Michael Knowles argues conservatives are reclaiming cultural ground, citing The Sound of Freedom and the Bud Light boycott as backlash against progressive policies, framing their rise like Augustus Caesar’s post-civil war reset. He dismisses classical liberalism’s individualism failures while attacking transgender advocacy as "evil," proposing "honor" as a moral middle ground—though fringe figures like Nick Fuentes and Andrew Tate expose risks of extremism. The 2024 GOP primary pits Trump’s disruption against DeSantis’ disciplined governance, with Hungary’s Orbán praised for reversing demographic decline via pro-family policies. The debate hinges on crafting an American conservatism that merges tradition, virtue, and identity without sliding into authoritarianism. [Automatically generated summary]
One of the things that I think is happening right now that is just beginning to happen, so a lot of people don't see it, is I think the right is starting to win the culture war.
It's very thick ice, but I see some cracks appearing in it.
Successful films like The Sound of Freedom, the successful boycott against Bud Light.
People waking up to who they are, and the left has just gone too far.
People are alienated.
They don't like what's happening.
They shouldn't like what's happening.
It's just become kind of absurd, and they're fighting back.
What is it going to look like if and when the right comes back from where the exile that it's been in?
I wanted to talk to two people about that because I've heard them talking and they have a lot of interesting things to say.
One is my son, Spencer Clavin, no relation, and the other is Michael Knowles, who we wanted to invite because someone had to empty the ashtray.
Sort of the trap.
But actually, it's true.
When I sit with you guys, you have these interesting conversations because you assume I've already passed away.
You're mostly following me.
Nodded away by the fires.
You talk among yourselves.
But you actually have your pulse on a lot of different movements.
You have your finger on the pulse of a lot of different movements on the right.
So let's just begin in a general way.
Wither the right.
Where do you think the right is heading?
And if you had to guess right now.
Man, I feel so hip.
We just have to sit next to this guy.
And by contrast.
No.
This is a really fascinating question, actually.
And one thing that I've been thinking about a lot, and don't take this the wrong way, is the reign of Augustus Caesar in Imperial.
Andrew, tell us what it was like.
Right.
Stories you told me when it dandled me on the knee.
Tell me about it.
No, so I mean, this is obviously ancient history.
Augustus Caesar, the first true emperor of Rome.
And what I'm not saying is that I think the right is about to become an authoritarian imperial project.
I don't want that to happen.
I don't foresee that happening.
But one feature of Augustus' reign and the reason why it worked is that they've just had all these civil wars, years and years, generations really, of bloody civil war.
And at various points, people tried to kind of seize the reins, take control, and start again with a blank slate.
And they did it by basically like executing their enemies en masse.
Now all the bad guys are going to be gone.
And of course, this continually didn't work.
You had the Gracchi, you had Sula, you had all these guys who in various different ways thought, you know, we're going to clean the slate.
But actually what they were doing was just digging the kind of resentments in deeper.
Augustus was able to represent himself as the clement fresh start, right?
The merciful guy who actually said, no, we're not going to have those fights anymore.
We're going to put that to bed.
Here's a new thing.
What you're talking about on the right, with the culture wars, strikes me a little bit like a kind of new, clean start that doesn't refer back to any of the stuff that we've been, like all the kind of teams have been scrambled and the people that we're listening to most, like, you know, you talk a lot about our friend Mary Harrington, these women, Erica Bakiochi, but also like if you listen to the Red Scare podcast,
this is like ex-kind of Marxists basically that have realized it.
And I think there is a certain brand of like young hip conservatism that no longer really gives a toss for a whole range of pieties, left and right, that have entrenched us in this fight.
And I wonder whether the best case scenario is for the right to kind of morph into the cultural renegades, the hip young people, and to take over that way by the sheer force of like everything that the left is doing sucks.
It sucks for you personally.
Here's a better way of life.
We're cooler.
We're more fun.
Come hang out.
That's my pitch.
So, Knowles, you know absolutely nothing about classical history.
Of course.
You talk about the 90s?
But you have spoken in actual depth.
You really have.
Your speeches, especially recently, have been excellent.
And you've talked about the fact that you've kind of lost faith in the liberal idea, or at least you have doubts about the whole idea of classical liberalism, not leftism.
Does that remain true?
Yes, it does.
And I've had questions about it and skepticism of liberalism writ large for a long time.
It was probably since I was 18.
And in recent years, those intuitions and those skepticisms have really come to the fore of the political conversation.
For a while, I guess around 2016, between 2010 and 2016, the conservatives would say, you know, we're the real liberals.
We're the classical liberals.
And classical liberalism is totally different from modern liberalism.
They're completely distinct.
And you think, well, how did we get the modern liberalism?
Are you sure there's no connection here between the current kind of liberalism and the old kind of liberalism?
And it's because it's based on mistaken political premises.
So the liberal project, and I'm painting with a very broad brush, but broadly, exalts the individual and views the individual as the basic unit of society.
The conservative and the classical view is that the family is the fundamental unit of society.
It's the fundamental political unit because it's the most basic public grouping, meaning more than one person.
And there's a reason that the libs of the progressive strain have tried to destroy the family.
In fact, they've tried to destroy the family much more than they've tried to stomp out the individual.
On the social side, they've tried to exalt the individual.
And they've said, oh, you do you.
You know, don't yuck my yum.
That's fine if you want to chop yourself up or whatever.
That's totally fine.
Just don't bother me or something like that.
So I think when I look back at the ancient history of the 1980s to the 1990s to the 2000s.
Tullian talks a lot about that.
Yeah, he does.
Of course he does.
I think that the you do you, leave me alone kind of fashionable liberalism that's cracking up.
And I wonder why is it happening around that time?
In part, I think the conservatives made common cause with the libertarians and the classical liberals to fight off the godless commies.
But we had different agendas, obviously.
And that was the three-legged stool of Reagan.
We win the Cold War, then the fissures start to come up again.
But I think even more than the Cold War, it's the change in the media landscape that has caused such a big shift in the way we view politics.
You know, in the 90s and the 2000s, there was still a homogenous, basically mainstream major media landscape.
That's gone.
Fascism, Liberty, and Media Shift00:12:49
We now have these little niche places to get 300,000, 400,000 viewers on any given piece.
That's a big win.
10, 20 years ago, that wasn't the case.
And so as a result of this, you're seeing random people like this guy talking about Caesar, talking about ancient history.
I mean, you never would have heard that on CNN or Fox News.
It's a better time.
But what that has done is then brought older ideas, more niche ideas, more fringe ideas to life.
And so if the political divide 20, 30 years ago was, we want individualism but pay more taxes, or we want individualism but pay less taxes, that's over.
Now you're going to see a much more extreme leftism and you're going to see what I think are more interesting and ultimately deeper forms of the right that don't just try to maintain the status quo, but get back to deeper springs of conservatism and that talk for the first time in a while about virtue.
All right, we'll have more with Michael Knowles and Spencer Clavin in just a bit.
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You're talking about the family.
I think we're all very concerned about the collapse of the family.
And also, I particularly feel that the transgender, the movement to especially butcher children, as I politely put it, is an upsurge of evil.
I mean, it's something somewhere along the line we have philosophically gone down, opened the wrong door, and there is the devil, and this is a bad thing, and we should probably go to another door.
On the other hand, you have benefited from the fact that gay people can get married and aren't, as they were in my day, arrested simply for being themselves, which I even then thought was a bad thing and think was a bad thing now.
Yes.
How can you get back to a world of the familial, or do we want to go forward to a new world?
I shouldn't, either way.
How are we going to reform that basic structure without excluding people who now are included?
I actually think that I have an answer to this, or the shape of an answer.
I'm shocked to say.
You know, one common thread in what we both just said was the moral claim, the virtue claim that the new right, new forms of the right is making.
Not just, hey, as long as you don't bother me, we can be good and get along, but actually, that's wrong.
Don't do that to yourself.
Like, don't chop your genitals off.
Bad.
And when you start talking about this, this is why I, when I started talking about Caesar, had to make this disclaimer: like, I'm not saying let's do Caesarism.
Let's do a strong man, let's do, you know, the church reigneth triumphant or what have you, because that is another, you have to concede, right, another sort of strain that's rising on the right is not just a kind of post-liberal or liberal skeptic project, but like an anti-liberal project.
And my concern about that is simply: if you're going to revive America, it's got to be America.
You can't rewire the country just because the commies are trying to take it over.
And for all that, I agree with the criticisms of liberalism that Michael is raising and that have kind of become current.
I still think that some form of liberty rightly understood is central to the American idea.
And so then you do have this genuine problem, right?
If we're talking about virtue, if we're talking about ethics, if the need is to recover a sense of morality in politics, how do you do that without lapsing into Caesarism?
And the concept that I think is really urgent to recover when you ask that question is the concept of honor, honor, and value.
What do you elevate morally?
Because we as Americans are very used to talking about two categories: the legal and the illegal, the allowed and the not allowed.
And for us, if something is bad, you know, we can only think about basically getting it out.
We can only talk about things that we think should be outlawed altogether, full stop.
We're uncomfortable because of our kind of, I think, now hyper-metastasized egalitarianism, kind of wrongly understood egalitarianism.
We're uncomfortable with a state that might say, okay, you know, everybody is allowed to make these choices that may or may not hurt other people, you know, or rather to make these choices that won't hurt other people.
But some things are central and some things are going to be honored by the state.
And the secret is the state is always already doing that.
Every civilization elevates certain things.
Right now, the reason that the trans thing is so crazy is because they're giving these awards at the Dodger Games at the guys that dress up as nuns.
Joe Biden is meeting with Dylan Mulvaney.
That's a form of honor, of public honor.
It's not actually about what's illegal and illegal.
It's more to do with, for instance, like even as a gay guy, I am very comfortable saying a man and a woman getting married and having children, that is central to civilization in a way that a gay union is not.
And we've got to find ways, both culturally and politically, of making that statement without just kind of outlawing everything that we don't want.
You know, it's a good point that honor and social condemnation actually have hierarchies in ways that law doesn't.
The law is a blunt instrument.
It always has been.
I'm worried about, you know, two of the things that you've both been talking about, about this kind of hip new movement where people are starting to say all hip people are going to want to say the forbidden thing.
That is, you know, that's just part of being hip.
And you're talking about restoring order and restoring the family and rejecting the old liberal ideas.
Recently we were all sitting around talking, the three of us were sitting around talking, and you said that you sort of thought that this Nick Fuentes kind of hip, self-mocking, but also serious, hardline, almost fascist, well not almost fascist, the guy's a fascist attitude was sort of seeping in to the culture.
Now, this week I saw a video of Fuentes calling for a holy war against the Jews, which in general I tend to oppose.
Not the most original thing.
I'm going to go out here and I'm going to say I'm opposed to mass slaughter.
Oh, wow.
All right.
Call me a little bit.
YouTube will cancel us for this.
Is that the other alternative?
I mean, if we back away from liberalism, do we wander into fascism?
Well, I would say it is blood alone that moves the wheels of history.
To quote you.
No, look, that kind of speech is obviously seeking attention, and it received that attention.
So what is the alternative?
The Libs are very fond of saying that, you know, if any of us says you shouldn't chop your genitals off, you're a fascist or something like that.
And the problem with that is it's not taking us seriously and it's not taking politics seriously.
It's also not taking fascism seriously.
I say this as an Italian.
When you study Italian in school, you read like three things.
Dante, the fascist writers of the 20th century.
Two things.
And the fascist movement is interesting because it comes out of futurism, people like Marinetti.
It's distinguished from something like German Nazism.
It doesn't really like the church.
It's hostile to religion.
It makes an idolatry of the state.
In some ways it's right-wing in that it looks back on tradition favorably and doesn't look favorably on communism and modernism and degenerate art.
That's the one I'm in favor of.
That's my fascist structure.
Of course, yeah.
And by the way, that phrase is a phrase that was coined by a Jew that was popularized by the Nazis.
So if you even use that phrase, they'll call you a Nazi.
I don't even know where the phrase comes from.
But there are many varieties of alternatives to liberalism, both in modernity and earlier, as reactions to the Enlightenment.
It's not just if you oppose, I don't know, John Rawls, that you're some kind of Hitler or something like that.
And so the thing that gets all the attention is when some guy goes on the internet and says we're going to kill all the Jews or whatever.
But that's such a distraction because there are so many serious criticisms and alternatives to it.
I mean, even this idea that you bring up that America, it's going to look a little different.
If we're going to go back and restore something, it's going to have a conception of liberty.
That's true, though it's worth pointing out our pal Yoram Hazzoni observes that the notion that America is and has always been a liberal democracy, that is a construct of the post-war period.
That's true.
If you look at that phrase, liberal democracy, it appears basically nowhere until the 30s and 40s.
So there is an American conception of liberty, but it's very different than the one that we think of today.
And I just think, yes, it's true.
If someone calls to murder all the Jews, it's going to get a lot of attention and the left is going to love sending that around.
But the opposition to liberalism on the right runs the gamut from extreme figures on live streams all the way to now U.S. senators, Jewish philosophers like Yoram Hazoni, Catholic integralists, Claremonsters.
To me, find me the conservative defending liberalism.
They're dwindling.
There's something to be said also, I think, about the Machiavelli comparison and the fascism comparison.
Not to equate those two movements, but both share the feature of disgust at a certain form of decrepit Christianity.
Machiavelli is extremely harsh and critical of the church.
The fascists, as you say, also have this kind of aversion to, you might say, a kind of hyper-feminized, not in the sense of being feminine, but just in having this kind of overly soft attitude, this kind of unrealist view of the world that they were in rebellion against.
The other guy who-they literally took the land away from the church.
Exactly.
The other guy who comes to mind in this context is Friedrich Nietzsche, right, who has extremely scathing things to say about Christianity and the church, which describe almost exactly the kind of church decay that we see now too.
This whole gentle Jesus, meek and mild, all he wanted was for you to hang the trans pride flag out your church, whatever.
In civilizations where the dominant moral narrative forbids certain obvious truths, which was the case in Machiavelli's day, was the case for fascism and so forth, in those times, it becomes incredibly powerful for anybody to make the claim that he, as you said, is the great truth teller.
This is what gives Fuentes, somebody like Fuentes, the power, whatever power and allure he may have.
Same thing with Andrew Tate, right?
Generations of men.
Yeah, generations of men who have been told that their mere existence on this earth is toxic.
The other thing that's worth pointing out with both of those guys is they're both clever and pretty funny.
And we shouldn't diminish that.
I mean, part of their appeal is they're just talented, intelligent people who could probably sell you anything.
And so the moral of the story here is if you want a new right that does not look like Nick Fuentes, that does not look like Andrew Tate, you are not going to get it by offering more of the same kind of hyper-emasculated liberalism that has failed to satisfy.
Right-Wing Politics Debate00:09:35
Offering more of the same kind of lukewarm green gunk isn't going to work.
And so that's one reason to really encourage other forms of critical, liberalism-critical right-wing attitudes, right, is to provide alternatives that don't actually veer off into this insane reactionism.
You know, to tie it in also with the change in media and politics following this change in media, and to put it right back on the internet, I think there's a comparison here to be made with porn, which is if you look at a naked lady on the internet and you think that's fine and you want to look at more porn, you're not going to stop just looking at a naked lady.
You're going to look at a naked lady, then you're going to look at two naked ladies, then you're going to look at like 10 naked ladies and a billy goat, and it's going to be up and like, I don't know, people eating a tuna fish sandwich and somehow that's sexual or something.
You're always going to try to get a bigger high.
And I think this is true in political affinity groups online too.
You always want the harder stuff.
It's like with drugs.
Well then let's look at the lineup.
I don't want to get too specific politically, but I do think I've come to the opinion that right this minute, and this could change in the coming days, but right this minute, I feel that Donald Trump has become an obstacle to the future that he essentially opened up.
He opened up a path to the future that I think the Republicans needed.
I don't think it was there before.
I think it was a revolutionary change and a good one.
And now I think he's in the way of people putting that into action.
I could be wrong, and I could be right today and wrong tomorrow.
My question is, you look at this lineup, some of them midgets, some of them fairly large, who do you look at and think there's the future in terms of right-wing politics?
Asa Hutchinson.
What's that?
Asa Hutchinson.
Oh, please.
Chris Christie.
Chris Christie.
The Chrissassance.
The Chrissance.
I really like Ron DeSantis.
I think he's a great guy.
I've gotten to spend a very tiny bit of time with him.
I'm personally impressed with him.
I'm publicly impressed with him.
He's done a great job as governor of Florida.
Right now, Trump remains the most impressive because Trump is a wrench into the machinery of the liberal establishment in a way that the other guys are not.
DeSantis has made a really great argument that he's the better version of Trump and he can wield power more effectively.
But even though people in a blind taste test like new Coke more than old Coke, when they take the blindfold off, they want the original.
They don't want the imitation.
The only candidate who's had any movement in the race really is Vivek Ramaswamy because he's just taking risks.
He's the only candidate taking any risks in the field.
He's very smart.
Super, super sharp guy.
Still, though, they're all 30 or 40 points behind.
It just seems to me that you're right.
Trump was this wrecking ball.
He was this wrench in the machine.
But the machine hasn't totally ground to a halt yet.
And I don't see any other candidate.
The flaws of Trump.
So in the immediate moment, you want more disruption?
I'm of two tastes and desires, of course, because of the downsides that come along with Trump and the fact that some of the other candidates, DeSantis notably, seem to see, as a matter of political philosophy, more clearly, perhaps, than Trump does.
But I guess that's what I kind of like about Trump, is that the machine is still running a little too well.
They're indicting him three or four times now.
They're jailing conservatives over nothing.
And so certainly we need more disruption.
And as of now, it would appear that Trump is the most likely to do that.
What do you think?
So I think a lot of this is true, to my dismay.
I really wish that the field didn't look the way that it looks.
I was talking to our friend Charles Kessler, who runs the CRB where I work, and he said something that I think was really true, which is the political, the presidential debate and the presidential fight that we kind of deserve is Ron DeSantis versus Gavin Newsom.
Yes.
And I agree with that.
You know, and not because we all long for Daddy Newsom to come in and discipline us, but because that represents the actual spiritual battle, principle level fight that we're having in the country.
And it's being enacted right now, state by state.
There's a reason why these are both governors and why their states sort of embody a form of life, a way of government, a system of ideals.
They are perfect pictures of those two ways of life.
Do you want to feel virtuous while the borders of your suburban enclave close ever tighter around you?
And outside there's a kind of mess of the abandoned poor just wandering drug-addled through the streets.
Do you want that?
Or sign me up.
Yeah, exactly.
Or do you want your Latinx brethren dancing in the streets with you while you all go out and drink tequila and like, you know, COVID's over?
No, seriously, I mean, yeah, I actually vote.
It is an amazing, amazing comparison.
Yeah.
Now, interestingly, in both these cases, we're talking pure politics.
We're talking right-wing politics.
The California model, as the leftist model always does, it has failed utterly.
And the DeSantis model is working great, which has nothing to do with what you were saying.
I mean, that still might make Trump the better candidate.
But still, as a model, those things.
Now, how much does culture and faith matter?
And is there something we should be doing about it?
So let me start with you.
The things about both of those, DeSantis is putting forward moral arguments, but I don't hear him talk in a religious way the way Reagan used to and the way plenty of politicians used to.
I hear him talking mostly in policy.
Obviously, Gavin Newsom is going to hell, so he can't talk about God.
He's already got his red claw on his head as they're pulling him down.
So what is the path forward in terms of culture and faith?
Hungary.
It is, really, because this should also allay some of the fears that the moment that we ditch liberalism, that we're all going to end up on boxcars in Nazi Germany or something like that.
Because Orban in Hungary, with in many ways, far deeper challenges than American conservatives face.
I mean, he's coming out of communism.
He's coming out of this kind of decadent period in Hungary.
He comes in and he says, we're going to be an illiberal democracy.
And he's changed his description recently to say we're a Christian democracy.
Has he said it?
He has.
And he's engaging in religious actions himself, actually.
He said he was kind of an atheist for a while, but he's now more religious.
And you're seeing one singular success in Hungary that it's alone among the West, which is they've turned around the demographic decline.
They still have a birth rate below replacement, but it's gone up dramatically.
How did it go up?
Not by accident.
They instituted a pro-family policy.
And if you have four kids in Hungary, you basically don't pay taxes.
And there are graduated steps all the way up.
And so it's been an amazing success.
They've now defended the family, defended marriage.
They've defended life, even to a degree that after communism, there was a widespread abortion regime in Hungary.
Slowly but surely, they've chipped away at that as well.
And it's happened because they've said we're going to have this North Star.
And the kicker of it is, only 15% of Hungarians go to church.
Wow.
Here's a big delta that tells you a lot that's applicable here.
15% go to church, 80% identify as Christians.
What does that mean?
I go back to the La Roche Foucault quote, which is, hypocrisy is the tribute vice pays to virtue.
And they recognize liberalism has left us with nothing, literally nothing.
We don't have a country anymore.
We don't have people.
We don't have borders.
We don't have anything.
No traditions.
Hungary took their old ugly buildings, Soviet brutalism.
They rebeautified them.
They put new facades on.
They're restoring things.
The only way you can do that is with religion.
I was going back.
I'm going back through all these old dusty writers who you can read in the original languages.
And the recurrent theme is that religion is the basis of the state of everything.
And so without it, if we try to find some conciliatory middle ground and say, well, we're just going to fight for some abstract value or something, we might win some short victories.
We'll lose in the end.
And once again, secretly, you already have a national religion.
It just doesn't travel under that name.
You don't know that the state worships something.
We were talking about this a little bit before we started rolling, that one feature of nationalism that I think Hazzoni, I don't want to speak for him, but he would endorse and that I think is very important.
Edmund Burke is kind of good on this, right?
Is that if you really believe that the nation is a thing, the nation state is a thing, then you believe that people and places have a unique and distinctive character.
And so whereas the kind of natural right truths, the Thomas Aquinas eternal truths, are always with us and ever present and real, their enactment in the moment and in time and space always looks specific to the situation and the country that you're in.
Church Back Off Mandates00:00:55
And so my feeling about Hungary is I don't think that what they are doing is how it's going to look when we do it, of course.
But they're doing it and we're not at all.
The form of what they're doing, right?
That's a policy of honor, right?
Elevating people that have four children, offering incentives.
Nobody's like saying you have to get carted off and go to church, like mandatory church.
As you say, they back to never go to church.
But the cultural change that that makes is significant and is certainly better than incentivizing hormone blockers, which is what our state religion effectively now does.
Unfortunately, I have to stop there.
And even more unfortunately, I'm going to have to ask you to come back another time and we'll continue this conversation.
I can't stand it.
Fate that we're saying.
This is your personal experience.
I get it.
However, we will be back on Friday with the Andrew Claven Show and we'll talk more about how the culture is changing, I think, in our direction.