relation to your domestic policy and we want you to budgetary policy. We think that your taxation or your welfare benefits are wrong

and we need to be changed in various ways. I don't think that that's a part of what international bodies are supposed to do or should do. And they certainly can't be justified democratically. The European view is that legitimacy exists in some stratospheric realm up there and that lends authority and legitimacy down to governments who then exercise it over democratic publics. I think we should follow the logic of that, which is increasingly demand that there should be – that the international bodies should respect the legitimacy of democratic states. And what they do about undemocratic states, well, they don't do anything because they have no concern about trying to change those states who very often provide the secretariat with a block vote, so it's very pleased with them. But this is something which has happened since 1989 and

gradually and in a thousand small ways we didn't notice until all of a sudden the threat of being forced to change our policies because they conflict with something we never discussed with other countries is becoming a serious one. I don't think anyone thought that the World Court would try to arrange the arrest of Netanyahu. And I don't think it has done actually. But the general feeling that Netanyahu should be arrested in Western Europe is ridiculous. It's quite unjustified. It's not going to happen.

And I see no reason why we should pay even lip service to the authority of an institution which disobeys its own rules. And it reflects in Western societies, I think think a kind of deep demoralisation. Why is there that deep demoralisation? It's conventionally said that we have decided to accept in the West our guilt over both colonisation, which we interpret not as it actually was, a mixture of good and bad, of assistance as well as exploitation, but as if it were like the Holocaust. And of course it was, in fact, the population of India greatly increased during the period of British rule, for example.

All of these things are complicated and I wouldn't deny that but they are not but we don't treat them as that way. We treat, we've now begun to look at ourselves as blameworthy for things which were first of all do not require blame and secondly when there is blame to be given things which we are not ourselves either wholly or partly responsible for. Namely, Britain was the first to end slavery and to stop it out, is now almost the only country from which reparations are demanded. That's obviously historical nonsense.

We've observed, and this is something that Mark Andreessen spoke about in a podcast he did with Joe Rogan, which I thought was fascinating. The term is preference falsification, right? That people don't really speak their mind because there's this huge social cost to it. But the spell of that somehow seems lifted and people seem like there seems to be this cascade now to being able to be more honest about your true views and just talk about them openly and an ability to have conversations. Are you seeing that?

I'm seeing it for the second time because if you read Richard Legutko's book, The Demon in Democracy, you'll see that he describes a very similar state of affairs in the period – we're talking about 88 to 90. And he's talking obviously about Polish society and Central European and Communist society too.

The system was breaking down. Even the people, even its veterans, realized that. They were losing their self-confidence to impose ideological control, which they'd done very successfully for 60 years. Everybody else began to sense it. And as Ligutko says, this was almost the freest period he could remember in his life. And I think the same thing is happening now, probably not on the American campus yet, but it will probably leak into there as well. And secondly,

it expands enormously the range of respectable or legitimate opinion. I would say the most striking element here is Elon Musk's willingness to allow that to be true of what is now the biggest single news producer and disseminator in the world, namely ex-formerly Twitter. And I think that that itself is not just a symptom of change. It's a change agent too. Now, he may go too far and say extravagant things, generally speaking, but having said that, he's a powerful factor in opening up the debate, and we should be grateful to him for that. I think previously I would say the same of Rupert Murdoch. I mean, the reason why he's hated by the left is because he's allowed in his papers the expression of views which the left really doesn't like.

I mean, the progressive world, the people who, not liberals who essentially were prepared to give and take, but the people who go further left to that, who become either woke or nearly woke, and who themselves in a sense reach automatically it seems, reach automatically for the editorial blue pencil or the off switch which will cut off your microphone. But it's in the last two or three years that people, particularly Hungarians who'd come back from living in America, they would say, you know, I don't like what's going on in America. I'm hearing the same kind of language and arguments I remember

from when I was living here under the communists, and it worries me. We now know that during COVID, for example, that the companies censored quite a lot of information. On behalf of a government which said, that's just misinformation, we provided the accurate information. And we now know that the government was wrong and these independent scientists were right, not in every case, but in some cases. And I think that would apply not just to COVID, but to other political, thorny political decisions. So we need to, we need an open and robust debate. And I think, think obviously sometimes your feelings get hurt in that. Part of living is learning to take the knocks and we've all had to do it and sometimes you you're humiliated in some way you crawl back

home and you think I'm never going out again you know but the fact is you emerge stronger but that's what the snowflakes have got to learn. And they'll find their surprise that when they look back that some of the most productive moments in their life have been when they had to receive a rebuke and accept it, realize it was correct and make sure that they didn't fall into that trap again. I don't want to sound like a wise philosopher. My life wouldn't support that. It's got lots of things, had lots of things wrong with it.

We find ourselves in situations where our societies, whether it's Canadian or American, are broken in many ways. And I think everybody would actually agree on this point. What do you see as kind of the key elements of making things better? Well, let me put it this way. Back when we were talking about my work with Mrs. Hatcher, when I was working as a columnist and an editorial writer on the Daily Telegraph, I and my colleagues were conscious of the fact that we didn't represent the opinion of the majority. We represented that of a solid conservative minority, but we knew that the odds were stacked

against us. We used to joke that one way of making sure you'd never appear on the BBC was to get a job as the Daily Telegraph editorial writer. We felt, of course we were young, we felt not embattled exactly, but that we were stimulated by this. We had a sense of mission, I think. There was a sense that Mrs. Thatcher quoted when she became, in the introduction to her memoirs, she quotes Lord Chatham,

who succeeded to be prime minister at a low point in the histories of the British Empire. "'I know that I can save this country "'and that no one else can.'" Now, she said about herself, "'It was a vainglorious thing to think and she had doubts about saying it, but a lot of, you know, I feel and most English people feel I think that she fulfilled that mission. I don't think we are in such a terrible state that such hopes should not rest in the

breasts of younger people of sensible views. As Reagan said in one instance, it's not true that all these problems facing us are complex. Some of them are quite simple. What they are is hard to do and you've got to have readers who among other things have the courage to demand some sacrifice in order to make greater gains in the future and I would add the ability to express this clearly and well so that they take along a significant section of their people as well.

And then it's surprising what can be achieved. After all, we should not give people the impression that life is a continual uphill struggle with no reward at the end. There are periods in a nation's history in which it clearly enjoys the benefits of its previous sacrifices and we should be aware of that as we face the sacrifices that are probably going to have to be made in the next few years. So you're asking not what your country can do for you but ask what you can do for your country? Well or you can say ask what you can do for your neighbour, ask what you can do for your

family, ask what you can do for the business you work in. I mean, obviously very few of us are going to be presidents, have our names in the history books, but that doesn't mean to say we can't be local heroes. Well, John, this has been a fascinating conversation. Any final thoughts as we finish? Well I think only to say that I wrote the book from a selection of essays over the years about different aspects of the crisis and how each one of them comes into it. There are some heroes in that. You're talking about local heroes.

One I mentioned in the context of terrorism. I was lucky enough to know a man called Sean O'Callaghan, who was somebody who joined the IRA, and actually he murdered two people. He then underwent a tremendous Dostoevskan moral conversion. He knew he was in some profound sense on the wrong side. And so what he did was he contacted the Irish and the British intelligence authorities. He became an insider who gave information about the bombs that were going to go off. He saved a lot of lives, but it wasn't enough for him. And so he went back to the police in Tonbridge Wells, I think, and then on his own evidence was convicted for murder and was in prison for some time.

And he wrote a book and I was present at his memorial service. Among the people at the memorial service for Sean were the families of the two people he had murdered. And he had asked that the memorial service be for them as well. And his son is, I think, very active, along with other people, in what I'd call the post-terrorist, anti-terrorist movement, which is attempting to persuade people to give up this kind of thing. That's somebody who led a good life and paid for it and deserves our gratitude. That was the life of somebody that, the end was well lived. And he managed

to crawl upwards from a very dark space, place, to one of unremarked heroism. It's a beautiful story, you know, this idea of redemption and I guess reconciliation is possible and happens and indeed needs to happen. And you can get there if you really work hard at it. Well, there were members of the two victims of his early terrorism at the memorial service. I've known more obviously heroic heroes, but he's certainly the one, I think, that's made an impact on my life. Well, John O'Sullivan, it's such a pleasure to have had you on the show.

Thank you very much, and thank you for giving me the opportunity to go on and on and on. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you all for joining John O'Sullivan and me Go on and on and on. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you all for joining John O'Sullivan and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek.