May 15, 2022 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| It used to be that, I would say after World War II, there was a very, very strong impulse in America and across Europe to say, look, liberalism is all we, it's all we need. | ||
| People, you know, private people will make the decisions about, you know, where the guardrails should be, what the constraints should be. | ||
| And I, you know, maybe that made sense to a lot of people then. | ||
| I think at this point we've reached the point where, you know, we're looking across America and across Europe and I think, I mean, I think it's scary. | ||
| I think you can see the chaos coming. | ||
| Yoram Hazony, welcome back to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Hi, Dave. | ||
| Thanks for having me back. | ||
| It's good to see you, my friend. | ||
| I sense by that background you are not in the Holy Land, but perhaps a slightly less Holy Land at the moment. | ||
| I'm here in DC. | ||
| I actually wanted to be with you in Florida, but you guys didn't have room in the studio for me or something, so I'm in DC. | ||
| We've been very busy. | ||
| I just got back from tour. | ||
| You're on the short list of people I would have been willing to have here at the house. | ||
| But let's dive right into the book, because first off, I've got it in my hand. | ||
| This is a dense, powerful book full of a whole bunch of the ideas that you've been talking about. | ||
| For really decades at this point, but I want to read just the first paragraph off the back flap here because I think you say something very interesting that I think is the thing that sort of connects both of us. | ||
| You say, conservatism as we know it has failed. | ||
| While liberalism was eroding the foundations of our culture, the family, the nation, and religion, conservatives adopted the very principles that ensured their defeat. | ||
| Routinely confused with classical liberalism, conservatism found itself defenseless before a ferocious and relentless foe. | ||
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All right. | |
| Now, you know I'm Mr. Classical Liberal. | ||
| I think I helped bring that phrase back into the American lexicon, but you also know that I have found faults within the liberal lens. | ||
| We've discussed them before, and we've discussed them at NatCon, actually, just a couple months back here in Florida. | ||
| So, what brings you... Well, first let me let you define conservatism, and how it's different than classical liberalism, and then we'll go from there. | ||
| OK, well, conservatism puts—conservatism's an Anglo-American political tradition. | ||
| It goes back many centuries, long before Burke. | ||
| And it's a tradition that puts the idea of transmission and stability of the nation at the center. | ||
| So a conservative is always going to be asking questions like, have we upheld the You know, the main principles, traditions that are holding our people together, you know, that can't go on forever. | ||
| There's always deterioration. | ||
| There's always things that change. | ||
| And then a conservative is going to be looking back when, you know, when something starts to fall apart and saying, what can we restore? | ||
| What can we go back to that used to work, that we really need and are sorry that we've lost? | ||
| So I think a lot of people are hearing that, and that's pretty clean and clear that, you know, there were some hard-fought things of the past that we should remember and perhaps bring back into our daily lives. | ||
| Does classical liberalism not grab a hold of all of that? | ||
| What's the problem there? | ||
| Classical liberalism is something that is based on, like if you take a look at the big thinkers of the Enlightenment, the rationalist thinkers of the Enlightenment who originally designed this, liberalism is a set of principles that begin with every human being is by nature free, perfectly free and perfectly equal, And the purpose of government is to give the individual, to protect the rights and equalities that belong to the individual by nature. | ||
| So the entire set of ideas that are at the basis of liberalism They're basically, you know, lots of people said this, they're basically, they are a philosophy of freedom. | ||
| They're a way of thinking about how do we work it so that people are maximally free and unconstrained. | ||
| And the problem is, and this is something very deep and very serious that I really think we need to be talking about much more, is that human beings do not only need freedom by nature. | ||
| And if you think human beings only need freedom, then I think you've got a mistaken and misleading philosophy. | ||
| Human beings need to be constrained. | ||
| They need to have guardrails and guidelines. | ||
| They need to be encouraged to do the things that are needed in order to keep their society, their people, their families, to keep it going. | ||
| And it used to be that, I would say after World War II, there was a very, very strong impulse in America and across Europe to say, look, liberalism is all we, it's all we need. | ||
| People, you know, private people will make the decisions about, you know, where the guardrails should be, what the constraints should be. | ||
| And I, you know, maybe that made sense to a lot of people then. | ||
| I think at this point, we've reached the point where, you know, we're looking across America and across Europe. | ||
| And I think, I mean, I think it's scary. | ||
| I think you can see the chaos coming. | ||
| The people, the assumption of liberalism is let people argue and be free, freely speak and freely argue, and they'll come to the right decisions. | ||
| But I would say, since 2020, we're looking at an America that is tottering on having the woke neo-Marxist ideology become kind of like the public ideology of the state. | ||
| And if you look on the edges of the political right, beyond conservatism, there's fast-growing Thinkers, I mean, that a lot of the kids are reading, who are arguing for dictatorship. | ||
| They're just saying, look, the whole idea of the American Constitution has failed, and they're looking to dictatorship. | ||
| So I think it's becoming really, really clear that if we don't start talking about conservation and transmission and restoration, like a lot, and focusing on it, I think America is in danger and I think it's in danger of taking like all the democratic countries with it. | ||
| All right, so you're hitting on a lot of the stuff that obviously I focus on, | ||
| and I'm proud to say that at the end of my first book, Don't Burn This Book, I made an argument | ||
| related to God and belief, connecting some of the classic liberal beliefs to that, | ||
| because I saw what you're now talking about. | ||
| I sort of saw it on the horizon that we could get to this point. | ||
| So first, do you think, is that a flaw in liberalism, or is that a flaw in human nature, | ||
| or is there even a distinction there in that from say World War II till about, | ||
| I don't know, maybe five, 10 years ago. | ||
| The liberal order sort of worked, right? | ||
| Or, I don't want to put words in your mouth. | ||
| In my estimation, it sort of worked, and then suddenly this woke parasite got inside. | ||
| But would you say that it roughly worked for a certain amount of decades? | ||
| Well, I think it's been running down. | ||
| Look, I think 2020 was a shocking year in terms of just institutions all the way from the New York Times to Princeton University just being taken over. | ||
| I think it was a shocking year. | ||
| And I don't want to say that it was obvious that was going to happen. | ||
| But I think, as I write in this new book, I think the deterioration has been really clear, almost a straight line since the 1960s, even the 1940s. | ||
| The 1960s is when there's this final decision that the United States is going to ban God, religious tradition, prayer, Bible, just ban it outright, more or less, from schools across the country. | ||
| And the theory behind it was people said, look, we live in a Christian country. | ||
| Overwhelming majority of people are Christian. | ||
| We can be tolerant and decent to other people, but basically It's a Christian country, so we don't have to have this stuff in the schools. | ||
| And I think pretty much since then, the assumption that you could just take God and Scripture out of the schools and it would continue to live, like, you know, on Sundays and in people's homes, I think that turned out not to be true. | ||
| And what happened is, first, in the name of equality, You know, and freedom from religion, and everybody being treated equal. | ||
| All religion was removed from the schools. | ||
| God and scripture. | ||
| And after that, then, you know, the idea of an independent nation, or of the family, ended up kind of being eliminated from the schools. | ||
| And by this point, even the idea of man and woman being the basis of the traditional family, that's also now, in the name of equality and freedom from religion, that's also been eliminated. | ||
| So as I understand it, it's been a one-way ratchet where every 10 years something else | ||
| that we will sorely miss has been removed. | ||
| And people just don't know what to do with it. | ||
| I mean, I really think an awful lot of people in America and other countries are saying, | ||
| look, this is just the fall of the Roman Empire. | ||
| This is just the end. | ||
| You can't remove every single basic building block of the way we built society, throw it away, open it to question, and then think that there's going to be anything but chaos. | ||
| That's pretty much what looks like it's coming. | ||
| Right, chaos seems to be at our doorstep. | ||
| So do you think secular institutions simply cannot work at all? | ||
| I mean, basically what you're saying is, well, I guess everything is going to degrade over time, right? | ||
| Everything degrades over time. | ||
| The question is, are you helping it degrade, or are you working for a restoration where you can see that a mistake has been made, so you can act to try to stop it? | ||
| Look, Dave, I'm a religious person. | ||
| In the end, I, you know, in the end I think we have to do what looks right to us the best we can. | ||
| In the end we're really bad at seeing the future and what's going to happen is going to, you know, God decides in the end what's going to come of all of our efforts. | ||
| But we have an obligation to try to restore things, you know, to try to restore respect for the American Constitution and the Anglo-American Legal tradition. | ||
| We have to try to restore respect for the traditional family and for the Bible and for God. | ||
| That's up to us to try to do and maybe it'll work. | ||
| So I think a certain amount of people are watching this, and what they may not know is on the other side of that very fine head of hair, my friend, is a yarmulke back there. | ||
| You are an Orthodox Jew, you live in Jerusalem, and yet here you are talking about Anglo beliefs, Christian America, things like that. | ||
| I was on a panel with you at NatCon where we were trying to sort of It was the two of us and Sourabh Amari, who I've had on the show, and Douglas Murray, who I've had on many times, trying to sort of whittle out where, if you were to go back to some of what you're calling for in a national conservative country, what happens to the minorities? | ||
| What happens to the religious minorities? | ||
| What happens to people that don't necessarily prescribe to all of the sort of religious set of views that you're including here? | ||
| So what do we do with that? | ||
| Okay, well, the book deals with two different fronts. | ||
| One is the question you're asking me now, which is about the public life of the country, and the other part of the book deals with our private lives, because people tend to think these things are unrelated. | ||
| I think they're Deeply connected. | ||
| And so the book is really an argument for people to drop the idea that you can just argue for conservative policy. | ||
| I think that you have to also lead a conservative life. | ||
| You have to come back to a conservative life and be a conservative person. | ||
| So there are those two things. | ||
| Now when I talk about conservative democracy, I'm talking about a democracy, right? | ||
| I'm talking about, you know, the kind of democracy that America was. | ||
| Sure, there's some things from the past that we should never go back to. | ||
| I mean, you know, slavery and persecution of blacks in America just as, like, the most obvious example. | ||
| I don't know any conservative that wants to go back to that. | ||
| In fact, in my book I make the argument that that was a A deviation from the Anglo-American tradition, which for a very long time was anti-slavery before there were slaves in America. | ||
| But since I'm arguing for democracy, I'm still talking about the political framework where this should not be imposed on anybody. | ||
| We're talking about those states that still have a Christian majority, You know, or let's say, I mean, maybe there's Orthodox Jews who would support this kind of thing, or others. | ||
| So those states, those regions, those places, where there's still a desire to lead a democratic life, but where the public philosophy, let's say, is not Neo-Marxism. | ||
| The public philosophy is going to be based on a biblical vision, on a Christian and Jewish vision. | ||
| And my assumption is that anybody who actually wants to do this, I'm not just assuming it, I mean, this is what I, you know, I talk to Catholics and Protestants and Jews, I mean, I talk to them and try to understand people from all over the country, what's possible. | ||
| And I believe that there is a, that people looking at sort of the cliff that America's just hurtling towards this cliff and about to go over, I think an awful lot of people, Protestants, Catholics, and Jews, and others, would be willing to negotiate some kind of a return of, let's say, the basic Christian moral vision to be like the public background against which things operate in some places. | ||
| I mean in some states in the U.S. | ||
| and I think The conservative way to do this is, you know, not to have the Supreme Court, you know, dictate this to people who don't want it. | ||
| The conservative way to do it is to experiment with it in those places that want it so that we can see what does this, you know, what does this add up to? | ||
| Instead of, like, you know, saying, well, you know, Christians were always terrible throughout their history. | ||
| Let's see what the Christian, which I don't believe, by the way, but instead of that kind of, like, you know, argument in the air, we should Do an experiment. | ||
| Let's see. | ||
| What are the Christians in America when they get to be like the public culture in a few states, what do they do? | ||
| If it's better, and I'm guessing it's going to be better, if it's better, so people want to move there and other states will adopt it. | ||
| And if it's as terrible as everybody's always saying, to let the Christians, where they're a majority, to let them have the public, if it's so awful, so we'll see that it's awful and we'll say, okay, we tried that, that didn't work, let's do something else. | ||
| So do you see something like what's going on here in Florida, where I think we're defending almost everything you're talking about, but not from the religious perspective, in that the governor is not up there talking about this stuff from a religious perspective. | ||
| However, he's doing a lot of the work that I think you're calling for. | ||
| He is acknowledging differences biologically between boys and girls and getting rid of critical race theory out of the schools, and he's fighting against a constantly overreaching federal government and all those things. | ||
| I think I sense that you still think that that may not be enough for the experiment as you want it. | ||
| Is that right? | ||
| No, I don't think it's enough because, I mean, the basic problem is that, you know, for many years Most liberal scholars and professors who talked about this kind of thing, theorists, they talked about liberalism as a neutral state, like a state that wouldn't actually have any kind of moral vision. | ||
| It would just be neutral and let everybody do what they want. | ||
| This book argues, and I'm certainly not the only one, but I'm arguing there is no such thing as a neutral state. | ||
| You can try it, but it continues to be mostly Christian values up until the moment that it just falls apart and you suddenly realize that it's anti-Christian. | ||
| And I think that's what's happening in America and in Britain and other places, too, is that there is a public philosophy, but that public philosophy is progressive, woke neo-Marxism. | ||
| And I know that there are a lot of good liberals Who they want to hold on to the idea of, well, let's just go back to a neutral state. | ||
| And I think they just don't understand that that's collapsed. | ||
| And it hasn't collapsed by accident. | ||
| It's collapsed because of the fact that when you're saying, no, the state is neutral, we don't have to defend any particular set of values, when you say that, Then you just open the door for the Marxists to take over. | ||
| The only way you can fight a serious public religion or public philosophy is with another public philosophy. | ||
| So I get it. | ||
| I get you on the liberal part. | ||
| I say, you know, I talk about Bill Maher all the time where the five remaining sane liberals in America, they just are sort of in this slow motion paralysis. | ||
| And two years later, they get it. | ||
| They repeat what a bunch of us say, but they keep voting for the wrong people. | ||
| So I'm with you on that. | ||
| But what would you say is that is not enough? | ||
| For, say, what Ron DeSantis is doing in Florida. | ||
| I mean, I can tell you, from living here for four months, I'm living in a free state that feels strong and defended, and it is starkly different than California, which made all of the wrong decisions and went that route. | ||
| Well, I think the number one thing is that sending kids to schools Where five days a week or whatever it is, they spend their time in an environment that is stripped of any reference to God or to the Bible as the basis of Western civilization. | ||
| The Bible is the fundamental text on which Western tradition was built. | ||
| I think that that doesn't work. | ||
| I try to go into the psychology of all of this and how it actually works because I think people don't understand this. | ||
| If you want anything You know, young people are always saying, what do you mean conservative? | ||
| Conservatives don't conserve anything, right? | ||
| You've heard that. | ||
| I mean, people say that all the time. | ||
| It's like, what have conservatives succeeded in conserving in the last 50 years? | ||
| And I think we have to take that argument seriously, that there's a constant role in cultural revolution. | ||
| And the reason for the constant rolling cultural revolution, which just rips up one thing after another, is because of the fact nobody's focused on how does the transmission, the conservation of ideas actually work. | ||
| And for the way it actually works, is that if you're a kid and you see that the people around you give honor to something, let's say the Bible, they give honor to it. | ||
| They say, look, this is really important. | ||
| Now I'm not talking about them saying, you have to believe this, or if you don't believe this, then you're a terrible person. | ||
| I'm talking about something much more basic. | ||
| That if you're in an environment where people are giving honor, they say, look, this constitution is, you know, the best that, you know, that there's been in the world. | ||
| And this scripture is the best moral framework for leading your life that there's ever been. | ||
| When you hear that from people you respect, your mind opens up. | ||
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Right? | |
| Everybody's always saying, oh, your mind closes. | ||
| That's not my experience. | ||
| If people are saying, look, this is just really important, you should take a look at it, your mind opens up to learning. | ||
| And right now, in America and lots of other places, I mean, this is true for most of Europe, this is true for most democratic countries, The kids, the adults, people's brains are snapped shut like a trap. | ||
| Somebody starts talking about Bible and they think, oh, that's that primitive dark ages stuff that we got rid of. | ||
| People are scared of it. | ||
| They just think you must be some kind of idiot for talking about this stuff. | ||
| And as long as the Bible continues to be under this shadow, instead of being this spectacular document that created the world we live in, Instead of that, people just keep saying, oh, that's the dark ages. | ||
| So the disintegration of what used to be America, like, it's inevitable. | ||
| You pulled all of the, you know, the vacuum tubes out of the back of the television. | ||
| I mean, that's like I'm dating myself. | ||
| You pulled all the... Sorry about that. | ||
| The HDMI wire? | ||
| Right, you pulled all the... The red and the yellow. | ||
| Yeah, you know the little square things in the back? | ||
| You pulled them out and you stepped on them. | ||
| You get what I'm saying? | ||
| And then you're surprised the thing stops working. | ||
| So you got to get it working again. | ||
| And to get it working again, we need to be able to give honor to those things that allowed our ancestors to create a free and constrained and decent society. | ||
| So I hate to keep bringing this back to Florida, but you know that it's really just on my mind these days, and I'm so impressed with what's going on here. | ||
| So I think I sense what you're saying is basically, Florida's doing a pretty darn good job. | ||
| You'd like to see the re-institution of some religious teaching in school. | ||
| You do make a carve-out for, let's say, the non-believers or people of minority religions, et cetera, et cetera. | ||
| But is that it? | ||
| I mean, is that basically the only thing that you think is going wrong? | ||
| Because to me, what's happening here right now at a secular level, and I don't even think it's purely at a secular level, DeSantis doesn't talk about religion a lot as far as I know, but he's talking about reality, and I think his reality is based in something. | ||
| Yeah, look, I like DeSantis and I like what he's doing, but I think that what's sort of missing from the conversation is a longer view. | ||
| That's what I'm asking, yeah. | ||
| Because everything that's going on right now is mostly reactive. | ||
| It's reacting against the excesses of woke neo-Marxism. | ||
| And God bless them for doing that. | ||
| And the legislature, and Chris Ruffo, and all the people who are working at the grassroots level, God bless them. | ||
| They really are trying to save their country, and I hope they succeed. | ||
| But we're at the very, very beginning of this. | ||
| And what's actually going to happen is, As Christian activists like Rufo start to just look beyond, just reacting and trying to get the worst of the stuff out of the schools, you're going to find out that that's not enough to transmit anything. | ||
| It's just not. | ||
| I mean, the schools without the woke stuff from 15 years ago, that's how we got here. | ||
| In other words, the way that we got to the mess that we're in now is that 15 and 20 years ago everything was run by liberals. | ||
| And so I'm just trying to look just a little bit beyond the horizon. | ||
| And no, I don't think it's just a matter of education. | ||
| But I don't want to speak for... Look, I think there's going to be a number of different states and countries and they're going to try different things. | ||
| So, some of those things could be. | ||
| They could be Sabbath laws. | ||
| some people might want to try having Sabbath laws. | ||
| There could be legislation about what the family is. | ||
| I mean, that's just not smart leadership. | ||
| I mean, it could be all sorts of things. | ||
| And I think a smart governor or leader, what he would do is he would say, look, I don't | ||
| want to take the most controversial stuff and like try to force it on people. | ||
| I mean, that's just not smart leadership. | ||
| I think that in every state what will happen is conservative leadership will say, what | ||
| are the kinds of things that we have a majority and they can get behind this and they think | ||
| that this could make sense. | ||
| And they'll try different things and they'll see what can work and they'll do experiments. | ||
| So would your argument, let's say they do this in Alabama, would your argument then be, well, you're in the free United States, that then if you don't like what's going on there, whether it's Sabbath laws or whether it's related to the traditional family, and I do want to obviously discuss a little more on that, that you should just get up and get going to California? | ||
| Yeah, why not? | ||
| I mean look, if you want to know why there are borders, like why do we divide the world up into countries and states and municipalities with borders? | ||
| The reason we do that is because we assume, if we're not totally insane, then we assume that Local people close to the ground, they know what their people can want and what they can put up with and what's best for them. | ||
| Now, that's obviously not always true, but it's more likely to be true than some distant emperor who's dictating everything to everybody. | ||
| Right. | ||
| This is very much what your first book was about, by the way. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| So that's the reason we have borders. | ||
| America was founded as a federal republic. | ||
| And that federalism has, you know, basically since World War II, it's been progressively ruined. | ||
| The National Supreme Court takes away the right of the different states to do any kind of experimentation on major things, on major issues. | ||
| And so part of the program has to be federalism. | ||
| It has to be giving power back to people to try things at the local level. | ||
| And look, nobody ever thinks that everything that their government is doing is the way that they would do it. | ||
| Government is always somebody else and not only that, but it's always like a combination, | ||
| even if you're in government, it's a compromise and it's a combination of things. | ||
| But the bottom line answer is instead of having the national government impose one system | ||
| on everybody. | ||
| Let's go back to the old federalism and let some of these issues, which are just tearing America apart, let some of them be worked on at the state level, at the local level. | ||
| There's some chance that people will hate each other less if they can say, you know, look, I didn't like it in Alabama, so I moved to Massachusetts. | ||
| Look, I can tell you as someone that left California, I don't really care that much about California anymore. | ||
| That's not to say that there aren't good people that live there. | ||
| Of course there are. | ||
| I still have a couple friends that haven't made the move yet. | ||
| California is a beautiful place. | ||
| But unfortunately, the political leadership has chosen its direction, and I just don't want that much to do with it at this point, and they shouldn't have that much to do with me as a citizen of the free state of Florida. | ||
| So before we get into some of the granular stuff on that, Has there ever been a time in the world where a country or a group of people got so close to the precipice, got so close to that chasm, that bottomless pit, and then turned back? | ||
| Or is it just entropy that almost has to take us over at this point? | ||
| Look, there are forces of entropy, that's for sure. | ||
| And even successful traditions, like, you know, I know two traditions really well, pretty well. | ||
| I know the Jewish tradition, which is like 3,000 years old, and I know this Anglo-American tradition, which is about 1,000 years old. | ||
| And what's really clear when you study these long traditions is that they run down And then, you know, like a great, there's like a restoration, there's like a great man or a group of great people who say, we see the precipice coming and we gotta restore it, we gotta put it back together again. | ||
| You know, just two obvious examples. | ||
| In English history, and people know that there were, I think most people probably know that in the 1600s, 1640s, there was a revolution, a republican revolution. | ||
| They killed the king and they tried to have a republic, to revise the English constitution. | ||
| That went on for, I don't know, 15 years or something. | ||
| And it didn't work. | ||
| It didn't work. | ||
| They kept changing the Constitution. | ||
| They couldn't get any kind of cohesive solidity back to their country. | ||
| And less than 20 years went by, this guy Matthew Hale, who's like a famous conservative thinker who's in my book, he proposed, let's bring the king back. | ||
| And they brought the king back and the settlement that they ended up with was a more moderate constitutional monarchy than what they had before. | ||
| An example that's closer to Americans is the American Constitution of 1787. | ||
| You know, people think of, and I read about this at some length in the new book, people think of the American Constitution like, you know, like they declared independence and they wrote the Constitution, there was like this miracle, and then they just got it right. | ||
| But that's not what happened, that's almost the opposite of what happened. | ||
| What actually happened is that in 1777 the Americans tried to step away from the Anglo tradition. | ||
| They wrote a constitution, which is called the Articles of the Confederation, is what we call it today. | ||
| But it was a constitution. | ||
| And George Washington and his forces tried to fight a war against Britain under that constitution. | ||
| It was a weak constitution. | ||
| Its purpose was liberty. | ||
| Its purpose was to give as much freedom as possible. | ||
| But it didn't give anybody enough strength to be able to do things like raising an army, raising taxes, being able to impose a negotiated treaty with another country, being able to impose on the states the terms of the treaty. | ||
| And after 11 years of this chaos, I mean, the American army was moved to Georgetown by people writing personal checks as a donation because the country was so weak. | ||
| And Washington came out of this and he said, We need something like the English government, like the British government. | ||
| We need some kind of strong central government that protects freedom, but it has the ability to raise an army, raise taxes, impose decisions where necessary. | ||
| And that's how the American Constitution was born. | ||
| It's a restoration of the constitutional tradition of Anglo-Americans, and that restoration was because they | ||
| thought we're going over the precipice. | ||
| If you just think for one second, like, if they hadn't been able to get private donations | ||
| to get the army to Yorktown, I mean, they just could have lost the war. | ||
| It's interesting because I've been saying on my show for a couple of weeks now that | ||
| we've begun to enter a post-woke world. | ||
| I do see a fight against the woke movement, the Marxism that you're talking about, and you're talking about checks being sent. | ||
| To keep the army going and, you know, Elon Musk buying Twitter, one federal judge reversing the mask mandate, individual people trying for that restoration is an interesting, is the most American thing perhaps that you could possibly do. | ||
| So let's let's link this to something a little more recent. | ||
| So at the National Conservatism Conference, which was at the end of October, Twenty twenty one. | ||
| You, me, Saurabh Amari, who I mentioned earlier, and Douglas Murray, we're all on a panel where we were trying to do just what we've been discussing here, that we were trying to piece together. | ||
| How do you take the traditional sort of religious conservative perspective? | ||
| Where do you blend that with the classical liberal perspective? | ||
| How do you take a purely secular libertarian and even the more traditional conservative? | ||
| How do you take all of this, combine all of these people with all of their difference, make it into something that's whole? | ||
| And what was particularly interesting about the conversation, which we'll link to below so people can see it, Is that two of the four panelists up there happen to be gay. | ||
| Now that obviously is a minority from a sexuality perspective, let's say. | ||
| And we were really trying to hash through these issues in about an hour and a half talk and nothing was left on the table and we took questions from everybody. | ||
| Where do you see that now? | ||
| And I don't know that, I don't think we all got to a full conclusion on it exactly. | ||
| I think Saurabh and Douglas definitely had some big disagreements by the end. | ||
| But where do you fall on that? | ||
| Look, I'm glad that we did the experiment. | ||
| And not only that, but I'd like to keep trying to do the experiment because I think the reality is that there's all these liberal refugees who are, you know, they're moving to the right because they can see something terrible is happening on the left. | ||
| Oh, I saw it. | ||
| These, you know, and Elon Musk, I don't know if you saw, I mean, he tweeted this, you know, this image. | ||
| Oh, I saw it. | ||
| We played it on the show. | ||
| Right, so I think a lot of people feel like that. | ||
| He says, look, I've never been anything but a liberal, but now I'm clearly on the right. | ||
| It's not that I've moved, but the spectrum has moved. | ||
| It's being pulled like taffy by the revolutionaries. | ||
| And so he sees himself now as being part of the right. | ||
| But look, that's what's happening. | ||
| And what that means is we have no choice. | ||
| There's going to have to be some kind of alliance between conservative and liberals. | ||
| But, you know, that doesn't mean that this is easy to do. | ||
| And I don't, look, I don't think that particular thing worked out so well. | ||
| I mean, Douglas came out of it, and he felt like he needed to write, like, an essay saying, you know, these conservatives, they're too much, they're too far. | ||
| You know, I don't know if you saw that, but he, like, two weeks after, he... Yeah, I've had Douglas on my show since, and we discussed, yeah. | ||
| OK, so that was him. | ||
| And then Saurabh responded to him by saying, I just don't see how this can work. | ||
| And look, I'm not, you know, I'm not like, you know, terribly surprised. | ||
| But that tension that you're talking about, I get it exists and that's why I mean for years I've been saying if there is some sort of new conservative movement on the horizon I still no matter what at the end of the day will probably end up on the more libertarian side of it or classically liberal side of it. | ||
| I think we're all trying to do something that's That's tough. | ||
| And when you try to do something that's tougher, as Jordan Peterson would say when we were on tour all the time, you know, that healthy tension that perhaps we all want between liberalism and conservatism, it's hard to balance that all the time. | ||
| And maybe it just can't be done. | ||
| Maybe it can't be done at a national level. | ||
| I think perhaps it could be done at a personal level. | ||
| You're a model in what you just said, right? | ||
| That people can disagree, and in the end of the day, we ought to be able to just go have scotch together. | ||
| And I do everything I can to live like that myself. | ||
| And in that, I'm following the way that you talk to people in the studio. | ||
| I mean, I really think that discussion should be And by the way, removing me from the equation, if there's a conservative out there, a religious conservative, who thinks that Douglas Murray is not a good enough conservative for them, then that's not my brand of conservatism. | ||
| How about that? | ||
| To remove us from the equation for a moment. | ||
| Douglas is a little bit different because Douglas doesn't claim to be a conservative. | ||
| He doesn't claim to be a nationalist. | ||
| He comes to the conferences and he says things like, you know, I probably agree with one third of the things that are being stated here. | ||
| So he deflates, he participates, he's a great friend, he participates fully, but he doesn't He doesn't take a leadership role among conservatives the way that you do. | ||
| And I'm not blaming you for this. | ||
| I mean, I think everybody has just been really happy to have somebody like you taking leadership. | ||
| And I think it's hit a bump and I don't, you know, I regret that. | ||
| I'm really sorry about that, but I'm looking forward to the scotch. | ||
| Yeah, listen, I probably can't solve all of the existential issues for all of the people | ||
| that come at this from a purely religious perspective, and I think it's a great challenge | ||
| to blend a society from a traditional and religious perspective that also has an awful | ||
| lot of secular people in it. | ||
| Although you happen to be in the swamp right now, you live in a country that's only 70 plus years old, that has done a pretty good job, but often an imperfect job of blending the secular and the traditional. | ||
| And I suppose the best thing we can do is continue to have these conversations. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yoram, the book. | ||
| Is conservatism a rediscovery? | ||
| And we will do that whiskey and or tequila soon, my friend. | ||
| Good seeing you. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Thank you, Dave. | ||
| Good to see you. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about politics instead of nonstop yelling, check out our politics playlist. | ||
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, watch our full episode playlist all right over here. |
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