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March 7, 2025 - Epoch Times
23:04
Why Post-Nationalism Leads to Disintegration and Violence: John O’Sullivan
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A unified national identity is an absolute essential for a successful democracy.
In this episode, I sit down with John O'Sullivan, a former policy and speechwriter for British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and former editor-in-chief of National Review and executive editor of Radio Free Europe.
Today, he's the president of the Danube Institute, a Hungary-based think tank.
His latest book is titled, Sleepwalking into Wokeness, How We Got Here.
If we continue on a multicultural path, it's a path which is going to go in the direction of ever more aggressive and hostile identity politics, and people will feel that their neighbors are their enemies.
This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek.
John O'Sullivan, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.
Jan, very nice to be here.
Thank you for inviting me.
Well, let's talk about, from the European perspective, what happened in this recent election in America?
I think the reactions in Europe are an exaggerated version of the reactions in America.
If you think about the three or four months before the actual election, everyone, everyone in...
In scare quotes, assumed a Kamala Harris victory, thought it was likely, thought a Trump victory would be a reversal of nature like water running uphill, and was accustomed to thinking that Trumpism was a backward-looking philosophy, no longer relevant to a modern world.
And then, in America itself, you sensed...
A huge feeling of relief when Trump actually won.
And, of course, there were none of the riots or violence reactions that had been anticipated if he were to win.
None of them happened.
Those two things told you a great deal.
There was virtually no one who expected a Trump victory in Europe, whereas quite a number of people did actually think he could win in America.
And secondly, when he did win...
People were surprised at the American reaction, but also, I think, began to adjust their own responses in response to that reaction.
And suddenly, although they were nervous of Trump, and still are, because after all he's gone out of his way to make people nervous by suggesting he might take over Canada and Greenland, despite the...
Kind of, I think, intentional bomb-throwing, rhetorically, that he goes in for.
I think people are thinking, beginning to say, well, actually, look back at his first term.
It wasn't so bad.
His economic policy, it was a success.
His new proposals, well, deportations are not a dramatic new development in immigration policy.
A lot of deportations took place under Obama, and no one thought the world had come to an end.
So quite a lot of the things she's proposing are in accord, not only with what's happening in America, but with what's happening in Europe.
Immigration in Europe has gone from being A moderately important issue to being by far the most important issue.
Multiculturalism, which was regarded as absolutely, not just common sense, but a mixture of common sense and high ethics, has gone to being a scare policy because it plainly introduced all kinds of tensions into European societies.
And they're looking at Trump.
For that reason, among others, as somebody who may be coming along saying something useful and important.
Fascinating.
And, you know, multiculturalism, I grew up, of course, in Canada, and we have huge viewership for this show in Canada.
What you're describing seems a little bit like...
The Canadian response, too.
Well, multiculturalism was invented in Canada.
It was invented by Pierre Trudeau and his son.
He has taken multiculturalism to its illogical conclusion.
He's gone some way to ensuring Canada won't have a core culture, a core identity.
You won't be able to say, what is a Canadian?
You are a Canadian.
I lived in Canada for...
Almost three years.
I think that multiculturalism, as it's played out in Canada, has produced an unsuccessful society.
In many respects, Canada is a wonderful country, as I think we probably both would agree.
And I certainly know from my time when I was working at Radio Free Europe that a lot of the people who came out of Eastern European countries and indeed the world of the stands...
A lot of them chose to settle in Canada when they could because of its welcoming character to them.
But you have to be something more than simply not American.
And when I was living in Canada, I had the sense that when you asked a Canadian what he says, well, I'm not an American, that was the first stage.
That's why perhaps Trump is trying to roll a stone uphill when he says Canada will become the 51st state.
Of course, I don't believe he means it, and I think it has elicited a kind of a general skeptical hostile reaction in Canada.
Justin Trudeau has called Canada the first post.
Well, let me put it this way.
The idea of post-nationalism, it's unachievable as if you're a state.
You don't remain just a post-national state.
What you become is something else.
A state which holds together lots of different nationalities is called an empire.
And the problem with an empire is, if it's full of different nationalities, They're going to tend to quarrel and to argue and debate and sometimes to take up arms against each other.
So you're going to have to have a class of people who run the society and negotiate bargains between these different nationalities and police those bargains.
And that will mean that the police, the literal police and the civil service, they're not regarded by the citizens of the country as...
Brothers, we are not in power.
It's this class of people who don't belong to any of the squabbling tribes who are running things, and we don't think they treat us well.
That is what everyone will say.
Now, what you have in England and what you have in Canada, and what you don't yet have here to a serious extent, is the phenomenon of people fighting ancestral battles.
That's why a unified national identity is an absolute essential for a successful democracy.
I may have Polish roots, I may have Indian roots, but I'm an American first and my loyalty is to this country or to Britain or to whatever.
And then...
The people who run the country are your representatives.
You could be one of them.
They will join you maybe after the next election in being a citizen and not a member of the government.
That's very important for long-term harmony.
And multiculturalism is designed to persuade us it's not so.
And if we continue on a multicultural path, it's a path which is going to go in the direction of ever more aggressive and hostile identity politics.
And people will feel that their neighbors are their enemies.
John, just one sec.
We're going to take a quick break, and we'll be right back.
And we're back with John O'Sullivan, author of Sleepwalking into Wokeness, and the President, the Pope and the Prime Minister, and also President of the Danube Institute.
Of course, identity politics is one of the central themes in your new book that I've been reading, you know, with great fascination, sleepwalking into wokeness.
You know, this is a very interesting treatment because you've been on the scene.
Why don't we actually start with this?
You've been on the scene looking at politics.
I mean, you started with Margaret Thatcher in the 80s.
Just tell me a little bit about your background and how you ended up in Central Europe.
Well, my background is that I grew up in England.
My parents were an English mother and an Irish father.
In those days, remember, I was born in 1942, so my youth and adolescence occurred when Britain was feeling relatively contented with itself because it had won the Second World War, and everybody felt that war was justified and something to be proud of on our side.
So although I had an Irish father and I went to a school, a Catholic school, in which virtually all the boys had names like Murphy and O'Brien, we didn't think of ourselves as Irish.
We thought of ourselves as British with Irish relatives and many of whom of course had come over to Britain to help fight the Germans in the Second World War.
So the kind of ill feeling that you now often think of in relation to the English and the Irish, that's developed in the late '60s and early '70s.
Now I was always involved in politics.
I think I'm the only person, maybe in the Guinness Book of Records sometime, who actually lied about his age in order to join the young conservatives.
And the conservative agent, whose job it was to recruit people, advised me not to do this.
He said, look, you're young.
Have a good time.
Don't get involved in politics.
But through my university years, I was involved in...
In politics, university politics.
My first job, I worked for the Conservative Party.
I was given the responsibility of editing a magazine, a small magazine.
And I took it seriously and turned it into a real magazine.
You know, it had a boutique success.
Not many people knew about it, but it was well regarded.
And that led me into journalism.
And so after a brief time, I went from that job to a job at The Daily.
While I was at the Telegraph, I was offered the job of working for Irish television and radio.
And I really got my journalistic training in both of those places.
I was, for ten years, the Telegraph's parliamentary sketch writer.
That's a job which is unique.
What it is, it's kind of like a dramatic critic's account of what happened in Parliament yesterday.
And you're allowed to be satirical.
You're allowed to make it lively and fun.
And it's quite a powerful job because no MP really worries about whether people read a condensed account of his speech in the parliamentary report.
But they do worry about whether he's mocked in the sketch.
I was a strong supporter of Mrs. Thatcher when she ran for the leadership of the Conservative Party.
I was kind of and became somebody whom the Telegraph hoped would remain in touch with her.
And I did until she won the election and then I came to America.
To work at the Heritage Foundation.
And when I returned, she asked, Mrs Thatcher asked me to join her team in Downing Street as a special advisor on several topics, but also after hours, you know, the job ended, but a new unpaid job was available, which was that of speechwriter.
And, of course, that was a great privilege because the prime minute, Margaret Thatcher used to do a lot of her political thinking.
When she was writing speeches, by that I mean a minister, when they're doing the civil service job, so to speak, the ministerial job, they develop a ministerial outlook.
They don't think politically.
The department has its own objectives.
They become the servants of those objectives.
When you actually have to think, how am I going to sell all of this?
To the British people.
What must I change in it in order to make it more acceptable?
What should I emphasize?
Then you start to think politically.
And that's why Mr. Thatcher did a lot of her political thinking when sitting around the table with the four or five other people who worked with her on this.
And so I was kind of involved in that kind of thinking about politics.
Just very, very briefly, was she...
We kind of have a very stereotypical, almost mythical view of Miss Thatcher.
Was she like that in reality?
You're thinking of her Bodicea act, right?
Okay.
She was a mixture of that and of ordinary English housewife.
If you were coming around to interview her, she would be very worried about whether or not...
You were sitting in a draft.
Were you comfortable?
Would you like a cup of coffee?
She would be just...
She would revert at once to being a nice middle-class English woman who was thinking of her guest's comfort.
And she never lost that.
She never lost that.
Where her staff used to say of her...
She kicked up and she kissed down.
She kissed the people who did the humble jobs.
Nothing was too good for them, particularly the detectives, whom she knew would take a bullet for her.
But the ministers, the top civil servants, well, she felt they got paid a lot of money.
They're treated very well.
We've got to make sure that they do the job that the British people pay them for.
And I think that was something that over time, not only did the civil servants come to respect that, but the British people came to know about it.
They came to sense it.
Mrs. Thatcher went through periods of unpopularity, but at no point, I think, after the first year or two, at no point did the British public not think that she was on their side.
They knew she was batting for them.
And that's a big difference to the situation today.
And in what way?
Because they don't feel that the government is batting for them.
Oh, you mean in the UK specifically?
And it's true, I think, across Europe.
They think that there is a governing class, there is a political class, and that is a kind of oligarchy that is looking out for its own interests.
Now, you might say that from the oligarch's point of view, those interests are...
Important political principles and the welfare of people.
But that is not how they are seen.
And I think that that skepticism about them is correct.
They have come to feel that large numbers of their constituents are, well, backward-looking.
The term deplorables comes to mind.
Exactly.
That kind of thing.
No governing class, no political party, no political leader can think of people in that way and expect to do well.
They have to respect their constituents, even when they disagree with them.
And I would say one of the most, if you are dealing with someone who, you know, you realize doesn't agree with you, you're asked a question.
I think a good way to begin a reply is to say, I'll give the answer to that.
I'm going to tell you now, you won't like it.
Now, when you then give the answer, the person then, in a sense, says, OK, well, that's fair enough.
I see.
I don't agree, but, you know, we can quibble.
And I don't think that that kind of basic insight is something that a lot of modern politicians grasp.
Mrs Thatcher did grasp it.
When you were sitting down with her, one of the most frequent things she said was, but what will Mrs Buggins think about this?
But Mrs Buggins being the mythical ordinary voter.
And when Mrs Thatcher said about somebody we were thinking of...
Hiring or somebody she was going to mention in the speech, is he one of us?
Is she one of us?
She meant, does he or she share our general outlook?
Do they like us?
Do we like them?
Not, are they part of a small...
But are they part of a large group of the British public who are concerned about this?
You said something to me, I noted down, when we were talking about your book.
Violence enters the bloodstream of societies when governments treat criminals as if they're politicians.
In the context of both, of Ireland and, in particular, sympathy for terrorism.
Or a belief that the terrorists are the people who in some sense have got the key to solving the problem.
I don't mean their key, but if we treat them right, we can get the problem solved.
Governments must remember that people are not represented by armed groups.
And the majority of people in almost all cases, I can't say in everyone, do not believe in supporting people who are murdering their neighbours and one day might murder them for some political objective, even one they share.
So it's a very bad thing when in a domestic context that...
We don't turn to the elected representatives of the people.
I'm talking here about, let's say, people on local governments and local councils.
We tend increasingly, particularly where there are racial and religious divisions in society, to select a group of people whom we think we have to deal with.
In Ireland, of course, that was the IRA and Sinn Féin.
It was their political face.
But remember, Sinn Féin, which is as a result of our giving more and more of our attention to Sinn Féin and less and less to the SD, the Social Democratic and Labour Party, which was a larger representative of the Catholic minority.
The SDLP shrank further and further in importance and Sinn Féin grew larger and larger.
And as a result now, Sinn Féin is a major political party in the whole of Ireland and we are faced with a distasteful situation in which a political party that is controlled by...
A private army, a secret army might be part of the government in every election and that is a very disturbing thing.
That's true there.
I think it's also true when we come to look at the way in which again and again some of our institutions have flattered.
And promoted the most extreme elements in racial and religious conflicts.
Because they thought, well, these are the guys who can riot.
Why should we talk to the respectable people who are simply presenting a decent moral case?
These are the ones we have to deal with, basically.
These are the ones we have to deal with.
And I don't think we do have to deal with them.
And I don't think we should deal with them.
And I think the less we deal with them.
Well, I'll quote you what Conor Cruz O'Brien said.
He said...
That giving television interviews to terrorist leaders is an incentive to murder because they know that they would not appear on television programs or be quoted favorably in a newspaper if they weren't prepared to murder people and, in effect, are always poised to threaten to do so.
Well, John, this has been a fascinating conversation.
Any final thoughts as we finish?
I was lucky enough to know, man.
Sean O'Callaghan, who was somebody who joined the IRA and actually he murdered two people.
Then he underwent a tremendous Dostoevskan moral conversion.
He knew he was in some profound sense on the wrong side.
And so what he did was he...
He had contacted the Irish and the British intelligence authorities.
He became an insider who gave information about the bombs that were going to go off.
He saved a lot of lives, but it wasn't enough for him, and so he went back to the police in Tombridge Wells, I think, and then, on his own evidence, was convicted for murder and was in prison for some time.
And he wrote a book, and I was present at his memorial service.
Among the people at the memorial service for Sean were the families of the two people he had murdered.
And he had asked that the memorial service be for them as well.
And his son is, I think, very active, along with other people, in what I'd call the post-terrorist, anti-terrorist movement, which is attempting to persuade people to give up this kind of thing.
That's somebody who led a good life and paid for it and deserves our gratitude.
That was the life of somebody that, in the end, was well lived.
And he managed to crawl upwards from a very dark place to one of unremarked heroism.
Well, John O'Sullivan, it's such a pleasure to have had you on the show.
Thank you very much and thank you for giving me the opportunity to go on and on and on.
Thanks.
Thank you.
Thank you all for joining John O'Sullivan and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders.
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