Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: 266Th episode of objectively speaking. I'm Jag. I'm the CEO of the Atlas Society, leading nonprofit promoting capitalism and the ideas of Ayn Rand to teens and young adults. I am very excited to have Eric Kaufman rejoin us. He first joined us on, I believe our 130th episode and this time he's going to be talking about his life latest book, the third Awokening, a 12 point plan for Rolling back Progressive Extremism. Eric, thank you for joining us.
[00:00:36] Speaker B: Jennifer, it's great to be back. I hadn't realized it was that many episodes ago.
[00:00:41] Speaker A: Yes, yes. Well, we might have missed a book, but we're definitely. You're so prolific we can't keep up with you. But you know, as I've said, when I was actually interviewing Martin Gurri, there was are a number of books of our guests and they're all interesting, but probably I can count on one hand the books that had the most effect on me. And certainly your book White Shift changed the way I view the world and really deepened my understanding. So I really want to encourage everyone not only to get this latest book, the Third Awokening, but also, but also the third White Shift. And I also wanted for those who are actually watching this as opposed to are many who listen to this as a podcast. As you'll see, I'm not in my usual studio. I'm in an RV in Black Rock City, Black Rock Desert in Nevada at Burning Man. So we are going to do our best. We've got a Starlink connection, but my producer, if for whatever reason that that connection gets interrupted, will join in.
And also really want to thank eric because it's 8pm there, so appreciate your you're pulling a slightly different time shift for us now when you first joined us two years back to talk about your book White Shift, Populism, Immigration and the Future Future of White Majorities, in which he made the compelling case that suppression of conservative dissent on the scale and pace of immigration was driving populist uprisings around the world.
Since then, have you seen any shifts in how elite gatekeepers of the cultural narrative have accommodated a broader discussion? Or rather, rather did they in fact go in the opposite direction?
[00:02:42] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean it's a really good question because the book, the book came out in 2018, 2019 already then what we call the Great Awokening was really in full swing.
And what that really was about is essentially restricting debate and speech in the name of minority sensitivity. I mean that is basically what it was about.
And that meant that mainstream Political parties couldn't really address the issue of immigration without the taint of being accused of racism. And again, that's that restriction on speech coming from minority sensitivity.
What's happened since then? Well, I mean it depends on the country where populist parties have broken through into double digit support, which is now the case in almost every European country.
Eventually it seems to, it forces the mainstream to also start talking about the issue of immigration. So that helps to break taboos to some degree. Now of course there's still an attempt to entrench taboos in other realms. So for example, I think it's far easier to have a conversation about illegal immigration than about legal immigration numbers. It's easier to have a conversation about the economic and security perhaps consequences of immigration than it is to have a conversation with the cultural effects of immigration. So I think there are still taboos and obviously in some countries the old taboos have, have not really come down, I think only very recent, I should say in the last six months now even in Canada, I think there is now more of a willingness to talk about it. But it's, I would say the taboos in places like Australia and Canada remain stronger than they would be in, for example, you know, the Netherlands and France.
But, but these taboos still are still there and they're still making it difficult for mainstream parties to move. I think if I have to argue, I think it seems like the center right has been able to talk the talk of immigration restriction more in Europe. I think the left wing parties, with the exception of the Danish Social Democrats, to some extent their Norwegian counterparts, I think the left has had a head a much, has had a much harder time same in the US I think I would argue that it's very difficult for the Democrats to talk about immigration, whereas for the Republicans it's much, much easier to talk about immigration than the pre2015 period. So it depends on the location as to, as to what's happened to the Overton window of acceptable debate. It's shifted in different ways in different places.
[00:05:24] Speaker A: So I mentioned Martin Gury. I recently interviewed him about his book Revolt of the Public. And he argued that the term populist, like the term misinformation, is used by elites less to define than to marginalized leaders and ideas they abhor. For example, they will characterize libertarian Pavier Malay in Argentina as populist, even though his primary focus is economic policy rather than cultural. Do you agree with this take and what does populism mean in your usage?
[00:06:02] Speaker B: Yeah, so I think two things can be true once, you know, I do think populism is a useful analytical term, but equally it can be weaponized and exaggerated.
I think that, you know, if we take a definition that says, well, okay, a party that is not one of the mainstream parties or that is not, you know, is outside the system, like the Reform Party in Britain, I think it's reasonable to call a populist party or a party that uses rhetoric about the people more or it makes more emotional appeals and is oriented against existing elites. I think that's a legitimate, I think it's a legitimate analytical concept. It applies incidentally as equally to left wing populists like, you know, Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn here in Britain or someone like a Chavez, you know, so that term, as long as it's used equally with left and right, it has some purchase analytically? Yes, I think so, but I think it's exaggerated often. And let's not forget that a lot of parties, you know, the Democrats started out as a populist party.
Populists introduce new ideas, ideas that they can bring in groups of people who've been neglected by the established elites.
And there are systematic pressures that tend to favor certain opinions and certain groups of people over other groups of people within a democratic system. And I'll give you one example. We know from survey data that members of legislatures in Europe, across the west, the political representatives, members of Parliament or the equivalent would be congressmen, they tend to be more liberal on cultural issues, especially immigration, than their voters. That holds systematically across countries. And so we have a problem that even though you might have a left wing party and a right wing party, because of the kind of person that winds up in politics, in the parties in the system, they will systematically be ignoring, I won't say even necessarily deliberately silencing, but just because of the nature of political recruitment, certain interests will not be given a fair hearing or given an equal hearing. Equally, certain interests have lobbyists behind them.
So when you have a lobby behind you, you've got a lot more power. Whereas often majorities are disorganized. They, they aren't focused enough, they don't have a lobby. And so when you get lobbies and special interests gaining power in a system, that too can crowd out, can lead to a decline in effectiveness of democracy. And so you need a very, it's very legitimate to have a populist movement that speaks for those who are disadvantaged or left out of the system because of either they're not organized lobbies and special interests or because they're not well represented in the political elites due to candidate selection. So I think it's a perfectly.
There's obviously a balance. If you are George Wallace and you're trying to bring back segregation, I think it's legitimate to say, well, that's a view that we don't want in the system.
It's a populist view, but it's arguably something that the mainstream party should stay away from.
But with something like immigration, a perfectly legitimate issue to debate and has been stigmatized, essentially. So, yeah, I think that. I guess my answer would be it's a bit of both.
It is useful, but it's also a stigma.
[00:09:41] Speaker A: All right, let's now turn to your latest book, the third Awokening, a 12 point plan for rolling back progressive extremism. As long as we are on definitions, the term woke can mean all sorts of things to different people. Right. So how do you define it in the context of your book?
[00:09:59] Speaker B: Again, another one of these terms that is analytically useful but can be weaponized and stretched beyond its. Its reasonable meaning. Right, so woke, in one sentence, I define it as the making sacred of historically marginalized race, gender and sexual identity groups. So the process of making sacred, fetishizing, centralizing minority, racial, gender and sexual identity groups, that's really what woke is.
[00:10:26] Speaker A: Now.
[00:10:26] Speaker B: It intersects with left wing ideas which are more broad, which are broader than just the holy trinity of the sacred symbols, race, gender, sexuality. There is a broader cultural leftism which is simply says we want equal outcomes and we want to protect people from harm. So this is this kind of what you might call democratic socialism or social democracy. That, that then intersects in.
[00:10:51] Speaker A: Yeah, sorry, no, go ahead. I didn't mean to interrupt you.
[00:10:55] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, so, so basically what you get with the intersection of this cultural leftism with the, with the woke holy trinity is essentially a kind of operating creed which says we want equal outcomes and harm protection, including emotional safety and emotional harm protection.
So equal outcomes, emotional harm protection for historically marginalized race, gender, sexual identity groups. And that's really what we're dealing with as the ideology.
That ideology is then going to say two things. One is, well, we want equality, which is essentially want equal, no race gaps, no gender gaps in terms of income, in terms of admittance to Harvard, in terms of government contracting.
So this is this idea of equal outcomes rather than equal treatment. And so you get affirmative action, which is about equal outcomes. Harvard, we need to have 13% black, so we're going to discriminate against Asians and whites to get there.
That's the principle of equal outcomes trumping equal treatment. That's part of it. So equality is one part of it. The second part of it is this emotional harm protection. So we're going to do the equal outcome stuff. We're also going to do what we call inclusion, which basically means that we're going to censor your speech.
Because if you say anything that might offend, make somebody feel, let's call it emotional trauma, that's the term, or microaggression. These are all terms that refer to somebody who's been psychologically perturbed by speech. And so our solution is going to be to silence someone's free speech in order to protect the emotional safety of these. Again, coming back to those historically marginalized, that holy trinity, race, gender, sexual identity groups, we have to protect them.
And essentially we do that through speech codes and through cancel culture. And. And so this is really the. This is really where we get to, is you get this ideology, culture, what I call cultural socialism. Equal outcomes, emotional harm protection for minority groups. That means we need to discriminate against majorities through affirmative action, and we need to essentially restrict speech through cancel culture or through punishment speech codes and the like. And that's kind of really what comes out of it. Now, of course, there's another.
There's another dynamic which is that we've also got to go into the past and make that more equal. So if we don't have enough black or female presidents or big people in history who did important things, we have to sort of, you know, erase, you know, knock down the odd statue. We have to perhaps change history, only focus on the deeds of certain individuals, get rid of the dead white males to some extent so that we can have this nice representative multicultural history. That's another example of this phenomenon. And equally looking at literature and movies and ensuring that there's essentially equal outcomes by representation in the Oscars, that's another example of this getting rid of any historical figure who might have said something racist, Even though that might have been the conventions of the day, Jefferson or Churchill or whoever, it might mean. Well, if we go to Jefferson's Monticello, we're gonna. We're gonna hear mainly about slavery. You know, that this sort of reworking of the past is also part of the thrust of Woke.
[00:14:38] Speaker A: Yes. I mean, it reminds me of Orwell talking about every street name has been changed. That we really are, you know, changing the past to suit the present. And. And those who are able to control the narrative of the past are able to shape future narratives. Now. We've Got a bunch of great questions which are actually dovetailing into some of the things I wanted to ask about. But first I was curious. As a more classically liberal political science professor who has been unwilling to a certain extent to self censor, I wonder about your experience.
I know you have had your run ins with Twitter mobs and academic investigations. I think you were at a different university when we interviewed you a couple of years back. And I wonder if the switch was part of that kind of experience.
[00:15:37] Speaker B: Yeah. Oh yeah, definitely. Thanks for asking. I mean, yes, is the answers I was Starting in about 2018, more openly critical of the social, so called social justice movement. Social justice, by the way, is simply an equivalent of cultural socialism, is an equivalent of woke, but the social justice movement.
And so if I, for example, a lot of this was happening on social media. If I retweeted a video of Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who couldn't pronounce lgbtq, he tried about three times. I mean, you know, that's the kind of thing that would land you in hot water.
And you know, you had these self appointed radical students and their staff allies who would coordinate either to do the annual Twitter mobbing or to put in the, these formal complaints which were actually, you know, that's quite serious. You get the email saying you have to show up at a certain hearing at a certain time and you've been accused of violating policy X.
And it kind of reveals that what's occurred is you get these policies which are all oriented towards harm protection that are then weaponized by WOKE activists to try and cancel people. And that's kind of what I experienced. I had about four of these different internal investigations. I had, you know, plenty of the Twitter mobbings. And yeah, it was leading to an environment where, you know, and I want to stress that at this university it was only a few people.
So I got along with most people. I'd known them for the better part of 20 years.
But what happened was that just the interactions were so awkward because they, you know, I knew that they knew about something in the press or about some Twitter mobbing, you know, that was common knowledge. And so that, that was always present in the, in the air whenever I was meeting people. And so it just made social interaction kind of awkward and it just added a layer of, of alienation really. So it's not as though I was cancelled, forced out, but I did have to towards the end. I mean, what's interesting is as we get into 2021, 22, the great Awokening was starting to lose energy. And you could see that, you know, on Twitter, for example, when they would try these Twitter mobbings, they'd get badly ratioed when the, the internal investigations happened, you know, I, we now had the Free Speech Union, for example, which is in Britain and now in Canada and elsewhere. And they did a great job that just a letter would be enough to shut the university up and to stop these things. Because actually the top part, the top management of the university, the equivalent to the president, those people were not interested in this. It was people a little further down the chain who had a little bit of power, who'd volunteered for the DEI committee or to serve as an inquisitor on the. Of these kangaroo cords. I mean, those are the people who felt the power, who really wanted to sort of push the agenda. But so it is quite interesting, but I definitely felt that some of the power was ebbing away from these people.
[00:18:48] Speaker A: All right, we've got some great questions, including one here from my modern Galt. He says, looking at the synopsis of your new book, I'm curious why you say that woke extremism is a, quote unquote, perverse extension of liberalism rather than a repudiation of liberalism. And that is something that you go on in your book at leg. So, yeah, great to get to.
[00:19:16] Speaker B: Yeah. I mean, liberalism is a word that can mean many things. If we're just talking about John Stuart Mill and classical liberalism, Adam Smith, that's.
There's clearly no problem there.
The problem is with the movements that call themselves liberal. Now, if you take the liberal identity liberalism as an identity, people who say, I'm a liberal, what does that mean? It doesn't clearly mean 19th century, you know, Scottish or Scottish Enlightenment liberalism. It means a liberalism that has actually been heavily influenced by, by left wing and socialist ideas.
So if you look at, you know, first the work of John rawls in the 20th century, and then if you look at multicultural, you know, liberals who would be in favor of multiculturalism, like Charles Taylor, for example, or Will Kimlich or Iris Young, these sorts of people, you know, they. It's really a hybridization of some liberal ideas with ideas from the left.
And one of those ideas is this notion of emotional harm protection which comes from humanistic psychotherapy, this idea of, for example, speech codes. Now, because there's really a debate over whether Marxism is the source of woke or whether liberalism is the source of woke, my argument is actually that it's not liberalism per se, but it is, it's not that John Stuart Mill, Scottish Enlightenment classical liberalism. But what it is is the humanitarian and egalitarian elements that have been brought into social democracy and modern liberalism, what philosophers would call modern liberalism, which is very left influenced, Rawls type liberalism.
And this idea of harm prevention and harm protection is very central to liberalism. And so, for example, if we take speech codes, that doesn't, or even if we take affirmative action, that doesn't come out of Marxism. It's coming out of this more humanitarian left, liberal, social democratic tradition.
And similarly, you know, disparate impact law, which is, which has led to, you know, has led to a lot of problems in terms of, you know, reporting on the race and gender makeup of your board, of your university. You know, a lot of that kind of tallying up of race and sex composition and saying, well, you have to rectify that.
This idea that we're not diverse enough, we need to be more diverse, that doesn't come from Marxism. It actually comes from this sort of therapeutic humanitarian liberalism, a kind of left liberalism. And I think that's actually, for example, the slogan be nice or be kind, which is very important in the WOKE lexicon. It doesn't really have much to do with Herbert Marcuse and critical theory and cultural Marxism and all of these arguments about, you know, systems of oppression, I think is a more intellectual argument. I'm not saying that doesn't matter, but I think that this sort of be kind of bleeding heart left liberalism is also very important. None of which means that this is a critique of classical liberalism. I think we need to really distinguish classical liberalism from modern liberalism. They're quite different, actually.
[00:22:45] Speaker A: All right, let's got another great question from Alan Turner.
What do you define as the time frame content of the three waves of awokening? What is what we see today? The same WOKE as was starting to be talked about in the late 2010s, for example.
[00:23:05] Speaker B: Yeah. So I do have this idea of the third awokening. And if you think about Great Awakenings, you know, American history, Protestantism has had the first Great Awakening in the 18th century and then the second Great Awakening in the early 19th century, for example. So these idea of these awakenings, it's really sort of an emotional outpouring. You could call it a moral panic. But in any case, this is driven by these outrage entrepreneurs people. Now if the earlier Great Awakenings were driven by religious entrepreneurs, the Great Awakenings are driven by cultural left outrage entrepreneurs. Focusing. Now, the reason I think that these are connected is the symbols, the core sacred groups.
Race is at the center.
I argue that the rise of the race taboo in the mid-1960s, the taboo against racism.
And of course, we can agree that there should be a norm against racism, but what a taboo is. Is, you know, there's a very clear line. You step over it, you're gone. You're excommunicated. It's a very black and white way of thinking. Instead of the more proportionate and the more proportionate sort of jurisprudential way of adjudicating a dispute where, you know, there's more serious race and less serious. There's first offense, second offense, there's context. All of that is out the window. It's just social death, as John McWhorter says.
And so with the. The advent. Shelby Steele talks about this in his book White Guilt, this sudden emergence of this race taboo in the mid-60s, all of a sudden, you now have this kryptonite, sacred substance. And if you get anywhere near it, you're then tarred with it. You become radioactive. You. Everyone needs to stay away from you, because if they're associated with you, they get some of that radioactivity onto you. The late 60s is really the beginning, and we see the first cancellations in the late 60s and into the mid-70s, for example.
And, you know, an example would be the Moynihan report in 1965 on the black family. That was probably the first cancellation in terms of. When I talk about modern woke culture, where it was, you know, this was seen as. As. It had to be shelved by the Johnson administration because it was talking about a sensitive subject that. The rise of fatherless, which, of course, at the time was actually quite low in the black community. I mean, even at one third out of wedlock births, as opposed to 70% now. But even so, just raising that topic was. Was enough to land Moynihan in hot water. That's kind of the beginning of this reflex. It just. Is that the case that as we then get into the second awokening, which is when political correctness or a phrase like dead white males or Eurocentrism, that comes in in the late 80s, early 90s with speech codes, and then it's. It's still about race, and then it's about sex and sexuality comes along. All of those ideas. It's race, gender, sexuality.
In the beginning, in this first awokening, race was more central.
The feminism thing was just coming in. By the time of the second awakening, all three are very much in place. Race, gender, sexuality. And then, of course, that's the same. Those same themes happen in the third awokening, where Cancellations are almost entirely around race number one. Number two would be me too, and sex, and then gender and sexuality as well.
So same symbols.
It works similarly in terms of, if we can track it in big data, the number of times the word racism or sexism is used in English language books is a good indicator of this. You see those three waves very clearly in that data. The only thing I would say is that in the third, the third Awokening, the one we lived through, the 20 we're still living through, is different in a number of ways. The main reason it's different is because social media connects trends in academia. So academia went through these three awokenings.
People were already talking about, you know, racism and sexism at a very high amplitude in academia in the, in the 80s, 90s, 2000s, but not in the pages of the New York Times and Washington Post or on the major networks. By the time we get to the third awokening because of social media, these ideas are coming off campus and entering the mass media and are entering mass politics.
And so that's really the big difference with the third awokening as opposed to the first two.
[00:27:36] Speaker A: Interesting. All right, well, so before I had read your book, I was more of the opinion, as many people are, that we have kind of reached peak woke and progressed beyond it. In your book you say not so fast. And we've got a couple of questions here that I think speak to the same curiosity. I like numbers, asks, was the Cracker Barrel logo a turning point?
Is the Scottish girl with the accent knife becoming a turning point? Also, Kingfisher again is asking, do you think wokeism is on the decline? Is something like the Cracker Barrel reverting back to the classic side, an indicator of change?
[00:28:18] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, I think these are really good questions. I think that, yes, the first obvious answer is there is no question that there has been a decline of woke since the peak of 20, 2021. That's the sort of peak of the moral panic and the fear fervor, the popular fervor. There's two. But I would, I would sort of stress a couple of things. There's the short term, so the energy. It's often hard to sustain energy in any social movement. There's no question energy has dropped off. For example, the number of professors that have been targeted for cancellation by the left, according to the foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, shows a very clear drop since 2021.
Similarly, mentions of racism and sexism in the new Times, again, you'll see the same drop.
So there's no question Energy has been lost and the peak of the movement has passed. The question, however, there's a couple of questions. You know, one is the institutionalization of these ideas in DEI bureaucracies, for example, means that they can live on unless they are cut out of the system. Now, of course, that is happening in the United States with the Trump administration and its approach to DEI and government and universities.
It's also happened to some degree in the corporate sector. And we can see that in terms of the mention of DEI on earnings calls, which drops after 2022. So there's been movement in the corporate world. And you have also these consumer backlashes against WOKE advertising, as we see with Cracker Barrel. And that does seem to be changing the calculus.
And same with anti esg, you know, environmental, social, governance standards in states like Texas. So there's no question, there is legislative movement, there's cultural movement. The question I have, however, which comes out in the book is on all of these attitudes. You know, is America a racist country? You ask a question like that, clearly anyone who's more on the left is going to be more likely to agree with that than someone that identifies as a conservative. But it is also the case that younger Americans, particularly younger left wing Americans, are more likely to agree with these kinds of WOKE statements.
And so I think there's a generational issue which is if those ideas are sticky with generation, then as the zoomers become the median voter in 20 years or 30 years, will they shift the median in American society away from the kind of free speech position to a more emotional safety and woke position? I think the, the evidence is in fact that that younger generation, more since I read or since I wrote the book, I think there is some evidence that the younger generation is in fact splitting and polarizing and that their views on these issues are in fact more polarized than older Americans. And so there is a very strong woke group, which is much larger among young, young people. But there is also quite a strong anti woke sentiment and consciousness about what WOKE is in that young generation. So we're going to see, I think, more of a polarized public opinion coming through. But what I would say is the kind of taken for granted, unreflexive view that, you know, speech should be free.
Sticks and stones may hurt, break my bones, but words will never hurt me. It's a free country. All these kind of sayings that Jonathan Haidt talks about, I think are just less in the DNA of young generations. So there isn't that automatic defense of freedom, freedom of speech.
But what There is, I think is, is more of a polarized culture war within that generation. I think we're going to see that emerging in politics more too. But my, one of my points was the reason we can't count woke out is simply because generational turnover is likely to lead to the media voter becoming more woke just by virtue of the fact young people are more woke.
[00:32:19] Speaker A: All right, Ann M. Asks, did early cancel culture with Howard Cassell and Marge Schott create a bit of a power trip which inspired woke bullying? So you know this idea that you can never quite satisfy a bully by apologizing and you know, the only way is to say I don't think of you or to push back and accuse them of liberalism. Your thoughts?
[00:32:48] Speaker B: Well, there is kind of like a debate between those who see the woke phenomenon as inspired by, let's call it self interested motives like wealth, power, you know, wealth, power and status and prestige.
And those who see it as a true belief, as a kind of no, people are fired up by religion. I take more that second view and less the more instrumental view.
However, I acknowledge that there's no question that there is money to be made if you're in the grievance industry. There's no question that there's power in sort of making an accusation. But if I were to say, you know, my, my view is that people are true believers, you know, they have the belief, then they'll take the power of it's there.
So I guess I'm more of the view like John McWhorter and Joshua Mitchell and others who say this is a kind of religion, that people truly do believe it. And then when they're taking the knee, they're really believing that it's not just virtue signaling. Of course there are some people who are just doing this out of conformity and virtue signaling. That's true of any movement. But I do think there is a significant number of people. So for example, even on an anonymous survey where no one's watching you.
[00:34:06] Speaker A: You.
[00:34:06] Speaker B: Know, on an anonymous survey you'll get 7 in 10 US students saying a professor that offends members of the class should be reported to the administration.
There's nobody in their class necessarily watching them fill out that survey. And similarly, even within the general public, you'll get a certain percentage who will say, you know, statues of, of Jefferson should come down, for example, or saying that anyone can make it, anyone can make it in America is, is a racist microaggression that doesn't recognize systems of oppression. I mean, there will be a Certain percentage of people who truly believe that.
So I guess it does give power, but I don't, I think focusing on the power or the money or the status, you know, I think that's actually not the problem. Prime driver.
[00:34:56] Speaker A: Interesting, interesting.
So in your book you describe a two distinct schools of thought in terms of how to deal with the woke corruption of our institutions. One being more libertarian, market oriented approach and one being more interventionist using the levers of power to force change within the installation institutions themselves. Where do you land on that spectrum?
[00:35:23] Speaker B: Yeah, I think that I tend to land on the interventionist side and I don't think, you know, I mean, obviously the way this debate tends to shake out. If we take higher education for example, you know, you have the Chris Rufo school, which is an interventionist, and then you have the, you know, the FIRE people like Jonathan Hyde or people like Kathy Young or various other liberals, Steven Pinker maybe, who, people who I respect a lot who would say, well no, we need to just encourage people to find their inner courage and, and rise up. And I, I think my view is we got to do both of these things, but I don't think moral exhortation is going to be enough to get us over the line. And I don't even think, you know, lawfare either. Suing, you know, to protect your First Amendment rights. Yeah, in theory that's great, but this is expensive. A lot of people will avoid getting into lawsuits which are protracted and expensive, even with support from, from the likes of fire, for example. So I'm not, I'm not convinced that that's going to get us to a place of reform and we, so my view is really that you need to use elected government, which is probably the only institution that the majority of the population that is not woke up can control. Whereas the other institutions have fallen progressively to the activist left who are simply better organized, they're more motivated, they are simply setting the tone in schools and universities and bureaucracies and so on. And so I think there's really no other alternative.
Now I also would argue that I would defend the use of government from a classical literature liberal perspective because don't forget that Hobbes and John Locke amongst others would make the argument that government has a role in protecting liberty, particularly where you have private censorship and private violence.
So they were quite comfortable, Hobbes and Locke, in talking about the role of government in protecting people's liberties.
Again, government then can be a threat to liberty. But equally if you, you know, I think of society as three Layers, you have government, you have institutions and citizenry. Now government can oppress the citizens, and Madison is right in that respect. But equally institutions can oppress citizens. And I think a lot of the problems that we have had with cancel culture have come out of unaccountable institutions, whether those be government or university or even sometimes tech corporations. Corporations that have used their power to sort of silence speech. And so therefore they are the threat to liberty. And in those situations, it is legitimate for elected governments to actually step in to curtail the autonomy of institutions like a university in order to protect the speech of the citizenry. And that is a long tradition within liberalism. And there's many court cases as well. Well, that could spell this out that have shown, you know, sometimes you do have corrupt schools, corrupt police departments. Governments have to take them into special measures. I mean, this is, this is simply part of the society we live in. So I just, I would call my position liberal realism rather than liberal idealism.
[00:38:43] Speaker A: Okay, I like that distinction.
Well, you mentioned height, of course. Greg Luglyanov has been a frequent guest on this podcast and in their book, the Coddling of the American Mind, they make the case that a generation of over productive, overprotective parenting has given rise to a generation that is more fearful, less resilient, more likely to call for things like speech protections. But you seem to have some skepticism about the all encompassing explanatory power of that theory.
[00:39:17] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, my sense is, first of all I want to endorse what they write in terms of mental health. And I think that the coddling has certainly contributed to the mental health epidemic amongst young people.
However, when you look at, for example, attitudes to speech, you know, is it legitimate to physically use violence to block or to block somebody from speaking, or to hackle them so that they can't speak, you know, those sorts of attitudes, or to keep somebody off campus who says transgender is a mental disorder? You know, on all of these kinds of questions, what you find I think is that people with bad mental health are somewhat more likely to be woke, but it doesn't make much difference. It's the big difference is really where people identify ideologically.
And I think I would say the same with regard to hyper parenting and over protective parenting, that, you know, it makes some diff. It makes up quite a bit of difference for mental health. I don't think it makes an enormous difference for endorsing woke. I think endorsing woke is a kind of mind virus that you catch and that is some is largely independent of the psychology of Your upbringing, the psychology makes a small difference. I don't think it makes a massive difference in terms of endorsing these ideas.
[00:40:39] Speaker A: So.
[00:40:40] Speaker B: And let's not forget that, yes, of course, young people are more woke, but the great awokening actually shifted opinion amongst white liberals in particular of all ages.
So, for example, white liberals of all ages became over twice as likely to say, racism is a big problem, or, you know, systemic racism is a big problem in American society. They became more likely to endorse affirmative action.
That happened across all age groups, not just the young people who are arguably affected by this helicopter parenting.
So my argument is that I don't want to completely trash what they're saying. I think that it does matter. It is something we have to rectify.
I don't think that's the main reason for the awokening, no.
[00:41:28] Speaker A: Interesting. Okay, so. So in your book, you describe how the cultural socialists deploy what you call a radioactive velvet glove approach in their bid to gain ideological supremacy. What is it and how do they deploy it?
[00:41:48] Speaker B: Well, yeah, so I think, you know, one of the themes of the book is that a lot of the woke phenomenon comes from emotions, that it is an empathizing emotional kind of energy and a movement that comes from below. It is not a system of ideas like Marxism.
And that also this, this race taboo, as I mentioned, is kind of like the Big bang of our moral universe.
There's before the big bang and there's after the Big bang. So the Big bang happens around 1965. Now, of course, it's going to take time for this universe to expand, for all the possibilities to be explored and for all of the logic of these ideas to unfold. But that's the beginning. And in fact, the race taboo is really the center of our moral universe, and it's the origin of our moral universe. And of course, the sacred substance around race and then later sex and gender and sexuality, although never quite as much as race. I would argue it is this kind of kryptonite that can be weaponized if you, you get a hold of it and you wave it at somebody and they shrink back because they don't want to be touched with it. And if you're touched with it, you're then radioactive to others. So this is what I mean is they want to make you radioactive. The other thing, so that's the radioactive part, the velvet glove is really the use of euphemism. So one of the things you see is there is always this kind of use of euphemisms which Orwell commented upon on as well, the nature of language becomes political rather than empirical, describing the real world. And so you take a word like anti racism or equality, diversity, inclusion, they all sound like great words. Anti fascism.
If you actually scratch the surface, if you, if you go under the hood and look at what these things mean in concrete, diversity and equity sounds reasonable, equal, right? We're treated equally. No, what it means is we're going to treat you unequally to achieve equal outcomes by race or by sex.
So in fact it is an attempt to, it's kind of a shell game where you're attempting to use a fig leaf to launder quite radical ideas under the badge of something that's quite liberal sounding. And so that's the velvet glove, this velvet glove which conceals the iron fist of illiberalism. So diversity and equity is a velvet glove. It conceals the iron fist of discrimination against whites, males, Asians, conservatives. Inclusion is a velvet glove. It conceals censorship of speech, for example, in the name of emotional safety. So there are all these ways in which there's the official meaning, which is sounds great and, and it's nice and velvet and soft and then underneath it is the cancel culture, the discrimination or, or by the way, even something like gender affirming care or you know, trans rights, which conceals underneath that of course, chemical castration.
It conceal, it conceals surgery. That's the irreversible kind of. What I mean is the velvet glove concealing the iron fist.
[00:45:03] Speaker A: All right, help us to understand asymmetric political bias with regards to how Democrats and Republicans see each other and treat each other and how other factors such as education levels may warp perceptions. Why are Democrats more than twice as willing to date Republicans than vice versa or seven times more willing, willing to shop at a store owned by Republicans?
[00:45:30] Speaker B: Well, I mean, the reason is that because the left is, those on the left are more likely to moralize politics. They're likely to see your political views as not just an expression of you've got the wrong beliefs, but actually there is something that cuts to the core of your character. So you're a bad person. You just, you don't just have wrong ideas, you're a bad person person. And it's that tendency to moralize politics. And in fact, if you ask younger white Americans, you know, do you agree with this statement, people who disagree with me politically are immoral.
You will get almost half of young white liberals agreeing with that statement far more than say, young black liberals or white Republicans of any, of any race. It seems to be that this moralization of politics, it's connected to.
So people who say, who agree with that statement, that people who disagree with me politically are immoral are also, if they're on the left, more likely to agree with the statement that white Republicans are racist.
So it's because the political belief in being conservative or Republican is seen as connected to violations of the sacred around race or sex. So sexist, racist, homophobic, whatever that is the reason for the moralization and the stigmatization coming from the left, it's worth saying, by the way, in Britain, where I've done similar questions, you get the same response.
People who vote for left wing parties or who voted to remain in the European Union are much, much less tolerant of people on the other side than those who voted to leave or who are conservative. So this seems to be a generalized phenomenon across Western countries, this moralization. And I think that kind of explains the anathematization and the kind of political hygiene that's practiced. This disgust reflex that just this is emotional disgust reflex that is just stronger amongst left wing partisans.
[00:47:35] Speaker A: Interesting. Okay, well, we now have just 12 minutes and this hour has flown by. So I don't want to end this without getting at least an overview of your 12 point plan for rolling back progressive extremism, particularly which elements you believe are the most urgent and why.
[00:47:57] Speaker B: Yeah, thanks, Jennifer. I mean my, the 12 point plan is very much saying that that change can really I talk about the importance of government intervention and reform. I think change can only come from the political process. Again, elected government is the only major institution, particularly one that might have some cultural influence that the anti woke majority can control, has a hope of controlling at least half the time perhaps.
And so you need to use government power at the state and federal level in a number of different ways. So one of those ways is to rein in the bureaucracy, to enforce institutional neutrality in the bureaucracy and in publicly funded bodies like universities, for example, that universities should not be making political statements on, on Israel or Black Lives Matter or anything else if they want to continue having public funding. We're seeing that agenda, by the way, being rolled out under the Trump administration. I think that he's going too far and he's not going about it in as principled a way that as I would like. But I do think that there's no question that government involvement is important. In order to get there, of course, you need culture wars issues that is around cancel kind of free speech, pursuit of truth, due process, process and also defense of national heritage. You need those to be important in politics. And for a long time those issues were not important to the Republican Party, for example, so they would endorse generally affirmative action. They didn't want to challenge affirmative action. They didn't want to be seen to be on the wrong side of a number of these cultural issues. They did very little about them. And that's changed now. That's a recent development. I would say that if you go to, I'm from Canada originally, if you go to Britain or other western countries, none of this has happened. And so the woke grip on institutions is as total as it's ever been.
And so there is no real way out. These institutions can't reform themselves also.
And so as a part of this, the change can only come initially from the right. The pattern of change I envision, as you know, you have the right come in, win elections by raising the salience of issues like trans or issues like critical race theory, Youngkin in Virginia or Trump, perhaps that then makes the sensible center left say, look, you know, this is too much of a liability. We've got to drop this. Once they moderate, the whole system shifts.
That hasn't happened yet fully in the United States, but it could happen.
So I think this is really where change comes from. Now, I'm not saying that this is really what we're talking about is making the institutions look more like public opinion, but there's also the longer term question of what happens with younger people and with the institutions of socialization. So I really think K12 schooling much more than universities, which don't actually studies show they don't change people's minds all that much. But it's the schools. You know, I did a, a study with Zach Goldberg at the Manhattan Institute and schools, the amount of critical race and gender theory they were exposed to really did seem to shape opinion. And so this is really where reform efforts really need to go for the long term, is to try and get critical race and gender ideology, get the politics out of the school system. And it's not enough to have school choice. My argument is that, you know, we already have school choice with regard to universities, but if everything on offer is more or less the same, if there's conformity in the system, the problem is systemic. You then have to actually crack into the system through government reforms of the kind we've seen, we're seeing now.
So I think these are just, these are some important things I think trying to get at the teaching of history.
You want to obviously teach history faithfully, but if you're going to teach about slavery or the conquest of land from the Native Americans.
I don't think that should be done without putting that in a world historical context. So I do think that curriculum reform, for example, teaching, you know, if you're going to teach about a European country or, or the United States engaging in slavery or conquest, then you must teach about a non European civilization doing the same thing. Because in fact, this was a universal of world history, conquest, slavery, colonial colonialism. That's. Those are universals. They don't respect race. They've been going on forever. In fact, students don't understand that. In fact, 70% of young Americans in a survey I looked at said that Native Americans lived in peace and harmony before the European settlers arrived. So there's a huge amount of illiteracy, lack of contextualization, blind spots that need to be addressed. We want to talk about the facts, but this isn't about changing facts or not teaching facts, but it's about changing the emotional regime, the emotions that are attached to these particular events of slavery. Or for example, if someone realized slavery was, you know, Africans were enslaving each other, Indigenous Native Americans were enslaving each other.
Whites did slavery too, Muslims did it, but whites ended it. You know, that is a sort of much more contextualized understanding which will draw some of the emotional fervor out of these settler colonialist understandings of the past. So I just think that that's another thing we need to get right, is we need to get the teaching of history right to children. Because ultimately, you know, you also, you have to win the short term, which we're seeing progress on in terms of getting rid of dei, but also have to win the long term battle of ideas with the younger generation. And I think the education system is key there.
[00:53:43] Speaker A: And also what we're doing at the Atlas Society to introduce young people to the ideas of Ayn Rand and Objectivism, which is about objective reality and reason, and not self sacrifice, but advancing one's long term rational self interest. Okay, apology. Apologies to the many people who asked questions that we couldn't get to. And I think that just speaks to how excited our audience was to hear from you because we changed the time a little bit and because it's so late there in the uk, But I had one more question for you if we can get to it somewhat quickly. You describe this recurring self perpetuating cycle in which the excesses of political correctness trigger a populist backlash and then the excesses of that in turn trigger a new woke wave with each side side prompting ever ratcheted up levels of outrage. So how does this cycle work and how does society break out of this destructive reactive pattern?
[00:54:53] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean this is really interesting. I think, you know, the way I would interpret it is that wokeness or the cultural left essentially narrows the window of the Everton window of acceptable debate. That meant that society couldn't discuss immigration properly. So immigration essentially rose to levels the public didn't want.
The mainstream politicians wouldn't deal with it, so the populace dealt with it. And then you get populism and then, and then you get the left reacting to the populace and getting worked up to a fever pitch.
I think what I would say is that the awokening did lead to a reaction, but I don't think that the main cause, the main cause of populism I think is more to do with the downstream effects of woke. So the culture war is not just about cultures. So when you can't talk about crime or you can't talk about the border properly because of sensitive minority sensitivity, then those problems are going to fester and they're going to lead to revolts.
And, and that's sort of the way I see it now. I do think there is a problem on, on the online, very online. Right. You, you get, you get crazy radicalism there too. And there, there is a problem also I think in, you know, in part of the way Trump, Trump is operating, which of course, but I'm, I'm not. You know, I think what I would like to say, I think my view is because the cultural left is so influential in the meaning making institutions of society and the way they have been operating is to sort of infiltrate and launder quite radical ideas like critical race theory under the badge of something nice sounding like inclusion and incorporated anti racism. I do think that a lot of responsibility rests with, with the left who, who are controlling very important rich and powerful institutions to try and check their radicals. I mean the center left has a big responsibility and they're trying, some of them are trying and there's plenty of them, Matthew at Colasius and Noah Smith and a number of others.
But they haven't prevailed. They need to, we need to get the institutions under, under control and we need to get them to become more moderate. I think that is the beginning of unwinding this cycle. I don't think just pointing the finger. Yes, they're going to, you have crazy right wingers online and elements of the Trump administration but, and of course we can criticize them. I think however, a lot of the extreme right stuff is, is has very little power. It's just on the Internet, hasn't not a lot of institutional power and resources. I think really the change is going to have to come from a moderation on the left. If that moderation happens, I think that'll put, put a spiral in motion which can get us to a more sane place and reduce polarization.
[00:57:46] Speaker A: That's a good green shoot, potentially optimistic place to end. So this has been fantastic. Thank you so much, Eric, for joining us very late there in the uk. Thank you, Elon Musk, for this Starlink right in the middle of Burning man, which pretty much got us through the interview without incident. Thanks, of course, to everyone who asked your great questions. Again, apologies I was not able to get to all of them, but I hope you will join me again next week. I will be in the studio. We will have everything working properly. I'm going to be joined by billionaire entrepreneur Tomas Petterfi. He's going to share his extraordinary journey from growing up in Communist Hungary to coming to America, becoming an early pioneer of electronic trading, and how his experience led him to become an outspoken criticism critic of the rising tide of collectivist thinking and an outspoken defender of the practical moral superiority of capitalism. So looking forward to that and I'll see you then.
