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Sept. 27, 2023 - Radio Renaissance - Jared Taylor
41:40
Ricardo Duchesne — “Liberalism Is Responsible for Western Greatness and Its Current Decline.” (2023)
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Ladies and gentlemen, Ricardo Duchesne, our first speaker, was a professor of social sciences for 25 years at the University of New Brunswick in Canada until 2019 when he was forced out for the usual reasons.
He had written a number of books that celebrated and defended Western man.
I think his most significant and best known is The Uniqueness of Western Civilization.
And since 2014, Professor Duchesne has been monitoring a website called the Council of European Canadians, which is really an excellent source of information, facts, and opinion on what's happening north of the border.
Professor Duchesne tells me he's working on what is likely to be quite a long book on what has caused the rise of Western civilization and what may cause its decline.
And today, I think we'll probably get a glimpse of some of those ideas in a speech that he has titled, Liberalism is Responsible for Western Greatness and Its Current Decline.
So, pretty much, it's a straightforward reading.
I'm going to try and be as clear as I can.
It's going to be about 30 minutes long, and then hopefully you have 15 minutes to tell me what's wrong with what I said.
I don't think anyone here will doubt that the most important political question of our times is why Europeans are embracing diversity and destroying their ethnic cultural identity.
The answer to this question I'm going to argue today is to be found in the unique ideology of Western liberal pluralism and its principle that all humans are alike in their innate freedom to decide for themselves their values and lifestyles.
Liberalism does not advocate any moral doctrine about the meaning of life, the fundamental nature of reality, or what is best for humans.
It only advocates for a political setting within which every person is equally free to make decisions about the good life based on their conscience as long as they don't seek to undermine the political setting within which this pluralism is possible.
Blaming cultural Marxism is a preferable option among dissidents because the dissident right Lacking an ideology of its own, an alternative doctrine with fully developed concepts and moral values is fundamentally dependent on liberalism.
Believing it can return to an earlier version of this ideology when it coexisted with ethnic nationalist prejudices as testified by its acceptance a few decades ago.
of white-only immigration policies.
According to Paul Gottfried, one of the popularizers of the term cultural Marxism, the left managed over the 20th century, almost imperceptibly, to create a whole new form of governance,
a therapeutic state with a capacity to engineer progressive souls via multiple educational and social programs imposed from above, along with regulations and speech codes,
with trained bureaucrats exacting major penalties against those in violation of politically correct mandates.
Traditionally, I'm thinking of Alain de Benoît, Kerry Bolton, and Alexander Dugin have been the only ones to insist that liberalism Remains the dominant ideology in the West,
and that it is responsible for undermining every collective racial and sexual identity in the West.
But traditionalists tend to view liberalism as an economic doctrine of capitalist individualism.
Without adequately appreciating its ideal of the equal right of human beings to decipher themselves, their own values, without being told by a state what to think, what religion to practice,
or what choices to make in life.
The conception of liberalism I will be putting forth follows closely.
John Rawls' theory of political pluralism.
Rawls is recognized as the most substantial and influential political philosopher of the 20th century.
Yet, in the abundant writings of dissidents, Rawls rarely gets a mention, never mind a study.
The focus is invariably on Frankfurt intellectuals, post-modernists, Globalists, feminists, critical race theories, spiteful mutants, or politicians of the moment.
Strictly speaking, raw theory is not about how society ought to be organized, but a systematic treatise on the best way to think about the nature of contemporary, pluralist Western cultures.
The theory aims to show that the institutionalized principles of of political pluralism, if properly understood and acted upon, provide the best moral framework for Westerners to coexist in a state of relative concord despite their political differences.
Rawls' theory says that, given the moral equality of humans as agents capable of deciding their own lifestyles, they should never be subjected to the political power of another agent without their consent.
The public sphere should be characterized by value pluralism, with everyone enjoying the following basic liberties, freedom of belief on all subjects, freedom of association, equal right to participate in politics,
equality under the law, and fair equality of opportunity.
When Rawls writes that in our current times these liberties are fixed, And correctly settled once and for all, he means that they're accepted as indisputably true in the mainstream world of Western politics.
Doctrines that directly threaten this pluralism will be rightfully suppressed or kept on the margins without much influence.
For all the enforcement upon citizens of politically correct beliefs and behaviors, the essential aim of liberalism remains the emancipation of individuals from all collective constraints, including the removal of unfair conditions for freedom,
such as lack of economic opportunities, racial and sexual discrimination.
Which are believed to curtail the equal expression of basic liberties among citizens.
And even if this requires regulating speech and behavior, liberalism to this day explicitly rejects a collective conception of the good life.
Rawls observes that under conditions of freedom, divergent individuals will...
Always endorse incompatible religious, philosophical or moral worldviews about what they sincerely think is the best way to find a purpose in life.
Respect for the decisions of individuals about their own conception of the good life and the pursuit of happiness is what liberalism is ultimately about.
In a liberal society, there can be no shared doctrine or way of life other than a shared conception of the alienable nature of the basic liberties.
Western nations have shown themselves to be fair, Rawls believes, insofar as the public domain within which people express their views has been characterized as freestanding, wherein the government abstains from imposing the truthfulness of any doctrine.
But instead justifies itself to citizens as a neutral arbiter in charge of ensuring the equal right of everyone to express their views on their fair conditions.
Rawls makes a crucial distinction between reasonable and unreasonable doctrines.
Doctrines are reasonable in so far as they are committed to fairness in the public domain.
Even if such doctrines hold illiberal religious views or platonic metaphysical views about what constitutes human perfectibility, doctrines are unreasonable if they seek to impose a collective or illiberal values upon the public domain.
Or express views that challenge the autonomy and equal liberties of ethnic minorities, women, or LGBT members.
Individuals are free to hold doctrines that affirm traditional values about family life, the five pillars of Islam, or a strict Hasidic lifestyle.
They are also free to create their own private spaces, clubs, Engage in group sex, join motorcycle gangs, play video games all day, or become hermits, so long as they do not infringe on the rights of others or advocate illiberal views that aim to undermine the pluralist liberal domain.
Classical liberalism grew along with, but in opposition to...
The civic liberal republicanism of ancient Greece and Rome, which did not recognize the equal liberty of individuals, but instead insisted on the privilege and duty of citizens with a naturally higher status to participate in the politics of the states.
The essential idea of this civic republican form of freedom, articulated from Aristotle through to Cicero, was that man's highest nature was realized through his participation in the political life of his community and that only some men were naturally gifted with the honor and self-control to prefer the public good over private domestic self-indulgence.
During the Middle Ages, this aristocratic civic liberalism was substantially influenced by the Christian idea That every human being had been made equally by God.
Republican notions of the public good and the importance of government championing civic virtues, selflessness, and benevolence continued to be held by modern classical liberals through both the glorious revolution of 1688 and the American Revolution of 1776.
But with the expansion of trade and manufactures, Through the 1700s and the realization among a new generation of thinkers that the general well-being of the society could be improved within competitive markets.
Markets where self-interested producers are obligated to be efficient and respond to consumer demand, the emphasis of classical liberalism on the benefits of the private pursuit of wealth came to displace the old Republican ideal that only civic values could improve the common good.
There is more, however, to classical liberalism than a theory of free markets.
The central figure in classical liberalism is John Locke, and the central idea in John Locke is not laissez-faire, but the idea that all men, by virtue of their capacity to reason, are born with an equal right to natural freedom,
and that among the fundamental rights to freedom are life, liberty, and property.
And that the authority of governments springs from the consent of individuals born with these rights, and that therefore governments have an obligation to respect the liberties of individuals, and citizens have right to rebellion if these rights are violated.
Locke is also the source of the cardinal principle of liberty of conscience.
The classical liberalism of love...
was indeed a reaction against the violent authoritarian impulses of Christendom witnessed during the religious wars of the 1600s when governments sought to enforce religious uniformity as a way of terminating religious divisions believed to be the cause of civil war.
Since the glorious revolution of 1688, liberalism has been marching through every institution in the West, leading to the world we inhabit today.
Let's take England with some references to the US and Canada as a demonstration of this march.
The 1688 revolution enacted a new conception of liberty not valued by the ancients or present in English common law.
The right to hold and profess what principles we choose, liberty of conscience, which is the foundational stone of liberal pluralism.
The Toleration Act, 1688, started a trajectory that eventually terminated the authoritarian Christian unity of the Middle Ages by extending toleration to non-conformists who did not belong to the established Anglican Church who had pledged loyalty.
To the British monarch.
In the language of roles, we can say that it launched a new conception of the public sphere as a freestanding domain, free from any collective creed, wherein individuals who are deeply divided by cultural, religious,
and moral beliefs may coexist in a state of tolerance and reciprocity.
With the American Declaration of Independence, Notwithstanding the persisting influence of civic republicanism among the founders, we have a more definitive statement of the Lockean doctrine of natural rights.
We hold this truth to be self-evident, and you know that line.
The Bill of Rights, 1791, explicitly limits the government's authority to infringe on the citizens' rights to religious freedoms sought an assembly.
It states that citizens have a right to hold property free from usurpation by the government without compensation and to equal rights under the law.
A common argument among dissidents wishing to counter the claim that the U.S. was founded on universal values for the benefit of humanity.
It's that the founders, including many of the authors of canonical texts of liberalism, had racial views or held slaves themselves.
They point to John Jay's statement that Americans are, quote, a people descended from the same ancestors, speaking the same language, professing the same religion, attached to the same principles of government, very similar in their manners and customs.
It can't be denied.
That there existed a racial subtext or a taking for granted awareness that only white people or British descendants were parties to the social contract.
But while the American founding principles did not prohibit slavery, they did provide the principles for its abolition and for equal civil rights regardless of sex and race.
By the time Lincoln came along, as he himself wrote, The Liberal Party throughout the world disapproved of slavery and thought that it contradicted the values endorsed in the Constitution.
There was no need for a new Constitution.
Amendments to the original founding documents were enough to set blacks free, grant them citizenship, and the vote by 1870.
For a long time, the Supreme Court did justify the legality of segregation.
Nevertheless, Slowly and inevitably, the court would reach the conclusion that race can never be a legitimate ground for legal distinctions, deciding unanimously in 1954 that segregation was contrary to the equal protection of the laws guaranteed by the 14th Amendment and that separate educational facilities are inherently illiberal.
Relying on the spirit of Locke, the British would go on to reject in 1829, with the passing of the Catholic Emancipation Act, Locke's prejudicial view that Catholics cannot be loyal or that men who don't believe in God are unfit for society.
Civil and political rights would henceforth be extended.
In 1832, the English Reform Bill reduced property qualifications, Before voting to include small landowners and shopkeepers.
In 1833, black slavery was abolished in the colonies as an inhumane practice that violated the equal moral worth of humans.
In 1846, the Religious Disabilities Act was enacted, removing the last restrictions against religious liberty.
And in 1858, Jews were granted full and equal civil rights.
The free trade mentality of the corn laws, the early classical liberal notion that property owners have a right to use their property as they please, came under criticism in regards to the employment of children and women.
As witnessed in the factory laws of 1842 and 1847, which prohibited females and boys under 10 years old from working underground in coal mines, and restricted the working hours of women and young persons in textile mills to 10 hours per day.
The liberal rationale was that such working conditions We're damaging to the moral state of children and their ability to develop their faculties to be truly free persons.
John Stuart Mill, who entered Parliament as a liberal in 1866, would go on to renounce all remaining property qualifications for voting on the grounds that when a segment of the population, in this case the working classes and women,
are excluded from representation on the...
In the government, their interests and ideas as individuals with the same natural rights cannot find equal expression.
He also advocated for state intervention to bring about a more equitable distribution of wealth and improve thereby the material well-being of the greatest number so as to ensure the development of faculties essential for all citizens to actualize their self-autonomy.
He valued unlimited liberty of thought as a way of encouraging humans to employ their rational capacities away from the constraints of social taboos and dogmatic traditional norms.
He accepted Harriet Taylor's feminist argument that in a liberal society it was immoral for men to decide for women their role in society as if they were unequally innate rights.
The Frankfurt School argument that patriarchal families engender authoritarian personalities was already implied in Mill's view that the Victorian family was a school of despotism.
The Reform Bill of 1867, put through by the Conservative Party, granted the vote to industrial workers.
By this time, across Western Europe, traditional conservatism As a short-lived ideology that emerged in the wake of the French Revolution of 1789 in defense of clericalism, aristocratic privilege,
and the divine right of monarchy had been thoroughly defeated by liberalism.
Conservatives would henceforth accept all the fundamental premises of classical liberalism and its progressive implications, even as they move at a slower pace.
Conservatives and progressives alike have reached the conclusion that democracy is fundamental to give voice to every citizen and to allow them to express their political beliefs freely.
Soon the consensus would be, including among conservatives, That without some socialist distribution of economic power or further equality of opportunity, the right to vote amounted to a mere juridical equality without substance.
The realization that the expansion of government services is essential to the actualization of liberal ideals can be seen in the Elementary Education Act of 1870.
Which established a national system of free public schools for children aged 5 to 13. The Workman's Compensation Act of 1906, which provided compensation to workers for injury during employment.
The All-Age Pension Act of 1908.
The Minimum Wage Act of 1909.
And the National Insurance Act of 1911, which gave benefits to workers during sickness and unemployment.
Legislation in the next few years was aimed at giving women an equal right to seek any civil profession with divorce and contraception made easier on the grounds that it was a contradiction to have a constitution affirming the equal right of all citizens without rendering the wife a fully responsible individual.
Capable of making her own decisions.
The post-World War II decades would see an expansion of these new liberal programs aimed at ensuring a minimum level of subsistence for all, from the cradle to the grave.
The National Health Act of 1946 provided free Medicare services to all, from Duke to Dossman.
The West at large would witness similar legislation aimed at creating equality of liberty.
Through individual freedom, FDR would tell Congress in 1944 cannot exist without economic security and independence.
By the mid-20th century, everyone had come to agree that it would be most unreasonable, that is, illiberal, To advocate for the elimination of minimum wage laws, health and safety laws, product safety provisions,
and public funded education.
In 1965, the Race Relations Act banned racial discrimination in public places and made the promotion of hatred on the grounds of ethnicity and offense.
The Equal Pay Act of 1970 prevented discrimination as regards Terms and conditions of employment between men and women.
The Race Relations Amendment Act 2000 made it unlawful for any public authority to discriminate on racial grounds and mandated governments, schools and the police to promote equality of opportunity and good relations between people of different racial groups.
The Gender Recognition Act 2004 allowed people to legally change gender.
The Same-Sex Couple Act 2013 made same-sex marriage legal.
The imposition of immigrant multiculturalism across the West was not orchestrated by cultural Marxists or by high liberal ideas on their own.
The classical liberal idea...
That all individuals are born with a natural disposition for security, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, is respective of cultural background, is a perfect fit for capitalism.
Capitalism, as Marx explained, abstracts individuals from all social connections, traditions, and national identities, other than those created through contractual arrangements for the pursuit of gain.
During the 1957s, capitalism took on an increasingly transnational character.
In the words of San Francis, by a global elite, controlled, in the words of Francis, by a global elite, detached and disengaged from...
and actually hostile to any particular place or group or set of beliefs that supports particular
The elections of Thatcher, Reagan, and Mulroney should be seen less as a return to a laissez-faire that never really existed.
Than a concerted effort by business elites to institute a new regime of accumulation known as post-Fordism, involving globalized financial markets and free trade zones, making it easier for businesses and laborers to move across borders in search of lower wages,
job opportunities, and less regulated standards.
The aim was a new form of capitalism.
Dedicated to a global market, producing standardized products for rootless consumers without deeply ingrained local preferences on the basis of price, quantity, reliability,
and delivery.
There is an elective affinity between this globalized capitalism and the leftist goal of creating post-national citizens.
Sexnophobic ethnic attachments emancipated from pre-given sexual, cultural, and rational identities.
That is, individuals who construct their identities completely out of their free will.
As fertility rates drop across the West, where it was prohibited to ask the native white population to create bigger families, Both the left and right would instruct citizens that mass immigration was essential to avoid permanent labor shortages,
a declining GDP, lower tax receipts, and declining government services.
The convergence of the left and right was most visible in their agreement to redefine Western nations as inherently immigrant and multicultural.
For the corporate world, the only way to keep the workforce, consumer demand, GDP, and earnings in a state of expansion was through mass immigration.
It did not matter whether immigration would have the effect of increasing GDP per capita for the native population.
Improve access to hospitals, schools, and recreational facilities, or make housing more affordable.
Leftist politicians were only too pleased to augment their power by calling for increases in spending to remedy these problems, including the problem that most of the total income gains generated by the expansion of GDP across the West since the 70s,
80s. Right as immigration was intensified, have accrued to the top percentiles of households, that is to the owners of capital, the major owners of capital.
Immigrant multiculturalism was justified by liberal scholars for its enhancement of the liberal principle that the government should not mandate any cultural values other than the inclusiveness.
For the divergent choices of citizens.
Just as the religious wars of the 17th century proved the deadliness of religious uniformity, World War II demonstrated the deadliness of nationalist cultural uniformity.
Immigrants would be allowed to retain their cultural identities rather than be forced to assimilate to the dominant white culture as long as they did not seek to impose Illiberal customs upon the rest of society.
White-owned immigration regulations were rejected in the 60s, 70s as unconstitutional because making distinctions among potential immigrants on the basis of race, religion, and nationality stood against the principle that all human beings across the world are born free and equal in dignity and rights.
I don't deny there are differences between right and left liberals and that many conservatives today oppose critical race theory, which they identify with cultural Marxism.
But right-wing critics of PC intolerance defend open inquiry under the assumption that it is the best way to protect and validate the progressive liberalism of the West, while ultimately agreeing with the left.
That illiberal findings that invalidate pluralist values, even if scientifically based, such as studies demonstrating that in-group favoritism would be a good evolutionary strategy for Europeans, should be relegated to the margins or portrayed as the product of bad science,
creating thereby social pressures towards conformity.
This view is akin to Rawls' exclusion from the public sphere of views which seek to undermine the already settled principle of equal freedom for all human beings.
The liberalism of the 1940s through to the 70s, roughly speaking, worked relatively well in the degree to which it continued to be sustained by healthy sentiments and instincts rooted in human nature, acceptance of male-female distinctions,
Collective norms of motherhood, countless small towns with rooted families, high church attendance, customary regulation of sexual behavior, respect for ancestors, symbols, and authoritative hierarchies.
In other words, liberalism worked because it was still sustained by important non-liberal qualities.
The past 1960s, however, saw a final push by liberalism to discredit Mock, devalue, and identify as oppressive these remaining traditions, leading to the liberal world of today populated by increasingly unmarried and isolated individuals with barely any community ties in charge of reimagining themselves and their societies as their free creations.
The decision right has no choice but to find an alternative ideology.
I believe it has to be some form of traditionalism, as Dugin has been arguing, a fourth theory beyond fascism, communism, and liberalism.
It is called a fourth theory, for it does not advocate specific principles and policies for mankind as such, but calls upon different cultures, civilizations in the world to find within themselves their own alternative paths to modernity.
In the case of the West, Transcending liberalism will be an immensely difficult task, for this ideology is epigenetically rooted in the psychology of whites, inscribed in every institution, advocated by almost every intellectual,
and supported by global liberal capitalism.
But a solution must be found or Europeans will perish as a world historical people.
That's it.
Thank you.
I might even ask a question myself.
All right.
Could you give us something of a sketch of the kind of society that you would see Europeans reconstitute if it is not an older traditionalism?
What would be some of the outlines of this society that you envisage for us?
Well, the West is a very different society, as you all know, because It really has never been a traditional society as that is understood in China, in Africa, and all other societies.
So when you think of reconstituting traditionalism, you have to be aware that you're trying to reconstitute an earlier version of liberalism, if you like.
The Greek, Roman, Republican version.
And it is a version, actually, that even contemporary liberals today try, in a very popular way, to reconstitute.
It's called liberal communitarianism.
But essentially, it turned out to be a failure because Their conception of creating a common set of identities and breaking away from a strict pluralism whereby every individual that goes his /her own way, that idea of creating a common identity among Americans was,
well, we will promote multiculturalism as their common identity.
We will get them to love the gay flag and things of that nature.
So it just didn't work.
And the reason is that liberalism is very hard for it to generate common values because this fundamental common value of liberalism is pluralism.
And that means individuals go their own way.
So, in other words, I am pessimistic about the whole project of overcoming liberalism.
Do you think that the superstructure is, in a way, dependent on the structure itself?
So, like, for example, the bourgeois class rising and their economic ties caused the liberalism, and then later now, neoliberalism is, in effect, descended from, say, material and technological gains that we've had.
And so, for example, if this big global structure fill in on itself, like Dugan wants for his multipolar world...
Would that naturally lead to the rejection of liberalism just based on the economic realities of the time?
Well, I don't think...
Classical liberalism has a very close relationship to the emergence of capitalism.
They feed on each other.
But they're also...
It has its own intellectual sources.
And then that classical liberalism is...
Rooted in Christian principles and in ancient Roman principles as well.
But it is different from them, as I explained.
So about Dougie, I wasn't sure, but essentially he's for multipolarity in the world.
Each civilization culture goes its own ways.
He doesn't advocate an ideology.
I think...
The starting premises of its argument, which I think is correct, is that liberalism defeated fascism, defeated communism, and there hasn't been anything else.
Feminism is not an alternative idea.
It's a subset of liberalism.
So is postmodernism.
Cultural Marxism is just taking liberalism to its logical conclusion.
So once we get this idea into our heads that this is a liberal society, even when it...
You feel that they're intolerant, that they're not allowing you to speak.
The theory contains within itself principles as to why they have a right to suppress certain ideas, that is, ideas that are illiberal or threaten the pluralist political domain.
I'm very interested in the Glorious Revolution and its role As a predecessor to the American Revolution.
But my take on the Glorious Revolution and certainly my take on the initial goals of the American Revolution are somewhat different from yours.
You see the Glorious Revolution as coming out of the philosophy of John Locke.
I think the Glorious Revolution was simply a restatement of the original setup in Great Britain against a set of kings who wanted to import a French or Spanish form of monarchy that the people of Britain had never known.
I see it as a reaffirmation of traditional beliefs far more than the incorporation of the philosophy of John Locke.
So what are your thoughts on that?
You're correct.
The Harringtonians, the people that were schooled in the ideas of republicanism, were actually more influential during the Glorious Revolution than the Lockeans.
And Edmund Burke was right, broadly speaking, that the British were thinking about past liberties.
They were not conceptualizing.
A new conception of freedom the way that the Enlightenment did.
But I think what these accounts mean is one that capitalism was emerging clearly by the late 1700s.
The discipline of economics was really having a lot of influence, culminating in Adam Smith.
And this is a classical version That is also associated with Locke.
And it would eventually displace the Harringtonians.
And the same thing happened.
So you have to see the dynamics.
Society was moving in a more Lockean version of liberalism.
And also the point I made is that liberty of conscience is not there.
In the Harringtonians, it's not there in past British history.
Liberty of conscience is as a new principle that emerged around this time and is rooted in John Locke.
And that principle, in many ways, is the foundation of liberalism.
To these days, every human being has a right to decide what they want to believe because it's part of their conscience.
That intent is rooted in Christianity.
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