March 11, 2025 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
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| The US has just given us a masterclass in how to completely change politics. | ||
| The interesting thing is we have just gone from an enormous conservative majority in 2019 with Boris Johnson to an enormous Labour majority with Keir Starmer. | ||
| Now, that itself shows the volatility in the system. | ||
| So people used to say in this country, well, my dad voted Labour, his dad voted Labour, you'll never get an insurgent party breaking through. | ||
| I say, look at Germany, look at Italy, look at France, look at Sweden. | ||
| Everywhere you look, In European nations, disruptors are breaking through. | ||
| Because I think we're not just seeing the re-election of Trump. | ||
| I think what Trump symbolizes is a new chapter in the history of mass democracy. | ||
| It's a new cultural zeitgeist, like counterculture is becoming the culture. | ||
| I think that's fascinating. | ||
| And the old left-right split that shaped politics in the 20th century, I think is now completely making way for this new two-dimensional politics where cultural values are really dominant. | ||
| All right, Matt Goodwin, let's talk about what's going on with the conservatives in this country, because one of the themes that I've talked to a whole bunch of people about since we've been here at ARC is that the conservatives are better than the liberals here, but are not that great and seem incapable of solving problems. but are not that great and seem incapable of solving And of course, now there's Nigel Farage's Reform Party. | ||
| How do you see the landscape there? | ||
| Do you think that's the proper assessment of what's going on with the Conservatives? | ||
| And what does that look like for Americans that maybe don't pay too much attention to the inner workings of British politics? | ||
| Yeah, well, I think Americans should pay a lot of attention because what we've got in the US and the UK is a story about two realignments. | ||
| You've had the post-2016 Trump realignment, which... | ||
| I think the Republicans made the right choice in leaning into that, and then they dominated the system, and they've really reaped the dividend of that. | ||
| And here in Britain, we've had the Tory party, which was really given the same kind of realignment after Brexit, could have expanded into working-class areas, into small towns, medium towns, could have advocated a proper conservative message. | ||
| But they chose not to do that, so then they were decimated. | ||
| At the last election in 2024. So what we've been left with here... | ||
| Why is that? | ||
| Why did they not lean into that? | ||
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I think it's hard for people to believe post-brunson. | |
| Okay, so the thing... | ||
| You guys have this saying, rhinos, Republicans in name only. | ||
| So we have what I would call chinos, conservative in name only. | ||
| The Tory parliamentary party is absolutely obsessed with social status, with not engaging in culture wars, with avoiding anything that might make them look bad on the London dinner party circuit. | ||
| So they were given all of these Brexit voters, right, who were more working class, who were culturally conservative, who said, we want the border secure, we want immigration brought down, we don't believe in this woke stuff that's telling us everything's wrong about British history. | ||
| But the Tories never really knew what to do with that because they're, you know, London set kind of middle class wets, basically. | ||
| They didn't really want to get down with that message. | ||
| So all realignments are about demand and supply. | ||
| We had the demand, you guys had the demand, but you also had the supply with Trump. | ||
| We didn't really have that supply side. | ||
| So that's why now the British Tories are facing this, I would argue, existential threat from Nigel Farage and the Reform Party, which has now replaced them. | ||
| In the national polls. | ||
| And this is, for Americans unfamiliar maybe with British politics or watching from afar, this is really a pivotal moment in the history of our country because you're talking about the most electorally successful political party, the Tories in the history of democracy, being replaced by a party that has 15 full-time members of staff. | ||
| Not really a lot of resource, but is on message when it comes to that realignment. | ||
| But a guy who's on message and goes to the pubs and goes out into crowds with the people and knows how to do that. | ||
| What are the differences between the two parties, actually? | ||
| Beyond just sort of, there seems to be an attitudinal difference, at least. | ||
| Well, I would argue the Tory party is a liberal party. | ||
| So I would argue that Kemi Badenoch, who was speaking here at ARC, it was interesting to me listening to her as she talked about, well, liberalism has got hacked. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Where's the case for conservatism? | ||
| If you take the kind of Yoram Hazoni view of the world, what we need fundamentally in the West is not just a sort of reinvented, recycled liberalism. | ||
| We actually need a new case for conservatism, and we need to make it culturally relevant to new generations. | ||
| And Kemi Badenow, what was interesting, she said, look, we need to control the borders, we need to lower migration. | ||
| But she stopped short of doing things that reform would do, such as leaving the European Convention on Human Rights, which is preventing us from deporting murderers, rapists, killers from our country. | ||
| It's preventing us from controlling our own borders, from stopping the small boat invasion on the southern border. | ||
| From an American perspective, by the way, it's very hard for people to understand that, that you actually cannot do certain things in your own country because of these broader agreements. | ||
| It's insane. | ||
| And the reasons are Americans looking at your southern border. | ||
| Well, you can actually have jurisdiction over that. | ||
| You can have sovereignty over that. | ||
| I could see Trump and others moving to do that. | ||
| We are beholden. | ||
| to supranational conventions and agreements that are stopping us from being able to actually remove foreign offenders from our country and stop those small boats. | ||
| Now, Kemi Badenot will not do what needs to be done on that because fundamentally she's not really a radical. | ||
| She's a Tory and the Tories basically created the managed decline that everybody in Britain sees around them. | ||
| And what I'm saying is very similar to what Nigel was saying. | ||
| We need to completely reshape So, are there any other sort of major policy differences besides reform wants out of these international treaties? | ||
| Is everything else sort of similar? | ||
| I would say there are a number of other key differences. | ||
| The Tories gave us mass immigration. | ||
| Boris Johnson gave us mass immigration. | ||
| He was a bohemian liberal. | ||
| He was never a conservative. | ||
| Reform are utterly committed to ending mass uncontrolled immigration. | ||
| The Conservatives never did anything on woke. | ||
| They talk the talk. | ||
| They don't walk the walk. | ||
| Reform will overturn woke ideology, DEI, strip it out of the public institutions, a bit like Musk and Trump are doing now. | ||
| I think reform are a bit more business savvy. | ||
| They're actually led by people who've created large-scale businesses. | ||
| Nobody really on frontline politics has done that. | ||
| So they're a bit more in favour of cutting tax, pushing back regulation. | ||
| They're very critical of our government's Chagos deal. | ||
| And they go much harder than the Tories on the rape gangs and the victims of rape gangs by saying we should be deporting dual nationals who are convicted of raping our kids. | ||
| So they are... | ||
| I think a sort of unfiltered conservative movement. | ||
| And they can also reach into parts of the labor areas that the Tories can simply never do. | ||
| So they are Trumpian. | ||
| I mean, Nigel is obviously very close with Trump. | ||
| He's gone on the campaign trail with Trump. | ||
| He's learned a lot of lessons about using rallies, but also building a team of people. | ||
| And I think that's what he took away from watching the inauguration. | ||
| It's not just Trump anymore. | ||
| It is about Kennedy. | ||
| It's Elon Musk. | ||
| It's a kind of crew of people. | ||
| And I think that's what he's now trying to put into place here. | ||
| Yeah, you might find this interesting, but one of my reasons for supporting DeSantis during the primary was that I didn't think Trump was going to be able to build out that team. | ||
| And now he has some of the best people in the world, and I couldn't possibly be more of a supporter. | ||
| So if Nigel can do that, I think you guys would be in great shape. | ||
| Are you? | ||
| Sorry, go ahead. | ||
| Yeah, although DeSantis made the cardinal mistake of backing Kemi Badenok, which I always thought was... | ||
| For a guy who was saying, you know, we need a new conservatism, because that's basically what we're all talking about. | ||
| I was struck that he would back somebody who had presided over the wholesale liberalization of immigration. | ||
| So are you surprised that this is the state of Britain right now? | ||
| No. | ||
| No, I've been talking about the realignment for 15 years. | ||
| I was probably the first person in the country to say to the conservatives pre-Brexit, this is the future of conservatism in terms of the electorate. | ||
| When the vote for Brexit happened, I was probably the only... | ||
| The only academic, I was a university professor in my former life, I was the only academic saying Britain was going to vote for Brexit. | ||
| And then when it happened, I was saying to the Conservatives, this is a historic, unique opportunity now for you to realign your party and the people who are voting for you around this new zeitgeist. | ||
| And I briefed Boris Johnson and told him exactly how he should do that. | ||
| What happened then was, as we know, the opposite. | ||
| And so... | ||
| Really, over the last five, six years, like many people here, I've become desperately concerned about the state of our country, and I've become much more involved with reform, not as a member, but speaking at their events, because what I can see happening, look, I think we have two general elections to really save this country. | ||
| Maybe just one, but I think probably we have two. | ||
| And by save, I mean get reform to 32% of the vote, win a majority, And enact the wholesale repudiation of the consensus that has been dominating Britain for the last 30 years. | ||
| And by that I mean big immigration, big state, big tax, big debt, big spending, big woke. | ||
| And I don't think there's ever been as much of an opportunity as there is today to do that. | ||
| So the 32%, that's not a technical number. | ||
| That's just the number you think you would need, basically, to get enough to form a coalition. | ||
| No, no. | ||
| That's the number reform need for a majority. | ||
| That's like going into number 10, saying, okay, we're going to completely turn this thing over. | ||
| Now, to get there, they need to completely decimate the Tories, which they're doing. | ||
| As you and I sit here today, the Tories are on 20% in the polls on average. | ||
| Reform are averaging 27. They need to decimate the Tories, and they need to take a big chunk of that working-class Labour vote, or I guess you'd call them Blue Democrats. | ||
| They need to eat into those working-class heartlands, take some of those. | ||
| It's literally what Trump did. | ||
| I mean, it's just what Trump did. | ||
|
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Exactly. | |
| And the funny thing about it is, to Americans looking at Britain, because some of Trump's team came over recently and they said, God, I haven't been in London for 10 years. | ||
| What has happened to this country? | ||
| And these were serious people. | ||
| They said it wasn't just the immigration, it's just the way in which your leaders seem to hate your own people. | ||
| And I think what's so fascinating about Britain now and worrying is, if you look ahead, the only thing this country has really is managed decline. | ||
| We've got low growth rates. | ||
| We've got spiralling debt. | ||
| We don't have a strategy to revive our economy. | ||
| We've just got spiralling immigration. | ||
| We've got flat birth rates, declining birth rates among the British. | ||
| And we've got about 10 million more people projected to come into Britain. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So there won't be cultural cohesion. | ||
| Most of those people will be coming from Nigeria, Pakistan, China, Vietnam. | ||
| How do you build, to go back to the Robert Putnam question, how do you build a functional, integrated, cohesive nation on that basis, right? | ||
| What you end up with is a low-trust country where everyone just hunkers down and nobody's really contributing to the collective part. | ||
| So, I'm very gloomy, but within that chaos will come an opportunity to radically reshape politics. | ||
| And that's basically why you think that it's two at most. | ||
| It seems to me like it's probably one election cycle. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, who knows? | ||
| The remarkable thing, I mean, again, you know, the US has just given us a masterclass in how to completely change politics. | ||
| from an enormous conservative majority in 2019 with Boris Johnson to an enormous Labour majority with Keir Starmer. | ||
| Now, that itself shows the volatility in the system. | ||
| So people used to say in this country, well, my dad voted Labour, his dad voted Labour, you'll never get an insurgent party breaking through. | ||
| I say, look at Germany, look at Italy, look at France, look at Sweden. | ||
| Everywhere you look in European nations, disruptors are breaking through. | ||
| Because I I think what Trump symbolizes is a new chapter in the history of mass democracy. | ||
| It's a new cultural zeitgeist, like counterculture is becoming the culture. | ||
| I think that's fascinating. | ||
| And the old left-right split that shaped politics in the 20th century, I think is now completely making way for this new two-dimensional politics where cultural values are really dominant. | ||
| It's not to say economics doesn't matter, because of course it does, but cultural values are becoming so much more dominant. | ||
| So these issues over free speech, over the compatibility of Islam with Western nations, border security, the scale of migration. | ||
| Samuel Huntington asks, who are we? | ||
| And I think that's a question many people in Europe are asking, certainly many people in Britain are asking, who are we? | ||
| And he said, well, in relation to America, it was funny rereading that book last month. | ||
| He said, Americans are based on distinctive values and those values are under threat through large-scale Hispanic, Latino immigration and a political elite that doesn't believe in its own country. | ||
| I kind of wish Huntington was still alive because... | ||
| I would say, well, hang on, the Hispanics and Latinos are voting for Trump. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So you got that one wrong. | ||
| Trust me, I live in Miami. | ||
| I'm in a Hispanic town. | ||
|
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Exactly. | |
| I live in West America loving people. | ||
| So he got that bit wrong. | ||
| But what he got right was what we've now called the woke elite. | ||
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Right. | |
| The self-bashing, you know, self-hating, you know, West-loathing political elite. | ||
| And if you look at Europe, I think that's why J.D. Vance's speech struck a chord with the European people. | ||
| He irritated the elites, but the people got it. | ||
| Because what he was saying is, you are now in the hands of an elite class that is using censorship to suppress your free speech, is imposing mass immigration on you, is eroding your borders, and is no longer standing up for those shared values that Huntington talked about. | ||
| The values of Western civilization. | ||
| That's why so many elites found it so annoying that he gave that speech, because they know what we know, which is that the forgotten majority were nodding along saying, yeah, that guy's got it right. | ||
| Well, we're happy to send our VP over to the shores over here to do some damage so you guys can clean it up. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Thanks for the chat. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| If you're looking for more eye-opening and worldly conversations, make sure to dive into our international playlist. | ||
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