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May 17, 2020 - The Ben Shapiro Show
01:06:50
Douglas Murray | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 95
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Why are the fourth wave feminists much, much worse in their arguments and much more vociferous and bitter and ugly than people were 100 years ago?
And they have something legitimate to say about this.
I say this in the man's crowd.
Why?
Why does Ta-Nehisi Coates come across as far more bitter and negative about America than James Baldwin?
In this current shutdown crisis, the issues that dominated the headlines the past few years now seem trivial in comparison.
Intersectionality, reusable plastic bags, gender pronouns, culture wars obsessed with inequality, sowing division among us as the issues become more and more niche in what was, up until three months ago, the richest, most prosperous time to be alive in America.
Douglas Murray willingly and enthusiastically dances over these landmines as a British political author and journalist.
In his new book, The Madness of Crowds, Gender, Race, and Identity, Douglas exposes the grotesque nature of finding meaning in one's identity.
He explores the ways social media, news, universities, and so on drive the wedge and sell social justice.
Which leads him to ask his readers to look around and ask themselves, is this the society they want to live in?
Douglas has been a contributor to The Spectator for 20 years and associate editor for The Last Eight.
He writes regularly for outlets including The Wall Street Journal, The Sunday Times, National Review, and more.
In his previous book, The Strange Death of Europe, Immigration, Identity, and Islam, he spent 20 weeks on The Sunday Times bestseller list.
In our conversation, we discuss that book's analysis of the full-on destruction of Europe, if everyone is a nationalist during a pandemic, what conservatives in the UK have taken for granted, and what the European perception of President Trump has been missing.
I'm joined today by Douglas Murray, and I have a bunch of special bonus questions just for Douglas A.
And you can hear those special questions when you become a member over at dailywire.com slash subscribe.
You're going to hear all the bonus questions and his answers over there.
Join the club, dailywire.com slash subscribe.
Douglas Murray, thanks so much for joining the Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special.
It's great to see you from afar.
So let's begin with, what is the situation with COVID-19 abroad?
So obviously in the United States, all attention has been on how the United States has been handling this thing.
There's been a lot of controversy over in Britain about the original handling of COVID-19 and then the sort of shift from a Swedish model to a more lockdown model, and now they're opening up the lockdown.
What exactly was the chain of events that occurred in Britain?
Well first it's great to be with you Ben and I'm sorry we couldn't do it in person but yes I'm here in the UK and we're having very much the same conversations you're having there.
Indeed the same conversations that are going on in every country at the moment.
It's true that the British government changed its tactics early on, its strategy, but by and large the government has had good public support for this.
There are some interesting developments that have been going on.
The first of them is the fact that it seems that the earliest projections, particularly from Imperial College, of what were expected to be the mortality rates, it's nothing like it that's occurred so far.
I suppose the fallout from that here already is the debate that's now emerging between the people saying, well, it was never going to be like that, and the ones who are saying, well, it's only like that because of the precautions that we've all taken by locking ourselves in our houses.
Strange here in the UK, I have to say, because we don't really have the pressure that is clearly mounting there in the US of people saying, look, this isn't sustainable.
In fact, the polling in the UK suggests that quite a significant percentage of the British population quite like lockdown, would like to see it go on.
Something like 28% want it to go on, even if all of the conditions the government has set for lifting it are met.
So, I don't know about those 28%.
Either they're very scared, very worried, or really lazy and love getting most of their salary without the tedium of having to go into the office.
Why do you think that is?
It's been fascinating to watch.
This has turned very political in the United States really, really quickly.
And some of that may be because the United States is such a large country territorially, and obviously there are vast differences between New York City and the rest of the country.
But has it broken down along political lines, the pressure to either lock down or to end lockdown?
You sort of suggest that there's been a lot more consensus about policies.
Why do you think there is that difference?
It's interesting.
Britain has been, in recent years, seen to be very like America.
That is, we've been repeatedly told that we're a divided society and divided along specific political lines.
Now, in the UK, those lines were pro- or anti-Brexit.
And, of course, that pretty much was solved at the end of January this year when Britain left the European Union, finally.
So we've got a fairly united front in this particular crisis at the moment in a way that I think America doesn't because in America, not least obviously because you've got an election coming up, this crisis seems to me to be being seen inevitably through the prism of what do you think about Donald Trump and do you want him re-elected.
So, mercifully, we haven't had quite that sort of clear divide that you've got going on there between people who'd like to use the coronavirus to get Donald Trump out of the White House and those who'd like to use it to keep him in.
But there are certainly the beginnings of a type of line emerging, a competition emerging, shall we say.
Which is the same one that we're going to have everywhere, which is the very significant tension that is emerging between the people saying we have to keep people, particularly the elderly who are most vulnerable to the virus, safe, and those saying we just can't go on with this forever.
The British government is currently borrowing at levels that are higher than at any time since the Second World War.
And some of us, myself included, think that this is very unwise for a range of reasons, one of which is the point of running up the debt after the Second World War was because this was something that was never going to be needed again, something that would never happen again, we hoped.
I don't think anyone can say that with this virus.
I think we are mounting up unbelievable levels of debt and doing so to tackle something which is quite likely to happen again, certainly in our lifetimes.
When you look at, again, that political debate, one of the things that I wonder is whether that exposes not so much the difference between left and right transnationally as the difference between, perhaps, the American right and the British right, meaning that the European right has been, for a very long time, a lot more friendly to the idea of a massive social safety net.
Even the Conservative Party in Britain isn't talking about dismantling the National Health Service.
In the United States, obviously, the Republican Party has been very much against the federal government getting deeply involved in the economy, providing the sorts of Yeah, I think that is true.
The British and European right long ago made their peace with the welfare state in a way which I think isn't the case obviously in the US to the same extent.
European right and American right?
Yeah, I think that is true.
The British and European right long ago made their peace with the welfare state in a way which I think isn't the case obviously in the US to the same extent.
The Conservative Party at the moment, I mean, it's in a very interesting position.
It has become the party of the National Health Service.
Now, the Labour Party, the left-wing party here in the UK, has tried for years to win elections by saying every time, you've only got X number of days left to save the NHS.
You know, if you vote Conservative, they will dismantle, privatise, whatever, the NHS.
I've heard that all my life.
You've got three days to save the NHS.
Two years.
One day.
Two hours.
That's what they always say.
And here we see this incredible moment where the Conservative Party has not only been more than adequately funding the NHS, but cannot possibly be accused of being anti the National Health Service at the moment.
You know, every minister turns up to the press conferences with an NHS badge on their lapel.
I mean, they've got it written on them.
And so I think that critique of the left is going to be hard to sustain.
It has an obvious downfall, doesn't it?
Which is when the Conservative Party simply has to keep doing anything that the NHS asks for.
It satisfies every demand.
Because it's become so much a hock to it.
Now, I mean, there are problems here because the NHS does some things well and does some things badly.
You know, it's a service, not a deity.
But under this government, in this crisis, inevitably it's become a sort of deity.
And that's going to have problems down the road.
So in your book, The Strange Death of Europe, you talk about all of these sort of fragmenting elements that have been happening in Europe for years.
And it feels like the pandemic has really exacerbated a lot of these problems.
Obviously, there were serious debt problems in a lot of countries in Europe before this.
The idea of sort of a unified economic bloc didn't make a lot of sense when Germany was footing the bill for Greece.
And when it comes to immigration, obviously, there were serious underlying problems with the idea that every country was going to have completely permeable borders.
There's been this sort of talk in the United States that everybody's a socialist during a pandemic, but what it really seems like is everybody's a nationalist during a pandemic.
Oh yeah, well, it's both of those things, isn't it?
I mean, it seems so to me.
I mean, everyone's in favor of massive spending and of shutting all the borders.
I mean, I covered the migration crisis of 2015, you know, firsthand.
I traveled very widely across the continent and the continents people were coming from.
And, you know, in 2015, when hundreds of thousands of people were pouring into Europe illegally, you know, I used to think, why isn't this able to be stopped?
And people tell me, you've got to understand, we live in a globalized world and it's not possible to shut borders.
This is simply the modern world.
I remember one of the former French ministers saying to me, there's nothing that can be done.
And so you can imagine that it was a certain amount of, well, glee, I suppose, that I noticed people like Justin Trudeau shutting all the borders of Canada, having told us for years that, you know, open borders were just a thing that we all lived with and there were only upsides.
And then the coronavirus comes along and it turns out even Justin Trudeau can shut the borders at a moment's notice.
This happened across Europe, It's something that we were told wasn't possible with the immigration crisis, was certainly possible with the corona crisis.
But there are lots of tensions in Europe that this has opened up.
The most interesting to my mind is the North-South divide, which always goes on.
One of the great, I mean, obviously, we in Britain have now left the European Union.
It always seems to me slightly rude to criticize a club you've just resigned from.
But some of us who were always critics of the EU used to say that the fundamental problem, particularly of monetary union, was the idea that you could meld German and Italian fiscal habits, or Greek and German bookkeeping.
And, you know, one of the fascinating tensions has just broken out again over this coronavirus, which is this North-South divide, where the South, once again, is absolutely the brunt of the problem.
I mean, it's Italy and Spain that first had the worst mortality figures in this virus.
And having been lectured for years, as those countries were, by the North, telling them that there needed to be greater integration and a greater pooling of sovereignty, what happens when the coronavirus hits, but both France and Germany suddenly become completely protectionist over the export of masks, oxygen and other necessities?
And you can imagine, and the southern European countries, particularly Italy, looks at this, has been told for years that this is precisely the sort of thing that the EU has been set up to avoid, and the two countries that lectured them hardest, France and Germany, turn out when needed to be just as nationalistic as the countries they had been attacking all of these years.
You know, I mean, particularly Mr Macron and Chancellor Merkel have loved attacking people for being nationalists in Central and Eastern Europe, love attacking people for being protectionists in these countries, but it turns out that there is something which makes them do exactly the same and actually a lot more.
So in a second, I want to ask you about the future of Europe and then about the future of specific states within the European Union and the future of Britain.
We'll get to that in just one second.
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So Douglas, let's talk about the future of the European Union.
Then I want to get to sort of analyzing the differences within the European Union.
So in your book, you talk about some of the animating differences in the EU that were leading to its breakup even before the pandemic really exacerbated those divides.
So you've talked about sort of the fiscal differences and cultural differences.
What do you think are the chief factors that are leading to the breakup of the great European dream, the post-World War II idea that Europe was going to be sort of the United States of Europe going forward?
Well, I think the central tension has always been the same, which is that many countries, including Britain at the time, believed in a trading bloc.
Believed that it was sensible that instead of having dozens of countries each competing with each other and the wider world, they should group together.
And in the 70s in particular, that seemed to many people, including people on the right, to be a fairly sensible policy.
The problem started to emerge particularly in the 90s, particularly in the early 90s with the Maastricht Treaty, which is the moment when everything changes because the Maastricht Treaty is a time when the EU says that it is dedicated to ever closer union.
The problem with ever closer union is that it shows you the direction of travel.
It says we will not be content until this is one sovereign unified continent, nation.
And, of course, the problem is there are lots of people who are vaguely supportive of aspects of the EU project, the European project, who still want to be citizens of a country and still believe that there are a range of things, from security, to taxation and more fiscal matters that should be decided at the national level.
I mean, Greece in recent years would have had a lot easier a time if it had not been tied to the promises that it ended up having to make to the Germans and to Brussels in the wake of the 2008 crisis.
If Greece could have just gone off alone and had the drachma It wouldn't have had the severity of the depression it's had in the last decade.
So there were lots of reasons why people were worried.
It wasn't just, you know, nationalism of some kind.
There were just lots of reasons why people in each of the countries thought that the EU project should stop at a certain stage.
That there was a stage where the public became uncomfortable.
There was a stage where basically the EU became a lecturing body to the continent rather than a representative body of some kind, or a convening body.
And that happened from the 90s.
And all of the tensions that have arisen since have arisen basically from that one tension.
Why can't the EU stop?
Why can't it say this is what we are and this is what works?
Why does it always have to pull sovereignty more and more?
And that's the tension that is just on every issue still playing out.
Now within Europe, obviously there are very large national differences in Europe.
In Eastern Europe, you have very nationalistic states with authoritarian tendencies.
In Western Europe, you have states that seem to, in many cases, have lost their way.
We talked with Ross Douthat last week on the Sunday Special, and he was talking about the sort of lack of will that seems to have been engendered in Western civilization is happening in the United States.
He suggests that Europe has become decadent.
Where do you think are sort of the virile centers for Europe?
If there are going to be countries in Europe that are sort of, if you have to map trajectories, which countries have an upward trajectory and which ones look like they are tabloing or falling?
That's a very different question to answer.
I mean, until we were all confined to our homes and couldn't travel anywhere, I was in a different European country pretty much every week over recent years.
I travel and continue to travel very widely, even after finishing The Strange Death of Europe, because I find the developments across the continent fascinating.
And one of the reasons why it's so fascinating is because individual countries you can see being pulled in different directions at the same time.
Let me give an example.
France, for instance, has a particularly bad, I think the worst in Europe, record on integration.
France has a larger population of immigrant background than any other country in the EU.
It massively mucked up its integration programs after the movement of peoples in large numbers From North Africa in particular.
As you know, if you go to Marseille or Paris, you know, the center of the city is still this beautiful chocolate box, idyllic, romantic place.
And you go to the suburbs where the Parisians or the locals don't go, and you see this totally other world.
I use the example in A Stranger's Death of Europe.
If you go to Paris, you have the two forms of metro.
You have the Paris metro and then you have the RER.
The RER is the deep underneath the metro line that goes out to the banlieue of the suburbs.
And if you get to Charles de Gaulle, you use that.
Now, the fascinating thing to me is, you go on the metro, the more shallow one, that just stops you off at short intervals in the center of Paris, and it's a beautiful, chic, Parisian life.
Everyone's beautiful, everything seems wonderful.
Go on the RAR that goes out further, and you see a totally different world.
and one that the Parisians, in my mind, deliberately avoid.
The stations where these RAR lines stop are like little bits of a volcano.
You see the people from the banlieue will come in and congregate around that station.
I give it as an analogy, not to beat up on the French good pastime, as that is for many people, but just to point out this is a particularly It's just more visible than almost anywhere else.
Now, why do I give the example of France?
Not just for that reason, but because simultaneously France has an extraordinary strength that I don't think almost any other country in Europe has.
It has an extraordinarily strong sense of itself.
It has the role of the president in France, by the way, and I don't particularly say it with admiration, just as an observation, is the president in France has more power than almost any other leader you can think of in the democratic world.
I mean, what the French president can do, you know, ban all public gatherings, ban protests.
This has been done scores and scores of time in the present president's time alone.
So the reason I mention this is because simultaneously you have this country with, I think, worst integration history, but one of the strongest senses of itself.
I mean, take one of the key years in recent years, when you have 2015-2016, with the rise of ISIS, you see in one year in France, at the beginning of the year, the most renowned secularists in France, the staff of Charlie Hebdo, the most renowned secularists in France, the staff of Charlie Hebdo, are gunned down in their offices by two
And at the end of the year, a priest is beheaded, has his throat slit at the altar of his church while saying mass outside Rouen.
Now, I tell you this because what society could go through a year like that and with a massive Bataclan attacks and much more and hold together with its sense of itself.
That could have everybody from the secularists to the priests attacked and could still hold the society together.
So there's an extraordinary complexity of trying to analyze European countries because of precisely that sort of Duel problem going on at the same time.
A terrible, terrible challenge.
And a deep well that can be drawn upon.
That I certainly wouldn't ignore.
Well, one of the things that you talk about there is the society's senses of themselves.
And it feels like in America also, we're having trouble deciding exactly what our sense of ourselves is.
In Europe, it used to be that one of those senses was religious in nature.
Obviously, Europe has moved in an overwhelmingly secular direction.
And at least at the same time, birth rates have concomitantly fallen and Muslim immigration into Europe has concomitantly increased.
So it seems like religious identity is on the wane.
It seems like until the past decade or so, nationalist identity was dramatically on the wane with the rise of the EU and the feeling that we had moved into the post-national world.
And so the question becomes for a lot of these nations, what exactly is the animating feature of a shared identity?
What exactly is shared anymore?
We're experiencing this in the United States.
As well, do you think that there's a renewed sense of shared identity in places like Britain, and is that really what is driving a lot of the separationism inside the EU, an attempt to derive a shared identity again, because it turns out that transnationalism is not an identity, globalization is not an identity, secularism isn't actually an identity, that you need something more than that in order to create a shared polity?
Yes, I mean, there are relatively few ways, as you know, that we can go here as human beings outside of the immediate family structure.
Religion is one of the very few and one of the best.
National belonging is certainly one of the only other alternatives, and national belonging has been seen in Europe as being purely a vice in recent decades, basically since the end of the Second World War.
And that's because of a very simplistic analysis which caught on, which said, well, nationalism caused two world wars, and therefore if we get rid of nation-states, we'll get rid of nationalism, therefore, ergo, we will get rid of war.
Well, there are many problems with this overwhelmingly common viewpoint.
One of them is, of course, before Europe was riven by the conflicts of the nation-states, we were riven by the wars of religion.
Something which I think is perfectly possible we could return to in our own lifetimes.
So it's not the case that nationalism or national identity is the only cause of war.
A second problem, by the way, of that critique is that it completely fails to notice that it's not nationalism that caused those wars, it was German expansionism.
In both cases, albeit the second time under Nazi ideology.
I've said several times, most recently in a speech in Rome, that I think we know where nationalism can go wrong.
But everything can go wrong.
I mean, love caused the Trojan Wars.
Love can go wrong.
Everything can be perverted, used to terrible ends, and cause and bring about catastrophe.
But it doesn't mean you don't deal in that element at all.
You know, religion can cause wars.
Yes.
Do you want to ban religion?
No.
And how would you go about that?
This is a problem of the post-war identification of nationalism as being the sole cause of conflict.
is that nationalism can also be, national belonging can also be, one of the most important sources of meaning that people find in their lives.
And as the late Roger Scruton described it, the widest application of the first person plural, the widest application of the use of we, You know, where you can feel a pride in things you yourself may not directly have contributed to, but also can spread that around to others, and that you can feel belonging.
Even if it's just because of your adjacency to people.
Now, I think that, as I say, that what we did in Europe was to essentially try to get rid of national belonging as a legitimate source of meaning.
We lost religion around the same time.
We've been losing it for 150 years in Europe.
And, you know, that's a very interesting subject in itself.
But the problem this has left us with is what I described in A Strange Death of Europe in one chat as the sense that the story has run out.
And this is, I think, very pertinent to American viewers as well, because what this means is that you know that you're living in the embers of something which you yourself cannot kindle.
But you like the afterglow.
You like what warmth there is, but you have no intention to tend the fire.
And there are many, many deep problems that come from this, which I explore in that book.
One of which is this thing to do with religion, which is whether or not, to sort of put it in a Hegelian-like term, is whether or not it's an exhausted force or not.
And my own belief is that it isn't.
And that we should think about it and deal with it more deeply and more seriously than we've been willing to.
That, you know, religion isn't just something like a sort of charity event you do, you know, and it's not a hobby.
You know, it's not something you could choose to do or not, like tennis or golf.
And so I think that one other thing I'd add to that, which is that there's a very deep issue which America is going through, which we went through before you, which is this fundamental question of who are we?
And in Europe we've started, and this includes in Britain, although things like the Brexit vote are definitely an attempt to sort of push back against this, but in recent years in Europe we've basically come to this place where we've decided we are basically nothing.
And we're not interested, and we have nothing of our own of interest, other than that we can provide a sort of convening space for the world to meet and bring us ideas and cuisine and culture and music and things that we in Europe, of course, have never had.
And therefore, we are, as it were, like the paint that you need to add colors to that isn't yet a color itself.
That we're this non-thing.
Now, it seems to me that in America you have a version of that as well that's been coming along in recent years.
And there is a backlash to it, which we had again first, which is you start to redefine yourself in increasingly crass terms.
So in Europe and in Britain in recent years, we've had this thing of, who are we?
And you come up with things like, we are about niceness.
Or kindness?
Or fair play?
Sure, I mean, all those things are definitely good.
I mean, nobody actually says they're anti any of those things.
Even the Saudis don't say they're actually against niceness or fairness.
You know, everyone thinks they're for fairness and decency, you know.
They've just got different definitions of it.
But that's the sort of thing we've come down to.
And I think that it's because In Europe, as in America, we've basically wanted to pretend that a highly unusual political and religious settlement is the norm, is that non-coloured paint, and that, you know, whenever you shake out the human species and give it long enough, it always looks like Amsterdam.
It's just so fantastically crass, because the people who think this are so parochial, they've never been anywhere, they've never travelled anywhere, they clearly have no recognition of the fact that what we have in Europe and what you have in America is unbelievably unusual in historical, geographical terms.
And that, you know, it's as likely that the world turns out looking like Mogadishu as it does that it ends up looking like Boston.
And you didn't get to Boston instead of Mogadishu just by chance, or hanging around long enough, or having enough diversity parades.
It is that mentality that we've seen in the United States as well.
And it's something that I've found really troubling.
And you see it in the sort of study of both American and European history, this idea that when something truly terrible happens in the West, that it is unique to the West.
But when something good happens to the West, then it is a world achievement.
We saw this With regard to the moon landing, where people in the West are saying, well, that was a real achievement by humanity.
But when it comes to things like slavery, well, that is unique to the West.
Yes, it's a horrible sin that was committed by the West, also existed in every society for all of human time.
And that isn't a justification for slavery in the West.
It is to suggest that what makes the West different is the stuff that actually makes the West different.
It is not the stuff that is common to all humanity.
Yeah, the interesting thing was that we abolished slavery.
I mean, plenty of places didn't bother to.
Plenty of places still have it going on now.
So yes, I think, by the way, Ben, this particular issue points to a very important thing I think we all have to be able to think about, which is, when people raise these things, are they raising them?
When they say, look at your history of colonialism, or look at your history of slavery, are they raising them as critics or as enemies?
I think this is one of the most important questions to address.
It reminds me of something that Jeanne Kirkpatrick said around the time of Vietnam.
She said, I didn't doubt that America had the opportunity to be better, but in order to be better, it had to survive.
It had to continue.
And you had then, as we have now, a certain cohort of people who don't want America to continue as it is, don't want Britain to continue as it is, don't want Europe to continue the way it is.
And I hear that all the time, and I don't think it's called out often enough, that when somebody says, you know, You have nothing but the original sin, as I call it in Strange Death of Europe, the original sin of settler colonialism, or slavery, or empire.
And by the way, you can do that everywhere.
Even countries in Europe, like Sweden, that have no empires are sort of, you know, like melded into the guilty empire post-colonial guilt parade.
And so when people do that, and they say, that's all you are, I just think we should turn around and say, That is such an unfair estimation of our societies.
I mean, every country on earth I've ever been to has good things and bad things to be said about them.
But when you only focus on the bad, you know, if you said, I don't know, a country like Greece or something, if you said, Greece has never done anything, it's never produced anything, it just robs people or something, people say, That's just unfair.
It seems like a weird critique.
What have you got against the Greeks?
We'd know that that was what was going on, because this wouldn't be a fair estimation of the country, as it would be if you talked about any country in Africa, the Far East, the Middle East, or anywhere else.
And that's what we've been dealing with.
We've been dealing with, in all of our countries in recent years, enemies, people who hate our societies, don't want them to continue as they are, in any recognizable form, want to completely transform them, but would like us To pretend that they are merely critics who just want a couple of tweaks and mildly change us.
And that's just not the case.
It's so wildly unfair the way in which a couple of generations now have been lied to about what our societies are.
Well, this goes to the thematics of some of the stuff you talk about in your newest book, The Madness of Crowds, because as we've dissolved some of the larger kind of societal forces that bind us, as we've dissolved religion, as we've dissolved nationalism, tribalism has sprung up in its most basic forms.
You've seen people reverting to Almost more basic forms, smaller forms, smaller group forms of identity in opposition to that larger blank space that you've been talking about.
And you talk about this in terms of what we see online, the social media mobbing, the search for identity in finding people that we can gang together and attack, the search for identity in race, in gender, and how that really is tearing us apart.
Yes, I mean, after doing The Strangest Death of Europe and writing about immigration, Islam and multiculturalism, I thought, what are the remaining landmine issues that I can merrily dance over and jump on?
and I thought I know and in fact I quite like occasionally and I speak at Oxford University a little while ago and as a very smart young student interviewing me and about the madness of crowds and he said I just like for the audience to get an idea of what I just like to read out the title page of Douglas's new book and he read out he's a gay women race trans
And he looked out at the audience, and I looked out at them, and they all just had their eyes open, and then we all burst out laughing.
Because you could see people just like, no!
Every single one of them!
And I can't deny that I sort of enjoy seeing these sort of, you know, ridiculously overcomplicated issues.
that people are terrified about.
I can't deny that I quite enjoy being the person, you know, one of the people who says, you know, the emperor's got no clothes, or in this case, also the emperor's a total fraud and idiot.
So I decided to do them all one by one and loved doing so.
I mean, I also, by the way, I just have a great time on this because it's just, I mean, a lot of it is like shooting fish in a barrel.
Because you're dealing with, I thought, by the way, I should stress that When I started looking deeply into the whole issues of intersectionality and all that sort of thing, I did what I always do, which is I go back to the fundamental text, the foundational literature.
What are the philosophical bases for this?
What's the stuff we contend with first?
And I have to say, I thought with this that You know, the identity politics movement, which is not just racing through all of our societies, but racing through business in all of our societies.
I mean, it's not just government that's absorbed this stuff.
It's, you know, Fortune 500 companies.
They've all got diversity outreach, you know, offices and HR departments, which are the only thriving part of the business.
And so I thought, well, at least if we've done this, if we've rolled this out everywhere, There must be some serious thought behind it, and I was just flabbergasted by how little of it there was.
It is small, insignificant texts from the 1970s onwards, mainly from American universities, it has to be said, who just assert things.
They don't even prove anything, they just assert things.
The foundational text, one of them of intersectionality is, unpacking the knapsack, is just a couple of pages of assertions, which are all wrong by the way.
Provably so.
And now you've got, you know, now several decades of people who've gone to universities, particularly in America, and become totally unemployable, or at least completely useless to society at large, by studying these things as if they exist, as if they're real, as if they've been agreed upon.
And so, by taking them one by one, one of the things I wanted to do was to help deprogram Particularly young Americans and young Europeans who have been violently, badly programmed, who have been told that their society is something which their society isn't, and have been told that the way out is something which is catastrophically, obviously not a way out.
You know, find meaning in womanhood.
Wow.
Deep.
Find meaning in being gay.
Make it your entire life, you know?
Only listen to gay music and read gay texts and wear gay clothes.
This is pathetic.
And it's the same, I think, on the race issue.
These unbelievable race baiters who pretend they're anti-racist, who pretend that people can find meaning in their life because of their skin pigmentation.
I mean, it's grotesque and I wanted to push back against it.
And to say to people, particularly young people, don't waste any more of your life than you have to on this crap.
You know, find meaning in your life, definitely.
Well, don't think you're going to get it from your chromosomes.
It seems as though one of the fundamental underlying bases is an unarticulated assumption.
And that unarticulated assumption, because if you actually articulated it, it would be obvious what a problem it is, is that all inequalities are inequities.
And that, therefore, if you are a member of a group that has had some sort of unequal outcome, then that must be the result of an inequitable system, that the system itself is corrupt.
And so what you end up seeing is a lot of these sort of group identities directed at precisely the sorts of free institutions that we normally enjoy and like.
So the idea is that a right, because the right is distributed equally, is actually inequitable because not everybody can take equal advantage of the right.
So if you have free market economics where everybody has control over the alienation of their own labor and resources, well, that's actually unequal and unfair because some people have more resources than others.
Some people have more intellectual capital than others.
The idea is that in the end what you're shooting for is a sort of utopian leveling.
And if any group, and all groups will be unequal, it doesn't matter how you staff a room.
You can distribute a room any way you want.
If you draw a line down the middle of it, there will be inequalities between the two sides of the room.
But the idea here is that if those inequalities exist, that is a problem with the system, which leads to this sort of perennial revolutionary idea, because of course you're never going to reach utopia.
Well, quite.
I mean, the first thing is the importance of avoiding utopian thinking in general.
You know, the people, as a late friend of mine who was an expert in this once said, the people who you can see from the stare in their eyes as they're coming towards you with an idea of how you should live your life, and that they know better than you how you should.
You should run a million bloody miles for these people.
Always, always.
And that's the first thing.
The second thing is, I do think there is a fundamental issue which doesn't get opened up enough, which you just did, which is this very instinctive one, long before the level of analysis is, is that the sort of world you want to live in?
I mean, you know, I think the late Irving Kristol, who I enormously admire, said somewhere years ago in a quote that would have got him cancelled today, he said somewhere, I'm just not, I'm not for equality.
He said, I just, I'm not for it in the arts, I'm not for it in sports, I'm just not for it in this world.
And I think there's something in this that has to be identified because we've been through iterations of this before.
Do you want a society where everybody turns out the same?
Or are you content with a considerable degree of variation in all sorts of things?
I mean, we accept, the example I was giving, we accept the fact that height shifts, changes a lot, and that it actually has quite an important impact on your life, for some people.
I could never have been a basketball player, even if I wanted to.
I don't think you could have been either, probably, Ben.
And I'm sure we've both nursed our wounds for years on this, and we've probably come to an acceptance by now.
But, you know, that was something that was just, that was a born thing.
There's nothing either of us could have done about that.
There's a lot of other factors that we have no say over.
Very attractive people are disproportionately likely to be successful in their lives.
What do we do about this?
We don't know.
any more than we do with heights.
So the weird thing is that we've selected a few things to become obsessive about in the equality states.
But there's this foundational question, which many people went through in the early parts of the 20th century as well.
One of the things I've been interested in is why some people had a visceral reaction against communism.
visceral reaction, long before any organized movements were against it.
Why did some people just not want it?
And broadly speaking, the thing I've often found in people's testimonies from the time is that there was an instinctive revulsion from a certain type of person who liked the complexity and oddity and variety of the world.
Now this is, by the way, this is a sort of difficult thing because of course you'll say, well it's all very well if you're at the top of the tree to enjoy the variety, but I'm not really saying that.
What I'm trying to say is that we probably have to, in order to lead contented or happy lives, reconcile ourselves with certain things in the world.
And just as one reconciles oneself to the fact that one will never be a basketball player, so one has to reconcile oneself to other things that one can't be and do.
And the problem is there's one thing built into this, which is the discussion we should be having.
Which we don't have because everyone's got us stuck on the equality one.
The discussion we should be having, because I think we could get agreement on right and left on this, is the world we, I think, probably could agree on that we want is one in which nobody is held back from achieving things because of a characteristic they have no say over, if they have the competency to achieve it.
And I reckon across the left and the right we could agree on that.
You know, who doesn't agree with the idea that if somebody wants to be a physicist and they happen to be, I don't know, a woman or from an ethnic minority or something, that they shouldn't be able to be a physicist?
Who wants to keep women out of physics, or black people or minorities out of physics?
I mean, almost nobody.
I mean, there'll be a few nutters in America and a few in Europe, but they have no meaningful voice, those people.
The rest of us are trying to contend with a really complex question, and we have a variety of answers, and it sometimes competes with each other.
But broadly speaking, that is a different thing from trying to make society come out completely equal or equitable, as you quite rightly make the difference.
And I just wish that we actually had that conversation of how can we make sure that we are societies with the best possible ladders system in them, rather than this balking, moaning, whining, there are things I haven't got in my life.
Because we can all play that.
It's an absolutely unending game.
That's why I tell people, don't play the privileged game.
You can't play it.
You could discover an earl in Britain, with a castle of their own, who you would say, that's the most privileged person, and they could have led a hell of a life.
You have no idea.
And as I say, I just want to tell people, don't play games that cannot be won.
Well, this does raise the question.
I mean, you talk about various sorts of group identity here.
And I will say, it seems to me that some of the group identities that have been formed have been formed responsibly.
So, for example, racial group identity in the United States, in many cases that was formed, to be fair, in response to actual racial oppression.
So if you say, you know, I identify as a black person in the United States and you're talking about growing up in the 1960s, that makes perfect sense considering that there was an active attempt to oppress you and prevent you from taking part in sort of the ladders of opportunity that you're talking about.
But we've now shifted the discussion from you are part of a group that is being put upon to we are going to redefine reality so as to create new groups.
And this is where you move into sort of the trans identity issue.
So now if you are a man who is a biological male who believes that you are a woman, we are going to label you as part of a separate group who are actually women.
And if people refuse to change the science in order to meet your expectation of what you wish you were, then you are now an oppressed group of people, just like black Americans were oppressed in the 1960s by Jim Crow.
Well, I mean, there's several things to say.
One is that, of course, To say that these things are going on illegitimately now is obviously not to say there wasn't legitimacy in the past.
I mean, I'd be an idiot to claim there hasn't been racism or sexism or homophobia or transphobia for that matter.
But to say that has existed in the past and to say as a result we should be fighting this battle not just in the same manner but actually in a more vociferous manner in many ways today is I think one of the reasons why this has been so divisive.
I mean there are things that fourth wave feminists say that the suffragettes would never have dreamt of saying.
Can you imagine the suffragettes a century ago trying to persuade people to give women the vote?
Can you imagine how far they'd have got if they'd have adopted kill all men as their slogan as fourth wave feminists had?
How about the Pankhursts and others had gone around with placards saying men are trash to use another fourth wave feminist slogan?
How many men do you think they'd have got on their side in that?
Why are the fourth-wave feminists much, much worse in their arguments and much more vociferous and bitter and ugly than people were a hundred years ago when they had something legitimate to say about this?
I say this in the madness of crowds.
Why does Ta-Nehisi Coates come across as far more bitter and negative about America than James Baldwin, who's the writer who was furious when somebody said he wasn't?
And he's going to love to be James Baldwin.
He ain't James Baldwin.
And there's a reason.
And there's a reason in a way, which is that James Baldwin, among other things, has extraordinary moral imagination and a consideration about forgiveness and much more.
And I'm just amazed that people don't see that the thing has gone off the rails because at the stage where things have never been better, they are led by and asked to look up to people who present the situation as if it's never been worse.
And I think in a way that just...
It just vindicates, I think, was it Thomas Sowell who said that thing about all rights movements starting off as a legitimate cause, becoming a business and ending up as a racket?
There's something in that.
But we are being divided by these people, I think, in a way that just has to be called out.
Again, they're making unfair claims about our societies.
And that does raise this question, of course, of how do you know when to stop?
And I see this all the time in the LGBT bit of this, which is the only crampon I can claim to have on the social justice marathon wall.
And I'm just fascinated by the people who sort of, you know, who don't know that it's over, basically, you know, because they've got a business on the back of it.
They've got a racket going.
They want to protect it, you know, and they're reduced to making stuff up, making up false claims and exaggerating things just because otherwise they've got nothing to do.
And I did always think this, that all of these social justice movements were in some way the product of boredom and excessive wealth and excessive comfort.
I mean, it's only if you've got nothing to complain about that you can possibly think the world would give a damn about a microaggression.
So I wanted to ask you, Douglas, about the media in Britain versus the media in the United States, because you've written pretty extensively about the differences between media in both countries.
It's sort of fascinating.
In the United States, obviously, we have very broad free speech rules, much broader than the free speech rules in Britain.
But at the same time, our media seem to be significantly more censorious, significantly more welcoming toward opinions masquerading as objective journalism can you give us sort of a rundown on on the differences between british media and american media in this way yeah i mean the um whenever i'm in america and absorb a lot of american media it makes me um value the bbc
um uh which i mean i have plenty of criticisms of um but But I do think that there have been several things that have happened in American media in recent years which have been very much the negative.
I mean, I think the main thing is We don't really have the sort of creations you have there of people who are, for instance, in front of the camera and expected to explain a worldview for a willing, waiting audience.
Our news programs in particular, mainly because of impartiality rules, you have to sort of demonstrate impartiality, which is something we go, ha!
But it's there as an aspiration, shall we say, in British broadcasting.
You can't just go on air and, as the presenter, say stuff.
You have to counterbalance and much more.
Now, of course, there's a problem with that.
The problem of the balance issue in British broadcasting is when you have, and it does happen, you have somebody, I don't know, for instance, it happens a lot on the Israel one, you know, you get somebody from, you know, who's a sort of moderate leftist analyst of Israeli affairs and because they recognize, you know, the Israeli government, You have to balance them out with, you know, Abu Jihad from the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade.
And so there's this weird idea that that's the balance of the debate.
And I'm afraid that does happen on quite a lot of things.
And it negatively impacts our understanding of a range of issues.
So there is a problem to this balance thing.
But it does save us from, you know, having... One of the things I saw recently, Don Lemon starting his show by just saying, you know, it's... and he named the day... I think it was after the sh** all countries comment to President Trump.
You know, Don Lemon goes on and he says, you know, it's whatever the date is and the President of the United States is a racist.
You just couldn't.
You couldn't do that in British broadcasting.
You can't just go on air as a presenter and say stuff.
And I think that has had a hugely negative effect in America.
And I think the worst thing, by the way, is this thing of two sides that talk about each other and never to each other.
You know, the left says, you know, the thing about conservatives is, and the right says, the thing about the left is, and I just think it'll make things a lot worse, is my own opinion.
I've had this experience personally, actually, obviously, being from America and dealing almost solely with American media, when I was on BBC with Andrew Neil and had no clue who he was, and he was just playing devil's advocate with me, or taking a sceptical point of view, I had no understanding that that's actually his job, is to basically just play The other side to whomever he's interviewing.
And so my core assumption was, OK, if somebody is going to be speaking to me that way, then it's because they are representing their actual viewpoint, which is the way that it works in the United States.
Yes.
I had that quite early on in my career.
I had a news night once with a legendary broadcaster called Jeremy Paxman.
Jeremy Paxman asked me a question and I did sort of find it and he seemed to like what I said and I was sort of feeling rather smug and he laid into the other guy and I was actually making the mistake of sort of sitting there vaguely smiling and Jeremy Paxman wheeled round to me and sort of said, what are you smiling at?
And then attacked me on something and I thought it was a good lesson early on that a presenter's just never on your side in British TV.
So with that said, let's turn to British politics and the media treatment of Boris Johnson.
So obviously in the United States, the media treatment of President Trump is 107% negative.
There has yet to be a broadcaster in the United States outside of Fox News who voted for President Trump, who even thinks that President Trump is a breathing, sentient human being as opposed to just a bad orange giant with minimal hand size.
So how has the media treatment been of Boris Johnson in Britain?
There is some similarity in the treatment.
There has been an attempt to pretend that Boris Johnson is some appalling, divisive figure and so on.
It doesn't actually work, I have to say.
One of the reasons is that actually in conservative terms, Boris Johnson is very liberal.
And I mean this in a way in the American and the British sense of the understanding of that term.
His instincts are deeply liberal in the true classical sense and he's certainly not some authoritarian figure.
He was enormously successful by being elected twice as the Mayor of London.
In a Labour voting city, he twice took that position for the Conservative Party.
So he's obviously able to attract crossover votes.
By leading the Brexit campaign, the Leave campaign in 2016, and that being successful, a lot of people who did like him or had time for him definitely turned against him.
He definitely took the brunt for a long time with the negative fallout that did come from people who were furious about the Brexit vote.
But by and large I would say that he enjoys some better press in the UK, certainly than President Trump does in the US.
And I think there's lots of reasons for that, but one of them is just the fact that the separating sore that we've had under British politics in recent years has been addressed now.
I mean, I was very, very worried for my country in recent years, much as I have been for America in this era.
Because it did seem to me that having voted to leave EU in 2016, we had such pushback.
All the same things that were done in the US after the Trump vote.
You know, the voters are racist, the voters are sexist, the voters are misogynist, the voters are homophobic, they are voting for an increase in hate crime, they're carrying out hate crimes.
And much more.
We had all of that before it was done in the States as this massive playback to punish the voters.
And I worried that that era was not going to end.
By actually taking control of the Conservative Party finally and leading the UK out of the EU, it seems to me that that terrible sore has finally been lanced.
And that it's meant that although there are some people who just want to replay 2016 forever, By and large, people have now progressed through the various stages of grief, and that while there were people who were stuck on the second or third stage, they were still bargaining, they were still pleading.
I know that people voted to leave EU, but perhaps we can beg them not to, or get it back, or
By and large those people have passed through the stages of grief now and have realised that we've got to make the best job of where we are whether you are for leaving or for remain and so we're in a better position on that and I just add one thing which is that throughout this coronavirus it is striking to me that there has been much more public support and unanimity for the government's stance here because it's Boris Johnson.
I mean I can assure you as a ...fairly vocal critic of Jeremy Corbyn, who was the Labour Party leader until earlier this year.
If Jeremy Corbyn had won the election in December, and Jeremy Corbyn and Diane Abbott, who would have been his Home Secretary, had told me to confine myself to my house and never leave again, I'm not sure...
I'd have agreed to do it.
I'd have been very suspicious of it.
I just thought it was very personal, apart from anything else.
But no, I don't think that is... I think there's reason why we have a certain amount of trust in Boris Johnson in a way that in America, you know, as I say, you just have this totally bifurcated system, nation still.
So I touched on it a little bit earlier, but I was wondering if maybe you could explicate for folks in the United States who are on the right side of the aisle, the differences between sort of British conservatism and American conservatism.
In American conservatism, there's been this real drive for smaller government, a more libertarian view of society.
In British conservatism, what are the animating forces behind British conservatism that separate them on the one hand from sort of the Labour Party, and on the other hand from American conservatives?
The truth is that in many ways British conservatives would be seen as pretty left-wing by their American counterparts.
And I've seen it all my life.
I mean, there is a very clear difference in drive between the Republican Party, for instance, in the US and the Conservative Party in the UK.
Part of it is tonal.
Part of it goes back to that thing I mentioned at the beginning of, you know, the Conservative Party having for a long time made its peace with the welfare state.
And I think beyond that, there's a very interesting question within British conservatism, which is, Is there much more than the economic element of it?
And that's something which I think in the States you could say yes, and it's essentially the defence of the amendments and of the Constitution, and some social issues which you obviously, like abortion, go round and round and fight very, very hard on.
In a way, I admire the fact that America still takes certain very fundamental issues very seriously and debates them seriously.
But in the UK, we don't have those sorts of issues.
We don't really have these litmus test issues.
I think that that's a failure in many ways.
And I've often had this conversation with other conservatives and conservative philosophers in the UK of what conservative thinking in the UK really is.
Because it has been hard in recent decades to identify what it is beyond a certain view of the state, a certain view of the economy.
I'd say this is something that needs to be addressed because conservatives took an awful lot for granted in the UK and probably have been reminded, all of us in our lifetimes, of how unwise that is.
Let me give an example.
We have a monarchy in the And this is just part of the fabric of the state.
Now, I would say that it's obvious that the Conservative would inevitably be defensive of the monarchy, inevitably be in favour of the monarchy.
But it isn't something you hear people going on about.
Because it's sort of agreed upon, it's accepted.
There are some people who want to get rid of the monarchy, but my point is that we have great institutions in the UK, wonderful institutions, which have endured the test of time and have provided, as the Queen has actually in particular in recent weeks, extraordinary level of unity and really moral encouragement to the country.
But I mention that because conservatives don't go on about it, because it's just in the fabric of the nation.
And many of these institutions, many things that are conservative, we've just forgotten to talk about.
And, you know, I mentioned Roger Scruton earlier, who was a great friend and a great inspiration to me.
And Roger was always thinking about this.
Why is it that conservatives have so little to say about, for instance, beauty, the built environment?
You know, what does it matter if you've got a conservative government in power, if it's wrecked the inner cities of all of our beautiful cities and put up horrible, horrible monstrosity buildings?
I think it was Lord Clark, Alan Clark's father, Kenneth Clark, Lord Clark of Civilization, who said that if you want to judge a civilization, you shouldn't read the speeches of the finance minister.
You should look at what buildings they've erected.
That'll tell you.
That'll tell you everything very, very fast.
And I do think that there's something in that.
What did it matter to have post-war conservative governments erecting huge tower blocks that they expected the populace to live in?
So there are an awful lot of questions which we've just presumed, and a lot of these presumptions have just been allowed to go by by conservatives in the belief that, well, at least we've got control of the economy.
And that is something I think which everybody on the right has to think about more.
Mainly because it's so striking to me that the left speaks at a totally different level from the right on issue after issue.
Again, this may not be the case quite so much in the US, but I'm just so struck by the fact that the left does something like inequality And the right talks about a small increase in house building in brownfield site areas or something.
It's like, wow, that's going to fire them up.
And again and again, on issue after issue, that's what happens.
The left talks to things that are very deep.
I often used to talk about this with Roger.
Look at resentment.
Look at resentment.
Envy.
Those are deep, deep human instincts to play to.
And when the left does resentment and envy, if the right just says, oh, we found this really interesting tax loophole that we can address, it's not that you're not doing anything, but you are not acting at the same level.
If somebody does resentment to you, you need to do something of equal weight back.
I would argue on that one.
Aspiration, for instance.
But if somebody else is talking about despair, you need to talk about hope.
You need to counter these out.
And I think we haven't done, actually.
Conservatism in the UK has been in power, but it's done a horrible job.
So in just a second, we're going to talk about the royal family and the European perspective on President Trump.
If you want to hear Douglas Murray's answers on those specific questions, head on over to dailywire.com slash subscribe and become a member.
You can hear the rest of our conversation over there.
Well, Douglas Murray, really appreciate your time.
Go check out Douglas's books, Madness of Craswell's The Strange Death of Europe.
Douglas, stay safe in there forever, since none of us are ever leaving our homes.
And and we won't have to worry about the death of civilization because literally we're never going to see it again.
So that's that's exciting stuff.
Yeah, we wouldn't notice it even if it went anymore.
It would just go by.
But it's been a great pleasure, Ben.
I'm very glad to be able to do this, and I hope to be able to do it in person at some point.
Sounds great.
Great.
Thanks so much.
Thank you.
Executive producer, Jeremy Boring.
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