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[00:00:00.320 --> 00:00:02.400] Candice Rivera has it all.
[00:00:02.400 --> 00:00:08.880] In just three years, she went from stay-at-home mom to traveling the world, saving lives, and making millions.
[00:00:08.880 --> 00:00:13.360] Anyone would think Candice's charm life is about as real as Unicorn.
[00:00:13.360 --> 00:00:16.960] But sometimes the truth is even harder to believe than the lies.
[00:00:17.280 --> 00:00:18.080] Not true.
[00:00:18.080 --> 00:00:19.680] There's so many things not true.
[00:00:19.680 --> 00:00:21.440] You gotta bring me.
[00:00:21.760 --> 00:00:28.000] I'm Charlie Webster, and this is Unicorn Girl, an Apple original podcast produced by Seven Hills.
[00:00:28.000 --> 00:00:31.040] Follow and listen on Apple Podcasts.
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[00:00:36.080 --> 00:00:40.160] When the killer's identity is about to be revealed.
[00:00:40.160 --> 00:00:43.840] During that perfect meditation flow.
[00:00:43.840 --> 00:00:47.840] On Amazon Music, we believe in keeping you in the moment.
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[00:01:08.880 --> 00:01:14.560] You're listening to The Michael Shermer Show.
[00:01:21.600 --> 00:01:27.680] Eric Heinze, professor of law and humanities at Queen Mary University in London.
[00:01:27.680 --> 00:01:32.720] He's the author of The Most Human Right, Why Free Speech is Everything.
[00:01:32.720 --> 00:01:37.520] You can imagine I like that book, as a free speech fundamentalist, as it were.
[00:01:37.840 --> 00:01:42.960] Among other books, he's published over 100 articles and has been featured in radio and television and other media around the world.
[00:01:42.960 --> 00:01:50.000] His new book is, here it is, Coming Clean: The Rise of Critical Theory and the Future of the Left.
[00:01:50.000 --> 00:01:55.200] Now, after I had Christopher Ruffo on the show, I got some pushback going, hey, you got to have somebody that's not on the right.
[00:01:55.200 --> 00:01:57.760] Okay, I gather my guests today, Eric.
[00:01:58.080 --> 00:01:59.200] Nice to have you on here.
[00:01:59.200 --> 00:02:00.760] You are not from the right.
[00:01:59.760 --> 00:02:04.520] You're not a MAGA right or a conservative, I gather from reading your book.
[00:01:59.840 --> 00:02:07.320] But welcome to the show, and maybe start there.
[00:02:07.800 --> 00:02:08.440] What's your story?
[00:02:08.440 --> 00:02:12.120] How'd you get into all this stuff in political science and law and all that?
[00:02:12.120 --> 00:02:14.920] And then what is your position on these things?
[00:02:15.880 --> 00:02:33.160] Yeah, well, I mean, basically, yeah, I think as with many people who kind of jump into these issues, you notice certain things and certain discontents over a long time, sometimes dating back to your student days.
[00:02:33.480 --> 00:02:40.360] But it can take time to kind of be able to articulate a broader picture of what's going wrong.
[00:02:40.360 --> 00:02:47.080] Sometimes the things are so glaring in front of us that we don't see them.
[00:02:47.640 --> 00:02:52.760] Because I don't think anything I say in the book should be very shocking.
[00:02:52.760 --> 00:02:56.520] And yet, I think a lot of what I say is not really being said.
[00:03:00.200 --> 00:03:07.960] A lot of people, I think, are getting the impression that I simply kind of want to rehash a kind of whataboutery, right?
[00:03:07.960 --> 00:03:14.920] And so the left spends a lot of time criticizing, you know, sort of the West and Western history.
[00:03:14.920 --> 00:03:24.760] And then on the right, you get the kind of mirror imaging of telling the left all of the complicity that they've had with totalitarianism.
[00:03:25.080 --> 00:03:29.400] That's kind of a starting point from me, but that's not my end point, right?
[00:03:29.400 --> 00:03:38.280] The problem with these discussions is that's kind of where it ends, is just this kind of eternal firing back and forth of those sorts of very entrenched positions.
[00:03:38.280 --> 00:03:47.840] So, my point in the book is certainly not just to rehash once again all the crimes of the Soviet Union and of Maoism and of Pol Pot and you know, write down the list.
[00:03:48.320 --> 00:03:53.760] This is all well known, it's out in the public domain, either people will take an interest in it or they won't.
[00:03:53.760 --> 00:03:57.760] What I want to do is then go to step two: what do we do with this knowledge?
[00:03:58.480 --> 00:04:05.040] How does this then really translate into a kind of reinvention of progressive politics?
[00:04:05.040 --> 00:04:14.480] A lot of people on the left think that they've done this, they think that they've incorporated lessons from the past, and one of the things I show in the book is they haven't.
[00:04:14.480 --> 00:04:15.120] They haven't.
[00:04:15.120 --> 00:04:27.200] If you look at the ways in which this is done, it actually tends to be often very superficial to the point of dismissive or simply strategic, simply a matter of self-positioning.
[00:04:27.200 --> 00:04:33.440] But progressive thought otherwise has always been a lot more than just about strategizing.
[00:04:33.440 --> 00:04:36.400] So, these are some of the things that I try to get at in the book.
[00:04:36.400 --> 00:04:37.040] Yeah.
[00:04:37.040 --> 00:04:43.280] Could you distinguish for us like liberalism and leftism and progressivism?
[00:04:43.280 --> 00:04:48.960] Are these largely overlapping, or are there sharp distinctions between them?
[00:04:51.680 --> 00:04:54.000] This is a trap.
[00:04:55.600 --> 00:05:04.880] And again, I've already had flack for this: you know, people, without reading the book, they read some blurb, you know, problems over the left or what the left needs to do.
[00:05:04.880 --> 00:05:08.560] And then, of course, the immediate response is: well, what do you mean by the left?
[00:05:08.560 --> 00:05:10.160] There are many kinds of leftism.
[00:05:10.160 --> 00:05:13.760] There's no single, you know, often they contradict each other and so on.
[00:05:13.760 --> 00:05:15.680] But that's not just true of the left.
[00:05:15.680 --> 00:05:20.560] This is true of, you know, pretty much any ism that we've had over the past few centuries.
[00:05:20.560 --> 00:05:23.360] That's not, that's not a revelation.
[00:05:23.360 --> 00:05:33.000] And so, yes, of course, leftism, liberalism in the more colloquial sense, progressive, radical, revolutionary.
[00:05:33.000 --> 00:05:35.640] Yes, all of these have long histories.
[00:05:29.360 --> 00:05:36.760] They fed into each other.
[00:05:37.000 --> 00:05:41.160] Yes, sometimes there are contradictions, sometimes there are convergences.
[00:05:41.160 --> 00:05:45.240] And so the point in my book is not to get hung up with these sorts of definitions.
[00:05:45.240 --> 00:05:52.360] That would just be another book to, you know, to kind of tease out all the different strands over the last century or two.
[00:05:52.360 --> 00:06:05.880] My aim instead is simply to identify a number of strands that have predominated, that have kind of recurred, that have tended to mark a lot of progressive thought.
[00:06:06.200 --> 00:06:13.160] It doesn't claim to talk about everybody who might call themselves progressive or only people who might call themselves progressive.
[00:06:13.160 --> 00:06:24.920] It's simply looking at tendencies, trends that have been very strong in shaping progressive thought over at least the past few decades, arguably for more than a century.
[00:06:25.800 --> 00:06:48.600] I guess what I'm getting at is like since the 2024 election of Trump, liberals, kind of old school liberals, have been wringing their hands about maybe we went too far to the left and that jolted people who were slightly left of center to pull the handle for Trump because they just couldn't take some of the crazy far woke far left woke ism and that kind of thing.
[00:06:48.600 --> 00:06:53.080] You've been hearing all this, like Bill Maher, the comedian, you know, he's been ranting about this for a year now.
[00:06:53.080 --> 00:06:58.360] Like, we're going to lose this election if we don't, you know, get rid of this crazy, far woke progressivism.
[00:06:58.360 --> 00:07:08.920] I'm an old school liberal, you know, by which he means sort of a Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, you know, maybe Kennedy Johnson, that, you know, kind of that kind of 60s, 70s liberal.
[00:07:09.880 --> 00:07:15.360] And this has been a big talking point for my book.
[00:07:14.280 --> 00:07:19.680] I finished my book actually before the past November elections.
[00:07:20.960 --> 00:07:24.880] 99% was done before last November.
[00:07:25.200 --> 00:07:34.160] But of course, now that the election results are all too well known to all of us, you know, the book has to keep coming back to these questions.
[00:07:34.160 --> 00:07:41.360] And sort of the constant jump-off point is, as you say, and essentially, you know, where have Democrats gone wrong?
[00:07:41.360 --> 00:07:43.200] Or where has the left gone wrong?
[00:07:43.200 --> 00:07:46.400] Or where have liberals, you know, however you want to phrase it?
[00:07:46.400 --> 00:07:56.080] And then the answers kind of tend to degenerate just into this sort of, yeah, well, you know, we need to talk a little bit less about this and a little bit more about that.
[00:07:56.080 --> 00:08:00.720] You know, this kind of tweaking, you know, yeah, maybe we went a bit too far to the left.
[00:08:00.720 --> 00:08:02.800] For me, this is very superficial.
[00:08:05.040 --> 00:08:12.160] I don't think the problem, one of the things I try to hopefully show in the book is the problem is not going too far to the left.
[00:08:12.160 --> 00:08:16.880] That just begs the question about what, again, what we mean by left, too far, and so forth.
[00:08:16.880 --> 00:08:22.480] The problem is not having gone deep enough into ourselves.
[00:08:22.800 --> 00:08:28.400] And that's why my book is fundamentally about what the left does with history.
[00:08:28.720 --> 00:08:34.560] All of leftist thought in the past few decades, here I will generalize.
[00:08:34.560 --> 00:08:37.920] I guess you could find exceptions, but you won't find many.
[00:08:38.240 --> 00:09:12.360] I would say all or pretty much all of leftist thought over the past few decades or more has ultimately boiled down to critical readings of history, readings in particular of the history of the West over the last, say, two, three, even four centuries, you know, starting with really the emergence of modern states into periods of colonialism, transatlantic slave trade, racial and ethnic discrimination, tied in, of course, questions about patriarchy, heteronormativity, right?
[00:09:12.360 --> 00:09:16.920] So, however, you want to define the left, these have been constant and recurring themes.
[00:09:18.200 --> 00:09:32.200] The left is fundamentally, whatever your position is, whether it's all the way to the left, all the way to the right, it's very much the left that has defined our discussions about injustice, regardless of the positions people ultimately stake out.
[00:09:32.840 --> 00:09:42.840] And it's largely the left which has defined those discussions in terms of colonialism, capitalism, racism, patriarchy, heteronormativity.
[00:09:43.160 --> 00:09:46.920] And one of the things I say in the book is: I'm not attacking that.
[00:09:47.160 --> 00:09:49.240] Let conservatives attack that.
[00:09:49.240 --> 00:10:01.160] You know, just stop the DEI, stop the, you know, the, you know, the eternal hang-ups of history, you know, stop the anti-racism, stop the Me Too, and so forth, stop the LGBTQ.
[00:10:01.160 --> 00:10:03.960] I'm not saying that any of this should stop.
[00:10:03.960 --> 00:10:15.240] What I'm saying is that, yes, it's good that we've had decades of history focused on the shortcomings of the West, the mass injustice of the West.
[00:10:15.240 --> 00:10:20.840] This is, incidentally, throughout all of human history, a radically different way of doing history.
[00:10:21.160 --> 00:10:28.040] The idea that history would fundamentally be about collective self-critique, this is something very new.
[00:10:28.040 --> 00:10:29.400] And I think it's good.
[00:10:29.400 --> 00:10:30.920] And I don't want to lose it.
[00:10:30.920 --> 00:10:40.840] I think it's perhaps probably the best chance for democracy is understanding that the purpose of democracy is to be able to deal with history and to deal with it critically.
[00:10:40.840 --> 00:10:44.680] So, I don't, unlike conservatives, I don't reject any of that.
[00:10:44.800 --> 00:10:54.640] What I'm saying is that those same people who have taught all the rest of us how to do critical history have completely failed to do it themselves, right?
[00:10:54.640 --> 00:11:14.480] And so, in fact, when we talk about the fact that, well, actually, yes, much of the left, much of the time, at the very least, lent legitimacy and often zealous support to some of the most brutal and repressive dictatorships of the past hundred years, entailing millions of deaths and damaged lives.
[00:11:14.720 --> 00:11:23.760] When we want to also do these histories of oppression, all of a sudden we're met with the most dismissive, if not disdainful, responses.
[00:11:23.760 --> 00:11:25.120] That has to change.
[00:11:25.120 --> 00:11:27.920] Either we do history or we don't.
[00:11:27.920 --> 00:11:48.160] If history is vital to democracy, critical history is vital to democracy, then those people who are teaching all the rest of us how to do it publicly, in film, in media, in television, in schools, in training programs, have to use all those same channels to engage also with the most brutal histories of the left.
[00:11:48.160 --> 00:11:50.000] And they don't do that.
[00:11:50.000 --> 00:11:53.920] Instead, what we get is, oh, yes, well, of course, we know Stalin was bad.
[00:11:53.920 --> 00:11:55.840] Oh, and of course, that wasn't the real socialism.
[00:11:55.920 --> 00:12:01.040] We get these, again, I call these dismissive apologetics literally often in one line.
[00:12:01.040 --> 00:12:07.280] And then, you know, let's get back to business, you know, almost as if you're an idiot for raising these ideas, right?
[00:12:07.600 --> 00:12:22.400] And I do believe that we have to look at histories, centuries of history of Western oppression and mass injustice, but as part of histories of oppression and mass injustice.
[00:12:22.400 --> 00:12:26.880] So, yes, the West has been part of that, but the left has been part of that.
[00:12:26.880 --> 00:12:43.000] And that we are not getting until we get into this much deeper understanding of what we mean by left, what we mean by progressive, then all of the little tweaking of the message, and should we talk a bit less about that, a little bit more about this, is going to be useless.
[00:12:43.480 --> 00:12:44.280] Interesting.
[00:12:44.280 --> 00:13:01.080] I should point out that there's a lot of hand-wringing on the right as well from old school conservatives, the Mitt Romney's and John McCain's of the world, as opposed to MAGA right, authoritarianism, populism, economic nationalism.
[00:13:01.400 --> 00:13:09.880] Those things do not tend to fall into that bin of conservatism as we think of it from Edmund Burke on, that kind of Burkean conservatism.
[00:13:09.880 --> 00:13:11.960] So they're undergoing their own hand-wringing there.
[00:13:11.960 --> 00:13:13.400] So fair enough.
[00:13:13.400 --> 00:13:15.000] What do you mean by coming clean?
[00:13:15.000 --> 00:13:16.680] Coming clean about what?
[00:13:18.280 --> 00:13:30.840] I guess that title is meant to be a bit playfully ambiguous because the question of cleanliness, or rather, of purity, kicks in at a number of different levels.
[00:13:32.680 --> 00:13:41.640] One of my chapters, although in a sense, the whole book, but one chapter in particular, is devoted to this question of what I call the purity narrative.
[00:13:41.640 --> 00:14:00.680] In other words, ways in which all sorts of ideologies, again, not just on the left, just to be absolutely clear, religious ideologies, conservative ideologies, economic ideologies, all sorts of ideologies, essentially present themselves as pure in the following way.
[00:14:00.680 --> 00:14:05.240] For the most part, their articulate spokespeople don't claim to be perfect.
[00:14:05.240 --> 00:14:06.600] That would be ridiculous.
[00:14:06.600 --> 00:14:07.800] No one would believe it.
[00:14:07.800 --> 00:14:08.760] It would be fatuous.
[00:14:09.400 --> 00:14:11.000] Our ideology is perfect.
[00:14:11.000 --> 00:14:12.200] No one says that.
[00:14:12.200 --> 00:14:34.160] Instead, what I'm defining as a purity narrative is a way of presenting one's own ideological position such that one acknowledges all the injustices that have come from it, but then fashions them as mistakes, as errors, as not the real embodiment of whatever that ideology is, right?
[00:14:34.160 --> 00:14:37.360] As I said before, oh, well, that wasn't the real socialism, right?
[00:14:38.480 --> 00:14:40.080] That's not what Cuba was supposed to be.
[00:14:40.080 --> 00:14:42.880] That's not what Russia was supposed to be, and so on and so on, right?
[00:14:42.880 --> 00:14:45.920] And so it's this kind of purifying the narrative.
[00:14:45.920 --> 00:14:53.280] So not denying the atrocities, but rather always peripheralizing them, sanitizing them, right?
[00:14:53.280 --> 00:15:09.520] And again, on the left, what this means is that the histories of Western mass injustice, as I've named them, again, capitalist exploitation, colonialism, slave trade, patriarchy, and so forth, are presented as systemic and structural, right?
[00:15:09.520 --> 00:15:17.040] As part of the very fabric, so that they're not just histories, they're still ongoing, which is why we need to know history.
[00:15:17.040 --> 00:15:23.280] Whereas once we start talking about the histories of the left, then they're presented only as mistakes.
[00:15:23.600 --> 00:15:36.560] Even though we're talking, you know, about the most massive sorts of structures, which again were responsible for the death or destruction of millions and millions of lives, it's only ever mistakes.
[00:15:36.560 --> 00:15:40.960] It wasn't the real, it wasn't the pure, it wasn't, you know, the ideal, right?
[00:15:41.520 --> 00:15:58.480] And so we end up with this curious situation where the history of the West is meant to be understood as systemically and structurally unjust at a mass level, whereas the same brutality on the left, it was only ever a mistake, right?
[00:15:59.040 --> 00:16:06.520] And what this means is that we can, to get back to the title, in a sense, we can never come clean of Western history.
[00:16:07.880 --> 00:16:09.320] We always have to be saddled with it.
[00:16:09.320 --> 00:16:11.480] And again, I don't have a problem with that.
[00:16:11.480 --> 00:16:15.080] But these same speakers are always coming clean of their own leftist histories.
[00:16:15.080 --> 00:16:17.160] Oh, well, we don't support Stalinism.
[00:16:17.160 --> 00:16:18.600] Oh, we don't support Malik.
[00:16:18.600 --> 00:16:19.640] We stop that, right?
[00:16:19.640 --> 00:16:23.480] In other words, they get the clean breaks, but none of the rest of us get the clean breaks.
[00:16:23.480 --> 00:16:24.840] How is that?
[00:16:24.840 --> 00:16:38.120] How is it that they don't have to deal with, you know, with, you know, with the ongoing burden of all of the shit that happened, you know, in how many socialist regimes, right?
[00:16:38.120 --> 00:16:43.080] Why isn't it when Putin invaded Ukraine, right?
[00:16:43.400 --> 00:16:52.680] And, you know, why did we not see 100 times more encampments as a matter of one's own responsibility?
[00:16:52.680 --> 00:16:56.600] Oh, yeah, you know, we were supporting the regimes that put all of this in place.
[00:16:56.600 --> 00:16:59.000] Where were those encampments?
[00:16:59.000 --> 00:17:03.320] From the same people who are teaching the rest of us to be critical about our histories.
[00:17:03.320 --> 00:17:04.440] Where were they?
[00:17:05.480 --> 00:17:09.880] And so what you'll get on the left is not factual denials, as I say in the book.
[00:17:09.880 --> 00:17:18.280] You know, you'll always, oh, yes, of course, there were gulags, of course, you know, Stalin was oppressive, but you'll always get the factual acknowledgement, right?
[00:17:18.280 --> 00:17:23.160] You won't get the factual denial, but what you get is ethical denial, right?
[00:17:23.480 --> 00:17:29.880] In other words, the factual acknowledgement is taking place, but then simply to sideline it, to sidestep it, right?
[00:17:29.880 --> 00:17:33.720] And then to get back to the business as usual, which is the critique of the West.
[00:17:33.720 --> 00:17:35.720] We have to stop doing history this way.
[00:17:35.720 --> 00:17:39.720] We have to stop understanding progressive thought this way.
[00:17:40.040 --> 00:17:41.480] It's hideous.
[00:17:41.480 --> 00:17:42.920] It's not progressive.
[00:17:42.920 --> 00:17:44.280] It's regressive.
[00:17:45.280 --> 00:17:53.680] And that's why I'm digging much deeper than just, you know, what was Kamala Harris saying on some podium on a certain campaign trail.
[00:17:53.680 --> 00:17:55.520] We have to go much deeper than that.
[00:17:55.520 --> 00:18:00.160] So an example might be going on, as they say, for more than a century.
[00:18:00.480 --> 00:18:09.440] So an example might be when someone like Bernie Sanders and AOC go on the campaign trail, which they've been on, talking about democratic socialism.
[00:18:09.440 --> 00:18:16.400] And then the right says, oh, yeah, you mean Stalinism and Maoism and Cuba and so on.
[00:18:16.400 --> 00:18:18.560] And then they go, no, we don't mean that.
[00:18:19.520 --> 00:18:20.640] So what do they mean?
[00:18:21.120 --> 00:18:26.480] What would an ethical, pragmatic, practical, democratic socialism look like?
[00:18:27.120 --> 00:18:29.360] Yeah, no, and I mean, and they're right.
[00:18:29.360 --> 00:18:30.560] They don't mean that.
[00:18:30.560 --> 00:18:31.840] They don't mean that.
[00:18:31.840 --> 00:18:43.840] But the reason why it's easy to trip them up on this is because again, and again, just to be clear, I don't really want to sort of start tangling with individuals, right?
[00:18:43.840 --> 00:18:46.320] Bernie and AOC, they do what they do.
[00:18:46.320 --> 00:18:48.880] They're not history lecturers, right?
[00:18:50.000 --> 00:18:56.320] You know, so of course, there's only so much they can say when they're stumping, and particularly in the present climate.
[00:18:56.320 --> 00:19:02.720] So my point is not to say, you know, that they should start standing up there doing a lot of self-flagellation.
[00:19:02.960 --> 00:19:12.320] Rather, again, this is going to have to be about more than just two people stumping on a campaign trail, right?
[00:19:12.640 --> 00:19:28.240] But one way to start is, yeah, you see, I'm not even sure that people like Bernie and AOC, for all of their incredible intelligence, which I absolutely acknowledge and I credit, I think they also are part of lesson leftism that still just doesn't get it.
[00:19:28.240 --> 00:19:33.960] The conservatives criticizing them don't get it either because, again, they're just playing what a bountery.
[00:19:33.960 --> 00:19:38.280] So each side is just throwing what a bountery at the other side, you know.
[00:19:38.280 --> 00:19:40.120] So neither of them are great at history.
[00:19:40.120 --> 00:19:46.040] I mean, it's one of the things I say in the book is that I'm going to criticize the left, but the conservatives are certainly no better in history.
[00:19:46.040 --> 00:19:47.080] Far from it.
[00:19:47.400 --> 00:19:49.320] Far from it, you know.
[00:19:49.320 --> 00:19:56.360] And so AOC and Bernie have no lessons to take from conservatives, but they have plenty of lessons to take.
[00:19:56.680 --> 00:20:00.840] And of course, again, it's not fundamentally about these two individuals.
[00:20:00.840 --> 00:20:02.440] It's about a movement.
[00:20:02.760 --> 00:20:26.120] It's about a whole fabric of thought from, you know, which created them, which created us, which created many people who do want to engage with progressive thought, but don't realize that we're constantly stumbling falls here, and for me, that means comfort meals, cozy nights, and tail-gating weekends.
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[00:21:28.640 --> 00:21:31.760] Or dismissive apologetics, however you want to call it.
[00:21:31.760 --> 00:21:32.720] I like that.
[00:21:32.960 --> 00:21:35.440] Maybe just another way to summarize your thesis here.
[00:21:35.760 --> 00:21:39.040] What is it that Bernie AOC or pick anybody, doesn't matter?
[00:21:39.200 --> 00:21:40.560] What is it they don't get?
[00:21:40.560 --> 00:21:45.600] When you say you don't get it, and they go, let's say they go, okay, what is it I'm missing?
[00:21:46.880 --> 00:22:11.520] Because again, when conservatives start punching holes in their idea of democratic socialism, I'm not sure that they really do understand what it means to take the kind of responsibility that they expect everyone else to take, right?
[00:22:11.520 --> 00:22:25.680] In other words, if you ask them about, you know, about, you know, about slavery, about discrimination, about patriarchy, about heteronormativity, they will be able to pretty instantly give you some histories.
[00:22:26.000 --> 00:22:26.480] Right?
[00:22:26.800 --> 00:22:30.560] I'm wondering how they would do the history of socialism.
[00:22:30.880 --> 00:22:32.880] Again, they probably do know.
[00:22:32.880 --> 00:22:41.280] In fact, I'm sure they know about oppression in the USSR, oppression, you know, under Maoism, and again, the whole long list.
[00:22:41.280 --> 00:22:52.240] But it's not really clear, again, how they are expecting the rest of us to understand what mass injustice is.
[00:22:52.560 --> 00:22:58.960] Because otherwise, the background story, which they're presupposing, would just look very differently.
[00:22:59.120 --> 00:23:01.800] We'd talk about it very differently, right?
[00:23:02.600 --> 00:23:05.960] You know, again, I was mentioning Israel-Palestine, right?
[00:23:05.960 --> 00:23:10.920] You know, in order to draw the parallel to Ukraine, right?
[00:23:10.920 --> 00:23:21.480] Again, as I said, one thing that would look different is if there were really a taking of responsibility on the left, we would have seen 100 times more encampments in favor of Ukraine and against Putin.
[00:23:21.480 --> 00:23:26.040] We haven't seen, we've seen virtually none, or I think zero, actually, right?
[00:23:26.040 --> 00:23:27.000] None of note.
[00:23:27.000 --> 00:23:30.440] You know, every now and then, a couple of students here and there, right?
[00:23:31.560 --> 00:23:38.920] But of course, it would also mean, you know, taking a far more nuanced position on something like Israel-Palestine itself.
[00:23:38.920 --> 00:23:48.360] And in particular, again, the history of leftist complicity in that conflict is constantly factored out, except, of course, to play the heroic role, right?
[00:23:48.360 --> 00:23:51.720] We always factor ourselves into the heroic role, right?
[00:23:51.720 --> 00:24:10.520] But the ways in which the left, again, for decades, at least lent legitimacy, if not zealous support, to a regime such as that in the Kremlin, right, which was toxifying the Middle East for decades, spreading anti-Semitism for decades, helping to shape whole mentalities.
[00:24:10.520 --> 00:24:12.840] Who took responsibility for that?
[00:24:12.840 --> 00:24:20.920] If the rest of us are supposed to take responsibility for Israel, who took responsibility for that massive pumping of anti-Semitism?
[00:24:20.920 --> 00:24:29.960] Not to mention the whole structuring of Israel's neighbors, essentially as Kremlin-esque totalitarianisms, right, during the Cold War, right?
[00:24:29.960 --> 00:24:33.960] If you look at Iraq, if you look at Libya, if you look at Yemen and so forth, right?
[00:24:33.960 --> 00:24:41.360] The kind of regimes that were put into place there, not always, but often, you know, with direct involvement of the Kremlin.
[00:24:41.360 --> 00:24:49.680] Where is that discussion from these people who are again preaching to the rest of us how we have to take a critical view of history, how we have to understand our own complicity?
[00:24:50.000 --> 00:24:55.680] Where in any of those encampments are we hearing about the leftist's own complicity in these situations?
[00:24:55.680 --> 00:24:59.760] Again, I'm not saying that they shouldn't talk about the West's complicity.
[00:24:59.760 --> 00:25:03.360] I'm not even against the encampments, just to be clear, right?
[00:25:03.360 --> 00:25:04.720] I'm not against them.
[00:25:04.720 --> 00:25:10.720] I'm not against looking at problems of colonialism or of racism in the Israel-Palestine conflict.
[00:25:10.720 --> 00:25:15.200] Quite the contrary, we have to look at any relevant factor and we have to discuss it, right?
[00:25:15.840 --> 00:25:31.200] But to have the left dictating this one-sided agenda, that same left, which is constantly teaching the rest of us to look for ambiguity and complexity in human situations and to always engage with the other and all of these other, you know, kind of nostrums, right?
[00:25:31.200 --> 00:25:46.560] When they're doing nothing but pushing the most one-sided, the most blinkered histories which completely subtract the left's own complicity, the left's own role from these histories, that there's no way in which, there's no way in which this is progressive.
[00:25:47.200 --> 00:25:50.080] There's nothing progressive about any of it, right?
[00:25:50.080 --> 00:26:00.400] It is deeply regressive because it is deeply amnesiac about the left's complicity in the most heinous crimes of the 20th century.
[00:26:00.400 --> 00:26:05.440] Not all of them, but many of them, and in the regimes that were committing those crimes.
[00:26:05.760 --> 00:26:18.560] So I gather you were not totally surprised by the anti-Israel and in many cases anti-Semitic response post-October 7th in the West, particularly by students, who I was, you know, many people are shocked.
[00:26:18.560 --> 00:26:20.240] You know, do they really hate Jews?
[00:26:20.400 --> 00:26:29.040] I mean, one thing to be critical of the Israeli government or the IDF or whatever for certain strategies, but there seems to be a lot more than that.
[00:26:29.040 --> 00:26:30.440] Is that what you mean?
[00:26:29.600 --> 00:26:32.440] Yeah, I mean, here again, right?
[00:26:32.600 --> 00:26:42.440] As I said, you know, so much of this, to get back to your introductory comments, is about breaking out of the simple-mindedness of the culture wars, right?
[00:26:42.440 --> 00:26:44.920] So let's use this example, right?
[00:26:47.800 --> 00:26:51.000] Again, in the case of Israel-Palestine, what do we have, right?
[00:26:51.000 --> 00:27:12.280] We have, you know, one kind of entrenched position, which, you know, which gives us nothing, and particularly in universities, almost exclusively in universities, which literally presents the whole situation as nothing but a kind of re-embodiment of, again, centuries of colonialism and racism, right?
[00:27:15.400 --> 00:27:26.200] And then at the opposite extreme, equally entrenched positions, right, which are just outraged and just deny that there's anything colonial or anything racist in that situation, right?
[00:27:26.200 --> 00:27:36.040] Both of those situations, both of those positions, again, they're simplistic and all they do is entrench a standoff by constantly firing missiles at each other.
[00:27:36.040 --> 00:27:42.360] What I'm arguing is, yeah, okay, I mean, racism, that's hardly a revelation.
[00:27:42.680 --> 00:27:50.600] I think you'll scarcely find a modern state today in the world that doesn't have racism, and often far more than you're going to find in Israel.
[00:27:50.600 --> 00:27:56.840] So the fact that Israel might be, I mean, it would be strange for Israel not to be racist, what society isn't, right?
[00:27:56.840 --> 00:28:01.160] So of course we should talk about racism in Israel because we have to talk about racism everywhere.
[00:28:01.160 --> 00:28:01.960] Number one.
[00:28:01.960 --> 00:28:13.800] Number two, colonialism, again, you know, to the degree to which the creation of the Israeli state, you know, was, you know, was best characterized as a colonial enterprise.
[00:28:13.800 --> 00:28:15.520] Well, we can debate that.
[00:28:14.840 --> 00:28:18.000] So I'm happy to have both of those debates.
[00:28:18.640 --> 00:28:23.360] Again, of course, there would be racism in Israel because there's racism everywhere.
[00:28:23.360 --> 00:28:34.400] And of course, we have to look at possible patterns of colonial governance in Israel, even if Israel was not set up as a conventionally colonial state.
[00:28:34.400 --> 00:28:36.720] So I think we need to have both of those debates.
[00:28:36.720 --> 00:28:37.760] I'm open to them.
[00:28:37.760 --> 00:28:42.720] I think there should be more of them, you know, in a more nuanced sort of way than we're witnessing.
[00:28:42.720 --> 00:28:45.680] But again, these are still only one side, right?
[00:28:45.680 --> 00:28:51.280] Again, this is the discourse that the left has presented: the racist paradigm, the colonialist paradigm.
[00:28:51.280 --> 00:29:08.480] Again, where is the paradigm of dictatorial government surrounding Israel that have, again, massively fed into this problem, and particularly if one cares about something like human rights or humanitarianism or humanitarian norms or any other paradigm of decent treatment of people, right?
[00:29:08.480 --> 00:29:20.320] So where, again, which encampment do I go to to hear people getting up and saying, look, this is how our political home was complicit in screwing up the Middle East for decades.
[00:29:20.560 --> 00:29:26.880] Which encampment do I go to to hear this if these people all believe in a self-critical rendering of history?
[00:29:26.880 --> 00:29:34.080] If these people are teaching all the rest of us that we have to approach history self-critically, which encampment do I go to to find this?
[00:29:34.080 --> 00:29:36.320] Because I haven't heard of it yet.
[00:29:36.320 --> 00:29:41.040] All we get is the, again, the racist paradigm, the colonialist paradigm, and that's fine.
[00:29:41.040 --> 00:29:42.400] That is part of it.
[00:29:42.400 --> 00:29:46.280] But what about the paradigm of leftist complicity, right?
[00:29:47.040 --> 00:29:58.200] Again, and particularly the role, you know, of a Kremlin, which often received, you know, again, at least legitimacy, rarely much harsh criticism, right?
[00:29:58.520 --> 00:30:11.720] And particularly insofar as the Kremlin was involved in fashioning Middle East policy, you know, certainly after, say, the 1960s or after 1970s, you know, depending on how far back you want to go.
[00:30:12.040 --> 00:30:30.680] So it's not about, so it's not about, you know, denying some of these legitimate concerns that the left has raised, but asking, wait a minute, which ones are they constantly just sidelining and pushing to the peripheries, again, in order to spew essentially a purity narrative, in order to look clean.
[00:30:31.000 --> 00:30:31.800] Right.
[00:30:31.800 --> 00:30:32.920] I think that's correct.
[00:30:32.920 --> 00:30:44.280] But the points you're making are those that are made by what I refer to as old school liberals and right of center commentators who say that the academy has become corrupted by going too far left.
[00:30:44.280 --> 00:30:48.760] It was always slightly left, but not so lopsided.
[00:30:48.760 --> 00:30:57.160] You know, like English departments, humanities, social science departments, 10 to 1, 20 to 1, 50 to 1, liberal versus conservative professors.
[00:30:57.400 --> 00:31:07.640] What do you expect when you introduce all these DEI sensitivity training and this is all you talk about is race and colonialism and so on and so forth?
[00:31:07.640 --> 00:31:12.040] This is what you get after October 7th.
[00:31:12.360 --> 00:31:16.440] And again, as I said, I'm not saying that the left should stop doing any of these things.
[00:31:16.440 --> 00:31:23.480] I'm not saying that it should stop looking at colonialism or stop DEI or LGBTQ or feminism.
[00:31:24.200 --> 00:31:26.360] Let those keep going.
[00:31:26.680 --> 00:31:32.520] But again, you know, 100 years or more than 100 years ago, actually, right?
[00:31:32.520 --> 00:31:44.880] If we go back to the early Bolsheviks, the idea of critique as always coming out of a place of self-critique, at least the intelligent Bolsheviks, right?
[00:31:42.920 --> 00:31:48.960] Those kind of the first ones who were killed off, you know, first by Lenin, then by Stalin, the intelligent Bolsheviks, right?
[00:31:50.400 --> 00:31:56.880] Who really did believe that you could only, well, okay.
[00:31:56.880 --> 00:32:12.160] Well, Matt might have to make that another episode, but, you know, but you know, who believe that you could only credibly, you could only epistemologically do critique from a standpoint of self-critique, right?
[00:32:15.440 --> 00:32:16.880] That's what's disappeared.
[00:32:16.880 --> 00:32:17.920] That's what's disappeared.
[00:32:17.920 --> 00:32:20.240] Again, they all think they do it.
[00:32:20.240 --> 00:32:22.000] Oh, yes, of course, Lenin was terrible.
[00:32:22.000 --> 00:32:22.640] Oh, yes, of course.
[00:32:23.040 --> 00:32:28.480] You know, so you'll always get, again, as I've called them, you know, already, the, you know, the dismissive apologetics.
[00:32:28.480 --> 00:32:32.640] You'll always get, and then they think they've done their utter critique, right?
[00:32:32.640 --> 00:32:34.720] I mean, here, let me give an example.
[00:32:37.280 --> 00:32:44.400] In fact, I give some examples, hypothetical examples like this in the book, just to sort of try to make this a bit more concrete.
[00:32:44.720 --> 00:32:49.840] Imagine you have a group of students, yeah, and they want to do something that we've all seen many times.
[00:32:49.840 --> 00:33:00.160] And, you know, I think that we've always welcomed, and, you know, at least, you know, many of us have welcomed and thought was, you know, was perfectly appropriate, say, on a university campus.
[00:33:00.160 --> 00:33:05.200] Things like a Black History Month, a Women's History Month, the LGBTQ History Month, right?
[00:33:05.200 --> 00:33:06.640] All these sorts of things, right?
[00:33:06.640 --> 00:33:16.160] And so, you know, usually universities will have a little pot of money so that you can maybe get some speakers and maybe run some films and do some events and so forth, right?
[00:33:16.160 --> 00:33:17.440] All right, then.
[00:33:18.080 --> 00:33:22.240] Let's imagine that a group of students wanted to do this sort of event, right?
[00:33:22.240 --> 00:33:28.160] So they go to the university administrators just to apply for a bit of the usual funding.
[00:33:28.160 --> 00:33:36.760] And the administrators say, you say to them, oh, well, we know that there was slavery.
[00:33:36.760 --> 00:33:38.520] We don't support that anymore.
[00:33:38.520 --> 00:33:41.560] Oh, we know that there was sexism.
[00:33:41.560 --> 00:33:42.520] We don't support that.
[00:33:42.520 --> 00:33:44.120] Or we know there's heteronormativity.
[00:33:44.120 --> 00:33:45.320] We don't support that.
[00:33:45.320 --> 00:33:46.680] Goodbye.
[00:33:47.960 --> 00:33:49.560] That wouldn't be seen as obvious.
[00:33:49.560 --> 00:33:50.920] It would be seen as outrageous.
[00:33:50.920 --> 00:33:53.080] It would be seen as idiotic.
[00:33:53.400 --> 00:33:57.320] And yet, to say, oh, but we don't support Stalin anymore.
[00:33:58.120 --> 00:34:01.320] Oh, but we don't support the way Castro created gays, right?
[00:34:01.640 --> 00:34:02.680] That's all done.
[00:34:03.000 --> 00:34:04.440] So it's again what I was saying before.
[00:34:05.400 --> 00:34:13.400] It's the critical Western histories have to be done because it's an ongoing set of injustices which haven't stopped.
[00:34:13.400 --> 00:34:21.720] But all of a sudden, again, when we're talking about the most heinous things that the left has supported, oh, well, that's done.
[00:34:21.720 --> 00:34:22.920] That's the past.
[00:34:22.920 --> 00:34:25.160] We don't need to dwell on it.
[00:34:25.480 --> 00:34:26.200] Right?
[00:34:26.520 --> 00:34:35.320] And that's, and so, and so, and so what I find astonishing is that people aren't even surprised when progressives answer in this way.
[00:34:35.640 --> 00:34:37.720] Oh, but we don't support that anymore.
[00:34:37.720 --> 00:34:40.280] Okay, so as if it's done, you know, that ends the conversation.
[00:34:40.280 --> 00:34:46.840] Well, if that ends the conversation, then why are we doing endless study of all of the injustices that you think are important?
[00:34:46.840 --> 00:34:51.400] And they are really saying that they don't give a damn.
[00:34:51.720 --> 00:34:53.560] But of course, they can't say that.
[00:34:53.560 --> 00:34:56.520] So instead, they seem to say the opposite.
[00:34:56.520 --> 00:34:58.920] Oh, yeah, well, you know, we wouldn't support that.
[00:34:58.920 --> 00:35:00.360] No, Stalinia, of course.
[00:35:00.360 --> 00:35:01.000] Terrible.
[00:35:01.000 --> 00:35:02.760] Mao, oh, yeah, horrible, right?
[00:35:02.760 --> 00:35:04.760] So they'll do the lip service.
[00:35:04.760 --> 00:35:07.480] But in fact, they don't give a damn.
[00:35:07.960 --> 00:35:12.040] But we should give a damn about mass injustice when they don't.
[00:35:12.040 --> 00:35:14.600] We should be self-critical when they're not.
[00:35:14.720 --> 00:35:18.400] That's not progressive in any conceivable way.
[00:35:18.400 --> 00:35:24.960] So I would say to these people: no, the academy has not been dominated by leftists or progressives.
[00:35:24.960 --> 00:35:30.000] Because the leftists and progressives, first and foremost, would be doing self-critique.
[00:35:30.320 --> 00:35:34.160] Which, in fact, as I said, some of the early Bolsheviks understood.
[00:35:34.160 --> 00:35:38.080] I think you could find almost no progressives in the academy today.
[00:35:38.080 --> 00:35:39.440] Because who does this?
[00:35:39.440 --> 00:35:40.240] Who does this?
[00:35:40.240 --> 00:35:43.360] Name me a few who have done this.
[00:35:43.680 --> 00:35:48.080] Where you can, you know, I don't know, Judith Butler, Slavoj Žižek, let's go all the way down the list.
[00:35:48.080 --> 00:35:49.680] There are loads of them, right?
[00:35:49.680 --> 00:35:52.400] And they've shown me in their books where they start, right?
[00:35:52.800 --> 00:35:58.400] Instead of telling us, we have to start from the, you know, we can't just talk neutrally and objectively about history.
[00:35:58.400 --> 00:36:01.520] We have to first understand our own position in that history.
[00:36:01.520 --> 00:36:03.920] Show me where they do that with the left.
[00:36:03.920 --> 00:36:18.320] Okay, we have to start with our centuries of commitments at a higher or lower intensity to, you know, Leninism, to Stalinism, to Maoism, to the whole, you know, Castro, to Chavez, to the whole long list.
[00:36:18.320 --> 00:36:28.960] And we have to understand how our discourses of liberationism, and they call it egalitarianism, how were they systematically deployed in order to bring about precisely the opposite?
[00:36:28.960 --> 00:36:34.000] You're right, this is what we're meant to do with discourses of liberal democracy or of capitalism.
[00:36:34.000 --> 00:36:37.600] Where do we see this being done with the leftist discourses?
[00:36:37.600 --> 00:36:39.360] Which of the leading leftists?
[00:36:39.600 --> 00:36:42.080] So they're not leftists, they're not progressives.
[00:36:42.080 --> 00:36:44.880] They're just mirror imagery aggressives.
[00:36:45.360 --> 00:36:46.080] Right.
[00:36:46.080 --> 00:36:51.440] Well, maybe your book is the the launching of a new revolution on the far left or the progressive left.
[00:36:52.080 --> 00:37:00.920] Eric, if we took a big picture look at 30 from 35,000 feet, like you mentioned earlier in the conversation, you know, last three, four, five hundred, four, four hundred years, let's say.
[00:36:59.920 --> 00:37:07.080] You know, the rise of the nation state, the enlightenment, the rights revolutions of the late 18th century.
[00:37:07.400 --> 00:37:09.560] Candice Rivera has it all.
[00:37:09.560 --> 00:37:15.960] In just three years, she went from stay-at-home mom to traveling the world, saving lives and making millions.
[00:37:15.960 --> 00:37:20.520] Anyone would think Candice's charm life is about as real as Unicorn.
[00:37:20.520 --> 00:37:24.040] But sometimes the truth is even harder to believe than the lies.
[00:37:24.120 --> 00:37:25.160] It's not true.
[00:37:25.160 --> 00:37:26.840] There's so many things not true.
[00:37:26.840 --> 00:37:28.520] You got a great lead.
[00:37:28.840 --> 00:37:35.080] I'm Charlie Webster, and this is Unicorn Girl, an Apple original podcast produced by Seven Hills.
[00:37:35.080 --> 00:37:38.120] Follow and listen on Apple Podcasts.
[00:37:38.760 --> 00:37:55.800] And then the rights revolutions of the second half of the 20th century, the abolition of slavery and torture, cruel and unusual punishment, civil rights, women's rights, gay rights, animal rights, workers' rights, children's rights, now LGBTQ rights.
[00:37:55.800 --> 00:37:58.760] It seems like we've made a lot of progress.
[00:37:59.720 --> 00:38:04.200] Do you feel like the left or progressives acknowledge that enough?
[00:38:04.200 --> 00:38:13.880] Or does it, I mean, to me, it seems like they're in many of the narratives, things are horrible and we've made next to no progress.
[00:38:13.880 --> 00:38:19.400] And my response is, well, how about acknowledging that we're not living in 1950 anymore?
[00:38:20.120 --> 00:38:24.200] Conservatives today are socially more liberal than liberals were in the 1950s.
[00:38:24.200 --> 00:38:27.000] Isn't that something worth celebrating?
[00:38:27.960 --> 00:38:29.000] I hope.
[00:38:29.640 --> 00:38:45.200] But look, I mean, you know, again, I think so far in our discussion, you've sort of accepted that, you know, there's a certain kind of academic or intellectual level, which is not quite the level of people like Bernie and AOC, right?
[00:38:44.600 --> 00:38:48.800] Which is more the ideas factories of the universities and so forth.
[00:38:49.120 --> 00:38:56.560] And I think you've kind of gone, you know, gone along with me that that has a certain importance, where these ideas are coming from.
[00:38:56.560 --> 00:39:00.400] And so I kind of get the idea that fine, it's never enough.
[00:39:00.400 --> 00:39:02.000] We always want to push further.
[00:39:02.000 --> 00:39:04.240] There are always still residual injustices.
[00:39:04.320 --> 00:39:06.560] So I don't have a problem with that.
[00:39:06.560 --> 00:40:20.680] So I guess a simple way of putting my gripes about the way we're doing history nowadays is again, it's not the conservative idea that we should just stop all these critical histories and right and you know get back to you know amber waves of grain um right right so so so again that's not what i'm asking for at all it's what i'm saying is that there's a whole 50 of that history which progressives are not discussing while telling all of the rest of us that we have to look at untold stories right this is one of the points i make in the book in other way in which um uh you know critical theorists progressives understand and teach what they're doing and justify what they're doing is by saying look you know for you know for how long was history simply a question of you know glorifying the high deeds of great men right and then you know a few decades ago this really began to change and we tell we start telling the untold stories right again the stories of slaves the stories of women the stories of lgbtq that's fine i think that should continue i have no problem with that but who again who among the leading leftists today is acknowledging the fact that that whole heap is also sitting on an on a large heap of untold stories.
[00:40:21.000 --> 00:40:23.640] Where are those untold stories?
[00:40:23.960 --> 00:40:24.600] Give us some.
[00:40:24.760 --> 00:40:34.040] And if one is keeping those stories untold, which pretty much everyone in the academy is, and certainly on the left, right, in what way is one left?
[00:40:34.040 --> 00:40:41.800] In what way is one progressive when one is far from telling untold stories, is just replacing one heap of untold stories with another?
[00:40:42.120 --> 00:40:43.560] How is that progressive?
[00:40:44.040 --> 00:40:47.240] What would a good progressivism look like then?
[00:40:47.240 --> 00:40:48.680] What stories would you want to see told?
[00:40:50.840 --> 00:40:55.400] Again, it would not sacrifice some untold stories for others.
[00:40:55.400 --> 00:40:57.560] It would say, yes, we have to look at racism.
[00:40:57.560 --> 00:40:59.000] Yes, we have to look at patriarchy.
[00:40:59.000 --> 00:41:00.600] Yes, we have to look at heteronormativity.
[00:41:00.600 --> 00:41:03.640] Yes, we have to look at capitalist exploitation.
[00:41:03.640 --> 00:41:14.040] And also, we have to look at these mismass injustice in which our own political home has also been deeply implicated for more than a century.
[00:41:14.040 --> 00:41:16.760] And we have to come to terms with that too, right?
[00:41:16.760 --> 00:41:20.200] Again, how do we do the history of Western liberal democracy?
[00:41:20.200 --> 00:41:25.400] We look at ways in which the ideals of liberal democracy, right?
[00:41:25.400 --> 00:41:37.640] Individual autonomy, civic equality, equal opportunity, how these norms have actually been deployed in order to justify precisely the opposite outcomes.
[00:41:38.520 --> 00:41:49.160] So Plessy versus Ferguson, the kind of quintessential example of a case which actually used the discourse of equality in order to entrench the most heinous inequality.
[00:41:49.160 --> 00:41:50.280] That's good.
[00:41:50.280 --> 00:42:01.000] And once again, I'm going to ask: who are the leading leftists who are showing how the same thing happened with leftist discourses and who think that it's just as important that we understand this?
[00:42:02.600 --> 00:42:04.120] I can't think of one.
[00:42:04.360 --> 00:42:08.280] So, again, the point is not that we stop doing one and start doing the other.
[00:42:08.600 --> 00:42:19.680] It's that, you know, what is presented as something which is very broad and pluralistic is actually remarkably narrow and simply has to be broadened and broadened by quite a bit.
[00:42:20.960 --> 00:42:25.280] You know, I've been at a couple conferences where Zizek, is that how you say his name?
[00:42:25.280 --> 00:42:25.600] Yeah.
[00:42:26.560 --> 00:42:29.520] I have a hard time following his train of thought.
[00:42:29.520 --> 00:42:31.200] He seems to bounce around a lot.
[00:42:31.200 --> 00:42:36.800] I don't know if you know him, but if he represents anything, what is that position?
[00:42:36.800 --> 00:42:38.560] What is he arguing for?
[00:42:39.200 --> 00:42:58.240] Well, no, he's very interesting, actually, because he's one of the best examples of what I'm criticizing, though I think not the best example, precisely because, yeah, that kind of playfully aleatoric rhetoric is, in fact, part of the philosophy of the world that he wants to present.
[00:42:58.240 --> 00:42:59.040] Yeah, that's fine.
[00:42:59.040 --> 00:43:00.720] You can take that or leave it.
[00:43:01.280 --> 00:43:06.000] But what's very, very interesting is that he is quite eager.
[00:43:06.000 --> 00:43:19.920] And in fact, I quote him at the beginning of one of the book sections, as essentially saying that what we are doing is holding liberal democracy to its own standards.
[00:43:19.920 --> 00:43:26.160] And this is quite typical of Žižek to kind of announce these sort of platitudes as if they're grand revelations.
[00:43:26.160 --> 00:43:31.520] Again, this is something that was done, that Karl Marx discovered 200 years ago and that leftists have always done.
[00:43:31.520 --> 00:43:32.400] But that's fine.
[00:43:32.400 --> 00:43:32.960] That's fine.
[00:43:32.960 --> 00:43:36.000] He wasn't claiming to be original in that quote, right?
[00:43:36.000 --> 00:43:39.920] So we're simply holding the liberal democracy to its own standards.
[00:43:39.920 --> 00:43:40.640] Fine.
[00:43:40.960 --> 00:43:44.000] Who's holding the left to its own standards?
[00:43:44.000 --> 00:43:46.480] Again, they all think they do.
[00:43:47.760 --> 00:43:56.880] They all think they do, again, and you know, simply by teaching the rest of us how to criticize our, you know, again, the history of Western liberal democracy.
[00:43:57.200 --> 00:44:12.680] But, you know, as I, you know, as I say in the conclusion of the book, when it comes to teaching us to take collective responsibility for our history, don't tell us, show us who does that.
[00:44:14.280 --> 00:44:20.360] So I shouldn't only be asking which encampment should I go to, I should really be asking which classroom should I go to?
[00:44:20.360 --> 00:44:26.760] Which classroom can I go to where progressives are teaching progressive thought this way?
[00:44:28.200 --> 00:44:28.600] No idea.
[00:44:29.320 --> 00:44:52.680] Not simply with five minutes of, oh, yes, Stalin was bad, and yes, of course, we don't do that anymore, but showing how, again, how leftist concepts were manipulated and deployed by structures of power in precisely the way that they teach the rest of us that liberal democratic discourses were manipulated and disseminated and by powerful structures.
[00:44:52.680 --> 00:45:01.800] Again, I'm not denying that that happened, but where is the same teaching that the same thing has happened with leftist discourses?
[00:45:01.800 --> 00:45:02.200] Where?
[00:45:02.200 --> 00:45:03.880] Which classroom do I go to?
[00:45:03.880 --> 00:45:05.080] Sign me up.
[00:45:05.080 --> 00:45:06.120] Send me.
[00:45:06.840 --> 00:45:07.320] Send me.
[00:45:07.320 --> 00:45:09.000] Because I haven't seen it.
[00:45:09.000 --> 00:45:12.120] Maybe that's your next course you can teach at your university.
[00:45:12.120 --> 00:45:16.040] And that's why I would say there are no progressives in the academy.
[00:45:16.040 --> 00:45:16.440] Wow.
[00:45:16.440 --> 00:45:17.240] Zero.
[00:45:17.240 --> 00:45:17.640] Okay.
[00:45:17.640 --> 00:45:18.360] Wow.
[00:45:19.000 --> 00:45:20.680] That's a shocking statement.
[00:45:20.680 --> 00:45:32.840] What would a fair and just society look like to you when your progressives say things like, well, Stalin, you know, and Mao and Cuba, these are not good examples.
[00:45:32.840 --> 00:45:34.600] Well, what would it look like then?
[00:45:34.600 --> 00:45:37.560] A fair and just society?
[00:45:39.160 --> 00:45:48.800] And I'm glad that you asked that question because, again, I know that I'm sounding terribly irritated.
[00:45:44.440 --> 00:45:49.360] That's all right.
[00:45:52.560 --> 00:45:55.600] But here's actually a point of conciliation.
[00:45:58.880 --> 00:46:16.160] Because now we're at a moment, you know, right now we're at a moment where even mainstream conservatives are actually having a lot more sympathy for Bernie and AOC than for the guy in the White House.
[00:46:16.480 --> 00:46:18.160] Not to mention people on the left.
[00:46:18.720 --> 00:46:26.480] You know, Larry Summers was saying, you know, recently at a public event, you know, that Trump is a unifier.
[00:46:26.480 --> 00:46:36.080] You know, that all sorts of ideological divisions at Harvard, these people, they're suddenly all coming together because the one thing they can agree on is get rid of this guy, right?
[00:46:36.080 --> 00:46:39.760] So what would a fair and just society look like?
[00:46:39.760 --> 00:46:40.800] Who knows?
[00:46:40.800 --> 00:46:46.240] Step one is you don't start with autocrats, right?
[00:46:46.560 --> 00:46:51.600] And again, this has always been a real sore point on the left, right?
[00:46:51.600 --> 00:46:56.480] So if the left again wants us to critically look at history, right?
[00:46:56.480 --> 00:46:57.200] Yeah, fine.
[00:46:57.200 --> 00:47:05.840] And let's come together and get rid of Trump and get rid of all of this dismantling of liberal and democratic institutions.
[00:47:05.840 --> 00:47:18.480] But do we also have to look at the fact that for more than a century, leftists were supporting regimes that were doing exactly what we see, hollowing out democratic institutions, hollowing out the rule of law?
[00:47:18.480 --> 00:47:26.960] So, what do people on the left think that this is inherently bad to be hollowing out these institutions?
[00:47:26.960 --> 00:47:30.000] Or is it only bad when it's being done for a program that you don't like?
[00:47:31.640 --> 00:47:53.880] Again, where is this discussion about how the left, for you know, for over a century was systematically and to this day still supporting dictators who were undermining the rule of law, undermining the free press, imprisoning prisoners, imprisoning political opponents, undermining constitutional democracy?
[00:47:53.880 --> 00:47:57.240] The left has been deeply implicated in that, right?
[00:47:57.240 --> 00:47:59.480] So, that history has to be done.
[00:47:59.480 --> 00:48:02.360] Yeah, and again, we're not hearing about this.
[00:48:02.360 --> 00:48:03.160] Yeah.
[00:48:03.160 --> 00:48:06.520] Well, we can come together.
[00:48:06.520 --> 00:48:09.560] We can come together to get rid of people who do that.
[00:48:09.560 --> 00:48:10.280] Yeah.
[00:48:10.600 --> 00:48:21.080] So, when you talk about the purity test, and this has always been my problem with the idea of utopias, they're not achievable, and you know, no one's going to be perfect, and so on.
[00:48:21.080 --> 00:48:28.600] So, when we talk about a just and fair society, you know, we're not going to get rid of every last racist and bigot and misogynist.
[00:48:28.600 --> 00:48:30.440] There's always going to be a handful.
[00:48:30.440 --> 00:48:35.160] You know, so how do we move or sort of nudge in that direction as you see it?
[00:48:35.160 --> 00:48:37.080] And what would be the measure?
[00:48:37.080 --> 00:48:42.120] You know, so here we can shift from equality of opportunity to equality of outcomes.
[00:48:42.360 --> 00:48:45.080] Do we need, let me use specific examples.
[00:48:45.080 --> 00:48:49.640] There's 14% African American of the American population, the U.S.
[00:48:49.640 --> 00:48:50.440] population.
[00:48:50.440 --> 00:49:00.520] Would we need 14% physicians, lawyers, 14% academy, or sorry, of congressional members, or 14% CEOs of Fortune 500 companies?
[00:49:00.520 --> 00:49:05.160] And then we would know we've achieved an equal, fair, just in society?
[00:49:05.160 --> 00:49:06.680] Or is it something else?
[00:49:06.680 --> 00:49:12.440] Just the opportunities are there, and there'll always be difference, group differences, and we can't focus on that.
[00:49:12.440 --> 00:49:14.120] How do you think about that?
[00:49:15.200 --> 00:49:17.840] I'm not sure that those are the only two options.
[00:49:18.640 --> 00:49:25.920] Either we find the precise percentage point on the one hand, or on the other hand, you know, it'll always be there and can never change, right?
[00:49:25.920 --> 00:49:30.480] And again, that's why, you know, in my book, I don't set out a program.
[00:49:30.480 --> 00:49:33.520] I know, but I'm asking you, I'm just curious what you think.
[00:49:34.240 --> 00:49:39.200] Separate from the book, just give me your idea of a fair and just society.
[00:49:41.760 --> 00:49:58.800] Well, I'm more interested, I think I'm more interested in what can we all agree has gone wrong, and what can we all agree on as being a better way of addressing, of taking seriously what has gone wrong?
[00:49:58.800 --> 00:50:06.720] Because that's always step one before getting to the next step of, well, what do we mean by right and how do we get to right?
[00:50:06.720 --> 00:50:08.640] Of course, that's always harder, right?
[00:50:08.640 --> 00:50:21.280] It's always easier to look at the past and find what's gone wrong than to deliver guarantees about what will work in the future, because the future always holds too many unforeseeables.
[00:50:21.600 --> 00:50:27.520] So, yeah, so I mean, I could probably sit here and give you 10 plans.
[00:50:27.520 --> 00:50:30.480] I wouldn't really know which is better than the other.
[00:50:30.800 --> 00:50:35.680] And again, I just don't think that's, I just don't think that's really necessary.
[00:50:36.000 --> 00:50:49.600] You know, these are, this is why we have democracy, because fine, you know, once we, you know, once we identify problems in the past, you know, then we all come to the table and we fight it out in that messy way, and we just come up with something.
[00:50:49.600 --> 00:50:53.360] And as you say, it's, you know, it's probably not going to be perfect.
[00:50:53.360 --> 00:50:55.520] It's always going to have a lot of horse trading.
[00:50:55.840 --> 00:50:57.840] That's kind of the way politics is.
[00:50:57.840 --> 00:51:01.000] And that's why, for me to kind of present my ideal model, right?
[00:51:01.000 --> 00:51:05.480] It doesn't matter what my ideal model is because that's not what we're going to get or anybody's ideal, right?
[00:51:05.480 --> 00:51:09.080] That's not democracy, is not there for ideals, right?
[00:51:09.080 --> 00:51:13.880] Democracy is there to try to hash out workable, imperfect solutions.
[00:51:13.880 --> 00:51:16.280] And I think that's good.
[00:51:16.600 --> 00:51:28.120] You know, I think, um, I think, um, I think too many evils over the past, you know, century or so have been committed in the name of getting to higher and more perfect ideals.
[00:51:28.920 --> 00:51:47.480] But of course, so I'm happy more with a system, you know, that you know, where people have, you know, where different voices are participating, and and uh, and again, where we're where we're looking at if we're gonna look at history critically, we're we're sure to include the relevant histories and not only selectively.
[00:51:47.480 --> 00:51:49.640] Selective history is not history.
[00:51:49.640 --> 00:51:55.720] Yeah, but Marx famously said that the point of studying history is you know to change the future, right?
[00:51:56.040 --> 00:52:01.560] Or phylagaso is philosophy study is not to understand the past but to change it.
[00:52:01.560 --> 00:52:07.240] And Marx also famously admitted to being very vague about what it would look like.
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[00:52:59.600 --> 00:53:01.040] You couldn't plot it out.
[00:53:01.040 --> 00:53:02.640] That there was also contingencies.
[00:53:02.640 --> 00:53:12.880] That's why I think we tend to exaggerate the determinacy of his understanding of history, the determinism, I should say, of his understanding of history, right?
[00:53:13.120 --> 00:53:17.840] He is quite deterministic in talking about the past because that's easy to do.
[00:53:18.480 --> 00:53:19.840] It's there, right?
[00:53:19.840 --> 00:53:23.360] So you can put a pattern on it, and he certainly did.
[00:53:23.360 --> 00:53:31.440] That was somewhat in vogue in the 19th century, certainly in the early and mid-19th centuries, was to put these patterns on history.
[00:53:31.440 --> 00:53:40.800] And he did it, but he was quite straightforward about saying, We don't know what the future is going to look like, right?
[00:53:41.040 --> 00:53:48.400] You know, at one point, he says, well, but we know what it won't look like, or at least what it shouldn't look like.
[00:53:48.400 --> 00:53:55.040] In other words, we can still look to the past for understanding of what needs to be changed.
[00:53:55.680 --> 00:54:00.320] So much of your discussion is slightly different words, but okay.
[00:54:00.320 --> 00:54:05.760] Well, you discussed critical theory, and I guess that's overlapping with critical race theory, right?
[00:54:06.080 --> 00:54:06.720] Yeah.
[00:54:07.040 --> 00:54:22.360] So the identification of past wrongs and the kind of culmination of critical race theory, I guess, would be the 1619 project in which they kind of outline: here's all the ways America and the West is still structurally racist.
[00:54:22.360 --> 00:54:39.960] Even if you personally are not a racist, you don't know any races, everybody's, you know, likes everyone else, but generationally, there are huge gaps in income, home ownership, quality of schools, and where different groups go to different schools because of this past history and so on.
[00:54:39.960 --> 00:54:44.200] The whole point of that is we need to do something about it, right?
[00:54:44.200 --> 00:54:47.080] We need to change whatever it is.
[00:54:47.960 --> 00:54:49.480] Reparations or something like that.
[00:54:49.480 --> 00:54:50.520] Well, where do we get the money?
[00:54:50.520 --> 00:54:54.840] You have to raise the tax rates at the upper income.
[00:54:54.840 --> 00:54:59.240] For example, at the moment, it's 37% in the United States of the highest earners.
[00:54:59.240 --> 00:55:03.720] And Bernie and AOC and the progressives, they want to raise it, 50%.
[00:55:03.720 --> 00:55:07.960] It used to be 70% in the 70s, even 90% in the 50s.
[00:55:07.960 --> 00:55:11.480] Let's get back to that so we can correct these wrongs.
[00:55:11.800 --> 00:55:16.680] That's taking the past and understanding it and then wanting to do something about it.
[00:55:16.680 --> 00:55:17.640] Do you go that far?
[00:55:17.640 --> 00:55:25.000] Like, okay, let's take what we know and then now let's correct these injustices.
[00:55:25.320 --> 00:55:30.440] Well, yeah, I mean, of course, that is, you know, where we want to be headed.
[00:55:30.440 --> 00:55:34.920] Otherwise, the whole thing becomes kind of just a meaningless exercise.
[00:55:36.760 --> 00:55:38.200] I guess I would say two things.
[00:55:38.200 --> 00:55:43.080] I mean, in other words, so let's take the 1619 project, right?
[00:55:43.080 --> 00:55:50.360] Because as we know, it was subject to not only a lot of attack, but a good amount of ridicule and still is.
[00:55:51.960 --> 00:55:52.440] Right?
[00:55:52.440 --> 00:55:56.760] And there again, so you see that's a typical product of the culture war, right?
[00:55:56.760 --> 00:56:01.000] So those who have to kind of virulently defend it, those who virulently attack it.
[00:56:01.000 --> 00:56:04.440] How about a 1917 project?
[00:56:04.760 --> 00:56:07.160] Right, now there's let's keep the 1619.
[00:56:07.160 --> 00:56:08.280] I don't have any problem with that.
[00:56:08.280 --> 00:56:08.600] Fine.
[00:56:08.600 --> 00:56:10.360] You know, every now and then you might get the history wrong.
[00:56:10.360 --> 00:56:12.920] So then someone comes along and corrects it or challenges it.
[00:56:12.920 --> 00:56:13.800] You have the debate.
[00:56:13.800 --> 00:56:14.280] Great.
[00:56:14.280 --> 00:56:16.160] Keep the 1619 project.
[00:56:16.480 --> 00:56:18.400] Where's the 1917 project?
[00:56:18.400 --> 00:56:32.960] Right now, there's a project which starts at the point where leftism was no longer just something in books and at meeting tables, right, but took on power which soon snowballed into massive power, affecting millions of lives.
[00:56:32.960 --> 00:56:50.480] And as I said before, with enjoying at least legitimacy, if not often zealous support from important strands of leftism in the West, and asking the question: how has that influenced what we're calling progressive politics?
[00:56:50.480 --> 00:56:57.680] Including, when I say how is that influenced, including the ways in which we've conveniently ignored it.
[00:56:57.680 --> 00:56:59.600] So let's have two projects.
[00:56:59.600 --> 00:57:02.400] Let's have more than two, but let's start with a second.
[00:57:02.400 --> 00:57:04.480] We'll call it the 1917 project.
[00:57:04.480 --> 00:57:06.720] Then we can add more, right?
[00:57:10.400 --> 00:57:12.480] You know, so that's you know, that's what I would say.
[00:57:12.480 --> 00:57:16.320] So again, it's not an either-or, it's not a zero-sum game.
[00:57:16.560 --> 00:57:21.440] And, you know, one of the things I insist on in the book is you can't compare atrocities.
[00:57:21.760 --> 00:57:32.160] And so that's why, you know, it's adamantly not what about, you know, well, let's add up the numbers of dead on this side and add up the numbers of dead and see which regime was worse.
[00:57:32.160 --> 00:57:33.200] It's not about that at all.
[00:57:33.200 --> 00:57:39.840] You can't do that anyway because atrocities are only quantifiable to a certain degree.
[00:57:40.080 --> 00:57:42.320] You know, why would we want to?
[00:57:42.640 --> 00:57:44.240] So, yeah, that's what I would say.
[00:57:45.520 --> 00:57:51.360] But again, you know, as to your question of, well, you know, again, you're really pushing me to get, you know, to stick out a policy.
[00:57:51.360 --> 00:58:01.560] Well, yeah, I mean, you know, once we're getting into, you know, incomes in the billions, which is not being reinvested, you are right.
[00:58:01.880 --> 00:58:12.040] I would be very much a partisan of not taxing or low taxing for any, which is reinvested, which goes back into creating jobs and creating employment, right?
[00:58:12.200 --> 00:58:25.400] But once we're just talking about, you know, personal wealth, which is skinned off the top, yeah, sure, I'm happy to increase taxes on that because, you know, it's, you know, because its beneficial effects on the economy are minimal.
[00:58:25.720 --> 00:58:27.240] So there, I gave you a policy.
[00:58:27.560 --> 00:58:28.280] Okay, there we go.
[00:58:28.280 --> 00:58:34.280] Well, Eric, I'm not sure that was, you know, maybe the most insightful thing I've had to say today, but there you go.
[00:58:34.280 --> 00:58:37.720] You know, I mean, sure, I'm happy to look at that.
[00:58:37.720 --> 00:58:49.160] You know, I think $999 million of personal wealth is very nice.
[00:58:49.160 --> 00:58:57.640] I'm not sure that, you know, once it becomes a million more, all of a sudden, you know, taxing it is going to be such a terrible thing.
[00:58:57.640 --> 00:59:12.440] But again, of personal, you know, of personal final wealth, not in terms of reinvestment, research and development, other things where I think there are good reasons to, you know, to let that money continue to be productive.
[00:59:13.080 --> 00:59:22.200] So, but again, on this kind of practical level, you know, we want to kind of correct what has gone wrong.
[00:59:22.520 --> 00:59:27.480] In terms of studying history, we, as a social scientist, we can't run experiments.
[00:59:27.480 --> 00:59:30.920] You know, let's try an autocracy versus a democracy or whatever.
[00:59:30.920 --> 00:59:35.880] But we can use the natural experiments that have happened and then use the comparison method.
[00:59:35.880 --> 00:59:39.160] Obvious simple examples: North Korea versus South Korea.
[00:59:39.400 --> 00:59:41.960] Let's look at why they are different.
[00:59:41.960 --> 00:59:47.040] Or, you know, East Germany versus West Germany before the unification and so on.
[00:59:48.480 --> 01:00:02.160] When you give examples of Lenin, Stalin's the USSR and Mao's China, Pol Pots, Cambodia, and so on, people might say, why can't they say, yeah, we tried progressive leftism.
[01:00:02.160 --> 01:00:03.760] That's what it looks like.
[01:00:03.760 --> 01:00:04.880] So it's failed.
[01:00:04.880 --> 01:00:06.480] We've run the experiment.
[01:00:06.480 --> 01:00:07.680] That doesn't work.
[01:00:07.680 --> 01:00:08.160] Period.
[01:00:08.160 --> 01:00:08.800] End of story.
[01:00:09.120 --> 01:00:11.360] We got to try something different.
[01:00:13.920 --> 01:00:27.360] Yeah, and I mean, I think what's curious here is that I think many of the, many, not all, but many serious people on the left did come to this understanding.
[01:00:27.360 --> 01:00:43.200] I mean, if we go back actually to, you know, Donald Trump's first term, I mean, even further, if we go back to what, I guess, about 2014, 2015, I'm not perfectly clear on the dates now, but as the kind of those primaries were starting to heat up, right?
[01:00:43.200 --> 01:00:49.280] And so Donald Trump was still in the running with other Republicans, and then you had the whole roster of Democrats.
[01:00:49.280 --> 01:00:54.560] I think a big mistake that Bernie Sanders made was just to use the word socialism, right?
[01:00:54.560 --> 01:01:01.200] If he had said social democracy, again, if he had shown that he understands the history that you've just mentioned, right?
[01:01:01.840 --> 01:01:17.360] And that, you know, you know, fully fledged, centralized, centrally managed economies managing every aspect of an economy, right, you know, have led to economic catastrophes and breakdowns, right?
[01:01:17.360 --> 01:01:21.440] And so acknowledge that by changing the terminology a bit, right?
[01:01:21.760 --> 01:01:24.400] You know, we might be in a very different place today.
[01:01:24.720 --> 01:01:28.080] And it made me wonder at the time, what does he mean?
[01:01:28.080 --> 01:01:29.680] I mean, he's no idiot.
[01:01:29.880 --> 01:01:30.840] He's no idiot.
[01:01:30.840 --> 01:01:34.200] He knows the difference between socialism and social democracy.
[01:01:34.520 --> 01:01:41.240] I mean, this is just, you don't need to be, to have a PhD in political science to know this, right?
[01:01:41.320 --> 01:01:43.160] I think pretty much anybody who reads...
[01:01:43.160 --> 01:01:44.360] the news, right?
[01:01:46.040 --> 01:01:51.960] And so I have to say that that threw me too when he was not using the term social democracy, that little difference.
[01:01:52.040 --> 01:01:57.560] Although I think that, you know, at least now, 10 years later, that seems to be what he and AOC mean.
[01:01:57.560 --> 01:01:58.600] Who knows?
[01:01:58.600 --> 01:02:05.560] So I, you know, if what you're saying is that they need to be a bit clear about this, yeah, you've got my 100% support on that.
[01:02:05.560 --> 01:02:06.280] All right.
[01:02:06.280 --> 01:02:11.800] And in so doing, would also, again, be showing somewhat of a greater awareness of history.
[01:02:11.800 --> 01:02:19.480] That if they mean something like, you know, an enormous state managing every aspect of an economy, right?
[01:02:20.840 --> 01:02:24.440] Well, how, you know, are they willing to acknowledge that these have been colossal failures?
[01:02:24.440 --> 01:02:28.520] And if that they don't mean that, well, can they be a bit clear what they do mean?
[01:02:28.520 --> 01:02:37.960] You know, I'd like to think that they mean something more like, you know, a roughly, a loosely sort of Northern European model of, say, the 1970s.
[01:02:37.960 --> 01:02:52.120] Now, I'm not sure that a Northern European model of the 1970s can be adapted wholesale into present conditions because other factors in the world economy, you know, such as China and so forth or India, now play a very, very different role.
[01:02:52.920 --> 01:03:03.880] But if they mean, you know, something like that, which is, you know, generally hospitable to free markets, redistributive in a strategic way, yeah, I mean, I think that's at least more serious than something to look at.
[01:03:03.880 --> 01:03:19.840] And when conservatives just kind of, you know, tar that all as communism, it, you know, they're just kind of flaunting their ignorance in the most, and, you know, in the highest, you know, you know, with the brightest colors.
[01:03:14.840 --> 01:03:22.000] So it's not to be taken seriously.
[01:03:22.080 --> 01:03:29.040] So, yeah, of course, there are different, you know, we always have to understand that there are different competing economic models.
[01:03:30.320 --> 01:03:44.320] You know, so and it's true that I think a real problem among conservatives is to ultimately lead us to the idea, fine, we believe in free markets, but that free markets only mean one very specific type of model.
[01:03:44.320 --> 01:03:46.640] You know, that's that's terrifying.
[01:03:46.640 --> 01:03:49.680] You know, we always have choices among economic models.
[01:03:49.680 --> 01:03:52.080] That's as true on the left as on the right.
[01:03:52.080 --> 01:03:57.840] And I would say, on, you know, straight along the spectrum, we could use more clarity.
[01:03:58.160 --> 01:03:59.120] That's good.
[01:03:59.120 --> 01:04:00.560] All right, Eric, thank you so much.
[01:04:00.560 --> 01:04:02.960] Here it is again, coming clean.
[01:04:03.440 --> 01:04:07.120] Rise of critical theory and the future of your left of the left.
[01:04:07.120 --> 01:04:07.920] Thank you, Michael.
[01:04:07.920 --> 01:04:10.320] It's been an absolute pleasure to talk to you.
[01:04:16.720 --> 01:04:22.160] Groons just launched a limited edition Grooney Smith apple flavor, and it's o

Prompt 2: Key Takeaways

Now please extract the key takeaways from the transcript content I provided.

Extract the most important key takeaways from this part of the conversation. Use a single sentence statement (the key takeaway) rather than milquetoast descriptions like "the hosts discuss...". 

Limit the key takeaways to a maximum of 3. The key takeaways should be insightful and knowledge-additive. 

IMPORTANT: Return ONLY valid JSON, no explanations or markdown. Ensure:
- All strings are properly quoted and escaped
- No trailing commas
- All braces and brackets are balanced
Format: {"key_takeaways": ["takeaway 1", "takeaway 2"]}

Prompt 3: Segments

Now identify 2-4 distinct topical segments from this part of the conversation.

For each segment, identify:
- Descriptive title (3-6 words)  
- START timestamp when this topic begins (HH:MM:SS format)
- Double check that the timestamp is accurate - a timestamp will NEVER be greater than the total length of the audio
- Most important Key takeaway from that segment. Key takeaway must be specific and knowledge-additive.
- Brief summary of the discussion

IMPORTANT: The timestamp should mark when the topic/segment STARTS, not a range. Look for topic transitions and conversation shifts.

Return ONLY valid JSON. Ensure all strings are properly quoted, no trailing commas:
{
  "segments": [
    {
      "segment_title": "Topic Discussion", 
      "timestamp": "01:15:30",
      "key_takeaway": "main point from this segment",
      "segment_summary": "brief description of what was discussed"
    }
  ]
}

Timestamp format: HH:MM:SS (e.g., 00:05:30, 01:22:45) marking the START of each segment.

Prompt 4: Media Mentions

Now scan the transcript content I provided for ACTUAL mentions of specific media titles:

Find explicit mentions of:
- Books (with specific titles)
- Movies (with specific titles)  
- TV Shows (with specific titles)
- Music/Songs (with specific titles)

DO NOT include:
- Websites, URLs, or web services
- Other podcasts or podcast names

IMPORTANT: 
- Only include items explicitly mentioned by name. Do not invent titles.
- Valid categories are: "Book", "Movie", "TV Show", "Music"
- Include the exact phrase where each item was mentioned
- Find the nearest proximate timestamp where it appears in the conversation
- THE TIMESTAMP OF THE MEDIA MENTION IS IMPORTANT - DO NOT INVENT TIMESTAMPS AND DO NOT MISATTRIBUTE TIMESTAMPS
- Double check that the timestamp is accurate - a timestamp will NEVER be greater than the total length of the audio
- Timestamps are given as ranges, e.g. 01:13:42.520 --> 01:13:46.720. Use the EARLIER of the 2 timestamps in the range.

Return ONLY valid JSON. Ensure all strings are properly quoted and escaped, no trailing commas:
{
  "media_mentions": [
    {
      "title": "Exact Title as Mentioned",
      "category": "Book",
      "author_artist": "N/A",
      "context": "Brief context of why it was mentioned",
      "context_phrase": "The exact sentence or phrase where it was mentioned",
      "timestamp": "estimated time like 01:15:30"
    }
  ]
}

If no media is mentioned, return: {"media_mentions": []}

Prompt 5: Context Setup

You are an expert data extractor tasked with analyzing a podcast transcript. 
I will provide you with part 2 of 2 from a podcast transcript. 
I will then ask you to extract different types of information from this content in subsequent messages. Please confirm you have received and understood the transcript content.

Transcript section:
 present conditions because other factors in the world economy, you know, such as China and so forth or India, now play a very, very different role.
[01:02:52.920 --> 01:03:03.880] But if they mean, you know, something like that, which is, you know, generally hospitable to free markets, redistributive in a strategic way, yeah, I mean, I think that's at least more serious than something to look at.
[01:03:03.880 --> 01:03:19.840] And when conservatives just kind of, you know, tar that all as communism, it, you know, they're just kind of flaunting their ignorance in the most, and, you know, in the highest, you know, you know, with the brightest colors.
[01:03:14.840 --> 01:03:22.000] So it's not to be taken seriously.
[01:03:22.080 --> 01:03:29.040] So, yeah, of course, there are different, you know, we always have to understand that there are different competing economic models.
[01:03:30.320 --> 01:03:44.320] You know, so and it's true that I think a real problem among conservatives is to ultimately lead us to the idea, fine, we believe in free markets, but that free markets only mean one very specific type of model.
[01:03:44.320 --> 01:03:46.640] You know, that's that's terrifying.
[01:03:46.640 --> 01:03:49.680] You know, we always have choices among economic models.
[01:03:49.680 --> 01:03:52.080] That's as true on the left as on the right.
[01:03:52.080 --> 01:03:57.840] And I would say, on, you know, straight along the spectrum, we could use more clarity.
[01:03:58.160 --> 01:03:59.120] That's good.
[01:03:59.120 --> 01:04:00.560] All right, Eric, thank you so much.
[01:04:00.560 --> 01:04:02.960] Here it is again, coming clean.
[01:04:03.440 --> 01:04:07.120] Rise of critical theory and the future of your left of the left.
[01:04:07.120 --> 01:04:07.920] Thank you, Michael.
[01:04:07.920 --> 01:04:10.320] It's been an absolute pleasure to talk to you.
[01:04:16.720 --> 01:04:22.160] Groons just launched a limited edition Grooney Smith apple flavor, and it's only available through October.
[01:04:22.160 --> 01:04:26.880] Same full body benefits you love, but now it tastes like sweet tart green apple candy.
[01:04:26.880 --> 01:04:30.960] Like walking through an orchard in a cable-knit sweater, warm cider in hand.
[01:04:30.960 --> 01:04:36.320] Each packable pouch delivers six grams of prebiotic fiber and a powerful daily dose of vitamins and minerals.
[01:04:36.320 --> 01:04:38.880] Grab your limited edition Grooney Smith Apple Groons.
[01:04:38.880 --> 01:04:40.800] Stock up because they will sell out.
[01:04:40.800 --> 01:04:42.800] Use code apple at groons.co.
[01:04:42.800 --> 01:04:46.800] That's g-u-r-n-s.co-o to get up to 52% off.

Prompt 6: Key Takeaways

Now please extract the key takeaways from the transcript content I provided.

Extract the most important key takeaways from this part of the conversation. Use a single sentence statement (the key takeaway) rather than milquetoast descriptions like "the hosts discuss...". 

Limit the key takeaways to a maximum of 3. The key takeaways should be insightful and knowledge-additive. 

IMPORTANT: Return ONLY valid JSON, no explanations or markdown. Ensure:
- All strings are properly quoted and escaped
- No trailing commas
- All braces and brackets are balanced
Format: {"key_takeaways": ["takeaway 1", "takeaway 2"]}

Prompt 7: Segments

Now identify 2-4 distinct topical segments from this part of the conversation.

For each segment, identify:
- Descriptive title (3-6 words)  
- START timestamp when this topic begins (HH:MM:SS format)
- Double check that the timestamp is accurate - a timestamp will NEVER be greater than the total length of the audio
- Most important Key takeaway from that segment. Key takeaway must be specific and knowledge-additive.
- Brief summary of the discussion

IMPORTANT: The timestamp should mark when the topic/segment STARTS, not a range. Look for topic transitions and conversation shifts.

Return ONLY valid JSON. Ensure all strings are properly quoted, no trailing commas:
{
  "segments": [
    {
      "segment_title": "Topic Discussion", 
      "timestamp": "01:15:30",
      "key_takeaway": "main point from this segment",
      "segment_summary": "brief description of what was discussed"
    }
  ]
}

Timestamp format: HH:MM:SS (e.g., 00:05:30, 01:22:45) marking the START of each segment.

Prompt 8: Media Mentions

Now scan the transcript content I provided for ACTUAL mentions of specific media titles:

Find explicit mentions of:
- Books (with specific titles)
- Movies (with specific titles)  
- TV Shows (with specific titles)
- Music/Songs (with specific titles)

DO NOT include:
- Websites, URLs, or web services
- Other podcasts or podcast names

IMPORTANT: 
- Only include items explicitly mentioned by name. Do not invent titles.
- Valid categories are: "Book", "Movie", "TV Show", "Music"
- Include the exact phrase where each item was mentioned
- Find the nearest proximate timestamp where it appears in the conversation
- THE TIMESTAMP OF THE MEDIA MENTION IS IMPORTANT - DO NOT INVENT TIMESTAMPS AND DO NOT MISATTRIBUTE TIMESTAMPS
- Double check that the timestamp is accurate - a timestamp will NEVER be greater than the total length of the audio
- Timestamps are given as ranges, e.g. 01:13:42.520 --> 01:13:46.720. Use the EARLIER of the 2 timestamps in the range.

Return ONLY valid JSON. Ensure all strings are properly quoted and escaped, no trailing commas:
{
  "media_mentions": [
    {
      "title": "Exact Title as Mentioned",
      "category": "Book",
      "author_artist": "N/A",
      "context": "Brief context of why it was mentioned",
      "context_phrase": "The exact sentence or phrase where it was mentioned",
      "timestamp": "estimated time like 01:15:30"
    }
  ]
}

If no media is mentioned, return: {"media_mentions": []}

Full Transcript

[00:00:00.320 --> 00:00:02.400] Candice Rivera has it all.
[00:00:02.400 --> 00:00:08.880] In just three years, she went from stay-at-home mom to traveling the world, saving lives, and making millions.
[00:00:08.880 --> 00:00:13.360] Anyone would think Candice's charm life is about as real as Unicorn.
[00:00:13.360 --> 00:00:16.960] But sometimes the truth is even harder to believe than the lies.
[00:00:17.280 --> 00:00:18.080] Not true.
[00:00:18.080 --> 00:00:19.680] There's so many things not true.
[00:00:19.680 --> 00:00:21.440] You gotta bring me.
[00:00:21.760 --> 00:00:28.000] I'm Charlie Webster, and this is Unicorn Girl, an Apple original podcast produced by Seven Hills.
[00:00:28.000 --> 00:00:31.040] Follow and listen on Apple Podcasts.
[00:00:32.000 --> 00:00:36.080] Ever notice how ads always pop up at the worst moments?
[00:00:36.080 --> 00:00:40.160] When the killer's identity is about to be revealed.
[00:00:40.160 --> 00:00:43.840] During that perfect meditation flow.
[00:00:43.840 --> 00:00:47.840] On Amazon Music, we believe in keeping you in the moment.
[00:00:47.840 --> 00:00:57.600] That's why we've got millions of ad-free podcast episodes so you can stay completely immersed in every story, every reveal, every breath.
[00:00:57.600 --> 00:01:04.720] Download the Amazon Music app and start listening to your favorite podcasts ad-free, included with Prime.
[00:01:08.880 --> 00:01:14.560] You're listening to The Michael Shermer Show.
[00:01:21.600 --> 00:01:27.680] Eric Heinze, professor of law and humanities at Queen Mary University in London.
[00:01:27.680 --> 00:01:32.720] He's the author of The Most Human Right, Why Free Speech is Everything.
[00:01:32.720 --> 00:01:37.520] You can imagine I like that book, as a free speech fundamentalist, as it were.
[00:01:37.840 --> 00:01:42.960] Among other books, he's published over 100 articles and has been featured in radio and television and other media around the world.
[00:01:42.960 --> 00:01:50.000] His new book is, here it is, Coming Clean: The Rise of Critical Theory and the Future of the Left.
[00:01:50.000 --> 00:01:55.200] Now, after I had Christopher Ruffo on the show, I got some pushback going, hey, you got to have somebody that's not on the right.
[00:01:55.200 --> 00:01:57.760] Okay, I gather my guests today, Eric.
[00:01:58.080 --> 00:01:59.200] Nice to have you on here.
[00:01:59.200 --> 00:02:00.760] You are not from the right.
[00:01:59.760 --> 00:02:04.520] You're not a MAGA right or a conservative, I gather from reading your book.
[00:01:59.840 --> 00:02:07.320] But welcome to the show, and maybe start there.
[00:02:07.800 --> 00:02:08.440] What's your story?
[00:02:08.440 --> 00:02:12.120] How'd you get into all this stuff in political science and law and all that?
[00:02:12.120 --> 00:02:14.920] And then what is your position on these things?
[00:02:15.880 --> 00:02:33.160] Yeah, well, I mean, basically, yeah, I think as with many people who kind of jump into these issues, you notice certain things and certain discontents over a long time, sometimes dating back to your student days.
[00:02:33.480 --> 00:02:40.360] But it can take time to kind of be able to articulate a broader picture of what's going wrong.
[00:02:40.360 --> 00:02:47.080] Sometimes the things are so glaring in front of us that we don't see them.
[00:02:47.640 --> 00:02:52.760] Because I don't think anything I say in the book should be very shocking.
[00:02:52.760 --> 00:02:56.520] And yet, I think a lot of what I say is not really being said.
[00:03:00.200 --> 00:03:07.960] A lot of people, I think, are getting the impression that I simply kind of want to rehash a kind of whataboutery, right?
[00:03:07.960 --> 00:03:14.920] And so the left spends a lot of time criticizing, you know, sort of the West and Western history.
[00:03:14.920 --> 00:03:24.760] And then on the right, you get the kind of mirror imaging of telling the left all of the complicity that they've had with totalitarianism.
[00:03:25.080 --> 00:03:29.400] That's kind of a starting point from me, but that's not my end point, right?
[00:03:29.400 --> 00:03:38.280] The problem with these discussions is that's kind of where it ends, is just this kind of eternal firing back and forth of those sorts of very entrenched positions.
[00:03:38.280 --> 00:03:47.840] So, my point in the book is certainly not just to rehash once again all the crimes of the Soviet Union and of Maoism and of Pol Pot and you know, write down the list.
[00:03:48.320 --> 00:03:53.760] This is all well known, it's out in the public domain, either people will take an interest in it or they won't.
[00:03:53.760 --> 00:03:57.760] What I want to do is then go to step two: what do we do with this knowledge?
[00:03:58.480 --> 00:04:05.040] How does this then really translate into a kind of reinvention of progressive politics?
[00:04:05.040 --> 00:04:14.480] A lot of people on the left think that they've done this, they think that they've incorporated lessons from the past, and one of the things I show in the book is they haven't.
[00:04:14.480 --> 00:04:15.120] They haven't.
[00:04:15.120 --> 00:04:27.200] If you look at the ways in which this is done, it actually tends to be often very superficial to the point of dismissive or simply strategic, simply a matter of self-positioning.
[00:04:27.200 --> 00:04:33.440] But progressive thought otherwise has always been a lot more than just about strategizing.
[00:04:33.440 --> 00:04:36.400] So, these are some of the things that I try to get at in the book.
[00:04:36.400 --> 00:04:37.040] Yeah.
[00:04:37.040 --> 00:04:43.280] Could you distinguish for us like liberalism and leftism and progressivism?
[00:04:43.280 --> 00:04:48.960] Are these largely overlapping, or are there sharp distinctions between them?
[00:04:51.680 --> 00:04:54.000] This is a trap.
[00:04:55.600 --> 00:05:04.880] And again, I've already had flack for this: you know, people, without reading the book, they read some blurb, you know, problems over the left or what the left needs to do.
[00:05:04.880 --> 00:05:08.560] And then, of course, the immediate response is: well, what do you mean by the left?
[00:05:08.560 --> 00:05:10.160] There are many kinds of leftism.
[00:05:10.160 --> 00:05:13.760] There's no single, you know, often they contradict each other and so on.
[00:05:13.760 --> 00:05:15.680] But that's not just true of the left.
[00:05:15.680 --> 00:05:20.560] This is true of, you know, pretty much any ism that we've had over the past few centuries.
[00:05:20.560 --> 00:05:23.360] That's not, that's not a revelation.
[00:05:23.360 --> 00:05:33.000] And so, yes, of course, leftism, liberalism in the more colloquial sense, progressive, radical, revolutionary.
[00:05:33.000 --> 00:05:35.640] Yes, all of these have long histories.
[00:05:29.360 --> 00:05:36.760] They fed into each other.
[00:05:37.000 --> 00:05:41.160] Yes, sometimes there are contradictions, sometimes there are convergences.
[00:05:41.160 --> 00:05:45.240] And so the point in my book is not to get hung up with these sorts of definitions.
[00:05:45.240 --> 00:05:52.360] That would just be another book to, you know, to kind of tease out all the different strands over the last century or two.
[00:05:52.360 --> 00:06:05.880] My aim instead is simply to identify a number of strands that have predominated, that have kind of recurred, that have tended to mark a lot of progressive thought.
[00:06:06.200 --> 00:06:13.160] It doesn't claim to talk about everybody who might call themselves progressive or only people who might call themselves progressive.
[00:06:13.160 --> 00:06:24.920] It's simply looking at tendencies, trends that have been very strong in shaping progressive thought over at least the past few decades, arguably for more than a century.
[00:06:25.800 --> 00:06:48.600] I guess what I'm getting at is like since the 2024 election of Trump, liberals, kind of old school liberals, have been wringing their hands about maybe we went too far to the left and that jolted people who were slightly left of center to pull the handle for Trump because they just couldn't take some of the crazy far woke far left woke ism and that kind of thing.
[00:06:48.600 --> 00:06:53.080] You've been hearing all this, like Bill Maher, the comedian, you know, he's been ranting about this for a year now.
[00:06:53.080 --> 00:06:58.360] Like, we're going to lose this election if we don't, you know, get rid of this crazy, far woke progressivism.
[00:06:58.360 --> 00:07:08.920] I'm an old school liberal, you know, by which he means sort of a Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, you know, maybe Kennedy Johnson, that, you know, kind of that kind of 60s, 70s liberal.
[00:07:09.880 --> 00:07:15.360] And this has been a big talking point for my book.
[00:07:14.280 --> 00:07:19.680] I finished my book actually before the past November elections.
[00:07:20.960 --> 00:07:24.880] 99% was done before last November.
[00:07:25.200 --> 00:07:34.160] But of course, now that the election results are all too well known to all of us, you know, the book has to keep coming back to these questions.
[00:07:34.160 --> 00:07:41.360] And sort of the constant jump-off point is, as you say, and essentially, you know, where have Democrats gone wrong?
[00:07:41.360 --> 00:07:43.200] Or where has the left gone wrong?
[00:07:43.200 --> 00:07:46.400] Or where have liberals, you know, however you want to phrase it?
[00:07:46.400 --> 00:07:56.080] And then the answers kind of tend to degenerate just into this sort of, yeah, well, you know, we need to talk a little bit less about this and a little bit more about that.
[00:07:56.080 --> 00:08:00.720] You know, this kind of tweaking, you know, yeah, maybe we went a bit too far to the left.
[00:08:00.720 --> 00:08:02.800] For me, this is very superficial.
[00:08:05.040 --> 00:08:12.160] I don't think the problem, one of the things I try to hopefully show in the book is the problem is not going too far to the left.
[00:08:12.160 --> 00:08:16.880] That just begs the question about what, again, what we mean by left, too far, and so forth.
[00:08:16.880 --> 00:08:22.480] The problem is not having gone deep enough into ourselves.
[00:08:22.800 --> 00:08:28.400] And that's why my book is fundamentally about what the left does with history.
[00:08:28.720 --> 00:08:34.560] All of leftist thought in the past few decades, here I will generalize.
[00:08:34.560 --> 00:08:37.920] I guess you could find exceptions, but you won't find many.
[00:08:38.240 --> 00:09:12.360] I would say all or pretty much all of leftist thought over the past few decades or more has ultimately boiled down to critical readings of history, readings in particular of the history of the West over the last, say, two, three, even four centuries, you know, starting with really the emergence of modern states into periods of colonialism, transatlantic slave trade, racial and ethnic discrimination, tied in, of course, questions about patriarchy, heteronormativity, right?
[00:09:12.360 --> 00:09:16.920] So, however, you want to define the left, these have been constant and recurring themes.
[00:09:18.200 --> 00:09:32.200] The left is fundamentally, whatever your position is, whether it's all the way to the left, all the way to the right, it's very much the left that has defined our discussions about injustice, regardless of the positions people ultimately stake out.
[00:09:32.840 --> 00:09:42.840] And it's largely the left which has defined those discussions in terms of colonialism, capitalism, racism, patriarchy, heteronormativity.
[00:09:43.160 --> 00:09:46.920] And one of the things I say in the book is: I'm not attacking that.
[00:09:47.160 --> 00:09:49.240] Let conservatives attack that.
[00:09:49.240 --> 00:10:01.160] You know, just stop the DEI, stop the, you know, the, you know, the eternal hang-ups of history, you know, stop the anti-racism, stop the Me Too, and so forth, stop the LGBTQ.
[00:10:01.160 --> 00:10:03.960] I'm not saying that any of this should stop.
[00:10:03.960 --> 00:10:15.240] What I'm saying is that, yes, it's good that we've had decades of history focused on the shortcomings of the West, the mass injustice of the West.
[00:10:15.240 --> 00:10:20.840] This is, incidentally, throughout all of human history, a radically different way of doing history.
[00:10:21.160 --> 00:10:28.040] The idea that history would fundamentally be about collective self-critique, this is something very new.
[00:10:28.040 --> 00:10:29.400] And I think it's good.
[00:10:29.400 --> 00:10:30.920] And I don't want to lose it.
[00:10:30.920 --> 00:10:40.840] I think it's perhaps probably the best chance for democracy is understanding that the purpose of democracy is to be able to deal with history and to deal with it critically.
[00:10:40.840 --> 00:10:44.680] So, I don't, unlike conservatives, I don't reject any of that.
[00:10:44.800 --> 00:10:54.640] What I'm saying is that those same people who have taught all the rest of us how to do critical history have completely failed to do it themselves, right?
[00:10:54.640 --> 00:11:14.480] And so, in fact, when we talk about the fact that, well, actually, yes, much of the left, much of the time, at the very least, lent legitimacy and often zealous support to some of the most brutal and repressive dictatorships of the past hundred years, entailing millions of deaths and damaged lives.
[00:11:14.720 --> 00:11:23.760] When we want to also do these histories of oppression, all of a sudden we're met with the most dismissive, if not disdainful, responses.
[00:11:23.760 --> 00:11:25.120] That has to change.
[00:11:25.120 --> 00:11:27.920] Either we do history or we don't.
[00:11:27.920 --> 00:11:48.160] If history is vital to democracy, critical history is vital to democracy, then those people who are teaching all the rest of us how to do it publicly, in film, in media, in television, in schools, in training programs, have to use all those same channels to engage also with the most brutal histories of the left.
[00:11:48.160 --> 00:11:50.000] And they don't do that.
[00:11:50.000 --> 00:11:53.920] Instead, what we get is, oh, yes, well, of course, we know Stalin was bad.
[00:11:53.920 --> 00:11:55.840] Oh, and of course, that wasn't the real socialism.
[00:11:55.920 --> 00:12:01.040] We get these, again, I call these dismissive apologetics literally often in one line.
[00:12:01.040 --> 00:12:07.280] And then, you know, let's get back to business, you know, almost as if you're an idiot for raising these ideas, right?
[00:12:07.600 --> 00:12:22.400] And I do believe that we have to look at histories, centuries of history of Western oppression and mass injustice, but as part of histories of oppression and mass injustice.
[00:12:22.400 --> 00:12:26.880] So, yes, the West has been part of that, but the left has been part of that.
[00:12:26.880 --> 00:12:43.000] And that we are not getting until we get into this much deeper understanding of what we mean by left, what we mean by progressive, then all of the little tweaking of the message, and should we talk a bit less about that, a little bit more about this, is going to be useless.
[00:12:43.480 --> 00:12:44.280] Interesting.
[00:12:44.280 --> 00:13:01.080] I should point out that there's a lot of hand-wringing on the right as well from old school conservatives, the Mitt Romney's and John McCain's of the world, as opposed to MAGA right, authoritarianism, populism, economic nationalism.
[00:13:01.400 --> 00:13:09.880] Those things do not tend to fall into that bin of conservatism as we think of it from Edmund Burke on, that kind of Burkean conservatism.
[00:13:09.880 --> 00:13:11.960] So they're undergoing their own hand-wringing there.
[00:13:11.960 --> 00:13:13.400] So fair enough.
[00:13:13.400 --> 00:13:15.000] What do you mean by coming clean?
[00:13:15.000 --> 00:13:16.680] Coming clean about what?
[00:13:18.280 --> 00:13:30.840] I guess that title is meant to be a bit playfully ambiguous because the question of cleanliness, or rather, of purity, kicks in at a number of different levels.
[00:13:32.680 --> 00:13:41.640] One of my chapters, although in a sense, the whole book, but one chapter in particular, is devoted to this question of what I call the purity narrative.
[00:13:41.640 --> 00:14:00.680] In other words, ways in which all sorts of ideologies, again, not just on the left, just to be absolutely clear, religious ideologies, conservative ideologies, economic ideologies, all sorts of ideologies, essentially present themselves as pure in the following way.
[00:14:00.680 --> 00:14:05.240] For the most part, their articulate spokespeople don't claim to be perfect.
[00:14:05.240 --> 00:14:06.600] That would be ridiculous.
[00:14:06.600 --> 00:14:07.800] No one would believe it.
[00:14:07.800 --> 00:14:08.760] It would be fatuous.
[00:14:09.400 --> 00:14:11.000] Our ideology is perfect.
[00:14:11.000 --> 00:14:12.200] No one says that.
[00:14:12.200 --> 00:14:34.160] Instead, what I'm defining as a purity narrative is a way of presenting one's own ideological position such that one acknowledges all the injustices that have come from it, but then fashions them as mistakes, as errors, as not the real embodiment of whatever that ideology is, right?
[00:14:34.160 --> 00:14:37.360] As I said before, oh, well, that wasn't the real socialism, right?
[00:14:38.480 --> 00:14:40.080] That's not what Cuba was supposed to be.
[00:14:40.080 --> 00:14:42.880] That's not what Russia was supposed to be, and so on and so on, right?
[00:14:42.880 --> 00:14:45.920] And so it's this kind of purifying the narrative.
[00:14:45.920 --> 00:14:53.280] So not denying the atrocities, but rather always peripheralizing them, sanitizing them, right?
[00:14:53.280 --> 00:15:09.520] And again, on the left, what this means is that the histories of Western mass injustice, as I've named them, again, capitalist exploitation, colonialism, slave trade, patriarchy, and so forth, are presented as systemic and structural, right?
[00:15:09.520 --> 00:15:17.040] As part of the very fabric, so that they're not just histories, they're still ongoing, which is why we need to know history.
[00:15:17.040 --> 00:15:23.280] Whereas once we start talking about the histories of the left, then they're presented only as mistakes.
[00:15:23.600 --> 00:15:36.560] Even though we're talking, you know, about the most massive sorts of structures, which again were responsible for the death or destruction of millions and millions of lives, it's only ever mistakes.
[00:15:36.560 --> 00:15:40.960] It wasn't the real, it wasn't the pure, it wasn't, you know, the ideal, right?
[00:15:41.520 --> 00:15:58.480] And so we end up with this curious situation where the history of the West is meant to be understood as systemically and structurally unjust at a mass level, whereas the same brutality on the left, it was only ever a mistake, right?
[00:15:59.040 --> 00:16:06.520] And what this means is that we can, to get back to the title, in a sense, we can never come clean of Western history.
[00:16:07.880 --> 00:16:09.320] We always have to be saddled with it.
[00:16:09.320 --> 00:16:11.480] And again, I don't have a problem with that.
[00:16:11.480 --> 00:16:15.080] But these same speakers are always coming clean of their own leftist histories.
[00:16:15.080 --> 00:16:17.160] Oh, well, we don't support Stalinism.
[00:16:17.160 --> 00:16:18.600] Oh, we don't support Malik.
[00:16:18.600 --> 00:16:19.640] We stop that, right?
[00:16:19.640 --> 00:16:23.480] In other words, they get the clean breaks, but none of the rest of us get the clean breaks.
[00:16:23.480 --> 00:16:24.840] How is that?
[00:16:24.840 --> 00:16:38.120] How is it that they don't have to deal with, you know, with, you know, with the ongoing burden of all of the shit that happened, you know, in how many socialist regimes, right?
[00:16:38.120 --> 00:16:43.080] Why isn't it when Putin invaded Ukraine, right?
[00:16:43.400 --> 00:16:52.680] And, you know, why did we not see 100 times more encampments as a matter of one's own responsibility?
[00:16:52.680 --> 00:16:56.600] Oh, yeah, you know, we were supporting the regimes that put all of this in place.
[00:16:56.600 --> 00:16:59.000] Where were those encampments?
[00:16:59.000 --> 00:17:03.320] From the same people who are teaching the rest of us to be critical about our histories.
[00:17:03.320 --> 00:17:04.440] Where were they?
[00:17:05.480 --> 00:17:09.880] And so what you'll get on the left is not factual denials, as I say in the book.
[00:17:09.880 --> 00:17:18.280] You know, you'll always, oh, yes, of course, there were gulags, of course, you know, Stalin was oppressive, but you'll always get the factual acknowledgement, right?
[00:17:18.280 --> 00:17:23.160] You won't get the factual denial, but what you get is ethical denial, right?
[00:17:23.480 --> 00:17:29.880] In other words, the factual acknowledgement is taking place, but then simply to sideline it, to sidestep it, right?
[00:17:29.880 --> 00:17:33.720] And then to get back to the business as usual, which is the critique of the West.
[00:17:33.720 --> 00:17:35.720] We have to stop doing history this way.
[00:17:35.720 --> 00:17:39.720] We have to stop understanding progressive thought this way.
[00:17:40.040 --> 00:17:41.480] It's hideous.
[00:17:41.480 --> 00:17:42.920] It's not progressive.
[00:17:42.920 --> 00:17:44.280] It's regressive.
[00:17:45.280 --> 00:17:53.680] And that's why I'm digging much deeper than just, you know, what was Kamala Harris saying on some podium on a certain campaign trail.
[00:17:53.680 --> 00:17:55.520] We have to go much deeper than that.
[00:17:55.520 --> 00:18:00.160] So an example might be going on, as they say, for more than a century.
[00:18:00.480 --> 00:18:09.440] So an example might be when someone like Bernie Sanders and AOC go on the campaign trail, which they've been on, talking about democratic socialism.
[00:18:09.440 --> 00:18:16.400] And then the right says, oh, yeah, you mean Stalinism and Maoism and Cuba and so on.
[00:18:16.400 --> 00:18:18.560] And then they go, no, we don't mean that.
[00:18:19.520 --> 00:18:20.640] So what do they mean?
[00:18:21.120 --> 00:18:26.480] What would an ethical, pragmatic, practical, democratic socialism look like?
[00:18:27.120 --> 00:18:29.360] Yeah, no, and I mean, and they're right.
[00:18:29.360 --> 00:18:30.560] They don't mean that.
[00:18:30.560 --> 00:18:31.840] They don't mean that.
[00:18:31.840 --> 00:18:43.840] But the reason why it's easy to trip them up on this is because again, and again, just to be clear, I don't really want to sort of start tangling with individuals, right?
[00:18:43.840 --> 00:18:46.320] Bernie and AOC, they do what they do.
[00:18:46.320 --> 00:18:48.880] They're not history lecturers, right?
[00:18:50.000 --> 00:18:56.320] You know, so of course, there's only so much they can say when they're stumping, and particularly in the present climate.
[00:18:56.320 --> 00:19:02.720] So my point is not to say, you know, that they should start standing up there doing a lot of self-flagellation.
[00:19:02.960 --> 00:19:12.320] Rather, again, this is going to have to be about more than just two people stumping on a campaign trail, right?
[00:19:12.640 --> 00:19:28.240] But one way to start is, yeah, you see, I'm not even sure that people like Bernie and AOC, for all of their incredible intelligence, which I absolutely acknowledge and I credit, I think they also are part of lesson leftism that still just doesn't get it.
[00:19:28.240 --> 00:19:33.960] The conservatives criticizing them don't get it either because, again, they're just playing what a bountery.
[00:19:33.960 --> 00:19:38.280] So each side is just throwing what a bountery at the other side, you know.
[00:19:38.280 --> 00:19:40.120] So neither of them are great at history.
[00:19:40.120 --> 00:19:46.040] I mean, it's one of the things I say in the book is that I'm going to criticize the left, but the conservatives are certainly no better in history.
[00:19:46.040 --> 00:19:47.080] Far from it.
[00:19:47.400 --> 00:19:49.320] Far from it, you know.
[00:19:49.320 --> 00:19:56.360] And so AOC and Bernie have no lessons to take from conservatives, but they have plenty of lessons to take.
[00:19:56.680 --> 00:20:00.840] And of course, again, it's not fundamentally about these two individuals.
[00:20:00.840 --> 00:20:02.440] It's about a movement.
[00:20:02.760 --> 00:20:26.120] It's about a whole fabric of thought from, you know, which created them, which created us, which created many people who do want to engage with progressive thought, but don't realize that we're constantly stumbling falls here, and for me, that means comfort meals, cozy nights, and tail-gating weekends.
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[00:21:28.640 --> 00:21:31.760] Or dismissive apologetics, however you want to call it.
[00:21:31.760 --> 00:21:32.720] I like that.
[00:21:32.960 --> 00:21:35.440] Maybe just another way to summarize your thesis here.
[00:21:35.760 --> 00:21:39.040] What is it that Bernie AOC or pick anybody, doesn't matter?
[00:21:39.200 --> 00:21:40.560] What is it they don't get?
[00:21:40.560 --> 00:21:45.600] When you say you don't get it, and they go, let's say they go, okay, what is it I'm missing?
[00:21:46.880 --> 00:22:11.520] Because again, when conservatives start punching holes in their idea of democratic socialism, I'm not sure that they really do understand what it means to take the kind of responsibility that they expect everyone else to take, right?
[00:22:11.520 --> 00:22:25.680] In other words, if you ask them about, you know, about, you know, about slavery, about discrimination, about patriarchy, about heteronormativity, they will be able to pretty instantly give you some histories.
[00:22:26.000 --> 00:22:26.480] Right?
[00:22:26.800 --> 00:22:30.560] I'm wondering how they would do the history of socialism.
[00:22:30.880 --> 00:22:32.880] Again, they probably do know.
[00:22:32.880 --> 00:22:41.280] In fact, I'm sure they know about oppression in the USSR, oppression, you know, under Maoism, and again, the whole long list.
[00:22:41.280 --> 00:22:52.240] But it's not really clear, again, how they are expecting the rest of us to understand what mass injustice is.
[00:22:52.560 --> 00:22:58.960] Because otherwise, the background story, which they're presupposing, would just look very differently.
[00:22:59.120 --> 00:23:01.800] We'd talk about it very differently, right?
[00:23:02.600 --> 00:23:05.960] You know, again, I was mentioning Israel-Palestine, right?
[00:23:05.960 --> 00:23:10.920] You know, in order to draw the parallel to Ukraine, right?
[00:23:10.920 --> 00:23:21.480] Again, as I said, one thing that would look different is if there were really a taking of responsibility on the left, we would have seen 100 times more encampments in favor of Ukraine and against Putin.
[00:23:21.480 --> 00:23:26.040] We haven't seen, we've seen virtually none, or I think zero, actually, right?
[00:23:26.040 --> 00:23:27.000] None of note.
[00:23:27.000 --> 00:23:30.440] You know, every now and then, a couple of students here and there, right?
[00:23:31.560 --> 00:23:38.920] But of course, it would also mean, you know, taking a far more nuanced position on something like Israel-Palestine itself.
[00:23:38.920 --> 00:23:48.360] And in particular, again, the history of leftist complicity in that conflict is constantly factored out, except, of course, to play the heroic role, right?
[00:23:48.360 --> 00:23:51.720] We always factor ourselves into the heroic role, right?
[00:23:51.720 --> 00:24:10.520] But the ways in which the left, again, for decades, at least lent legitimacy, if not zealous support, to a regime such as that in the Kremlin, right, which was toxifying the Middle East for decades, spreading anti-Semitism for decades, helping to shape whole mentalities.
[00:24:10.520 --> 00:24:12.840] Who took responsibility for that?
[00:24:12.840 --> 00:24:20.920] If the rest of us are supposed to take responsibility for Israel, who took responsibility for that massive pumping of anti-Semitism?
[00:24:20.920 --> 00:24:29.960] Not to mention the whole structuring of Israel's neighbors, essentially as Kremlin-esque totalitarianisms, right, during the Cold War, right?
[00:24:29.960 --> 00:24:33.960] If you look at Iraq, if you look at Libya, if you look at Yemen and so forth, right?
[00:24:33.960 --> 00:24:41.360] The kind of regimes that were put into place there, not always, but often, you know, with direct involvement of the Kremlin.
[00:24:41.360 --> 00:24:49.680] Where is that discussion from these people who are again preaching to the rest of us how we have to take a critical view of history, how we have to understand our own complicity?
[00:24:50.000 --> 00:24:55.680] Where in any of those encampments are we hearing about the leftist's own complicity in these situations?
[00:24:55.680 --> 00:24:59.760] Again, I'm not saying that they shouldn't talk about the West's complicity.
[00:24:59.760 --> 00:25:03.360] I'm not even against the encampments, just to be clear, right?
[00:25:03.360 --> 00:25:04.720] I'm not against them.
[00:25:04.720 --> 00:25:10.720] I'm not against looking at problems of colonialism or of racism in the Israel-Palestine conflict.
[00:25:10.720 --> 00:25:15.200] Quite the contrary, we have to look at any relevant factor and we have to discuss it, right?
[00:25:15.840 --> 00:25:31.200] But to have the left dictating this one-sided agenda, that same left, which is constantly teaching the rest of us to look for ambiguity and complexity in human situations and to always engage with the other and all of these other, you know, kind of nostrums, right?
[00:25:31.200 --> 00:25:46.560] When they're doing nothing but pushing the most one-sided, the most blinkered histories which completely subtract the left's own complicity, the left's own role from these histories, that there's no way in which, there's no way in which this is progressive.
[00:25:47.200 --> 00:25:50.080] There's nothing progressive about any of it, right?
[00:25:50.080 --> 00:26:00.400] It is deeply regressive because it is deeply amnesiac about the left's complicity in the most heinous crimes of the 20th century.
[00:26:00.400 --> 00:26:05.440] Not all of them, but many of them, and in the regimes that were committing those crimes.
[00:26:05.760 --> 00:26:18.560] So I gather you were not totally surprised by the anti-Israel and in many cases anti-Semitic response post-October 7th in the West, particularly by students, who I was, you know, many people are shocked.
[00:26:18.560 --> 00:26:20.240] You know, do they really hate Jews?
[00:26:20.400 --> 00:26:29.040] I mean, one thing to be critical of the Israeli government or the IDF or whatever for certain strategies, but there seems to be a lot more than that.
[00:26:29.040 --> 00:26:30.440] Is that what you mean?
[00:26:29.600 --> 00:26:32.440] Yeah, I mean, here again, right?
[00:26:32.600 --> 00:26:42.440] As I said, you know, so much of this, to get back to your introductory comments, is about breaking out of the simple-mindedness of the culture wars, right?
[00:26:42.440 --> 00:26:44.920] So let's use this example, right?
[00:26:47.800 --> 00:26:51.000] Again, in the case of Israel-Palestine, what do we have, right?
[00:26:51.000 --> 00:27:12.280] We have, you know, one kind of entrenched position, which, you know, which gives us nothing, and particularly in universities, almost exclusively in universities, which literally presents the whole situation as nothing but a kind of re-embodiment of, again, centuries of colonialism and racism, right?
[00:27:15.400 --> 00:27:26.200] And then at the opposite extreme, equally entrenched positions, right, which are just outraged and just deny that there's anything colonial or anything racist in that situation, right?
[00:27:26.200 --> 00:27:36.040] Both of those situations, both of those positions, again, they're simplistic and all they do is entrench a standoff by constantly firing missiles at each other.
[00:27:36.040 --> 00:27:42.360] What I'm arguing is, yeah, okay, I mean, racism, that's hardly a revelation.
[00:27:42.680 --> 00:27:50.600] I think you'll scarcely find a modern state today in the world that doesn't have racism, and often far more than you're going to find in Israel.
[00:27:50.600 --> 00:27:56.840] So the fact that Israel might be, I mean, it would be strange for Israel not to be racist, what society isn't, right?
[00:27:56.840 --> 00:28:01.160] So of course we should talk about racism in Israel because we have to talk about racism everywhere.
[00:28:01.160 --> 00:28:01.960] Number one.
[00:28:01.960 --> 00:28:13.800] Number two, colonialism, again, you know, to the degree to which the creation of the Israeli state, you know, was, you know, was best characterized as a colonial enterprise.
[00:28:13.800 --> 00:28:15.520] Well, we can debate that.
[00:28:14.840 --> 00:28:18.000] So I'm happy to have both of those debates.
[00:28:18.640 --> 00:28:23.360] Again, of course, there would be racism in Israel because there's racism everywhere.
[00:28:23.360 --> 00:28:34.400] And of course, we have to look at possible patterns of colonial governance in Israel, even if Israel was not set up as a conventionally colonial state.
[00:28:34.400 --> 00:28:36.720] So I think we need to have both of those debates.
[00:28:36.720 --> 00:28:37.760] I'm open to them.
[00:28:37.760 --> 00:28:42.720] I think there should be more of them, you know, in a more nuanced sort of way than we're witnessing.
[00:28:42.720 --> 00:28:45.680] But again, these are still only one side, right?
[00:28:45.680 --> 00:28:51.280] Again, this is the discourse that the left has presented: the racist paradigm, the colonialist paradigm.
[00:28:51.280 --> 00:29:08.480] Again, where is the paradigm of dictatorial government surrounding Israel that have, again, massively fed into this problem, and particularly if one cares about something like human rights or humanitarianism or humanitarian norms or any other paradigm of decent treatment of people, right?
[00:29:08.480 --> 00:29:20.320] So where, again, which encampment do I go to to hear people getting up and saying, look, this is how our political home was complicit in screwing up the Middle East for decades.
[00:29:20.560 --> 00:29:26.880] Which encampment do I go to to hear this if these people all believe in a self-critical rendering of history?
[00:29:26.880 --> 00:29:34.080] If these people are teaching all the rest of us that we have to approach history self-critically, which encampment do I go to to find this?
[00:29:34.080 --> 00:29:36.320] Because I haven't heard of it yet.
[00:29:36.320 --> 00:29:41.040] All we get is the, again, the racist paradigm, the colonialist paradigm, and that's fine.
[00:29:41.040 --> 00:29:42.400] That is part of it.
[00:29:42.400 --> 00:29:46.280] But what about the paradigm of leftist complicity, right?
[00:29:47.040 --> 00:29:58.200] Again, and particularly the role, you know, of a Kremlin, which often received, you know, again, at least legitimacy, rarely much harsh criticism, right?
[00:29:58.520 --> 00:30:11.720] And particularly insofar as the Kremlin was involved in fashioning Middle East policy, you know, certainly after, say, the 1960s or after 1970s, you know, depending on how far back you want to go.
[00:30:12.040 --> 00:30:30.680] So it's not about, so it's not about, you know, denying some of these legitimate concerns that the left has raised, but asking, wait a minute, which ones are they constantly just sidelining and pushing to the peripheries, again, in order to spew essentially a purity narrative, in order to look clean.
[00:30:31.000 --> 00:30:31.800] Right.
[00:30:31.800 --> 00:30:32.920] I think that's correct.
[00:30:32.920 --> 00:30:44.280] But the points you're making are those that are made by what I refer to as old school liberals and right of center commentators who say that the academy has become corrupted by going too far left.
[00:30:44.280 --> 00:30:48.760] It was always slightly left, but not so lopsided.
[00:30:48.760 --> 00:30:57.160] You know, like English departments, humanities, social science departments, 10 to 1, 20 to 1, 50 to 1, liberal versus conservative professors.
[00:30:57.400 --> 00:31:07.640] What do you expect when you introduce all these DEI sensitivity training and this is all you talk about is race and colonialism and so on and so forth?
[00:31:07.640 --> 00:31:12.040] This is what you get after October 7th.
[00:31:12.360 --> 00:31:16.440] And again, as I said, I'm not saying that the left should stop doing any of these things.
[00:31:16.440 --> 00:31:23.480] I'm not saying that it should stop looking at colonialism or stop DEI or LGBTQ or feminism.
[00:31:24.200 --> 00:31:26.360] Let those keep going.
[00:31:26.680 --> 00:31:32.520] But again, you know, 100 years or more than 100 years ago, actually, right?
[00:31:32.520 --> 00:31:44.880] If we go back to the early Bolsheviks, the idea of critique as always coming out of a place of self-critique, at least the intelligent Bolsheviks, right?
[00:31:42.920 --> 00:31:48.960] Those kind of the first ones who were killed off, you know, first by Lenin, then by Stalin, the intelligent Bolsheviks, right?
[00:31:50.400 --> 00:31:56.880] Who really did believe that you could only, well, okay.
[00:31:56.880 --> 00:32:12.160] Well, Matt might have to make that another episode, but, you know, but you know, who believe that you could only credibly, you could only epistemologically do critique from a standpoint of self-critique, right?
[00:32:15.440 --> 00:32:16.880] That's what's disappeared.
[00:32:16.880 --> 00:32:17.920] That's what's disappeared.
[00:32:17.920 --> 00:32:20.240] Again, they all think they do it.
[00:32:20.240 --> 00:32:22.000] Oh, yes, of course, Lenin was terrible.
[00:32:22.000 --> 00:32:22.640] Oh, yes, of course.
[00:32:23.040 --> 00:32:28.480] You know, so you'll always get, again, as I've called them, you know, already, the, you know, the dismissive apologetics.
[00:32:28.480 --> 00:32:32.640] You'll always get, and then they think they've done their utter critique, right?
[00:32:32.640 --> 00:32:34.720] I mean, here, let me give an example.
[00:32:37.280 --> 00:32:44.400] In fact, I give some examples, hypothetical examples like this in the book, just to sort of try to make this a bit more concrete.
[00:32:44.720 --> 00:32:49.840] Imagine you have a group of students, yeah, and they want to do something that we've all seen many times.
[00:32:49.840 --> 00:33:00.160] And, you know, I think that we've always welcomed, and, you know, at least, you know, many of us have welcomed and thought was, you know, was perfectly appropriate, say, on a university campus.
[00:33:00.160 --> 00:33:05.200] Things like a Black History Month, a Women's History Month, the LGBTQ History Month, right?
[00:33:05.200 --> 00:33:06.640] All these sorts of things, right?
[00:33:06.640 --> 00:33:16.160] And so, you know, usually universities will have a little pot of money so that you can maybe get some speakers and maybe run some films and do some events and so forth, right?
[00:33:16.160 --> 00:33:17.440] All right, then.
[00:33:18.080 --> 00:33:22.240] Let's imagine that a group of students wanted to do this sort of event, right?
[00:33:22.240 --> 00:33:28.160] So they go to the university administrators just to apply for a bit of the usual funding.
[00:33:28.160 --> 00:33:36.760] And the administrators say, you say to them, oh, well, we know that there was slavery.
[00:33:36.760 --> 00:33:38.520] We don't support that anymore.
[00:33:38.520 --> 00:33:41.560] Oh, we know that there was sexism.
[00:33:41.560 --> 00:33:42.520] We don't support that.
[00:33:42.520 --> 00:33:44.120] Or we know there's heteronormativity.
[00:33:44.120 --> 00:33:45.320] We don't support that.
[00:33:45.320 --> 00:33:46.680] Goodbye.
[00:33:47.960 --> 00:33:49.560] That wouldn't be seen as obvious.
[00:33:49.560 --> 00:33:50.920] It would be seen as outrageous.
[00:33:50.920 --> 00:33:53.080] It would be seen as idiotic.
[00:33:53.400 --> 00:33:57.320] And yet, to say, oh, but we don't support Stalin anymore.
[00:33:58.120 --> 00:34:01.320] Oh, but we don't support the way Castro created gays, right?
[00:34:01.640 --> 00:34:02.680] That's all done.
[00:34:03.000 --> 00:34:04.440] So it's again what I was saying before.
[00:34:05.400 --> 00:34:13.400] It's the critical Western histories have to be done because it's an ongoing set of injustices which haven't stopped.
[00:34:13.400 --> 00:34:21.720] But all of a sudden, again, when we're talking about the most heinous things that the left has supported, oh, well, that's done.
[00:34:21.720 --> 00:34:22.920] That's the past.
[00:34:22.920 --> 00:34:25.160] We don't need to dwell on it.
[00:34:25.480 --> 00:34:26.200] Right?
[00:34:26.520 --> 00:34:35.320] And that's, and so, and so, and so what I find astonishing is that people aren't even surprised when progressives answer in this way.
[00:34:35.640 --> 00:34:37.720] Oh, but we don't support that anymore.
[00:34:37.720 --> 00:34:40.280] Okay, so as if it's done, you know, that ends the conversation.
[00:34:40.280 --> 00:34:46.840] Well, if that ends the conversation, then why are we doing endless study of all of the injustices that you think are important?
[00:34:46.840 --> 00:34:51.400] And they are really saying that they don't give a damn.
[00:34:51.720 --> 00:34:53.560] But of course, they can't say that.
[00:34:53.560 --> 00:34:56.520] So instead, they seem to say the opposite.
[00:34:56.520 --> 00:34:58.920] Oh, yeah, well, you know, we wouldn't support that.
[00:34:58.920 --> 00:35:00.360] No, Stalinia, of course.
[00:35:00.360 --> 00:35:01.000] Terrible.
[00:35:01.000 --> 00:35:02.760] Mao, oh, yeah, horrible, right?
[00:35:02.760 --> 00:35:04.760] So they'll do the lip service.
[00:35:04.760 --> 00:35:07.480] But in fact, they don't give a damn.
[00:35:07.960 --> 00:35:12.040] But we should give a damn about mass injustice when they don't.
[00:35:12.040 --> 00:35:14.600] We should be self-critical when they're not.
[00:35:14.720 --> 00:35:18.400] That's not progressive in any conceivable way.
[00:35:18.400 --> 00:35:24.960] So I would say to these people: no, the academy has not been dominated by leftists or progressives.
[00:35:24.960 --> 00:35:30.000] Because the leftists and progressives, first and foremost, would be doing self-critique.
[00:35:30.320 --> 00:35:34.160] Which, in fact, as I said, some of the early Bolsheviks understood.
[00:35:34.160 --> 00:35:38.080] I think you could find almost no progressives in the academy today.
[00:35:38.080 --> 00:35:39.440] Because who does this?
[00:35:39.440 --> 00:35:40.240] Who does this?
[00:35:40.240 --> 00:35:43.360] Name me a few who have done this.
[00:35:43.680 --> 00:35:48.080] Where you can, you know, I don't know, Judith Butler, Slavoj Žižek, let's go all the way down the list.
[00:35:48.080 --> 00:35:49.680] There are loads of them, right?
[00:35:49.680 --> 00:35:52.400] And they've shown me in their books where they start, right?
[00:35:52.800 --> 00:35:58.400] Instead of telling us, we have to start from the, you know, we can't just talk neutrally and objectively about history.
[00:35:58.400 --> 00:36:01.520] We have to first understand our own position in that history.
[00:36:01.520 --> 00:36:03.920] Show me where they do that with the left.
[00:36:03.920 --> 00:36:18.320] Okay, we have to start with our centuries of commitments at a higher or lower intensity to, you know, Leninism, to Stalinism, to Maoism, to the whole, you know, Castro, to Chavez, to the whole long list.
[00:36:18.320 --> 00:36:28.960] And we have to understand how our discourses of liberationism, and they call it egalitarianism, how were they systematically deployed in order to bring about precisely the opposite?
[00:36:28.960 --> 00:36:34.000] You're right, this is what we're meant to do with discourses of liberal democracy or of capitalism.
[00:36:34.000 --> 00:36:37.600] Where do we see this being done with the leftist discourses?
[00:36:37.600 --> 00:36:39.360] Which of the leading leftists?
[00:36:39.600 --> 00:36:42.080] So they're not leftists, they're not progressives.
[00:36:42.080 --> 00:36:44.880] They're just mirror imagery aggressives.
[00:36:45.360 --> 00:36:46.080] Right.
[00:36:46.080 --> 00:36:51.440] Well, maybe your book is the the launching of a new revolution on the far left or the progressive left.
[00:36:52.080 --> 00:37:00.920] Eric, if we took a big picture look at 30 from 35,000 feet, like you mentioned earlier in the conversation, you know, last three, four, five hundred, four, four hundred years, let's say.
[00:36:59.920 --> 00:37:07.080] You know, the rise of the nation state, the enlightenment, the rights revolutions of the late 18th century.
[00:37:07.400 --> 00:37:09.560] Candice Rivera has it all.
[00:37:09.560 --> 00:37:15.960] In just three years, she went from stay-at-home mom to traveling the world, saving lives and making millions.
[00:37:15.960 --> 00:37:20.520] Anyone would think Candice's charm life is about as real as Unicorn.
[00:37:20.520 --> 00:37:24.040] But sometimes the truth is even harder to believe than the lies.
[00:37:24.120 --> 00:37:25.160] It's not true.
[00:37:25.160 --> 00:37:26.840] There's so many things not true.
[00:37:26.840 --> 00:37:28.520] You got a great lead.
[00:37:28.840 --> 00:37:35.080] I'm Charlie Webster, and this is Unicorn Girl, an Apple original podcast produced by Seven Hills.
[00:37:35.080 --> 00:37:38.120] Follow and listen on Apple Podcasts.
[00:37:38.760 --> 00:37:55.800] And then the rights revolutions of the second half of the 20th century, the abolition of slavery and torture, cruel and unusual punishment, civil rights, women's rights, gay rights, animal rights, workers' rights, children's rights, now LGBTQ rights.
[00:37:55.800 --> 00:37:58.760] It seems like we've made a lot of progress.
[00:37:59.720 --> 00:38:04.200] Do you feel like the left or progressives acknowledge that enough?
[00:38:04.200 --> 00:38:13.880] Or does it, I mean, to me, it seems like they're in many of the narratives, things are horrible and we've made next to no progress.
[00:38:13.880 --> 00:38:19.400] And my response is, well, how about acknowledging that we're not living in 1950 anymore?
[00:38:20.120 --> 00:38:24.200] Conservatives today are socially more liberal than liberals were in the 1950s.
[00:38:24.200 --> 00:38:27.000] Isn't that something worth celebrating?
[00:38:27.960 --> 00:38:29.000] I hope.
[00:38:29.640 --> 00:38:45.200] But look, I mean, you know, again, I think so far in our discussion, you've sort of accepted that, you know, there's a certain kind of academic or intellectual level, which is not quite the level of people like Bernie and AOC, right?
[00:38:44.600 --> 00:38:48.800] Which is more the ideas factories of the universities and so forth.
[00:38:49.120 --> 00:38:56.560] And I think you've kind of gone, you know, gone along with me that that has a certain importance, where these ideas are coming from.
[00:38:56.560 --> 00:39:00.400] And so I kind of get the idea that fine, it's never enough.
[00:39:00.400 --> 00:39:02.000] We always want to push further.
[00:39:02.000 --> 00:39:04.240] There are always still residual injustices.
[00:39:04.320 --> 00:39:06.560] So I don't have a problem with that.
[00:39:06.560 --> 00:40:20.680] So I guess a simple way of putting my gripes about the way we're doing history nowadays is again, it's not the conservative idea that we should just stop all these critical histories and right and you know get back to you know amber waves of grain um right right so so so again that's not what i'm asking for at all it's what i'm saying is that there's a whole 50 of that history which progressives are not discussing while telling all of the rest of us that we have to look at untold stories right this is one of the points i make in the book in other way in which um uh you know critical theorists progressives understand and teach what they're doing and justify what they're doing is by saying look you know for you know for how long was history simply a question of you know glorifying the high deeds of great men right and then you know a few decades ago this really began to change and we tell we start telling the untold stories right again the stories of slaves the stories of women the stories of lgbtq that's fine i think that should continue i have no problem with that but who again who among the leading leftists today is acknowledging the fact that that whole heap is also sitting on an on a large heap of untold stories.
[00:40:21.000 --> 00:40:23.640] Where are those untold stories?
[00:40:23.960 --> 00:40:24.600] Give us some.
[00:40:24.760 --> 00:40:34.040] And if one is keeping those stories untold, which pretty much everyone in the academy is, and certainly on the left, right, in what way is one left?
[00:40:34.040 --> 00:40:41.800] In what way is one progressive when one is far from telling untold stories, is just replacing one heap of untold stories with another?
[00:40:42.120 --> 00:40:43.560] How is that progressive?
[00:40:44.040 --> 00:40:47.240] What would a good progressivism look like then?
[00:40:47.240 --> 00:40:48.680] What stories would you want to see told?
[00:40:50.840 --> 00:40:55.400] Again, it would not sacrifice some untold stories for others.
[00:40:55.400 --> 00:40:57.560] It would say, yes, we have to look at racism.
[00:40:57.560 --> 00:40:59.000] Yes, we have to look at patriarchy.
[00:40:59.000 --> 00:41:00.600] Yes, we have to look at heteronormativity.
[00:41:00.600 --> 00:41:03.640] Yes, we have to look at capitalist exploitation.
[00:41:03.640 --> 00:41:14.040] And also, we have to look at these mismass injustice in which our own political home has also been deeply implicated for more than a century.
[00:41:14.040 --> 00:41:16.760] And we have to come to terms with that too, right?
[00:41:16.760 --> 00:41:20.200] Again, how do we do the history of Western liberal democracy?
[00:41:20.200 --> 00:41:25.400] We look at ways in which the ideals of liberal democracy, right?
[00:41:25.400 --> 00:41:37.640] Individual autonomy, civic equality, equal opportunity, how these norms have actually been deployed in order to justify precisely the opposite outcomes.
[00:41:38.520 --> 00:41:49.160] So Plessy versus Ferguson, the kind of quintessential example of a case which actually used the discourse of equality in order to entrench the most heinous inequality.
[00:41:49.160 --> 00:41:50.280] That's good.
[00:41:50.280 --> 00:42:01.000] And once again, I'm going to ask: who are the leading leftists who are showing how the same thing happened with leftist discourses and who think that it's just as important that we understand this?
[00:42:02.600 --> 00:42:04.120] I can't think of one.
[00:42:04.360 --> 00:42:08.280] So, again, the point is not that we stop doing one and start doing the other.
[00:42:08.600 --> 00:42:19.680] It's that, you know, what is presented as something which is very broad and pluralistic is actually remarkably narrow and simply has to be broadened and broadened by quite a bit.
[00:42:20.960 --> 00:42:25.280] You know, I've been at a couple conferences where Zizek, is that how you say his name?
[00:42:25.280 --> 00:42:25.600] Yeah.
[00:42:26.560 --> 00:42:29.520] I have a hard time following his train of thought.
[00:42:29.520 --> 00:42:31.200] He seems to bounce around a lot.
[00:42:31.200 --> 00:42:36.800] I don't know if you know him, but if he represents anything, what is that position?
[00:42:36.800 --> 00:42:38.560] What is he arguing for?
[00:42:39.200 --> 00:42:58.240] Well, no, he's very interesting, actually, because he's one of the best examples of what I'm criticizing, though I think not the best example, precisely because, yeah, that kind of playfully aleatoric rhetoric is, in fact, part of the philosophy of the world that he wants to present.
[00:42:58.240 --> 00:42:59.040] Yeah, that's fine.
[00:42:59.040 --> 00:43:00.720] You can take that or leave it.
[00:43:01.280 --> 00:43:06.000] But what's very, very interesting is that he is quite eager.
[00:43:06.000 --> 00:43:19.920] And in fact, I quote him at the beginning of one of the book sections, as essentially saying that what we are doing is holding liberal democracy to its own standards.
[00:43:19.920 --> 00:43:26.160] And this is quite typical of Žižek to kind of announce these sort of platitudes as if they're grand revelations.
[00:43:26.160 --> 00:43:31.520] Again, this is something that was done, that Karl Marx discovered 200 years ago and that leftists have always done.
[00:43:31.520 --> 00:43:32.400] But that's fine.
[00:43:32.400 --> 00:43:32.960] That's fine.
[00:43:32.960 --> 00:43:36.000] He wasn't claiming to be original in that quote, right?
[00:43:36.000 --> 00:43:39.920] So we're simply holding the liberal democracy to its own standards.
[00:43:39.920 --> 00:43:40.640] Fine.
[00:43:40.960 --> 00:43:44.000] Who's holding the left to its own standards?
[00:43:44.000 --> 00:43:46.480] Again, they all think they do.
[00:43:47.760 --> 00:43:56.880] They all think they do, again, and you know, simply by teaching the rest of us how to criticize our, you know, again, the history of Western liberal democracy.
[00:43:57.200 --> 00:44:12.680] But, you know, as I, you know, as I say in the conclusion of the book, when it comes to teaching us to take collective responsibility for our history, don't tell us, show us who does that.
[00:44:14.280 --> 00:44:20.360] So I shouldn't only be asking which encampment should I go to, I should really be asking which classroom should I go to?
[00:44:20.360 --> 00:44:26.760] Which classroom can I go to where progressives are teaching progressive thought this way?
[00:44:28.200 --> 00:44:28.600] No idea.
[00:44:29.320 --> 00:44:52.680] Not simply with five minutes of, oh, yes, Stalin was bad, and yes, of course, we don't do that anymore, but showing how, again, how leftist concepts were manipulated and deployed by structures of power in precisely the way that they teach the rest of us that liberal democratic discourses were manipulated and disseminated and by powerful structures.
[00:44:52.680 --> 00:45:01.800] Again, I'm not denying that that happened, but where is the same teaching that the same thing has happened with leftist discourses?
[00:45:01.800 --> 00:45:02.200] Where?
[00:45:02.200 --> 00:45:03.880] Which classroom do I go to?
[00:45:03.880 --> 00:45:05.080] Sign me up.
[00:45:05.080 --> 00:45:06.120] Send me.
[00:45:06.840 --> 00:45:07.320] Send me.
[00:45:07.320 --> 00:45:09.000] Because I haven't seen it.
[00:45:09.000 --> 00:45:12.120] Maybe that's your next course you can teach at your university.
[00:45:12.120 --> 00:45:16.040] And that's why I would say there are no progressives in the academy.
[00:45:16.040 --> 00:45:16.440] Wow.
[00:45:16.440 --> 00:45:17.240] Zero.
[00:45:17.240 --> 00:45:17.640] Okay.
[00:45:17.640 --> 00:45:18.360] Wow.
[00:45:19.000 --> 00:45:20.680] That's a shocking statement.
[00:45:20.680 --> 00:45:32.840] What would a fair and just society look like to you when your progressives say things like, well, Stalin, you know, and Mao and Cuba, these are not good examples.
[00:45:32.840 --> 00:45:34.600] Well, what would it look like then?
[00:45:34.600 --> 00:45:37.560] A fair and just society?
[00:45:39.160 --> 00:45:48.800] And I'm glad that you asked that question because, again, I know that I'm sounding terribly irritated.
[00:45:44.440 --> 00:45:49.360] That's all right.
[00:45:52.560 --> 00:45:55.600] But here's actually a point of conciliation.
[00:45:58.880 --> 00:46:16.160] Because now we're at a moment, you know, right now we're at a moment where even mainstream conservatives are actually having a lot more sympathy for Bernie and AOC than for the guy in the White House.
[00:46:16.480 --> 00:46:18.160] Not to mention people on the left.
[00:46:18.720 --> 00:46:26.480] You know, Larry Summers was saying, you know, recently at a public event, you know, that Trump is a unifier.
[00:46:26.480 --> 00:46:36.080] You know, that all sorts of ideological divisions at Harvard, these people, they're suddenly all coming together because the one thing they can agree on is get rid of this guy, right?
[00:46:36.080 --> 00:46:39.760] So what would a fair and just society look like?
[00:46:39.760 --> 00:46:40.800] Who knows?
[00:46:40.800 --> 00:46:46.240] Step one is you don't start with autocrats, right?
[00:46:46.560 --> 00:46:51.600] And again, this has always been a real sore point on the left, right?
[00:46:51.600 --> 00:46:56.480] So if the left again wants us to critically look at history, right?
[00:46:56.480 --> 00:46:57.200] Yeah, fine.
[00:46:57.200 --> 00:47:05.840] And let's come together and get rid of Trump and get rid of all of this dismantling of liberal and democratic institutions.
[00:47:05.840 --> 00:47:18.480] But do we also have to look at the fact that for more than a century, leftists were supporting regimes that were doing exactly what we see, hollowing out democratic institutions, hollowing out the rule of law?
[00:47:18.480 --> 00:47:26.960] So, what do people on the left think that this is inherently bad to be hollowing out these institutions?
[00:47:26.960 --> 00:47:30.000] Or is it only bad when it's being done for a program that you don't like?
[00:47:31.640 --> 00:47:53.880] Again, where is this discussion about how the left, for you know, for over a century was systematically and to this day still supporting dictators who were undermining the rule of law, undermining the free press, imprisoning prisoners, imprisoning political opponents, undermining constitutional democracy?
[00:47:53.880 --> 00:47:57.240] The left has been deeply implicated in that, right?
[00:47:57.240 --> 00:47:59.480] So, that history has to be done.
[00:47:59.480 --> 00:48:02.360] Yeah, and again, we're not hearing about this.
[00:48:02.360 --> 00:48:03.160] Yeah.
[00:48:03.160 --> 00:48:06.520] Well, we can come together.
[00:48:06.520 --> 00:48:09.560] We can come together to get rid of people who do that.
[00:48:09.560 --> 00:48:10.280] Yeah.
[00:48:10.600 --> 00:48:21.080] So, when you talk about the purity test, and this has always been my problem with the idea of utopias, they're not achievable, and you know, no one's going to be perfect, and so on.
[00:48:21.080 --> 00:48:28.600] So, when we talk about a just and fair society, you know, we're not going to get rid of every last racist and bigot and misogynist.
[00:48:28.600 --> 00:48:30.440] There's always going to be a handful.
[00:48:30.440 --> 00:48:35.160] You know, so how do we move or sort of nudge in that direction as you see it?
[00:48:35.160 --> 00:48:37.080] And what would be the measure?
[00:48:37.080 --> 00:48:42.120] You know, so here we can shift from equality of opportunity to equality of outcomes.
[00:48:42.360 --> 00:48:45.080] Do we need, let me use specific examples.
[00:48:45.080 --> 00:48:49.640] There's 14% African American of the American population, the U.S.
[00:48:49.640 --> 00:48:50.440] population.
[00:48:50.440 --> 00:49:00.520] Would we need 14% physicians, lawyers, 14% academy, or sorry, of congressional members, or 14% CEOs of Fortune 500 companies?
[00:49:00.520 --> 00:49:05.160] And then we would know we've achieved an equal, fair, just in society?
[00:49:05.160 --> 00:49:06.680] Or is it something else?
[00:49:06.680 --> 00:49:12.440] Just the opportunities are there, and there'll always be difference, group differences, and we can't focus on that.
[00:49:12.440 --> 00:49:14.120] How do you think about that?
[00:49:15.200 --> 00:49:17.840] I'm not sure that those are the only two options.
[00:49:18.640 --> 00:49:25.920] Either we find the precise percentage point on the one hand, or on the other hand, you know, it'll always be there and can never change, right?
[00:49:25.920 --> 00:49:30.480] And again, that's why, you know, in my book, I don't set out a program.
[00:49:30.480 --> 00:49:33.520] I know, but I'm asking you, I'm just curious what you think.
[00:49:34.240 --> 00:49:39.200] Separate from the book, just give me your idea of a fair and just society.
[00:49:41.760 --> 00:49:58.800] Well, I'm more interested, I think I'm more interested in what can we all agree has gone wrong, and what can we all agree on as being a better way of addressing, of taking seriously what has gone wrong?
[00:49:58.800 --> 00:50:06.720] Because that's always step one before getting to the next step of, well, what do we mean by right and how do we get to right?
[00:50:06.720 --> 00:50:08.640] Of course, that's always harder, right?
[00:50:08.640 --> 00:50:21.280] It's always easier to look at the past and find what's gone wrong than to deliver guarantees about what will work in the future, because the future always holds too many unforeseeables.
[00:50:21.600 --> 00:50:27.520] So, yeah, so I mean, I could probably sit here and give you 10 plans.
[00:50:27.520 --> 00:50:30.480] I wouldn't really know which is better than the other.
[00:50:30.800 --> 00:50:35.680] And again, I just don't think that's, I just don't think that's really necessary.
[00:50:36.000 --> 00:50:49.600] You know, these are, this is why we have democracy, because fine, you know, once we, you know, once we identify problems in the past, you know, then we all come to the table and we fight it out in that messy way, and we just come up with something.
[00:50:49.600 --> 00:50:53.360] And as you say, it's, you know, it's probably not going to be perfect.
[00:50:53.360 --> 00:50:55.520] It's always going to have a lot of horse trading.
[00:50:55.840 --> 00:50:57.840] That's kind of the way politics is.
[00:50:57.840 --> 00:51:01.000] And that's why, for me to kind of present my ideal model, right?
[00:51:01.000 --> 00:51:05.480] It doesn't matter what my ideal model is because that's not what we're going to get or anybody's ideal, right?
[00:51:05.480 --> 00:51:09.080] That's not democracy, is not there for ideals, right?
[00:51:09.080 --> 00:51:13.880] Democracy is there to try to hash out workable, imperfect solutions.
[00:51:13.880 --> 00:51:16.280] And I think that's good.
[00:51:16.600 --> 00:51:28.120] You know, I think, um, I think, um, I think too many evils over the past, you know, century or so have been committed in the name of getting to higher and more perfect ideals.
[00:51:28.920 --> 00:51:47.480] But of course, so I'm happy more with a system, you know, that you know, where people have, you know, where different voices are participating, and and uh, and again, where we're where we're looking at if we're gonna look at history critically, we're we're sure to include the relevant histories and not only selectively.
[00:51:47.480 --> 00:51:49.640] Selective history is not history.
[00:51:49.640 --> 00:51:55.720] Yeah, but Marx famously said that the point of studying history is you know to change the future, right?
[00:51:56.040 --> 00:52:01.560] Or phylagaso is philosophy study is not to understand the past but to change it.
[00:52:01.560 --> 00:52:07.240] And Marx also famously admitted to being very vague about what it would look like.
[00:52:07.240 --> 00:52:07.640] I see.
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[00:52:59.600 --> 00:53:01.040] You couldn't plot it out.
[00:53:01.040 --> 00:53:02.640] That there was also contingencies.
[00:53:02.640 --> 00:53:12.880] That's why I think we tend to exaggerate the determinacy of his understanding of history, the determinism, I should say, of his understanding of history, right?
[00:53:13.120 --> 00:53:17.840] He is quite deterministic in talking about the past because that's easy to do.
[00:53:18.480 --> 00:53:19.840] It's there, right?
[00:53:19.840 --> 00:53:23.360] So you can put a pattern on it, and he certainly did.
[00:53:23.360 --> 00:53:31.440] That was somewhat in vogue in the 19th century, certainly in the early and mid-19th centuries, was to put these patterns on history.
[00:53:31.440 --> 00:53:40.800] And he did it, but he was quite straightforward about saying, We don't know what the future is going to look like, right?
[00:53:41.040 --> 00:53:48.400] You know, at one point, he says, well, but we know what it won't look like, or at least what it shouldn't look like.
[00:53:48.400 --> 00:53:55.040] In other words, we can still look to the past for understanding of what needs to be changed.
[00:53:55.680 --> 00:54:00.320] So much of your discussion is slightly different words, but okay.
[00:54:00.320 --> 00:54:05.760] Well, you discussed critical theory, and I guess that's overlapping with critical race theory, right?
[00:54:06.080 --> 00:54:06.720] Yeah.
[00:54:07.040 --> 00:54:22.360] So the identification of past wrongs and the kind of culmination of critical race theory, I guess, would be the 1619 project in which they kind of outline: here's all the ways America and the West is still structurally racist.
[00:54:22.360 --> 00:54:39.960] Even if you personally are not a racist, you don't know any races, everybody's, you know, likes everyone else, but generationally, there are huge gaps in income, home ownership, quality of schools, and where different groups go to different schools because of this past history and so on.
[00:54:39.960 --> 00:54:44.200] The whole point of that is we need to do something about it, right?
[00:54:44.200 --> 00:54:47.080] We need to change whatever it is.
[00:54:47.960 --> 00:54:49.480] Reparations or something like that.
[00:54:49.480 --> 00:54:50.520] Well, where do we get the money?
[00:54:50.520 --> 00:54:54.840] You have to raise the tax rates at the upper income.
[00:54:54.840 --> 00:54:59.240] For example, at the moment, it's 37% in the United States of the highest earners.
[00:54:59.240 --> 00:55:03.720] And Bernie and AOC and the progressives, they want to raise it, 50%.
[00:55:03.720 --> 00:55:07.960] It used to be 70% in the 70s, even 90% in the 50s.
[00:55:07.960 --> 00:55:11.480] Let's get back to that so we can correct these wrongs.
[00:55:11.800 --> 00:55:16.680] That's taking the past and understanding it and then wanting to do something about it.
[00:55:16.680 --> 00:55:17.640] Do you go that far?
[00:55:17.640 --> 00:55:25.000] Like, okay, let's take what we know and then now let's correct these injustices.
[00:55:25.320 --> 00:55:30.440] Well, yeah, I mean, of course, that is, you know, where we want to be headed.
[00:55:30.440 --> 00:55:34.920] Otherwise, the whole thing becomes kind of just a meaningless exercise.
[00:55:36.760 --> 00:55:38.200] I guess I would say two things.
[00:55:38.200 --> 00:55:43.080] I mean, in other words, so let's take the 1619 project, right?
[00:55:43.080 --> 00:55:50.360] Because as we know, it was subject to not only a lot of attack, but a good amount of ridicule and still is.
[00:55:51.960 --> 00:55:52.440] Right?
[00:55:52.440 --> 00:55:56.760] And there again, so you see that's a typical product of the culture war, right?
[00:55:56.760 --> 00:56:01.000] So those who have to kind of virulently defend it, those who virulently attack it.
[00:56:01.000 --> 00:56:04.440] How about a 1917 project?
[00:56:04.760 --> 00:56:07.160] Right, now there's let's keep the 1619.
[00:56:07.160 --> 00:56:08.280] I don't have any problem with that.
[00:56:08.280 --> 00:56:08.600] Fine.
[00:56:08.600 --> 00:56:10.360] You know, every now and then you might get the history wrong.
[00:56:10.360 --> 00:56:12.920] So then someone comes along and corrects it or challenges it.
[00:56:12.920 --> 00:56:13.800] You have the debate.
[00:56:13.800 --> 00:56:14.280] Great.
[00:56:14.280 --> 00:56:16.160] Keep the 1619 project.
[00:56:16.480 --> 00:56:18.400] Where's the 1917 project?
[00:56:18.400 --> 00:56:32.960] Right now, there's a project which starts at the point where leftism was no longer just something in books and at meeting tables, right, but took on power which soon snowballed into massive power, affecting millions of lives.
[00:56:32.960 --> 00:56:50.480] And as I said before, with enjoying at least legitimacy, if not often zealous support from important strands of leftism in the West, and asking the question: how has that influenced what we're calling progressive politics?
[00:56:50.480 --> 00:56:57.680] Including, when I say how is that influenced, including the ways in which we've conveniently ignored it.
[00:56:57.680 --> 00:56:59.600] So let's have two projects.
[00:56:59.600 --> 00:57:02.400] Let's have more than two, but let's start with a second.
[00:57:02.400 --> 00:57:04.480] We'll call it the 1917 project.
[00:57:04.480 --> 00:57:06.720] Then we can add more, right?
[00:57:10.400 --> 00:57:12.480] You know, so that's you know, that's what I would say.
[00:57:12.480 --> 00:57:16.320] So again, it's not an either-or, it's not a zero-sum game.
[00:57:16.560 --> 00:57:21.440] And, you know, one of the things I insist on in the book is you can't compare atrocities.
[00:57:21.760 --> 00:57:32.160] And so that's why, you know, it's adamantly not what about, you know, well, let's add up the numbers of dead on this side and add up the numbers of dead and see which regime was worse.
[00:57:32.160 --> 00:57:33.200] It's not about that at all.
[00:57:33.200 --> 00:57:39.840] You can't do that anyway because atrocities are only quantifiable to a certain degree.
[00:57:40.080 --> 00:57:42.320] You know, why would we want to?
[00:57:42.640 --> 00:57:44.240] So, yeah, that's what I would say.
[00:57:45.520 --> 00:57:51.360] But again, you know, as to your question of, well, you know, again, you're really pushing me to get, you know, to stick out a policy.
[00:57:51.360 --> 00:58:01.560] Well, yeah, I mean, you know, once we're getting into, you know, incomes in the billions, which is not being reinvested, you are right.
[00:58:01.880 --> 00:58:12.040] I would be very much a partisan of not taxing or low taxing for any, which is reinvested, which goes back into creating jobs and creating employment, right?
[00:58:12.200 --> 00:58:25.400] But once we're just talking about, you know, personal wealth, which is skinned off the top, yeah, sure, I'm happy to increase taxes on that because, you know, it's, you know, because its beneficial effects on the economy are minimal.
[00:58:25.720 --> 00:58:27.240] So there, I gave you a policy.
[00:58:27.560 --> 00:58:28.280] Okay, there we go.
[00:58:28.280 --> 00:58:34.280] Well, Eric, I'm not sure that was, you know, maybe the most insightful thing I've had to say today, but there you go.
[00:58:34.280 --> 00:58:37.720] You know, I mean, sure, I'm happy to look at that.
[00:58:37.720 --> 00:58:49.160] You know, I think $999 million of personal wealth is very nice.
[00:58:49.160 --> 00:58:57.640] I'm not sure that, you know, once it becomes a million more, all of a sudden, you know, taxing it is going to be such a terrible thing.
[00:58:57.640 --> 00:59:12.440] But again, of personal, you know, of personal final wealth, not in terms of reinvestment, research and development, other things where I think there are good reasons to, you know, to let that money continue to be productive.
[00:59:13.080 --> 00:59:22.200] So, but again, on this kind of practical level, you know, we want to kind of correct what has gone wrong.
[00:59:22.520 --> 00:59:27.480] In terms of studying history, we, as a social scientist, we can't run experiments.
[00:59:27.480 --> 00:59:30.920] You know, let's try an autocracy versus a democracy or whatever.
[00:59:30.920 --> 00:59:35.880] But we can use the natural experiments that have happened and then use the comparison method.
[00:59:35.880 --> 00:59:39.160] Obvious simple examples: North Korea versus South Korea.
[00:59:39.400 --> 00:59:41.960] Let's look at why they are different.
[00:59:41.960 --> 00:59:47.040] Or, you know, East Germany versus West Germany before the unification and so on.
[00:59:48.480 --> 01:00:02.160] When you give examples of Lenin, Stalin's the USSR and Mao's China, Pol Pots, Cambodia, and so on, people might say, why can't they say, yeah, we tried progressive leftism.
[01:00:02.160 --> 01:00:03.760] That's what it looks like.
[01:00:03.760 --> 01:00:04.880] So it's failed.
[01:00:04.880 --> 01:00:06.480] We've run the experiment.
[01:00:06.480 --> 01:00:07.680] That doesn't work.
[01:00:07.680 --> 01:00:08.160] Period.
[01:00:08.160 --> 01:00:08.800] End of story.
[01:00:09.120 --> 01:00:11.360] We got to try something different.
[01:00:13.920 --> 01:00:27.360] Yeah, and I mean, I think what's curious here is that I think many of the, many, not all, but many serious people on the left did come to this understanding.
[01:00:27.360 --> 01:00:43.200] I mean, if we go back actually to, you know, Donald Trump's first term, I mean, even further, if we go back to what, I guess, about 2014, 2015, I'm not perfectly clear on the dates now, but as the kind of those primaries were starting to heat up, right?
[01:00:43.200 --> 01:00:49.280] And so Donald Trump was still in the running with other Republicans, and then you had the whole roster of Democrats.
[01:00:49.280 --> 01:00:54.560] I think a big mistake that Bernie Sanders made was just to use the word socialism, right?
[01:00:54.560 --> 01:01:01.200] If he had said social democracy, again, if he had shown that he understands the history that you've just mentioned, right?
[01:01:01.840 --> 01:01:17.360] And that, you know, you know, fully fledged, centralized, centrally managed economies managing every aspect of an economy, right, you know, have led to economic catastrophes and breakdowns, right?
[01:01:17.360 --> 01:01:21.440] And so acknowledge that by changing the terminology a bit, right?
[01:01:21.760 --> 01:01:24.400] You know, we might be in a very different place today.
[01:01:24.720 --> 01:01:28.080] And it made me wonder at the time, what does he mean?
[01:01:28.080 --> 01:01:29.680] I mean, he's no idiot.
[01:01:29.880 --> 01:01:30.840] He's no idiot.
[01:01:30.840 --> 01:01:34.200] He knows the difference between socialism and social democracy.
[01:01:34.520 --> 01:01:41.240] I mean, this is just, you don't need to be, to have a PhD in political science to know this, right?
[01:01:41.320 --> 01:01:43.160] I think pretty much anybody who reads...
[01:01:43.160 --> 01:01:44.360] the news, right?
[01:01:46.040 --> 01:01:51.960] And so I have to say that that threw me too when he was not using the term social democracy, that little difference.
[01:01:52.040 --> 01:01:57.560] Although I think that, you know, at least now, 10 years later, that seems to be what he and AOC mean.
[01:01:57.560 --> 01:01:58.600] Who knows?
[01:01:58.600 --> 01:02:05.560] So I, you know, if what you're saying is that they need to be a bit clear about this, yeah, you've got my 100% support on that.
[01:02:05.560 --> 01:02:06.280] All right.
[01:02:06.280 --> 01:02:11.800] And in so doing, would also, again, be showing somewhat of a greater awareness of history.
[01:02:11.800 --> 01:02:19.480] That if they mean something like, you know, an enormous state managing every aspect of an economy, right?
[01:02:20.840 --> 01:02:24.440] Well, how, you know, are they willing to acknowledge that these have been colossal failures?
[01:02:24.440 --> 01:02:28.520] And if that they don't mean that, well, can they be a bit clear what they do mean?
[01:02:28.520 --> 01:02:37.960] You know, I'd like to think that they mean something more like, you know, a roughly, a loosely sort of Northern European model of, say, the 1970s.
[01:02:37.960 --> 01:02:52.120] Now, I'm not sure that a Northern European model of the 1970s can be adapted wholesale into present conditions because other factors in the world economy, you know, such as China and so forth or India, now play a very, very different role.
[01:02:52.920 --> 01:03:03.880] But if they mean, you know, something like that, which is, you know, generally hospitable to free markets, redistributive in a strategic way, yeah, I mean, I think that's at least more serious than something to look at.
[01:03:03.880 --> 01:03:19.840] And when conservatives just kind of, you know, tar that all as communism, it, you know, they're just kind of flaunting their ignorance in the most, and, you know, in the highest, you know, you know, with the brightest colors.
[01:03:14.840 --> 01:03:22.000] So it's not to be taken seriously.
[01:03:22.080 --> 01:03:29.040] So, yeah, of course, there are different, you know, we always have to understand that there are different competing economic models.
[01:03:30.320 --> 01:03:44.320] You know, so and it's true that I think a real problem among conservatives is to ultimately lead us to the idea, fine, we believe in free markets, but that free markets only mean one very specific type of model.
[01:03:44.320 --> 01:03:46.640] You know, that's that's terrifying.
[01:03:46.640 --> 01:03:49.680] You know, we always have choices among economic models.
[01:03:49.680 --> 01:03:52.080] That's as true on the left as on the right.
[01:03:52.080 --> 01:03:57.840] And I would say, on, you know, straight along the spectrum, we could use more clarity.
[01:03:58.160 --> 01:03:59.120] That's good.
[01:03:59.120 --> 01:04:00.560] All right, Eric, thank you so much.
[01:04:00.560 --> 01:04:02.960] Here it is again, coming clean.
[01:04:03.440 --> 01:04:07.120] Rise of critical theory and the future of your left of the left.
[01:04:07.120 --> 01:04:07.920] Thank you, Michael.
[01:04:07.920 --> 01:04:10.320] It's been an absolute pleasure to talk to you.
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