March 12, 2025 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
13:12
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| It got to the point where our institutions have got so paralysed and corrupt and captured that we really do have to think of alternative ways. | ||
| I mean, David Brooks this morning... | ||
| Bless him, was trying to say, you know, the MAGA movement, Trump, they're not conservatives because they want to tear down the institutions. | ||
| And conservatives should want to conserve the institutions. | ||
| That's not what conservatives want to conserve. | ||
| Conservatives want to conserve timeless principles. | ||
| Right, the valuable things. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And institutions are the vehicles and the instruments for implementing those timeless values. | ||
| And if those institutions have shown themselves, however long they've been around, however noble they may seem to be, but if they've shown themselves to be completely incapable of implementing those values. | ||
| Quite the reverse. | ||
| eroding them, then the conservative position is to pull them down. | ||
| All right, James Orr, I'm doing a ton of interviews while I'm here at ARC. | ||
| You're the only person that I'm actually going to read the bio for, Some of them were just putting some information beneath their name, but you got a lot of stuff here, so let's just do it. | ||
| James Orr is the Associate Professor of Philosophy of Religion at the University of Cambridge, Chair of the Edmund Burke Foundation UK, and Director of UK Programs for Trinity Forum Europe. | ||
| That kind of sums up what this whole... | ||
| Our conference is about, doesn't it? | ||
|
unidentified
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It does. | |
| A little political, a little philosophical, a little religious, a little of everything. | ||
| Yeah, I think so. | ||
| And that kind of delicate tango between the institutional and the networked and how we think about... | ||
| Was it one of the speakers on the first day was talking, invoking Neil Ferguson's metonymy, that distinction between the square and the tower. | ||
| And it's such a brilliant image, that. | ||
| And I think, yes, the power of networks, what networks can do, but they can't be without... | ||
| Institutions. | ||
| So networks need an anchoring unit, I suppose, in institutions. | ||
| But yeah, I think you're right. | ||
| This gathering does testify to the strength of networks. | ||
| And all the kind of superpowers that networks have, particularly networks of relative minorities, high levels of trust. | ||
| They can adapt very quickly. | ||
| They grow geometrically as opposed to institutions which grow in a more linear way. | ||
| They accommodate disagreement better on the whole. | ||
| If there is real disagreement, then breaking off a node of the network isn't such a catastrophe as a big institutional split that can paralyze an institution and its functions. | ||
| They're harder to capture, much harder to capture, because they're made up of people rather than big buildings or big foundations or whatever. | ||
| And I think, crucially, they're invisible to the naked eye. | ||
| This is why historians, actually, until Neil, have been so bad at picking them up, because you've got to go through complex correspondence relationships, and, oh, this guy went to this school with this guy, and he went drinking with this guy. | ||
| They're harder to spot, and so harder to take down, harder to target. | ||
| And so I think what's great about ARC is that it understands all those advantages. | ||
| It's not deliberately trying to just say, let's tear down all the institutions. | ||
| It's trying to renew the institutions. | ||
| But we've got to the point where our institutions have got so paralyzed and corrupt and captured that we really do have to think of alternative ways. | ||
| I mean, David Brooks this morning, bless him, was trying to say, you know, the MAGA movement, Trump, these are anti... | ||
| They're not conservatives because they want to tear down the institutions. | ||
| And conservatives should want to conserve the institutions. | ||
| That's not what conservatives want to conserve. | ||
| Conservatives want to conserve... | ||
| Timeless principles. | ||
| Right, the valuable things. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And institutions are the vehicles and the instruments for implementing those timeless values. | ||
| And if those institutions have shown themselves, however long they've been around, however noble they may seem to be, but if they've shown themselves to be completely incapable of implementing those values, quite the reverse, eroding them, then the conservative position is to pull them down. | ||
| So I wasn't in the main room when David Brooks was speaking, so I didn't hear that line, although it doesn't surprise me from David Brooks. | ||
| But even that, him being up there and saying that, which is clearly counter to, I think, what most people here believe, that sort of shows the strength of Ark in the first place. | ||
| I think that's absolutely right. | ||
| I was doing an interview with a... | ||
| Times Radio last night, I don't know already why I agree, but they were trying to just frame us. | ||
| I do too with them. | ||
| They do the same thing with me. | ||
| I never learn. | ||
|
unidentified
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I never learn. | |
| But, you know, one of the points I made, I said, look, we would love to have more left-leaning people along, but they just don't accept the invitation. | ||
| And I think it was important to have a figure like David Brooks there, because first of all, it shows that we're not. | ||
| We're not frightened of the other side. | ||
| We're not frightened of critiques of our own position. | ||
| We're willing to be open to intellectual diversity, if you want to use the D word in this context, if it's not been so diseased already. | ||
| Because it shows generosity, it shows breadth, and it shows the kind of openness that is essential for any kind of free inquiry. | ||
| Imagine the equivalent on the left, right? | ||
| You're not going to get... | ||
| They're much, much less open to conservative speakers going along and, you know, pricking their bubbles. | ||
| You're not going to get... | ||
| They're much less willing to have liberal speakers speak. | ||
| Precisely. | ||
| Or get conservatives. | ||
|
unidentified
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Absolutely right. | |
| And so I would have thought, we've got a big coalition here, ranging from classical liberals right up to conservatives, and actually plenty of more reactionary types as well. | ||
| I mean, I'm not quite sure what you call them. | ||
| They're not conservative in as much as they want to tear a lot of stuff down, but for the reasons I was explaining earlier, that may be the most authentic conservative position in some situations. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Is that the strange tension that might exist in the subset here, that Do you go in and reform these things? | ||
| If we were to look at a list of 100 institutions, is it maybe that 70 need to be reformed, 30 need to be burned, could reverse those numbers? | ||
| That probably is like the most granular question being asked, or the most literal question. | ||
| Yeah, I think that's right. | ||
| I mean, one of the points that David Brooks made, or tried to make, was that, you know, he visited Africa, and he'd seen all the good that American dollars had done with the AIDS crisis there, and now, you know, Trump was tearing all of that up. | ||
| Now, Look, okay, maybe that's valid criticism. | ||
| I don't think it is. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because I think if you go in and if you've got a system that is so corrupt and diseased, part of the problem with that system, as I understand it, USAID, is that it was doing good things. | ||
| Like the work in Africa, no doubt, in the 80s and 90s and so on. | ||
| But in a way, it was a bad thing because it was masking the terrible waste and abuse and fraud on the American taxpayer that it was, as it were, permitting for decades. | ||
| So I think the idea is, you know, rather than just pull the plaster off just a little bit, just rip the whole thing off, just tear the whole thing down. | ||
| And yes, start again, but slowly and work out a system that is more transparent and is better equipped. | ||
| If you've got to the point where an institution has shown itself to be just completely unsuited for its purposes and for its founding aims and ideals, just... | ||
| Burn it down, salt the earth, and work out how you build things up again. | ||
| Have you seen any institutions, important institutions, that have not been infected by this woke thing? | ||
| I mean, even, I'm doing an Oxford debate in a couple days. | ||
| Oxford, or Cambridge, or, you mentioned to me right before we started, Jordan Peterson had been invited. | ||
| We were on tour when he got the invite. | ||
| I had never seen him so happy to be a visiting fellow at, well, it was at the Divinity School, I think, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And he got invited. | ||
| Then there was backlash and they disinvited him. | ||
| Eventually, I think you mentioned about a year and a half later, that got reversed. | ||
| But the point is, all of these institutions, the things that we thought would never be touched, it seems to me, have been touched. | ||
| It's a great question. | ||
| I think in the UK context, a quick answer to that would be to say there are almost no institutions that have been completely untouched by this cultural revolution. | ||
| One plea I would make in defense of Oxford and Cambridge is that... | ||
| The rot has spread more slowly, first of all, the other UK universities, and certainly more slowly than seems to be the case with the Ivy League. | ||
| One of our advantages in Oxford and Cambridge is that we're a lot poorer than... | ||
| I mean, Harvard seems to be basically a hedge fund with the university. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| We are not, and what that means is the leadership tends to be more sensitive to legal liability and reputational risk. | ||
| The other interesting feature of the kind of... | ||
| a unique feature of the architecture of... | ||
| Oxford and Cambridge is really a basket of quasi-autonomous colleges that really have a lot of power and really run their own thing. | ||
| The universities slowly emerged as a kind of supranational body. | ||
| That could call the shots to some extent, but really the power is still with the colleges. | ||
| Why is that important? | ||
| Well, it's important because it shows that in any intellectual culture or any culture at all that values true diversity, freedom, it's important for there to be those sort of poles of disagreement. | ||
| I think of the United States and sort of a big, very big national version of that, as it were. | ||
| You've got... | ||
| Lots and lots of different states that can experiment in different ways, and that's a sort of sifting mechanism, and it works out, it helps you work out what's right, what's working. | ||
| So Oxford and Cambridge have been, they're much harder to capture, in other words, because you've got to go through each, as it were, go through each college. | ||
| Now, things are not great, absolutely. | ||
| I mean, I would just stand by your initial diagnosis. | ||
| It's absolutely, absolutely true. | ||
| But we've had some successes. | ||
| Actually, the Jordan affair, the... | ||
| With its cancellation in 2019 and then it's coming back in 2021, was one of, I think, a catalytic factor in the government, the Tory government, who's just been voted out, pushing for a piece of legislation on academic freedom, which, as far as I know, is the first attempt in the West to address this crisis within the universities. | ||
| Now, the new regime has been trying to slow it down and torpedo it and destroy it, but it looks as if it's going to stay in some form. | ||
| And that's encouraging. | ||
| I mean, no conservative wants the state to be intruding on the intellectual culture of the university. | ||
| But again, it is a conservative position for the state to act when it should act in order to ensure that institutions are recalled to their founding ideals. | ||
| And that was an interesting example of that. | ||
| It was a big debate on the right here in the UK. Do we really want to do this? | ||
| And it was an interesting moment in the emergence of the kind of British new right. | ||
| That the victory went to those who said, we can't just be small state conservatives anymore. | ||
| If we're going to confront these problems, we've got to learn how to wield power when we've got it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And that really would be the difference between a conservative and a libertarian in some sense. | ||
| And that's what the right seems to be grappling with right now. | ||
| Do we ever protect anything, even when we have to unfortunately use the government? | ||
| The reactionary right, and again, you mentioned some of them are represented here, they're all for that. | ||
| The more libertarian right, or the liberals maybe don't want to do it as much, but this is what conservatism, why 10 conservatism is grappling with. | ||
| I couldn't have put it better myself. | ||
| That's exactly right. | ||
| I mean, Hamilton talks a lot about, you know, the importance of a muscular government. | ||
| It doesn't mean a big government. | ||
| Actually, it may be the case, as I think we're beginning to see in the United States, that a smarter and more effective government is, in fact, a smaller government. | ||
| That doesn't mean it's a less powerful government or a government that's not, as it were, making sure that everything is running right. | ||
| You want an efficient government if you're going to have a smart and effective government. | ||
| And that will probably mean a smaller government than the governments that we've got at the moment. | ||
| Let me ask you one other thing, which is, I've asked everybody the same exact question I've gotten. | ||
| Fairly similar answers, I would say. | ||
| We're clearly hopeful in America right now. | ||
| And I think most of you guys are looking at us across the pond and going, boy, there is a lot of hope for America. | ||
| Maybe some of that can translate here. | ||
| Do you think it can translate here? | ||
| I do. | ||
| And in fact, I know that it can because we're feeling it already. | ||
| A lot of the conversations that I've been having at ARC, a lot of the speeches I've been hearing at ARC, you can hear, you can feel that kind of infectious enthusiasm coming from across the pond. | ||
| I mean, a year ago, I would be lamenting with my right-wing British friends. | ||
| Isn't it just so depressing that we're now just loyal colonials of the 51st state, just wondering what Sleepy Joe is going to do next? | ||
| But now I'm thinking, gosh, vassalage, I think we could live with this. | ||
| We'll be happy to take our orders from the imperial metropole. | ||
| But no, seriously, what's happening over there, it's shifting the parameters of the politically possible. | ||
| Things are happening. | ||
| No one, you could not, in our election in July last year, in July 2024, You could not be talking about cuts to the civil service. | ||
| You could not be talking about waste and abuse. | ||
| It was all about fiscal headroom. | ||
| How do we get more taxes? | ||
| I think that debate is going to change forever, just on that one issue. | ||
| And there will be many others, too, where I think we're going to be taking our cues from our American cousins. | ||
| And that's kind of appropriate. | ||
| We taught you all you know, and it's only right that we enjoy the benefits 300 years later. | ||
| We're happy to help. | ||
| If you're looking for more eye-opening and worldly conversations, make sure to dive into our international playlist. | ||
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