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March 21, 2025 - System Update - Glenn Greenwald
01:11:35
Life-Long Leftist Philosopher Susan Neiman on how Wokeism Assaults and Subverts Traditional Left-Wing Politics

Philosopher Susan Neiman on why the left is not necessarily "woke," the right's weaponization of antisemitism to shield Israel, the true meaning of the Enlightenment, and more. -------------- Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET. Become part of our Locals community Follow System Update:  Twitter Instagram TikTok Facebook LinkedIn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Good evening.
It's Thursday, March 20th.
Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m. Eastern exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube.
Tonight... It is becoming an increasingly common view, certainly one that I share, that American politics cannot really be understood by applying traditional labels such as right versus left or conservative versus liberal as shorthand for modern day worldviews.
That's because those terms have so radically shifted in terms of their meaning and viewpoints and agenda over the last several decades, I would argue especially with the emergence of Donald Trump and the anti-establishment sentiments of the MAGA movement.
But they now mean so many different things to so many different people as to render them more obfuscating than enlightening.
I really come to believe that the most relevant dichotomy in Western politics generally is not left versus right or liberal versus conservative, but rather anti-establishment versus pro-establishment.
One reason for this confusion is that left liberalism has so often become the party-aligned most and most loyal to establishment institutions and dogma, Including the U.S. security state, the public health apparatus and pharmaceutical industry,
war making, regime change, imperialism, and on and on and on.
Another reason is that so much of American liberalism and even parts of the left now ignore, if not outright abandon, most of the political values and traditions that long define what the Western left was.
All in pursuit of a monomaniacal fixation on academic and niche culture war issues.
At the expense of any substantive challenge to economic power, civil liberties abuses, American foreign policy, and anything that really determines the distribution of power.
Our guest tonight is Susan Neiman, who's an American professor and philosopher and writer.
She has written extensively on the Enlightenment, on moral philosophy, metaphysics, and politics.
She's a PhD in philosophy from Harvard.
And is now a member of the Berlin Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society.
She's the author of nine books, translated into 15 languages.
She has taught in universities in the United States, namely at Yale, in Israel, and in Germany, where she has lived for the last 25 years.
For most of her life, if not all, she has been, by her own description, a leftist, a proponent of left-wing politics and philosophy.
But in her latest book released last year entitled Left is Not Woke, she argues that what is now referred to as wokeism or identity politics is strongly intentioned with, if not outright waging war against,
the longstanding core values that had shaped and defined left-wing political objectives for the last century,
She maintains and I think makes a very compelling case for the argument that by dividing people into these little groups, constantly dividing them and chopping them up based on immutable demographic characteristics and then insisting that people can be primarily judged and understood
by those attributes.
...
we discuss the abstract ideals driving her argument, much of which is based in the defining values of the Enlightenment, which she believes the woke agenda assaults.
But we also apply her thesis and her views to the most current and contentious political debates in the West.
We sat down with her just before the show aired earlier today, and I found the discussion very illuminating.
I don't agree with everything she says, as I made clear, and we hashed some of that out.
But by and large, I think her critique is extremely worth listening to, no matter where you fall on the political spectrum.
Before we show you all that...
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Professor, thanks so much for taking the time to join us.
We have been really looking forward to you ever since reading your 2023 book, which is The Left Is Not Woke.
And I have a lot to ask you about that book, about your work, and how as well it applies to a lot of current day political debates and controversies.
But let me begin by asking you this term.
Can I just...
Move in a second.
You said 2023.
The book did come out in English in 23, but there's an expanded edition that came out in 24. That's actually the edition.
So it's in paperback in English, and it's in all the other languages it's been translated to.
But I would urge...
People, if they're interested in reading the book, to make sure they get the English paper back, the Brazilian is fine, too.
Yeah, no, I read it in English, so I assume, we saw that it was your publication date, but I read the English version, I think the expanded one, so that's the one that interested me in talking to you.
But what I did want to ask you about, especially because there's so much discussion of what woke means, what wokeism means, without a lot of people stopping to define the term.
I went to college and law school in the late 80s and early 90s and I think back then there were very similar debates and this approach that we now call woke was referred to as political correctness.
And then for me it kind of morphed into identity politics and then...
Well, the problem is there is no coherent worldview that defines wokeism,
and that's why I...
I refuse to spend an awful lot of time defining it.
In the very shortest version, my argument is that woke arises from a set of emotions that are traditionally left-wing.
Stand on the side of people who have been oppressed and marginalized.
That's an old left-wing emotion that I certainly share.
What I think most of the woke don't realize, and what's so confusing for everybody, is that they're actually drawing on philosophical assumptions that are very reactionary.
So, look, that's the first answer to your question, is the reason people have a hard time defining woke is that it isn't coherent.
It's dependent on a contradiction between emotions and ideas.
Okay, that's the first thing.
The second thing to say is that...
I wasn't interested in defining woke in this book.
I wanted to define what left is because I think so many people are confused about what is left in an age where so many people think that woke focus on certain questions takes a pronoun question or the bathroom question or things that I've been astonished to see are actually internationally focuses of political
debates when we live in a world of rising fascism, rising inequality, and to focus on things that are symbolic strikes me.
At this point in time, it's almost suicidal.
So my interest was really to define what left means when many, many friends of mine, colleagues of mine, who spent their lives engaged in various forms of social justice activism, were shaking their heads and saying,
maybe I'm not left anymore, as they would tell about the latest form of...
Woke enthusiasm, but they would only say this in private and very small circles where people were alone and trusted each other.
And actually, when I first presented the book at Princeton, I said, this book has arisen from conversations that you all have been having in private.
And everybody laughed and nodded, because most people whose hearts are on the left, there's a nice German expression that says, the heart beats left.
Most people's hearts are on the left.
We're terribly afraid of criticizing it for fear of falling into the Trump-DeSantis form of woke bashing, which simply means finding an excuse to get rid of every progressive.
Every progressive political action against racism, against sexism, against homophobia, and declare it all to be silly or wrong.
We see that happening in the U.S. right now in a frighteningly fast way.
And I hate to say, you know, that I warned people about this, but I did.
And I started writing this book in 1922, when it seemed to me that the left was losing steam because so many people were put off by the woke and deeply confused
about what it meant to be engaged on the left.
Maybe the third thing I wanted to say is I don't use the phrase identity politics because I think it presupposes what What it needs to argue for, namely that our identity is determined fundamentally and essentially by two features of ourselves that we actually have no control over,
either our ethnic background or our biological sex.
And, you know, to call that our identity already, you know, I think commits a complete error.
Really seriously in any serious situation between human beings or even if you're applying for a job or admission to a university or whatever you're doing, you don't describe yourself as a white man and think you're done with it or a brown woman or whatever it is.
But the move...
To call that identitarianism is already giving away the game or prejudging the game.
So I use the word tribalism.
It has an old history.
I was once criticized by a former student of mine who said he was afraid that it was Yeah, it seems to me kind of foundational to how human beings have evolved in a lot of ways.
But let me leave that term to the side and dig a little bit deeper into what you just said, because there was a long time that I think I was universally perceived as being on the left, and the sort of left with which I identified was shaped,
I guess, by my generation.
I mean, it didn't live through the 60s, but the anti-war and civil liberties activism of the 60s and the 70s, heading into what became the kind of ideas of liberation and the like in the 1990s, this opposition to U.S. foreign policy,
imperialism, the U.S. security state.
And I look at what is now called the left in the United States and more broadly in the West, and I often see not only very little of that, but sometimes an antagonism to it.
And in a way that does seem like the left has morphed into what it had traditionally embraced as its defining values into the agenda it now pursues above.
I feel like this is, maybe you wouldn't put it quite that bluntly, but I certainly feel like that is your critique, and I'm wondering what you think has caused that.
You were just describing, for example, massive income inequality, and instead there's this fixation on who uses what bathrooms and pronouns and the like that have nothing to do with how power is distributed or wealth is assigned and hoarded and the like, things that had traditionally been concerns of the left.
What do you think explains the changes and the focus and the defining values of what is called the left?
Two dates.
One is 1991, the collapse of state socialism, which could have gone in all kinds of ways.
You could have moved towards international democratic socialism, which is certainly what people in East Germany were demanding, I think less so in the Soviet Union.
There were all kinds of discussions about new non-alignment movements, about a peace dividend that could happen if people started disarming.
And there was a very interesting confluence between industry, finance, governments, Western governments, and popular culture.
All combining to convince us that any form of socialism would lead straight to the gulag, or at the very best, you know, a miserable grey form of life,
okay? And I even went further than that, and this is where I talk about some of the ideas, one of the ideas that I think has been...
Really taken for granted and understudied is evolutionary psychology.
I'm not talking about evolutionary science, but evolutionary psychology, which purports to answer the question, what is human nature, by saying that our hunter-and-gatherer ancestors were motivated By producing the largest number of copies of themselves or their genes as possible and competing against others to do so.
Now, there are a number of problems with that.
First of all, We have no access to what was driving our hunter and gatherer ancestors 200,000 years ago.
I mean, what archaeology can teach us is really very little.
So this is speculation of the kind that philosophers have always done.
What is the original state of...
State of nature or what's the essence of the human being?
It was just dressed up as science in the 90s.
It came from this earlier movement, sociobiology, which was so discredited that when it was revived, it had to use another name.
And I think it's not an accident that it arose to popularity at the same time as neoliberalism was telling us that this was the only possible form of life.
And so you have, I mean, I'm not suggesting a conspiracy, things come together often without there being a big brother to plan them, but you have at one...
On the one hand, an ideology is saying we are all determined in our genes to compete with each other for power and material goods.
What our genes make us do.
And at the same time, then, a worldview that made it look positively silly to suggest that human beings actually might be driven by the wish to live in a just society, which is a premise of socialism,
that this is something that actually the human being wants to take part in.
All of those desires, not only a concrete hope for a different form of socialism, and there are many forms of capitalism, there's no reason why they can't be different forms of socialism, but not only the idea of some new form of socialism,
but any form of principle that we might be motivated to act by.
That was discredited, made to seem either, you know, sort of something for old hippies or, you know, new Stalinists.
And those people whose hearts beat on the left focused, therefore, on concrete questions of discrimination, usually in their own cases.
Now, I'm not saying that...
It was wrong to fight against racism or feminism, or sexism rather, or homophobia, and I think we made some important strides in those directions.
But we did lose the sense that we might all act together towards a common goal.
We could at most be allies rather than having...
Again, a common goal for a better world.
That came to seem very foolish.
And the funny thing is, it came to seem like a childish wish that human beings working together could actually create a much more livable and more just world.
And the serious part of adulthood, we're supposed to put those dreams aside.
And get down to the adult business of collecting toys.
That is, the newest iPhone, the best car, whatever it was.
I read about this in my book, Why Grow Up?
It's quite paradoxical.
One doesn't see those things as toys.
One sees them as, you know, things that are necessary for any serious adult who wants to.
Be part of the world.
But I think all of that contributed to an ethos that, again, produced some genuine progress, but let us forget what the main goal ought to be.
And I hate to say it, but I think we've seen the The realization of that entire ethos in Donald Trump.
In his second term, it was present in his first term, but it's gone absolutely crazy in this one.
So that's the first date that I think is important, 1991.
And I think the second date that's important is 2016.
It's important to remember that in the 2016 American election, no one used the word woke.
It's very interesting.
I think people occasionally talked about political correctness, but nobody was talking about woke.
And I think for young people who grew up in the Obama era, one can disagree with all kinds of things that Obama did.
But honestly, at this moment in time, the vision of a highly intelligent person of integrity,
his entire family, a beautiful black family of intelligence, talent, and integrity in the White House, who were even cool.
Whatever you might disagree with a particular policy, it was a norm for anybody growing up in that period of time.
And the idea that the arc of justice was slowly bending towards progress was something you could believe in.
The idea that the Ark wound up in Donald Trump, and I do mean to include his whole family.
I mean, you know, we have this saying in the US that you don't have in every other country, we talk about the first family.
But the difference between the Obamas as the first family and the Trumps as the first family must have been an incredible shock for anybody who grew up in that era.
And that is, of course, where WOKE began to take over American universities.
I know that you have a big foot and a big investment in your work and in your life in Germany.
I find German politics very interesting.
One of the people I have taken a great deal of interest in, we've actually interviewed her several times on our show, is Sarah Wagenknecht, who's a longtime She's a leftist who has more or less split with the left for a bunch of different reasons, but one of her primary ones is that she believes this fixation on what you might call wokeism or the cultural war has not only distracted from class issues or class-based inequities,
which had been for a long time in her view the foundation of the left, But has Ivan created this kind of opening where if the left is not talking about class, then right-wing populists can.
And certainly Donald Trump has made a great deal, has had a great deal of success in making inroads with working-class voters, with presenting himself as this sort of anti-corporatist populist who...
You know, wants to protect Social Security.
Marine Le Pen, same thing.
You know, talks about not raising the retirement age, expanding benefits for French citizens and the like.
And I also think you saw a lot of this in the 2016 Democratic primary, which, of course, was very vitriolic, where you kind of had Hillary Clinton heavily focused and her followers on identity politics and the idea of becoming the first woman president and all of that.
Bernie Sanders, this kind of old-style leftist, maybe not in 2020, but in 2016, certainly saying, look, those issues are not what's going to solve homelessness and low wages and the like.
Do you think that illustrates this kind of tension between old left-wing values and the modern-day version?
And is there a kind of growing sense among parts of the left that it's time to kind of refocus what it means to be on the left?
So you're raising a lot of complicated, worthwhile questions.
First of all, I do think the difference between Bernie and Hillary absolutely illustrates the problem.
Woke, as other writers have pointed out, is deeply amenable to neoliberal Political and economic relations.
In fact, there's a new book that's come out by David Reif called Desire and Fate, in which he actually argues that neoliberalism needed woke in order to preserve a sort of moral sheen that it didn't take serious.
And I think there's something quite right about that.
My children were enthusiastic Bernie supporters, both Both campaigns, and I have to say, I mean, let's look at this seriously.
A lot of people have forgotten this.
2020, Bernie was leading a lot of primaries and coming very close.
What happened in February 2020?
Two things.
The Republicans dug up a speech in which he had praised the health system of Cuba.
And, you know, called him a terrible communist.
Bernie doubled down and said, you know, unfortunately, I think, because he had to pander to a certain kind of very deep anti-communism that we've come to take for granted.
He said, well, there are terrible things about Cuba, but at least they have good health care.
He might have added, and they have the best educational system in America, with the possible exception of Canada.
Diplomats from Latin America say that if they have children, they all want to be posted to Cuba because the educational system is the best.
So, of course, the Republicans were after him for that.
As was Hillary.
As was Hillary.
Totally, totally.
And at the same time, but that's 2016.
I'm talking about 2020 now.
2020. It's right before the South Carolina primary, which has a large number of black voters.
And Joe Biden did a very woke thing, which I think shows the pitfalls of woke.
He said, I'm going to be the president who appoints the first black woman to the Supreme Court.
Now, I am sure that Ketanji Brown Jackson is a qualified justice, certainly more qualified than many people sitting on On the court now, but by saying that, he doesn't,
first of all, he's pandering to identity politics and a certain primary, but he also undermines poor Justice Jackson's credentials forever, okay?
But that got him the nomination and the rest.
Is sad history.
Now, let me go to Sarah Wagenknecht.
I've been once on a podium discussion with her.
She's a very smart person.
And initially, I was quite pleased with statements like, you know, somebody who can't pay their rent.
From their pension, which is true of many people in the East because their pensions were so low because they're based on lifetime earnings and you didn't have to earn very much in East Germany because your apartment costs, you know, $10 a month.
So a lot of people there are really hurting because somebody who can't pay their rent is not going to be helped by...
What's called gendering, correct gender language in German.
The funny and parochial thing about the insistence of these language questions is that feminist gendering in German is the exact opposite of what it is in English.
You know, in English, we've moved to not noticing gender.
We don't even call actresses, actresses anymore.
We call them actors.
Germany, you have to say, if you're going to be politically correct, actors and actresses, citizens and citizenesses, you know, teachers and teacheresses.
Anyway, so her point that this is actually not helping women who need something quite different was absolutely right.
What I did not like as Wagenknecht's campaign went on and why I
I wouldn't vote for her, but the traditional left party, which is getting its act together, I hope, I hope, is that, first of all, she started playing with some really, I think, quite dangerous anti-immigrant language that was moving in a direction of nativism.
And that strikes me as a dangerous and probably tactical move, which I and many other people were not happy with.
She's also somebody who's been highly critical of the European Union.
Now, there are many things criticized about the European Union.
You know, there's a sort of neoliberal, gigantic machinery based in Brussels.
One can say all of that, but right now I think it's the only hope for a political, and I've thought this, by the way, not just now, but for a good couple of decades, for a value-based political counterweight
to,
I mean, I don't look at Russia or China as a particularly good counterweight to the United States right now.
So that was troubling.
And then finally, she said in an interview...
Just before the election, she said, a journalist asked her what she would do if she were voting in the United States.
And she said, oh, I'm so glad I'm not in the United States.
That's such a hard question.
I wouldn't know who to vote for.
And I just thought, I'm sorry.
If that's how little you've perceived of Donald Trump, you don't deserve to be mayor of a small town.
You have no political judgment.
And here I really stand with AOC, who the Democrats seem only to have allowed, like Bernie, to speak in the...
Last week or so of the election, she said, look, I completely understand people who don't want to vote for Biden because of Gaza.
But if Harris is president, we can negotiate with her.
We can put pressure on her.
There's normal political possibilities.
With Trump, there are none.
And I think his Gaza video...
You know, reflects how grotesque his visions are.
I mean, whatever that's supposed to do, if that's supposed to be blackmailing other Arab countries, you know, that's maybe another question.
So anyway, I agree with you that Wagenknecht is interesting, but I think she's problematic, and I'm not sorry that she didn't get enough votes to get into Parliament.
She came very close.
She came very close, but I didn't quite make that 5%.
Let me just probe a little bit on that because there are some things that you said that I certainly agree with and others that I don't necessarily.
But I want to just touch on the broader point that I think is raised by your answer, which is I think one of the core facts of Western politics, of the views of the citizenry of the West, Is that they feel as though the institutions of power,
the establishment dogma that shapes these institutions, have become extremely hostile toward and threatening of their welfare, their economic welfare, their moral welfare, etc.
And I think you can make a very strong case that that has been true.
There's a lot of policy approaches, whether it be free trade or centralizing authority in distant...
Institutions where there's less democratic control that people perceive have become increasingly indifferent to their lives, instead concerned with the sort of elite, the highly educated, the highly wealthy.
And I think there's validity to that, but whether or not there is, I think that's a big explanation for why people are turning to the politicians who at least depict themselves as sharing their antipathy towards these establishments.
And obviously in Europe...
The EU is sort of a symbol of that neoliberalism.
It's why I think the British people voted to leave Brexit and the like.
And so if you're going to continuously align with Brussels or with the Democratic Party and the technocrats who run it...
Isn't that just going to continue to fuel what you say is your concern about this rising white-wing populism, namely that the left liberals, used to be the anti-establishment faction, have become sort of the symbol of the status quo and the establishments who run it?
And I think what Sarah Wagenknecht is sort of saying is that to have success with a left-wing agenda, you need to abandon that perception that you're on the side of establishment power.
What do you make of that?
You know, I think there's something right about that.
And again, to go back to the American case, I think that's why the Democratic Party not only, you know, made fun of Bernie and did, we don't even know what went on behind the seats.
I only know what went on, you know, that one could see.
To make sure that although there was overwhelming popular support, I mean, people talk about generational, you know, I mean, there was some ageist discussion.
We have to get rid of the old guys.
You know, again, my children in their 20s and early 30s, they would have done anything to help elect Barney, and there were millions of other kids like that.
So, you know, I think we can, even in American terms, see a real difference between Somebody like Sanders and somebody like Clinton.
And also see how hard the Clintonites pushed back to make sure that he looked like someone silly.
very funny of course now that Trump has proved true basically everything he was saying, suddenly the New York Times is printing op-eds from Bernie.
You know, if they mentioned him when he was campaigning for the nomination, it was only to make fun of him.
That's the first point.
The second point, though, is I really want to repeat that AOC I don't think we live in a world where a Leninist view that the worse it gets,
the better it is for the revolution is something we really want to chance.
We're talking about not just thousands of lives, but millions of lives that are at risk.
And I do think it would have been possible to put pressure on a democratic administration to stop its atrocious, unconditional support of Netanyahu's government.
I think that could have happened.
The tide is turning.
We had the most broad-scale student...
It's a demonstration since the Vietnam War, which I'm just barely old enough to remember.
And, you know, it isn't simply students.
It's a very broad swathe of society that is not happy about genocide in Gaza.
And that's willing at this point to say it's genocide.
So I think that there could have been pressure, negotiation, various sorts of political tools brought to bear on that, which would have directly benefited the people of Palestine.
And there's clearly nothing we can do in a Trump administration.
Trump is arresting and threatening to deport and already deporting.
So, you know, there's a difference between a problematic neoliberal establishment that is distant from the concerns of so many people.
There's a difference between that and sheer fascism, which is what we're seeing in the U.S. right now.
Yeah, I certainly have been very vocal about my vehement opposition to a lot of that.
But I think the question of how you vote and the lesser of two evils rationale, that's something we could do a whole show on.
And I want to kind of focus on your book, but I just want to note that maybe we should have you back on and we can talk about those issues more directly.
Let me just say in one sentence, I think the lesser of two evils is not a general principle.
It's something you have to decide every single time you make a political decision.
Yeah, and I think, I mean, as you know, there were a lot of Arab voters, a lot of Muslim voters, Palestinian voters in the U.S. who felt like, given everything Joe Biden had done, Kamala Harris had said, even refusing to let a Palestinian speak.
in the convention, even if they were going to praise Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party, that it was almost impossible to imagine a breaking of the status quo with regard to Israel, whereas Trump is such a kind of what Seymour Hersh called a circuit breaker.
You saw some of that potential with ushering in the ceasefire that, of course, now has been abandoned and that was always the plan.
But sort of the ceiling was higher, the floor was lower, and people were willing to take that chance.
But let me just go back to your...
Can I just interrupt you for one second?
Yes, yes.
I knew if we got into this, we were going to want to talk about it, but go ahead.
I don't want to spend the whole time talking about it, but when you mentioned the Arab voters in Michigan, you're doing identity politics again.
I know lots of people who were...
Not Arab, and not even young, and often who were Jewish, who were so disgusted that they didn't vote.
So let's again remember, it was the largest student demonstration in 50 years, 60 years?
60 years, almost.
And, you know, it was a very broad, certainly under 50-year-old, Jewish Americans are deeply against what's happening in Israel-Palestine.
So let's just...
No, no.
Point taken, absolutely.
I don't think there's been a day in my life over the last year and however many months that I haven't been vocally pointing out that a huge part of these student movements were not just...
We've interviewed a lot of them.
And it's very broad-based across demographic lines.
So you're absolutely right about that.
I was just sort of noting that, you know, even people who put Palestine as their first issue made that conclusion.
But let me go back to wokeism for a second and the critique that you've voiced of it.
And I want to do something that I don't ordinarily do, maybe not ever do, which is kind of give the defense of people who might identify.
As wokeism, just because neither of us are such people, and I want to make sure that view is presented and then you can address it.
You were talking earlier about, it's a major part of your book that there's often a failure to recognize the distinction between power and justice.
You were talking earlier about the kind of predominant need to make the society more just, if that's ultimately a major part of politics and our human endeavor.
And I guess people who have this woke agenda who do focus on what you might dismiss as these limited forms of culture war issues, you know, I referred earlier to the 2016 argument that the Bernie campaign was making, which is that even if you eliminate racism or homophobia or misogyny,
you're not addressing the core economic deprivations and injustices.
But the other side of that is you can correct all the economic injustices, but if you're not working to eliminate racism and the idea that white people should have a supreme position or that men should or whoever, all the other arguments,
arguments that you're not really making the society more just except for the group of people who have traditionally benefited from those kinds of economic improvements.
And I guess that's their argument is, no, we are focused on justice.
We just believe that justice can't happen.
Well, thank you for that question, because it allows me to explain why I'm a socialist but not a Marxist.
I'm not a Marxist because I don't believe that class is any more our essential identity than race or gender is, okay?
And I think the class reduction that you get in traditional Marxism doesn't do justice to...
Well, first of all, it's very hard to understand what people want to hold on to.
A conception of class that's all-determining in the 21st century.
So if it's income, you know, you have PhDs.
Sorry, I mean, is it income?
Is it education?
Is it what you called social capital?
If that were the case, you would not have You know, PhDs driving Ubers for billionaires who can't read.
I mean, we live, it seems to me, if Marx's class theory was even correct in the 19th century, and there are big questions about where Marx and Engels themselves fit in a sort of traditional Marxist understanding of class,
it certainly doesn't work.
For the 21st century.
So that's the first answer, which is why I don't think focusing on class solves everything.
I think that, again, it's the idea of justice, which is a broader idea in all of its forms, in all of its focus on human dignity.
As something that fundamentally ought to be recognized and unite all of us.
Now, I should add that there's another point that I make that I think is very important, that some of the principles that I list in the book are like...
A belief that it's possible to distinguish between justice and power.
Those are common to liberals.
So the difference for me between left and liberal is that leftists believe that social rights are genuine rights.
And they're every bit as important as political rights.
Take the South African Constitution, which is the most progressive in the world.
I was just there for three weeks.
And among constitutionalists, it's fascinating.
They haven't realized the Constitution, but there's not only a prohibition on discrimination on any of the grounds that political discrimination should be prohibited,
but there's an insistence that every human being has a right to.
Health care, housing, education, access to culture, and all of those things are in the South African Constitution.
Of course, it hasn't been fulfilled yet.
There are people working on it.
All those things are in the 1948 Declaration of Human Rights of the United Nations, which was actually shepherded by Eleanor Roosevelt.
But for liberals, Social rights are not real rights.
They're benefits or privileges.
They're things that would be nice to have if you're lucky, but if not, certainly the most horrible thing would be to have your freedom of speech taken away, your freedom of travel.
Well, actually, the Trump administration has started on those rights, too.
I don't mean to laugh.
It's just in terrible times, you know, at some point one has to.
What has to be a little bit ironic about them.
So does that answer your question?
This is why I think that the dichotomy that some people have suggested, and sometimes Sanders is one of them, although I agree with you, I think he's evolved, but he's still basically in that mode.
The dichotomy between economic rights and ending discrimination against minorities and women doesn't need to be a dichotomy.
It only is if you take a very Marxist view of the world, which I don't.
I learned a lot from Marx, but I...
Stay a socialist without the Marxism.
All right.
I think I wish people, especially on the right, understood that there is that distinction, and maybe even people on the left as well, that that is an important distinction.
I think it's one Bernie Sanders often makes.
You know, he says, oh, my form of socialism is what they have in Scandinavia, you know, democratic socialism, and not the kind that was driving the Russian Revolution and the like, or 20th century communism.
I just have a couple other questions.
It is ironic to me because your critique of what is called wokeism, whatever it means, and we kind of have a vague understanding of what it means even if we can't clearly define it, is something that a lot of people on the right have actually co-opted.
As a way of arguing against this more aggressive form of race-based or gender-based justice.
They very commonly cite Martin Luther King's defining vision of judging people by the content of their character.
I know all the arguments.
Let me just lay out their case and not the color of their skin.
I've heard a lot of people on the right.
Over the past decade say there's nothing more evil than judging people or dividing people up based on the color of their skin, which is what ultimately wokeism does, kind of creates these divisions that you described, these kind of hierarchies of entitlement and power, not based on who you are,
but based on these demographic characteristics.
And they've been very vocal about this vision of co-opting kind of the language of the 60s about what social justice is to argue against wokeism.
Leaving aside questions of motive or authenticity or whatever, it has been equally ironic to me that over the last year and a half, especially since October 7th, a lot of people on the right have turned to what seems to me to be the exact narrative that they are,
have been denouncing, which is, oh, we have to look at this one minority group as a unique victim group, which are American Jews, or more broadly, Western Jews, they constantly,
you know, complain that anybody on the left, the minute you disagree with them, they call them a racist or whatever.
And, you know, the minute you open your mouth and express any dissent about Israel, you're instantly branded by them as an anti-Semite.
They're even turning to speech codes and speech restrictions, obviously deporting people who participated in protests.
Against them, do you see this kind of new narrative, and it's not really so new, but it's kind of taken on a much stronger expression in the wake of October 7th that surrounding anti-Semitism and what Chuck Schumer has a new book out calling it the grave crisis of anti-Semitism as a way of defending Israel and the special rights needed to protect it,
is a version of or maybe even a replica of what we might call wokeism that the right has been condemning for so long?
Boy, how many hours do we have to discuss this question?
That's why I said I just have two more questions because the other one's maybe even broader, but go ahead.
I mean, you're talking to, if you read some of the German media, you're talking to one of the biggest anti-Semites in the country.
Right, I know.
And I'm very Jewish.
And I have, together with a small group of comrades, been trying very much to fight that narrative long before October 7th.
It was clear three years ago that the right was hijacking the memory of the Holocaust and the real history of anti-Semitism to hide their own racism.
It's a Steve Bannon trick, you know?
I mean, it's a...
I mean, that, of course, Trump and other people have taken over.
That is, I can't possibly be a Nazi if I swear unconditional support of the state of Israel.
And a lot of far-right parties in Europe use that now, too, as their shield.
All of them.
No, I did a conference almost three years ago.
We had people from 17 countries talking about the permutations of this move in their countries.
It's a really pernicious hijacking.
We actually called it hijacking memory.
Hijacking of, you know, some very important criticisms.
Is it woke?
Yeah, of course.
I mean, and that's actually, I should say that my own Criticisms of the woke were being articulated as I was involved in this political activism in Berlin,
where I have lived for 25 years and more, and sort of realizing that, you know, I was expected.
The good Jew was expected to be a Jew who always talked about the Holocaust, always talked about anti-Semitism, was tribalist, was fundamentally afraid of other people.
And that those people like me and my friends who consider themselves deeply universalist, and indeed, you know, you can find support of that in the Book of Exodus.
We were strangers and slaves in the land of Egypt, and that's why we have a responsibility to stand by the stranger.
And that's how I was taught growing up in Georgia during the Civil Rights Movement.
So, but, and I see that sometimes in...
In the U.S., among the African-American community, that is the Afro-pessimist school, is not very different from the Jewish focus on anti-Semitism and the idea of one's own...
Potential victimhood and also the idea that it's never going to go away.
And so, you know, and those are considered to be authentic black voices, whereas someone who says, you know, I don't want to spend my life focused on racism gets called a black conservative.
And often they're not.
So, yes, I think we're dealing with many of the same philosophical ideas and tropes.
And that's, yeah, very much influenced my book.
I want to just ask you this last question about your views of the Enlightenment.
I'm sure you don't know this, but I was actually a philosophy major.
I'm kind of jealous of the trajectory you ended up pursuing.
I considered it and sort of fell prey to pragmatic considerations and went to law school.
But in any event, it's always been something that I've been deeply interested in that has formed a great deal of my outlook and worldview.
Obviously, I've read all the establishment thinkers and writers and were taught to venerate them that this was kind of the context in which our Constitution emerged and the Federalist Papers and the like.
And I think you share a certain admiration for a lot of the core establishment values, but you also have a lot of criticisms of what the Enlightenment is, as I understand them.
And I have been of the view that a lot of left-wing politics, as it has manifested over the last, say, 10 to 15 years, has become increasingly at odds with the better parts of establishment
values.
I don't know why I keep saying establishment when I mean enlightenment.
Enlightenment values.
Sorry about that if I've confused you.
I know I've said that a couple times.
that it has become sort of at odds with enlightenment values.
And I'm wondering if you could talk about first your view of the enlightenment in terms of the admiration and the criticisms you had of it and how it pertains to the thesis of your book, That Left Is Not Woke.
Sure. As a side note, if it makes you feel any better, I was in South Africa with a bunch of, you know, anti-apartheid fighters who were lawyers and Justices, and I started wishing I had gone to law school.
The grass is always greener, right?
Yeah, but here I am doing what I'm doing.
Look, I think the first thing one has to understand about the Enlightenment is they were left-wing intellectuals.
First of all, sometimes people will...
get into enlightenment bashing and they'll talk about people like Locke and Hegel who were really not part of the enlightenment as you know if you know something about the history of philosophy and I think most of the Criticisms which have come from post-colonial theory are based on an astonishing amount of ignorance about what the Enlightenment was and what it stood for.
And anybody who's interested can read just a little novel by Voltaire called Candide.
It's very famous, but I think very few people read it.
And you will not find a better attack on European politics, It's all there.
But one has to understand that the great thinkers of the Enlightenment were left-wing radicals, and left-wing radicals don't always win all our battles, at least not immediately.
So that when people say, you know, well, it was the age that invented human rights, but it was also an age of slavery and colonialism, First of all, slavery and colonialism have very long histories.
They were both revved up towards the end of the 18th and particularly during the 19th century.
But the fact that it happened together with the thinkers of the Enlightenment doesn't mean that they're responsible for it.
They were protesting it and often very, very sharply.
You know, the very ideas with which we want to argue that Europe is not the center of the world and all things good, and we ought to take a look and learn from other cultures,
that was an Enlightenment idea.
They were the first people to come up with that.
And they used both genuine...
You know, interlocutors from other countries and also fictitious ones to strongly criticize European patriarchy, private property and land.
I mean, all of these things that some post-colonial theorists think that they've just discovered are in the Enlightenment texts, okay?
But they're done not from the perspective of You know, the indigenous or the global south are always right and the Europeans are always wrong.
Sometimes yes and sometimes no.
They're done from a commitment to universalism and universal justice.
So I agree with you.
It's actually gone on longer than the last 10 or 15 years.
I first ran into it, I remember exactly when and where.
I was actually writing a book.
I'm trying to answer Enlightenment criticism.
It's called Moral Clarity.
And I ran into this criticism that the Enlightenment was Eurocentric and colonialist.
And I thought, well, this isn't going to last long.
All you have to do is look at one text and see that it's not true.
So much for my prediction about intellectual trends.
Do you think it's coming around?
And I have been, through my work at the Einstein Forum, which is a public think tank, I have actually been collecting really interesting thinkers from the so-called Global South and other traditions who themselves are very critical of...
Of the anti-enlightenment thought.
You might want to sometime invite Olufemi Taiwo.
There are two philosophers named Olufemi Taiwo in the United States, but the one who wrote a book called Against Decolonization.
And it's a terrific book.
He's a really interesting guy.
And there are more such voices.
I don't know.
Does that answer your question about the Enlightenment?
Yeah, I just wanted to kind of connect it to your critique of wokeism as well, like how it informs that critique.
So the ideals of the Enlightenment, which I take to be the ideals of liberal leftists, are all the ideas...
That get thrown out with woke.
So take universalism.
Michel Foucault said human being is an invention of the 18th century and it will disappear like writing in the sand.
Famous quote of Foucault.
You don't have to have read Foucault to have been influenced by him.
He is the most influential writer in the social sciences and humanities in the world.
And, of course, we've taken over this concept of post-humanism and so on and so on.
And when you actually read the Enlightenment with an open mind, you realize, oh, gosh, it was an idea that was invented in the 18th century.
To really value their ability to make an abstraction.
Think about the way things were in the 17th century.
Not only were people from different cultures, different countries, different languages, different colors, not all considered to be part of the same, you know.
Genre, human being.
People from different classes weren't considered to be.
You know, the laws on who you could fraternize with and what you could wear and who you could marry were based on the idea that people in different classes did not, were not...
Fundamentally human and bearers of human rights, okay?
So this is an abstraction.
You can read some counter-Enlightenment people who say there is no such thing as man, the human, okay?
Carl Schmitt, the Nazi legal philosopher, also said the same kind of thing.
But for the Enlightenment, Realizing that you could abstract from all of these differences that we see and find a common core that's human, which does not mean that everybody's supposed to be all the same or that you're not supposed to enjoy different cultural forms.
On the contrary, one of the silliest problems with the woke is the idea of cultural appropriation.
I mean, it is through...
Trying to enter and interact with other people's cultures that we both get a better understanding of their humanity, but that we also understand our own.
So that's the first Enlightenment idea.
The second Enlightenment idea really is the idea that it's possible to make a distinction between the desire for justice.
And the desire for power.
They've been deliberately confused as long as we have recorded writing.
I mean, Plato talks about this.
But to conclude, because let's say the Bush administration claimed to be fighting for democracy in the Middle East when their real aims were something else, does not mean that no one ever...
Tried to fight for justice, okay?
But that is a conclusion that people make.
And then finally, the idea of progress, which was also a new idea for the Enlightenment.
You had either the idea of the fall from grace, you know, things were good in the Garden of Eden, and they've gone downhill from there, and maybe a miracle can save us, but only after we're dead.
I mean, that was the concept of time.
Or you had this sort of Greek cyclical idea of time.
And the idea that human beings working together could actually construct a better world in this world was, again, a new idea that came with the Enlightenment and that I fear.
And I understand the pessimism.
I mean, I totally understand why people can despair of The possibility of progress.
But we need to appreciate what progress has been made in the past in order to make more in the future.
Well, I have to say I really got a lot out of your book.
I enjoy the writings and thinking of philosophers for the reason I referenced earlier, but also it has so much application.
I would say that's the primacy of the book is application to our current political debates, especially on the left.
And I think what you said at the start, that you really set out not to ask what is woke, but what is the left, is such an important project.
To me, these terms have almost taken on a kind of meaninglessness because of how confused they are.
It's almost unhelpful to think about the world through that way, even though...
These kinds of divisions ought to be informative and helpful if you have a clear understanding of what each is.
And I think your book does a great job of enabling that.
I really enjoyed our conversation.
I'd love to have you back on.
I appreciate you taking the time to talk to us.
Well, thanks so much, Glenn.
I enjoyed it as well.
Thank you.
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