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July 14, 2019 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:00:28
Daniel Hannan | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 59
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Britain, in the end, was not prepared to become a province of a country called Europe.
We want to have the best and closest relations with our neighbours.
They will remain our friends and our allies and our suppliers and our customers.
But we want to live under our own laws, just like any other country. - Hey, hey, and welcome to the show.
This is the Ben Shapiro Show Sunday special with Daniel Hannan.
He's the president of the Initiative for Free Trade and a UK member of the EU Parliament.
Daniel, thanks so much for stopping by.
Thank you, Ben.
It's great to be here.
I'm a big fan.
Well, thank you.
I appreciate it.
Back at you.
So, let's jump right in.
Obviously, what's at the forefront of every person's mind when they hear your accent is what is happening with Brexit.
So, what is sort of the latest there?
Well, first of all, I'm the only person in this conversation who doesn't have an accent, right?
What's happening with Brexit?
Look, what's happening with Brexit is that two years ago there was an election during which every major party promised to uphold the referendum result.
It's now clear that one of those two parties didn't mean it.
The Labour Party have done everything they can to frustrate it.
So we've had years of Postponement and delay, and it is making people crazy.
And one of the things that is infuriating is you hear people saying, Brexit has divided the country, Brexit has made you all mad, Brexit has set people against you.
Brexit hasn't happened!
I mean, do I need to spell this out?
The thing that is dividing the country, etc, etc, etc, is exactly the opposite.
It is the refusal of members of parliament to do what they promised and honour the result.
So there have been a lot of folks who have been uttering the word Brexit.
President Trump obviously says Brexit a lot.
I don't know that very many people know exactly what Brexit is, what drove it.
What is the history of Brexit?
Why is it happening?
Why did the British population vote for it?
If the European Union were just a club, if it were just a trade association, if it were a group of neighboring countries wanting to do things together, there'd have been no referendum, there'd have been no argument, right?
You'd have to be crazy to have a problem with that.
The problem was that the EU didn't stop there.
It wanted ultimately to become a country called Europe.
And one by one it acquired all of the attributes and trappings of a nation-state.
It has a flag, it has a national anthem, it has a passport, a parliament, a president, a supreme court, external borders, representation at the UN, developing military capacity, a criminal justice system.
What it doesn't have is a sense of nationhood.
It doesn't have a sense of shared identity or affinity among the people that can sustain these organizations.
So Britain, in the end, was not prepared to become a province of a country called Europe.
We want to have the best and closest relations with our neighbors.
They will remain our friends and our allies and our suppliers and our customers.
But we want to live under our own laws, just like any other country.
So how did the EU make this shift?
Because originally it was just supposed to be sort of an economic bonding together, wasn't it, the European Commonwealth?
Well, there were always people who wanted a federal state of Europe, right from the start.
But the real shift came at the beginning of the 90s, when the Treaty of Maastricht was passed.
And that was when it stopped being the European Economic Community and became the European Union.
And that was when it acquired the flag and the trappings and attributes of statehood.
And that really was the birth of modern British Euroscepticism.
Up until then, there'd been a tiny remnant, mainly of the trade unions and the far left, who'd always been against it.
But Euroscepticism was not a thing until the early 90s.
And as the EU has gone further and further towards political amalgamation, Britain has gone in the other direction.
How is it allowed to progress so fast?
I mean, it really did progress pretty quickly.
one of the only countries in the EU that maintained its own currency and therefore was able to survive the economic crash in a way that was better than the rest of the EU and a lot of the pressures that were inside of the EU.
Why did things escalate this quickly inside the EU?
It's become, I think, almost a religion for them.
So it began, of course, from good motives, right?
I mean, like almost everything in politics, we're not dealing with evil people.
We're dealing with people who have good intentions but have made miscalculations.
And the good intention behind the EU was the only way to stop wars in Europe and to get everyone to get on is to kind of pool the institutes of their statehood, to have a bigger sovereignty that covers all of the old ones.
Some of them look to the example of the US.
The big difference, of course, is that in the U.S.
people were already starting with one language, with basically compatible religion, with the same legal system, and with a sense of shared identity, which of course is not the case in Europe.
And so you can't, the way I'd put it is this, if you want a democracy, You have to have a demos.
You have to have a unit with which we identify when we say the word we.
It's what my friend Roger Scruton calls the politics of the first person plural.
You've got to have that sense of community.
And if you take the demos away, then you're left only with the kratos, only with the power, the power of the system that has to compel by force of law what it can't ask in the name of patriotism.
Because there is no common patriotism.
Because no one really feels European In the same sense that somebody might feel Hungarian or Swedish or Portuguese.
So in a second, I want to ask you about sort of the particular driving force behind Brexit.
Was it immigration?
Was it economic?
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So, let's talk for a second about what exactly was the driving force behind all this.
So the EU is gaining power, they're obviously issuing a lot of regulations, and it seems like the media coverage has focused in on one specific area of European integration, and that is immigration.
The idea that there is this open immigration movement, particularly springing from Angela Merkel in Germany.
And this freedom of movement inside the EU where people could basically settle where they want and move across borders freely.
How much of Brexit was driven by immigration concerns and how much of it was driven by economic pressures or over-regulation from Brussels?
Well, we had quite a lot of polling data on this, including a massive exit poll on the day of more than 12,000 people.
It was a really big data set.
And so we don't need to speculate.
We asked, and the answer was the top issue for people was sovereignty.
The top issue was the principle of wanting to live under their own laws, to hire and fire the people who pass those laws.
Immigration was an issue.
It was one of many areas where people wanted control back.
But it was not the issue in the way that you would think if you rely on reports from the New York Times, the Financial Times, The Economist or the BBC.
In fact, I will give you a general rule of thumb, Ben.
A heuristic, as we might pretentiously call it.
If any Brit says to you, Brexit was all about immigration, I guarantee that you're talking to someone who voted Remain.
Because leavers know that that wasn't really the issue.
That the issue was democracy, of which immigration was one subset.
So with that said, when looking at the media coverage of this, the media basically covered this as a xenophobic backlash to immigration.
Of course.
And they also suggested this was part of a broader global populist uprising of which President Trump was a part.
Yes.
So those are two separate claims.
So much, much easier to dismiss your opponents than to engage in any self-analysis, right?
So, I mean, there is a parallel universe somewhere where the media and indeed the bureaucrats in Brussels might have said, oh, I wonder why they voted leave.
I wonder whether we might have played that a bit better.
I wonder whether other people might not like us.
Maybe we should be a little bit more flexible.
But of course, nobody likes to do that.
Nobody likes to question whether they got something wrong.
It's always more tempting to say, bunch of xenophobes.
It was all about not liking different races or not liking immigration.
And then you don't have to think.
You don't have to question yourself at all.
And that's now sort of built up this head of steam.
I mean, it's become almost an article of faith among the Romaine media that There was a spike in racially aggravated crime.
This turns out to be absolute rubbish.
There's a police kind of hotline where people are encouraged to say, I'm a victim of hate crimes.
There was a spike in the 96 hours after the vote.
Which turned out to be a lot of people complaining about the Leave campaign.
And yet this is now solemnly reported everywhere as the spike in hate crimes that followed the referendum.
And even to question that, it's now taken on kind of canonical force.
Even to say there was no spike in hate crimes, people are more pro-immigration than they were before the result, Britain is more pro-immigration than almost any country in Europe, you know, the number of cases referred for prosecution has fallen.
Even to say those things, As well.
What is it you like to say?
Facts don't care about your feelings, right?
These are hate facts.
Simply to recite the facts is to open yourself to the accusation of being a xenophobe or a racist or whatever.
So you mentioned the Remain media.
Maybe you could give sort of a breakdown as to how the media works in Britain.
So I famously was unaware of how the media works in Britain based on my labelling of particularly the BBC.
So I knew that the BBC is state funded.
I knew that the BBC leans left.
I know that there are Publications like The Guardian that obviously have a large online presence and lean left.
But what is the breakdown in media in the UK and how does that impact things like the Brexit campaign?
Right, so the newspapers are fairly balanced in terms of the numbers of titles left to right and pro to anti-EU.
And by the way, that second fissure has now become the dominant cultural one in Britain.
Really, really weird thing.
People are much more likely to self-define as leave or remain than they are as Labour or Conservative or left or right.
But the broadcast media are overwhelmingly one way.
There is no Fox.
There's no plurality, right?
And by the way, I'm not someone who says Fox is always fair and balanced.
I don't think any medium can be.
You're not.
I'm not.
We've all got our point of view.
We all bring assumptions to the table.
But the best you can have in a world where your bias is my accuracy or whatever, the best you can have is pluralism, right?
It's to have a cacophony of lots of different interpretations.
And then out of that, people can kind of gauge what they think is true.
When it comes to the broadcast media in the UK, that simply doesn't exist.
There is a single way of looking at the world, which is soft left.
It's not violently revolutionary left like Jeremy Corbyn, but it has a number of fixed assumptions.
Immigration good, Israel bad.
Welfare good, austerity bad.
It's created a climate where if you say something else, it sounds jarring.
And that makes life much easier if you're on the left.
So in a second, I want to ask you about the differences between sort of left and right in America versus left and right in Britain, and the divisions that are now increasing between Labour and Conservative Party as the Labour Party moves incredibly radical.
First, I want to ask you one more question about Brexit.
And that is, now that we've had this Brexit vote, what's the holdup?
So the EU obviously is attempting to leverage Britain into staying.
And basically revoking its own referendum, which seems to me pretty good justification for the Brexit campaign in the first place.
Of course.
I mean, if the complaint is that the EU is taking away your power.
Was undemocratic, right?
Exactly.
Anyone now doubt that, right?
Exactly.
Exactly.
Basically what happened was that when the Conservatives lost their majority, or when Theresa May lost the Conservative majority in 2017, there was then a majority in Parliament that was saying quite publicly, We will not leave except on terms laid down by the EU.
We are not prepared to walk away from the table.
Imagine any negotiation, right?
Imagine you were buying a house or a car and you said, listen, before we even start talking, I want you to understand that I will not walk away from the table.
What's the other guy going to do, right?
And that's basically what happened.
The British Parliament said, we will leave only on terms that you, the EU, agree.
At which point, of course, the EU said, oh, well, in that case, here are some much tougher terms.
And if you don't like that, stay.
Of course they did.
I mean, I kind of can't blame them for that, right?
Ultimately, I suspect that may mean we will need another general election.
thought specifically on this issue.
Because if Parliament will not leave on time in the way that it promised to when it triggered the whole process, you have to change the majority in Parliament. - Okay, so a lot of the media coverage was suggestive of the idea that the Brexit campaign was led by a bunch of people who are anti-free trade.
These are a bunch of people who are interested in cutting off trade ties with the EU, that they were economic isolationists, that they were sort of Trumpian in their approach to tariffs.
You're obviously the head of a group that is free trade.
That is so the opposite of the truth.
In all of the material that we put out, we would say, here are three reasons to vote Leave, or five reasons to vote Leave, or ten reasons to vote Leave, depending on how long the pamphlet was.
Always, one of them was, free a trade with the world.
This wasn't something we sneaked out in the small print.
I mean, we were absolutely clear about this.
And that is a big difference between the Trump campaign here and the Brexit campaign in the UK.
I mean, sure, of course, necessarily there were some similarities, because they were both kind of anti-establishment, and they both played on a sense that the elites had failed.
But as I understand it, a big part of Donald Trump's shtick here was, we don't want free trade with China.
Whereas a huge part of the Leave campaign was, we do want free trade with China, and with America, and with India, and all the other places that we don't have because the EU is too protectionist.
And one of the huge advantages that I hope will come out of Brexit is deep, comprehensive free trade between the UK and And the US.
We're already each other's biggest trading partners.
We're already each other's biggest investors.
Of course, because of the affinities of language and law and all the rest of it.
But up until now, we haven't been able to sign a free trade agreement.
And what I really hope is that when we do, it's not just going to... Donald Trump says it's not just going to be a trade.
You can imagine how he puts it.
He is going to be a beautiful, incredible freedom.
No one does trade.
Do you know what?
This time, It really could be true.
All those superlatives of his may on this occasion be justified because if we did a trade agreement where we just said whatever is legal in your country is automatically legal in ours and vice versa, right?
So you get away from all the common standards, all the common regulation, all the bureaucracy, all the cartels, all the corporatism.
And you just say, if a drug is approved by the FDA, that's good enough for us.
If a guy is qualified to work as a trader in the city of London, he can automatically work on Wall Street.
Think of how that would bring down costs, remove regulations, work for the little guy instead of for the big corporate.
And that would be a different way of doing trade.
So for American viewers, obviously we've been focused in on Brexit, but there are some other issues in Britain that have obviously taken center stage.
One of those has been the radical move to the left of the Labour Party, which is now led by basically a communist, Jeremy Corbyn, and an anti-Semitic communist at that.
What happened to the Labour Party in Britain, which used to be of Tony Blair and is now of Jeremy Corbyn?
It's absolutely extraordinary.
When you say basically a communist, I mean, this is a guy who regrets the outcome of the Cold War.
And I'm not saying that as a political slogan, I'm saying it as an observable fact of his political development.
This is a guy who at the last election was asked, would you ever have been on our side in any conflict?
Not raising the bar very high, that, right?
I mean, you aspire to lead the country.
When would you be on the side of the country you aspire to lead?
You have to really think.
Because this is a guy who's pro-IRA, pro-Hamas, pro-Hizballah, pro-Castro, pro-Chávez.
Even in the Falklands War, you'd have thought if there was any regime on the planet that someone on the left would have hated, it would have been a fascist junta that locked up trade unionists and murdered left-wing activists, right?
But of course, as soon as they were all with us, no, no, no, we couldn't criticize it.
So we had to really think.
And you could see the process going on.
And then like a little boy who gets the right answer in class, he goes, yeah, yeah, yeah, the Second World War!
And I was thinking, yeah, after June 1941, when Stalin switched sides, then maybe you would have been on our side, and not because it was our side.
Actually, do you know what a really funny thing that I discovered?
His father, who was a communist at that time, did exactly that.
So he was against us when the Nazis and the Soviets were on the same side.
And then he switched when Hitler attacked Stalin, like almost all British communists did.
It is, by the way, an incredible cultural victory for the left.
This massive act of amnesia that we all forget that Hitler and Stalin were on the same side for fully a third of the entire war.
So, how did this happen?
How did Jeremy Corbyn end up at the head of this Labour party?
I guess the short answer is, from the 80s, Labour began to expel the hardline Trotskyist militants.
And the rules were changed under the previous Labour leader because there'd been a scandal in the selection of a candidate in a seat in Scotland.
And the then Labour leader, Ed Miliband, said, well, let's open the doors so that more people have a say over who the MP is and who the leader is.
And basically these kind of probably 200,000 people who were really on the fringe left, the proper Marxist left, came flooding back in, or flooding in in the cases of the younger ones.
And although 200,000 is tiny in a nation of 65 million, it is huge for a political party.
And so even if Jeremy Corbyn were tomorrow to be hit by that proverbial bus that is so lethal and is always running over political leaders in our imagination, the same electorate would pick another Corbyn.
I mean, I can't tell you how strange this is, how outside our experience it is.
I mean, we've had a fairly moderate party of the centre-left compared to almost any European country.
You know, it wasn't revolutionary, it wasn't Marxist, it was born out of non-conformist churches and the temperance movement and brass bands and working men's libraries and it was all about building up the working man and spreading opportunity.
It was not A violent revolutionary party.
Unlike most places, you don't have to look too far to see a different model.
And suddenly we have got a doctrinaire Marxist who I won't say that he is himself an anti-Semite.
I always think he looks like a rather scruffy Reform rabbi actually when you see him.
But he has opened the door to some unbelievable people.
I just think this is really interesting.
People denied it for a long time.
They couldn't bring themselves to admit that Labour had a problem with anti-Semitism.
Which is totally new.
I mean, of course, Britain, like every country, like the US, like France, has had some anti-Semites down the years, but we have never until now had them infiltrate one of the main parties.
This is completely unprecedented in Britain.
And I think the reason that they got away with it for a long time is that there's this kind of funny jejun view out there now, especially to young people, that right-wing means intolerant and left-wing means nice.
And therefore, since anti-Semites are intolerant, they can't be on the left.
As I don't need to tell you, Ben, of all people, that is such a falsification of history.
The guy who invented the word anti-Semitism was a socialist.
The guy who invented the word socialism was an anti-Semite.
In the late 19th century, this wasn't common to the whole left, but it was a very, very natural thing.
To have revolutionary socialist parties who said, capitalists and Jews are the problem.
They're grinding down the working man.
In 1920, Hitler says to his party members, how, as a socialist, can you not be an anti-Semite?
And nobody thought it an odd thing to say in those days.
It's the strange cultural victory of the left that these phrases now sound so jarring.
Because how can you be a nice lefty and think these things?
They did, for a long time.
Not all of them.
Of course, there was an honorable pluralist tradition on the left.
There were lots of Jewish socialists and all that, right?
But going right back to Karl Marx, there was this other tradition as well of seeing anti-Semitism as an extension of anti-capitalism.
And that is what's come flooding back in to the Labour Party.
This idea that we're against kind of Rothschild taking over the world.
And it is not something you find on the right.
It's something that is almost exclusively now on the left.
So let's talk for a second about the left's moves on multiculturalism, which seem to me to have some ties to anti-Semitism in Europe.
I mean, having visited Europe, the making room for folks who really despise Jews, and by this I mean Some radical Muslim immigrants who have been unvetted, the radical rise in hate crimes against Jews in places ranging from France to Sweden, which in many cases is linked undeniably to a rise in an unvetted population of radical Muslims coming from a part of the world where Jews are particularly hated.
Does that have any linkage with the Labor Party's move on anti-Semitism?
Are these unrelated?
It's a really interesting question.
I think that the left in Britain and in the U.S.
And in Europe, has now got itself into this strange obsession with a brand of identity politics that is really about imagined hierarchies of privilege or imagined pyramids of oppression or whatever you want to call it.
And it's an incredibly kind of pre-enlightenment way of seeing the world, that you are defined by the caste or the race that you're born with.
And you guys, in some ways, are ahead of anywhere else on this.
But our Labour Party has got into it.
And so it has good categories and bad categories.
And generally, if you're an immigrant, you're in a good category.
What's happened and why the door has been opened to anti-Semitism on the left is that in this imagined hierarchy of oppression, the left can no longer tell itself that Jews are an oppressed, you know, discriminated against, wretched minority that suffers from penal laws and all the rest of it.
Success of the State of Israel and the success of Jewish people throughout the English-speaking world in particular makes it difficult to maintain this imagined pyramid in your mind.
And so with the sticking up for the little guy thing as they would see it, suddenly Jews have found themselves on the wrong side of the imagined pyramid.
And I think it's probably, that's the linkage if you like, it's the beginning of this This re-emergence of racial identity politics.
So do you think that it's left-wing anti-Semitism that is leading to the left's hatred of Israel, or do you think it's vice versa, or do they feed each other?
Because one of the things that is obviously notable about Europe is the entire European attitude toward Israel, which is extraordinarily hateful and terrible overall.
There are some exceptions, but it seems like there's pretty broad agreement that Israel is the bad guy across Europe.
Where is that coming from?
First of all, every country sometimes deserves criticism.
Yours does, mine does, Israel does, right?
Of course.
So I'm not saying that you should never criticise Israel or any other country.
But you're right, there is a disproportionate focus on a pretty tiny strip of land which, compared to its neighbours, is doing pretty well, you'd have thought, in terms of human rights, democracy, inclusiveness, etc.
Where does that come from?
I mean, a lot of American friends and a lot of Israeli friends of mine say it's anti-Semitism or it's anti-Americanism, and there's an element of truth in that.
But I think the bigger factor is this.
The European ideal is based on the premise that national loyalties are arbitrary, transient, and ultimately discreditable.
That the nation-state is a bad thing.
That nationalism causes war and ethnic conflict and all the rest of it.
And that we should all be transcending the nation-state and forming these big supranational unions.
That's the EU story in a nutshell.
Now, there is no stronger rebuke of that ideology than the story of Israel.
Here is a people who are, for 2,000 years, stateless and scattered, but who never lose the aspiration of nationhood.
Next year in Jerusalem, right?
And then one day, against all the odds, providentially you might say, they achieve it.
Now, I look at that story, most American, you know, politicians look at that story and say, that's a great uplifting story, you know, how fantastic, a triumph against all the odds.
But if your starting point is that the national principle is the root of all evil, then you're bound to be triggered by it.
And ultimately, I think that's why Israel is always going to fight to get a fair hearing in Brussels.
It's because simply by existing, it undermines the whole basis of the European project.
So let's talk for a second about the conservative parties.
We've talked about sort of the shortcomings of the Labour Party.
First of all, most Americans hear a conservative party and they think, OK, American conservative.
What are the differences between European conservative parties, European right-wing parties, and the American Republican Party, or American conservative ideology, do you think?
Depends what you mean by Europe.
So I'm British rather than European.
Our Conservative Party, I think, is fairly analogous to your Republican Party in its good and its bad ways.
But in Europe, especially in continental Europe, it's a different story.
You have Christian Democrat parties that tend to be culturally of the right but economically much more of the centre or centre-left.
And then you have Liberal parties which are economically to the right but are culturally to the centre or centre-left.
So we as British Conservatives struggled for a long time to find a neat fit in continental Europe.
There were no obvious allies for us.
We've now found some, from Scandinavia and from Eastern Europe in particular, but not really so much from the old core EU countries.
And the Christian Democrat parties that are called the main, you know, Angela Merkel's party or, you know, the Dutch Christian Democrats or whatever, They are, I mean they're pretty, you know, as that great Californian Arnold Schwarzenegger would say, these are girly men conservatives.
These are panty waist conservatives.
They're not conservatives as you and I would understand.
So when it comes to the UK Conservative Party, what does the party believe the role of government is?
So it seems like the NHS, for example, is completely untouchable by both sides of the political aisle.
in Great Britain.
Obviously, that is an issue of tremendous import in the United States when it comes to the role of government in health care, where the Republican Party used to, and I hope still for the future will stand against nationalized health care.
But increasingly, both parties are moving in that direction.
Yeah.
But you know, the weirdest thing about that is that in both countries, defenders of...
I mean, I don't think either of our countries has an especially good health care system, right?
Absolutely.
I mean, there are many, many better models out there than either the American or the British system.
And yet, in both countries, defenders of the status quo have done an incredibly good job of pretending that the other country is the only alternative, right?
So any proposal to reform the NHS is, oh, you want an American system.
And similarly here, any move away from the old system is either Canada or Britain.
Well, you know, there are countries with way better health outcomes than either yours or ours and way better value for money.
Switzerland, Singapore.
Yeah, right, right.
Loads.
And in all these places, you know, You are not denied healthcare because you're poor.
But if you can afford it, you don't get treated as a supplicant.
You're a consumer and you tend to get much better value and much better treatment.
And it works out particularly in Singapore.
I mean, they've got incredibly good outcomes compared to anybody else.
Healthier population and it's a much better place to be poor, right, in terms of health outcomes.
I mean, at every level you're better off in Singapore.
You know, we've got the same, we've got the same spread, you know, we have the same electoral system as you.
Our right of centre party, like yours, is a coalition.
It's got some great people and some bad people.
And I'll tell you one thing that I think is going to be where we move in your direction.
As we record this interview, we're two weeks away from knowing who the Tory leader is, but I'm going to go out on a limb, and I may look an idiot when this is broadcast, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say that Boris Johnson is likely to be elected and will be prime minister.
I think we're going to see something very similar to the culture war prompted by Donald Trump.
I don't mean to imply that Boris is like Donald Trump.
In character or personality.
They are very, very different people.
Boris is one of the cleverest people I've ever met.
And I don't just mean in politics, I mean in life.
He's a brilliant, brilliant man.
Who is clever enough to understand that that can intimidate people, so he clowns around a little bit and puts people at their ease.
It's kind of polite, right?
Whereas I don't think that is true of Donald Trump.
He is keen to tell everyone what a genius he is, but I've yet to see much independent evidence of it.
Having said that, they do have this in common.
They're both kind of outside their parties.
And they both polarize opinion.
And very quickly the culture war ceases to be about them and becomes about whether you like or dislike the other side, right?
And I don't think that's a good thing.
I don't think it's been good for you and I don't think it's going to be good for us.
But it's the way politics is moving.
So speaking of President Trump, you're obviously not from the United States.
What is sort of the conservative British view of President Trump, his performance, his personality, and sort of speaking to the future of conservatism along those lines?
I think you are about the only popular commentator in the U.S.
who gets this right.
One of the things that really alarms me is that you can't express any kind of modulated view on this now, you know, without being howled down.
So if you take a statement that would have been completely uncontroversial during the primaries like, it's wonderful that Trump is cutting taxes but he shouldn't have lied about releasing his own tax return, or how fantastic to have him getting on top of the administrative state but you shouldn't insult the family of a dead serviceman, right?
My point is not that these are true or false.
The point is you never hear them.
You never hear them because nobody, apart from you, is even trying to be balanced about this.
And it shouldn't be impossible to say, yes, you know, he's doing some good things and some bad things, like every other human being.
Part of the problem is that, of course, the left won't countenance that.
They've turned this into a moral battle and he's evil.
Frankly, part of the problem is that he doesn't like it either.
He doesn't want conditional support.
He doesn't want people to say, I support you when I agree with you.
He insists in a quite needy way on getting people to support him when he does his 180 degree flips.
And so that means it's very difficult to have a kind of moderate view on this.
And I don't know, I was just reading Jonah Goldberg's book about the state of current politics, and he makes the point that autocracy or wanting to follow a strong man on his own account rather than because of what he stands for is actually a very natural condition of human government. and he makes the point that autocracy or wanting to You know, We were monarchies for almost the whole of the last 10,000 years.
And when we stopped formally being monarchies, we very quickly went back to having the strong guy.
In fact, I think it's not just that we have this in our past.
When we imagine the future, when we write Star Wars, Look, we fill it with emperors and princesses, right?
It's almost like that is the natural human condition.
And I think this is what Franklin meant by if you can keep it, right?
The US is extraordinary in that it has created a system of checks and balances where autocracy is difficult.
But just because you've managed for a couple of hundred years doesn't mean that what you're doing is natural.
It's not.
It runs up against human instincts and intuitions.
And one of the things that really worries me is how easily people can go back to authoritarian politics, autocracy, my guy, not your guy, tribalism.
It's happened here.
With a rapidity that I found astonishing, and it's happening all over the Western world.
So, how do we keep this anachronism going?
I mean, given the fact that people seem to want to follow the strongman, given the fact that the only type of politics people actually want to talk about is not the legislative sausage-making, or even the party interplay, what they really want to talk about is the leadership, right?
Here, we've only talked about Donald Trump, we've talked about Boris Johnson, we've talked about Jeremy Corbyn, namely the quote-unquote big men of politics.
How do we avoid- - Fairly unlikely big men, right? - Yeah. - You don't imagine any of them as like a dictator, right?
The classic sort of fictional dictator.
They are, I don't know which of them is the least plausible.
Here's the thing.
You and I are products of an education system that, and most people watching, that taught us a bunch of counterintuitive and countercyclical ideas.
For example, the notion that someone that you don't like may still have something useful to say.
That is a really difficult idea.
It does not come naturally.
We're much more prone to go with our tribal heuristic of my side good, your side bad.
And you have to be taught that.
You have to be taught the scientific method, you have to be taught empiricism, you have to be taught this difficult idea of assessing something by whether it's true, rather than by whether you like the guy saying it.
I don't think we're doing that now.
I think, not only in, and most obviously in universities, but actually in secondary education as well, we are, instead of teaching these counter-cyclical ideas that make an open society and republican government possible, We're doing the opposite.
We're teaching identity politics.
We're going back to the pre-modern idea that you're defined by the circumstances of your birth.
And I think that is turning our backs on the Enlightenment.
I think it's a really alarming trait.
I'm generally hugely optimistic about the world and about the US, but this is the thing that worries me more than almost anything else, because having built this extraordinary miracle where we are able to change governments peacefully without anyone being exiled or shot, where you have free speech and free assembly and private property and all the rest of it, If you lose that, the idea that it's just going to happen again, when it really only happened the one time in 10,000 years, it's kind of a big gamble.
So you've got to constantly work to keep our system going.
Constant repair work.
Constant husbandry.
And in particular, that means teaching people all the time.
You can disagree with someone without his being an enemy.
Our opponents are not our enemies.
This is one of the things that I find so odd about sort of our modern politics.
We focus a lot on what government is doing, what government actors are doing.
But it seems like the important work is being neglected.
This is sort of the upkeep of the ditches to make sure the irrigation is flowing.
The social fabric that requires stitching, that is being allowed to fray.
Meanwhile, we're focusing on sort of clubbing each other at the governmental level.
It's become what Barack Obama suggested in 2012.
The only thing that we have in common is government, which means that if the only tool of power is government and the only thing we have in common is government, then control of government becomes the only end.
Whereas if you really don't care about government that much, then you can say we disagree about government and that's that and we leave each other alone and we can live in a society.
The more powerful government becomes, the less we are allowed to disagree with each other, lest we undermine the basis of the state itself.
I mean, I still think there is an immense job of education to be done, and that's partly a question of formal schooling, but it's also, I think, partly a question of, you know, we are civilized by families in the first instance.
Hannah Arendt had this lovely phrase where she said, every generation the West is invaded by barbarians.
They're called children, right?
So we arrive with the same basic mental kit that a baby would have had 50,000 years ago, right?
The thing that makes us What we are, rather than hunter-gatherers and vengeful and violent and all the rest of it, in the first place is what we learn in our families, and then what we learn in schools and by imitating norms of other people.
And to be honest, I think the West is kind of falling down on all those things at the moment, and we're storing up a heap of trouble.
So let's talk about one of the things that I think a lot of conservatives in the United States look at Europe and are deeply worried by.
Because for me as a conservative, I look at Europe and I say, OK, we're always 50 years behind whatever Europe has going.
So Europe can be 50 years more toward the cliff, and we will be there soon enough.
And you see this in terms of spending habits, or you see this in terms of health care systems, and you see this in terms of social institutions as well.
European religion began its long, slow, it seems, irreversible decline in the 1910s and 1920s, and then that pursuit apace.
By the time you hit post-World War II, religion in Europe has basically hit low up and then continued to drop even beyond that.
In the United States, you're seeing late-breaking irreligion.
You're seeing secularism rise.
It's now the single sect that is most identified with as unaffiliated in the United States, about 25, 26 percent of the population.
But, And it seems to me that that is reflected in our politics, that if people don't believe in the notion of God-given rights, if people don't believe in the notion of a social fabric that exists outside of government, which used to exist in churches, that that's very bad news.
Number one, do you see a substitute for religion in Europe that is rising?
Number two, do you see anything like a religious revival on the road in Europe?
These things can happen, right?
I mean, there was a religious revival in the late 18th, early 19th century in Britain.
It was kind of like the Great Awakening here.
These things can go in waves.
But I would say it's not intrinsically impossible to carry on being a successful, confident society with a lower number of people who are churchgoers, as long as you have other values that bind the country together.
And throughout the 20th century, although rates of church attendance fell in Britain, life generally got better, people got richer, the country became successful in lots of ways, we were inventive, because we still had a brand, we still believed in ourselves.
What worries me much more is if people lose their belief in anything.
There's no substitute.
And I don't think it's going too far to say that this has contributed to the rise of some forms of religious extremism among the children of immigrants.
If you grow up in a country where Patriotism is scorned and where if you've got any history at all in school it will have been presented to you as a hateful chronology of racism and exploitation where every interaction you had with the state will have taught you to despise it.
You're going to start casting around for something more assertive.
And one thing that the Salafists do not lack is self-confidence.
I don't know if you saw how many of the Paris bombers had come from one district of Brussels called Molenbeek, which is very close to where the European Parliament is.
It's kind of obvious when you go there what the problem is for at least some people.
You know, Belgium has the problems of the EU writ large.
There's no Belgian language.
There's no Belgian culture.
There's no Belgian history.
You've got two completely separate communities who live side by side, Dutch-speaking and French-speaking.
They read two sets of newspapers.
They vote for two sets of political parties.
They use different banks, shops, TV channels, the whole works, right?
So no one really feels Belgian.
You're either Flemish or you're Walloon.
But then what if you're the child of Moroccan immigrants in Molenbeek?
What is there for you to be part of?
You're not Flemish.
You're not Wallonian.
Of course you're not Belgian.
Everyone has taught you that the nation-state is finished and is evil and all the rest of it.
Some people – it's important to stress that most kids in that category do not become terrorists – but some people are bound to start thinking, well, there's got to be something more meaningful out there.
And they, I think, are the ones who are then prey to the people who make the most forceful argument that, you know, the bigger the sacrifice you make, the more meaningful your life is.
The more it seems at odds with all the values of the people around you, the better, right?
And I think that's what's going on.
I think a lot of these people are attracted precisely by the sense of glamour attached to something being shocking and extremist, rather than by anything that you and I would understand as conventional religion or piety.
Well, and this is, I think, my big focus on religion lately when it comes to upholding liberalism itself.
One of the things that I fear is that it's very easy to view liberalism as moral relativism.
It's very easy to look at liberalism and its freedoms and say, OK, well, you're just saying that everybody's opinion is equally I think the U.S.
has been very good at doing this.
everybody ought to do whatever they want, that it slides into libertinism, and that if there's no rooted sense of common good, that government is either going to have to fill it on the left, or that I'm going to fill that with my own sense of moral certainty.
I think the U.S. has been very good at doing this.
It's a secular republic, but it has been very, very good at making people want to belong.
And it sometimes does so in ways that are very simple and very straightforward, and are exactly the kind of thing that Euro-sophists sneer at.
And indeed, that sophisticated liberals here sneer at.
The flags and the bunting and the 4th of July celebrations and so on.
But actually that makes it very easy for a newcomer to feel that there is something to belong to, right?
And that's been a miraculously powerful agent for binding people together for a very long time.
And people are always Every generation of Americans thinks it's coming to an end, but actually it hasn't.
You can't read the history of this country without realising that people are unduly pessimistic.
The attitude of every generation of Americans is, immigration has been great until now, But this time it's different.
And there's always some apparent reason why it's going to be different.
Yeah, but up until now they all spoke English.
Yeah, but up until now they were all Protestant.
Yeah, but up until now they were all white.
It always works.
And it will work now.
As long as you retain a sense of confidence.
As long as you project a sense of, this is a country worth coming to.
This is my biggest beef, right?
Cheer up, guys.
I mean, I was watching the Democrat debate last week, and one after another they were telling us that the economy's in collapse and people are getting poorer and children are being left in unchanged diapers and all this kind of stuff.
Come on.
I mean, this country is a quarter of the world's economy.
It could take on the armies of the next two or three biggest combined.
Growth from the first quarter was like 3-point-something percent.
You know, jobs have never been better since the 50s.
But what is that civic religion going to be?
There's a reason why people are risking life and limb to try and come and live here, right?
And generally when they arrive, they're pretty grateful for the opportunity.
You don't take that risk to go to a country that you think is a bit crap, right?
But what is that civic religion going to be?
What is the binding tie?
So we've been told now that apparently, according to Colin Kaepernick, the flag is a symbol of American racism and slavery.
The Constitution is a hallmark of rich white property owners who disdained black folks and gay folks and women.
American history is replete with suffering and cruelty.
Fourth of July parades themselves are indicative of... So, I mean, I'd say two things about that.
First of all, it is the cheapest kind of bad history to judge any past generation by our common standards, but especially in this case, when our modern standards came precisely from the promise of the Constitution.
Right?
In other words, the Constitution is being damned precisely by the set of values that it created and that Martin Luther King appealed to and that Frederick Douglass had appealed to.
Their argument was precisely, it is because this republic is not living up to its ideals that we should have equality.
That seems to me a pretty good story, right?
They would have had, I think, no truck with this idea that the whole system was rigged.
And was wrong.
The other thing that really struck me as an outside observer is just how suddenly, how quickly everyone rushed to pretend to believe something that was patently absurd, right?
The idea that the Betsy Ross flag was... I mean, you know, I can buy an argument that you shouldn't wear a flag on your sneakers, right?
I think that you could... But that was not the problem, right?
And the suddenness, you know, you beat over a rock saying, well, yeah, you know, that we've got to feel the pain and...
What pain?
Who was complaining?
People who knew better within hours said, OK, that's the new line.
And then this was really kind of Salem witch trial stuff.
I need to rush out my condemnation first before somebody accuses me.
And that really, I mean, I'll tell you, if the Betsy Ross flag stands for anything and Actually, it wasn't, of course, the first flag of the Republic.
That is the now largely forgotten Continental Colours, which expressed in its Union Flag iconography the belief that the Patriots had that they were standing for their freedoms as free-born Englishmen.
But, you know, okay.
The country has invested with some mythology, the Betsy Ross flag, that she probably didn't invent, etc, etc.
If it stands for anything, with all that mythology attached, it's for the idea of an inclusive republic that everyone is part of.
And the idea that people now kind of rush to anticipate criticism by being the first in line to condemn it, I think is profoundly un-American.
And this is one of the things that is that is truly scaring me is I'm seeing all of these common institutions disappear.
And that includes the teaching of of Western civilized history.
If you say the phrase Western civilization, you are now condemned as a sort of xenophobe or some sort of racist.
And I've seen the same thing take place in terms of how people characterize British history.
Apparently, British history is just a litany of rape, slaughter, looting, imperialism, colonialism and brutality.
And you know what's missing is any sense of perspective.
So, of course, Britain has done things that are sordid and things that are shameful, like America has, like every single country in the world, right?
A country is a collection of human beings, some of whom are saintly, some of whom are monstrous, and most of whom are somewhere in the middle, right?
Think of the extent, in terms of time and space of the British Empire, of course it will contain examples of heroism and examples of nastiness and everything in between.
But I would just say, judge by the relevant standards of that age.
There was a Cambridge historian in the early beginning of the 20th century called Herbert Butterfield who said, the study of the past with one eye on the present is the origin of all the sins and sophistries in history.
It is the essence of what we mean by the word ahistoric.
I would just say to people, when they say, oh, you know, Britain or indeed the U.S., it was kind of, you know, bad for gay people or for women or whatever, OK, in what other country at that time Would you rather have been gay?
Or female?
Or from an ethnic minority?
Or poor?
Seriously, where?
Ethiopia?
Japan?
You know, really?
And unless there is an answer to that, all of this is meaningless.
It's the cheapest kind of virtue signaling.
It is a self-righteous contemporary mediocrity saying, I am a better human being than Thomas Jefferson or Winston Churchill or whatever, right?
And being able to get away with it because they've identified some past attitude that we no longer hold.
So where is this revival going to come from?
We've been talking about it for a while.
Who are going to be the leaders in this revival?
Because it seems a bit much to ask our politicians to do it.
Yeah, I really worry about this because the way I see it, the drive of identity politics here is Instead of creating, let's call it a civic-liberal backlash that would say, no, no, no, we're all together, we're all equal before the law, I think it is much more likely to create an identitarian white response, which would be wrong for all the same reasons that the current... In fact, I think it's already happening, right?
When I first came to this country, I didn't really come across any white Americans who thought of themselves as white rather than as Americans.
I'm afraid that is no longer true because they've been repeatedly told by the woke left that the most important fact about them is that they're white and that this is some kind of original sin and there's nothing they can do about it and it's irrecoverable.
I'm afraid some people are bound to respond then by having an identity politics of their own.
An immigrant-descended, multi-ethnic republic like this, more than almost any other country, cannot afford to let people do that.
I'm not talking about people having pride in the hyphenated bit of their name.
That's fine.
And freedom to congregate, and sure, you're going to have Italians or Irish or whatever.
It's fine.
But when you start defining people as a legal category, effectively, Whether it's in terms of universities or jobs or whatever, when the state starts defining people by accident of physiognomy or birth, then we are in kind of apartheid South Africa territory, and that is not something that the United States should ever contemplate.
OK, so let's talk for a second about what you do with most of your time, which is represent the free trade perspective.
So this sort of populist revolution that is supposedly sweeping the globe, which I find bizarre because a lot of these populists don't think alike at all.
It seems like Donald Trump's platform is closer to Nigel Farage's than it is to Boris Johnson's.
It seems like many of the populist groups in Australia are not very similar to President Trump.
So I'm confused by the word populist, first of all, because it doesn't seem to have a common definition.
But beyond that, there seems to be this push now against free trade.
Where is that coming from?
I think free trade is counterintuitive.
Free trade runs up against instincts and intuitions that we've evolved, you know, for a much more dangerous planet.
Put it the other way around.
The Trumpian protectionist position rests on a series of assertions that sound completely plausible, even though none of them is true.
But it sounds totally reasonable to say something like, we can't carry on with the trade deficit like this, or we need to protect strategic industries, or we can't compete with low-wage economies, or we should be self-sufficient in food.
And none of those things is true, and the countries that have done those things have always made themselves poorer.
Always.
Always, by a kind of mathematical iron law.
But they all sound reasonable.
Like, you know, you and I are descended from Paleolithic hunter-gatherers, right?
We carry deep in our DNA the desire to hoard food to provide against famine.
So translated to a political level, that means that you're always going to have a majority of people who say, yes, of course we should grow our own food here, right?
Actually, the countries that are trying to be self-sufficient in food are the ones that open themselves to localized catastrophe.
The ones that have diverse supply globally are the ones that genuinely have security of food.
The country that is most determinedly trying to be self-sufficient in food anywhere on the planet is North Korea.
The country which grows zero food and imports its own drinking water and everything is Singapore.
Where would you rather live?
So you have to keep winning these arguments because they seem implausible.
And I think that's a big part of it.
Also there's the perennial problem of free trade which is It brings dispersed gains and concentrated losses.
So the steel tariffs here may have propped up 20,000 jobs possibly in the steel sector, but would have affected well over a million jobs in everything else, in construction, automotives, aeronautics.
But of course it's the steel lobby that is aware and that will vote accordingly, whereas the other people don't really notice.
So what do you make of the Tucker Carlson argument, which is that free trade has sucked away manufacturing jobs to places like China, a lot of those manufacturing bases, those people are not qualified to certainly go learn computer programming, and that that's a derisive way of referring to folks shifting industries in any case, and that lack of economic opportunity is leading to A certain amount of societal breakdown, fundamental institutions like marriage being broken down because of economic need, so isn't some government involvement necessary to prop those folks up?
So I'm really interested by this, and you see the contradiction actually in the president's tweets.
Half of the tweets are along those lines, you know, the world is laughing at us, we're offshoring jobs to Mexico and China and so on.
And then the other half is, best employment figures we've ever had!
Listen, they can't both be true.
And it's the second one that's accurate.
Yes, when you have free trade with a lower-wage country, some low-paid jobs will go to that country, and many more high-wage jobs will be created in your country.
And that's basically what happens.
But this is a difficult point.
I totally get it.
Your country, mine, they've all largely made a transition already away from heavy industry towards services.
We've gone a bit further than you have, but we're now both largely service-based economies.
And that isn't really about free trade, that's just about technological advance and automation and so on.
When a steelworks closes, that bothers us much more than when video rental chain closes or a travel agent or whatever, you know, other, which are all equally victims of the same technological advance.
And I get that.
I mean, I have, in my constituency, I had an old shipyard, Chatham Docks, which employed 12,000 people at peak.
It closed in 1984, just the same moment that all the steel mills and coal mines were closing all over Britain.
And to this day, there are guys there who still get angry about it.
That evil witch Margaret Thatcher, she hated the working class.
She did this to us out of sadism.
Do you know what?
I get it.
I mean, who wouldn't be mad in their position?
Forty years old, you've got a perfectly good job as a welder.
No fault of yours.
Suddenly that disappears and you're going to be a security.
Of course you'd be furious.
I'd be furious.
But it's only fair to tell this story to the end.
Unemployment in that constituency is now 1.2%.
There are more people per square inch on the old dockyards than there were when there were ships there.
And what are they doing?
Part of it is university, a little bit of it is kind of industrial heritage tourism, but the biggest employer there is the audiovisual sector.
It's where they make Call the Midwife, it's where they make Sherlock, you know.
My maternal grandfather was a shipyard worker in the West of Scotland on the Clyde.
And he had the typical unhealthy West of Scotland lifestyle and he died very young, I mean 59, 60.
So I never met him.
So I never got the chance to say to him, would you have rather kept this whole industry artificially alive?
I suspect that if he could see what my cousins and I are doing for a living instead, if he could see us tapping at a screen instead of hitting metal, he would not hesitate.
Now that is a tough argument to make to the people who are involved.
I totally, totally get that.
But this, of all countries, is based on the premise that people are prepared to make sacrifices so that their kids get a better deal?
And let's do people the courtesy of assuming that they are also able to think long-term like that.
We cannot stay with old industries simply because we already have them.
There is going to be a gradual shift towards new things.
The next thing is going to be driverless cars, right?
How many people in this country drive for a living?
Put them all together.
Uber drivers, bus drivers, you know, cab drivers.
When that happens, are they all going to be unemployed?
Of course not.
Of course not.
Just like phones put telegraphists out of business, they move on to the next thing.
And living standards continue to rise.
And I know this is a really difficult thing for people.
But if you could go back in a time machine to any other time, you would find it tougher than now.
The progress is always over time in one direction.
Tucker Carlson sat in that chair and informed me that he would outlaw self-driving cars specifically to ensure that truckers were able to keep their business because there are so many of them in the United States.
So what do you make of the rise of China?
So you suggested before that you're in favor of free trade with China.
I'm a free trader as well.
My only hesitation with regard to China is the question as to whether we are actively strengthening a regime that will be opposed to us in the future.
Yeah, of course.
And that is exactly the right question to ask.
You know, there are issues of industrial espionage as well, which are not really about a free trade agreement.
I mean, they're happening now without a free trade agreement, so you've got to tackle that.
But as a general rule, I would say economic engagement is almost always a way of driving reform in a good direction.
It doesn't work every time, but the tendency is always a good one.
Or let me put it the other way around.
Sanctions never work.
General economic sanctions hurt the wrong people and prop up the government by creating a sort of siege mentality and allowing The relatively greater opportunities for corruption that happen in a more closed economy.
And if you think about it, not signing a trade deal is the weakest form of trade sanction, right?
So, I mean, I'd have said the same about Cuba or whatever.
It's always better to engage economically.
You can by all means sanction politicians, by all means have personalized, micro-targeted sanctions like against the Madurista regime in Venezuela.
But in the long run, the aim surely has to be to try to draw China into a rules-based international trading order.
I mean, I suppose that the counter-argument would be sort of the Soviet Union, that Reagan took a much harsher stance against open trade with the Soviet Union, and in doing so helped collapse their economy, make it impossible for them to continue their expansionism.
China obviously has been directing an enormous number of resources toward expansionism in the South China Sea, spending resources in South America, really expanding its tentacles into Africa.
So are we enriching Sure, sure.
I mean, it doesn't guarantee peace.
are intransigently in power.
I mean, current President Xi has been radically increasing his power radically rather than decreasing his power.
I wonder if that theory actually works or not.
In other words, which countries have been actually liberalized by free trade?
I mean, there's heavy free trade in the run up to World War I as well.
And then World War I happened and that was sort of the end of free trade in the region.
Sure.
Sure.
I mean, it doesn't guarantee peace.
It makes peace more likely.
But of course, there's no guarantee.
I mean, you know, I agree.
I think China is a nasty autocracy which under the current leadership has become more revanchist, more nationalist and more saber-rattling generally.
But I think the thing that defeated the Soviet Union wasn't really economic sanctions, it was superior military standoff.
It was the deployment of the cruise and Pershing missiles and then the Star Wars system.
And I do think you may need to be prepared to challenge China in quite strong terms over Taiwan.
I mean, in fact, over, I would say, almost every... I'm trying to think of a contiguous country to China that has not at one time or another felt Chinese aggression.
You know, Russia, India, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Tibet.
But I just don't think there's ever been a... Saddam or Castro or whatever, they all end up being more propped up By being able to say, look, I'm the guy leading the country against all these people who are trying to besiege us.
So, in one second, I want to ask you the final question, which is, what does the United States need to learn from Britain, and what does Britain need to learn from the United States?
I'm going to ask you that question in just one second.
If you want to hear Daniel Hannan's answer, you have to be a Daily Wire subscriber.
To subscribe, head on over to dailywire.com.
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You can hear the end of our conversation over there.
Well, Daniel Hannan, thank you so much for stopping by.
I've wanted to have you on for a really long time.
It's been a real pleasure, Ben.
Keep it up.
I'm going to keep enjoying the show.
The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is produced by Jonathan Hay.
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