Rubin Report - Dave Rubin - Is Wokeness Pushing More Liberals to the Right? | Sohrab Ahmari | POLITICS | Rubin Report
Aired: 2021-11-05
Duration: 07:06


=== New Coalition Emerges (04:38) ===

[00:00:00]  [MUSIC PLAYING]
[00:00:03]  I'm Zohra Amari, who has left, officially, the New York Post after about a decade.
[00:00:13]  He's building his own media empire.
[00:00:15]  How's that going, building the media empire?
[00:00:18]  I've never had to do payroll before.
[00:00:21]  I've always been an employee, now this new reality, but it's enjoyable.
[00:00:24]  It's very exciting.
[00:00:25]  Yeah, so what exactly are you working on?
[00:00:26]  Sure, so I'm doing it with two other partners.
[00:00:29]  Some of us come from the right, and some of us come from a more leftist milieu.
[00:00:36]  And we want to critique both the existing left and right, because I think they've both failed, and to maybe try to forge a new fusion.
[00:00:43]  And what this conference is about is trying to piece this thing together.
[00:00:47]  So I guess in the broadest sense, do you think it's even possible to do it?
[00:00:52]  I think a new kind of coalition has to emerge.
[00:00:58]  I've used the term the new right, and that includes traditional conservatives.
[00:01:03]  It includes nationalists and national conservatives.
[00:01:08]  It includes a kind of pure Trumpian populist as well.
[00:01:11]  And I would even add various people exiled from the left.
[00:01:16]  All of these people, you know, we're not going to agree on everything, but we share a critique.
[00:01:22]  isn't working.
[00:01:23]  There is a dystopian quality to life in the United States and across the West.
[00:01:29]  And I think it tends to work for an elite.
[00:01:32]  It increasingly doesn't work for ordinary people.
[00:01:34]  They want economic stability.
[00:01:37]  They want a measure of cultural normality, I would say.
[00:01:40]  And I think out of that, it is possible.
[00:01:42]  You can, you know, ferociously disagree about what comes next.
[00:01:46]  And out of that, engagement possible to forge a new coalition.
[00:01:52]  So the elements are there.
[00:01:53]  As someone that comes from the more religious side of this, how do you say to the purely secular people,
[00:02:00]  you can fit in?
[00:02:00]  I think it's something that you said, Dave, at your remarks here earlier,
[00:02:05]  where you said that freedom without ends, in a sense, what are we fighting for, has left us here.
[00:02:13]  An idea of the kind of liberalism that rejects any kind of moral authority,
[00:02:21]  or any account of what makes people happy.
[00:02:24]  What it means to build a society where people flourish.
[00:02:26]  If you reject that, you go down a dark place.
[00:02:31]  And ideologies like wokeism, in a way, are prepared to It has a moral account.
[00:02:39]  Now, you and I think it's a correct account, but it is a moral vision, and so it cannot be met with mere individual rights type discourse.
[00:02:48]  It has to be met with a truer account of who the human person is, and religious conservatives play a role in that.
[00:02:56]  Um, and they can play well with that, not spray drawing on revelation, but just reason alone, right?
[00:03:01]  Reason as the classical understood it has a much bigger account.
[00:03:05]  Okay, who's the human person?
[00:03:07]  How does he fit into a cosmos?
[00:03:09]  That sort of stuff, I think.
[00:03:11]  Again, without bringing the Bible into the picture, is where, you know, seculars can meet conservatives like me, religious conservatives like me.
[00:03:23]  Yeah.
[00:03:23]  Are you shocked that it's happening?
[00:03:25]  It seems like it really is happening.
[00:03:26]  I mean, the fact that you and I find common cause in all of this.
[00:03:30]  People would ask me this a few years ago when things look especially, well, things continue to look great.
[00:03:37]  But what's going to happen?
[00:03:40]  Do you have any optimism?
[00:03:42]  And the answer I would give is that the very miserableness of our current social economic arrangement, that will awaken people.
[00:03:54]  They have to ask themselves, there must be something more to our common life together.
[00:03:58]  It can't just be this.
[00:04:02]  With the particular formation that it took?
[00:04:04]  No.
[00:04:04]  I didn't know.
[00:04:04]  I couldn't predict that.
[00:04:05]  But a sense that some liberals, some leftists would break.
[00:04:12]  I thought I saw that coming.
[00:04:14]  So, you live in New York.
[00:04:15]  Yeah.
[00:04:16]  I live, at least for now, in California.
[00:04:18]  We are here in the free state of Florida.
[00:04:21]  Do you sense that, regardless of whether we can put this coalition together or not, that the states are just going to keep drifting apart?

=== Defending National Power (02:42) ===

[00:04:28]  Which, in many ways, is sort of how it's supposed to be.
[00:04:31]  That's sort of what the founders wanted, in some sense.
[00:04:34]  See, I don't like that.
[00:04:35]  I don't like any kind of pseudo-secessionist thoughts, I think.
[00:04:38]  I didn't say I like it.
[00:04:40]  No, I know.
[00:04:40]  It just sort of is what it is.
[00:04:43]  Well, we have to aim...
[00:04:48]  For national power.
[00:04:52]  They're not going to leave us alone in states where, for example, the regime is more sane.
[00:04:57]  They can muscle through what their will, both at the federal level, but also because often their power is corporate power.
[00:05:05]  It's private power.
[00:05:07]  And so as long as they have that, we don't have a countervailing power.
[00:05:10]  So I just say, you know, it's not going to last.
[00:05:14]  Either they're going to take over the whole or we're going to take over the whole.
[00:05:17]  Right.
[00:05:17]  What do you make of this Virginia situation tomorrow?
[00:05:19]  I see this as a huge bellwether moment.
[00:05:21]  Like, it's crazy that I have to care about a Virginia gubernatorial election.
[00:05:25]  It shouldn't be that way.
[00:05:26]  But for the purposes you're talking about, it's sort of all or nothing in a weird way.
[00:05:30]  I think this is huge, huge.
[00:05:31]  It's like, if we can get a win here, it signals to people we're going to really push back against critical race theory.
[00:05:37]  We're going to start caring about, you know, parents are allowed to care about their kids again.
[00:05:41]  And if we don't win, it's just more ash on the heap right now.
[00:05:47]  I think it's a very crucial race because it will confirm this theory or not, which is that liberals in their aggression went...
[00:05:58]  Pick one too many battles and pick the battle where it's things are very very sensitive and that is people's children.
[00:06:05]  Yeah.
[00:06:05]  Even people who don't think like me don't like the thought of their kids being targeted for gender ideology and transitioning without them having a say in it or being told that because of the color of their skin they're inherently either a victim or a permanent oppressor class.
[00:06:22]  People don't like that and I think it is a good bet to think You know, this is where the fight back begins.
[00:06:29]  And it's so appropriate because family, children are the fundamental unit of political community.
[00:06:35]  And so in defending it, you're defending the whole as it were.
[00:06:39]  So do you want to make an official prediction?
[00:06:42]  No, I'm not.
[00:06:44]  I don't follow polls.
[00:06:45]  I have no idea.
[00:06:45]  All right.
[00:06:46]  Well, I think we should leave it there because we're going to pick this up tonight for a good half hour or so.
[00:06:50]  Previewed our discussion.
[00:06:54]  If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about politics instead of nonstop yelling, check out our politics playlist.
[00:07:00]  And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, watch our full episode playlist all right over here.