Douglas Murray examines Europe’s accelerating decline, tracing its roots to Islamist immigration and Western self-loathing since The Strange Death of Europe, where COVID-19 border closures exposed hypocrisy but failed to shift migration policies. Brexit, he argues, is a rare chance for Britain to reclaim sovereignty—yet success hinges on post-referendum decisions, like its vaccine triumph over EU bureaucracy. Rejecting Ross Douthat’s dismissal of Islamism as a distraction, Murray warns of Europe’s unique vulnerability, contrasting it with America’s lesser exposure, while critiquing U.S. media’s oversimplification of European politics. On transgender debates, he balances support for LGBT rights with skepticism toward sex redefinition, framing the conflict as a clash between biological reality and ideological extremes. Ultimately, he exposes a crisis of values: secular human rights, stripped of Judeo-Christian foundations, leave societies adrift in a "metaphysical void," demanding urgent reckoning with identity’s deepest fractures. [Automatically generated summary]
All right, well, as you know, we occasionally like to bring on someone intelligent and articulate to break up the rhythm of the show, a little change of pace.
Today we have got Douglas Murray.
And if you have not read Douglas's books, The Madness of Crowds and The Strange Death of Europe, I've read them both and they are absolutely terrific, not just well written and well thought out, but beautifully researched.
Douglas, it's great to see you.
How you doing?
It's very good to be with you, Andrew.
How nice to see you.
You know, when I read The Strange Death of Europe, which basically talks about a sort of cultural suicide that was going on, a sort of, I don't know, surrender to ideas, illiberal ideas coming over with the Islamist immigrants, a sort of self-hatred and idea, as you put it, that maybe Europe was just over and a new thing had to happen.
I was really moved by that.
It really was such a perfect description of what I was seeing.
It's also been written about in Huihlerbeck's terrific novel, Submission, and all those novels, which are basically the same novel.
I'm wondering, since you wrote that book, if you stepped back, would you say things that that process of decay and death has proceeded apace or has it gotten better or has it changed at all?
I'd say it's continued on the trajectory that I lay out in the book.
I mean, there are peaks and troughs.
You know, there are things, new things that happen that you didn't think could happen and become acceptable again.
Things you would have thought would have made more of an impact that just ride by and glide by in the news agenda.
Occasionally, you know, a politician will say something, Monsieur Macron has done so in the last year, which sort of surprises you in its, you know, sensibleness and relative resilience.
But then, you know, you don't see very much happening as a result of it.
And it turns out to be just more words intended to placate any members of the public who are onto this problem.
So no, I don't see a big change in direction.
I think that because we've all lived in this very strange last year, the year of COVID, I think that there are inevitably going to be aspects of what I describe in Strange Death of Europe, as elsewhere, that are affected by that.
And the one that strikes me most at the moment is the whole issue of borders.
You know, I think when we last spoke, if either of us had said, you know, I think that at some point in 2020, Justin Trudeau will announce that no foreigners can come into Canada, you'd have thought, what would be the situation in which Mr. Trudeau would say that?
Seems unlike him.
It doesn't he make an awful virtue of being anti-borders.
I think there are a lot of strange things like that that have happened in the last year that will have changed certainly the public feeling about certain issues and what's possible and what isn't, and may even change some politicians' attitudes in relation to that.
I mean, after all, we have lived through an era in immigration terms where consecutive governments of every imaginable stripe have told us there's nothing you can do about immigration.
It's just a fact of the globalized world.
Suck it up, live with it.
And now we are told that although you can control COVID by closing the borders, you couldn't control migration by closing the borders.
Because you can close borders to do with the virus, but not to do with migration.
I think very basic things like that are unsustainable.
I think that governments have done things that are totally unusual and will have some policy repercussions.
Whether it'll make any major difference, though, to the change of direction, I rather doubt.
Do you think that Brexit will do anything for Britain particularly?
Do you think it will take it out of that decaying European system or not?
I certainly think it can do it, but that depends on the choices we make.
I was very moved at one point when doing the tour, sort of an international tour in the days one could do that, of translations for Strange Death of Europe, speaking to a Norwegian politician.
I mentioned something I write about in Strange Death, which is this problem that Western Europeans and Americans have these days with luck, as it were.
We don't know what to do with our luck.
We feel guilty about our luck.
We recognize lots of people in the world are born with terrible luck and we don't know what to do other than sort of abolish our luck or sort of dilute it into the whole, you know.
And I mentioned this.
I was rather moved by a Norwegian politician who was talking about this was saying to me, no, Douglas, it's not luck.
We have the same energy reserves as Venezuela, but there's a reason why we're not Venezuela and Venezuela is, it's because we made more careful decisions.
And the reason I say that is because I don't like to encourage a sense of fatalism.
And Brexit is a good example of the fact that this is a process by which the British public voted to regain control of the levers of their own governance.
That isn't to say that everything from here on will be better.
It now relies on us making good decisions.
And it's the start of a process by which we can be free to make better decisions, but we are also free in that situation to make bad decisions.
Obviously, I hope that we don't.
But it's a process, Brexit.
It isn't a magic wand thing.
It's the beginning of being able to make our own decisions.
And by the way, there is an example already of the benefit of that.
When Britain left the EU, we left all the agencies, including the European Medicines Agency.
We were criticized by a lot of people, particularly, of course, those who wanted us to remain in the EU, for leaving the medicines agency and going our own way with the vaccine.
Well, without wanting to brag, Britain's vaccine scheme has been an incredible success, one of the best in the world, not just for the development of the Oxford vaccine, but for the rolling out of it already across millions and millions of households.
And by contrast, the EU vaccine scheme has been a disaster.
I say this not to brag or to boast or to sort of rub the noses of Romanians or anything else in the dirt on this, but simply to say this was one of the points of Brexit was that we could go our own way.
And we did on the vaccines and it's paid off.
Being limber and nimble and adaptable is a good thing.
It's not a good thing to be stuck with a juggernaut where there are 28 countries trying desperately to come to some kind of agreement.
So there are benefits.
You shouldn't be afraid to boast about that because we don't hear about it at all.
We only hear about what a terrible thing it is, how crazy you were to leave the wonderful EU.
And of course, the powers of globalism, the voice of globalism is so loud and the voice of nationalism nowhere near.
American Analysis Disconnect00:02:16
You know, I recently had Ross Douthat.
I don't know if you know him.
Very intelligent columnist for the New York Times.
I don't know him personally, but I reviewed his latest book.
Yeah.
Well, in that book, Decadence, he talks about the fight against Islamism as being kind of a dodge, a sort of an attempt to reinvent the Cold War ideological battle and hopefully bring meaning back to Western life when we're so decadent, we've run out of meaning.
Do you agree with that?
I mean, was the problem never actually Islamism, but only people's agreeing to it?
People's self-was the problem Western self-hatred more than Islamism?
Or was there, in fact, a clash of civilizations that's still going on?
I think there's a, I mean, I don't like the clash narrative.
I think he's wrong in that.
And I think that he wouldn't have made, I admired the book in the main, but I think he wouldn't have made that judgment had he lived in France.
I think Doubt is lucky, like you are, to have the virtue of living in America, which doesn't have a very significant Islamist. issue.
We wouldn't say that if you lived in Paris.
Left-wingers in Paris don't say that.
Ah, interesting.
So it depends where you are.
It depends where you are.
I'm struck always by the disconnect that's been growing in recent years between America and Europe, and including Britain, the failure to understand what we're up to.
The incredibly, I'm not saying that Doubt is responsible for this, but more the sort of New York Times sort of message that the Europeans are sort of moving rightwards or something like this, you know, or that we're becoming populists, all of this kind of really low-grade analysis that has even seen the American president, President Biden, talk about Boris Johnson as if he's the same as Donald Trump because they both had sort of slightly funny hair.
I mean, I'm amazed by the puerile nature of the American analysis of anything outside America and the rather unbecoming lack of desire to understand us.
Why Rights Can't Be Ignored00:11:33
You know, it's not a becoming trait that.
You know, Douglas Adams, the science fiction writer, moved here just before he died, and I got to know him and I said to him, how are you liking America?
And he said, the news blackout is a little hard to deal with.
And, you know, it's very hard to describe to Europeans just how big the country is.
And New York is covering Oregon is covering something so far away that that is almost more than we can deal with.
It's almost more than we can deal with to actually deal with other countries which are not on our news at all.
Unless they're a threat to us or affect us in some way, we have no idea what's going on.
I have to watch the BBC, basically.
Yeah, I think that is a big problem in America.
I mean, I do think, I mean, I don't want to go abashing, but I mean, I do think young people in America are the most ignorant in the world, perhaps now.
And it's pretty fascinating.
There should be an embarrassment about that and a desire to rectify it.
And I don't see a desire to rectify it.
I just see more of the same, you know, and the dogmatism that I hear coming, particularly from young America, the dogmatism that seems to think it knows how to run everything in the world and can't point to most of the world on a map.
Yes, that is a perfectly fair description.
It's absolutely true.
And we're talking about, I mean, a lot of my friends are talking about it, the level of ignorance of people coming up and the certainty, which I think naturally comes with ignorance.
It's only when you get to know things that you get a little uncertain and start to see.
Ignorance and dogmatism is the big danger as a cocktail.
Speaking of uncertainty, and in the madness of crowds, you have one of the best descriptions, best discussions of transgenderism I've ever read.
Nuanced, intelligent, insightful, compassionate, but not dogmatic.
It really was illuminating.
I'm not sure I would ask, I'm not sure I'd have the nerve to ask you this question if you weren't an openly gay person, but I think I have to.
I've lived my entire life taking basically the Ebenezer Scrooge attitude toward other people's sexuality, which is that a man should attend to his own business.
Mine occupies me constantly.
And I have never cared about, you know, I've always believed in the rights of other people to do whatever they wanted to do.
When I was arguing with conservatives, my fellow conservatives for gay rights and gay marriage, they would constantly say to me, no, no, no, you don't want to open that door because once you do, it's going to be a threat to religious rights and it's going to bring in this entire parade of gender insanity.
Well, they've been kind of right about that.
I mean, gay activists in this country have been incredibly oppressive, incredibly small-minded, going out of their way to find businesses that have religious objections to homosexuality and attacking them in the courts.
And their attitude towards transgenderism, which can now get you fired, it can get you fired for saying simple facts like a man actually can't become a woman in any real sense of that word.
Was I wrong to support the rights of people?
Is there something about a society that needs to have firm sexual borders in order to keep from going insane?
I guess that's the question I'd like to ask.
Well, I mean, there is no definitive answer on this.
And I suspect that ages swing, or they do swing rather clearly between two different extremes on this.
One is to not know where any borders are, and another is to draw them badly.
And obviously, you know, I mean, the famous example everyone knows is with Victorian puritanical views about sex, where there were more brothels in London than at any other time.
I regard sex as being like a geyser-like force.
You know, it'll come out somehow.
And the more you keep it down, the more it'll spring out in a particularly, you know, virulent form somewhere.
So I don't see it as being, I don't see it as being containable, as it were, in that way.
I think that there is a fear that the conservatives always have to do with sex, sexuality, which is precisely that if you don't have the very firm lines, you know, anything will happen.
It's been a critique for all time, pretty much.
If we allow X, then Y will follow.
I don't quite think that that conservative analysis has been vindicated because all we have done is to come to what I regard as being a more reasonable attitude towards sexual difference.
I think, by the way, even in particularly perhaps in the trans debate, this is ignored.
Very, very few people desire anything but an expression of compassion and understanding towards people who say they're trans.
I've never met anyone in all my researches on this who has ever wanted, wished any ill will to anyone who says that they think they're in the wrong body.
Very far from it.
They're deserving of a lot of sympathy and get it.
There is, however, a very reasonable question that follows, which is, can everyone else change their understanding of, for instance, biology in order to fit around your self-designation?
And the answer to that is, I think, no.
And as I say, I think in the Madness of Crowds, if the gay rights movement had said, we're here, we're queer, and as a result, penises and vaginas don't exist, the gay rights movement wouldn't have made as much headway as it did.
It was, we're here, we're queer, and we'd like just to get on with our lives, and you can get on with yours.
The trans one is different because it says, we would like to get on with our lives, and we would like you to fundamentally reorient your understanding of sex.
And I think that's why it's provoking a lot of problems, a lot of problems, particularly for women, I think, who have been noticing that they are being effectively biologically erased by this movement.
But I don't like the idea that, as it were, this madness vindicates, let's say, sexual Puritanism.
What I think is necessary is that there is a reigning in of the extremists on the so-called LGBT, which doesn't really exist side, and pointing out to them that, as I say in the book, that this boot on the other footism is very ugly.
You know, the boot on the other foot principle, you know, if you now have the power that the religious once did over you, and you now have it over the religious.
You're not behaving very well, are you?
What you talked about, what you talked about in terms of, you know, people being allowed to do things in private that didn't infringe upon your liberties, you don't seem to be very good at that.
Now the boots on your foot.
These are basic principles, which I would simply say need to be reasserted.
And I think they can be reasserted without returning to some kind of puritanical view on sex, which I think almost always goes badly wrong.
You know, this and the question of Islamism come back to this idea of religion and religious rights.
And you make a point.
I think it's in The Death of Europe, The Strange Death of Europe.
You make the point how much, how many of our ideas and our values come essentially from our founding religion, which is Christianity.
I don't know if you've read Tom Holland's Dominion, but he goes on quite at length about that.
Excellent book, really good book.
And you have put forward an idea.
This is where you were when I last talked to you anyway.
You've kind of put forward this idea of Christian atheism, the idea that we want to keep the values but lose the religion, a sort of Marcello Para in Italy had that book, Why We Should Call Ourselves Christians.
This seems to me unsustainable, just being blunt about it.
I'm not trying to, obviously you can't believe if you don't believe, but it seems to me unsustainable to have values that are propped on something and pull the prop away.
How can you sell a certain series of values that are based on certain theological assumptions without those theological assumptions?
Isn't that basically bound for disaster?
It's not bound for disaster.
I think I say in Strange Death, I think that it's a temporary measure.
It's a temporary solution, at least for now.
I try to explain in Strange Death of Europe what I regard as being the metaphysical religious situation which we find ourselves in in the modern West.
Obviously, what I describe annoys some, or a lot of the religious who say, well, if you recognize where these values came from, why don't you believe?
And I say in Strange Death, I think this is a facile counter to the challenge I say, which is that large numbers of people cannot because of what has happened in the discoveries of recent centuries.
We cannot unlearn what we know, although, as I say, a lot of people in America are trying.
We cannot unlearn what we know.
And therefore, how do we deal with this?
I say that I basically came to the same conclusion that my late friend Roger Scruton came to, which was, at the very least, don't war on it.
At the very least, don't try to pull out the branches on which you sit and see what happens.
However, we do live in a very strange period of change in this regard.
And very few people of right and left, or right or left, or religious or non-religious, are really willing to admit this.
The fact is that we do live in a metaphysical system, which is divorced from the thing that gave that system its origins.
And it has come away from it.
And that is causing much of the deep pain of our time.
It's why, as I say, I think in Strange Death, it's why we have this oddity where we say human rights.
Human rights are obviously, again, as Tom Holland points out in Dominion, human rights are a secular derivative of a set of Judeo-Christian principles.
They're by no means shared across history and they're by no means shared across the planet as we speak.
The Communist Party of China does not regard this system as being in any way dominant or indeed particularly impressive, clearly.
Certainly not something we'd like to follow.
So this system exists, it's got all sorts of benefits and virtues, but the religious don't like to hear it talked about as if this is some success of Christianity.
And the people who believe in human rights don't like to believe that they haven't come dropped from the sky and are there for all time.
I mean, there's just a sort of ignorance and blindness on all sides in our day and a refusal to recognize what I regard as being the extraordinarily profound situation that we find ourselves in, the profound conundrum we find ourselves in.
I think it's incumbent on all people of good faith, whether they're people of faith or not, to engage themselves in these deep discussions to any extent that they can and to try to find a reasonable attitude in their own lives towards problems which are eternal.
Great Talking To You00:00:17
Douglas, I wish I could continue this conversation.
I would go on with you for hours.
It is great to see you and great talking to you.
Again, if you haven't read The Madness of Crowds or The Strange Death of Europe, they are terrific.