June 1, 2018 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| Joining me today is the Milbank Family Center Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution | ||
| at Stanford University, a Senior Fellow at the Center for European Studies | ||
| at Harvard, where he also served as a professor of history for 12 years, | ||
| as well as the author of 14 books. | ||
| Neil Ferguson, welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| It's exciting to be here. | ||
| How'd I do on the intro there? | ||
| I mean, I was looking through your bio. | ||
| 14 books. | ||
| There were 87 other things I could have credited you for. | ||
| We've already done an interview here in just the 15 minutes we've been sitting here. | ||
| Was that all right? | ||
| I mean, I could have just made it quicker. | ||
| Yeah, I think the shorter the better is my feeling about introductions. | ||
| You could just have said, here's Neil. | ||
| Here's Neil. | ||
| All right. | ||
| There's a ton we've got to cover here, and we've already done half of it, I think, without the cameras. | ||
| So let's just dive in immediately to the culture war stuff, because I can tell you've been traveling a lot. | ||
| Half jet-lagged, half wide-awake, but I can see that's really where your head's at, at the moment. | ||
| So let's talk some culture war stuff. | ||
| What do you feel is happening, sort of, in the gestalt of the universe at the moment? | ||
| Well, the gestalt of the university might be where we should begin, since I've spent a lot of my life in universities. | ||
| You mentioned a couple of them there, Stanford and Harvard. | ||
| I was at Oxford before that. | ||
| Now, much of my life has been I think witnessing the gradual homogenization of academic life, especially in a field like history. | ||
| When I became a historian back in the 1980s in Oxford and then in Cambridge, It was generally accepted that there could be conservative historians, and liberal historians, and socialist historians, and then some Marxist historians. | ||
| It was really quite a heterogeneous community, Oxbridge, in those days. | ||
| And if you were, as I was, attracted to the conservatives because they were more fun, I thought you were going to say more right, but more fun. | ||
| The fun was the initially attractive thing. | ||
| When I first got to Oxford in the early 80s, it was clear that the funniest people were the Thatcherites, the young Andrew Sullivan, who was a year ahead of me at Magdalen. | ||
| So this was all great fun, and it led to intellectual insight, because they turned out also to be right. | ||
| The historians take Bob Conquest, who was then at the Hoover Institution, one of the few historians who got the Soviet Union right at the time. | ||
| Who wrote about Stalin's crimes not long after they were perpetrated. | ||
| I mean, those were the heroes of my early years. | ||
| But in the course of my career, what has happened has been that one history department after another has moved steadily and relentlessly To the monochrome left. | ||
| And it has become steadily harder to be seen as a conservative. | ||
| I say seen as because I've never really felt that I'm a conservative, but I've often been described as one. | ||
| To be seen as a conservative historian has become steadily harder and harder. | ||
| And as a result, the culture war, to use your phrase, in the universities has been won by the left. | ||
| There will really be, soon, a handful left of conservatives at institutions like Harvard and Stanford. | ||
| And Harvey Mansfield will probably be the last one at Harvard. | ||
| And that's, to me, deeply depressing. | ||
| Deeply troubling. | ||
| Do you remember a moment when you saw that shift occurring? | ||
| Because you're saying in the 80s, mid 80s, it was pretty diverse in terms of ideas. | ||
| Do you remember seeing something or did you see markers that started, that you could start putting together the map of where this thing was going to go? | ||
| I think the definition of defeat in the culture war is that it's imperceptible. | ||
| You're aware of it a little bit each year because In a typical department, each year somebody retires or dies. | ||
| But they're always replaced with somebody working on, let's say, for the sake of argument, gender history. | ||
| So your colleague was lecturing on the history of the Soviet Union, Richard Pipes, who was at Harvard and just lately died. | ||
| One of the great historians of the Bolshevik Revolution. | ||
| You don't ever see someone like that replaced with somebody like him. | ||
| They'll always be replaced by somebody working on gender history, Native American history. | ||
| That process whereby there was no replacement of conservative historians was a more or less annual event. | ||
| I got accustomed to being in a real minority, a minority of conservative historians. | ||
| I got accustomed to losing pretty much every vote, being in the minority on every committee. | ||
| It became a kind of, you got acclimatized to it. | ||
| And then one day it suddenly hit you that you were practically the last one left. | ||
| And you know, when I moved to Stanford, the revelation was quite startling. | ||
| I was invited to come to the Hoover Institution. | ||
| Many Hoover Fellows have associations, joint appointments with Stanford departments. | ||
| I had been pretty successful as a teacher at Harvard. | ||
| My classes had been very large. | ||
| The students gave me very powerful evaluations. | ||
| I kind of assumed that I would come to Stanford and have some relationship with the history department. | ||
| And then I was told, oh no, no, none at all. | ||
| Not even a courtesy appointment. | ||
| And it was clear at that moment that I had become, in the eyes of the Stanford History Department, a pariah, somebody who simply couldn't be allowed in the building because of my conservative leanings. | ||
| Can you explain a little bit more about how the universities work like that, that that could even happen? | ||
| They're gonna bring you in, you're a fellow there, and that you're just gonna be ignored by the department that you're an expert in. | ||
| It's quite insulting. | ||
| Especially, as you mentioned, as I've published rather a lot of books, in fact rather more than most of the department put together, and I think A department with falling enrollments might have been expected to want to have me playing a part. | ||
| But what happened is, and it's happened in most departments in most universities, inexorably the left took over. | ||
| And an implicit rule, a tacit rule, was imposed that one does not hire right-leaning historians, nor does one hire their graduate students. | ||
| So they too, people who have been my graduate students, have found it difficult to get hired. | ||
| So it's essentially a straightforward process whereby the institution is taken over, one committee at a time. | ||
| And the left has been good at that for the better part of a century. | ||
| They've always been good at that. | ||
| How do you think they saw that? | ||
| How did they have the foresight to go, all right, we've got to take over the universities first? | ||
| I think that on the right, the previous generation of historians, and this was also true of philosophers and people working in other fields, did not fight very hard. | ||
| or effectively, to promote their successors. | ||
| In academic life, you need to be mindful of the succession. | ||
| The left was better at ensuring that its protégés got the appointments. | ||
| Ultimately, academia is a committee's game. | ||
| It's all about getting to be the chair of the department, to be in charge of the committees. | ||
| If you control the process, you control the selection, you control the recruitment. | ||
| I suppose I'm such a naive person. | ||
| I kind of, in my youth, assumed we were in a broadly meritocratic world, in which if you were smart and hard-working, then good things would happen. | ||
| That's pretty old-fashioned. | ||
| Yeah, I was completely naive. | ||
| It took me a while to cotton on to the fact that In reality, in academic life, as in other walks of life, patronage is everything, and you can be as talented as you like if you're not in the right patronage network, then you're done. | ||
| And I suppose it's been thinking about these issues, how do networks capture institutions? | ||
| That led me to write the most recent book, The Square and the Tower, which is actually book number 15, to try to think about how networks operate. | ||
| We tend to talk casually about networks, but I came to realise that in academic life, as in other areas, You need to understand quite exactly, quite precisely how networks operate to see how power is truly wielded. | ||
| We can all see the hierarchical institutions that are where power is located. | ||
| I mean, universities are clearly not as powerful as governments. | ||
| But the critical point is to understand that these are often networks that capture institutions, that capture the hierarchies. | ||
| And that's what happened in academic life. | ||
| And now, I think pretty soon, there just won't be conservatives in university departments. | ||
| More importantly than that, nobody will be teaching subjects like the history of the Soviet Union. | ||
| So no students will be taught about the crimes of Lenin and Stalin. | ||
| And students like the students I taught yesterday will not hear from anybody that there was a religious motivation to the 9-11 attacks. | ||
| I had a class at Stanford yesterday. | ||
| I was allowed to sit in and teach somebody else's class as a guest professor. | ||
| And it happened to be a discussion about 9-11. | ||
| And it became clear to me that the students had never considered the possibility that there was a religious motivation to the 9-11 attacks, and more or less accepted the idea that they were retaliation for the misdeeds of U.S. | ||
| foreign policy in the Middle East, what I'll call the Howard Zinn theory. | ||
| And since Howard Zinn's books are more widely read in the United States than anybody else's history books, We therefore arrive at a situation in which there will be nobody in any major university saying, actually Howard Zinn is completely wrong, and this is not what 9-11 was about. | ||
| So that's what I find depressing. | ||
| When I say that the culture war is kind of over in the universities, that's really what I mean. | ||
| Yeah, so let's circle back, because it does bring us to your 15th book, I stand corrected. | ||
| This idea of networks, because we were talking right before we started that there's something happening here with this loose association of people that has been coined the intellectual dark web. | ||
| And I said to you when you walked in, are you part of the intellectual dark web? | ||
| As if you were going to give me a secret handshake or a special card. | ||
| When I was asked about it, I denied all knowledge. | ||
| In the assumption that it was secret, and then it turned out to be all over the New York Times. | ||
| Yeah, so you weren't photographed in the bushes like the rest of us, but I suspect that you secretly are in the intellectual dark web. | ||
| Well, I couldn't possibly reveal that because it's secret. | ||
| But you said something interesting about, because of your level of sort of academic credit, that you thought perhaps that took you out of it, but then Christina Hoff Sommers said something interesting. | ||
| I'll let you go from there. | ||
| Barry Weiss emailed me and my wife Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who's been on your show. | ||
| Ayaan is the queen. | ||
| She's much more interesting than me, is the greatest. | ||
| That must be tough for you, because millions of people love your work and everything else, but Ayaan is like transcended. | ||
| Absolutely, she's wonderful. | ||
| That's tough. | ||
| It's the most enormous, wonderful blessing in my life to be married to somebody who's just way more interesting than me, and better looking too. | ||
| So we were both asked by Barry Weiss about the intellectual dark web and I said look how could I really claim to be part of that when I taught for 12 years at Harvard, left of my own volition, I'm here at Stanford, can write newspaper columns and have them published more or less where I want. | ||
| It would be a little disingenuous to claim kinship with people like Brett Weinstein who I've been persecuted by the academic left. | ||
| I've been attacked, I've been criticized, but I haven't really been driven underground, at least not at this point. | ||
| But Christina Summers said to me just the other night, no, it's not about whether you've been denied a platform or not. | ||
| Clearly, almost all the people In the article that Barry wrote, have plenty of opportunities to make their views known. | ||
| It's about whether you are seen to speak for people who feel that they have been silenced, who feel that their voices aren't heard. | ||
| That's quite a good definition of what this is about. | ||
| But you're also right to see that it's a network. | ||
| As I was reading the article, I was thinking, how funny, I know all these people, with the sole exception of Jordan Peterson, whom I've never met. | ||
| I sense that's coming. | ||
| Well, yeah, I hope so. | ||
| I look forward to it. | ||
| But I think it's a network of the most ideal sort. | ||
| It is a truly informal network of people. | ||
| From right across the political spectrum because nobody could call Brett Weinstein a conservative. | ||
| Yeah, who have come together Spontaneously informally nobody called it into being and said I'm forming the intellectual dark web turn up on Monday at 5 p.m Right and I love it change does it change the second? | ||
| It's named generally a network So if this is the right type of network, right? | ||
| It's cool kind of diverse group of people who had all sorts of different motivations and everything else once it's sort of named Does that change the way a network has to operate? | ||
| Because I sense that's what the discussion is about right now. | ||
| Yeah, although not, I think, fundamentally. | ||
| The critical thing is when something ceases to be secret. | ||
| I tell the story of the Illuminati, a network in the late 18th century in Germany that sought to advance a radical version of the Enlightenment. | ||
| But covertly, as a secret organisation, the intellectual dark web, I semi-seriously said was secret until Barry wrote that piece. | ||
| And now that it's out in the open, what will happen is that it will grow, because people... Andrew Sullivan! | ||
| I was discussing it with him, too, said, why am I not in it? | ||
| And of course, the answer is, you should be really. | ||
| I mean, anybody who who is engaged in critical thinking about the whole range of ideas in our society, ranging from the political to the social and cultural, anybody who is in the debate and is antagonistic to the dogmas of the left The political correctness, the identity politics, the spurious pursuit of so-called social justice. | ||
| If you are skeptical, if you are thinking critically about the dogmas of the left, then you belong in the intellectual dark web. | ||
| Because you're the kind of person who at some point will be no-platformed, who at some point will be taken down, who at some point will be the target of a hit piece in the New York Times. | ||
| One of the characteristic features of the intellectual dark web, I think, is that most members at one time or another have fallen foul of the leftist thought police. | ||
| And as soon as you've had that experience, it's happened to me a number of times, that is quite transformative. | ||
| Yeah, I mean it literally changed my life. | ||
| It's the only reason you're sitting here right now. | ||
| I was once one of them. | ||
| And I suspect your experience was like mine. | ||
| You're kind of taken aback to be on the receiving end of a social media mob. | ||
| You're kind of taken aback to be attacked, not for the substance of anything that you've argued or written or said. | ||
| You're attacked for your reputation. | ||
| You're attacked for your alleged bad faith. | ||
| And each time this has happened to me, I've been a little stunned. | ||
| I was naive. | ||
| Not only was I a believer in meritocracy, I was also a believer that we were engaged in a rational debate about the past, that's what historians do, and that one made one's case, presented the evidence, and then the other side did the same. | ||
| But I wrote a book about the British Empire, now 15 or so years ago, and the argument of that book was that not everything about the British Empire was bad, that there were benefits as well as costs to imperialism. | ||
| And I never had a debate about that argument. | ||
| I only ever was attacked by the left for being an apologist of empire, a neo-colonialist, etc. | ||
| And so in that curious debate that is central to the culture war, You never really are engaged with on the ideas or the evidence. | ||
| It is always about whether you have bad faith or not, whether you are covertly a racist, an Islamophobe, a homophobe. | ||
| There's a long list of things that you can be accused of, but those are the most popular ones. | ||
| One's never really discussing the arguments of the books. | ||
| One's always discussing the personality of the author. | ||
| Yeah, so this is just sort of simply put the ideas versus people conversation, right? | ||
| So in a case of Ayaan, I mean, to live through the things that she has lived through between FGM and her friend being murdered and the whole thing, To be called the things that she's called, I mean, it flips your very personhood on its head, which is, I mean, it's so deeply twisted. | ||
| The episode that, for me, brought it into bold relief was the Brandeis honorary degree fiasco, when Ayaan was invited by the president of Brandeis, I think this was in 2014, to accept an honorary degree and speak at commencement, and then, was very publicly and humiliatingly disinvited under pressure from an unholy alliance as far as I could see of leftists and islamists who set out online to smear her reputation with the usual confection of selective quotation and misrepresentation and as often happens in these situations the university authorities capitulate without a fight | ||
| to the left and they do it publicly. | ||
| And that for me was a moment when I learnt a lot about what was going wrong in American academic life and realised that it's the combination of aggressive activists on the left and useful idiots in university bureaucracies that people enfold. | ||
| Is it that they're useful idiots, or is it just sort of blanket cowardice on part of some of the academics, but really the administrators and the upper brass at all the schools, and the fact that the donors, although this is changing right now, and as we're taping this today, I know it's gonna be out in a couple days, Evergreen is now firing a whole bunch of professors, which is exactly what all of us predicted, basically, because the donors have just had enough. | ||
| It's fascinating. | ||
| So it's hard to figure out where does it come from? | ||
| I don't think it's just cowardice. | ||
| Cowardice is the most powerful force in human history, no doubt. | ||
| And I'm constantly amazed at just how much cowardice is out there. | ||
| My wife's experience has shown me that. | ||
| The difficulty of getting people publicly to support her work against Islamic extremism is all about cowardice. | ||
| Fear of being in any way drawn into into the real war, the jihad, facing the death threats that she has repeatedly had to face. | ||
| But it's not just cowardice. | ||
| There is a good deal of complicity. | ||
| Many university administrators are themselves ideologically on the left and feel that they have a mission to empower the leftists in the student body. | ||
| And this is, I think, a different thing from cowardice. | ||
| So yeah, I think this is a fascinating moment in time, because donors, alumni, look at what is going on on university campuses, as do people who have not had the privilege of university education, who see it all as complete madness. | ||
| And ask the question, what the hell is going on here? | ||
| And I think the more that question gets asked, the better. | ||
| But we should not underestimate the massive inertia in the system. | ||
| It is extremely hard, even if you're a university president, you say, right, I'm going to clean house. | ||
| It's really hard to do because they're all tenured. | ||
| I mean, the faculty is tenured. | ||
| How do you think it happened everywhere? | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Like, we don't find, oh, you know, in the Northeast, it's a little bit better. | ||
| You know, just even geographically, we just don't even see that. | ||
| Yes, there are bastions of some freedom. | ||
| I've heard University of Chicago or, you know, like a couple of places are a little bit better. | ||
| But how do you think it actually spread that way? | ||
| That it wasn't just here and there? | ||
| Well, there's a theory that universities are always left-wing, but that's not true. | ||
| For example, if you had been in Germany in the 1920s, the universities were bastions of conservatism and indeed extreme right-wing nationalism, which is one reason that universities very quickly went over to the Nazi regime when Hitler came to power. | ||
| There's no golden rule that says universities have to be left wing. | ||
| Oxford and Cambridge in the 18th century were extraordinarily reactionary, fundamentally religious institutions and deeply Tory with a few exceptions in their politics. | ||
| So there's no real rule here. | ||
| I think the best explanation I can offer you is a process of generational capture of educational institutions dating from the 1960s. | ||
| Universities, and let's take the elite universities, the Ivy League universities, in the 1950s were already seen as being liberal. | ||
| And if you were a kind of McCarthy-leaning Republican, you already knew that Harvard was likely full of fellow travelers and covert commies. | ||
| But the real shift, I think, came later. | ||
| I think it came with the anti-war protests of the late 60s and early 70s. | ||
| The more radical baby boomers who were protesting in the campuses in the 68s into the early 70s grew up to become professors. | ||
| And they're still around. | ||
| And I think that generation, which was essentially formed at the time of the anti-war protests, successfully replicated itself. | ||
| They were very, very good at replicating themselves by creating graduate students in their own image and then making sure that those graduate students got jobs. | ||
| And the right was nowhere. | ||
| So you were out there writing books, doing research, and... | ||
| Figuring, well, all right, they're doing that, and maybe in the long run... And my heroes at Oxford and Cambridge, who wrote great books and were also politically active, people like Norman Stone or Roger Scruton, who did much of the thinking that accompanied Thatcherism in the 1980s, what they did not do well was academic politics. | ||
| They were poor at that. | ||
| They were poor at succession planning. | ||
| And that is, I think, the best explanation I can offer for the fact that in nearly all universities in North America and in Europe, 90% plus of faculty members are liberals or progressives, if not outright Marxists. | ||
| All right, so with some of the historical context of how this all happened, I know you are enthused about this new network idea because it's come around the right way. | ||
| Do you think there's a gatekeeping responsibility for whoever is involved in this? | ||
| This seems to be one of the hot-button issues with this thing. | ||
| What can be in this, whatever it is? | ||
| What are the ideas that cannot be on the inside? | ||
| I see it coming much more that we have to watch out for ideas on the right than on the left. | ||
| That seems to be the way it's being framed, at least from where I sit. | ||
| How would you do that in a proper network? | ||
| Well, there are two kinds of networks. | ||
| Open access networks. | ||
| Let's take the example of Facebook, where you can just join up and open a Facebook account. | ||
| Do it as a fake human being. | ||
| And then there are the restricted access networks. | ||
| Extreme cases, the secret societies of the 18th and 19th century don't really have many analogues today because it's hard to do anything secret. | ||
| I mean secrecy barely exists anymore in the age of WikiLeaks. | ||
| So you have to, I think, decide whether to be an open or closed or restricted access network. | ||
| And the minute you're a restricted access network, somebody is making the decisions about who joins. | ||
| That ends up being the membership committee. | ||
| Then you're just a club. | ||
| Really. | ||
| I don't think that's an option in our time. | ||
| I think an open access network's the only real way to go. | ||
| And you must accept that if the intellectual dark web is real, that it's an open access network that won't necessarily connect you to everybody that you want to be connected to. | ||
| It may connect you to people that you positively don't want to be connected to. | ||
| This has been a central problem, I think, of Being on the political right for a long time, I can remember in the 1980s when people said to me, well, Neil, you're a conservative. | ||
| And I would say, well, I'm actually not a member of the Conservative Party. | ||
| I think of myself as a classical liberal. | ||
| They would say, oh, but nevertheless, when I look at all the things you say, you're a Conservative. | ||
| And then I would think, well, does that mean that I have to have dinner with the likes of, and I would think of various egregious Conservative members of Parliament? | ||
| And it was as if you would be associated with those people even if you never had dinner with them. | ||
| And it's the same problem now, except that it's It's worse now, because the way in which the left seeks to discredit you, and Jordan Peterson, and probably me as well, now that I'm on your show, is to say... You're screwed, man. | ||
| I mean, 15 books, you know, all right. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| Is to say, look at the people who are connected to these people, or who quote these people, or who read their books. | ||
| There they are over there, the terrible alt-right. | ||
| And, you know, when you say alt-right, the audience is supposed to start booing and hissing and, you know, Steve Bannon is supposed to appear in a black robe with a scythe, you know, I am death. | ||
| The problem is, I think, inescapable. | ||
| There will be a constant effort on the left to say that the intellectual dark web is just some kind of facade in front of a hideous alt-right, which is composed of, remember, racists, Islamophobes, homophobes. | ||
| And that will be the culture war's next ride. | ||
| I mean, that's how it works. | ||
| We have a strange amount of gay people and Muslim people. | ||
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unidentified
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Yeah, absolutely. | |
| Absolutely. | ||
| But there you go. | ||
| Otherwise brown people and every other type of thing. | ||
| The self-hating phenomenon. | ||
| The left has long known how to say that it is absolutely typical of the wicked right that they should have lured into their side self-hating and then you just fill in the blanks. | ||
| Self-hating Muslims, self-hating gays. | ||
| That's how this works. | ||
| Remember, they lost all the arguments. | ||
| All they've got left is reputational smearing. | ||
| Man, we got a fight in front of us, huh? | ||
| You know, I have lost sleep about this. | ||
| Not only because people threaten my wife's life, that's the real war. | ||
| The war against the Islamic extremists is no mere culture war, it's an actual war. | ||
| I've also lost sleep about the mere culture war at the prospect of Of the reputational attacks. | ||
| It's never pleasant to be attacked, as I was recently, in effect for being a, I guess, a sexist racist or a racist sexist, because I'd organized a conference at which all the speakers were white men. | ||
| Because the women I invited couldn't come. | ||
| That doesn't count! | ||
| It was a private conference. | ||
| It was a kind of informal discussion about how we could take the idea of applied history and make history more relevant to some of the debates that go on. | ||
| I think a lot of what is done in academic history these days is not really relevant to anything terribly much. | ||
| But this event was rather Crudely exposed in the New York Times and the Washington Post. | ||
| The pictures of the speakers were published as if the mugshots, as it were, appeared in the New York Times. | ||
| And the implication was that I must be a terrible racist sexist or sexist racist for having organized such a conference. | ||
| I did lose sleep about that. | ||
| And I think that part of the culture war is really odious because it is calculated to discredit the targeted individuals. | ||
| And it's bad faith on the part of the people who launched those attacks, in my view. | ||
| What's happening with some of those gated institutions, the newspapers that used to be objective? | ||
| Harry wrote this piece in the New York Times that I think was a pretty fair piece. | ||
| It was even somewhat critical of me, and I'm not above criticism, so I'm certainly okay with that. | ||
| But then, just a week later, we see this awful piece about Jordan and enforced monogamy, and it's just nonsense. | ||
| I mean, it's just nonsense. | ||
| And you know I'm on tour with him right now, and he keeps explaining why he doesn't want anyone to be forced to do anything and all that. | ||
| He's talking about marriage, in effect. | ||
| And Eric Weinstein, our friend, found two other references in the history of the New York Times where they talked about enforced monogamy and they were both positive relative to progressive ideals. | ||
| So it's like they flip everything on its head. | ||
| But what do you think happened there? | ||
| I mean, you've given me a pretty good layout of what's happened at the academic side, but on the media side and those gates, What is going on? | ||
| I spent a lot of my life doing journalism because I didn't have any inherited money and being an academic in Britain in the 1980s and 90s wasn't terribly lucrative so I kept body and soul together even from my graduate years writing for newspapers. | ||
| And newspapers have had their own transformation in the course of my adult life. | ||
| And part of that is just economics. | ||
| As we all know, the business model, which essentially revolved around advertising, has been annihilated by the combination of Google and Facebook. | ||
| And these institutions are in some measure in desperation trying to reinvent themselves for the Internet age. | ||
| Everybody's in pursuit of clickbait. | ||
| Even the Grey Lady, even the most illustrious of newspapers. | ||
| And I think that's one explanation. | ||
| The other explanation is that an institution like the New York Times has its own university-like character. | ||
| It behaves a little bit like university. | ||
| But the most self-important newspapers, if you go to them, are rather like colleges. | ||
| It's also true of the Financial Times, which is like a kind of Cambridge college that sort of ended up by mistake in London. | ||
| And so, they have some of the same dynamics as universities. | ||
| And I think that's especially true of the New York Times. | ||
| It's also true of the BBC, incidentally. | ||
| So, institutions like the Times and the BBC think of themselves as being liberal bastions. | ||
| But for them, liberalism is truth. | ||
| It's the same problem that Harvard has. | ||
| If your motto is veritas, but you translate that into liberalism, then by definition conservatism must be untruth. | ||
| And so I think there's a tendency, and it's there in the New York Times, periodically to lash out against anyone like Jordan Peterson, who dissents from liberal orthodoxy. | ||
| Part of what we're dealing here with is a kind of quasi-religious phenomenon. | ||
| The dogmas of the left have become more and more religious in their quality as they have been unmoored from that fundamental economic rationality which was at the heart of Marxism. | ||
| When that all went down in flames in 1989, the left decamped to the realm of culture. | ||
| And as it did that, it increasingly took on the form of a cult. | ||
| Let me illustrate what I mean. | ||
| Cults define themselves partly by a belief in a lot of things that are slightly weird. | ||
| In order to be in a cult, you have to have some weird beliefs. | ||
| And one good example of a weird belief is that sexuality is entirely constructed socially and is not biologically rooted. | ||
| And you can actually have any gender you like, and there are actually multiple genders. | ||
| Now that's absurd, but to believe it has become a kind of test of your orthodoxy. | ||
| And one sees this at meetings. | ||
| In academia, in which people introduce themselves by name and by their preferred pronouns. | ||
| Now, when this first happened to me, my immediate reaction was to introduce myself and say that my preferred pronouns were it and it. | ||
| I restrained myself, because I realised that my sense of humour, forged as it was in Scotland in the 1970s, is now almost entirely politically incorrect, and anything that I consider funny will get me into trouble. | ||
| But that has gone on in the media too, and the other thing that's happened is that the polarisation which characterises a networked society is now very visibly there in the realm of newspapers and cable television. | ||
| One thing that we all got wrong about the internet, because we hadn't really thought much about network science, was that we just assumed that if everybody was connected, everything would be awesome. | ||
| And that was the kind of mantra of Silicon Valley for about 20 years. | ||
| But no, network science tells you that if you build a social network, even quite a small one, There will be something called homophily, because birds of a feather flock together. | ||
| I'll bet you already that the intellectual dark web has two clusters that are somewhat separate from one another. | ||
| I sense it happening right now, immediately. | ||
| And that's what happened in the media. | ||
| So, as society became more polarized, Politically, so too did the media. | ||
| I think that is one of the defining characteristics of our age. | ||
| The polarization, or if you like, self-segregation that we see online is translated into almost every realm of life. | ||
| Can there be any positives out of that? | ||
| Out of that self-selection into finding groups that you're more in common with that for at least for a certain period of time there's some goodness there because you can really sort of get into your ideas enough to maybe leave the group then and take those ideas out. | ||
| I think if you are in whatever you want to call it, the echo chamber or the filter bubble, if you are in a cluster that cuts you off from contrary ideas, you're lost. | ||
| What was fun about being in a network of right-leaning undergraduates in early 1980s Oxford was that we were in constant combat with The left-leaning Marxists, they were still real Marxists then, and we were, far from cut off, constantly engaging with them and the soggy Social Democrats in the middle. | ||
| That was what made it interesting. | ||
| What I see happening in the networked age is that people can retreat into a realm of confirmation bias, where they hear only things that are similar to the things they liked yesterday. | ||
| And the algorithms are the key here, where you are, whether it's YouTube or on Facebook or on Twitter, you are Essentially going to be fed more of what you already liked. | ||
| That's deeply intellectually unhealthy. | ||
| Just as a university cannot be a university if everybody agrees about first ideological principles, because how can you have critical thinking in that environment? | ||
| So it's unhealthy for any intellectual network to be Autarkic. | ||
| So the one thing the intellectual dark web must not do is cut itself off from other networks, including the ones that hate us. | ||
| We have to be in an argument and we have to have our minds constantly open to the possibility that we're wrong about some things. | ||
| And that's what I see more or less disappearing from public life. | ||
| I recognised this at one time when I was in mortal combat with Paul Krugman, the economist-turned-journalist, and realised that Krugman could never admit that he'd ever been wrong, even when it was obvious that he had been, because part of his raison d'etre was always being right about everything. | ||
| Did you happen to see the day that the article came out, the original Intellectual Dark Web article by Barry, the day that that came out that Paul Krugman tweeted it and he tweeted this thing about how we're all so oppressed, you know, just mocking everybody basically. | ||
| And then a bunch of us responded to him and I of course retweeted it and invited him on the show. | ||
| I said I'd be happy to discuss this with you and it gets a couple thousand retweets, but of course no response. | ||
| And you're right, that's what we have to make sure we don't become. | ||
| But I think there's a human trait that would sort of make you want to retreat because it's exhausting. | ||
| Having your motives attacked and your humanity attacked and lies and smears and all the things that I don't see anyone on this side doing. | ||
| I don't. | ||
| So it's an exhausting fight because we're fighting two different battles on supposedly the same playing field. | ||
| Yes, I think it's quite an asymmetrical war at the moment in the sense that we haven't recognized that in the culture war the only thing that works is reputational destruction. | ||
| I think we are guaranteed sleepless nights. | ||
| Remember, there's also the phenomenon of guilty until proved innocent, which is insidious and means that if the reputational hit is bad enough, there may be no recovery from it. | ||
| I was very struck by the speed with which reputations were destroyed in the Me Too movement's most virulent phase. | ||
| And a characteristic feature of the process seemed to be that men were essentially guilty until proved innocent. | ||
| And crimes were conflated with quite clearly non-criminal behavior in ways that were deeply troubling to my eyes. | ||
| The false accusation is of course the ultimate nightmare of anybody in this world at this time. | ||
| Because if you're falsely accused, Well, your reputation can be gone in 24 hours. | ||
| And that has introduced into our lives something that hasn't really existed since medieval times. | ||
| The feeling that we are at the mercy of a wheel of fortune that can arbitrarily turn against us and dash us, overturn us. | ||
| I think this makes the culture war a deeply troubling thing to be a part of. | ||
| And most sensible, normal people say, God, I want a quiet life. | ||
| Get me out of here. | ||
| And never involve me in any of this. | ||
| Get me off Twitter. | ||
| Get me off Facebook. | ||
| Never let my name appear in the New York Times. | ||
| Never let me appear on a show like this. | ||
| Because it's just too dangerous. | ||
| I only need to say one thing. | ||
| That can be taken out of context and represented as heresy, or hate speech as heresy is now called, because that's what we now call heresy. | ||
| And I will be subjected to potentially weeks of vilification and maybe worse. | ||
| Maybe the vilification will actually lead me to lose my job. | ||
| People are right to be fearful of that. | ||
| Yeah, well, it's one of the things that Eric, who I mentioned before, who we had dinner with, and just to illustrate this, I'm sure you don't even want me to say this, but just to illustrate the level of what we're talking about, we had a private dinner in a home with Eric and his wife and Ayaan and you and me and my husband, and there were security guards outside. | ||
| So you're not just saying this stuff. | ||
| This is real stuff. | ||
| But what Eric has said to me is that It's exactly what you're saying, that there's a bravery element here that I don't even consider... I don't consider myself... I don't know what I'm... I'm just doing what I think is right. | ||
| That really is the truth. | ||
| But I want to ask you about that. | ||
| So for you, for Ayaan, it's not just academic. | ||
| Where do you think the bravery comes in for you? | ||
| Because I can tell there's nothing that I could possibly ask you here that you wouldn't give me the clearest, honest answer. | ||
| And that isn't always how it is with everybody, obviously, as an interviewer. | ||
| But where do you think that comes from? | ||
| Racist weaknesses. | ||
| And I think I was probably brought up in a rather combative family in a rather combative part of the world. | ||
| I grew up in Glasgow in the west of Scotland. | ||
|
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To a physician and a physics? | |
| That's right. | ||
| My mother was a physics teacher and my father was a doctor. | ||
| And they were the first in their families to go to university. | ||
| My grandfathers had served in the world wars. | ||
| Scots have a self-image of themselves as being courageous. | ||
| The Scottish regiments were famous, I wrote about this in one of my earliest books, The Pussy of War, were famously the sharp end of the British military. | ||
| We marched towards the sound of gunfire, bagpipes playing. | ||
| That's the self-image that a small Scottish boy growing up in the 1960s and 70s was encouraged to have. | ||
| I remember vividly the day that 9-11 happened. | ||
| I was sitting in Oxford where I was then teaching, but I'd planned and was intending to fly to New York very shortly to give a lecture on 9-12 at New York University. | ||
| Indeed, I was booked into a hotel very close to the World Trade Center. | ||
| And my response when I saw the attacks was, somewhat bloody-minded. | ||
| My response was very shortly afterwards to resign my post at Oxford and go to New York University. | ||
| And I taught there for two years in a, I suppose, a mood of defiance that the attempt to terrorize would not terrorize me. | ||
| When I met Ayaan nine, more than nine years ago now, it never crossed my mind As I fell in love with her, which happened very fast, that this implied some meaningful threat to my person. | ||
| Even when the FBI came to tell me that there had been a threat against me, something that I'd seen them do to Ayaan on more than one occasion, I never gave it a second thought, because obviously my calling Different from my grandfathers who were called to fight in real wars, my more, much more manageable calling is to protect her because she's one of the great heroines of our time. | ||
| An extraordinarily courageous woman who's been through a hell of a lot and who has never shirked from saying what she believes is wrong with modern Islam. | ||
| So, it is second nature to me to be there with her in that fight, in that war. | ||
| It turns out to be my war. | ||
| I always used to wonder as I was growing up, why is it that my generation isn't really being called on to fight wars the way my grandfather's generations were called on? | ||
| And then it turned up. | ||
| Then my war turned up. | ||
| You briefly mentioned this earlier when you were talking about Aion and Brandeis, but can you explain This intersection of Islamism and the left, why this has occurred, this confuses a lot of people, this idea of the oppression Olympics, and I've got plenty of theories on this that we've knocked out, but what do you think it is that has attracted something that is completely totalitarian in control with another thing that's so completely totalitarian? | ||
| I mean, I guess that's the answer right there. | ||
| Well, there are many unholy alliances in history, and No doubt many people were gravely surprised when the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact was announced and the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany formed an alliance. | ||
| So we shouldn't be entirely surprised when seemingly odd bedfellows jump into bed. | ||
| In the case of the Islamists and the left, I think it's pretty clear to me that the Islamists are the leading partner and the leftists are broadly the useful idiots. | ||
| Because the Islamists have a strategy, it's there in Muslim Brotherhood and other documents, for expanding their network in the West. | ||
| And part of the strategy is the kind of partnership that they have formed on campuses against their foes. | ||
| One way in which this works is that you use the issue of Israel to forge the pact with the left. | ||
| So you get the left's long-standing animosity towards Zionism, and you essentially say, well, we entirely agree with you about that. | ||
| Let's have an event about how wicked Israel is. | ||
| And so that's the gateway drug into accepting the next thing is, well, headscarves are actually empowering for women, don't you think? | ||
| And isn't it actually Islamophobia to be in any way critical of Sharia law? | ||
| So you play the multiculturalist, cultural relativist card, and you, again, depict any critics of radical Islam as in fact... | ||
| — engaged in some kind of Orientalist project or essentialist project to other — people always talk about othering in academia — Muslims. | ||
| And you blur the distinction between Islam, Islamism, and Muslims as people. | ||
| So, this has been going on for a while, and the left has broadly fallen for it. | ||
| And to me, it's just astonishing. | ||
| I remember looking at the list of academics who had argued that Ayaan should not receive an honorary degree at | ||
| Brandeis and it included professors of queer studies, female professors of | ||
| gender studies. | ||
| It's incredible. You kind of feel like saying to these people, have you taken a | ||
| look at what the Muslim Brotherhood envisages? | ||
| Have you read Qutb's works? | ||
| Do you realize that the project is the permanent demotion of women to second-class status and potentially capital punishment for gays? | ||
| Is that something you are aware of? | ||
| And I can only conclude that they aren't aware of it, and have been very thoroughly duped, as useful idiots usually are. | ||
| So is that basically because both of these movements want power? | ||
| So the useful idiot part of this is that the Islamists are really just using the left to attain power, and they're doing it all in the name of diversity and all of these things. | ||
| And eventually, once that power is attained, then for lack of a better expression, I mean, you basically decapitate them. | ||
| And then you've got, they did it for you, they did the work for you. | ||
| Yes, I mean I always used to joke with Ayaan that when we lived in Cambridge it would be fun if all my enemies and all her enemies came and protested outside our house together because after about 20 minutes they'd fall on one another and there would be the most tremendous fight. | ||
| I do think that Power is part of it, but if one looks back at the history of another intolerant totalitarian ideology, Marxism, there's a combination of power and a kind of idealism, one must call it that. | ||
| In The Square and the Tower, I tell the story of how the Soviets successfully penetrated the British establishment. | ||
| by recruiting spies in Cambridge. | ||
| And the people they recruited had leanings to the left that were inspired partly by revulsion at those aspects of British imperialism or British class society that were, in many ways, legitimately open to criticism. | ||
| There was an idealism there at the beginning of Guy Burgess's involvement in Marxism, sympathy with workers during the time of the Great Depression. | ||
| But those were the useful idiots that the Soviets cynically recruited to be spies, whom they persuaded to betray their countrymen, in what was the single most successful act of Russian espionage of them all. | ||
| Recruiting these highly educated people from an incredibly exclusive network, the Cambridge Apostles and the related network that led to Bloomsbury. | ||
| This was a brilliant strategy. | ||
| Something similar is going on here. | ||
| Because I think there are a great many naive young people who are drawn to the rhetoric of social justice. | ||
| I encounter them often. | ||
| People who say, oh, there should be limits on free speech because I don't want such and such as feelings to be hurt. | ||
| They're naive. | ||
| They have a very naive view that somehow there can be a circumscribed form of free speech in which nobody's feelings get hurt. | ||
| That's not the pursuit of power. | ||
| That's just naivety. | ||
| And the people who know how to exploit that naivety are both people amongst the Islamists and people amongst the leftists, who are pursuing power. | ||
| But you can never really get to power without the useful idiots, without the naive idealists, who think that they're going to build utopia with your help. | ||
| Yeah, and I don't have to tell you, that usually ends up in dystopia. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And that's something that is hard to persuade people of. | ||
| I keep reflecting on the curious revival of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, which is always taken to be a vision of what happens when right-wing people take over America. | ||
| And to me, the amazing thing that is almost never observed is that something very like this has happened. | ||
| It happened in Iran after 1979, and it happened after the Taliban came to power in Afghanistan. | ||
| So we don't need to fantasize about crazy evangelical fascists turning women into baby machines. | ||
| This has already happened, but it was done by Islamists. | ||
| It was done by people pursuing an extreme version of Sharia. | ||
| And yet almost nobody who enthuses about Margaret Atwood's book realizes that it is actually a really quite powerful realization of what a theocratic Islamist regime does to women. | ||
| All right, so I want to shift gears a little bit here. | ||
| I'm going to let you choose. | ||
| We can either go the historical route or we can go the present route. | ||
| What are you feeling first? | ||
| I do want to do both. | ||
| I think the key to applied history, which is what I've spent my whole life doing, is that you do both. | ||
| And you can't do one without the other. | ||
| You can have no real insight about the present without the past. | ||
| So, why don't we talk about the present and I'll try to show why to understand it you need history. | ||
| Alright, very good. | ||
| So, there are a couple of things that are interesting that you've staked out positions on over the past couple of years. | ||
| We briefly, right before we sat down, we talked about Brexit for a second. | ||
| So, you originally were for, were against Brexit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Then you came around for it. | ||
| Now it seems to be in this odd limbo that I think, unfortunately, most people in America don't even understand what's going on. | ||
| I don't think most people in Britain understand it at this point, to be honest. | ||
| I'm sure. | ||
| So when I was reading your position on this, at first I thought, well, wait a minute, as a conservative and as someone that wants some autonomy over his country, I was somewhat surprised, actually, that you weren't for it originally. | ||
| So can you explain your original position and then how you changed on that? | ||
| There were two reasons why I was on the side of Remain, Remain in the EU, back in 2016. | ||
| One was pure personal loyalty to friends. | ||
| David Cameron was Prime Minister, George Osborne was Chancellor of the Exchequer, and they are friends of mine. | ||
| And I felt obliged as a friend to support them when they decided To stick with the EU and not to recommend Brexit. | ||
| Did that friendship supersede what your feelings were? | ||
| Or was that because you really trusted that they could get it done? | ||
| Well, there was a second reason that swung it. | ||
| And I think the reason that I was willing to get on board with Remain was that I found the arguments of the Brexiteers deeply unconvincing. | ||
| I remember one night sitting down and reading a lot of stuff by Daniel Hannan, one of the leading advocates of leaving, and I remember thinking that this was just intellectually completely third class and unconvincing. | ||
| The notion that Britain would be better off economically outside the European Union, Wouldn't have passed muster as an undergraduate paper, never mind a graduate paper. | ||
| So I felt that the Brexiteers case failed intellectually because they were claiming, implausibly I thought, that you could have a free lunch, that you could leave the European Union and be better off. | ||
| And that just seemed to me to be intellectually completely deceitful. | ||
| I think it would have been harder for me if they had said honestly this is going to cost quite a bit but it's worth it because if we leave then we shall have the ability to control our borders and we shall have autonomy at a time when Europe is pursuing a federalist Of course. | ||
| But that wasn't the argument. | ||
| The argument was... Was that not the argument? | ||
|
unidentified
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No. | |
| The argument was we were going to get the money, this was the argument, we're going to get the money that we give to the European Union and we're going to be able to spend it on the National Health Service because we will be in fact better off. | ||
| And that was a lie. | ||
| And I'm not good with lies. | ||
| It was a clever lie. | ||
| It worked politically. | ||
| And I give credit to Dominic Cummings for crafting a message that was appealing both to Conservatives and to Labour voters. | ||
| The Conservatives got immigration control. | ||
| Labour voters got the National Health Service gets the money. | ||
| So this was brilliant politically, but it was mendacious, I think, at heart. | ||
| And so I opposed Brexit. | ||
| When it happened, What struck me in the subsequent months was that while I had been on the side that lost, there was a good reason why we lost. | ||
| And the good reason was that we went around saying how much it was going to cost. | ||
| And I think we were right about that. | ||
| I think ultimately at least some of what the Treasury said will turn out to be true about the cost. | ||
| But that wasn't what people cared about. | ||
| And when you went into pubs as I did in Wales and in England and in Scotland, there was a question to which you could not give an honest answer without losing the debate. | ||
| And I'll tell you what that question was, because I was asked it multiple times. | ||
| You'd make the case about the cost. | ||
| Nobody was interested in the cost. | ||
| They would say, listen, Neil, about the 1.3 million Muslims the Germans have just let in to Germany, because that had just happened. | ||
| If the Germans give them German passports, can they come here? | ||
| And the only honest answer to that question was yes. | ||
| So immigration was the issue, and I think for a significant number of people, in England and Wales especially, it was less so in Scotland where Brexit was defeated, the realisation was that Britain had lost control of immigration. | ||
| The people had been promised net migration in the tens of thousands in the 1990s under the Blair government. | ||
| And they'd ended up with net migration in the hundreds of thousands. | ||
| They saw the chaos in Germany. | ||
| They saw the waves of migration coming, not only from Syria, but from all over North Africa and even South Asia. | ||
| And they said, and I remember David Cameron using this phrase, get me out of here. | ||
| And that was That was the driving motivation for the Brexit vote, and I think it was legitimate. | ||
| Because I think that Angela Merkel had made a catastrophic mistake in throwing open the gates. | ||
| I think it will have dire consequences for the future of Germany and of Europe. | ||
| And I do not blame British voters for saying, forget about the cost of Brexit. | ||
| We really need to get out of this. | ||
| So I took the view by the end of 2016 that you had to respect the fact that ordinary people had cut through the crap of the debate and had got to the heart of the matter. | ||
| And the heart of the matter wasn't the cost of Brexit, which is what I had, I think, mistakenly focused on prior to the referendum. | ||
| What was it like for you as a public person and someone that writes about this stuff and puts your opinions out there to have that realization? | ||
| I think it's very important if you write regularly, if you are what we call a public intellectual, to be willing to admit that you've been wrong. | ||
| I think you have to be prepared to say, I was wrong. | ||
| And I think I was wrong in the sense that what I wish I had done, looking back, was I wish I had said to David Cameron and George Osborne in the spring of 2016 when it was clear that the Europeans were going to make no meaningful concession on the immigration issue. | ||
| When they basically sent an insulting proposal about what could be done about migration. | ||
| That was the moment I should have said to Cameron and Osborne Forget it. | ||
| You should campaign for Brexit. | ||
| If that's all they're going to offer you, if they're so completely oblivious to the very real concerns of immigration, then you should campaign for Brexit. | ||
| Instead of which we stuck with it. | ||
| And that was David Cameron's great mistake. | ||
| He should have said at that moment, if that's all you've got, I'm going to recommend Brexit to the voters. | ||
| And it would have saved him too. | ||
| So you think it was just a bad negotiating play that he just didn't use some leverage to say we're gonna have to walk away from this? | ||
| There was a moment when he should have walked away and I should have advised him to walk away. | ||
| So yeah, I think one has to recognize when one's made a mistake with such consequences. | ||
| The second thing which is worth knowing about this is that the people who then inherited power after the fall of Cameron and Osborne We're not the people who had campaigned for and won on Brexit. | ||
| It was people who'd been on the Remain side. | ||
| Theresa May became Prime Minister. | ||
| I always knew that would be a disaster. | ||
| I did not have high regard for her prior to the referendum. | ||
| The Daily Mail essentially put her in that position and also Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and others because they bungled the leadership contest. | ||
| So we then ended up with a terrible combination which was a commitment to Brexit. | ||
| But it's execution in the hands of people who had been remainers. | ||
| And I think the result is the worst of both worlds. | ||
| Because right now we essentially have the psychological reality of Brexit. | ||
| I think the British public to a large extent has accepted that we are leaving. | ||
| But the execution is a total mess. | ||
| By invoking Article 50 early on, The UK essentially ceded the power in the divorce to the European Union and the concessions have come one after another ever since then. | ||
| And we now find ourselves in the odd predicament that I think Theresa May is saying that Brexit means you cease to be a voting member of the European Union but you remain Within the customs union potentially even within the single market and you accept all the rules and regulations of the European Union You just don't have any power if that's the end game. | ||
| Yeah, then it's a disaster So the people that are trying to stop this now, they want to invoke some some pretty crazy extreme stuff, right? | ||
| I mean there would be some really very rarely if ever used rules am I right about this that would actually allow this to allow the stay to occur and Well, listen, I think there's going to be... Without getting into all of the minutiae of everything. | ||
| There is a level of complexity in the discussions now in London that is bewildering to most ordinary British people when people start talking about Max Fack and the customs union and the complexities of the Irish border. | ||
| Well, that's why I asked it in such a confusing way because I discussed it with Douglas Murray and he was even a little confused. | ||
| It's actually not confusing in the sense that what is happening is that Theresa May is trying to get Britain to accept The realities of belonging to the European Customs Union, which would preclude Britain having its own trade policy, with our leaving the European Union's decision-making body. | ||
| So essentially, in that version, Brexit is just, you have the responsibilities, you just don't have any power anymore. | ||
| Which is definitely not what the British public was told that it was getting in Brexit. | ||
| Bigger problem in my mind is not one that we've discussed, and that is that all of this will end in tears to the point at which Jeremy Corbyn, the most left-wing leader the Labour Party has ever had in its history, becomes Prime Minister. | ||
| Because Theresa May is leading the country towards this very unhappy compromise, at some point the people who truly believe in Brexit, Jacob Rees-Mogg, for example, perhaps Michael Gove, They may decide we can't ultimately accept this and the government may fall but the problem is that if the government falls then Jeremy Corbyn is Prime Minister. | ||
| If the government doesn't fall and we go all the way to the finishing line with this Theresa May version of Brexit then I think the Conservatives will lose the next election in 2022 and Jeremy Corbyn will be Prime Minister. | ||
| So the worst thing about Brexit is Is in my view that if it is bungled in this way, it will open the door to a truly leftist government. | ||
| And that will be far more economically damaging than anything Brexit has done. | ||
| And that's the nightmare scenario for me. | ||
| And probably socially damaging, and for a zillion other reasons. | ||
| We should be extremely suspicious of Corbyn and his people. | ||
| They are committed Marxists. | ||
| They've been on the wrong side of every issue in my lifetime, with a possible exception of South African apartheid. | ||
| And I do not trust them with the keys to 10 Downing Street, because I think that their ultimate agenda is a truly revolutionary one. | ||
| And it poses a threat to the fundamental liberties, the traditions of the Constitution. | ||
| It's a dangerous, dangerous prospect. | ||
| And I'm much more worried about Corbyn than about Brexit. | ||
| I mean, this is how I feel about what's happening with our left in America too, that you guys are giving us basically the precursor to this. | ||
| I think one of the lessons of history, and now we can bring history in, is that with populism you get two flavors. | ||
| In a typical backlash that would come after a financial crisis, The political establishment's discredited. | ||
| There's a backlash against inequality. | ||
| All of the things that typically follow a financial crisis. | ||
| But there are two possibilities. | ||
| There's the populism of the left, which is the tax the rich solution. | ||
| But the populism of the right is more potent because it says It's about immigration, it's about globalization, it's about free trade. | ||
| And so, broadly speaking, there's a very good study that shows this. | ||
| After big financial crises, the populists of the right do better, because they offer a more plausible story. | ||
| But, if they don't deliver, and they generally don't, because it's quite hard to make immigration control and tariffs Pay. | ||
| It's quite hard actually to make your constituents better off with those policies. | ||
| Then the pendulum has a tendency to swing to the populism of the left. | ||
| And that has happened in Britain really quickly because Corbyn became popular very soon after Brexit. | ||
| It's slower here, but the fear must be that if the Trump experiment goes as wrong as the vast majority of intellectuals expect it to, the pendulum will swing to the left of the Democratic Party. | ||
| And that scenario seems to me more and more plausible. | ||
| And I don't think that's not an appetizing prospect at all. | ||
| That's genuinely scary to me. | ||
| But I want to back up for one second, because the moment that you had, that you said a few times happened in these pubs, when you would go there and people would say this about 1.3 million Muslims in Germany. | ||
| How do you, so okay, so if you were listening to the mainstream media, they would say these people are all racist. | ||
| That's what they would tell you. | ||
| They're racists and they're bigots. | ||
| I suspect that's not what you think of these people, although there probably was a certain amount of people that are just racist and don't like people of a different color or a different culture. | ||
| How do you even have that conversation? | ||
| Because that's what so much of this is about. | ||
| Because you, I'm sure, would have a pint with these people and you'd talk to them and realize that they weren't racist, they were actually just worried about their future. | ||
| Which is legit, but if you can't have that discussion, because every time you open your mouth, they tell you you're racist, well then, we know what you end up with. | ||
| Look, I would be very strange if I took a bigoted view on this subject because I'm an immigrant. | ||
| I'm in fact about to become an American citizen in a matter of weeks. | ||
| My wife was a refugee who got from Somalia originally to the Netherlands by applying for asylum. | ||
| And so we would be the last couple to take a kind of bigoted view on the immigration issue, because we're immigrants. | ||
| When I had conversations on this subject at the time of the Brexit referendum, I remember realizing that the opposition to immigration was not plausibly racist, because I remember somebody making the point that he was as worried about The people from Lithuania and Poland coming to Britain, as he was about people from Syria and Iraq. | ||
| And you probably know that people from Poland and Lithuania are pretty white. | ||
| So, here's the thing. | ||
| What we all need to recognise is that if immigration shoots up If it grows from, in the case of Britain, 10,000 or 20,000 a year to 200,000 or 300,000 a year, perfectly unprejudiced people will say that's too much, this is going too fast. | ||
| And that, I think, was the dominant argument. | ||
| Of course there are people who are racists in any society, but the striking thing about Britain is actually that it's not a terribly racist place. | ||
| Did you see many people protesting against Prince Harry's decision to marry an American of mixed race? | ||
| I was there a couple days before. | ||
| People were very excited. | ||
| There were huge crowds. | ||
| This match is extraordinarily popular with ordinary people. | ||
| So I think it's hard to argue that racism played any meaningful part The white supremacist element in Britain is really very insignificant. | ||
| And actually one of the ways in which the British like to define themselves is as being tolerant. | ||
| Memories of the war have not entirely faded even as the wartime generation gradually disappears from the scene. | ||
| What was the war against Germany about? | ||
| It was a war against the ultimate racist state. | ||
| What hurt Jeremy Corbyn the most in the last three or four months? | ||
| The evidence that there are anti-semitic elements within his faction of the Labour left, that hurt him. | ||
| And it's important that that argument keep being made because it has real truth to it. | ||
| And I think ordinary people think that's not good. | ||
| So, I think this is not really about racism. | ||
| It's not about bigotry. | ||
| It's about how rapidly should immigration occur? | ||
| How large should flows be across borders? | ||
| And the lesson of history is that if you allow a real surge in immigration, there will be a populist backlash against it. | ||
| It's what happened in the United States in the late 19th century. | ||
| At the peak in the 1880s, the foreign-born percentage of the population in the U.S. | ||
| was about 14%. | ||
| It had gone up from a relatively low level to about 14%. | ||
| The same thing has happened in our time. | ||
| It was down, I think, below 7% in the mid-20th century. | ||
| In the period after World War II, immigrants were a relatively small proportion, foreign-born citizens, a pretty small portion of the U.S. | ||
| population. | ||
| And then, from the 1980s onwards, the proportion surged. | ||
| And the character of the immigrants changed. | ||
| The places that they came from changed. | ||
| And these changes are bound to elicit a reaction. | ||
| It always happens. | ||
| And it's not enough for people in the liberal elites, who by and large don't live in areas where immigrants come, to say what a terrible deplorable bunch of chauvinists you are for not wanting more immigrants. | ||
| That's simply historically stupid. | ||
| And the other thing that's stupid about this in the United States is the people on the left who want to legitimize illegal immigration. | ||
| Now, I think for many people who were attracted to Trump, The issue was the illegal quality of the immigration. | ||
| The rule of law is a big deal in the English-speaking world. | ||
| And people don't like to hear anything that simply says amnesty for lawbreakers. | ||
| If you're a law-abiding citizen and you're suddenly told, well, yeah, the law applies to you, but there are these other people it's not going to apply to, then your natural reaction is screw this. | ||
| That's why I thought one of his best lines, he doesn't use it as much anymore, but during the campaign, we're either a country or we're not, I thought was a really effective line. | ||
| You either have laws or you don't. | ||
| I mean, that in essence is the truth. | ||
| So let's shift to Trump a little bit here. | ||
| I think that we're kind of in a similar spot with him, which is that it's better than the alternative. | ||
| That's certainly how I feel at this point. | ||
| That all of the forces that we've spent the last hour plus talking about would be that much more emboldened against free thought and free expression and open inquiry and all the things that we care about and historical fact and everything else if he wasn't president right now. | ||
| I am deeply ambivalent. | ||
| About all of this. | ||
| I think it's very, very hard to say a good word about the personality of Donald Trump. | ||
| I'm with you. | ||
| It was a reason that I found it impossible to support him in 2016. | ||
| I think one has to Acknowledge that he has used inflammatory language on the issues. | ||
| We've talked about immigration, that he has a record of lying, which is, even by the standards of American presidents, pretty remarkable. | ||
| And so the familiar list of things about Donald Trump that most of my friends find objectionable is kind of hard for me to dismiss. | ||
| But I said ambivalent for a reason. | ||
| On the other hand, number one, What if he'd lost? | ||
| I said this to Sam Harris a few weeks ago. | ||
| Let's run the counterfactual. | ||
| This is what historians should do. | ||
| Let's imagine an alternative history. | ||
| If Donald Trump had lost the election by, let's say, the same narrow margin that he won it, how would all those people who voted for him have felt? | ||
| And how would they have behaved? | ||
| To my mind, the election of Donald Trump is a cathartic moment. | ||
| For those people so despised by the liberal elites that they could refer to them as deplorables. | ||
| The people who voted for Donald Trump are not by and large racists, are not by and large anything like Donald Trump is personally. | ||
| What attracted them to Trump were two things, which as with the Brexit campaign were legitimate. | ||
| Number one, they were attracted to Trump's policy positions on trade, on immigration, on Islam. | ||
| And on the somewhat corrupt liberal elite that had been running the country for the previous eight years. | ||
| So I think they were attracted to Trump's policy positions, but they were also attracted to his cultural position. | ||
| And I think about half of American populism is cultural. | ||
| What attracted The friends I have who supported Trump, to Trump, was his fundamental shift in language, away from the politically correct talking points of the political class, Republicans and Democrats alike, to a demotic, normal way of speaking, such as you would hear in a typical American bar, more or less anywhere in the country, except Cambridge, Massachusetts, Stanford, California and the rest. | ||
| Now I remember thinking on the eve of the election, If you line up all the people who are going to vote for her and you line up all the people who are going to vote for him, which line would you rather be in? | ||
| Remember, at that point I'm not a citizen, I don't have a vote. | ||
| And I thought, that's easy. | ||
| I'm with the people who are so pissed with the political establishment that they're ready to take a chance on this guy because they see no other way to shake things up. | ||
| The way my friend Jerry Blake put it to me, ex-Marine Corps, Ex-NYPD, never went to college, helps take care of my wife's security. | ||
| Jerry said to me, early 2016, two things that stuck in my mind. | ||
| First, he told me Trump was going to win. | ||
| But then he said the two reasons why he supported Trump. | ||
| Number one, he tells it like it is. | ||
| Number two, he's going to shake things up. | ||
| By he tells it like it is, Jerry did not mean he is always truthful. | ||
| What he meant was he talks like me. | ||
| And by shaking things up, Jerry meant we have to do something. | ||
| Because this system as it stands is not in my interests. | ||
| It's not in my interest economically, because it seems to favor China over the United States, Mexicans over native-born Americans, the rich 1% over me, the median household. | ||
| But it's also about this cultural reaction against the multiculturalism that has become the orthodoxy of the liberal left. | ||
| For all my reservations about Trump, I completely got why people voted for him. | ||
| And I think their reaction, had he lost, would have been toxic. | ||
| I don't think they would have accepted the legitimacy of the result. | ||
| I think they would have bought the story Trump would have told them that the election had been rigged. | ||
| And I think we would have had a poisoned body politic from day one of a Clinton presidency. | ||
| If it all ends... Oddly though, we're having that right now, just in reverse, right? | ||
| It would have been worse. | ||
| But we're having a left that's not accepting the legitimacy of the election, and Clinton not accepting... But I honestly think it would have been worse. | ||
| I think it would have been worse, and I think, and this is another part of the story, For Jerry and his many, many fellow Americans who voted Trump, this has always been a gamble. | ||
| And they've always had a sense that it could go wrong. | ||
| You know, when you shake things up, sometimes they break. | ||
| And I sense that if it all ends in fiasco, which I guess the vast majority of public intellectuals expect in some combination of Watergate and other scandals. | ||
| I think Jerry and his fellow American Trump supporters will say, well we gave it a try. | ||
| We gave it a try. | ||
| And I think that's one possible scenario. | ||
| The reason that I'm ambivalent about Trump is that for all his flaws, in some ways he's doing a better job on foreign policy than his predecessor did. | ||
| Because Trump has this superpower that most intellectuals can't understand. | ||
| He has an unerring instinct for the weakness of the counter-party. | ||
| It's a kind of almost animal instinct. | ||
| But somehow Donald Trump can tell when the other side is weak. | ||
| He could see it in Jeb Bush, he could see it in Marco Rubio, he could see it in Hillary Clinton. | ||
| And now, I think he sees it in the Europeans, he sees it in Angela Merkel. | ||
| You don't pay enough for your defence, what if I walk out on NATO? | ||
| He sees it in Kim Jong-un, he sees it in Xi Jinping, he sees it in the Supreme Leader in Iran. | ||
| So my ambivalence is partly my sympathy for Trump supporters, my fundamental sense of why they voted for him, but it's also that in some ways this disruption has its plus side in the way that it's repositioning the United States. | ||
| I mean to me it's given oxygen to everything that we've talked about here. | ||
| And that doesn't discount all of the legitimate concerns that you... Look, the big concern for me, as I mentioned before, is that the pendulum swings the other way. | ||
| If this all ends in tears, all of those who defended it, even if they defended it half-heartedly like me, will be discredited. | ||
| And the damage will be irreparable for conservatives and populists alike. | ||
| The left will be empowered and they will spend the rest of our lives telling us that we were apologists for the worst president. | ||
| And that's... | ||
| Not a scenario that you can discount lightly. | ||
| For a time, I think it was exhilarating. | ||
| I'll freely admit that, for me, one of the most satisfying aspects of Trump's victory was that all the people I most dislike in this country were in a state of hysteria and shock for weeks. | ||
| And I remember saying to Ayaan, you know, It can't be all bad if the people I really can't stand are in this state. | ||
| But you have to, I think, with history in mind, be conscious of the dangers of the fact that this could end so badly that it does irreparable damage. | ||
| And the worst damage of all will be if it propels the left of the Democratic Party into power. | ||
| And that you can't rule out. | ||
| You can't rule it out. | ||
| The worst thing about studying history is that it makes you aware of how undeterministic the historical process is. | ||
| That there is always more than one future. | ||
| There's the future of triumph, there's the future of tragedy, and there's this kind of other future in the middle which is a little bit of both. | ||
| And that's really why the historical moment is bad for restful sleep. | ||
| One wakes up in the morning, and I'm sure you have the same feeling, wondering what alert will be on your phone And what message will be on your phone? | ||
| Will the alert say, war has broken out? | ||
| Will the alert say, palace coup? | ||
| And will the message say your reputation has just been destroyed by some accusation or other? | ||
| So one wakes up in a state of anxiety in the United States of 2018. | ||
| That is a reality that I think is inherent in both the culture war that we've spoken about and the Trump presidency, which is in some measure a backlash against that culture war. | ||
| We're going to leave it at that, but I am going to demand that you come back. | ||
| I don't think I've ever demanded that a guest come back. | ||
| I've asked, but I'm legitimately demanding that you come back, because next time I want to just do all history. | ||
| Yeah, we better scratch the surface. | ||
| I know, to even barely jump in. | ||
| We haven't even mentioned Churchill. | ||
| Okay, I'm demanding it. | ||
| Will you accept my demand? | ||
| I accept. | ||
| All right. | ||
| It took a long time to get you here, but Considering we're both two guys just off planes today and you're like 87 hours out of whack and jet-lagged. | ||
| And who knows what things we said will be taken out of context on Twitter after this is broadcast. | ||
| I sincerely hope everything because that's how the whole thing goes. | ||
| This has truly, truly been an absolute pleasure, and thank you for doing this, and send my best, of course, to Ayan. | ||
| I sure will. | ||
| And for more on Neil, you can follow him on the Twitter, although you don't fight with people that much on Twitter, which means you're a strong moral character. | ||
| I decided that jungle warfare was not the way to go. |
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