Objectively Speaking with Eric Kaufmann Transcript

Many people assume that we’ve passed “peak woke” and are returning to merit and objectivity. Eric Kaufmann begs to differ, warning that the destructive mind virus won’t simply evaporate on its own, having captured the minds of too many young people. He presents a remedy in his latest book, The Third Awokening: A 12-Point Plan for Rolling Back Progressive Extremism, and returns to Objectively Speaking to make his case. Watch the interview HERE or read the transcript below. 

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JAG: Jennifer Anju Grossman

EK: Eric Kaufmann

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JAG: Hello everyone and welcome to the 266th episode of Objectively Speaking. I'm Jag. I'm the CEO of The Atlas Society, the leading nonprofit promoting capitalism and the ideas of Ayn Rand to teens and young adults. I am very excited to have Eric Kaufman rejoin us. He first joined us on, I believe, our 130th episode and this time he's going to be talking about his latest book, The Third Awokening: A 12-Point Plan for Rolling Back Progressive Extremism. Eric, thank you for joining us.

EK: Jennifer, it's great to be back. I hadn't realized it was that many episodes ago.

JAG: Yes, yes. Well, we might have missed a book, you're so prolific we can't keep up with you. But as I've said, when I was interviewing Martin Gurri, there are a number of books of our guests and they're all interesting, but probably I can count on one hand the books that had the most effect on me. Certainly your book White Shift changed the way I view the world and really deepened my understanding. I really want to encourage everyone not only to get this latest book, The Third Awokening, but also White Shift. 

I also wanted those who are actually watching this as opposed to many who listen to this as a podcast, that as you'll see, I'm not in my usual studio. I'm in an RV in Black Rock City, Black Rock Desert in Nevada at Burning Man. We are going to do our best. We've got a Starlink connection, but my producer, if for whatever reason that connection gets interrupted, will join in. Also I really want to thank Eric because it's 8pm there, so appreciate your pulling a slightly different time shift for us now than when you first joined us two years back to talk about your book White Shift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities, in which you made the compelling case that suppression of conservative dissent on the scale and pace of immigration was driving populist uprisings around the world. Since then, have you seen any shifts in how elite gatekeepers of the cultural narrative have accommodated a broader discussion? Or rather, did they in fact go in the opposite direction?

The Great Awokening was...really was about is essentially restricting debate and speech in the name of minority sensitivity.

EK: Yes, I mean it's a really good question because the book came out in 2018, 2019. Already then, what we call the Great Awokening was really in full swing. What that really was about is essentially restricting debate and speech in the name of minority sensitivity. That is basically what it was about. That meant that mainstream political parties couldn't really address the issue of immigration without the taint of being accused of racism. Again, that's restriction on speech coming from minority sensitivity. 

What's happened since then? Well, I mean it depends on the country where populist parties have broken through into double-digit support, which is now the case in almost every European country. Eventually it seems it forces the mainstream to also start talking about the issue of immigration. That helps to break taboos to some degree. Now, of course, there's still an attempt to entrench taboos in other realms. For example, I think it's far easier to have a conversation about illegal immigration than about legal immigration numbers. It's easier to have a conversation about the economic and security consequences of immigration than it is to have a conversation about the cultural effects of immigration. I think there are still taboos and obviously in some countries the old taboos have not really come down. I think only very recently, I should say in the last six months now even in Canada, I think there is now more of a willingness to talk about it. But I would say the taboos in places like Australia and Canada remain stronger than they would be in, for example, the Netherlands and France. But these taboos are still there and they're still making it difficult for mainstream parties to move. 

I think if I have to argue, I think it seems like the center-right has been able to talk-the-talk of immigration restriction more in Europe. I think the left-wing parties, with the exception of the Danish Social Democrats, to some extent their Norwegian counterparts, I think the left has had a much harder time. Same in the US. I think I would argue that it's very difficult for the Democrats to talk about immigration, whereas for the Republicans it's much, much easier to talk about immigration than the pre-2015 period. It depends on the location as to what's happened to the Overton window of acceptable debate. It's shifted in different ways in different places.

JAG: I mentioned Martin Gurri. I recently interviewed him about his book Revolt of the Public. He argued that the term “populist,” like the term “misinformation,” is used by elites less to define than to marginalize leaders and ideas they abhor. For example, they will characterize libertarian Javier Milei in Argentina as populist, even though his primary focus is economic policy rather than cultural. Do you agree with this take and what does populism mean in your usage?

Let's not forget that a lot of parties, like the Democrats, started out as a populist party. Populists introduce new ideas, ideas that they can bring in groups of people who've been neglected by the established elites.

EK: Yes, I think two things can be true. I do think populism is a useful analytical term, but equally it can be weaponized and exaggerated. I think that if we take a definition that says, well, okay, a party that is not one of the mainstream parties or that is outside the system, like the Reform Party in Britain, I think it's reasonable to call a populist party or a party that uses rhetoric about the people more or it makes more emotional appeals and is oriented against existing elites. I think that's a legitimate analytical concept. It applies incidentally as equally to left-wing populists like Bernie Sanders or Jeremy Corbyn here in Britain or someone like a Chavez. So that term, as long as it's used equally with left and right, it has some purchase analytically? Yes, I think so, but I think it's exaggerated often. 

Let's not forget that a lot of parties, like the Democrats, started out as a populist party. Populists introduce new ideas, ideas that they can bring in groups of people who've been neglected by the established elites. There are systematic pressures that tend to favor certain opinions and certain groups of people over other groups of people within a democratic system. I'll give you one example. We know from survey data that members of legislatures in Europe, across the west, the political representatives, members of Parliament or the equivalent would be congressmen, they tend to be more liberal on cultural issues, especially immigration, than their voters. That holds systematically across countries. So we have a problem that even though you might have a left-wing party and a right-wing party, because of the kind of person that winds up in politics, in the parties in the system, they will systematically be ignoring, I won't say even necessarily deliberately silencing, but just because of the nature of political recruitment, certain interests will not be given a fair hearing or given an equal hearing. 

Equally, certain interests have lobbyists behind them. When you have a lobby behind you, you've got a lot more power. Whereas often majorities are disorganized. They aren't focused enough, they don't have a lobby. When you get lobbies and special interests gaining power in a system, that too can crowd out, can lead to a decline in the effectiveness of democracy. It's very legitimate to have a populist movement that speaks for those who are disadvantaged or left out of the system because either they're not organized lobbies and special interests or because they're not well represented in the political elites due to candidate selection. I think there's obviously a balance. If you are George Wallace and you're trying to bring back segregation, I think it's legitimate to say, well, that's a view that we don't want in the system. It's a populist view, but it's arguably something that the mainstream party should stay away from. But with something like immigration, a perfectly legitimate issue to debate has been stigmatized, essentially. So, yes, I guess my answer would be it's a bit of both. It is useful, but it's also a stigma.

JAG: All right, let's now turn to your latest book, The Third Awokening: A 12-Point Plan for Rolling Back Progressive Extremism. As long as we are on definitions, the term “woke” can mean all sorts of things to different people, right? How do you define it in the context of your book?

So “ woke”, in one sentence, I define it as the making sacred of historically marginalized race, gender and sexual identity groups. The process of making sacred, fetishizing, centralizing minority, racial, gender and sexual identity groups, that's really what woke is.

EK: Again, another one of these terms that is analytically useful but can be weaponized and stretched beyond its reasonable meaning, right? So “ woke”, in one sentence, I define it as the making sacred of historically marginalized race, gender and sexual identity groups. The process of making sacred, fetishizing, centralizing minority, racial, gender and sexual identity groups, that's really what woke is. It intersects with left-wing ideas which are more broad, which are broader than just the holy trinity of the sacred symbols race, gender, sexuality. There is a broader cultural leftism which simply says we want equal outcomes and we want to protect people from harm. This is what you might call democratic socialism or social democracy. That then intersects in. . .

JAG: Yes. Sorry, no, go ahead. I didn't mean to interrupt you.

Equal outcomes, emotional harm protection for minority groups. That means we need to discriminate against majorities through affirmative action, and we need to essentially restrict speech through cancel culture or through punishment and speech codes and the like.

EK: Yes, so basically what you get with the intersection of this cultural leftism with the woke holy trinity is essentially a kind of operating creed which says we want equal outcomes and harm protection, including emotional safety and emotional harm protection. Equal outcomes, emotional harm protection for historically marginalized race, gender, sexual identity groups. That's really what we're dealing with as the ideology. That ideology is then going to say two things. One is, well, we want equality, which is essentially equal, no race gaps, no gender gaps in terms of income, in terms of admittance to Harvard, in terms of government contracting. This is the idea of equal outcomes rather than equal treatment. So you get affirmative action, which is about equal outcomes. Harvard, we need to have 13% black, so we're going to discriminate against Asians and whites to get there. That's the principle of equal outcomes trumping equal treatment. That's part of it. Equality is one part of it. 

The second part of it is this emotional harm protection. We're going to do the equal outcome stuff. We're also going to do what we call inclusion, which basically means that we're going to censor your speech. Because if you say anything that might offend, make somebody feel, let's call it “emotional trauma”, that's the term, or microaggression, these are all terms that refer to somebody who's been psychologically perturbed by speech. Our solution is going to be to silence someone's free speech in order to protect the emotional safety of these. Again, coming back to those historically marginalized, that holy trinity, race, gender, sexual identity groups, we have to protect them. Essentially we do that through speech codes and through cancel culture. This is really where we get to this ideology, what I call cultural socialism. Equal outcomes, emotional harm protection for minority groups. That means we need to discriminate against majorities through affirmative action, and we need to essentially restrict speech through cancel culture or through punishment and speech codes and the like. That's really what comes out of it. 

Now, of course, there's another dynamic which is that we've also got to go into the past and make that more equal. If we don't have enough black or female presidents or big people in history who did important things, we have to erase, knock down the odd statue. We have to perhaps change history, only focus on the deeds of certain individuals, get rid of the dead white males to some extent so that we can have this nice representative multicultural history. That's another example of this phenomenon. Looking at literature and movies and ensuring that there's essentially equal outcomes by representation in the Oscars, that's another example of this getting rid of any historical figure who might have said something racist. Even though that might have been the convention of the day, Jefferson or Churchill or whoever, it might mean, well, if we go to Jefferson's Monticello, we're going to hear mainly about slavery. This sort of reworking of the past is also part of the thrust of woke.

JAG: Yes. It reminds me of Orwell talking about how every street name has been changed. That we really are changing the past to suit the present. Those who are able to control the narrative of the past are able to shape future narratives. Now, we've got a bunch of great questions which are actually dovetailing into some of the things I wanted to ask about. But first I was curious. As a more classically liberal political science professor who has been unwilling to a certain extent to self-censor, I wonder about your experience. I know you have had your run-ins with Twitter mobs and academic investigations. I think you were at a different university when we interviewed you a couple of years back. I wonder if the switch was part of that kind of experience.

It was people a little further down the chain who had a little bit of power, who'd volunteered for the DEI committee or to serve as an inquisitor on one of these kangaroo courts. Those are the people who felt the power, who really wanted to push the agenda.

EK: Yes . Oh yes, definitely. Thanks for asking. Yes, is the answer. I was starting in about 2018, to be more openly critical of the so-called social justice movement. Social justice, by the way, is simply an equivalent of cultural socialism, it’s an equivalent of woke, but the social justice movement, a lot of this was happening on social media. If I retweeted a video of Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who couldn't pronounce LGBTQ, he tried about three times, that's the kind of thing that would land you in hot water. You had these self-appointed radical students and their staff allies who would coordinate either to do the annual Twitter mobbing or to put in these formal complaints which were actually quite serious. You get the email saying you have to show up at a certain hearing at a certain time and you've been accused of violating policy X. It reveals that what's occurred is you get these policies which are all oriented towards harm protection that are then weaponized by woke activists to try and cancel people. That's kind of what I experienced. I had about four of these different internal investigations. I had plenty of Twitter mobbings. Yes, it was leading to an environment where (and I want to stress that at this university it was only a few people; I got along with most people. I'd known them for the better part of 20 years) what happened was that the interactions were so awkward because I knew that they knew about something in the press or about some Twitter mobbing, that was common knowledge. That was always present in the air whenever I was meeting people. It just made social interaction awkward and it added a layer of alienation really. 

It's not as though I was cancelled, forced out, but I did have to leave towards the end. What's interesting is as we get into 2021-22, the great Awokening was starting to lose energy. You could see that on Twitter, for example, when they would try these Twitter mobbings, they'd get badly rated when the internal investigations happened. We now had the Free Speech Union, for example, which is in Britain and now in Canada and elsewhere. They did a great job that just a letter would be enough to shut the university up and to stop these things. Because actually the top part, the top management of the university, the equivalent to the president, those people were not interested in this. It was people a little further down the chain who had a little bit of power, who'd volunteered for the DEI committee or to serve as an inquisitor on one of these kangaroo courts. Those are the people who felt the power, who really wanted to push the agenda. So it is quite interesting, but I definitely felt that some of the power was ebbing away from these people.

JAG: All right, we've got some great questions, including one here from MyModernGalt. He says, looking at the synopsis of your new book, I'm curious why you say that woke extremism is a, quote unquote, perverse extension of liberalism rather than a repudiation of liberalism. That is something that you go on about in your book at length.

This idea that we're not diverse enough, we need to be more diverse, that doesn't come from Marxism. It actually comes from this sort of therapeutic, humanitarian liberalism, a kind of left-liberalism.

EK: Yes. Liberalism is a word that can mean many things. If we're just talking about John Stuart Mill and classical liberalism, Adam Smith, there's clearly no problem there. The problem is with the movements that call themselves liberal. Now, if you take the liberal-identity liberalism as an identity, people who say, “I'm a liberal”, what does that mean? It doesn't clearly mean 19th-century Scottish or Scottish Enlightenment liberalism. It means a liberalism that has actually been heavily influenced by left-wing and socialist ideas. If you look at first the work of John Rawls in the 20th century, and then if you look at multicultural liberals who would be in favor of multiculturalism, like Charles Taylor, for example, or Will Kimlich or Iris Young, these sorts of people, it's really a hybridization of some liberal ideas with ideas from the left. One of those ideas is this notion of emotional harm protection which comes from humanistic psychotherapy, this idea of, for example, speech codes. 

Now, because there's really a debate over whether Marxism is the source of woke or whether liberalism is the source of woke, my argument is actually that it's not liberalism per se, but it's not John Stuart Mill/Scottish Enlightenment classical liberalism. But what it is is the humanitarian and egalitarian elements that have been brought into social democracy and modern liberalism, what philosophers would call modern liberalism, which is very left-influenced, Rawls-type liberalism. This idea of harm prevention and harm protection is very central to liberalism. So, for example, if we take speech codes, or even if we take affirmative action, that doesn't come out of Marxism. It's coming out of this more humanitarian left-liberal, social-democratic tradition. 

Similarly, disparate-impact law, which has led to a lot of problems in terms of reporting on the race and gender makeup of your board, of your university: a lot of that kind of tallying up of race and sex composition and saying,” well, you have to rectify that”. This idea that we're not diverse enough, we need to be more diverse, that doesn't come from Marxism. It actually comes from this sort of therapeutic, humanitarian liberalism, a kind of left-liberalism. I think that's actually, for example, the slogan “be nice” or "be kind,” which is very important in the woke lexicon. It doesn't really have much to do with Herbert Marcuse and critical theory and cultural Marxism and all of these arguments about systems of oppression. I think it is a more intellectual argument. I'm not saying that doesn't matter, but I think that this sort of “be kind ” bleeding-heart, left-beralism is also very important. None of which means that this is a critique of classical liberalism. I think we need to really distinguish classical liberalism from modern liberalism. They're quite different, actually.

JAG: All right, let's get to another great question, from Alan Turner: What do you define as the time-frame context of the three waves of awokening? What is what we see today? The same woke as was starting to be talked about in the late 2010s, for example?

By the time we get to the third awokening, because of social media, these ideas are coming off campus and entering the mass media and are entering mass politics. So that's really the big difference with the third awokening as opposed to the first two.

EK: Yes. I do have this idea of the third Awokening. If you think about Great Awakenings and American history, Protestantism has had the first Great Awakening in the 18th century and then the second Great Awakening in the early 19th century, for example. This idea of these awokenings, it's really an emotional outpouring. You could call it a moral panic. But in any case, this is driven by these outrage entrepreneurs. Now if the earlier Great Awakenings were driven by religious entrepreneurs, the Great Awokenings are driven by cultural-left, outrage entrepreneurs. Now, the reason I think that these are connected is the symbols, the core sacred groups. Race is at the center. I argue that the rise of the race taboo is in the mid-1960s, the taboo against racism. Of course, we can agree that there should be a norm against racism, but what a taboo is there's a very clear line. You step over it, you're gone. You're excommunicated. It's a very black-and-white way of thinking. Instead of the more proportionate and the more proportionate sort of jurisprudential way of adjudicating a dispute where there's more serious race and less serious. There's first offense, second offense, there's context. All of that is out the window. It's just social death, as John McWhorter says. 

Shelby Steele talks about this in his book White Guilt, this sudden emergence of this race taboo in the mid-60s, all of a sudden, you now have this kryptonite, sacred substance. If you get anywhere near it, you're then tarred with it. You become radioactive. Everyone needs to stay away from you, because if they're associated with you, they get some of that radioactivity from you. The late-60s is really the beginning, and we see the first cancellations in the late-60s and into the mid-70s, for example. An example would be the Moynihan report in 1965 on the black family. That was probably the first cancellation in terms of when I talk about modern-woke culture, where this was seen as it had to be shelved by the Johnson administration because it was talking about a sensitive subject: the rise of fatherlessness, which, of course, at the time was actually quite low in the black community. Even at one-third out-of-wedlock births, as opposed to 70% now. But even so, just raising that topic was enough to land Moynihan in hot water. That's kind of the beginning of this reflex. It just is the case that as we then get into the second awokening, which is when political correctness or a phrase like dead white males or Eurocentrism comes in in the late-80s, early-90s with speech codes, and then it's still about race, and then it's about sex and sexuality comes along. All of those ideas. It's race, gender, sexuality.

In the beginning, in this first awokening, race was more central. The feminism thing was just coming in. By the time of the second awokening, all three are very much in place. Race, gender, sexuality. Then, of course, those same themes happen in the third awokening, where cancellations are almost entirely around race, number one. Number two would be “me too,” and sex, and then gender and sexuality as well. Same symbols. It works similarly in terms of, if we can track it in big data, the number of times the word racism or sexism is used in English language books is a good indicator of this. You see those three waves very clearly in that data. The only thing I would say is that in the third awokening, the one we lived through, the 2000s we're still living through, is different in a number of ways. The main reason it's different is because social media connects trends in academia. Academia went through these three awokenings. People were already talking about racism and sexism at a very high amplitude in academia in the 80s, 90s, 2000s, but not in the pages of the New York Times and Washington Post or on the major networks. By the time we get to the third awokening, because of social media, these ideas are coming off campus and entering the mass media and are entering mass politics. So that's really the big difference with the third awokening as opposed to the first two.

JAG: Interesting. All right, well, before I had read your book, I was more of the opinion, as many people are, that we have kind of reached peak woke and progressed beyond it. In your book you say “not so fast”. We've got a couple of questions here that I think speak to the same curiosity. ILikeNumbers asks, was the Cracker Barrel logo a turning point? Is the Scottish girl with the accent knife becoming a turning point? Also, Kingfisher again is asking, do you think wokeism is on the decline? Is something like Cracker Barrel reverting back to the classic side, an indicator of change?

The taken-for-granted, unreflexive view is that speech should be free. Sticks and stones may hurt, break my bones, but words will never hurt me. It's a free country. All these kinds of sayings that Jonathan Haidt talks about, I think are just less in the DNA of young generations.

EK: Yes. I think these are really good questions. I think that, yes, the first obvious answer is there is no question that there has been a decline of woke since the peak of 20, 21. That's the peak of the moral panic and the fear fervor, the popular fervor. But I would stress a couple of things. There's the short term, the energy. It's often hard to sustain energy in any social movement. There's no question energy has dropped off. For example, the number of professors that have been targeted for cancellation by the Left, according to the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, shows a very clear drop since 2021. Similarly, mentions of racism and sexism in the New York Times, again, you'll see the same drop. There's no question energy has been lost and the peak of the movement has passed. However, there's a couple of questions. One is the institutionalization of these ideas in DEI bureaucracies, for example, means that they can live on unless they are cut out of the system. Now, of course, that is happening in the United States with the Trump administration and its approach to DEI and government and universities. It's also happened to some degree in the corporate sector. We can see that in terms of the mention of DEI on earnings calls, which drops after 2022. There's been movement in the corporate world. You have also these consumer backlashes against woke advertising, as we see with Cracker Barrel. That does seem to be changing the calculus. Same with anti-ESG: environmental, social, governance standards in states like Texas. There's no question, there is legislative movement, there's cultural movement. 

The question I have, however, which comes out in the book is on all of these attitudes. Is America a racist country? You ask a question like that, clearly anyone who's more on the left is going to be more likely to agree with that than someone that identifies as a conservative. But it is also the case that younger Americans, particularly younger left-wing Americans, are more likely to agree with these kinds of woke statements. So I think there's a generational issue which is if those ideas are sticking with generations, then as the zoomers become the median voter in 20 or 30 years, will they shift the median in American society away from the free speech position to a more emotional safety and woke position? I think the evidence is, in fact, that of the younger generation, more since I wrote the book, I think there is some evidence that the younger generation is, in fact, splitting and polarizing and that their views on these issues are, in fact, more polarized than older Americans. There is a very strong woke group, which is much larger among young people. But there is also quite a strong anti-woke sentiment and consciousness about what woke is in that young generation. We're going to see, I think, more of a polarized public opinion coming through. But what I would say is the taken-for-granted, unreflexive view is that speech should be free. Sticks and stones may hurt, break my bones, but words will never hurt me. It's a free country. All these kinds of sayings that Jonathan Haidt talks about, I think are just less in the DNA of young generations. There isn't that automatic defense of freedom, freedom of speech. But what there is, I think, is more of a polarized culture war within that generation. I think we're going to see that emerging in politics more too. But one of my points was that the reason we can't count woke out is simply because generational turnover is likely to lead to the median voter becoming more woke just by virtue of the fact young people are more woke.

JAG: All right, Ann M. asks, did early cancel culture with Howard Cassell and Marge Schott create a bit of a power trip which inspired woke bullying? You know this idea that you can never quite satisfy a bully by apologizing and the only way is to say I don't think of you or to push back and accuse them of illiberalism. Your thoughts?

EK: Well, there is a debate between those who see the woke phenomenon as inspired by, let's call it, self-interested motives like wealth, power, and status and prestige and those who see it as a true belief, as a kind of “no, people are fired up by religion.” I take more that second view and less the more instrumental view. However, I acknowledge that there's no question that there is money to be made if you're in the grievance industry. There's no question that there's power in making an accusation. But if I were to say my view is that people are true believers, they have the belief, then they'll take the power if it's there, I guess I'm more of the view like John McWhorter and Joshua Mitchell and others who say this is a kind of religion, that people truly do believe it. Then when they're taking the knee, they're really believing that it's not just virtue signaling. Of course, there are some people who are just doing this out of conformity and virtue signaling. That's true of any movement. But I do think there is a significant number of people, for example, even on an anonymous survey where no one's watching you. On an anonymous survey you'll get 7 in 10 US students saying a professor that offends members of the class should be reported to the administration. There's nobody in their class necessarily watching them fill out that survey. Similarly, even within the general public, you'll get a certain percentage who will say statues of Jefferson should come down, for example, or saying that anyone can make it in America is a racist microaggression that doesn't recognize systems of oppression. There will be a certain percentage of people who truly believe that. I guess it does give power, but I think focusing on the power or the money or the status, I think that's actually not the prime driver.

JAG: Interesting, interesting. In your book you describe two distinct schools of thought in terms of how to deal with the woke corruption of our institutions. One being a more libertarian, market-oriented approach and one being more interventionist using the levers of power to force change within the institutions themselves. Where do you land on that spectrum?

I think that I tend to land on the interventionist side... I don't think moral exhortation is going to be enough to get us over the line. I don't even think lawfare will either. ...so my view is really that you need to use elected government.

EK: Yes. I think that I tend to land on the interventionist side. Obviously, the way this debate tends to shake out if we take higher education, for example, you have the Chris Rufo school, which is interventionist, and then you have the the FIRE people like Jonathan Haidt or people like Cathy Young or various other liberals, Steven Pinker maybe, people whom I respect a lot who would say, well no, we need to just encourage people to find their inner courage and rise up. I think my view is we’ve got to do both of these things, but I don't think moral exhortation is going to be enough to get us over the line. I don't even think lawfare will either. Suing to protect your First Amendment rights. Yes, in theory that's great, but this is expensive. A lot of people will avoid getting into lawsuits which are protracted and expensive, even with support from the likes of FIRE, for example. I'm not convinced that that's going to get us to a place of reform.

So my view is really that you need to use elected government, which is probably the only institution that the majority of the population that is not woke can control. Whereas the other institutions have fallen progressively to the activist left who are simply better organized, they're more motivated, they are simply setting the tone in schools and universities and bureaucracies and so on. So I think there's really no other alternative. Now, I also would argue that I would defend the use of government from a classical-liberal perspective because don't forget that Hobbes and John Locke amongst others would make the argument that government has a role in protecting liberty, particularly where you have private censorship and private violence. They were quite comfortable, Hobbes and Locke, in talking about the role of government in protecting people's liberties. Again, government then can be a threat to liberty. But equally, I think of society as three layers, you have government, you have institutions, and citizenry. Now, government can oppress the citizens, and Madison is right in that respect. But equally institutions can oppress citizens. I think a lot of the problems that we have had with cancel culture have come out of unaccountable institutions, whether those be government or universities or even sometimes tech corporations. 

Corporations that have used their power to silence speech. Therefore, they are the threat to liberty. In those situations, it is legitimate for elected governments to actually step in to curtail the autonomy of institutions like a university in order to protect the speech of the citizenry. That is a long tradition within liberalism. There's many court cases as well that could spell this out, that have shown sometimes you do have corrupt schools, corrupt police departments. Governments have to take them into special measures. This is simply part of the society we live in. I would call my position liberal realism rather than liberal idealism.

JAG: Okay, I like that distinction. Well, you mentioned Haidt. Of course, Greg Lukianoff has been a frequent guest on this podcast and in their book, The Coddling of the American Mind, they make the case that a generation of overprotective parenting has given rise to a generation that is more fearful, less resilient, more likely to call for things like speech protections. But you seem to have some skepticism about the all-encompassing explanatory power of that theory.

EK: Yes. First of all, I want to endorse what they write in terms of mental health. I think that coddling has certainly contributed to the mental health epidemic amongst young people. However, when you look at, for example, attitudes toward speech, is it legitimate to physically use violence to block somebody from speaking, or to heckle them so that they can't speak, those sorts of attitudes, or to keep somebody off campus who says transgender is a mental disorder? On all of these kinds of questions, what you find, I think, is that people with bad mental health are somewhat more likely to be woke, but it doesn't make much difference. The big difference is really where people identify ideologically. I think I would say the same with regard to hyper-parenting and overprotective parenting, that it makes some difference. It makes quite a bit of difference for mental health. I don't think it makes an enormous difference for endorsing woke. I think endorsing woke is a kind of mind virus that you catch and that is largely independent of the psychology of your upbringing, the psychology makes a small difference. I don't think it makes a massive difference in terms of endorsing these ideas. 

Let's not forget that, yes, of course, young people are more woke, but the great Awokening actually shifted opinion amongst white liberals, in particular, of all ages. So, for example, white liberals of all ages became over twice as likely to say, racism is a big problem, or systemic racism is a big problem in American society. They became more likely to endorse affirmative action. That happened across all age groups, not just the young people who are arguably affected by this helicopter parenting. My argument is that I don't want to completely trash what they're saying. I think that it does matter. It is something we have to rectify. I don't think that's the main reason for the awokening, no.

JAG: Interesting. Okay, in your book, you describe how the cultural socialists deploy what you call a “radioactive, velvet-glove approach” in their bid to gain ideological supremacy. What is it and how do they deploy it?

Diversity and equity sounds reasonable, equal, right? We're treated equally. No, what it means is we're going to treat you unequally to achieve equal outcomes by race or by sex. In fact, it's kind of a shell game where you're attempting to use a fig leaf to launder quite radical ideas under the badge of something that's quite liberal sounding.

EK: Well, yes, I think one of the themes of the book is that a lot of the woke phenomenon comes from emotions, that it is empathizing emotional energy and a movement that comes from below. It is not a system of ideas like Marxism. That also this race taboo, as I mentioned, is the Big Bang of our moral universe. There's before the Big Bang and there's after the Big Bang. The Big Bang happens around 1965. Now, of course, it's going to take time for this universe to expand, for all the possibilities to be explored and for all of the logic of these ideas to unfold. But that's the beginning. In fact, the race taboo is really the center of our moral universe, and it's the origin of our moral universe. Of course, the sacred substance around race and then later gender and sexuality, although never quite as much as race, I would argue it is this kind of kryptonite that can be weaponized if you get a hold of it and you wave it at somebody and they shrink back because they don't want to be touched with it. If you're touched with it, you're then radioactive to others. This is what I mean that they want to make you radioactive. 

So that's the radioactive part, the velvet glove is really the use of euphemism. One of the things you see is there is always this kind of use of euphemisms which Orwell commented on as well, the nature of language becomes political rather than empirical, describing the real world. You take a word like anti-racism or equality, diversity, inclusion, they all sound like great words. Anti-fascism. If you actually scratch the surface, if you go under the hood and look at what these things mean, diversity and equity sounds reasonable, equal, right? We're treated equally. No, what it means is we're going to treat you unequally to achieve equal outcomes by race or by sex. In fact, it's kind of a shell game where you're attempting to use a fig leaf to launder quite radical ideas under the badge of something that's quite liberal sounding. 

So that's the velvet glove, this velvet glove which conceals the iron fist of illiberalism. Diversity and equity is a velvet glove. It conceals the iron fist of discrimination against whites, males, Asians, conservatives. Inclusion is a velvet glove. It conceals censorship of speech, for example, in the name of emotional safety. There are all these ways in which there's the official meaning, which sounds great and it's nice and velvet and soft and then underneath it is the cancel culture, the discrimination or, by the way, even something like gender-affirming care or trans rights, which conceals underneath that, of course, chemical castration. It conceals surgery that's the irreversible kind. What I mean is the velvet glove concealing the iron fist.

JAG: All right, help us to understand asymmetric political bias with regards to how Democrats and Republicans see each other and treat each other and how other factors such as education levels may warp perceptions. Why are Democrats more than twice as unwilling to date Republicans than vice versa or seven times more unwilling to shop at a store owned by Republicans?

In Britain, where I've done similar questions, you get the same response. People who vote for left-wing parties or who voted to remain in the European Union are much, much less tolerant of people on the other side than those who voted to leave or who are conservative. This seems to be a generalized phenomenon across Western countries, this moralization.

EK: Well, the reason is that those on the left are more likely to moralize politics. They're likely to see your political views as not just an expression of you've got the wrong beliefs, but actually there is something that cuts to the core of your character. You're a bad person. You just, you don't just have wrong ideas, you're a bad person. It's that tendency to moralize politics. In fact, if you ask younger, white Americans, do you agree with this statement: people who disagree with me politically are immoral? You will get almost half of young, white liberals agreeing with that statement far more than young black liberals or Republicans of any race. It seems to be that this moralization of politics is connected to people who agree with that statement, that people who disagree with me politically are immoral, are also, if they're on the left, more likely to agree with the statement that white Republicans are racist. 

It's because the political belief in being conservative or Republican is seen as connected to violations of the sacred around race or sex. Sexist, racist, homophobic, whatever that is the reason for the moralization and the stigmatization coming from the left, it's worth saying, by the way, in Britain, where I've done similar questions, you get the same response. People who vote for left-wing parties or who voted to remain in the European Union are much, much less tolerant of people on the other side than those who voted to leave or who are conservative. This seems to be a generalized phenomenon across Western countries, this moralization. I think that kind of explains the anathematization and the kind of political hygiene that's practiced. This emotional disgust reflex is just stronger amongst left-wing partisans.

JAG: Interesting. Okay, well, we now have just 12 minutes and this hour has flown by. I don't want to end this without getting at least an overview of your 12-point plan for rolling back progressive extremism, particularly which elements you believe are the most urgent and why.

The pattern of change I envision, you have the Right come in, win elections by raising the salience of issues like trans or issues like critical race theory...perhaps that then makes the sensible center-left say, look, this is too much of a liability. We've got to drop this. Once they moderate, the whole system shifts.

EK: Yes, thanks, Jennifer. The 12-point plan is very much saying that—I talk about the importance of government intervention and reform—I think change can only come from the political process. Again, elected government is the only major institution, particularly one that might have some cultural influence that the anti-woke majority can control, has a hope of controlling at least half the time perhaps. So you need to use government power at the state and federal level in a number of different ways. One of those ways is to rein in the bureaucracy, to enforce institutional neutrality in the bureaucracy and in publicly funded bodies like universities, for example, that universities should not be making political statements on Israel or Black Lives Matter or anything else if they want to continue having public funding. We're seeing that agenda, by the way, being rolled out under the Trump administration. I think that he's going too far and he's not going about it in as principled a way as I would like. But I do think that there's no question that government involvement is important. 

In order to get there, of course, you need “culture wars” issues: cancellation of free speech, pursuit of truth, due process, and also defense of national heritage. You need those to be important in politics. For a long time those issues were not important to the Republican Party, for example, so they would endorse generally affirmative action. They didn't want to challenge affirmative action. They didn't want to be seen to be on the wrong side of a number of these cultural issues. They did very little about them. That's changed now. That's a recent development. I would say that if you go to—I'm from Canada originally—Britain or other western countries, none of this has happened. The woke grip on institutions is as total as it's ever been. So there is no real way out. 

These institutions can't reform themselves. Also, as a part of this, the change can only come initially from the Right. The pattern of change I envision, you have the Right come in, win elections by raising the salience of issues like trans or issues like critical race theory, Youngkin in Virginia or Trump, perhaps that then makes the sensible center-left say, look, this is too much of a liability. We've got to drop this. Once they moderate, the whole system shifts. That hasn't happened yet fully in the United States, but it could happen.

I think this is really where change comes from. Now, I'm not saying that this is really what we're talking about, making the institutions look more like public opinion, but there's also the longer term question of what happens with younger people and with the institutions of socialization. I really think K-12 schooling, much more than universities which studies actually show, don't change people's minds all that much. But it's the schools. I did a study with Zach Goldberg at the Manhattan Institute and schools, the amount of critical race and gender theory they were exposed to really did seem to shape opinion. This is where reform efforts really need to go for the long term to try and get critical race and gender ideology, get the politics out of the school system. It's not enough to have school choice. My argument is that we already have school choice with regard to universities, but if everything on offer is more or less the same, if there's conformity in the system, the problem is systemic. You then have to actually crack into the system through government reforms of the kind we've seen, we're seeing now.

I think these are some important things to get at the teaching of history. You want to obviously teach history faithfully, but if you're going to teach about slavery or the conquest of land from the Native Americans, I don't think that should be done without putting that in a world historical context. I do think that curriculum reform, for example, teaching, if you're going to teach about a European country or the United States engaging in slavery or conquest, then you must teach about a non-European civilization doing the same thing. Because, in fact, this was a universal part of world history: conquest, slavery, colonialism. Those are universals. They don't respect race. They've been going on forever. In fact, students don't understand that.

In fact, 70% of young Americans in a survey I looked at said that Native Americans lived in peace and harmony before the European settlers arrived. There's a huge amount of illiteracy, lack of contextualization, blind spots that need to be addressed. We want to talk about the facts, but this isn't about changing facts or not teaching facts, it's about changing the emotional regime, the emotions that are attached to these particular events of slavery. For example, if someone realized slavery was Africans were enslaving each other, indigenous Native Americans were enslaving each other, Whites did slavery too, Muslims did it, but Whites ended it. 

That is a much more contextualized understanding which will draw some of the emotional fervor out of these settler/colonialist understandings of the past. I just think that that's another thing we need to get right; we need to get the teaching of history right to children. Because ultimately, you also have to win the short term, which we're seeing progress on in terms of getting rid of DEI, but also have to win the long term battle of ideas with the younger generation. I think the education system is key there.

JAG: Also, it’s what we're doing at The Atlas Society to introduce young people to the ideas of Ayn Rand and Objectivism, which is about objective reality and reason, and not self-sacrifice, but advancing one's long-term, rational self-interest. Okay, apologies to the many people who asked questions that we couldn't get to. I think that just speaks to how excited our audience was to hear from you because we changed the time a little bit and because it's so late there in the UK, But I had one more question for you if we can get to it somewhat quickly. You describe this recurring self-perpetuating cycle in which the excesses of political correctness trigger a populist backlash and then the excesses of that in turn trigger a new woke wave with each side prompting ever ratcheted-up levels of outrage. How does this cycle work and how does society break out of this destructive reactive pattern?

The culture war is not just about cultures. When you can't talk about crime or you can't talk about the border properly because of minority sensitivity, then those problems are going to fester and they're going to lead to revolts. That's the way I see it now.

EK: Yes, I mean this is really interesting. I think the way I would interpret it is that wokeness or the cultural left essentially narrows the window of the Overton window of acceptable debate. That meant that society couldn't discuss immigration properly. Immigration essentially rose to levels the public didn't want. The mainstream politicians wouldn't deal with it, so the populace dealt with it. Then you get populism and then you get the left reacting to the populace and getting worked up to a fever pitch. I think what I would say is that the awokening did lead to a reaction, but I don't think that’s the main cause. The main cause of populism, I think, is more to do with the downstream effects of woke. 

The culture war is not just about cultures. When you can't talk about crime or you can't talk about the border properly because of minority sensitivity, then those problems are going to fester and they're going to lead to revolts. That's the way I see it now. I do think there is a problem on the online, very online, Right. You get crazy radicalism there too. There is a problem also, I think, in part, of the way Trump is operating. I think what I would like to say, I think my view is because the cultural left is so influential in meaning-making institutions of society and the way they have been operating is to sort of infiltrate and launder quite radical ideas like critical race theory under the badge of something nice sounding like inclusion and incorporated anti-racism, I do think that a lot of responsibility rests with the Left who are controlling very important rich and powerful institutions to try and check their radicals. 

I mean the center-left has a big responsibility and they're trying, some of them are trying and there's plenty of them, Matthew Yglesias and Noah Smith and a number of others. But they haven't prevailed. They need to, we need to, get the institutions under control and we need to get them to become more moderate. I think that is the beginning of unwinding this cycle. I don't think just pointing the finger. . . . Yes, they're going to, you have crazy right-wingers online and elements of the Trump administration and, of course, we can criticize them. I think, however, a lot of the extreme Right stuff has very little power. It's just on the Internet, with not a lot of institutional power and resources. I think really the change is going to have to come from a moderation on the Left. If that moderation happens, I think that'll put a spiral in motion which can get us to a more sane place and reduce polarization.

JAG: That's a good green shoot, potentially optimistic place to end. This has been fantastic. Thank you so much, Eric, for joining us very late there in the UK. Thank you, Elon Musk, for this Starlink right in the middle of Burning Man, which pretty much got us through the interview without incident. Thanks, of course, to everyone who asked your great questions. Again, apologies I was not able to get to all of them, but I hope you will join me again next week. I will be in the studio. We will have everything working properly. I'm going to be joined by billionaire entrepreneur Thomas Peterffy. He's going to share his extraordinary journey from growing up in Communist Hungary to coming to America, becoming an early pioneer of electronic trading, and how his experience led him to become an outspoken critic of the rising tide of collectivist thinking and an outspoken defender of the practical, moral superiority of capitalism. Looking forward to that and I'll see you then.

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