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April 30, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
01:02:12
THE POLITICS OF WHITENESS Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep 80
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Why are the Feds going after Rudy Giuliani and not after Governor Cuomo?
And an in-depth look at the politics of whiteness.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
The times are crazy and a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
What is happening to due process of law in the United States?
What is happening to the idea of equal justice under the law?
We talk incessantly about equality, we talk about civil rights, but it seems that in America now, The civil rights and the rights to due process are being trampled for Americans, at least Americans on one side of the aisle, which is to say our side of the aisle.
Now, I want to start with a very disturbing little tidbit I see about Derek Chauvin.
And it says, Feds had secret backup plan to arrest Derek Chauvin in court for police brutality if he was cleared of killing George Floyd.
Think about this. The guy is presumed innocent, at least until proven guilty.
And he was found guilty.
And maybe he was guilty.
But what if the jury decided, and remember, there were all kinds of pressures on the jury to find him guilty.
There was a kind of atmosphere of intimidation.
But juries can go either way.
You can have a hung jury, which is to say the jury can't agree on a verdict.
You can have an acquittal.
Now, apparently the feds were sort of deciding that we've got to have a guilty verdict.
And if we don't get a guilty verdict, we've got to go to Plan B. Which is to say, they apparently had coordinated, it says, with the prosecutors and also with the Democratic establishment in Minneapolis.
At least this is according to the Star Tribune, to immediately arrest Chauvin if he was acquitted and charge him with federal charges.
So back into the lockup.
And the point of this really was symbolic.
And this is the disturbing part of it.
It says that the reason for this was, quote,"...amid fears of a not guilty verdict that would have prompted fresh riots." So the motive here is not that Derek Chauvin has violated both state and federal laws.
Maybe he gets off on the state rap, but we're going to go after him on the federal rap.
No, the idea here was let's get him immediately upon being released.
He thinks, oh wow, I got off.
But no, they're waiting to arrest him again.
And so you get the idea here that these are show trials.
These are trials in which sort of the outcome is predetermined in advance.
You get off on this, we're going to get you on that.
So this is not really America.
This is not due process of law.
And this is only the start of it.
I want to focus now on two more high-profile situations, Rudy Giuliani and Andrew Cuomo.
Let's start with Andrew Cuomo.
There's new information, a bombshell sort of report, that says that Andrew Cuomo has been doing more than previously known to cover up the nursing home deaths.
He's covered up approximately 50% of them in a five-month period.
Here are some sort of key bullet items.
Number one, Andrew Cuomo instructed his state officials not to provide data to the New York State Health Department.
He told the Health Department Commissioner Howard Zucker, do not release the true death toll to the public and do not share it with lawmakers, either Democratic lawmakers in New York or federal lawmakers who are asking about this information.
Now, all of this is going on.
And there was also, by the way, a scientific paper which incorporated all the nursing home data.
and the Cuomo administration made sure that that was not published.
They had done an audit of the nursing home debts.
It was finished months before, but they suppressed it.
They waited months before they let it out, and letters had been drafted to inform health department, drafted by the health department for state legislatures.
The Cuomo administration made sure those were never sent, and all while Cuomo was basically preparing his new book, which would then become a kind of media sensation.
This man is a model of leadership.
Now when you think back to this Cuomo situation, let's remember, and people forget this, that the Trump administration sent a giant ship, the USNS Comfort, into New York Harbor with the explicit purpose of taking COVID patients.
Now, in order not to, quote, accept federal aid, in order not to be seen to be benefiting from something done by the Trump administration, Governor Cuomo decided, I'm not going to use it.
I'm going to dispatch the COVID patients to nursing homes.
So, in effect, he killed them.
I mean, his policies killed them.
His decisions killed these people.
And this, it would seem, at the very least, would be gross negligence.
Look at it. His motives throughout are political.
This is not a governor who's just making mistakes in the course of making decisions.
He is trying to evade the impression of getting federal help.
He's then trying to evade federal scrutiny.
So, his motives are thoroughly corrupt.
And yet, as far as I can see, there's no federal scrutiny of this.
Why aren't FBI agents at the Cuomo administration's offices?
Why aren't they ransacking through his desk?
Why aren't they trying to find out what was the basis of making these decisions in which all these people died?
And I haven't even brought up so far all the sexual allegations against him, made now by, what, 10 women?
Ten women who are all lying?
We're supposed to believe Christine Blasey Ford about something that happened 40 years ago, but we're not supposed to believe ten women who worked for Cuomo, were in his orbit, are on his side politically, and yet are all accusing him.
Now, let's turn to Giuliani.
What's disturbing about all this is supposedly the feds raided Giuliani's office.
They grabbed his computer, they took his hard drive and so on.
They're evidently trying to see if he did had some corrupt dealings that were involved with Trump.
But Giuliani has said, I have a statement issued by Giuliani, and he goes, the sole thing that they are supposedly looking for, the warrant is for, is his failure to register as a foreign agent.
Really?
That's it?
That's why you go and raid the offices of the lawyer of the former president of the And Giuliani goes, two years ago, through his attorney, he offered to sit down with them and demonstrate, show them that this is completely untrue.
And he goes, moreover, Giuliani has repeatedly tried to give the Hunter Biden hard drive to these very same federal prosecutors.
By the way, a hard drive that shows Hunter Biden's failure to register as a foreign agent.
But they didn't want it. They're like, no, we're not interested.
If it's not about Trump, don't contact us.
We'll contact you. So Giuliani, I think, is very right to suspect that there is a corrupt double standard, his words.
And he also points out that the Southern District of New York, by the way, this is the same outfit that prosecuted me, they had gone to the Justice Department earlier.
They're like, we want to raid Giuliani.
And the Justice Department repeatedly told them, no.
No. So what has changed?
Well, what has changed is Merrick Garland, the new Attorney General, who's apparently a thug with a badge, to use a term I've used before.
And Merrick Garland is like, okay, you know what?
We're now in. Let's go for it.
So Merrick Garland apparently is the guy who signed off on the raid on Giuliani.
So what we're dealing with here is not only, it seems, a hit, a political hit.
Would they be doing this to Giuliani?
Ask yourself the simple question.
If he were not the lawyer for Trump, if he were not fighting the alleged election fraud, if he were not behind, if they weren't scared of him politically, would they be doing this And the clear answer to that is no.
So the discrepant treatment between, say, Governor Cuomo and Giuliani shows that there are two standards of justice in the United States, one for them and one for us.
One of the signature hallmarks of socialist regimes, tyrannical regimes, is the idea of converting ordinary people into informants.
George Orwell was right on this in 1984.
He talks about children informing on other children and also informing on their parents and informing on their neighbors.
Let me quote Orwell,"...nearly all children nowadays, meaning in the regime of 1984, were horrible." And he goes, what was worst of all was that by means of such organizations as the spies, it was systematically turned into ungovernable little savages.
And yet this produced in them no tendency to rebel against the party.
On the contrary, they adored the party and everything connected with it.
All their ferocity was turned outwards against the enemies of the state.
And then he says, it was almost normal for people over 30 to be frightened of their own children.
So socialist regimes, and we've seen this, by the way, we saw it in Russia, the old Soviet Union.
We've seen it in China under Mao's Cultural Revolution.
We see it in Venezuela today.
You turn people into surveillance experts, if you will, spies for the socialist state.
And not only do you turn them into spies, they take a certain kind of pleasure in performing this task.
And I was looking at social media and I see almost a classic example of this.
Quite disturbing. Take a look.
Listen. Nobody's gonna know.
Nobody's gonna know. They're gonna know.
Ooh, Marissa, we're gonna know.
Especially when you documented your entire trip with travel dates.
I recognize this seat back.
You flew Southwest, right?
Great, so I forwarded all of that to Southwest Airlines and Anna made sure to tell me that they will pass it along to the appropriate leaders.
So if you get marked as a flight risk, it was me.
But wait bestie, I'm not done.
We need to discuss the other problematic shit on your page.
Like the vaccine misinformation where you claim nursing babies are dying and women are hemorrhaging by association?
Or the medical misinformation where you counsel people on taking unregulated supplements when you're not legally allowed to?
Or how about praising domestic terrorism on the day of the insurrection?
Or the racism where you compare marginalized groups of people to aliens and dolphins?
Or when you deny racism altogether as some form of government control, while highlighting your white fragility.
Like, we get it, you don't give a shit about anybody but yourself.
Wow. Let's take a look at what's happening here.
You've got two women.
Let's just call them woman A and woman B. And woman A is just apparently talking about, I'm not sure what she's talking about, but she's obviously making a kind of a joke and she's with some guy and they're kind of talking to each other.
And Woman B inserts herself into the picture and then turns herself into sort of an unrecruited Sherlock Holmes.
She's like, I'm going to find out all the stuff about you.
Hey, I'm going to look for clues.
I'm going to make myself into a nasty little sleuth.
For what purpose? Well, the purpose is really clear.
We want to out you, which is to say we want to publicly humiliate you, which is to say we want to sort of expose you and, if possible, destroy your life.
Because what is the outcome of all this?
Well, someone, you know, your employer then calls you in and decides to demote you or fire you.
So all of this, no, it's not occurring at the state level.
We don't have Big Brother, the socialist state.
But what you have are corporate entities here, and Woman B is counting on the fact that there is a kind of, you may almost say, fascist operation in place involving the state, involving the airlines, involving all these other entities.
So the outcome she would probably be happy with is if she even says she wants...
This woman put on a no-fly list.
She can't fly. She wants her, ideally, probably to be kicked off social media so she can't post, she can't talk to her friends, she can't be on Facebook.
And where does this end?
Now, the thing is, we think of tyranny in terms of stereotype.
We think of it as like Stalin, this guy with a big toothbrush mustache and a Cossack outfit.
It makes it harder for us to recognize tyranny among us.
Tyranny is a part of the human condition.
It's part of that nasty human desire to squelch and destroy other people.
It's very often driven out of envy.
You can almost see the envy dripping from this woman's face.
She envies the other woman, and envy converts itself into hatred and hatred into destruction.
Now, this tyrannical impulse is particularly dangerous when it's married to power.
I see no signs that this woman, woman B, has any power at all.
And that's a good thing.
Because if she had power, she would turn into Gretchen Whitmer.
So the problem is that when you combine these nasty, tyrannical impulses that are really, I think, embedded in human nature with power, what you get is a very destructive and dangerous combination.
And we're seeing that in very troubling ways playing out in the United States right now.
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Listen. They're attacking his power grid.
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Thank you.
Well, thank you for coming.
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Christian organizations and schools and universities are often subject to discrimination, by which I mean that they are treated badly and treated differently because they're Christian.
Now, fortunately, courts sometimes take a look at this and strike this Religious discrimination down.
And the good news is that's just happened at Wayne State University in Michigan in a case involving Wayne State versus a Christian club called the Inner Varsity Christian Fellowship.
Now, Inner Varsity is a nationwide organization.
They've got clubs on many college campuses.
At Wayne State, their club has been around for 75 years.
But, in 2017, Wayne State University decided, you know what?
We're going to de-recognize this club.
We're essentially going to kick it off the campus.
And why? Because the club, they said, is violating our non-discrimination principle.
How is the club doing that?
Well, the answer is that the club...
According to Wayne State, in order to conform with the non-discrimination policy, had to be willing to allow anyone to be in leadership, even if those people in leadership disagree with the religious beliefs of the InterVarsity Fellowship.
That's what the issue was all about.
So, the InterVarsity Fellowship disagreed, refused, and the school said, well, if you refuse, then you're...
Out of here. So, the InterVarsity Fellowship went to a Christian legal organization called the Beckett Fund, and the Beckett Fund sued.
Now, what's really interesting is the judge's decision and some of the things it says.
First of all, the judge says, wait a minute.
The college is applying this non-discrimination policy in a highly selective manner.
And now I want to read from his decision.
He goes, specifically...
Club sports teams on Wayne State's campus exclude members who don't fall within the prescribed sex or gender identity categories.
So, for example, women can't get on the men's team.
Men can't get on the women's team.
Also, Greek-led fraternities and sororities exclude members and leaders based on their sex and gender identity.
The Iraqi student organization required that its leaders be, quote, dedicated Iraqi students.
So they're not open to anybody.
They require that if you want to be in the Iraqi student organization and be one of the leaders, you've got to be from Iraq.
The Student Veterans Organization limits membership and leadership positions to those who are veterans or dependents on veterans, the ROTC. So basically what the court is saying is, listen...
You can have a non-discrimination policy, Wayne State, but you can't single out a religious organization and treat it differently than you treat all these other organizations.
So the bottom line of it, the InterVarsity Fellowship is now back at Wayne State.
The university has been appropriately chastened, and we need to see this kind of thing happening all over the United States so that religious organizations are at the very least treated no differently than secular ones.
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not all that often I come across a book that sort of takes me by storm by which I mean just draws me into the themes struck by its originality, its clarity of exposition and And it's, it's.
Effectiveness in thinking through the argument.
Well, recently I stumbled across White Shift, this book right here by Eric Kaufman.
And I said, I got to have Eric on the program.
So we chased him down.
He's in London. Eric Kaufman's a professor of politics at the University of London.
He's also affiliated with the Manhattan Institute.
He's written a couple of other books.
But we're going to talk about his book, White Shift.
Eric, it's a real pleasure to have you on the podcast today.
Thanks for joining me.
Let's start by diving right into it.
What do you mean when you use this term white shift?
What's going on? Well, the term is really meant to capture two things.
The sort of white shift 1.0, if you like, which is the decline of the white majorities across Western countries this century.
And then white white chip 2.0 is sort of a longer term Beijing or blurring of the boundaries of whiteness as we move into the next century. So both Both processes I write about in the book. All right now you're talking about two huge developments. Let's focus for a moment on the first one Whites used to be the overwhelming majorities in countries like Australia Canada pretty much all the major countries in Europe,
certainly the United States.
And what you're saying is not just in America, but in all these countries, we're seeing a shift away from these dominant white majorities toward less dominant white majorities.
In some cases, perhaps, whites don't retain their majority status at all.
I know here in Texas, for example, that Latinos are likely to become a majority in the not-too-distant future.
Now, my question to you is, this is happening.
Is it happening sort of by accident or by design?
Well, I think it's sort of an unintended consequence of certain policy decisions that were taken for sort of ethical, moral reasons to sort of try and craft colorblind immigration policies.
And the result of that has been, along with global demographic trends, the result of that has been a big shift in the origins of immigrants and thus in the ethnic composition of populations, because also the native birth rates have gone down a fair bit.
In the past century, and so as a result, the impact of immigration is so much the greater as well.
Now, when the United States debated its immigration law in the 60s, I believe it was Senator Kennedy who emphatically said that this change in the immigration laws is not going to produce any big demographic shifts in America.
There were others, by the way, opponents of the laws, who warned that it would.
Was this a case where the critics turned out to be right?
Yes, it was. I mean, in a way, critics like Sam Irvin, who I believe was a Texas congressman, were correct in that this did lead to a major change in the makeup of the American population.
But it's true that people like Ted Kennedy said that the new legislation would not have this effect, and lo and behold, they were wrong.
Ultimately, it did have a major effect.
And we're living through, in a way, the changes.
Similar bills, by the way, similar shifts occurred in Canada, in Australia and New Zealand.
And in different ways in Europe as well.
Now, historically, Eric, you've had America, which was a dominantly, you may say, British nation transplanted to America.
And over time, you had various ethnic groups.
I'm talking now about white ethnic groups, the Irish, the Italians, the Jews.
They came starting toward the middle of the 19th century, but all the way through the 20th century.
And they became assimilated into what Americans sort of called the melting pot.
They melted into this supposed American pot.
Could that be described as an earlier white shift?
Yes, it can be.
I mean, in the sense that the boundaries of the ethnic majority expanded from WASP to include Catholics and Jews.
But I would stress a couple of things.
First of all, it wasn't a shift in the meaning of white, the racial category, which actually Jews and Catholics already were legally white.
So it's not the sort of becoming white narrative that you hear, say, in critical race theory, but it's much more about the boundaries of the sort of old American or all American ethnic majority expanding in a way.
And this took place actually very suddenly.
So even though there were a lot of Catholics and Jews, they were relatively unassimilated to at least They were assimilated culturally, but not into the collective memory necessarily of the majority until really post-1960, after Kennedy's election, you had this sudden shift.
By 1980, more or less, those divisions had faded away in large part.
Now, one thing you say in White Shift is that we see this remarkable emergence of a kind of a left-wing ideology, which we're all very familiar with now, that essentially asks of every other minority group, particularly the sort of minority groups of color, but by extension this would apply to gender, to sexual orientation, that these groups should emphasize and italicize
their identity. They should celebrate it, they should be proud of it, they should put it on the table, so to speak, while whites should work to repent of, and if possible, dissolve their ethnic identity.
Talk a little bit about how this ideology came into being, and then I want to go a little bit more in depth into what it entails.
Well, yeah, Dinesh, I mean, you have to really go back to the 1910s, really, when you had an Anglo-Protestant country that was seeing a lot of Catholic and some Jewish immigration.
The Bohemian Cultural Left intellectuals, they were known as the Young Intellectuals, lived in Greenwich Village.
They very much celebrated this immigration as bringing spice and diversity into what they considered a repressive and boring society.
They were mainly WASPs themselves, but they were in revolt against their own group.
They encouraged, they wanted ethnic minorities not to assimilate, to stick to their own faith, and they wanted WASPs to become cosmopolitans and get away from their ethnicity.
So the message was what I call asymmetrical multiculturalism, multiculturalism for them, but not for us.
And that's really the beginning of this mindset, which then becomes stronger and stronger as we move, particularly post the 1960s.
It's less so about WASPs And Catholics and Jews as the outsiders and much more about whites and African Americans, Latinos and Asians as the outsiders.
But it's the same mentality, which is about ethnicity for them is great, ethnicity for us is toxic.
We're going to be back in just a minute.
I'm going to ask Eric Kaufman to talk about whether the culture, the bohemian culture of Greenwich Village has to some extent become the culture of America.
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I'm talking to political scientist Eric Kaufman about his important new book, White Shift.
Eric, you were saying a moment ago that you had bohemian cultures in places like Greenwich Village.
Now, I'm assuming that this was also true in Schwabing in Munich and probably in the left bank of Paris near the Sorbonne, that you have these bohemian cultures that found Western society to be repressive.
And they looked at an affirmation of ethnic identity on the part of minorities, in some cases, perhaps even white minorities, but now non-white minorities.
And they said, we want an America in which white people become cosmopolitan, as you put it, but black people and brown people celebrate being black and brown.
What is the sort of underlying logic of this concept?
Why should one group sort of cease to become itself, if I can say it, while other groups become themselves more than ever?
Well, there is no real logic to it.
It's really splitting the world into two non-overlapping groups.
Magisteria, where there's one set of rules for the majority group and another set for minorities, and each has to play their assigned role.
I mean, initially, this was all about kind of liberation and sophistication.
That was sort of the way it was justified.
By the time we get to the 1960s, however, it fuses with this sort of oppressor-victim kind of neo-Marxist philosophy to become something sort of a The white majority is an oppressor, and the minorities are victims, and it becomes much more of a sort of majority-minority, pseudo-Marxist sort of belief system.
And this is sort of the origins then of the kind of ideology that morphs into political correctness, Afrocentrism, cancel culture, all of that, which follows in train as this expands in scope.
Part of what you seem to be implying is that for the white bohemian, the minorities were, you may almost call them a kind of a battering ram, in order to knock down traditional elements of the old culture.
My question to you is, what about the other side of the coin?
What did the minorities get out of it?
Why would blacks and browns, let's say, coming to America, who might say, ordinarily, as I think to some degree I have, hey, listen, you know, I'm very proud of having come from India.
I had a happy childhood.
I don't repudiate my Indian identity at all, but I wouldn't have come to America if I didn't want to be part of something that could be loosely called American.
So why would the minorities themselves reject the assimilation model itself?
In favor of, let's just call it the ethnic identity model.
What's in it for them? Well, I mean, it of course isn't monolithic.
So many minorities, or if we go back to Catholics and Jews, they did want to assimilate and did assimilate, but the white bohemians very much discouraged.
They didn't want them to do that.
They actually had a term called Randolph Bourne, who was a leader of the Young Intellectuals, one of them, used this term cultural half-breed to refer to an assimilated So this is something they didn't want minorities to do, but of course minorities did it anyway.
But there's a significant group of minorities who just thought that their Catholic or Jewish interests would be better protected by their ethnic representatives who were all generally pro-immigration, and they worried about anti-Catholicism and temperance laws which were directed against Catholics.
So the banning of alcohol, for example.
And so there were various reasons why Catholics and Jews tended to sort of go in for this kind of philosophy.
Now, Trump made some important inroads.
He got a decent share of Black and Latino votes, even in 2016, but he got even more in 2020.
How would you describe these black people and brown people?
What did they see in Trump that they identified with?
And why are they in opposition to this bohemian plan in which they should sort of sign up for their own ethnic group and stay within it politically?
Well, yeah, so the white progressive bohemian view of minorities as sort of political objects to be used for some sort of transformation and the minorities own identities themselves don't line up necessarily very well.
And so a lot of minorities, particularly if we're talking about Latinos and Asians getting into the second, third generation, for example, feel more American and they're more sort of patriotic and aligned to the US. And for that reason, Tend to be more likely to be drifting towards the Republican Party.
So, for example, if you look at Asian, well, if you look at non-white Americans, their party identity peaks at about 75% Democrat in 2008, and it's now only about 50% Democrat as of 2019.
So there's been a big slide in the share of particularly Asians and Hispanics, but also African Americans who identify their party as Democrat.
And I think that's very important, particularly for the third generation.
You make a very subtle point in White Shift where you say that while minorities very often celebrate their identity in explicitly racial terms, that whites tend not to do that.
They tend to identify with nationalistic symbols.
So no one's going to say, you know, I'm really for white culture.
I love the fact that Mozart was white.
They'll talk about the fact that Mozart was a German or Mozart was part of Western civilization.
And so they use the paraphernalia of patriotism and the American flag and the national anthem.
So would it be fair to say that whiteness is to some degree disguised because it appears under this larger, you may say, nationalistic umbrella?
Yeah, so you have a white pan-ethnic identity that does exist, and it's more expressed by what it isn't.
So it isn't Asian, it isn't Hispanic, it isn't Black, as opposed to what it is.
And there's a taboo, of course, against creating a white club on campus, we know that.
And so naturally, this then gets sublimated in different ways.
But if you actually ask people, you know, what is your racial identity?
How important is it to you?
You actually find that amongst whites, it's sort of 45 to 65% of them sort of indicate that it's at least somewhat important to them.
Which is about 20 or 30 points less than other groups, but it is still a factor.
And interestingly, it's also there to some degree amongst some minorities.
So Latinos who identify as white, for example, which they're more likely to do if they're third generation, for example, they tend to be more likely to be Republican voters, which is quite interesting.
But these are, to some degree, choices people make.
When we come back, I want to talk to Eric Kaufman about neighborhoods and how the shifting composition of neighborhoods reflects, you may say, white shift in action.
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I'm back with political scientist Eric Kaufman.
We're talking about his book, White Shift.
Eric, if you look at the division between, let's just say, Trump and Biden or the Republicans and Democrats in America today, you find that the Democrats dominate the cities, particularly the inner cities, but the major cities are going in huge numbers for the Democrats.
And then you have the outlying areas, the rural areas and the outlying parts of the country, which seem to be going the opposite direction.
They go overwhelmingly for the Republicans, let's just say for Trump.
I guess there's a fight for some of the suburban areas that lie outside the cities but aren't exactly quite rural areas.
Can you describe the concept of white shift, if you will, and talk about how a lot of whites have actually decamped and exited the inner city, but a lot of other ethnic minorities, the Asian Americans, the Latinos, now occupy those inner cities with blacks and with a small number of residual whites?
Well, yeah, so you've had a shift of white population towards areas that are relatively white.
Now, this is true of all. All groups are attracted to their own areas.
But some of the studies seem to indicate that whites have more exclusive neighborhood preferences in that the share of whites that they're looking for in a neighborhood is higher than, let's say, a Latino, the share of Latinos that a Latino would be looking for in their neighborhood.
What you see sort of at the aggregate level is that, you know, white areas, all areas are becoming more diverse, including the heavily white areas.
But whites are not moving into super diverse, highly minority areas, except for a few gentrifying areas near large city centers.
And so essentially what's occurring is that, you know, the very white areas are becoming a little more diverse, but the diverse areas are becoming a lot more diverse.
So the white areas remain relatively white.
They're declining a little bit, but not very fast, whereas the diverse areas are becoming...
More and more diverse at a very quick rate.
And so yes, this is leading to a sort of very interesting geography.
It's worth saying, by the way, that a lot of the voting patterns are driven by the kinds of voters that live in rural areas.
They're older, less likely to have a degree.
If you actually strip out those demographic characteristics, there's a lot less difference between these places.
So for example, you know, in Britain, if you take Brexit, A white working class person from London is no less likely to have voted Brexit as somebody in the countryside.
And something similar is occurring in the US too, that if you were to take your white working class native-born person from New York City, for example, actually their voting is not as different from the countryside as people think.
Very interesting. Now, let's talk about where this is all going, because there is a school of thought that says, hey, and this is coming, I think, from the left, it's wonderful news that sort of whites are kind of on their way out.
The faster this happens, the better.
We're going to have a minority America, which is going to be a sort of a left-wing coalition of these different identity groups.
Now, you say, I think, that that is actually not so fast.
That's not necessarily true.
The real question is, is it possible to create, I think you used the phrase, an inclusive nationalism, in which just as the white majority, the WASP majority, was able to take in the Irish and the Italians in the past,
Is it possible that the still-white majority of America could, quote, take in members of other minority groups to the point that they would create a kind of new majority, a majority that looks tanner than the older majority, but remains a majority?
Talk about the possibilities of that happening.
What would need to occur?
And what should the Republican Party perhaps do to accelerate the creation of that kind of an enduring, or at least...
New majority. Well, yeah, I mean, there's really two entities.
One is the sort of nation state, which includes everybody.
But then you have the melting pot, which is the ethnic majority, I would call it.
And the intermarriage rates are such between all groups that we're seeing the pot bubbling.
And so, yes, I would think that what we will see is this emerging mixed race group.
But I argue that it will look more back towards the kind of European and Anglo past simply because that has the longest roots I would say that the Republican Party is obviously going to want to be pro-assimilation.
I also think the pace of immigration matters because it takes a long time for groups to melt into the core and the more they melt in and the more they assimilate, the more they'll move towards the Republican Party.
There's always going to be a political division, perhaps, which will affect how people Think of their ancestry as Americans, but I think that we are seeing this melting process and it will lead perhaps to something like we see in Turkey or even in the state of Hawaii where the Hawaiians, there's only about 7,000 pure Hawaiians, but actually there's hundreds of thousands of Hawaiians who identify as Hawaiian.
And similarly, I would have thought in the U.S. you'll have a sort of very polyglot gene pool, but the identity will be back towards a much narrower set of ancestries and myths.
Now, in the United States, we do have one thing, which is the so-called one-drop rule, which has been blocking, you may say, the assimilation of African Americans.
Because if you have somebody, you take, let's say, Barack Obama, who is half white and half black, but in some sense is culturally forced...
To identify as black.
I mean, if Obama were to call himself a white guy, people would start attacking him immediately.
So, for blacks in particular, you have this phenomenon in which they're not allowed, in a sense, to choose.
But I think for other ethnic groups, you do.
So, is it the case that we might be looking at a multiracial, even political majority, but to some degree one that excludes blacks because of the tragic inheritance of the one-drop rule?
Well, there is that tradition, you're right, although it is worth saying that the rate of black-white intermarriage has really taken off as well.
And, you know, certainly if you were to look in Britain, you know, you could see people with African ancestry who might perhaps be considered white at some level.
And I think maybe in the U.S. you'll get eventually the creation of that kind of mestizo that you have in Mexico where It's going to be the African American and the Anglo myth of origin that becomes the nucleus of this national ethnic group, if you like. I think I could see that occurring.
So I don't think there's an insuperable barrier to the absorption of African Americans either.
So you think, just to sum up, and we'll close on this, that you can foresee the possibility of a dominant Republican majority that is multi-ethnic, that has a white majority in it, but is an inclusive white majority that is defined by intermarriage, but also shared cultural ties that affirms the symbols of America as its own.
Right, and collective memories going back to the founding and settling of the U.S., the Westward Settlement, and the Puritans, and all of that history becomes its history in a way, and its memory.
And I guess it's about accepting or rejecting that memory, and that's really the split we're seeing now.
If you look in the survey data, people who reject that collective memory Are much more likely to vote for the Democrats, and those who accept that are much more likely to be Republicans, regardless of their actual ethnic origin.
And that debate over the collective memory and what is America, I think, will define, in a way, some of the divides between parties going forward.
Thanks, Eric, for what I think has turned out to be a very stimulating discussion.
Thanks for coming on. Thanks, Dinesh.
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I must be on some sort of a French kick this week.
Yesterday I talked about the writer Proust and why we should still read Proust despite Proustian circuitous language, unbelievably long sentences, and what many people consider to be that familiar Proustian boredom.
But I argue there were sort of nuggets of deep psychological insight hidden inside all of that.
Now, I want to talk about one of my favorite French writers, Gustave Flaubert.
Flaubert known most famously for writing the classic work Madame Bovary.
And Flaubert is often known as the sort of perfect novelist.
He was very meticulous about how he wrote.
It was said that sometimes he would spend hours thinking about a single word.
What is the perfect, appropriate word?
And I think at this time when people are so kind of casual about language and use language so improperly...
It's kind of amazing to find an author that cares about the word, the kind of aha word that makes you go.
That is just the right word to describe that emotion or that situation.
Apparently, Flaubert sometimes would spend a half an hour over a comma.
Does this sentence deserve a comma?
And if so, where should it go?
Now, the style of Flaubert that he's famous for is known as realism.
And we have to remember that realism is a style.
It's not the only way to write.
Shakespeare didn't use realism.
If you look at some of Shakespeare's plots...
Midsummer Night's Dream and so on.
They're like fantastical.
They're like preposterous.
They couldn't really happen.
But Shakespeare isn't worried about that because his style isn't this kind of realistic depiction.
It's almost like an analogy to painting.
You have painters who paint and they're like, I'm going to show you the tree exactly the way it is.
But then you have impressionists and they're like, I'm going to give a few splotches that give you the sort of impression of a tree and Not to mention more modern types of art in which the tree doesn't even look like a tree.
It actually looks like Nancy Pelosi.
So we see in literature realism as a style.
Flaubert's idea was this clinical detachment to look at situations, very ordinary situations, but render them in such a precise way That there was a kind of power in that type of writing.
Now, the funny story about Flaubert, and I'm going to talk about Madame Bovary in a minute, but the funny thing about Flaubert is he didn't start out that way.
He started out kind of the opposite.
He was a flamboyant guy.
I mean, he was French.
And he was sort of over the top, and he became interested in the sort of...
Very vivid art of earlier times.
He had gone to a museum. He had actually seen a powerful painting, The Temptation of St.
Anthony, with St. Anthony there in this kind of almost grotesque position.
And Flaubert goes, you know what?
I'm going to write a massive novel just on that.
And he did. He wrote this.
He spent apparently four years on it.
And he wrote this novel called The Temptation of St.
Anthony. And he was an up-and-coming 30-year-old writer in Paris.
And there were two of his close friends who were well-known writers at the time, Louis Boulay and Maxime Ducamp.
And Flaubert basically tells these guys, listen, I want you to come to my chateau.
And I will treat you to some wonderful French food and some beautiful French wine, but it's on one condition.
On Friday, I'm going to start reading to you my masterwork, The Temptation of St.
Anthony. It's probably going to take me two days to do this.
During this time, you must sit in full attention and not say a word.
And then when I'm finished, I want you to tell me what you honestly think.
And so the two friends who love Flaubert and were actually very interested to see what he had come up with, they're like, okay, we agree.
And so Flaubert gets started on Friday.
He goes all day Saturday.
He goes half the day Sunday.
And at the end of it, he stops and he goes, so what did you think?
And the first guy, Ducamp, sat in stupefied silence and said nothing.
And then the other guy...
Louis Boulet said to Flaubert the following, We think that you should throw this into the fire and never speak of it again.
You can just imagine poor Flaubert.
I mean, this was probably an incredible crusher, but something very good came of it because afterward, Flaubert and his two friends took a walk and they said, you know, Flaubert, there's no need to go back to ancient times, to go to the art museum.
The material of your writing, the material of the novel is right around you.
Why don't you take an ordinary incident from normal life and And get into the fullness of it and the meaning of it and write about it as only you can.
And not long after this, Flaubert is thumbing through the newspapers and he sees a newspaper cutting of a provincial local official in some small French town whose wife has an adulterous affair and then ultimately commits suicide.
And Flaubert goes, I'll write about that.
And that becomes, a little bit later, the classic that to this day Flaubert is known for, Madame Bovary.
So in a weird way, Flaubert's unfortunate experience with The Temptation of St.
Anthony, by the way, a book's still available, and people still read it out of a kind of curiosity about Flaubert and his intellectual development.
But in this way, the great masterwork, well worth reading, Madame Bovary came about.
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I'm going to talk in this segment about the genius of Flaubert and about his novel Madame Bovary, a novel that is conventionally thought to be a story of small-town adultery.
I'm going to argue that that is not its main theme.
And that its main theme is actually something that we should all think about and that relates to things going on in America today.
So Flaubert was captivated, at least in his early life, by the Romantic movement.
And the Romantic movement is a movement that is driven by the search for great achievements, high ideals, appealing to sort of the highest and more sublime aspirations of And the Romantic movement pitted itself against something that admittedly Flaubert hated,
which is the culture of the bourgeois, the culture of industry, of ordinary life, of people, for example, digging ditches and going to farming festivals and dispensing out pharmaceutical drugs and, let's just say, working in Target in our own time.
So here is Madame Bovary.
And she is someone who is enraptured with the idea of living this kind of romantic or to her sublime life.
She wants to live for something truly wonderful, truly spectacular, truly great, although she doesn't know what that is.
Flaubert, in a sense, identifies with her.
Why? Because he, too, Flaubert, wants to live in a culture that is a high culture that can rise above, you may say, the level of the ordinary bourgeois life.
And Madame Bovary, in her early life, goes to a convent.
She's... France is deeply Christian.
She's educated in a Christian way.
And I find it fascinating that when Madame Bovary is in the convent, she finds certain things in the convent very appealing that appeal to this romantic sense in her.
She loves, for example, the bleeding statues.
She loves the incredible Baroque architecture.
She even loves the liturgy and the kind of dramatic performances that she sees in various festivals and so on.
What she doesn't like, Is what she sees as the routine, boring aspect of it.
The nuns do the rosary, bead number one, bead number two, and then they all have to clean the kitchen.
So this aspect, the routinized aspect of religious life, does not appeal to her.
In a sense, you may almost say she wants to live in the France of the Middle Ages, where you have...
Where you have the knight errants and there are ladies on a pedestal.
So there's a Don Quixote element to Madame Bovary.
She's looking for a life that seems unavailable to her.
She marries a guy named Charles who doesn't abuse her in any notable way and her objection to him is not even the fact that he, you know, my husband doesn't love me, he doesn't really understand me.
It's none of this, none of that.
It's rather that Charles is an ordinary fellow, and his concerns are with ordinary life.
He wants to attend this matter and fix this thing on his estate, and he wants to dispense these medicines.
He's a medical doctor.
And for Emma, it's like, is this what life is all about?
Isn't there really something more to it?
In one notable scene, Emma and Charles are invited.
By a friend of theirs, the Marquis de Andervilliers, to a dance, to a ball.
And at the ball, there is, in the center of the room, this old man.
He's actually the Marquis de Andervilliers' father-in-law.
But this is a guy who's like 90 years old, and he's like doddering.
He doesn't really know where he is.
But... We're good to go.
And so the funny thing about it is you have two opposite reactions to this man, this old man who's called the Duc de Laverdiere.
You have all the sort of smart young people at the ball and they're looking at him and they go, look at this old geezer.
This is basically like the Flaubertian version of Joe Biden.
He's a doddering fool.
He's an idiot. Who can respect such a man?
He almost tripped. Look at him.
He can't even remember where he was yesterday.
But... That is not, Flaubert says, how Madame Bovary saw him.
She saw him in a completely different light.
She saw him, you may say, as he once was.
And so she stands there kind of transfixed.
Why? Because to Madame Bovary, all these other people around her are idle fools.
What are they doing with their lives?
Look at this guy. You know, he knew Louis XIV. He had tea with Marie Antoinette.
He fought against the Duke of Sussex.
He was part of the famous battles with Wellington and others.
So the bottom line of it is Madame Bovary, in a sense, is transfixed because she sees this old geezer for what he used to be.
So whose vision is correct?
Is it the scornful people who are laughing at him?
Well, they're correct in a sense, but Madame Bovary is also correct.
She's not wrong to want to long for, you may say, a greater era than the one in which she finds herself.
And I think for Flaubert, the ultimate tragedy of Madame Bovary, she makes a whole bunch of horrible decisions.
She has a whole bunch of affairs.
But affairs with men who turn out to be, in a sense, the same crafty, conniving, money-counting, quotidian guys like her husband.
They're not any different. They're not the great Sir Galahads that she hoped for.
And pretty soon, she's smart enough to realize that her life ends tragically in a kind of suicide mode.
And we have Flaubert with this kind of clinical precision, just describing her last moments.
And, of course, there's a priest there, and he's trying to administer the sacraments, but she's really not listening.
She hears a kind of sound outside from a blind man, and she's like, what's that all about?
So she dies really unfulfilled and in despair.
And I think the message of Flaubert is that you may say...
The enchantment of the old world, the enchantment of the Middle Ages, has gone out of the modern world.
I think when we look today in America at some of our discontented young people, they're angry.
They don't even know what they're angry about.
They're sort of young Madame Bovary's.
They want something out of life, but they haven't been educated for it.
They don't know how to accomplish it.
They're incapable of doing it.
So they have the idealism of the young, an idealism that always aspires to greatness.
But they're frustrated, they're unfulfilled.
They attach themselves to causes like social justice because they want to be part of something larger than themselves.
And so here they are, just as Madame Bovary is looking for a man that she will never find because he does not exist in contemporary France, the France of Flaubert.
You have these Antifa-types.
They're looking for racism.
Where's the racism? I want to fight it.
I want to be the Don Quixote.
I want to charge the windmill.
But alas, there is no windmill.
There's only mist in the distance and you are just a deluded individual who has, in a sense, an understandable desire for idealism.
But it's being distorted.
It's being twisted.
You're ultimately on a fool's errand that will end no better than it did for Madame Bovary.
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