Eric Kaufmann’s The Third Awakening outlines a 12-point plan to counter progressive extremism, framing it as an "evolutionary ratchet" of liberal-left identity politics—from Johnson’s affirmative action to compulsory pronoun laws. He argues woke ideology thrives by amplifying radical ideas under the guise of equality, while religious Democrats still support its policies. Conservative success hinges on weaponizing culture wars, exposing euphemisms like "chemical castration," and pressuring institutions, as Reform’s Nigel Farage did in Britain’s 2024 election by targeting immigration and school curricula. Without aggressive pushback, woke capture of education and public life will deepen, reshaping politics for decades. [Automatically generated summary]
Hey everyone, it's Andrew Clavin with this week's interview with Professor Eric Kaufman.
Eric has written a book called The Third Awokening, a 12-point plan for rolling back progressive extremism.
You know, there are a lot of books about how we got here into this kind of amazing place where not only are people saying things that are obviously untrue, they're condemning and canceling others for pointing out that they're untrue.
And there have been books by Carl Truman, who I love.
Chris Ruffo did one.
Michael Knowles, our own Michael Knowles did his book.
Katie Gorka, they've sort of talked about where we've come from.
And the reason I wanted to talk to Professor Kaufman is because he has a totally different take than they do.
And he's a guy who should know because he has been canceled himself kind of brutally.
And I want to hear about that as well.
Professor, thank you for coming on.
It's nice to meet you.
Andrew, thanks for having me.
As I was saying, it's long overdue, I think, for us to be here.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
It is great to see you.
And I have to, I wish you would just tell people before we start talking about the Third Awokening, tell us a little bit about your experience.
You're teaching in Britain, right?
Yeah, I'm teaching in Britain.
Well, if I can talk about my experience, which is kind of probably now, you know, I was at the Stanford Academic Freedom Conference.
They asked who here has been canceled.
And about 90% of people raised their hand in the room of several hundred.
So yeah, I was sort of, you know, it was that first wave.
Now, I can't say I was canceled out of a job, but certainly I was subject to cancel culture.
So I had, you know, starting about 2018, a number of Twitter mobbings and an open letter and then a number of about four internal university investigations prompted by radical faculty or students and to some extent outsiders.
So yeah, that was sort of my experience over maybe four years, 2018 to 2022.
And yeah, it really unsettles you when you get that email in your inbox telling you to show up for a hearing.
And then the, you know, it's kind of a kangaroo court, you know, these unspecified penalties and unspecified allegations like you're guilty, but your penalty is that you've broken this code.
But it's never clear exactly what the penalty is other than you've got to shut up, right?
What was the evil thing that you, I mean, you're clearly a terribly evil person.
So what was the evil thing that you had done?
Well, I was just a critic of the social justice movement, you know, whether that be, you know, skepticism on Black Lives Matter or whether it be, you know, something like a lot of it would happen on social media.
So retweeting Justin Trudeau mispronouncing LGBTQ, making fun of that, him mispronouncing LGBTQ.
Negative Procedural Liberalism00:13:14
I mean, that's the kind of level we're talking about.
Nothing that's nothing they could really, really nail me for, but just they would, anything you did in the past, they would retain it and add to the file.
Yeah, that is amazing.
So the thing about this book that really got to me is that I've read all these books now about how did we get here?
And they're written by very smart people.
And Michael Knowles, our own Michael Knowles, but the other people are smart.
And like they basically take this history, you call it Gramscian Marxist history, and that's basically the way they all go and get us to this place.
But you say you have a totally different take on this.
Can you explain this so we understand it?
So I don't deny that there are continuities between, you know, Angela Davis and Black Lives Matter and that kind of, you know, the Panthers and so on or weathermen in Antifa like Rufo mentions.
But I don't think if it was just the cultural Marxists, you know, people who wanted revolution, they couldn't do it on the class basis.
So they turned to identity.
I don't think that on its own, the revolutionary stuff would have done it if it didn't have quite a bit of pickup amongst that 50 to 60% liberal left inside, say, universities, the faculty.
And so what I argue this is, is it's more really about the liberal left.
So if you think about, for example, affirmative action, you know, President Johnson, this was an anti-communist.
He was fighting in Vietnam.
essentially engaging in bombing in Vietnam.
This was not somebody who was a communist.
And yet very much on board this idea of equal outcomes and affirmative action.
Or you take something like speech codes.
Again, neither of these things has a Marxist origin or even a cultural Marxist origin.
What I argue then is it's this evolutionary ratcheting process is we need more diversity, we need more equity, we need more inclusion, by which we mean speech suppression, suppression of ideas and speech, which might offend the most sensitive member of one of these minority groups.
So it's this evolutionary ratcheting of sensitivity.
So that's how we get in the courts, for example, to something like disparate impact, this idea that any policy like an SAT test, right, or excluding pupils from class for bad behavior, anything that affects one racial group more than another is by its nature discriminatory.
That is what I would call a left liberal ratchet.
It's not a sort of march through the institutions, we want revolution type of argument.
And I think a lot of it, political correctness, simply going from crippled to disabled to differently able to, you know, this kind of language stuff is also an evolutionary ratchet out of people trying to be more and more and more and more sensitive, you know, more and more and more equality, but not in the name of overthrow.
And that's kind of the process I point to is this sort of left liberal process.
So I hold kind of the left liberals, and also they are an amplification system for the cultural Marxist ideas.
So the reason that critical race theory and gender ideology, which do have their roots in cultural Marxist ideas or postmodernist ideas, the reason they are able to get through is because they resonate so well with the left liberal emphasis on sensitivity and inequality.
And it's a bit like plugging your guitar into an amplifier.
So the left liberal amplifier, we haven't focused enough on why did a majority of Seattle voters, like 51%, vote to defund the police.
Now, yes, defund the police is a Black Panther cultural Marxist idea, but it got a lot of support from left liberals who wanted to be quote unquote nice.
And it's that kind of well-meaning, I want to be kind type of person that I'm focusing on.
And it's that kind of humanitarian extremism taking that too far, that sort of bleeding heart liberal taking it too far that I think is really the driver.
People, I mean, people say such insane stuff.
Defund the police.
I mean, that's a, you know, you can't get any more crazy than that, unless you would say something like men can be women, but who would say anything that crazy?
So do you think that the ordinary liberal people were motivated by, as you say, this desire to be nice?
I've sometimes felt, I've often felt that you mentioned Johnson, that the great society was basically their big push to change all this and it just didn't work.
And rather than accept that it didn't work, they had to keep moving the ball.
It's just a weird, it's kind of the madness of crowds almost that has come upon us.
And it's weird to think of ordinary, nice liberal people.
And I know many of them who have just bought into this, though.
Yeah, I mean, it's quite interesting because I think what this is, is it's not an ideology so much as it's about compassion for particular groups, whether that be African-American, Indigenous, women, LGBT, whatever.
So you're attached to these particular causes.
Out of that emerges this loose set of ideas.
You know, we must not tolerate any kind of equal outcomes between men and women or black and white or whatever.
And we can't have any emotional harm to even the most sensitive member of one of these identity groups.
So we need speech codes and clamp down on free speech in order to prevent harmful words and microaggressions and so on.
And that's now, this is sort of a set of principles that arises.
You know, what I focus on is this is the emotions, what Jonathan Haidt would call the kind of elephant that's driving your behavior, but you're the writer telling yourself a story, which is kind of sort of made up.
It's justification.
And I think things like postmodernism and even some of the critical theory is just a sort of afterthought, justification for the core emotions, which is all about majorities are bad.
I'm scared of those people.
And minorities are nice and cuddly.
I feel warmly towards those people.
And it's about as simple as that.
And that's what informs.
So something like caring, you know, it's just be kind or I'm caring.
People don't actually question the source of those emotions.
And what I'm arguing in the book is that these emotions are socially and ideologically constructed and people are just not aware of it.
And so, for example, why do you think caring about somebody not being able to transition to become a boy, if they're a girl, that that's caring?
And the detransitioner, you know, you're ignoring that, the risk that that person's going to be a detransitioner, which is probably pretty high.
So you're not, you don't care about the detransitioner.
You care only about the transitioner.
And that's what I mean.
It's this very selective sorting that's going on beforehand, and you're not even aware of it.
You just think, I'm being caring because I'm enabling more people to transition.
You're not thinking, actually, I'm not being very caring because I'm causing a lot of misery to people who are going to detransition.
Right, right.
So we're talking to Eric Hoffman about the third awokening, a 12-point plan for rolling back progressive extremism.
Now, you don't seem to agree with the Patrick Denine set, who basically say this evolution that you're talking about is built into the liberal system and the liberal system itself is doomed.
And this is mostly a Catholic approach to what is, after all, a Protestant system, the kind of Enlightenment liberalism.
But you don't seem to agree with that.
You feel that there's something left in there that can be saved.
Yeah, I think to some degree, people like Denin and the post-liberals are correct that we slipped from what I would call or what Isaiah Berlin would call negative liberty, live and let live, to something like, so for example, tolerate diverse views or diverse individuals or groups to celebrate.
You must, you know, it's not just someone can use a pronoun, but you should have your pronouns on your badge, right?
That shift from something that is voluntary to something that's compulsive.
I think that is what occurred.
So they are right to that degree.
I just think, however, that we can have a system where we could be pretty tolerant.
We can have a sort of negative procedural liberalism that allows different points of view.
But within that, conservatives can advocate and quite successfully instill their point of view, for example.
So, for example, in schools, I don't think it is necessary to replace the public religion of woke, which is currently critical race and DEI and all of that that's being taught, with a different public religion, which might be Judeo-Christian or something.
I think you can actually have a politically neutral space, or you can work towards one in class or government buildings.
So, you can say no flags on government buildings other than the flag of the country or the state or the municipality.
You can in class say, you know, either no DEI is going to be taught at all, no critical race theory, no radical gender theory, or we're going to say that this curriculum has to be taught.
So, balance must be provided.
If you're going to talk about American slavery, you've got to talk about Comanche slavery and genocide, et cetera.
So, you've got to have a balance.
You're not going to be able to just teach it in a very sort of narrow curated way as it is now.
I think that's all doable with enough political will.
And Ron DeSantis is sort of showing that that can be done and it is having an effect.
I think if you had a public policy where you actually had accountability, you have to have schools being inspected a certain way, the inspectors reporting to the legislature, and that that becomes a priority for lobby groups, for example, to put pressure on legislatures if they're not actually doing their job.
I think all of that can work to get this ideology out of our public institutions.
You know, the thing I wonder about this, and I'm not trying to change your mind about anything, but I do wonder about this.
It has often seemed to me that without some kind of belief in a God, you know, it doesn't have to be this religion or that religion, but some kind of belief in a God, that a lot of the arguments of the left actually make sense.
I mean, there's no necessary good or reality or truth.
I remember a book by Anthony Cronman, who I think was at Yale, saying we can't allow religion into the great conversation, the search for truth, because it cuts off avenues of inquiry.
And I thought when I was reading that, no, that's not true, because you just have to think that you're moving toward a truth.
And I think Cronman has actually changed his mind about this.
If we remove not a religion, but if we remove theism entirely, can we win the argument with the woke people?
Well, I think there's different layers to this.
So, what I'd say we've got now is a sort of anti-religious, anti-patriotic, anti-conservative environment.
So, even to be able to get to a position where it's neutral and not anti, I think is going to help.
And that's sort of what I'm sort of arguing: is that if you create a more level playing field that isn't automatically critical of these things, that will sort of create a more enabling atmosphere.
The other thing I would say, though, is that in terms of, you know, we see woke being very successful, certainly amongst the upper echelons of, you know, mainline Protestantism, but even to some extent Catholicism, to some extent, certainly some of the more conservative and reformed Judaism.
And even actually at the upper echelons of evangelicalism, you see that some of these ideas have made a lot of headway.
And some of the worst, I guess, offenders, I'm thinking of the Church of England and the Anglican bishops and some of their pronouncements on reparations for slavery and critical race theory.
So I'm not sure, religion on its own isn't actually a barrier, I think.
But now, a certain version of religion, perhaps.
Patriotism is definitely a very strong, you know, it's very difficult to be strongly nationalistic and be woke.
That is, I think, much more tricky.
If you look at survey data, you do have, so if you are a Democrat and you're very religious, doesn't seem to moderate your views on questions like white guilt or affirmative action as compared to a sort of secular Democrat.
So I just don't know if that on its own is going to be enough.
But I think to the extent clearly, if you identify as Christian, you're more likely to be Republican.
That is really what is going to prove to be the barrier to woke.
Yeah.
Culture War Divide00:14:42
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I just make it look this easy.
There are no easy things.
A lot of these things involve what I would call culture, I guess what you would call culture.
And one of the interesting things I find is that culture questions, culture war questions, drive people insane.
I mean, people like hit the roof when you tell them, you know, that you don't believe in transitioning, that you do, whatever it is, it just drives people crazy.
But when they get to the voting booth, a lot of times, they're voting on economic issues and security issues and all that.
Is there something wrong?
Is that an impediment to changing the culture?
And is there another way to argue this?
Is there a way to argue this that would be more effective?
Yeah, I mean, that's a really good question.
And you're right that, you know, this culture wars issues don't rank that highly for voters at present.
Now, where politicians in certain cases, like Glenn Young in Virginia on the schools question, or Ron DeSantis to some degree in Florida, have raised it, I think they've benefited from it because the public leans about two to one.
And I've done a lot of survey work on this, UK, Canada, Britain, public leans about two to one against the woke position on average.
So something like, should school children be taught the U.S. is a racist country?
If you take a question like that, I mean, it could be any of these questions, should they be taught that there are many genders, what you find is this tends to unite the right.
So conservatives are strongly opposed to this.
Democrats or the left will tend to be splintered.
Some of them would be strongly in favor of teaching this kind of critical theory.
Others would be strongly opposed.
So it divides your opposition, unites you.
And so I think it's simply something that conservative politicians cannot lose on, in my view.
Now, is there a better way to do this?
I think there are a couple of things that need to happen.
I mean, one is to use vivid images.
You know, Chris Ruffo had this label critical race theory, which made sense of a lot of disparate concerns.
But likewise, using a term such as, you know, Billboard Chris talks about chemical castration of children with regard to so-called gender-affirming care.
If we, instead of talking about affirmative action, again, that affirming, try to use these euphemisms, the idea is to unmask them and to talk about anti-white, anti-male, anti-Asian discrimination, and to have an individual that symbolizes that.
So in Scotland, there was a tattooed male rapist, the picture of that tattooed male rapist going into the female prison, and that's really what blew it up in Scotland.
So these images can really say, you know, images speak a thousand words in a way.
But the other thing is to try and link culture wars issues to concrete issues voters do care about.
And that's the sort of next stage, I think, for the politics of this.
Because if we can't have a debate over immigration, because that might upset certain identity groups, at least in theory, or we can't have a debate about crime or about educational outcomes, and we can't do what's right in terms of improving educational outcomes, again, because of worries about who's going to be excluded from class, who's going to do well or not do well on a metric.
So all of these policy areas are actually implicated in the culture war.
And so the culture war is not just some sideshow.
I think the media to some extent has, or certain parts of the media have been able to paint it as just some sort of sideshow and only of concern to a few people on campus.
Actually, this affects a whole range of different policies.
And that point really needs to be brought out more, I think, by politicians.
You know, Doug Murray, I think, was said that America has become a net exporter of bad ideas.
And are you still in England?
I'm in England, yeah.
I'm in England.
You are.
So I hear these stories from England.
I lived in England through most of the 90s.
And I hear these stories now about people being arrested for praying silently outside in the vicinity of an abortion clinic or something like this.
Are these true?
I mean, these are things that are hard to believe.
They are true.
You know, and each, I mean, different countries are more extreme on different things.
So Britain seems to be worse on the police coming and knocking on your door for a tweet, or somebody, as you mentioned, you know, being arrested for praying silently.
So there seems to be an abuse of police authority.
Now, that's to some degree been rolled back, but only to some degree by the Conservative government.
They haven't been anywhere near as vigilant as they should.
But on the other hand, the gender transitioning stuff is worse in Canada and U.S. and I mean, in the U.S., there's the red and the blue states, and the red states are kind of cracking down on some of the excesses of gender ideology.
But in Britain, for example, that's not so bad.
And in fact, the legislative framework, at least in England, is pretty good on this.
You've had the CAS review and you've had other reports that are pushed back on gender ideology.
So it just depends on which dimension of woke we're talking about as to which country is the worst.
I mean, maybe Canada is the worst on pretty much every dimension.
I guess the police dimension is probably worse than Britain.
Interesting.
Okay.
The book, again, the author is Professor Eric Kaufman.
The book is The Third Awokening: A 12-Point Plan for Rolling Back Progressive Extremism.
Now, I like this title because it's optimistic.
And before I get to that, before I get to the optimism, I just want to ask you, because people here may not know, they've just called an election in England, right?
They've just called for an election.
And you've had, what is it, like 16 years of, am I getting that right?
14, 14 years.
14, sorry, 14 years of conservative craziness.
I mean, it's been kind of weird and it hasn't been what an American would call conservative at all.
And the polls show the conservatives in the tank like they're just going to be wiped out.
Can you explain why they called the election?
Because the conservative PM did it and what you're expecting to see now.
Well, yeah, I mean, they called the election partly because their terms, you know, there's a limit to how long they could be in.
They were elected in 2019.
It's now five years.
The latest they could have held it is January 25.
So now, why did they hold it?
Maybe they thought, I think what they're thinking is let's get it out of the way because the polls haven't moved.
We're going to lose badly.
So I actually think that's what's behind it.
Why are they doing so badly?
Well, you know, they came in with a huge majority in 2019 on the back of supporting the Brexit side more or less.
Get Brexit done was the slogan.
The reason most people, you know, about 40% of people who voted Brexit mainly voted Brexit to reduce immigration numbers.
The Conservative Party kind of, they came in and they didn't take that seriously.
And so they ramped up immigration to levels that have never been seen in British history, you know, 750,000 when people thought 300 or 250 was, you know, and that 250 or 300,000, which was the case between about 1997 and the 2010s, even that was a record high.
So they are mainly getting killed on immigration.
But in addition, you know, the things we're talking about, they haven't done a whole lot to push back against the sort of creep of DEI in the civil service, the critical race and gender theory in the schools, police, you know, doing the rainbow thing and celebrating every identity day, International Transgender Awareness Day, you name it.
It's there.
And so they've done a very weak, they've been very weak on culture war as well.
I think these are, this is one of the reasons we've now got a third party called reform, which has been polling as high as 16%.
So not that far off the Tories at about 2021.
So now if Nigel Farage, who's campaigning on behalf of reform, enters the race, actually becomes the leader of reform, there's a chance that reform can outpoll the conservatives and lead to a catastrophe within the Conservative Party.
So watch this space.
You know, the election on July, sorry, July 4th, actually, will be an interesting one.
And I think it is.
Yeah, go ahead.
Well, the reason I ask you this question is because what you're describing is exactly what we have here.
We have people who have urgent feelings about things.
We have people who believe that conservatism is defined a certain way.
And then we have the government, who are a clown show, who without Donald Trump, really, would not have noticed that people were saying anything.
We're perfectly happy.
I mean, we had guys just saying, basically telling their members, you know, ignore your constituents.
Just tell them you're doing it and we're doing what we're doing.
And they just completely ignored it.
So the same thing is obviously happening here.
Obviously, Brexit was an immigration thing.
The conservatives have done nothing about it.
So you have, your book is called The Third Awokening, a 12-point plan for rolling back progressive extremism.
Who are you calling upon to create this change if the conservative politicians aren't on board?
I guess that's what I'm trying to find out.
Yeah, so that is a good question.
Where does the pressure come from?
Now, my argument is really this change can only come from the right.
Once the right starts winning elections on culture war issues, and because, as I said, the public leans two to one against the woke position.
Once the right starts successfully weaponizing that, then the sensible center left, the James Carvilles of this world, will be able to prevail against the sort of activist elements in their party at some point.
And then we'll get a norm shift.
I mean, that's my hope anyway.
Now, of course, the parties, as you say, like in Britain, the Conservative Party consists of a lot of careerists or more liberal conservatives who really think this is ungentlemanly and they don't want, you know, they fall, they're kind of useful idiots for left-wing forces who say, oh, you're stoking division.
You can't talk about the culture war.
Whereas, you know, when teachers bring in critical race and gender ideology, that's not stoking division.
It's a bit like, you know, Russia invades, you resist, you're causing a war and not the invaders.
But in any case, yeah, so we have that kind of establishment conservatism in Britain, a bit like, as you mentioned, the Republican Party prior to Trump, where it was a sort of establishment that just wanted to talk about, talk about tax and spend, deal with libertarian donors and so on.
And what's happening now and what will happen after the Conservatives are defeated.
Part of it depends on how bad the defeat is, but there is a sort of strong element within the grassroots of the Conservative Party and also in the Reform Party, this new populist third party, that I think are going to be trying to redefine what conservatism is in Britain.
It's just happening instead of happening in 2015-16, as it was in the U.S., this will be happening in the mid-2020s.
And then if the National Conservative side gets control of the reins of power, they can then remake the party in their image.
I think that's probably where this is going to go before we start to get policy change.
Something similar might happen in Canada, but there's a debate there as to what's going to happen when they win.
I think they're going to win, but yeah.
So this is my, I'm out of time, but if you have a 12-point plan for rolling back progressive extremism, what's the first point?
What's the first thing that people should start thinking about?
Well, I think the starting point, again, it has to start with conservative parties, which means it has to start with the grassroots conservative voters to put pressure on their representatives to take these culture war issues seriously, not to sort of run down the national past, not to allow education to be captured by the cultural left.
And they have to actually be as serious about that as they are about gun rights, as they are about abortion, but all these traditional or tax, all these traditional Republican issues that have their lobby groups.
We need something like that to hold the feet of the politicians to the fire between elections so they don't just pay lip service to this stuff and not do anything about it.
Now, from that, a whole bunch of things will follow.
I mean, sustain stamina to sort of outdistance the teachers' unions, for example, on curriculum.
And the curriculum is the key because one of the points in the book is that young people, you know, you saw young people are sort of E50-50 between Hamas and Israel.
They are 50-50 between J.K. Rowling should be dropped by your publisher or not.
Whereas anyone over 45 is almost a zero.
We've got a big problem with this generation when they become the median voter.
And so education, that really has to be a number one policy focus, I believe.
Yeah, no, you know, it's funny.
I know people who've worked in the Department of Education here who say that Republicans just roll over and die.
Education's Critical Role00:00:56
They just have given up on it and they don't think it's important.
Really interesting.
Professor Eric Kaufman, the book again, The Third Awokening, a 12-point plan for rolling back progressive extremism.
A really different way of looking at this.
And in a lot of ways, I think maybe a more constructive one.
You know, maybe not conflicting with others, but a more constructive, immediate one.
Very nice to meet you.
Thank you for coming on.
I'm sure we'll talk again.
Thanks, Andrew.
I enjoyed it very much.
Really interesting.
did not contradict the thinkers who have gone into outlining the intellectual progression, but a very important addition to that is thinking about the ordinary nice people who sign on to insanity, who are not themselves insane.
And that is the power of ideology, the malignant power of ideology.
I'm on vacation.
I will not be here on Friday.
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And then I will be back next Friday after that with the Andrew Clavin Claven Show.