TRIGGERnometry - The Sacred Myths of Liberalism - Eric Kaufmann

Episode Date: June 9, 2024

Watch the Munk Debate: Is Anti-Zionism Antisemitism? Live June 17th. Join today to live stream. Click here: https://bit.ly/munk_debate Eric Kaufmann is a Canadian professor of politics. Following two decades at Birkbeck, University of London, he is now based at the University of Buckingham. He is Director of the Centre for Heterodox Social Science, a countercultural research centre (https://www.heterodoxcentre.com/ ). He is the author of several books including, most recently, ‘Taboo: How Making Race Sacred Produced a Cultural Revolution’. Available in the UK: https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/1800752660 Available in the US (with the title, ‘The Third Awokening: A 12-Point Plan for Rolling Back Progressive Extremism’): https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0D459XT8N/ Join our Premium Membership for early access, extended and ad-free content: https://triggernometry.supercast.com OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Music by: Music by: Xentric | [e-mail] | https://www.xentricapc.com/ YouTube: @xentricapc Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/#mailinglist Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media: https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod/ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod/ About TRIGGERnometry: Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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So because they are sacred, any speech that or anything you do that might be construed as offending the gods means you are excommunicated, i.e. cancelled. So minority's good, majority's bad is the mythic structure. As somebody who used to identify as liberal, essentially is watching a train go off the tracks on fire. How do we put the fire out and how do we put the train back on the track? Eric, welcome back to the show. we've had you on about 74 times because we love you so much. Your recent book that we're really looking forward to talking to you about is called Taboo.

And it's all about how making race and everything to do with race so sacred, as you say, in the subtitle of your book, has created many of the cultural trends that we've spent six years talking about on the show. And that is something that we discussed with Richard Hanania recently as well, that race is an issue that making it so, so important has caused a lot of this. That seems to me like there's quite a lot of truth on that. Flesh out the argument for us.

Okay, I will. And just before I do that, I should say that the U.S. title is entitled The Third Awakening, 12-point Plan for Rolling Back Progressive Extremism, and that sort of releases a bit earlier. But, okay, let's deal with the... I can see why you chose that subtitle for America.

Right, right, exactly. Well, we'll get back to why it's the third awakening, And I think that's important as well. But anyway, in terms of taboo, yeah. So I'm sort of arguing that taboo, the idea of the anti-racism taboo, which is in many ways a good thing. But that emerges in the mid-60s in the US. And that's like the big bang of our moral universe.

So you should, yeah. Sorry to jump in. Just for clarity, define what you mean by the anti-racist taboo exactly. Because to most people, the idea that we shouldn't be racist is pretty good. Yes. Right. So we definitely want a norm against racism, but a taboo which evokes a disgust reaction, which doesn't have a bounds as to what, how you define racism, right? So that immediately means you can stretch the definition out to include. Now we're at where if you mispronounce somebody's

surname or if you are hiking, for example, and everybody's white, that's racist. So we have this unbounded sacredness around this particular norm. And that's what's important. Not that you have a norm against racism. But what's interesting is the suddenness. You know, I write in my book about, you know, Paul Kroggman did an article in the New York Times where he said, you know, when he was growing up in Long Island, you know, suddenly all these houses which had these little black coachman figures on their gates, you know,

suddenly repainted them white. And it happened almost like that one summer, mid-60s. That is kind of like a Big Bang moment. And what we're living through is, I think, the aftermath of that explosion, just the way our universe is the aftermath of the Big Bang, right? Everything's kind of moving outwards. And so similarly with the race taboo as a Big Bang, it then means you have this sacredness around race. And that can be stretched to gender, to sexuality. It can be, you know, pushed out to include microaggressions such as, you know, you know,

saying anyone can make it in America or going skiing or whatever and or attacks on on white people white culture everything's whiteness white supremacy whatever that is therefore I think the key and it's this sacredness so when I define woke for example my argument is that the definition one sentence definition of woke making sacred of historically marginalized race gender sexual identity groups. The making sacred bit comes from that big bang. Now, feminists borrowed this sacredness from the original civil rights anti-racist movement, and then homophobia, transphobia, sort of becomes part of that. They tried with fatness and deafness. Didn't really work. Just again, to define things, because I think this is a really interesting point to flesh out.

When you say making sacred, what do we mean by that exactly? Well, making sacred means that this is sort of an object of devotion that. So if I were to say anything that insulted the gods, if I say anything that might be perceived as offensive to a member of a totemic group, right, if I say one of those microaggressions such as anyone could make it in America, that could be construed by an ultra-sensitive person who's reading you in the worst way as racist somehow or offensive. to say an African American. So because they are sacred, any speech that or anything you do that might be construed as

offending the gods means you are excommunicated, i.e. canceled, fired, shunned, your reputation is smeared. So it's the sacredness that sort of explains the overreaction and the very black and white way of viewing. So the difference being, if I say, I don't know, I don't like your trousers, that's a personal insult, whereas if I say something along these lines, then I'm blaspheming against the religion, if you like. And hence the very, very harsh reaction that you'd get that I might not get if I insulted your trousers. Right, right. Or even if you made fun of, you know, a French person

or an Italian. And so, and the other thing is there's no proportionality. So in law, you know, there's a first offense, a second offense. There is, you know, how bad was the, you know, the offense. That doesn't exist with this. You know, there's just racism. It's not worse racism. It's not second, third offense, racism. It's just, you know, you contravened. You stepped over the red line, and now you're out and you're ostracized.

And so, and there's no coming back. There's no redemption. So it's this very sort of black and white way of viewing the world, whereas the law is much more shades of gray, much more nuance, accepts the world's a complicated place. And that's why the sacredness thing is so important. And that's why it's so powerful. It's kind of like kryptonite, you know,

in the movie Superman, where you've got this very powerful stuff. And so other identity groups want some of that power because then it becomes useful to use also against your enemies. And that power that comes out of that Big Bang is now spreading through our moral order and defining our moral order and ordering it. And I think until we tame the power of this kryptonite, I would argue, we're not going to ultimately solve

the problem of, let's say, pressures on free speech, for example, or on merit or any of the problems that we associate with woke, we're not going to be able to address those until we start to sort of put that sacredness back in its box and say, no, let's actually have racism or sexism or any of these other isms that grow out of that big bang. They need to behave more like jurisprudence in law where you have proportionality and rationality, not irrationality. Eric, how much of this is white guilt?

Well, white guilt is absolutely key and absolutely central. And I should mention, by the way, Shelby Steele, of course, the African-American classical liberal-stroke conservative, who was just brilliant, who had a book of that name. And Steele's argument was that in this mid-60s, you had a sudden shift in moral and cultural authority from white America to black America. He lived as a sort of black man through Jim Crow segregation and through the civil rights period, and he just noticed this sudden change, whereas before the black man had to defer to the white man, and now suddenly the white man is deferring to the black man because their moral authority. And then he said, well, that actually means that the moral authority of the U.S., its entire constitutional history, all of a sudden gone overnight,

and the whole game becomes trying to virtue signal that you're not one of the bad white people that you are actually not fallen. You have some moral legitimacy by being an ally to the black people. And that's where affirmative action comes from. It's actually not about helping black people. It's actually about virtue signaling that you're not racist. The whole policy is a big virtue signal,

according to Shelby Steele. And I think that's crucial. The other thing I'd say is crucial about white guilt is this is not actually a cultural Marxist thing. It's got nothing to do with Marcuse and critical theory and any of that. This is coming out of liberalism, LBJ, the civil rights movement, which is a liberal movement, and then very quickly the white guilt comes in in the mid-60s and is kind of becomes part of liberalism. So this is about liberalism and it is not about Marxism, actually in the beginning.

Eric, where do you stand on this argument? Because there's a lot of conservatives who've come on the show and made the point, look, this is just the, this is just what happens with liberalism. Eventually you get to this point. And there's nothing that you can really do about it. And that's why conservatism is brilliant.

Obviously, I'm being slightly facetious. But you get... But that's the argument. James Orr, for example. So that's the argument. Where would you stand on that argument? So my take is somewhat different. I think you've got two things.

You've got liberal principles, classical liberal principles, which I think are sound and to be aspired to. And then you have the liberal identity. So I think these are separate things. And it's very important to understand that in the 20th century, what we get is a buildup of the liberal identity. And that identity essentially is largely about egalitarian myths, fighting against, you know, racism, sexism. Earlier it was maybe anti-Catholicism. And so all of the myths that build up

around liberalism are about extending the virtues of liberalism to marginalized groups. Now, of course, that's hugely important, and I would support that. But what it means is that all of your heroes, your mythical episodes, it could be the civil rights movement, for example. It could be, you know, the Holocaust and slavery. So essentially, the The way this set of myths is constructed is you are a virtuous person you're fighting for more or less equal rights. That means more equality. And so what that's, it winds up in a place that says the majority is to be feared, it's

always just one step away from Jim Crow and fascism and women back in the home and gays in the closet. And that, so you have a fear of the majority and you have warm, fuzzy feelings and a romanticized view of minority. So minority's good, majority's bad. is the mythic structure. It's a bit like nationalism where you have a certain set of myths and symbols

and heroes. So the whole liberal identity is essentially egalitarian and has no bounds on how far it can go. And that's why it's gone in such a sort of extreme direction. And so liberalism has become virulent and has become extreme

in towards the left where it's met the cultural Marxists. But liberal principles, I think, are salvageable, but liberalism as a whole needs to be really reformed and that kind of knee-jerk emotional reflex, which is really tied to the liberal identity and myths, the emotional reflex to attack and fear majorities

and feel warm and fuzzy feelings towards minorities and see them as virtuous and more moral and have deeper spiritual insight than anybody else, that whole kind of emotional reflex needs taming in order to get back to a liberalism that is in line with liberal principles. And when I say classical liberal, I mean classical liberalism,

this idea of John Stuart Mill, John Locke type of liberalism in which it's about, you know, you have your, you know, my right to swing my fist, ends at your nose. That kind of procedural liberalism, I think, is, is,

and now Patrick Danine and some of the post-liberals will say that once you have this emphasis on the individual, it'll automatically flip over into emphasizing ideals such as, you know, you have to, like, diversity and change and multiculturals. I don't think that's necessarily the case.

I think you can have a liberalism that has, it's a liberal structure and liberal procedures, but within that you can have conservative values, some conservative values and some more individualistic values in balance. I think that's very much possible. So that's where I kind of depart from the post-liberals like Denny's. or Danina Vermeul or some of these people who say that, you know, there's no salvaging liberalism. I think there is. And I mean, I think even East Asia, you know, it is a version of liberalism that they have in Korea and Japan.

And I just think it's a more sane version in many ways than what we're, where we're at in the West, where the culture has kind of metastasized in this very sort of, you know, well, I guess, maladaptive direction. It's a point that I actually really agree with. Because as somebody who used to identify as liberal, seeing what's happened to people that used to be in my tribe, essentially it's like watching a train go off the tracks on fire. So if we're going to use that metaphor, how do we put the fire out and how do we put the train back on the track? Because to an outside observer, I'm like, it's hurtling towards a cliff at the moment. I'm not sure if we're going to be able to get it back.

Yeah, I mean, clearly we have some liberals who see the problems, you know, with cancel culture, who see the problems with, you know, attacking everything as white supremacy and essentially these moral panics, the most extreme of which, by the way, is the Canadian mass graves hoax of this idea that there were mass graves and that the entire Canadian nation state is genocidal. I mean, this is insane and yet it's been embraced by almost the entire Canadian political class. But yeah, so people are kind of waking up to some of this. How do we reform it? I ultimately think we do need to, I think a Cold War framing is not a bad way of thinking about it.

So in the Cold War, we had economic socialism and economic freedom. And even though liberals are behind a lot of the problems, they've kind of met the post-Marxist, post-cultural Marxist, if you like, on the same terrain and all the EDI, all the EDI, all the sort of speech codes and cancellation is a result of the fusion of the sort of left liberals with the cultural Marxists. Now, what we need to do is have a sort of cultural version of the Cold War that says we've got cultural socialism, right, which is about, you know, we're going to have equal representation in the humanities curriculum in history, in mathematics, on the stage, and everything's

got to be equal, quotas, affirmative action. But that's one view of the world. And then cultural freedom, cultural liberalism, is the alternative view. So as with the Cold War, we have a cultural version of that conflict, which says, no, we prize beauty, excellence, rationality, objective truth, due process, equal treatment, all of that, and that's our vision.

And I think really it's about mobilizing this new reformed kind of liberalism that says, actually what we want is human flourishing. And we don't just want to optimize for equality and emotional harm protection for these groups. Now, there's some of that. We can do some of that. Just as with economics, we can have a welfare state.

We can have some redistribution. That's part of the good society. But we have to actually be able to criticize the excesses of quotas, the excesses of speech codes, the excesses of statute toppling, and completely distorted readings of history. in order to achieve the good society. So yeah, that is kind of, I think in terms of the post-woke ideal,

it has to be that sort of society of human flourishing. So just to use another metaphor, economists will often use this metaphor of, you know, you have a pie and it's cut up in a very equal way. The more equally you cut up the pie, the smaller the pie. The more you grow the pie, the more unequal to slices. You want to have some equality there, but you also want to allow that pie to grow.

In order to allow it to grow, you've got to allow the better people to accumulate capital and invest. Well, you've now used a trigger word, which is where I was going to take this conversation anyway, because you talk about the sacred myths of liberalism. I think that the most sacred now and the one that causes the most impact and therefore the most problems is the idea of equality. Because the problem with that, and you just said there are better people, which is, giving the game away, right? This is why I call it a trigger word, because I think we live in a society, I think it's fair to say, that has swallowed the idea that equality is a sacred

objective, hook, line, and sinker, which is fine if what you mean by equality is people should not be impeded in their ability to realize their potential. But let's be honest, that is not what we mean by equality in modern society. What we mean is if different groups, you know, if different happen to have different outcomes, that means there's inequality going on. And that's how most people now think, whether we like it or not. I mean, Thomas Sol in his last book, Social Justice fallacies, he talks about the fact, like, inequality between groups is not the norm. It's like inevitable. So he, you know, he breaks down the fact that almost every major brewery in the world was founded by Germans, including Tsint Tao. Right. And groups of a

accumulated over centuries and sometimes even millennia, certain aptitudes that happen to be a product of historical and cultural and genetic factors. So, you know, white people overrepresented in ice hockey and black people are, and on and on. Canadians, by the way. As a hockey player myself. Exactly. Yeah. Okay. So my point is this, as long as people are likely to be triggered by you using the phrase better people, which they will be, and as long as this myth of, of equality between groups, men, women, black, whatever exists. I just don't see how you get out from under that

to the point that you made so well, which is we gotta grow the bloody pie. Right. Well, I mean, I think that when it comes to the economy, the defeat of communism, I think people accept, not every individual must have exactly the same income and wealth. And of course, we wanna have some redistribution. I actually think in the economy,

people accept that there is this trade-off and they accept there's a certain amount of inequality that is normal and acceptable in an economy. I don't think people have made that connection to culture. So where they would accept inequality amongst individuals economically, they would not accept inequality between men and women between different racial groups, for example. I mean, they will accept inequality between, for example, West Africans and West Indians within the black group. That's fine.

And actually that's interesting because if you go to Harvard or any of these Ivy League schools, you know, black Americans of slave ancestry are grossly underrepresented within the black population. And it's mainly people of immigrant origins, actually, or their descendants. Like Claudine Gay would be an example of that. No one cares about that. They care about certain categories. Race, gender, you know, how many men and women? That's the kind of category that they care about. And that's one of the problems I think is because liberalism never, I mean, liberalism actually isn't, I don't think, friendly to communism, command and control everyone who must have the same.

So liberalism recognizes limits on the economic redistribution side. It doesn't recognize any limits on gender. You know, why aren't there X percent, 50 percent women CEOs? Why aren't there 50 percent women engineers? It's always we're underrepresented and that's a problem. Affirmative action. same thing. Why is the African-American share not at 13% at Harvard or at any these other institutions? So it's extreme and radical. Liberalism is radical and extreme when it comes to culture. And I think that's an important distinction. It has not accepted that there is a natural rate of inequality. Just as there is a natural rate of inequality in the economy, we don't expect everyone to have the same wealth. They do not accept that there is a natural inequality when it comes to groups being represented in different endeavors, particularly high status occupations or universities.

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backed by 50 years of experience delivering fresh flowers, so you can feel confident sending something that lands. Show up for her with double blooms, at 1,800flowers.com slash Spotify. That's 1,800flowers.com slash Spotify. Well, where I might disagree a little bit is I do think, I don't think it's true in the U.S. because the U.S. idea of free markets is so strong still. But in the U.K., I think increasingly and to some extent in the U.S., the idea that people are poor because they've been let down by the system is universally believed. And so that's why we have the highest tax burden for God

knows how many years under a conservative government, et cetera, because anytime anything goes wrong, and you've seen this over the last few years, if there's a global pandemic, you know, why hasn't the government done more? If the gas prices go up, why hasn't the government done more? If this has happened, why hasn't the government done more? And that's because I think increasingly, even on the economic side now, we're buying into this idea that inequality is unnatural. I mean, I don't know if I agree with you. I mean, I think if you look at the survey data on this stuff. Tell us. Well, I mean, for example, younger generations are not especially redistributionist economically the way they are woke culturally. So it's really the cultural

stuff that's gone radical. I mean, I'm not actually that worried about us moving to a sort of command and control economy. I mean, if you just look in this country, for example, when, you know, I just think that markets, you know, the rating agencies for government borrowing, those are all things that'll keep a check on some of these things. People don't want to pay You know, that yes, they want more government spending on themselves, but they also don't want to pay more tax Yeah, but half the country doesn't pay tax. I know they don't, but I still think... And they're the ones that want more tax?

No, in fact, if you run surveys, there aren't a lot of people favoring higher taxes. Really? No. Okay. Interesting. So I don't really, I'm not that worried about the economic stuff. I mean, we may go to slightly higher taxes or slightly lower. I think that struggle, people understand that, you know, government crowds out investment in their

therefore crowds out growth, and therefore we need growth. I think people accept that we need growth so that there's kind of a debate over where should the tax burden be to optimize the system. Okay, that's fine. That's the kind of debate we need on the cultural side. We need to be able to say, essentially, if we go for cultural equity, we're going to have cultural poverty. Just the same way, if we go for economic equity, we're in economic poverty. We don't have that debate on the cultural side. So if we actually say there's got to be equal representation in every film, every movie, every book,

every humanities course, we're going to have worse quality literature and art. We don't have that debate, right? If we cast a Shakespeare play or Shakespeare movie and the characters are, you know, racially unrepresentative and the gender roles are completely all over the place, it's just going to be less powerful, less evocative. No one has that debate. You're not allowed to have that debate. We need to be having that debate about excellence and growth of the cultural pie versus equity on the cultural side. You know, we can have a bit of equity. You know, we can have some equity

and some mixing up of gender roles, but not too much. And likewise, you know, we're going to have some female engineers, but it's never going to be 50-50. We have to accept a certain level of inequality as optimal. We're not there yet. And that's what I'm saying is that we need to be having that discussion about cultural wealth

and human flourishing on the cultural side. I'm not that worried about the economics, honestly, but on the cultural side, we're just going crazy. Eric, let's bring it back to the human element of it. And we're sitting here in a room and you're making very good points and we're all nodding and we're all agreeing. Right. However, you need courage in order for these changes to be made, to be made. For these cultural movements to be slowed down, halted, reversed, changing of direction.

And what I see, and correct me if I'm wrong, is a fundamental lack of courage in our society. Yes. I mean, I agree with you, and I think that to the extent we can encourage people to take a chance, I think we have to do that. People have to be pushing the boundaries. If there are new buzzwords, PC buzzwords, you know, differently able, whatever. I mean, Latinx, push back against them. So, yeah, I definitely think people need to resist as much as they can, ask questions in your EDI session. I am also realistic enough to know that people, you know, in the current dispensation, where you stand to lose your job, your reputation.

I don't expect people to make that kind of sacrifice. So there will be a few people who are able to do that. But in every era, I just don't think that's a realistic necessarily way forward. Now, therefore, and I think this is probably where I differ from, people who are, who I call classical liberals of the sort of David French, Greg Lukianov, many in the intellectual dark web actually, who would say, no, we can't use government, we have to use the law and moral exhortation, and people can do things in their local area, all of which I agree with, by the way. But I think we need to use government because government

is the only institution that conservatives or classical liberals can hope to control all of the other institutions, especially the cultural ones, are captured, and that's foundations and universities and schools and civil service, for example, government. So elected government needs to be used to try and break into these middle-level institutions, whether that be quangos, the so-called deep state or blob, whatever you want to call it, the kind of institutions, the schools. And so that means a couple of things. I mean, one thing is political neutrality in all public sector institutions needs to be enforced.

So all of the critical race theory EDI trainings, that's got to be gone. The schools, you've got to enforce non-indroctrination and gender ideology, critical race theory. That's probably one of the most urgent things we need to do. Because one of the studies I did with Zach Goldberg at the Manhattan Institute, we just showed the huge impact that this critical race and gender ideology is having on young people in moving them in a woke direction. And they really are in a woke direction. I mean, just to throw a couple of examples. One, should J.K. Rowling be dropped by your publisher? The Zoomers are split on that. Anyone over 50 is like 3 or 4% at most. So there's a big problem.

What are the stats for Zoomers? Zoomers, it's 50% of those who have an opinion think she should be dropped by your publisher. Another stat, well, Let's just look at a few stats, for example. If a professor says something that offends students, should that professor be reported to the administration? Over 70% of students are saying yes to that question. James DeMore, should he have been fired, two-thirds, in both Britain and America of the Zoomers,

say yes, where it's only a quarter to a third of anyone over 45. So when people say, oh, well, you know, woke has peaked and it's fading and all this sort of seats, it'll be like McCarthyism. no, you've got a generation coming in that will be the medium voter, the median employee. Those people are going to upend the classical liberal system. And I think we really, as a matter of urgency, have to be focusing on particularly K to 12,

those school years, reforming the system, getting the progressive ideology out of the schools. That's got to be job number one. Really, at this point, by the time they come to university, they're already indoctrinated. Universities don't actually make that much difference anymore in terms of shaping young people, but the schools. And there, I would say, you know, in the U.S., they're furthest out in front,

but in Britain they've completely, you know, taking their eye off that ball. And they're going to pay for, really, the right and conservatives and classical liberals are going to pay for that down the road. How have they taken their eye off the ball? That's interesting. Well, you know, if you look at this country, for example, I mean, Canada is another example I could talk about. there's just been no attention to schools. There's been this view that, yeah, I mean, once they leave school and get a job and have a family,

they'll just be conservatives, you know. I mean, it's utterly naive. People's worldviews are being shaped in part. Also, social media has got a huge impact, but schools are making an impact as well as our study showed. You take the government in this country, you know, there is a law in the books that says you cannot indoctrinate in schools. Well, the radical teachers say, oh, that means we can't say vote for the Labor Party. But, yeah, we can say that, you know, your gender is a choice and sex is a spectrum and, you know, Britain is a racist country. That's not political.

You see, the way you would, if you were a serious government, you know, maybe if Ron DeSantis was running Britain, you would have a 50, not a one or two paragraph set of guidance for educators, but you have 15 pages. And you would in fine detail specify that this is racism when you call somebody the N-word. On the other hand, saying, you know, saying the British Empire did many good things, that's not racism. There's no such systemic racism is considered political. You can't teach that as fact. 15 pages so that you take out any of the ambiguity and you get rid of any loopholes. That would be a serious government. And you would have a review, a report to parliament.

you would embed this in the inspection system, you would look at teacher training and reform it, all of that would have to happen. If you were serious about changing the messages that kids are getting, that hasn't happened here at all. I mean, the Tories are completely useless on this stuff. It's very half-hearted.

Yeah. And it's the same, by the way, I mean, in Canada where they're just starting to sort of mention, well, you know, you should inform parents if the kid changes their pronouns, you know, that's like a really radical thing. No seriousness in terms of school reform. And I think it's good.

And this idea of school choice that that's going to fix it, I think it's a pipe dream, by the way. Most people choose schools on the basis of how well they do in various rankings and they don't have any information about what's being taught. So I think some conservatives think, oh yeah, we're just going to have more school choice and that's going to fix it and people will vote with their feet. I don't believe that at all. I think you're going to have to get your hands dirty. You're going to have to use government intervention in the way people are going to

People like DeSantis are in Florida, I think that's the only way to address this. And look, we're talking about government intervention, and I agree with you. I think, for instance, universities that don't uphold the principles of free speech should be defunded because they need that level of threat in order for them to actually implement some changes. The problem comes, Eric, is we're looking at the general election. What are you going to do? Well, I think Britain obviously is going to, Labor's going to win.

I think that's, I know I've been on a number of, in a number of venues where it's all Tories and they're all saying labor's going to. So, yeah, I think that's a foregone conclusion in a way. Wokism, I think, will be, I mean, the restraints will be off. And I think in the institutions, it'll go even more extreme. And the schools will have, you know, no oversight. And they'll, I mean, not that the Tories were doing much, but they were at least, making noise and exercising a small amount of restraint. I think those restraints will be off. So yeah, I think Britain is going to have a tough five years, honestly, and I just don't know

what you do about that. But I do think that with the next turn of the wheel, the next government's going to have, the next conservative government is going to have to be a lot more focused on culture, a lot more serious, and a lot more focused on telling people why it matters, because the everyday person often only apprehends this at a distance. And it needs to be bound up. And this is one of the points in my book is that if you want to explain higher crime rates, higher rates of homelessness, the inability to control borders, falling educational standards, the inability to recruit for the police and the military, all of these things are linked to the rise of woke. They're all linked to the culture wars,

right? Because if you can't discuss immigration because of taboos that are politically correct taboos, which are connected again to the sacredness of race, if you cannot discuss immigration, properly and you cannot then take the steps necessary in order to control your borders and control the numbers. All of these things are connected. I don't think politicians have yet done that. And I guess that's sort of the next step to see which leader is able to make that link to those everyday issues and the culture wars. The way, for example, Farage in this country made the link between the EU something nobody cared about and immigration, something people did care about. Those kinds of links have to be made between the culture war, which is, again, a relatively low, salience, low priority issue for a lot of voters, and the high priority issues like immigration and crime. They have to be brought together to actually get more serious focus from politicians on things like the content of education. And Eric, and coming back to the subject of your book, one of the things I was going to ask you about, you know, this idea that culturally we have trouble.

finding the right response to certain transgressions. Jimmy Carr, when we had him on, said something very interesting, he said, you can't forgive what you can't punish. And I find that an interesting way of looking at it, because, I mean, Me Too was a good example of this, right? There were certain people who absolutely needed to be outed and dealt with.

But even in many of those cases, there was no legal recourse. And so some people ended up being, like a Louis C.K is a good example, right? A guy basically, according to what's happened, doesn't commit a crime. Many of us would look at that and go, oh, like, why are you doing that? But it's not a crime. And so he's then kind of stuck in limber for a very long time.

It's almost like he would have been better off committing a crime for which he could be punished under the law. And then he comes out and goes, well, I've served my time. Now let me crack on with my career. And it seems like with a lot of these cultural conversations, it's like if you, use the wrong word to describe a person of a certain ethnicity or whatever. Like, you talked about how it's completely out of proportion. And do you think it's possible that the reason that things are out of proportion is there is no, like, agreed response that we should have to somebody that says the wrong thing?

Yes, I think that's a really good point. I mean, one of the things I've argued for is a kind of almost like a task, online task force that would be like a Supreme Court, right, that would have a kind of normative jurisprudence like legal jurisprudence that would say, well, this was a transgression, but it wasn't a bad one, and it's a first offense,

and so the appropriate punishment should be X, or the way we should view this should be X. I mean, that would be ideal, because what we have is like a wild west of people liking tweets and dogpiling people, and, you know, I mean, I think so many of these problems come out of the fact that a lot of these,

the thrust that eventually got us to woke, a lot of these values were good ones. You know, liberalism, humanitarianism, egalitarianism, you know, they are good values in a way, but it's like anything, they go too far. And there is no limits. It's a bit, I can use the metaphor of hockey, which I like to play, any Canadians who are watching.

There's about three. Yeah, there's about the read. But if you imagine, you know, if you call no penalties, you've got, you know, a slap shot situation and people are going to be brawling and gooning. So you need to have some penalties to make the game work. But what if the referee is calling everything and people are diving

when there's nothing wrong? That's the other extreme. And so we actually have to have some pushback to prevent over-policing, over-refereeing, over-penalizing. And we haven't got that really on a lot of, particularly around racism, sexism, homophobia. We have no sort of limiting principle the other way.

So we can't get to an optimum. All we can do is move more. and more and more to the liberal left. And that's really what I, and the issue that I'm trying to raise is, well, if we have more strength behind this idea of cultural wealth, human flourishing, we can sort of say, well, for human flourishing to work and for cultural wealth to happen, you can go this far and no further. You know, Louis C.K., you can wrap him, have his hand slap, but you can't actually cancel

him. Because if you try and cancel him and not hire him, you're actually leading us to a worse place in terms of you're impoverishing the culture, you're damaging human flourishing. That kind of narrative, just the way if someone said we want to hike taxes up to 90%, you would say, well, we're going to kill the economy. And likewise, if you want to do extreme penalties for minor transgressions, you're going to kill the culture. We need to have some kind of response like that to kind of, it's like the referee. oh no, you're blowing too many penalties or this guy's taking too many dives. Yeah. Well, do you think that maybe has happened and you probably have a study that this proves what I'm about to say?

That would be consistent with the theme of this interview. But I'm curious because I guess the boy who cried wolf thing, particularly with the mainstream media, seems to me to have definitely happened to some extent where you go, oh, someone's been in the news because they say, I don't give it. Like a lot of people are now just going, yeah, whatever. Like, I don't. Everyone's far right now. Do you know what I mean? Is that, do you think that effect is taking place where people are sort of taking these allegations less seriously as a result of them being just so spurious and so multiple at this point? Well, I mean, yes. And there's no

question that we've seen. We've seen also cutbacks in DEI and corporations and the anti-ESG politics and all these sorts of things. But I sort of see that as pruning. back the Bush, the next time, maybe a few years down the line where we have a white cop killing a black person caught on video, whatever it is, I think this thing can surge again. And I think actually one of the reasons my book in the U.S. is entitled The Third Awakening is because we really, what you see, and we can track this in use of the terms like racist and sexist. There's a surge of energy in the late 60s around this, these terms you can track it in big data.

It then kind of goes down a bit and then it settles out. And then we have political correctness early 90s, late 80s, early 90s, another surge speech codes. And we have, hey, ho, Western Civ has got to go and all of that. And then, oh, political correctness, that wasn't at a joke from the 90s, right? It went away. Well, it didn't go away. A lot of these things became institutionalized and still continued to metastasize and grow. And then in the 2010s, boom, it's the third awakening.

I think we're now in a period where, yeah, it's had a sort of slight, downfall, but it's still, we've still got DEI bureaucracies. These are still the paramount values in high society and elite culture. Those have not been displaced. So I think they are poised for another wave. And in any case, I think that they're just too institutionalized in elite institutions. So if you look at cancellation figures, they're down. The number of profits that are being attacked and fired is down.

But no platformings, they went down and had gone up again. and the Israel-Palestine thing, suddenly they're back up again. I don't think for a minute that Woke has been vanquished. I think it's sort of somewhat in abeyance, but it's still at a much higher level than it was, even in the early 2000s.

And I think, again, the young population are the carriers of these values, and when they become, in 20 years, the median voter and corporate leaders, I shuddered to think where we're going to be. Choice hotels get you more of what you value. Here's a little tune to help you remember. Same drive, different day.

Don't you wish you were getting away? Pack your bags and come on through. Texas, Ohio, Alaska, we're up there too. Comfort in, it's calling your name. Save on the stay. Oh, and free waffles are yours to claim. Well, I hope you like my little song, book direct at sourcehiltails.com. Eric, so let me do a push back to you.

And let's talk about culture for a minute and music. So if you take the music scene, you tend to, let's take Prague Rock, very overblown, very pompous, very inward-looking seven-minute, you know, electric keyboard solos. What comes after Prague Rock, it's punk. And punk is very much, you know, everything pared down, every, you know, things are, songs are very short, sharp, they're very blunt, they're very profane as well. they challenge cultural norms. Do you not think that we could see young people having a punk movement against this kind of, against this extreme version of liberalism that we now see?

Yeah, I do. Absolutely. I mean, I think, and you're already seeing it, right? I mean, one of the interesting things, of course, is that there's a big gender split, that young men are not that different from older men. I mean, actually in their attitudes, there's not a lot of difference there. It's the young women where we see a big,

difference. Now, so what is going on there is going to be really interesting. I think you're already seeing that pushback. I mean, Gen Z, they really don't like cancel culture. My worry, though, is they haven't really been inculcated in, or at least given a set of alternative values to equality and emotional harm protection for minority groups. That's still the dominant value that most of them have. So there is, now, the young, particularly young men are rebelling against the overbearing nature and the lack of freedom in this. And I think that's a good, thing. But that's going to need more flesh on the bones for it to actually become enduring so that it gets into our institutions and into our high culture. And that's what I worry

about is I just don't know that they have any other values than those left liberal ones, whose extreme version has landed us in this predicament. Because if you look at cultural movements, a lot of the time, and we go back to music or art, they kind of feel like they spring from nowhere. It's fringe and then it's mainstream. So with this interview and with you saying, I can't predict or I don't know where it's going to come from, isn't that the way pushbacks movements have always worked? No one really knows what the next thing is going to be and all of a sudden it appears. And then people can look at it retrospectively and go, oh, we can see now that blah, blah, blah, and da-da-da-da-da-da. But at the moment, no one really could see the way the culture was going to

move. And by the way, there's potentially a good example of this. If you look at the comedians who are really going big in America, they're all pushing back against this stuff. You know, Shane Gillis doesn't get on SNL because he said something offensive. And now he's gone full circle, and he's back on SNL because they basically need someone of his caliber in order to do it, right? You know, Rogan, lots of other people that Theo Voge. These are not people who are like woke, you know what I mean? Right. And they are the cool ones.

So culturally, I guess is, you know, the question is, is there a possibility that there is this pushback now coming? Yeah, I think you're right. And I don't know if it's male culture or if it transcends the gender. But yeah, I think you're right to some degree. But I guess I'm sort of looking in the broader sweep in terms of what's taught in universities, what's in the theaters, what's in the movies. You know, I'd say really, if you were to take the history of Western art and culture from about 1900, I would say it's largely, not entirely, but it's largely been a history of liberal or left movements.

Starting with, I mean, World War I is a bit of a turning point. You know, you still had some, you know, fascist intellectuals. And actually in Europe, obviously, you did have, you know, conservative intellectuals right up until World War II. They had some obviously pretty bad ideas. But, but. Put very mildly. But on the other hand, certainly since World War II, but arguably even World War I, you know, you read Orwell, he's writing in 1941. He's saying since 1930, the intelligence has been on the left. And this is a kind of leftist himself. So for a very long time, we've had the intellectuals being on the left. I mean, really, you'd have to go back to the romantic movement, romantic nationalism, as a kind of.

of major conservative movement in the culture. So we haven't really had that. You know, yes, we've had the Islamic revival. We've had cultural movements outside the West that are clearly conservative, but not really within the West, and certainly if you're talking about the high culture, it's been almost a hundred years or over a hundred years where it's been moving in one direction only. And that's one of the reasons why I'm thinking, you know, I'm skeptical of this sort of conservative direction.

I mean, there may be a sort of offshoot, and there may be a sort of offshoot, and there's There may be people that are pushing back in a certain way, maybe on the fringe. Maybe it's not fringe, but it's not the main thrust of the culture. The main thrust of the culture is, again, equal outcomes, harm protection for minorities. That's the driver. And it's been the driver for a very long time. I mean, before we were talking about race, we were talking about European, like in the U.S. case, it was about Catholics and Jewish ethnic groups and pluralism instead of sort of wasp centrism.

I mean, that was the discourse in the sort of early, mid-20th century. So we've kind of for a very long time had the major values in the culture being focused on, you know, liberalism, humanitarianism, egalitarianism. And I guess one of the questions I have is, are we really going to see a movement against that? You know, it's been moving, at least that's my interpretation. I don't see too many backs and force. I see a largely unidirection. Yeah, and by the way, how many punks are running big institutions, you know, ultimately, right? Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's a good point.

I don't discount it. You know, it's not impossible. And maybe the left liberal juggernaut has come to the end of the line after 100 years and maybe it'll die on the hill called Trans. I mean, you know, maybe it's just become so absurd that enough people see it. And that starts the sort of movement back in the other direction after 100 years. So that's possible. But if I just look at the attitudes of the kind of zoomers,

in the surveys that we see. Have you got more data stuff to share with us from the Zoomers? Is there anything else you can tell us? Well, I mean, we can take the fire survey, 55,000 student surveys, you know, should somebody who thinks abortion should be banned be allowed to speak on campus?

55,000 students are asked this. It's a representative sample. Yeah, it leans to the top 20% perhaps of the student population, but still only about less than 20%, I think so of 10 to 15% of students would say, I definitely agree that someone who thinks abortion should be banned

should be allowed to speak on a campus. 10 to 15% with, and similarly, if we say someone who says that transgender is a mental disorder, should they be allowed to speak on campus? 85% would say no. massive numbers. If someone says Black Lives Matters a hate group, you know, 70% would be very against

letting somebody who has that view come onto campus. These are just a few examples, right? And that sort of shows you that the vast majority, for these people, it's just taken for granted. Of course they're not allowed to speak. I mean, isn't that hate speech? Isn't that harmful? It's not about, you know, I can't be offended.

If I'm offended, if a student is offended in class, of course they should report the professor. 70% agree with that. So we've got a majority who are holding these very illiberal views. And we've now got data actually going back to the 70s. So six questions are asked in the general social survey. You know, should a militarist be allowed to speak, homosexual allowed to speak, a communist, a racist? You know, you've had these six questions asked since the 70s.

And what you see is for a long time the greater toleration for all six speakers. And then sometime in the sort of 1990s, actually. So this starts quite early, and it starts with the boomers, actually. It's the one about racist speaking diverges from the other five categories. And that's continued. So the identity categories on race, sex, sexuality have diverged from the others. And it's a divergence that's got a lot of momentum behind it, and it's just getting more and more extreme. And so that's my worry is that these long-term trends are not favoring anti-woke.

Racists are the new homosexuals. is what you're saying. Really interesting, Eric. I suppose the one question that many people will have listening, and I'm sure you have data on this as well, is aren't young people always a bit stupid and a bit extremist and a bit utopian and a bit blah, blah, blah, and then, as you said, they go to get a job, they get married, they have kids, and then they sort of become normal again. Right. Well, yeah, and I guess the retort to that is to say, well, we can look at 18-year-olds in 1980, 1990, 2015, 2020. And comparing an 18-year-old in even 2000 to 2016, asking them the same questions that we put to them in 2000 shows an enormous shift from a pro-free speech orientation.

Like if people should be allowed to say something offensive, there's a study at Smith College, for example, he asked exactly the same question in 2016 as in 2000. Completely different answers. So that's an 18-year-old. I guess my view is that young people were very different in the past than young people today when it comes to offensive speech. That today the priority is more not hurting feelings rather than being allowed to say what you want. That balance is shifted. And as they take those mores into the workplace, I think they're going to change society.

I think it'll be massive. And we've really got to try and turn this around at the school level when they're young. that's when you've got to get them. Whereas the cultural socialists have got to them and have changed, you know, this is sort of, you know, what Rufo talks about the critical pedagogy, but it's not just the critical pedagogy, all of this kind of microaggressions, therapeutic stuff,

is part of that. That therapeutic totalitarianism, as Rod Dreher calls it. I mean, that's in the schools. And if we just let the schools go, then, you know, I'm not saying schools are everything. Clearly there's social media and there's TikTok and there's Instagram and all these things. but you've actually got to work on what you can change.

And I just don't think conservatives have been serious enough about focusing on culture and particularly focusing on school reform. Eric, here's a provocative question. Do you think this has got something to do with the feminization of society, the fact that more young women than ever are going to university, young women are more empathetic, more caring, etc., etc., which then can then lead to, we need to protect people. These people are vulnerable minorities.

You're using words like, you know, you're using words, which I consider to be transrobic racist, whatever it may be. Yeah, I mean, a really interesting question, right? And I think it was Corey Clark and Bo Weingard who did a paper on that and went through that argument. And I think, you know, there's no question that women are, you know, women are much more likely to say transgender shouldn't be allowed. Someone who says transgender is a mental illness shouldn't be allowed on campus.

And women are more likely than transgender people themselves. They're more likely than transgender people themselves to say that. It's astounding. But... That's so funny. Do I think this is because there are more women at university in the workplace? Actually, I don't think that's the main reason. Hold on, but you said yourself that young men are not different to older men.

It's the women that are going off the rails. That seems to me a contradiction. Well, the women are going more off, are much more off the real. I should rephrase that. Men have also moved a certain amount in the progressive illiberal. They're just not as much. And there is some difference with older generations. So I don't want to say they're completely the same as older men.

But so there is this whole literature on feminization. So you could say, for example, having table manners is a kind of, instead of just, you know, eating with your hand. And people used to just go to the toilet right by the table. not, you know, blow their nose in the tablecloth. There's a book called The Civilizing Process. Or not dueling. You know, you could say these are all kind of feminization, you know, not having a fight on the floor of the legislature.

But so I think I would distinguish between kind of an embodied feminization within ideas, right? Like not dueling. You know, there weren't any women involved in legislatures at the time and they, you know, they abolished dueling. But it was kind of feminine idea. So it's a feminine idea without women actually driving the change. I kind of think that's what's going on here, is the ideas have moved in a feminine direction.

It's not been driven by women. And, of course, it resonates better with women, but I think it's the feminization at the idea level. This idea that, well, we should be nice, feel people's pain, empathize. That's a kind of humanitarian idea. And, you know, it goes back to the abolitionists and various people. when all the abolitionists were basically male.

I mean, they weren't all, but most of them were. So I just think it's more a feminization of ideas. Now, the other thing about empathy, of course, as Paul Bloom's book Against Empathy, I don't know if that might have come up in one of your talks here, but his argument is empathy is always about who you're empathetic towards.

Are you empathetic towards transgender people accessing, you know, women's shelters? Or are you empathetic towards the women not wanting the transgender to come into their shelters because they find that traumatic. You know, are you empathetic towards the child who wants to undergo surgery

or the parent who doesn't want their child to undergo surgery? So it's all about who you're empathetic towards. You're empathetic towards, you know, white people, when someone says, all white people are racist? You know, are we going to have any empathy for white people? You know, so I think this is not, the empathy thing is on its own, doesn't explain a great deal. And it's interesting, like if you go to the past,

Empathy for white women in the South by white women was a factor behind lynching. Right. So a lot of this depends on where you're directing your empathy. And that's why I'm not as convinced that just talking about empathy on its own is going to get us that far. Let me ask you another provocative question before we wrap up. Because he talked about how actually this is about liberalism going off the rails as opposed to the cultural Marxism, cultural socialism, whatever. Are you familiar with a guy called Yuri Besmanov? I've heard the name, but I have...

He is a Soviet KGB defector who came to the West, and he gave a series of lectures which have gone super viral on the internet many years after his death, in which he essentially asserted that the KGB's primary foreign activities were not about industrial espionage or military espionage or trying to get people into positions of power who were... I mean, they did all of that too, of course. But the primary focus of their energy, manpower, money, et cetera, was spent effectively introducing these cultural Marxist ideas into the education system, into various institutions

from below in order to demoralize the enemy, which was America, to take away the cultural underpinnings of American society. And many people are now starting to kind of look at that and go, well, if you look at the last 60 years, I mean, if that had happened, this is kind of the result you might have expected. What do you make of that argument? Yeah, I mean, it's interesting and there's no doubt that, you know, the Soviet Union and now Russia obviously has an interest in destabilizing Western societies. I mean, my own view is similar to my view on whether, you know, Putin affected the American election. I mean, my view is, no, I don't see much real effect of that effort. I think this is largely an endogenous effort.

You know, what is driving this is this race taboo, which suddenly emerges, and, you know, the militant Black Panther movement and these other movements that are making claims, you know, that's where the moral power was, and that's what the system was responding to. You know, the riots going on in the late 60s in ghettos in the U.S. was a major spur to affirmative action policy, for example. So, yeah, I'm not really as much of a believer in that.

Now, of course, are there cultural Marxists in a way, you know, who are trying to get these ideas mainstream in the education system? Absolutely. Chris Rufo talks about this for era, for example, in the 80s in the U.S. However, again, what my book is talking about very much as well, you could have had these kind of cultural Marxists pushing their ideas about, you know, there's oppressor and oppressed, and it's now, about the race oppressor class and oppressed class.

That would have gotten nowhere if you had liberals who would say, no, that's actually very damaging and this is irrational and goes against the Enlightenment and stood up for their values. And the question I think that's more interesting than, I think the cultural Marxist's story, as Rufo tells it, is extremely important. But I think they would have had very little impact. They wouldn't have been welcomed with open arms into the universities, into the schools, if liberals have.

a different, had stuck to classical liberal principles. Instead, those liberals were highly receptive. You know, they, you know, Radical Sheik inviting the Black Panthers to, you know, was it Leonard Bernstein. I can't remember who had, it was the inspiration for that Tom Wolf book about radical Sheik. But yeah, they were fetid, they were celebrated, they were romanticized because liberals loved it. They couldn't get enough of it. Why? Because I would argue their myths and symbols were heavily overlapping with these post-Marxist. And those symbols were really all about, you know, fighting for the oppressed, the Robin Hood myths about, you know, I'm on the side of the oppressed against the oppressor and the big mean majority group, white, male, whatever it was. And so because those are the myths, not just of the cultural Marxists, but of the liberals, the liberals, the liberals were very receptive.

Black Lives Matter. I mean, if you actually looked at their manifesto, I mean, it is cultural Marxism. It goes back to the Black Panthers, and Rufo's right about that. But why did 51% of the city of Seattle vote to defund the police? I mean, were they all Marxists? No, they were kind of people who felt guilty and compassionate, and they just were manipulated in a way. And so I think we have to look at the big rump of these left liberals in order to understand the success of these cultural Marxist ideas. Eric, it's been an absolute pleasure as always.

I look forward to the 76th time you come back. The question that we always ask to finish our interviews. Before we go to locals, where we ask you more questions from our audience. Exactly. Subscribe now. It's it. Like and subscribe. Is what's the one thing we're not talking about that we really should be?

Before Eric answers, when the interview is over, make sure to head on over to locals to see this. Which books, articles or websites does Eric recommend? for people who are interested in learning how to actually oppose wokeness. The media is mirroring academia now, whereas they were very different in the past. And that's what's changed. Well, I guess I'm going to be boring and go back to two of my books, two books ago, to the book on Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth, which was written in 2010.

So there's now more and more talk about population. I've been interested in this topic for many years. political demography, right? This idea like, okay, we've got this population collapse. Who is left standing after we go through that bottleneck and come out the other end? And so in that 2010 book, I was saying, well, essentially world-denying religious sets like the Amish and the ultra-Orthodox Jews who have sort of five to seven kids on average, or even regular religious attenders who have replacement fertility, you know, those are the kind of people that are going to be sticking around after we go through the

bottleneck. And I don't think we've kind of talked enough about what that society's going to look like. Israel is now that kind of a society where conservative religious groups through high birth rates are slowly and surely increasing their vote show, increasing their influence. I mean, that is, again, not something I hear talked about very much. I do think we need to have a talk about, is liberalism demographically sustainable? And that's just, yes. Very, very interesting, and it's a subject of many conversations we've had, including one with Louise Perry, talking about birth rates and all of that. Eric, join us as we head on over to locals and we ask your questions. Does humanity have a default level of authoritarianism?

It seems like the moment one belief system eases up, for example, Christianity, becoming more tolerant, another belief system rushes in to fill the void.