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Aug. 24, 2018 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin

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Right Wing Collectivism and Saving Liberalism | Jeffrey Tucker | POLITICS | Rubin Report

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Speaker	Time	Text
unidentified		(upbeat music)
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Joining me today is an author, the editorial director of the American Institute
		for Economic Research, as well as a senior fellow at the Austrian Economic Center, Jeffrey Tucker.
		Welcome to The Rubin Report.
jeffrey tucker ▲ ● ▼		Thanks for having me.
jeffrey tucker ▲ ● ▼		Good to be here.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		I almost wore the same bow tie, my friend.
jeffrey tucker ▲ ● ▼		Really?
jeffrey tucker ▲ ● ▼		I should have brought one extra for you.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		That would have been nice.
jeffrey tucker ▲ ● ▼		We can work on this.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		All right, there's a ton I wanna talk to you about.
		You're sort of one of these people that are right around all of the topics that I'm talking about, from freedom and liberty and free speech and the battle between the left and the right and all that.
		But your new book, and I wanna get the title absolutely correct, Right-Wing Collectivism, The Other Threat to Liberty.
		I thought that would be the spot for us to kick this off because most of the people watching this show know that I've mostly focused on the left.
		That was my home.
		I was a progressive.
		I've woken up to what I think real liberalism is, obviously, and that has nothing to do with the modern left.
		But sometimes people say, Dave, you don't critique the right enough.
		So let's dive in.
jeffrey tucker ▲ ● ▼		What's interesting about that, too, is that so often the left and the right Are not as distinguishable as they seem to be.
		For example, this trade stuff, you know, Elizabeth Warren and Donald Trump basically agree.
		You know, how do you account for that?
		And now you see all the celebration of the working classes, you know, you're going to get again the Trumpian right agreeing with Bernie Sanders on that.
		The left is ever more trending nationalist.
		and its immigration policies, for example.
		That didn't used to be the case.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		How is the left nationalistic?
jeffrey tucker ▲ ● ▼		Well, like Bernie Sanders complained that free immigration is a Coke Industries plot,
		basically to provide the capitalist class cheap workers, for example.
		Now that, you would have never found anybody on the left 20 years ago saying that.
		But now it's happening.
		You know, the hatred of commerce and the merchant class is so intense now that if a luxury resort in Florida wants to hire some immigrants to work for them, then the left is saying, oh, no, this is terrible, because this is capitalism at work.
		So, you're starting to see this strange blending.
		The left and the right have different cultural pitches, different appeals, different constituencies, but they both have this agenda that boils down to the use of power.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Is this a little bit of just what people refer to as the horseshoe theory?
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		That the more that the sides have become sort of extreme, that they're oddly...
jeffrey tucker ▲ ● ▼		That may be right.
		I've heard this horseshoe theory.
		I tend to think it's a little bit superficial.
		I mean, I look at it a little bit more historically.
		And you see, since liberalism was born in the world in the 18th century, really high Middle Ages, but when the revolt against liberalism began in the early 19th century, right?
		Too much change.
		Too much wealth.
		The wrong people are getting rich.
		There's not enough control.
		What are we going to do about our religion, our language, our race?
		The revolt began to grow from about the 1820s and intensified and spread to the United States.
		Britain really began to take root in continental Europe.
		There took two forms.
		There was a left form and a right form.
		And in each country they took on different iterations, different names.
		So in Britain you had the Tories, then you had the Labor Party.
		They both wanted to use the state for their own purposes.
		you always had the opposition party which was the liberals.
		And that's the way it's fleshed out itself in country after country.
		The liberal party has always been the people said, why don't we just let society be, let people live their lives.
		Let them choose a religion of their own choice.
		If they don't hurt anybody, it's not a problem.
		Let's have free speech.
		Let's have universal rights.
		Let's have rights for Let's get rid of slavery.
		Let's acknowledge the existence of women's rights, equality of freedom for everybody.
		Leave everybody alone.
		That's the liberal position.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		That's a pretty good position.
jeffrey tucker ▲ ● ▼		It's a beautiful position, and it's what I favor.
		It's what built civilization.
		Coming out of the religious wars of the high Middle Ages, we discovered this idea of freedom.
		We tried it.
		It worked.
		But there's always been a revolt brewing against it.
		A resentment.
		A resentment against it.
		A resentment against the commercial class.
		Too much change.
		Too much wealth.
		Wrong people getting wealthy.
		We're not controlling demographics well enough.
		There's not enough equality.
		Whatever the thing is.
		It takes different forms in different countries and in different times and different places, but ultimately the right and the left are ideologies of control and power, and liberalism has always been the alternative to that.
		So we keep having to rediscover this again and again in every generation.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, well that's why now I'm so happy that there is, as you said to me right before we started, the phrase classical liberalism is coming back.
		You know what I mean?
		You hear it on TV every now and again.
		I like to think that maybe I had a little something to do with it, you know?
		And to me, it is the only current antidote to the problems that we have.
		Either the more state power that the democratic socialists want, as they've sort of ransacked, Their own party, and purged all of the liberals.
		And it's also the antidote for all of the people.
		If you think Trump is all of the horrible things that people say about him all the time, what's the antidote?
		The antidote isn't to get somebody else in that has that much power.
		The antidote, obviously, is to take power away from that.
		That's what liberalism is.
jeffrey tucker ▲ ● ▼		My hope is that the good people on the left, the center of the left, that are looking at the emergence of the Trump That's the real question that we're at right now.
		the uses of power and the executive state and why do we build this gigantic machinery
		of the total state if it's so vulnerable to being captured by our enemies, right?
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Right, that's the real question that we're at right now.
		If you believe this thing has been captured by the Russians or whatever it is, it's like,
		well, okay, you're kinda answering your own question.
jeffrey tucker ▲ ● ▼		So I hope that we can rekindle a kind of new resurgence.
		I do have to credit you and Jordan Peterson for this.
		I mean, I've been working at it for about ten years to try to bring back not just the term liberal but the concept of liberalism.
		To public life.
		But it's been difficult, because we do have this state that creates a kind of moral and intellectual and ideological hazard.
		Somebody's got to control it.
		And now that we've built it over the last hundred years, this total state, massive taxes, regulations, interventions, running people's lives, everybody's trying to get hold of
		it and grab it and beat up their enemies.
		And it's a problem, it's a serious problem.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		So when people say to me, and we've discussed this on the show a bunch of times before,
		and I've addressed this in several forums, when people say to me, wait a minute,
		when you say you're a classical liberal and you talk about laissez-faire economics
		and getting the government out of the way and all those things,
		really this is just a repackaged libertarianism or you're just afraid to say that you're a conservative
		because it's still not cool or something like that?
		How would you define the difference between, say, a classical liberal and a libertarian?
jeffrey tucker ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, let's talk about that.
		Because after World War II, these neologisms, these new terms came along.
		One was conservatism.
		It wasn't really used before the early 1950s.
		Russell Kirk's book called The mindset of a conservative, something like that.
		Conservative mind, I think is what it was called.
		And libertarianism was, again, first used in about 1957 by the translator of the works of Bastiat.
		The problem was that the term liberal had been captured.
		by the New Dealers as early as 1933.
		Once they acquiesced to the idea of the corporate of a state
		and were blaming the Great Depression on capitalism, that became a problem for liberalism.
		They kept the term liberalism, but they were no longer liberal.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Because they were suddenly for big government.
jeffrey tucker ▲ ● ▼		They were for big government, and even worse, the corporate state.
		And actually, we can just be more blunt about it and say that back in the 1930s, this ideology had a name.
		[BLANK_AUDIO]
		The name is fascism, okay?
		So they caved, right?
		I mean, in the New York Times in 1933, the New York Times Magazine was celebrating the great Professor Mussolini and how he and FDR shared a vision for the planned economy.
		So that's the world we were living in back then.
		So we lost the term liberal.
		After World War II, there was an attempt to just speak language and to describe who we are.
		And on one hand you had this new thing called conservatism and they
		they kind of sampled some of this Tory like nostalgia for the past, a little
		bit of revanchism, you know, let's recapture what we've lost.
		Then on the other hand you had the genuine liberals and they
		coined the term libertarianism, which had been sitting on the shelf
		since the late 19th century.
		Now, most of the people who call themselves libertarians in late 19th century America and England were anarchist socialists.
		But nobody had bothered with the term for decades and decades, so Dean Russell said, well, nobody's using that word, why don't we use it?
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		And that was closer to the truth of what they were, in effect.
jeffrey tucker ▲ ● ▼		Well, what was interesting about that is, as Dean Russell described it in his 1957 article, it was a synonym for what was once called liberal.
		He didn't think it was a A tweak, or an improvement, or a distillation, or a refinement, or a new dogmatic way of describing liberalism.
		He thought it was liberalism.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		I need to read that, because that's how I feel.
		If someone says to me, Dave, you're a libertarian, I don't mind that.
		If we need labels, I don't mind that label.
		I don't mind the label either.
		We can split the difference on how much government should be used.
jeffrey tucker ▲ ● ▼		I think libertarianism has a number, as a term, has a number of problems.
		One is it's a little clinical sounding.
		It has too many syllables and it makes you sound a little bit awkward.
		And it sounds maybe a little too canonical.
		You know, like we have a list of things you have to believe.
		You know, like this, this, this.
		It's all rooted in this kind of reductionist, more commonly these days, it's rooted in this kind of reductionist non-aggression principle, which is a fine principle as a rule of thumb, but it's not a good It doesn't describe the whole of life.
		The other problem is that libertarianism is a new term, so it doesn't have a deep history.
		So we can't look back and say, oh look, the libertarians freed the slaves.
		The libertarians acknowledged the rights of women.
		The libertarians gave us the commercial society that built the middle class and brought dignity to the average person.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		If they had existed as a party, they would have done those things.
jeffrey tucker ▲ ● ▼		Well, it's the liberals who did that.
		But we changed our name so now we can't feel a sense of pride in our past?
		So it doesn't have a past?
		So that's a problem.
		Libertarians tend to be detached from their own history for that reason.
		And I think it's a problem.
		It's a word problem.
		The second problem is that libertarianism doesn't have a universal of usage, like whereas liberalism does.
		You can go to Spain, describe yourself a liberal.
		Brazil, there's liberals.
		In Germany, there's liberals.
		There's a word for liberalism in every language, and it more or less means the same thing,
		except in the United States.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Right.
jeffrey tucker ▲ ● ▼		So if we acquiesce to this term libertarian and just wipe out our liberal history,
jeffrey tucker ▲ ● ▼		we're cutting ourselves off both from the world and from our own history.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		It's so funny because you've just said it in a far better way than I think I've ever really laid it out, but people will say to me, Dave, stop saying you're a liberal.
		And I don't want to stop saying I'm a... I get that I'm fighting an uphill battle right now, right?
		I'm a salmon swimming upstream.
		This is going to be tough.
		But I don't want to deny what is the truth just because it's tough.
jeffrey tucker ▲ ● ▼		It's who you are.
		And you want to have an ancestry.
		You know, you want to look back and see the champions of the Medicis in 15th century Florence and say, I know those people.
		Those are my people.
		You know, the people who long for a world without slavery, you know, in the early 19th century.
		The people who wanted free trade and fought hard for it.
		Those are our people.
		That's our history.
		I mean, we were born as part of a long stream of emancipation that's been taking place for 500 years.
		That's our movement, our people, our history.
		Let's embrace it.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		I'm with you, brother.
unidentified		Yeah.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		All right.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		So are there any of those liberals I'm just now getting out of my depression, having finished my book.
jeffrey tucker ▲ ● ▼		Well, strange things are happening on the left.
		Very strange things.
		And I'm not sure--
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		I should pause you for one sec.
		My original question here was I wanted to do the deep dive on the right.
		So we're gonna get--
		Well, maybe we'll get to it.
		No, we will get, no, I promise you we're gonna get to that.
jeffrey tucker ▲ ● ▼		Well, this is a funner topic.
unidentified		I mean, the deep dive on the far right gets us into a very dark place.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, all right, well, maybe that, all right, so maybe the whole second half will be on that.
		Maybe we just put that out there right now.
		That's what we'll do for the second.
jeffrey tucker ▲ ● ▼		I'm just now getting out of my depression having finished my book.
jeffrey tucker ▲ ● ▼		It was terrible.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		All right, so our whole second half is gonna be what my first question was about.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		But let's just keep going on this road for now.
jeffrey tucker ▲ ● ▼		So, strange things have happened to the left.
		Let's just mention the phrase cultural appropriation, for example.
		Now, when did the approbation of this idea of cultural appropriation come out, like, what, two or three years ago?
		Three or four?
		Five?
		I don't know.
		Academia is weird.
		It may have been brewing for ten years.
		Yeah.
		But when I first heard about it, I thought, that is the craziest bunch of nonsense I've ever heard.
		I mean, civilization is nothing but cultural appropriation.
		We've been doing this since the 9th century, you know, at the height of the Conferencium in Spain, when Judaism and Islam and Christianity came together in this beautiful melting pot where we all learn from each other
		and the cultures began to blend and our religions began to change and our outlook on life
		began to... because we learn from each other.
		If we stay isolated in our little tribes, we're never going to progress.
		And the idea that... and I don't know if it was inadvertent or what happened.
		We can talk about this, but when suddenly you're told you cannot have affection for another culture and take what you find valuable and learn for yourself and live a better life?
		That is very strange.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		They seem to think it's cultural annihilation, not cultural appropriation, right?
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Like, they seem to think that this is something that will lead to the destruction of that culture, when in fact, it actually spreads the ideas of that culture, the foods, the clothing, the ideas!
jeffrey tucker ▲ ● ▼		They're treating culture as a scarce good, like it's a property, but it's not.
		The magic of culture, which is the same magic of ideas, It resides in its infinite reproducibility and its malleability.
		This is something that the world of ideas can do that the physical world cannot do.
		And if we don't make that distinction, we're going to get very confused.
		Do you see what I mean?
		I do.
		Cultures spread.
		They're infinite.
		And they can constantly change.
		And that's the magic and beauty of culture.
		We can't get that out of this glass of water, this table.
		They're bound by the constraints of scarcity.
		But the world of ideas is magical.
		It's like a constant, infinite sandstorm.
		Unpredictable and constantly changing.
		And we can take A culture for ourselves without taking it from somebody else, right?
		It's reproduction.
		It's infinite reproduction.
		It's the loaves and the fishes.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Isn't the beauty, too, that America has done this better than anyone perhaps in the history of the world?
		You just referenced some other points in time, but that we have taken in more cultures, and you said the phrase melting pot.
		I mean, that's what we designed.
		I know.
		"the most beautiful melting pot ever.
		"I lived in New York City for most of my life, "most of my adult life at least,
		"and would be on subway cars, "and you were on that car with absolutely everyone,
		"with white guys with dreadlocks and the whole thing.
		"And guess what, you may not like everybody, "and you may not like the way this guy smells,
		"and that person may be doing this, "but we're all there, and we're living together."
jeffrey tucker ▲ ● ▼		It's magic.
		You know, really it's commerce.
		It's because this country elevated the commercial ethos to be the highest thing, the great ennobling factor of human life.
		And it's commerce that brings people together.
		And we experience that every day.
		In a commercial setting, people aren't fighting each other.
		They're getting along.
		I mean, I find I'm with you.
		I go to a restaurant and I get served by some guy from Pakistan.
		It's a chance to meet somebody new.
		It's a chance to engage somebody and have a personal relationship with somebody who's serving you, and you're serving them, and you experience this magic of exchange.
		Benjamin Constant used to talk about this in the 1830s, how commerce brought to the world a new understanding of freedom.
		And a new opportunity for us to find value in each other, in service of each other.
		And America just flourished in commerce, and that's why we have the diversity and this melting pot, as you call it, and this rich cultural life.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		You know, it's so funny, because I'm so keenly aware of it right now, not only because of the conversations I'm having and because people are screaming about this stuff all the time, but I'm on this tour with Jordan Peterson, and when I go to every airport that I go to, 90% of the time, unless someone sent a car for me, I take an Uber.
		And I just hop in whatever Uber shows up.
		And there is every single type of person that looks every which way, every color, every sexuality.
		And usually I talk a little bit to them.
		And it's like, man, these are just people.
jeffrey tucker ▲ ● ▼		Maybe you feel the same way.
		I live in Atlanta, which is just a gigantically diverse society.
		And everywhere you go, you're bumping into people who are different from you.
		and hang around in crypto circles in Atlanta.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		I want to talk to crypto as well.
jeffrey tucker ▲ ● ▼		And that, you talk about a melting pot.
		I mean, we're all together, and we all consider each other our people,
		you know, just because we all love crypto.
		And it has nothing to do with race.
		You can appreciate racial differences, but also see value in everybody,
		and hope they can see value in you.
		You can come together.
		It doesn't mean that we have to be egalitarian or deny differences.
		It means that we find strength in our heterogeneity.
		And that's...
		That makes for a beautiful and exciting life.
		One of the strangest things that's happening now, you know, with the rise of the alt-right, in response to the failures and strangeness of the left, is this new celebration of homogeneity, as if, oh, we need to live in a unitary racial state, you know, where we all speak the same language or all have the same So, that strikes me as aesthetically very boring, and I don't even recognize what that world would look like and feel like, and it doesn't appeal to me in the slightest bit.
		Minority was built out of the diversity that grows out of commerce, and the commerce is the key, because that's what helps us invest in each other.
		Adam Smith said this about the division of labor, right?
		It's like, what causes wealth?
		the division of labor.
		How big can that be?
		It should be as big as possible.
		The wider the division of labor, the more people you include in the great project
		of building commercial life and production, the wealthier we're all going to be together.
		And I just, I love that vision.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		So when we talk about capitalism on this show, I'll--
		Every now and again, I jump in the comments section, or I see what people say on Twitter, if I have some of the Ayn Rand people on, or just some of the people that are not for regulation, I'll just let the economy go and see what happens.
		There's always a certain amount of people that say, okay, that all sounds well and good, but then the rich just keep getting richer, and the poor keep getting poorer, and Jeff Bezos shouldn't have $20 trillion, or whatever he has right now, or the rest of it.
jeffrey tucker ▲ ● ▼		What's the boilerplate answer Well, I get frustrated with those kind of clichés, because they've been around for 150 years, and they've never been true.
		I mean, they weren't true in Marx's time, and everybody quickly recognized that.
		You know, by the late 19th century, in America, we had built the most prosperous economy in the world, by far, by far, by far.
		Growing incomes, longer lives, healthier people, more opportunities for everybody, people are moving to the cities, everybody's benefiting from capitalism.
		That's been going on for such a long time, yet here we are in 2018 and we're still recycling these Victorian era cliches about capitalism.
		I don't understand it.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		What do you think capitalism then screwed up, if only just a marketing piece of it or something, where right now you sense And I believe that it will not win, but that it somehow doesn't seem cool to be for capitalism, at least with young people.
jeffrey tucker ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, that does seem to be the change.
		Maybe it's in the name, and I don't even have a problem not using the word capitalism.
		I mean, we probably have the same view towards this.
		I will speak the language that you can understand.
		And if I want to rebrand capitalism as liberalism, which it probably should be, actually, liberal, liberalism, then I'm glad to talk about that.
		At the same time, I kind of like the term capitalism.
		I have no problem with the term capitalism.
		Because it really does underscore a really important point that without private property and ownership of the means of production, you can't have complex production structures, and you can't hire more people, you can't build great things, you can't have great cities, you can't improve people's lives.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		So what are the things that you think government should do?
jeffrey tucker ▲ ● ▼		Well, I think of lots of kinds of rules that we should have, but I'm not a fan of governments in general.
		If there were some way that you could have You know, an old-fashioned liberal state, you know, that was really minded in its own business and kept civil war from happening, for example.
		You know, kept conflict, that kind of mass conflict.
		Then that would be probably a good thing.
		The state is not very good at that.
		So, I think, I mean, I've got the mind of an anarchist, essentially.
		I trust, you know, I trust The chaos of spontaneous human action, much more than any kind of imposition.
		But at the same time, I do like the writings of the old liberals.
		They imagine that the state should do something to keep something like order in life, to keep civil war from happening, to keep people from killing each other, terrible things like that.
		But beyond that, the state should just be laissez-faire.
		It should just allow commerce to flourish and allow problems to work themselves out.
		And people don't have confidence in that anymore.
		But not because of any failure, but it's almost like the ideology of power has become a kind of a modern cancer that afflicts everyone.
		And I think we need to do something about it.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Wait, can you expand that a little further?
jeffrey tucker ▲ ● ▼		Well, it's just that once you believe that you can control the path of history and you have an end point in mind, society should look like this.
		Then you want to use every kind of tool to hammer it in place.
		And this is what I call right and left-wing Hegelianism, essentially.
		And it's a grave temptation.
		And so we built this, like we said at the outset, we built this gigantic machinery we call the state, this total state, and it controls so much wealth, and so much power, and so much rest with gaining access to it, that it's just a kind of a constant moral hazard for everybody.
		Like, give me that state, and I'll make it do the right things.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Right, so for the people on either side of this, whether you're on the left and you want to help those that you deem oppressed more, or people with less, when I believe their intentions to be good, even if their methodology I think generally is not good, or you're people on the right that want less of the state, you know, you're just on either side of this thing.
		How much do you think The system itself can move without breaking.
		Because what I think I'm noticing now is that there's a certain amount of people that really just wanna trash the whole thing.
		And I do see this certainly more on the left right now, because they're not in power.
		That there's this growing thing, and this is why they're so into Marxism and all this stuff now.
		It's like, let's just trash the whole freaking thing and forget all the goodness that this has done, and they're doing it from their iPhones, and their sense of irony is not great.
jeffrey tucker ▲ ● ▼		But is there just a- Right.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Is there just a certain amount that a system that's basically good can move before it snaps?
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		And I would suspect that it's not much either way, really.
jeffrey tucker ▲ ● ▼		You mean the commercial structure right now, or the capitalist structures, or you mean the state?
		Yeah.
		You know, what I see actually happening is the innovation is taking place so quickly, it's actually outrunning the capacity of government to control it.
		And I think that's really exciting.
		If I was going to look at one point of hope in the world, it's that the market and the entrepreneurial innovative
		sectors of life, from the app economy to the gig economy to now with blockchain technology and everything
		is moving so quickly that states can't even keep up.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Right, so I'm there with you on that.
jeffrey tucker ▲ ● ▼		And that's glorious.
jeffrey tucker ▲ ● ▼		I'm very happy about that.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		I see that, because to me, it's like, how are people listening to all of these conversations, all of these podcasts that are out there, and communicating about them so quickly?
		And it's like, the government can't.
		It can't keep up with all of that.
		The change can't, because people are lighting up all the time now in a much faster way.
		And I think we're changing in a much more rapid way.
		And I think that's actually really cool.
		There's a danger to it, because we could just spin out of control and do all sorts of awful things.
		What did you say before about the general inertia of people or something?
		The general left to their own ways of figuring things out?
jeffrey tucker ▲ ● ▼		They'll figure it out.
		There's a reason why our politics seem reactionary on the left and the right.
		Everyone's trying to bring back something.
		There's a nostalgia on the left and a nostalgia on the right, and they're trying to use the state to hold us back.
		Like, and whatever it's a vision of, is it the 60s?
		Is it the 70s?
		Is it pre-industrial revolution?
		You know, is it some Rousseauian fantasy of perfect equality, you know, that the left might imagine?
		Or the right thinking about, you know, a world of high tariffs of the 1880s?
		80s or 90s or but everyone's looking back to something they want to create and it's there's a real fear the
		Future on the left and the right and it's a future without control
		It's a future where we're able to travel where we want to Download the apps we want to invent what we want to work by
		ourselves live where we want to live Be digital nomads, you know travel around do what we want
		This world without control, I'm so cool.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		That's so cool.
		That's not what people should be fearing.
		Everyone should be going, holy cow, this is the freest, coolest thing ever.
jeffrey tucker ▲ ● ▼		That's the world I wanna live in.
jeffrey tucker ▲ ● ▼		I wanna live in the world.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		That obviously is why you're so attracted to Bitcoin also, right, and crypto in general.
jeffrey tucker ▲ ● ▼		Sure.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Because you're sort of the backbone for a lot of this, right?
jeffrey tucker ▲ ● ▼		Well, I mean, if you think about it, I mean, we've waited our whole lives and actually generations of great intellectuals have lived and died for so long wanting something like a private currency that emerged privately, that operates without financial intermediaries, that the government is not controlling, that it's global, that it's not restrained by currency zones that anyone could have access to.
		You know, a true democratic technology like Bitcoin or any cryptocurrency, that is just a dream come true.
		That is glorious.
		That's why I write about it all the time and talk about it all the time.
		It is the alt-right killer.
		It is the alt-left killer.
		It's the thing that's going to ultimately, I think, protect us from these wicked ideologies that are constantly trying to control our lives.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Because basically at some point one of these ideologies is going to get too much control of the state and the financial system.
jeffrey tucker ▲ ● ▼		Well, I hope they just fight with each other forever.
		I mean, you know, one of the things that, when I think about this sometimes, I get depressed about the divisions in our public life and the way people are tearing each other apart and the way you open up the newspaper and you can barely even read it anymore.
		Yeah, I know.
		But it's like, down with Trump.
		Then it's like, up with Trump.
		And it's just this forever debate.
		And the one thing that I think maybe we should not be entirely unhappy about this is, you look back at history, when freedom emerges out of the high Middle Ages, it wasn't because any One great intellectual or any one great state or any one great power said, hey, let's let everybody be free.
		It was because there's so many competitors for power.
		Nobody could gain the monopoly.
		It was the church.
		It was the nation state.
		It was the locality.
		It was a monarchical state.
		The landed aristocracy, the rising merchant class.
		So there are all these independent power centers strewn throughout European society and nobody can get access to the final singular control.
		No unitary power.
		And so that fight that took place among so many disparate powers actually led to a kind of flourishing of freedom.
		So, you know, in a sense the fight between the left and the right today is not the worst thing if they just keep fighting and leave the rest of us alone.
unidentified		Right, right, right.
jeffrey tucker ▲ ● ▼		I don't know where we're going to be that lucky.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Okay, so before we spend the whole second half on the question that I started this whole thing with, do the people who want freedom, basically, and a light touch of government, are they always at a disadvantage?
		Because there's another set of people who will always use the apparatus against them, where if they're being true to themselves, they won't use the power to stifle other people or all sorts of other things.
		So in an odd way, our ideas are at a disadvantage.
jeffrey tucker ▲ ● ▼		They always have been.
		We've always been a kind of minority, though.
		Even, again, over the last two, three hundred years of political history, we've always been that third way, that spine minority.
		But we had rare victories, but big ones.
		You know, like the end of slavery, you know, was just glorious.
		I mean, the protection of the great banking empires of Europe from the populist rabble, you know, from the preachers who wanted to destroy it.
		There were these great victories, the victory of free trade, you know, but we've won every
		once in a while and it always changed the world because once you have a little bit of
		freedom, just a little bit, it just blows up and it becomes awesome and it's amazing
		and it kills power because it's so powerful and so wonderful.
		But it's worth fighting for and we've always fought mainly through ideas, not through armies,
		not through guns and controlling states.
		It's always been the philosophical awesomeness of this position, it's been the celebration
		of the common man, the celebration of wealth, the love of consumerism and commercial life,
		the coming together of people, the ennoblement of people, the right of travel, the right
		of association and to do what you want, to have as many children as you want, to educate
		your kids the way you want to.
		These kinds of principles are compelling and they've always led to victory for liberals
		despite the pressure from the other two sides.
		I think it's going to be our future, I do.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Let's shift.
		Let's talk about the scary right.
		Are you ready?
		I tried to do this with you.
jeffrey tucker ▲ ● ▼		We did the happy stuff first.
		Now we're going to plunge.
		Look, Dave, when I began to research this thing, I probably ended up reading about 200 books on this topic in the end.
		And I'm a happy guy.
		I like happy things.
		I like technology.
		I'm an optimistic guy, but this really put me in a dark place, digging through this history.
		From Hegel, essentially, up to Julius Caesar, Ebola, and the post-war Nazi movement, and realizing that there was an intellectual strain that stretched over all of these years, essentially.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Okay, so let's go back.
jeffrey tucker ▲ ● ▼		Essentially 200 years, yeah.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		So let's go back 200 years.
		When you talk about right-wing collectivism, Because I think most of my audience now understands what left-wing collectivism is, because that's what we've got right now, in a very strong way.
		Talk to me about right-wing collectivism.
jeffrey tucker ▲ ● ▼		Okay, Dave, I'm going to tell you a story.
		I love Ludwig Mises.
		I think he was a genius.
		And I thought I'd read all of his works, but there was a transcript of a lecture he gave in 1956 at the San Francisco Public Library, and he had about three sentences in there that Just knocked me over, and I couldn't believe it, because he explained so much.
		He says something like this, and he's speaking casually.
		He says, Hegel ruined German philosophy for a century.
		His original followers believed that all of history would end in the Prussian state and the Prussian church having all power and the end of individualism.
		They became the right Hegelians that became the Nazis.
		The dissidence of the right Hegelians became the left Hegelians.
		They wanted a universal transformation of humanity and a historical drive to something other than the commercial society.
		They became the Marxists and the communists.
		And he said that it's left-right Hegelianism and that explains pretty much all of political history.
		And I closed that and I thought, That explains more than practically any other book I've ever read.
		And so I began to explore this.
		I understood the left Hegelianism.
		I understood Marxism.
		I mean, those were our professors, right?
		And they're annoying.
		But what I did not understand was the right Hegelianism and what that tradition looks like.
		It's the throne and altar, this historicist view that the nation should constitute its own unit of profound integrity that is more important than the individual.
		And that commercial society was too chaotic.
		That it was leading us, giving us the wrong kind of progress, that it was flattening out the hierarchies that we need to have an orderly life, right?
		This is the right Hegelian pitch that ultimately, by mid-20th century, becomes this very dangerous, dangerous movement in Europe, you know, that became catastrophic.
		But it gradually emerged, all the way from Hegel, because this is at the end of the seemingly endless Franco-Prussian wars.
		There's this battle, the Battle of Jena, that Germany lost.
		And the explanation for that was that it was a temporary setback, that history was going to determine that Germany would rise.
		Despite the choices of individuals, history's got its wind, it's like a meta-narrative that was going to override everything.
		Hegel himself was a theologian, by the way.
		And so this view began to kind of spread throughout German academia, and it ended up being imported to the United States through Through circuitous means.
		But one of the great theorists of the 1840s and 1850s who brought this to the United States was Frederick List, who was one of the first economists to repudiate the free trade tradition of the Smithian Manchesterites, and now is celebrating the nation as a unit, as a productive power, and believed in tariff walls, which was strange.
		And I've read his book.
		But—and that had a huge influence over American trade policy, actually, in the late 19th century.
		And it began to flow out from there.
		So Thomas Carlyle in Britain now begins to celebrate the great man theory of history.
		And really, we're nothing without Napoleon, without gigantic figures that we can worship, admire, and our individuality should be subsumed within them.
		They act for us.
		They're godlike, you know.
		And it was Thomas Carlyle who first coined the phrase to describe economics as being the dismal science.
		And the reason he said that is that every economist he knew imagined a world without slavery.
		And he said, you can't have a world without slavery.
		That's a dreadful world.
		Without slaves, you don't have masters, right?
		And we need a world with masters and slaves, so we can have a vision of hierarchy and greatness.
		Without that, we don't have greatness.
		So you begin to see this building of this intellectual apparatus.
		It was not left Hegelian.
		It wasn't Marxist.
		It was actually anti-Marxist in a strange way, but as an alternative form of collectivism.
		It began with a kind of historicism and a celebration of nationalism of the German state.
		It began to grow with this alternative theory of trade that we should build up tariff walls.
		And Carlisle with his great man theory of history.
		And then Ruskin in Britain with his hatred of commercial society because he believed that somehow commerce was ruining quality and culture and was giving us mass production.
		and what we all need to be really doing is living in guilds and making our own stuff, you know,
		because we're gonna destroy English life and English country life.
		And so a full-scale reactionary trend on the right began to develop.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Was there always a racial element to it?
jeffrey tucker ▲ ● ▼		No, so that's what's interesting.
		I'm so glad you asked that because it comes about, first of all, through nationalism.
		Now, in the early 1820s and 1830s, this celebration of nationalism.
		Now, you have to ask yourself, what is a nation?
		What do we mean when we say nation?
		And I'm taking a lot of this from an essay given in 1882 by Ernst Rennan, a great French historian, looking back at the rise of nationalism.
		He said, there's only five ways you can consider nationalism.
		You consider the geographic definition.
		So we just live in the space.
		There's a dynastic element.
		We can all trace our lineage back to the great There's a language theory of nationalism.
		We all speak the same language.
		There's a religious theory of nationalism.
		We all worship God in precisely the same way.
		I believe in transubstantiation.
		You believe in consubstantiation.
		We can't be part of the same nation in that case, right?
		And then finally, and probably most insidiously, there was the racial view.
		And that came along in essentially the 1860s and 1870s with a misapplication of Darwinian theory and scientific racism came along.
		And that swept through academia, particularly in the United States, like nothing you've ever seen.
		It was absolutely astonishing how much racism with orthodoxy in American academia in the 1890s.
		The very first This is a monograph published by the American Economic Association by a gay man.
		I think his name is Andre Hoffman.
		It's called Race Traits of the American Negro.
		And the first chapter just goes all in.
		You know, it's the horror of the black people.
		They don't have the right values.
		They can't save money.
		They're just terrible.
		Shiftless and lazy and ghastly and uncivilizable.
		And now chapter two, the Jews.
		You know, these people, I don't know what, they've got this crazed, out-of-control commercial ethic.
		They can't stop hoarding money.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Man, they really went for it.
jeffrey tucker ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, and then the third chapter three is the slobs, and so on, and so on.
		The American Economist Association, you know?
		And then, there was essentially nothing stopping it.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		What do you think was happening in the world there that it was taken so badly?
jeffrey tucker ▲ ● ▼		I'll tell you what was happening, Dave.
		Laissez-faire had transformed society so dramatically that the intellectuals felt that they had lost control.
		Now, you might think that when the world becomes massively prosperous and we suddenly have cities rising up and we've got steel that's transversing large bodies of water and we're developing the telephone and indoor electricity and people are living longer lives and so much wealth is being created that everybody would stand up and say, hooray!
		We've found the answers!
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		But the gatekeepers who had controlled everything for so long, so that's so interesting because- There was a revolt.
		This is sort of what it feels like now to me.
		The gatekeepers, we've had so much success.
		There's so many reasons right now to understand how great everything is.
		That book right there by Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now- That's a great book.
		Is all about how great things are and how actually we are- That's a great book.
		There is less violence now and all sorts of wonderful things.
unidentified		So the revolt, you always have to be on the, But the gatekeepers aren't happy when the narrative shifts.
jeffrey tucker ▲ ● ▼		The intellectuals are what Deirdre McCloskey calls the clerisy, right?
jeffrey tucker ▲ ● ▼		So it's the high-end intellectuals, it's the power elite bureaucrats and the public, the permanent keepers of our civic culture, you know, it's the political class.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		So this is sort of what, for my audience that may be not following all this, this is sort of what the New York Times is, right?
jeffrey tucker ▲ ● ▼		Yeah.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Maybe I shouldn't have said it so obviously, but like that's kind of what it is.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Like that class.
jeffrey tucker ▲ ● ▼		The ruling class.
unidentified		Yeah.
jeffrey tucker ▲ ● ▼		The ruling class.
		And they were in full-scale revolt.
		They did not like what was happening to the world in the 1880s and 90s because of the loss of control.
		And so the scientific racism came along to add to the celebration of dictatorship and protectionism and the new nationalism to add a very insidious element which culminated in eugenics ideology.
		And that's when it gets very strange.
		And this is where the reading gets very difficult.
		Because now you're reading all the way into the 1910s with the works of Oswald Spengler, you know, the right Hegelian German theorist that enraptured every American.
		They're all reading his book.
		Oh my God, the decline of the West.
		We better reconstitute ourselves as a tribe or we're going to be eaten alive by all the other foreigners.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		But there's a strain of that that's still going on right now.
unidentified		There's nothing new.
jeffrey tucker ▲ ● ▼		This very funny book called The Passing of the Great Race by Madison Grant that was on every coffee table in the late 19-teens and early 1920s.
		He was forecasting doom for the white race.
		He was a fascinating figure.
		Of course, I read his book, as did everybody.
		Greg Gatsby makes a passing reference to it.
		It was that popular.
		I tell you, there's not a single alt-right racist alive today who is not repeating those clichés that were written by Madison Grant.
		It's all pseudoscience.
		It's all just nonsense.
		It's just ridiculous and embarrassing.
		But it keeps being resurrected.
		But here's what's interesting.
		He was a thoroughgoing Darwinian.
		Because you recall that Darwin had two great books, The Origin of Species.
		The other was called The Descent of Man.
		And The Descent of Man had a very unfortunate paragraph in there where he regrets the invention of mass disease-killing cures, essentially.
		It's like if we keep curing people and we keep feeding inferior people and curing disease,
		then our genetic stock is going to go down and down.
		So they're all kind of playing off this little passage.
		Madison Grant was not unusual by American academic standards at all.
		This was orthodox in the 1810s and 1820s.
		What made Madison Grant interesting, you can look up his Wikipedia entry right now, if
		you look it up, it'll celebrate him as the father of the National Park Service.
		Well in the course of my research, I wanted to know, what is the connection between Madison
		Grant's hardcore eugenics-based racism and his environmentalism?
		What is the relationship there?
		Remember, it's not just two people.
		Usually people have it figured out in their own heads.
		I went through and read some of his works on the environment.
		It turns out that he had a master race theory of nature.
		And he went to the California Redwoods and he looked at these glorious, mighty trees.
		And he was horrified to see they were being cut down for making coffee tables and boats and things like that.
		He thought it was dygenic to nature.
		So he wanted the master race, the California Redwoods, to be protected.
		And so that's why he started the National Park Service.
		And now the left heralds them as this great That's a great visionary environmentalist, but actually, he was like a tree Nazi.
		I don't know how else you want to call it.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		A tree Nazi.
jeffrey tucker ▲ ● ▼		Very creepy stuff.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		We don't have enough Nazi labels being thrown around now.
		We're going to have tree Nazis.
		I'm sure that already exists.
jeffrey tucker ▲ ● ▼		He was nuts.
		But, you know, you can just march through the history and it gets worse and worse.
		And then, to me, Dave, it all culminates in the works of Carl Schmitt.
		From the late 1930s.
		And his amazing book called The Concept of the Political.
		And if you'll give me just one quick second to explain this.
		Because you as a liberal need to read this book.
		Because it's the most passionate, I would say, and even competent attack on liberalism written in the 20th century.
		Now, Carl Schmitt was a jurist, a brilliant man, and a philosopher, and a hardcore Nazi.
		Okay?
		He wasn't tried at Nuremberg, he escaped.
		I'm merely an intellectual.
		Okay, sure.
		His book, Concept of the Political, says, what's wrong with liberalism?
		I'll tell you.
		It's dull.
		Nothing happens.
		Nothing dramatic.
		There's nothing, just requires no courage whatsoever.
		Liberalism is a life in which we all benefit from each other's presence.
		We all just trade with each other.
		What kind of life is that?
		Where we all just are kind of the same and like each other and hold backyard barbecues and go to baseball games and just get richer and live longer lives and send our kid to college?
		This is terrible!
		We need to live big, dramatic, mighty, bold, courageous, transformative lives and live in times that are shocking, that are amazing, that make our lives worth living.
		That requires, above all else, politics.
		Liberalism imagines a world without politics?
		That's a terrifying world.
		What we need is a world of politics.
		And he continues to lay it out, chapter by chapter, why we have to destroy liberalism and celebrate the concept of the political.
		And for him that means having friends and having enemies.
		Defeating your enemies and rallying around your friends.
		Now, who are your friends and who are your enemies?
		And Carl Schmitt says, at some level it doesn't matter.
		What matters is that they exist, and the state, the powerful men, will choose them for us.
		They will decide who our friends and our enemies are.
		Now, let's be clear about what we mean by enemy.
		I just don't mean somebody you don't like.
		I mean the willingness to kill.
		There has to be the presence of real bloodshed in your time for you to have a sufficiently prescient sense of eneminess so that you'll feel the intense desire to rally around your friends and experience the awesomeness that only comes with belonging to a group.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		But the end feeling there is that you can't achieve what the real purpose of a human is, that you can't experience whatever the highs of humanity are.
jeffrey tucker ▲ ● ▼		Of group belongingness, essentially.
		And the life of drama.
		A big, important life without being part of a group on the move that's slaughtering its enemies.
		And so we have to have the presence of bloodshed.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		So it really is the opposite of live and let live.
jeffrey tucker ▲ ● ▼		It is.
		So through bloodshed comes life.
		Without bloodshed and death and violence and politics, then you're just going to live an irrelevant life and we can't have that.
		So he was, in many ways, the philosophical architect of the Holocaust.
		Again, not a leftist, not a Marxist, although he dabbled in it.
		You find this from a lot of these right collectivists, the right Hegelians, that they dabbled—guys like Werner Sombart, right?
		He was once a communist who later became a Nazi.
		Carl Schmitt dabbled in leftism and then went full right.
		And it was, in many ways, the culmination of the right Hegelian ideology in Carl Schmitt.
		So it's a book worth reading and contemplating.
		And I would say to anybody who rejects liberalism, You know, be honest about where you're going with this.
		This is the opposite of liberalism and celebration of death in the works of Carl Schmitt.
		Very powerful thinker.
		Highly regarded, even today.
		Worth reading.
		And worth reflecting on.
		What kind of world do you want to live in?
		You want to live at peace with others?
		Or do you want to slaughter your enemies and rally with your friends?
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		So move me from that point, 1930s, into, of course, obviously into Nazi Germany, and then we'll finish where we are now.
jeffrey tucker ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, and you know, my book really does end in 1950.
		Not necessarily, it didn't have to, but I started to get really queasy about what happened after World War II.
		A lot of the right Hegelian movement went underground, you know, and became a kind of
		a quiet neo-Nazi movement that never really had access to social media.
		Clearly they weren't in academia, obviously.
		But the ideology never entirely went away.
		And it was just lying in wait, waiting for the failure of the left and for the resentment
		of the population against the left to rise up and receive, get a fevered enough pitch
		that it would then come on full force.
		And that's really what's happening in Europe, Russia, United States.
		It's an alternative form of collectivism.
		It's got a different flavor, a different orientation, a different kind of resentments, but it still drags in this gigantic history of right Hegelian ideology, the celebration of the great man dictator, the protectionism, the anti-immigration, the nativism, the nationalism.
		It could take any one of five forms, including the racism.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		What do you make about how now, and it's obviously largely because of the internet, it seems to be happening in so many places at once.
		We're seeing this unholy, it's an oddly unholy alliance between the collectivist left and then that drives, I mean it's exactly what you're saying, then you've got this other thing that's just waiting there for these guys to go two bananas.
		And then it's like, ah, we got all the easy answers.
		Meanwhile, you have the liberals and all the decent 80% of us that are trying to live and let live.
jeffrey tucker ▲ ● ▼		So part of it really comes down to this.
		There's a weird sociological, cultural contradiction at the heart of social democratic leftist ideology.
		On one hand, they wanted to build gigantic institutions that are redistributory, and we're supposed to treat each other like a big family, and we're supposed to have this homogeneous nation-state.
		On the other hand, they're celebrating diversity and encouraging mass immigration and heterogeneous populations.
		And guess what?
		Those don't really work together.
		So, you build gigantic states that presume that we're all one family.
		And then you throw in this diverse set of people, especially with the refugee crisis in Europe and immigration in the United States, and people are looking around going, you know, these people aren't my family.
		I don't even like these people.
		And yet I'm paying for them.
		I mean, that is a prescription.
		I mean, that blows up.
		I mean, that's a disaster.
		It's a powder keg.
		And so it's the left and this core contradiction that they have between a welfare state on one hand and their celebration of heterogeneous populations on the other.
		Welfare state and diversity, they don't work.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		And that basically puts us where Germany sort of is at right now, right?
		Where they said, okay, three million people, come on in.
		Now all these people are going to have to pay for you.
		We're not going to integrate you properly.
jeffrey tucker ▲ ● ▼		I mean, this is not only... You've got the identitarian movements rising up in Germany and in Hungary and, of course, in Russia and, of course, the U.S., you know.
		So it all just kind of follows.
		It's inevitable.
		The left created this.
		I mean, if after World War II we had just embraced liberalism like we should have, like we should have, we wouldn't be where we are today.
		But we have another chance.
		And that's why you're here and that's why I'm here.
		We have another chance now to re-embrace liberal theory.
		And to reject the left.
		And don't feel yourself, just because the enemy of your enemy is there, it doesn't mean
		it has to be your friend.
		I mean, we really do need to think of ourselves as kind of a dissidence from a political culture
		that rally around freedom and human rights and universal human rights and the ennoblement
		of humanity, the champion of the common person, the rights of everyone to live freely with
		each other, to gain value from each other, to live in peace and stop thinking of our
		fellow human beings as possible enemies.
		We don't want to get drafted into the political world that Carl Schmitt imagined for us.
		As I was describing Carl Schmitt, you see it happening, right?
		That Schmittian view to slice and dice the population.
		Who do you like?
		Who do you hate?
		Who are your people?
		This is not a good life.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, we feel it chopping away at both sides.
jeffrey tucker ▲ ● ▼		Yeah, we do.
		We feel it.
		And so we don't, I just don't feel like we have to be part of it.
		I mean, as best we can, let's find things we love, you know, go places we love, be with people we love of all different backgrounds, all different kind of cultures, learn about alternative religions, learn about new ways to do things, travel, right?
		In the age of liberalism, there were no such things as passports, you know?
		Beautiful.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		All right, so let's spend the last portion here on just these last five years really here in America.
		Because I remember just even, it doesn't have to be the last five years, but let's say even three years ago, just at sort of the emergence of Trump as a candidate, when people started saying the phrase alt-right.
		And I did a bunch of videos on it where I was basically saying I see two strains to this thing.
		And people are now using this video against me.
		And what I saw was there was the sort of fun meme makers and all of the people who were having fun online,
		often doing awful things and Nazi imagery just to upset people in power and whatever,
		but sometimes very fun things too and funny things.
		But I saw just the real sort of shit posters, as they're known, and the Pepe people.
		The whole idea was we could start sending a frog to some intellectual and they're gonna think
		that's a racist thing and then they would say, I'm being under attack from racists.
		They would actually give them exactly what they wanted.
		So I saw this sort of fun shitposting whatever part of it, not to say it didn't have elements I didn't like, but I saw that as the bulk of it.
		And then alongside of that was this that you're talking about, the identitarian part, the true racist part, the part that had been sort of underground for a long time and then because of social media now is finding that it could Actually influence people and be powerful.
		And I think the media really fueled both of those things because basically when Hillary said that deplorables comment, she just lumped the whole damn thing together.
		And I think if she had not said that, I think it's very possible she'd be president.
jeffrey tucker ▲ ● ▼		She helped the cause.
jeffrey tucker ▲ ● ▼		She almost made the alt-right exist.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		My question really is, how would you just define the alt-right?
		Flat out, if I asked you right now, because I think the definition has changed a little bit.
		But if I ask you right now, in the summer of 2018, what the definition of alt-right is?
jeffrey tucker ▲ ● ▼		The phrase alt-right comes about, what, ten years ago?
		I think it was coined by Paul Gottfried, who himself is a follower of Kaushmet.
		I would rather look at this as a right Hegelian collectivist movement, in general, that stretches from the early 19th century all the way up to the present.
		It's characterized by a love of dictatorship, a love of power, protectionist trade policy, nativist immigration policy, and a resentment against commercial life because it's too heterogeneous and too ennobling of humanity.
		I mean, to me, the alt-right is one species, I guess you could say, one flavoring, one instantiation of a much larger problem that stretches way back, which is an illiberal theory of life, a liberal theory of politics.
		So that's, I think, the right way to think about it.
		The first time I heard Trump speak was July 2015, and I don't even think we were using the term "alt-right"
		at the time.
		But he opened his speech with "immigrants are a problem."
		I thought, hmm.
		Then it was protection, the foreign goods, protections, we need protections.
		And I thought, hmm.
		And his third big point was, I can fix everything.
		I thought, oof.
		This is all sounding strangely familiar to me.
		You know?
		That's, that's like the three pillars of right Hegelian ideology, essentially.
		And I realized we had a problem.
		And I understand, I do, why people had a high regard for him.
		He was going to save us.
		from the problems that Obama had created.
		And God knows those problems.
		And the left has gotten just bonkers, right?
		So we need protection from that.
		But he introduced his own form of problems.
		And he unleashed its own form of dangers and potentially very despotic arrangements of power.
		And in some ways they're more insidious, because they appeal to bourgeoisie.
		The left has always been a little bit culturally estranged, you know, from the mainstream of American life, whereas Trump connects very closely with it.
		This is why fascist movements have been oftentimes much more successful than left socialist ones.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		Wait, I gotta get this, because I would have thought the opposite.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		So if you would have asked me before you said that, I would say the left is the one that has understood the culture part of this, at least in the American, Certainly, academia and culture, what you could and couldn't joke about.
jeffrey tucker ▲ ● ▼		Sure, sure, sure, but that's high culture.
		As Hayek said, socialist ideology never came from below.
		It was never a working man's philosophy.
		It was always the intellectuals.
		It was a top-down rule.
		It was always the ruling class that hatched socialist ideology.
		There never would have been communism, socialism, all these things, without the intellectual class.
		But fascism, if you'll allow me to use that term, kind of flips the narrative a little bit.
		It's much more of a from below.
		It's you can keep your religion, you can keep your nationhood, your identity, your race, your language, rally around your friends, your family, you know, all the things that you believe are true you.
		And within me as a person, as a leader, I will embody all your values.
		and collectivize us in a way that means something important that connects with who you are.
		So in that sense, it's a very effective way of being illiberal.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		All right, so all that said, what is our way out of this precarious position?
		I think I get what you're, I get the theme of what you're doing here
		of is we have to just keep fighting for what we believe in and be better.
jeffrey tucker ▲ ● ▼		Well, so Dave, I think we need to rethink I think we need to deepen.
		And enrich our understanding of who we are and what we're here to do.
		And it goes back centuries.
		I mean, it was the liberalism that dug us out of feudalism, that ended the guilds, that brought us free trade, that ended slavery, that really gave birth to the modern world.
		And we need to learn to take credit for that and make that ethos our ethos.
		Go back and read the works of Adam Smith and the great Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, you know, and and
		understand our history So we understand ourselves better. I think this is
		important because we need to stop thinking of ourselves, even though we are radicals
		I think you are I think I am But I almost believe that we should stop thinking of
		ourselves that way we should think of ourselves as normal If I'm a radical then the phrase radical, it's definitely
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		not as cool as it used to be I mean, I think I'm open to these ideas.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		I guess being open right now and being really living up to the ideals that you've set forth here is radical these days.
jeffrey tucker ▲ ● ▼		It kind of is, and maybe liberalism has always been a radical creed, because it opposes power.
		It always has been opposed to power.
		That's what we have to do now, but we also have to celebrate regular life.
		We have to celebrate the good life, and the beautiful things, and the things we love, the people we love, and the choices that we can make, and the technologies we can use.
		I fall in love with the new technology every single day.
		I came over to see you with this new funny pillow that I bought for $10 on Amazon.
		It allows me to sleep sitting straight up, and I'm enraptured by that!
		I think this is the way to happiness and I think ultimately it's the path to political victory for us too.
		To be more hopeful, to be more cheerful, to celebrate life and celebrate love and celebrate wealth in a way in which neither the left or the right are doing right now.
		It gives us an opening to be awesome.
		To emancipate the world!
		We can do this.
dave rubin ▲ ● ▼		I got nothing better to do.

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