The Duran Podcast - The Case for Trump & Restraining Liberalism - Steve Turley, Alexander Mercouris & Glenn Diesen

Episode Date: December 4, 2024

The Case for Trump & Restraining Liberalism - Steve Turley, Alexander Mercouris & Glenn Diesen

Hi, everyone, and welcome. My name is Glenn Dyson. And to discuss the coming Trump presidency, I'm joined by Alexander Mercuris and Dr. Steve Turley to address his new book, Fight. And again, I just want to say, well, you obviously are not shy about your enthusiasm for the election victory of Donald Trump. And when I read your book, I thought that it should especially be interesting to people who do not like Trump or was hoping for a Harris victory, Because I have to say a lot of the media we have, especially in Europe now, it's been almost election pamphlets for Harris. People have simply very little appreciation or even understanding for why people voted for Trump because, well, it's hard to say the media's balance because quite obviously it's not. And this leaves us a lot poorer because people really don't understand Trump.

They think simply a lot of racists walk there woodworks and he hates women and black people. And it's quite an extraordinary narrative which is being sold. So I was hoping if you could maybe start off by saying how you would explain this election outcome, because it was extraordinary. I mean, he even took a popular vote by five millions or so. It was. And of course I predicted every bit of it, right? we were just talking before the interview of like oh good i'm glad it turned out the way it did kind

of thing um no i think what you're saying is absolutely right my my wife is japanese uh born and raised in tokyo and whenever she talks to her mom to my mother-in-law her mom it's the same thing the n hk just more or less reproduces democrat talking points at this point it's really like you said it's very sad because they're they just seem to have no understanding it and it's the same thing here United States with the legacy media. There's just no understanding of the wider context of the historical moment. I think we all recognize we're finding ourselves in, and that's what the book really is just an attempt to try to understand. I don't think we can, I don't think, Glenn, we can overestimate or exaggerate the significance of what happened on November 5th. I really don't.

I've thought about it, remunerate a number of times. Bottom line, every single state in the Union pivoted right, every single one. This is something akin to 1984. When Reagan won 49 states, no, there is, the demographics have changed. I've talked to pollsters that could never be reproduced again. If Reagan were running, if we're the same sort of campaign, he might get an election result like what we saw on November 5th. Just the demographics in California and New Mexico, for example, would just change too dramatically to get a 49 state win. But every single state in the union pivoted right. And it's something very much akin to a Republican version of the Obama landslide in 2008. Every state pivoted right. Some of the most dramatic movement happened in the most reliably blue

state. So New York shifted 12 points to the right. So Kamala only got half the margin that Biden got back in 2020. New Jersey, again, one of the most reliably blue states that has a million Democrat voter registration advantage. New Jersey shifted 10 points to the right. Trump came within five points of actually winning New Jersey. Same with Minnesota. It came within four of Minnesota. Again, Minnesota was the sole state that voted for Mondale back in 84. So Republicans, of course, won control the Senate. They won the House. They won the majority of governorship, state legislatures. But I think there's an important difference between 2024 and 2008. Obama won with a coalition that turned out to be, in reality, very fragile and very tenuous. It was a coalition that was, it seemed to have been artificially inflated with the excitement of being part of history and voting to the first black president.

But the enthusiasm for Obama dropped dramatically in 2012 when he really just barely won re-election. contrast to his overwhelming victory in 2008. What Trump has demonstrated in three election cycles in a row is the ability not merely to assemble a very loyal, very strongly aligned coalition, but one that has the power to grow and expand. So Trump is one of the few incumbents who actually increased his vote share between 2016 and 2020. If I recall, I got about 7 million more votes in 2020. And then he did it again in 2024, where you got even more votes than he did in 2020. And I think that's so key here in that this coalition seems to represent a very real political realignment that's happening in the nation. And as I argue in the book, would I want American readers to

understand in particular, I think it's reflective of a realignment that's happening all over the West, which is itself, as you know, as you guys study multipolarity, is itself part of a realignment that's happening in the entire world. And that's why I really do think we are just, we're witnesses to an extraordinary historical moment. It's just very sad that the media, the establishment media outlets are not there to report it. Now, there's a number of things I wanted to say in response to what you've just said. Firstly, about Obama, a fact that perhaps people always need to remember is that he won his first election in 2008 against the backdrop of a massive financial and economic crisis. So it undoubtedly strengthened his support very considerably.

Had that crisis not happened, I'm not saying he wouldn't have won the election, but it's likely that the margin of victory would have been significantly smaller. So it's an important point to make. For me, the most interesting thing about the book and the one that explains your point to a great extent about the fact that Trump's levels of support have been growing is that these are elections which have been taking place across or happening at the same time as a general political. sociopolitical, philosophical crisis across the West. You could call it, if you like, a crisis of liberalism. Liberalism, which has been the dominant political system in the West for decades, for centuries, arguably,

and which emerged in the 1990s, apparently unchallenged, is now sagging. it's a sort of struggling to hold itself together it's evolving in all sorts of ways that people find increasingly strange and difficult to come to terms with it's becoming deeply intolerant and aggressive in its attempts to assert its control

and it's not just that people are reacting against it that they're becoming more antagonistic to it. But reading your book, I got the sense that there's something even more profound going on, which is that people are becoming tired of it. They are feeling that liberalism no longer offers the solutions that it promised, that it's attempt to pretend that it has some kind of scientific validity, that its method of understanding things and resolving problems could,

you know, there was underpinned by some kind of. of science. People are no longer believing in that so much. And that beyond this, it's becoming a system which is dividing everybody into a very small number of winners and a very, very much bigger number of losers. So that there is this general crisis of liberalism, which is not exclusive, to the United States, but which is general to the West. Now, am I right about this? And that brings us to the discussion

of what liberalism is. And perhaps, because I know that Glenn has discussed and thought about this a lot. And he's also said many things about language, which I think it would be interesting if we could bring out. Glenn has written about the misuse and abuse of language

in order to prop up this sort of liberal ascendancy. But first of all, am I summarizing your book roughly correctly? And secondly, what points would you make in response to the ones that I've just been making? I think you're right. Absolutely. I mean, we're all witnessing at a real large global level, worldwide level. I think we're witnessing a profound phenomenon of re-territorialization. I get into that in the chapter on on the rise of multipolarity. And what makes

re-territorialization is it's basically populations sort of wrenching power out of the hands of this managerial few, this political class, this managerial class that through the process of disembedding, this globalist process of disembeding

basically recalibrates political power and decision-making into the hands of often unelected managerial bureaucrats who are aligned with billionaires and these bureaucrat billionaire alliance basically is creating

sort of a neo-futalized world that Joel Kotkin of Chapman University talks about. And I just think the world, I mean, there's all kinds of reasons for why it seems to be being rebelled against and revolted against.

I talked about, I think, the inherent futilities in a master version of liberalism as opposed to a servant. I guess my romantic notion of liberalism, classical liberalism, is it's always a servant to larger things like tradition and faith and family and community and civilization, so forth. But when liberalism becomes a master of all these things, you know, it'll go the way, not to sound too Jordan Peterson here. It goes away the idols and the golden calf and all of a sudden you find yourself enslaved to the very thing you're supposed to be freed from. So I focused on those inherent futilities, but there's also just the death of the liberal international order that John Mearsheimer's been

talking about for, oh my gosh, for like a decade now, Huntington's thesis on moving from an age of ideology to identity, from modernity to post-modernity. There's all kinds of dynamics for this re-territorialization. Why I like what you just said is I think it kind of, it gets to the heart of actually Trump's strategy, his political strategy, that is either mirrored or just exemplified in a number of strategies in the political right throughout Europe. And that is, Matt Goodwin talks about this, that is pivoting left on economics while at the same time pivoting right on culture. And this is just absolutely, it seems to be the secret sauce to what made Trump so popular, both in 2016, 2020 and then in 2024. The pivoting left on economics brings to an end the globalist division of labor that sends manufacturing industrial jobs overseas, as it were.

and then reallocates wealth and finance in the hands of the cosmopolitans, leaving rural populations highly unemployed. He is just taking a hammer and smashing that pivotal part of globalization by talking about protectionist policies, tariffs, bringing manufacturing industrial jobs back home, becoming energy independent, and that's galvanize originally the white working class in 2016, like never before. We had 200 counties, nearly 200 counties in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Minnesota,

many who had voted for Obama twice. They'd voted for every Democrat presidential candidate for decades, suddenly switch over and vote for Trump, some by margins of 20 points. So by pivoting left on economics, he brought in first the white working class and then brought in the non-white working class. And that's where we really saw in this election with a record number of Latinos, record number of particularly black men under the age of 50, going with Trump, not so much Republicans per se, but more this Trumpian populist paradigm that was really taking a blow torch to. the economic side of globalism, but then globalism also has the cultural side, the woke side. And what made Trump brilliant there is not only is he growing his coalition by pivoting left on economics, but then he's growing it by pivoting right on culture. And that's by taking

on any woke issue out there. It was relentless on pushing woke issues and and basically boxing Democrats out from any high ground. on a woke issue. They were they were they were tart and feathered with any with all with being the champions of woke but the problem with wokeness uh is that an eric Kaufman um an ex-Canadian expat over i think he's at buckingham college right now but he's talked about this where the problem with wokeness is you take any woke issue you literally take anyone you know um transgender male athletes and women's sports what a critical race there in the classroom what you're whatever it happens to be, take anyone. And what you'll find is it splits the left right down the middle.

So the left are not all for wokeness. About half of them are, but the other half, the Bill Maher half, the peers Morgan, you know, center left half. They don't like, they hate wokeness. They despise wokeness. But then when you ask the right whether they support any of these woke issues, it's 100% no way. So what wokenness does, is it splits the left and it unites the right. This is how Glenn Yonkin was able to win Virginia back in 2021, First Republican in a while to win Virginia, a very, very blue state. Again, Trump came within five points of doing the same thing here, where he was able to split the left and unite the right and, therefore, in a fact, create a coalition that was more likely to vote against

whokeness than vote for it. So pivoting left on economics, pivoting right on wokeness, to me sort of takes out those two underpinnings of liberalism, where you have this managerial economic liberalism, top-down billionaire bureaucrat rule. And then they rule by eliminating any possibility of dissent from this system. and that's what wokeness is for. Wokeness is, in many ways, a new kind of fundamentalism, where any dissent to wokeness is by definition heresy, and heretics must by definition be excommunicated, hence cancel culture. And it seems that it almost, it's almost dialectic.

It's almost like the more insane they get, the more heretics they can identify. Because the crazier wokeness gets, the more prone people will be to dissent from it and therefore they can be excommunicated. And it just seems from the economic view

and the cultural view that what liberalism has become, ironically is supposed to be rational and free, and I work it out in the book, it's become very repressive and very irrational. Well, those two dynamics, it seems to me, globalist economics and woke ideology

were at the very heart of Trump's political strategy. In the study, though, of liberalism, it's often pointed out by many scholars that liberalism works best when it's in opposition to something, ideally an outdated form of government, but because, of course, it's a great idea to carve out space for the individual.

Again, this is classical liberalism, but the main argument, again, I would argue also to Tocqueville, was the reason why he argued liberalism worked in America was it was balanced by what it called the spirit of religion. That is, you had the conservative balance to it. And I think over the past few decades, you see liberalism or the liberal nation state begin to fall apart because liberalism began to divorce itself from the concept of the nation state.

And so I think for many people that saw some of this coming already in the 90s. If you appear like Professor Roderick is an American professor who wrote back, in 97, a book on Has globalization gone too far? And because often we treat globalization's ultimate liberalism, but in globalization often means it's incompatible with

democracy, as you see political leaders start having more accountability to international capital and interests, and you start to see a split in society. And that's what I thought it was interesting. Right now you mentioned Samuel Huntington, because he actually

wrote this article back in in 2004. It's called dead souls or something. And for me, this is, everyone should read dead souls to understand the election of Trump because he kind of points out that this unfettered liberalism or neoliberalism, that it begins to split, both economic and cultural aspect, as you mentioned, and splits society because he argued for elites. Their main concern will be, you know, participate in global economy, international institutions. A lot of them, migration. And meanwhile, he said that the average person or the average American would then want to instead

try to encourage the recreation of national identity or reproducing it, protect this culture at home, protect jobs at home, not simply export everything. And so he said, oh, no, in the years to come, we're going to see a huge split in society. and it's not, well, he defined as nationalism versus cosmopolitanism. And we often speak with John Mersheimer, makes the point that nationalism always wins because human beings, we are a group animal as well. So I think a lot of people wrote especially in the 90s could very much see exactly what was coming. And, yeah, which is why I think this oversimplification of what Trump represents.

I think it's quite harmful because he addresses some key issues. But, you know, people can disagree whether or not he has to write answers, but he's definitely cut his finger on the pulse, I think. Yes, yes, absolutely. And, yeah, I mean, one of the frames that I draw on in the books, something called post-security politics. And post-security politics is very interesting because it shows how organic the resistances. And again, it comes in the forms of populist right movements as well as populist left

movements. But basically post-security politics argues that because globalism has these disembedding dynamics, where it dislodges political decision-making away from the local and kind of reallocates it at the managerial level, higher level, and often removed and unaccountable, people increasingly feel powerless over their own political destinies. Even Fukuyama's interesting, because if you think it through, the end of history thesis, it held sort of its own contradiction there, you know, in the sense it said, you know, well, guess what? I have good news for you. You're all, the world's about to discover the political system that will make you most free, and it's inevitable. So let that hit you.

right? You, I've got good news for you. You're about to find, you're about to discover the political system by which you are most free and there's nothing you can do about it. You know, it was like, well, which one is it? I mean, Alexander Dugent brings that up in his critique of liberalism, you know, I'm free to believe in anything except in being an anti-liberal, basically, that kind of structure. So there's an inherent sort of contradiction there. But yeah, I do. I do. I do. I I think there is, in post-security politics, there is just this notion that the response that we're seeing right now. And again, like I enjoy sharing, particularly an American audience, that's going on really all over the West and all different diverse, but yet similar ways is very organic. It's not, it's not based on an ideology.

It's not a bunch of people listening to some, you know, persuasive orator that's putting, you know, crazy ideas in their heads. No, they're under a protocol, a massive systemic international protocol that renders borders fluid, that ships manufacturing and industrial jobs overseas and that recasts cultures, customs, and traditions that most people hold dear. who in their own indigenous settings, they recast them as racist and bigoted and all kinds of phobic all in the name of emancipatory politics. And people are like, you know, I don't like that. And then when there's no representative for those concerns within either the mainstream center left or center right parties

that we saw here with pre-Trump Republican and Democrat parties and what we're seeing, of course, in Europe, some of these paralyzed political parties in parodons, then inevitably people are going to start looking for what we call bootlegger. You know, somebody who's, you know, we want alcohol. You guys all, the people in power bandit, we want it. So we're going to go find somebody who's actually making it in the back room, as it were. And so, you know, bootleggers are these third party candidates that, what we call in our two-party system, these third-party candidates who come on out and say, you know what? And of course, they're political opportunists. They smell an amazing

opportunity to accumulate power and wealth. But something that's more akin to sort of the aristopopopulism that Aristotle would talk about, where you have an aristocracy that actually wants to use their power and wealth to enact the values, interest, and concerns of the people, rather than despise it, rather than reject it, ignore it, and alike. And so that to me is really what Trump has always been. He's a third-party candidate who got a major party nomination. He, instead of going the Ross Perot way, where he could really only go, he can only get about 20% support. He got the major party nomination apparatus and then institutional alliances that turned on him quite a bit back in his 2017 to 2021 tenure.

But nevertheless, I think they turned on him precisely because there was this allergic reaction to this post-security revolt that the establishment and the cultural spaces in which they find themselves just couldn't understand. They were enjoying the height of power and prosperity with this globalist apparatus. What on earth? What's your knuckle-dragging problem with this? Come on, people, you know, you should love this. And I think you needed someone like a J.D. Vance, who sort of embodies a very interesting sort of reunification between Appalachia on the one hand and the new tech right on the other that does exemplify something akin to this aristopopulism that that Aristotle talks about. this unity, this continuity between an aristocracy that has power and wealth, but that uses it for the furtherance and the advance and the protection of values, interests, and concerns of the people. So it's a very organic thing. It would inevitably happen, and if it was not Trump, it would be somebody else. And that's exactly what we're seeing all throughout Europe in the comparable

movements from Le Pen to Maloney to Farage and the like. A number of things. I mean, the point about choice is a very interesting one, because, of course, democracy is only meaningful when people have a power to choose. I mean, that is, if you don't have any choice, then, of course, what you have, whatever it may be called, is disempowering. It's not really democracy, because democracy is all about, I mean, to govern is to choose, the sympathy once said.

So one almost feels that what's been happening over the last 30, 40 plus years is that the ability to make choices about the really big things, the economic things, the major things that concern people to a very great extent. Even questions of war and peace, by the way, which we haven't talked about, that power has been restricted. continuously. I mean, it's been taken away. People are always expected to agree on, are always accepted, expected to accept certain supposedly scientifically arrived conclusions, affecting economic policy, foreign policy. These are the rational positions people can take. Whereas choice, because we are supposed to be still a democracy, has become a a lifestyle question. What kind of lifestyle you follow?

So it's now limited in effect to this very narrow field. And if you express doubts about some of these choices, because that's all the democracy is limited to, then you are an anti-democrat. So you can't argue about the big things, because that's being irrational. But if you challenge the small things, if you say, well, you know, just a moment,

exercising these choices doesn't really make great deal of sense on lifestyle issues. That's essentially being anti-democratic. So, I mean, this is not really a sustainable position. No. And it's not something that one can build. an entire political system on. And it's not one that is going to adapt itself very well to changes in the world. And there have been huge changes in the world. There is something that is

very strange, however, about the developments that we have seen over the last 20, 30 years. The first is the really remarkable personality of Donald Trump that he's becomes the sort of sledgehammer that's knocked all this about because I think many people can discuss Donald Trump in many respects. He's a much more, I've said this many times, he's a much more intelligent person, far more sophisticated political leader

than people realize. But no one would ever call him an intellectual. I don't think he would want to call himself that. And yet, he is the person who has, batter this whole massive intellectual structure. So that is one thing that is very remarkable. And one does wonder how this individual ultimately arrived at fulfilling this seminal role. And the other thing, and coming back to that sort of sense of decay,

that we are looking at across the entire structure. You see this in so many ways, in the way in which politics has become very, very managerial and controlled until Donald Trump came a lot. And I have to say with this, there is no one, in my opinion, who's quite the same in Europe. I mean, if you're talking about Farage, for example, he's not made that link between being right on cultural things.

and left on economic things that Trump has done. If you followed Farage's thought on economics, it is still very, very much accepting of the neoliberal financial economic orthodoxes. So he's not shown, he's not shown, as I realized, very clearly, by the way, when I heard him speak in person just a few weeks ago. So how Trump has emerged and whether this is a specifically American phenomenon given that America has a history of populism,

that, as I said, is a strange question. And I don't know whether there's any obvious answer to it. But anyway, I throw these things at you again. Yeah, there's so much there. one thing just to kind of cap, kind of go full circle, close the loop with the issue of freedom and knowledge and so forth. It is what we saw, particularly in the whole situation with COVID, was this very bizarre renunciation of basic liberal premises. So as I understand, as I talk about in the book, there's an epistemological tenet to liberalism and an executive tenant liberalism. And you guys know this is very hard to actually pin down and define because we don't necessarily agree what liberty is.

But from what I found, there were basically two major premises for classical liberalism, an emphasis on reason over religion in matters of public policy. and then secondly, there's a restraint on executive power so as to maximize individual freedom. And what I found so interesting was how they played off each other, how this dance between the rational and the free actually seemed to need each other and imply one another. One of the most interesting historians out there is Mary Poovey, and she's a historian who actually traced out the history of the fact. and it's a very interesting book, and she basically asked, when do we first start citing statistics and indicators and graphs? And she argues that it was really at the beginning of the 19th century in relation to these burgeoning liberal democracies, because at the heart of it was this notion that now we are going to have leaders who are no longer there by virtue of their birthright or their, or ecclesiastic ordination, now they have to be voted by the people. And so whatever public policies

that they are going to advocate and pursue, they're going to have to be able to justify those policies by appealing to the common sense of reason and logic that we all have. So common sense and this emphasis on the rational really served as a very important indicator for the balance of power because our leaders no longer had, you know, special access to esoteric knowledge that's available to them by their ordination, all public policy from this point forward had to be justified by the very laws of logic and rules of reason that any and all we're privy to. So what have we seen of late, just like you described, what we've seen is now when the population comes out and says, you know what, I don't really buy that.

You're going to have to explain this. We suddenly get this notion. No, you see, I'm a credentialed expert. I know this, and you don't. And the moment you claim to be able to correct me or to be able to challenge me and dissent from my opinion, you're spreading misinformation. So it was this bizarre almost, again, Joel Kotkin refers to it as this refutalization. It was this bizarre step back. And there have been some interesting articles I've come across that have seen our mastery of science, technology, and mathematics as a new kind of priesthood. Because it entitles one to all kinds of public proclamations that have legitimacy by virtue of the credentialed, the accreditation, literally the ordination by which you're enunciating him, and any dissent from that is considered to be, again, a kind of heresy. As for why, so I just found that very interesting.

It's just so ironic that our society has turned against that. And again, if we are kind of a refutalized world, then we shouldn't be surprised if we see something akin to a new Protestant Reformation, which was a kind of, you know, populist revolt, as it were, with, Luther there, going against the entire powers of B. In terms of Trump himself, I came across a very interesting article by Alanda Newhouse. She wrote it before, she writes her tablet magazine, she wrote it before the election. But I thought it was very good in terms of she, she argues that our politics are more and more characterized by what she calls brokenism, the overall paradigm of

brokenism, meaning that both sides, all political sides, all recognize that our public institutions are going through a profound crisis of legitimacy right now. I mean, you look at the Gallup studies and you take any public institution all the way from government to, you know, universities, the justice system, the legacy media, and you'll find that they have their lowest levels of confidence and trust ever recorded right now. It's, it's, it's, It's pretty startling. And so she says, we all super majorities recognize the public institutions are broken. But then what that does is that's creating two sides, two political sides.

One, she calls brokenists who believe that the public institutions have wasted away. There is no hope found in the institution itself. So you need something from the outside to be a major disrupt. to come in and change and revive. Whereas the other side, she called status quoes, who recognize that things are broken. But they still believe, they still have enough hope in the establishment institutions

that whatever resources are needed to fix the problems can be found in the very institutions that are giving us those problems in the first place. I'm being a little, you could see which side I'm on. So she basically says there's two sides. There's brokenness. And there are status quoists. I guess we can call them in a sense institutionalists and like.

So what was 2016? 2016 seems to me was our first brokenest election. Where somebody, the very first person we ever elected, that never held office before and never held any kind of military rank before, one, the highest office in the land. Somebody completely from the outside. That bootlegger concept. coming in. And I think enough people over the course of now eight years have concluded that with all the problems he had clearly in his first term, he's the man who can, and especially

being surrounded by people like Vivek and Elon Musk and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Just he's, these are the, they're often likened to the Avengers. These are the superheroes that can kind of come in, sweep in, that are not of this world, as it were, that can, that can, that can change a world that is completely rotten out. I don't know why Trump himself per se. That's what for me, J.D. Vance is interesting because at least he embodies this reunification of the working class and the new tech right that's emerging, whereas Trump is, you know, he's a New York billionaire. But he's always seems, if you look back at his old, you know, when he was on Oprah back in the 80s, 90s and so forth. He was always very pro-tariff, always very pro-manufacturing and protectionist and

real old-school McKinley like international monetary policy and international policy. It wasn't a big interventionist. And it just seemed, again, it could be very much the post-security politics just beginning to work themselves out into policy as he's, as he's surrounding himself with some pretty confident people. But to me, the bottom line is you needed somebody completely from the outside. And he came with a certain celebrity status. You know, there's one thing to finish that point, too. There is, oh, who was it who wrote about this?

Oh, I'll think about it when I'm not thinking about it. But one pundit pointed out that whenever he drew from Oswald Spangler, whenever a civilization feels like it's about to meet its demise, it looks for a hero, a real hero. And so the very base of our thinking, the very mythic base of our thinking gets activated. And so it's, I don't think it is coincidence that Trump is so often to pick up. in these memes and so forth, as an emperor coming to defend his civilization that's under threat. Because I do think we feel like, certainly my audience does, we did feel on November 4th that this was it. If we don't win, I don't know if we can come back from this. And so I think Trump with his celebrity status, you know, is WWE passed, his UFC where he

walks into the Madison Square Garden like Caesar, you know, coming into the Coliseum. He just, he exudes a certain kind of mythic celebrity. The celebrity status becomes myth, becomes mythos in its, you know, archetype Jungian Sands. And I think only he can do that. I don't know any other personality who can do it. I mean, Oprah's a celebrity, but she's not mythic. She doesn't have all, she doesn't have the whole.

package where he does. And I just find I find him a very, very fascinating figure. I just, yeah, I wanted to make one comment because we're linking a little bit what both of you spoke about liberal intolerism and why probably Trump is, was ideal to break through this, because there's a great book called the two-face of liberalism. It points out that it has two components which are contradictory. One is, you know, liberalism is about tolerance because if we all have different views of the good life, we have to be tolerant of your other. And the second is the assumption of universalism. That is, you know, we have this universal path to, as we also suggested, path to development, and it's assumed that everyone will follow

this path, and there's only one path. And the problem is, as we saw, see after periods of globalization, which is often liberalism in its success. We saw the same in the 19th century, by the way. Afterwards, people want to restore their own, they want to renationalize their, or repatriate their supply chains, they want to have more reproduce their own national identity. They go back into more national identity aspect and reject some of the cosmopolitanism.

Well, what happens then is you see the liberal, or not classical liberals, but the new liberals then saying, well, fine and well, but we can't tolerate this because we have one path and you're trying to walk it back and this is not acceptable. And I think we've seen

a lot of this liberal intolerance over the past few days. decades. And so it comes in the name of virtue and progress. So, for example, in the 90s, we saw the whole debate around immigration. It was effectively shut down. It's either you're for progressive immigration or you're a bit of a racist. So it kind of was established. Now, there's no more debate over this issue. Then we had, I guess, the same over more radical secularization that is pushing, you know, the church to the corner of society, reproductive rights. Also, I thought gay marriage was interesting because I remember Obama

in the beginning said, oh, it's between man and woman. And then a few years later on, they all agreed, well, actually, now it's for everyone and it's settled. It can be no more debate unless you hate the gays. And then, of course, men can be pregnant. And it just goes on and on, and you're not allowed to dispute any of this. And I think that's why, of course, it's also the economic aspect, not just cultural, so on federal markets, the idea that industrial protection is a bad thing, technological, industrial sovereignty.

or in politics, we have our humanitarian wars. This is good. If you don't agree with it, you hate democracy. So once you build up this very strong intolerance, that is impossible to challenge very basic ideas, how can you break it? And I think Trump was quite unique in this extent, because no matter what they threw at him,

they call him a racist, like, eh, you know, he was able, everything brushed off him. He didn't really care with these labels. And I think he was quite a, It's been quite a unique character in terms of, he said, well, nothing could sink in them. And I think people often misunderstood that he didn't get elected, despite of all the attacks on him. I think he got elected because of it. He proved, even his political party was against him in 2016.

The media, everyone threw everything they had at him. And he said, he stuck to his principles. And this is, like you said, the hero, if you will, who they thought could really break through this machinery, which had built up. But I did want to ask the both of you, though, because a key important part of the book was also on the liberal international order. And how, because I think beyond America,

there's a lot of questions about Trump as well, if he will also put a dent, if not walk away from this, well, so-called liberal international order. Yeah. Well, again, Mirosheimer talked about how just even in his first term, he campaigned, quite aggressively against the liberal international order,

whether it was supporting Brexit or whether it was calling NATO obsolete, whether it was complaining constantly about dealing with the IMF. The WTO, he much preferred bilateral trade agreements, of course, over against the one-size-fits-all multilateral trade agreements. He did the unpardonable sin of being confrontational with China rather than appeasing China to bring China into the liberal international order, which have been trying to do for the last 30 years. He got rid of GATT, replaced it with the USMCA.

He imposed all kinds of tariffs on steel and aluminum, even from the EU. He withdrew from the Paris Climate Accord. So, you know, he certainly has shown his bona fides and his willingness to push back against the liberal international order. We will say he's the first U.S. president, I believe we have had in four years. who did not start another hot war. I think what Mearsheimer, I think, pointed out, I think we, since 1991, we fought, we've been fighting somewhere around the world

every two of, two of every three years over the last 30 years, something akin to that. And Trump would be a major disruptor to that. The, obviously, I mean, you guys have covered this so extensively and brilliantly, but the mess that is Ukraine right now. Interestingly enough, I don't know if you saw that the Hunter Biden pardoned, actually pardons him of all crimes committed, starting on January 1st, 2014. And I know the Duran crowd knows what happened in Ukraine in 2014.

So that's kind of, you know, that's interesting stuff. But I got to, you know, they're leaving Trump with such a mess and an escalation. mess. And I, it sounds to me, especially the way he was pressured constantly by CNN anchors, you know, don't you want, you know, say it, don't you want Ukraine to win? Don't you want to. And Trump kept going, I want people to stop dying. That's what I want. I want people to stop dying.

And first date, I'm going to get a piece. It just seems he knows he gets it. I certainly, RFC, Jr. gets it. And I hope he is able to push back against whatever residue is left of the neocon to, yeah, to end the American interventionism that is so integral to the liberal international order. It's talked about punishing bricks if they, if they go with another currency. But, you know, again, the responses will stop weaponizing that currency. Maybe we won't be thinking. We won't be talking about these things.

So the notion that we don't, I think what I like about the group of his closest confidants right now, Tulsi Gabb and so forth, is they all seem to recognize the contribution that are neocon neoliberal paradigm that we use to basically govern a unipolar world. had a lot of faults. And, you know, we had a lot of off ramps before February 2020. We didn't take a single one of them. I heard it put that way. And I thought that was really, that was really well put. We didn't take a single one. The notion that all the world's problems never involve our prodding or inciting seems to be absent. from this administration. So to me, that's a good thing. But we'll have to see.

We'll have to see the... Again, I just think... And you guys know it more than anyone. I just think the civilizationist, unipolar world, just like nationalism, like the return of religion, so forth, it's baked in the cake.

I mean, there's not... You know, you could frustrate it, but so what? I mean, it's... This is where all the dynamics are moving, right now. You're not going to be able to put these genies back in their respective geopolitical bottles. We are in a multipolar world now, and America can have an extraordinary role. And Western Europe could have an extraordinary role in that multipolar world. But we have to actually

acknowledge that world. And that's the biggest problem I have, obviously, with the neocon. who refuses to even entertain such a notion, and then governs accordingly and ends up poking bears and possibly poking dragons in a way that I don't think we're prepared for. I just make a few quick points. Firstly, I think it is the emergence of the multipolar system, which ultimately precipitated the start of the crisis, which has culminated in Trump,

in the sense that the fact that there are centres of power which have emerged around the world, which challenge the liberal order centered on the West, that has proved impossible for the system to adapt to. And it is one of the reasons why there is now an intellectual and political challenge to it right across the west of the kind that we've never seen. It's never

easy to say quite how these events are connected to each other, but I'm no doubt that that that connection exists. As to Trump himself and the movement that he leads, well it calls itself America

first. So I think that almost by definition means that it is a repudiation of the a liberal order. And whether it actually follows through on its promise, that is the promise it made. And it was the promise which enabled it to win the election.

And one of the most interesting facts about this election, which we have just seen, is that I see all kinds of people going out, talking to people who voted for Donald Trump in the election and for the Republicans. And the very interesting fact was the time, time again, foreign policy, questions of war and peace came up. You found this with working class people in Wisconsin and all of these people who supposedly

don't think about foreign policy. They were making the connection between foreign policy, issues of war and peace, and the things that concerned them. So it's cut through in important ways and it played to Trump and by the way, again, instinctive politician as he seems to be at so many levels. I think that part of the reason why he has been so successful

as a political leader, by the way, is that he goes out and talks to people. He meets with all these huge crowds. It's not just him talking to them. It's they relating back to him. And it's this that has given him this feel

for the sentiments that exist in America, which no other political leader in the United States has to anything like the same degree. So I do think that the international side of the liberal order, which cannot function without the United States, is being repudiated and challenged in a way that has never happened before. Can I just add one other thing, which is the one thing which I hope in your next book, you're going to address, which is the incredible cynicism that has become so pervasive

in the liberal system that we see today. People who say that they offer freedom, freedom of speech, restricting freedom of speech, people who talk about how democracy is, you know, what they want to defend, wanting, in effect, to ban parties to restrict the gentleman operation of democracy. People who say that they believe

in a rules-based international order who clearly do not believe in any kind of international order based on any sort of rules that limit them and restrict them in any way. And I once wondered whether these people

were deluded or whether they were cynical. And I have to say, I've come long since to the view that there is a genuine and real, very real, very profound cynicism is this. And one of the giveaways,

and this is where Glenn, if you will forgive me saying, bringing him in here, I think has

been outstanding is the way in which today's liberals use language, the way in which they use language

in their public speeches, the way they use language in their messaging, the use of cliches

that comes up all the time, All of this speaks of an underlying deep cynicism that exists within the system. Now, I'm not saying that these people don't believe in the system, that they aren't sincere in their convictions, but it's a sincerity which is profoundly cynical about methods, about means in order to keep the structure in place. And there is deeply off-putting,

as somebody who has peripherally been involved in politics and in elections. Cynicism is something that people smell. Yeah. They sense it. They may not always understand how manipulative the language has become. But they do get a feel for it. And the fact that Trump talks in a different kind of language. language, I think, again, has been a major factor in explaining why he won.

Oh, that's about, I mean, I'm writing notes as you're talking, like, well, this would actually really make a very good book. Maybe, maybe Glenn and I can write it together. I just, a couple of your prima facie responses, because I think it's just brilliant. I'm curious on Glenn's view, it seems to me that the cynicism is inextricably linked to post-modernity. And, um, where truth is ultimately power and language is ultimately power. Everything is fundamentally power, as I understand it. You can idealize power, but nevertheless, because you've idealized power, it by definition is pragmatic and it can move in this direction or that direction.

What makes, I think, Trump break through that. I've heard scholars talk about a post-post modernity, but they didn't know quite, this was just conceptual and several years back. They didn't know quite how to explain it. Well, increasingly, it seems like a number are talking about the emergence of an archaeo-modernity, where, okay, we've got this technology, we've got extraordinary advancement and science and so forth. But at the same time, like, again, someone like a Jordan Peterson, but at the same time, we are now appreciating that at the very fundamental level of what it means to be human, that, at the archi, the archa of, of, of the human person, that's going to be, that's going to be very religious, it's going to be very civilizational,

it's going to be very cultural, customary, traditional. And so I think, again, I think you're seeing it with Elon Musk and the rise of the tech right and so forth. We're starting to see technology tradition come together and break through this this postmodern cynicism because the one thing you definitely get when you're dealing with Trump and his inner circle of musk and Vivek and so forth is the death of cynicism they are not cynics by any stretch of the imagination they know what they believe they know why they believe it and they're going to act in accordance with those beliefs for I mean he's talking about a golden age for heaven's sake so those are some initial thoughts there So we go from modernity to the cynical post-modernity, and then we come out of there instead of a post-post-modernure, which is so silly, it's actually, ironically, an archaeo-modernity, or what Guillaume Fy would call archaeo-futurism, where tradition and technology become one, in effect.

Oh, I think you're correct. I think most people now recognize that this is something that crops the media as well, which is this focus on narratives. and this is what, again, what we're doing with just telling stories instead of actually relating to facts anymore. And yeah, I think this is what Alexander was also referring to, this corruption of the language, because if they argue language is power, then, of course, if you then can shape the language as you want,

then you can use it as a tool of power. And I think the EU especially, they take in a lot of work into this. I remember in the 90s we had some British complaining they referred to it as Eurospeak because the Europeans began to make up their own language and the whole purpose was in order to push for the agenda, you change the language to essentially boil everything down to either a binary, either being legitimate or illegitimate. So if you oppose joining or transferring further sovereign powers or centralizing power in Brussels,

you know, you were anti-European. And meanwhile, if you were for it, then you were for European integration. You wanted more Europe. You wanted ever closer union. You're making the European choice, pursuing the European dream. And the alternative is always, you know, nationalism, populism, being anti-European. And the problem often we see is by manipulating the language in this way, is you end up not being able to address any of the real issues you have. for example in Europe

the British they had real concerns you know you transfer power from Brussels from London to Brussels from elected parliament to unelected bureaucracy you know is this a good idea can we have a discussion but no we just all of us brushed away

and you saw the same with Poland Hungary you know they would like to have preserved some conservative ideas and of course the big one is Russia we you know we essentially decided to create a Europe where everyone should be part of it except for the largest country.

It recreates the dividing lines. We restart the logic of the Cold War. Everything becomes zero sum. But none of this could be addressed because we've referred to it as, well, it's democracy versus authoritarianism. We believe in post-confrontational

politics. Russia has a zero-sion mindset. So we began to shift so we were never allowed effectively to address the main issues. The same with the war, by the way. It's either you support you or you're against it. And usually supporting Ukraine means, oh, let's topple the government against the will of their people.

Let's overturn their election outcome where most people wanted implementing the Minsk Agreement. And we have all this very strange, you know, we cover up everything in language. So it's very, very manipulative. Yes. Yes. Yeah, I've heard the term radical perspectivalism. How's that for a million dollar word there? Yeah, radical prospectivalism. The idea in the end that there really is only one perspective allowed.

You can have multiple perspectives within the one perspective. I like how you talk about media is not so much about news. It's about narrative. And I think that's key. And it's very interesting to show how that's sort of technology and technology and tradition meet each other. There is a very interesting field of study known as techno-populism, where it looks at how technology emerging technologies actually redistributes information technologies away from their centralized control in institutions like the legacy media and disperses and democratizes that information

among the people so that two things happen now the people get to decide as a word the masses get to decide what is newsworthy and what's not zelan says no longer editorial boards uh just uh again a credentialed few determining what is newsworthy and what's not known. Now you get to decide it because you have the same access to information as any one of those credentialed anchors. And so that's the first thing. And then the second thing is it puts the people, the populace, in the position of being able to fact check the fact checkers. So now that they have access to the same information that legacy media outlets used to have a specific, special peculiar access to, now they get to fact-check whether those narratives actually line up

with the facts as they understand them. Again, they have the same. It's not like CNN has access to information that that's not available online to pretty much anyone else. So all of that is, I think, organically fostering a populist structure. The way I understand populism is, Populism reorganizes the political divides. The political divides usually understood horizontally as left versus right, for example. But populists reimagine that political divide vertically. It's the people versus the political class, you know, the ordinary citizen versus the oligarch, the ruled versus the rulers. And it seems that we have technologies now in play that actually foster that more.

more vertical structure, and then they see that they're globalists and that they're selling out their borders, they're selling out their manufacturing and industry, recasting their cultures as bigoted, racist, all kinds of phobic. So now they see themselves, the people see themselves, as Elon Musk explicitly state, as the saviors, in effect, saviors of civilization, defenders of civilization over and against a corrupt oligarchy. that would sell that civilization out to increase their own power and affluence. So that civilizational populism, ironically, has a whole technical matrix to it that gives birth to it. So it's fascinating stuff.

How, again, I try to explain in the book so much of what's going on with MAGA and its worldwide outworkings and its similar movements is organic to the to the innate futilities inherent in the globalist structure and the liberal international order.

Just one last comment from me and then turn over to Glenn. Just one very last comment which is this and that is that

I think that there's a very strong difference with the way which Trump was received after he won in 2016.

and the way he's been received this time. I mean, in 2016, there was furious, frenetic opposition to him. I mean, the claims that he was a Russian agent, investigations launched into him, Congress basically united against him for a time. I mean, the media were uniting against him. He was very, very much one man against the whole machine. This time, it's different. He's, personally, he has a much more coherent movement behind him.

He's also got a team of people behind him who seem to be generally, sincerely supportive of his agenda. But more importantly, his opponents are bewildered and tired and they look resigned. there isn't that same passion in the opposition that there was back in 2016. So he's got space. He's got an opportunity to move things forward and to shape things. I hope he does understand that

because, of course, if he doesn't use it effectively, then things will start to become more difficult and the other side will start to say to themselves, as well, maybe we can push back in some kind of way. But I think he's got about a year to make a change. If he uses that year well, then as I said, these processes will, I mean, they may be irreversible anyway, but he will be at the forefront of making them irreversible, not just as a candidate and as an opposition leader, but as a president as well.

He's got more scope to make a difference than any president since Roosevelt, in my opinion. So just, just, just, just, just, just, just, just, just, just, just, just, just, just, just to say. And I think that the place where it begins is war and peace. And I get to make a suggestion that war and peace, basically, centers on Russia, on the war in Ukraine, but even more on Russia. and I think that he might want to take a leaf from Bismarck's book, and by the way, Roosevelt's book, Bismarck, I think, put it very well when he said, the secret of success in politics,

a good treaty with Russia. Just to say. I love it. I think you're right, because in 2016, he was largely all alone, because there was no MAGA, but it's been eight years of building up a movement. So now he has political supporters, effectively. Not just electorate, but you have your Tulsi Gabbas, JFK, Elon Musk, J.D. Vance. But I agree with what you said, though, this idea.

He needs to do it within the first year. Milton Friedman made this. He's called the tyranny of status code, that if you don't get things done, the first few weeks, the bureaucracy will set in, and there won't be much you can do anymore. And yeah, no, otherwise, I was wondering if I can, I found a great quote, actually, just to explain Trump. It's from American philosopher Richard Rorty. He wrote a book in 1998, so it's worth noting it's 26 years ago. Nonetheless, he argued what would be the consequences of unfettered liberalism or excesses of liberalism and excesses of globalization.

And he wrote, again, members of labor unions and unorganized and unscathed. field workers will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers themselves desperately afraid of being downsized are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else. At that point, something will crack. The suburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking for a strong man to vote for. Someone willing to assure them that once he's elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors

will no longer be calling the shots. Once the strongman takes office, no one can predict what will happen. I thought that was, again. Brilliant. That's 40? Richard Warding? Richard Warder. Yeah. Wow, that's that's brilliant. So prescient. Wow. So, uh, far-sighted. But it captured their sentiments, I think. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. And again, and it goes beyond just the states. I mean, he captures the sentiments of the, the, uh, the, uh, the, uh, yellow vest uprising. It's, um, or the, uh, the freedom convoy in Ottawa. Yeah. It's, it's the same, it's very much, it's its own unique response to a basically the same monster, the same problem. And that is,

this globalist managerial system that's in effect eradicating culture while at the same time taking away a sense of political participation, one's own destiny. Absolutely. I just add to that, to that list of former coal miners in Britain. The coal mining towns were the, I mean, first of all, working class people in Britain, I think it's important. to say, never like the European Union. They voted overwhelmingly against joining in 1975. Coal miners, who were a major part of the British working class, were always resistant to it. They felt very betrayed by the Labour Party in 2016 when the Labour Party basically supported Brexit, opposed Brexit, even more so afterwards. And they also felt very much. very angry about the fact that the Labour Party and the left as it has become now, from where it had previously held them as the heroes of Labour,

now rejects and scorns their entire previous contribution to industry, because they say that it's, you know, polluting and has brought about climate change. So, you know, the importance of this, which has never talked about, by the way, in the media in Britain, but the sense of betrayal amongst these working class coal mining communities and coal mining towns right across the Midlands and Northern England is not to be underestimated in terms of the political change that's taking place in Britain. So anyway, just on that last note, I myself have finished. It's a superb book, if I may sake. You have got a copy. You've got a copy there next. Oh, yes.

Oh, where? The iconic picture of Donald Trump. It's an absolutely indispensable read. It gets everything together incredibly well. Five chapters, very clearly written. It's a page turner, if I may say, if you want to understand modern politics, the politics of the United States,

the intellectual framework and the historical framework, in which these things are happening, Dr. Tully's book is a good place to start. Thank you. Thank you. I'll second that. Thank you. Thank you both of you so much.

Thank you so much for inviting me on this show. You guys know I'm a fan as well as a guest, so I'm very, very, very grateful to the both of you. Thank you. Thank you.