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Speaker 1: Want to welcome everyone back to the Pekanana Show. Return

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into the show. See Jangle, How you doing, CJ doing good?

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Thanks Pete, thank you for coming and agreeing to do

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a reading with me. Now, this is a longer chapter.

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I don't know that we're going to get through the

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whole chapter, but I think this is a really important

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chapter in Paul Gottfried's book After Liberalism. So we were

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just before we started recording talking about Paul Godfreed. You

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actually just finished doing a live stream with him. Talk

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a little bit about this book and why you were

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eager to read from it.

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Speaker 2: Well, anything Paul's written I take very seriously. Paul's a

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very academic writer. You know, like a lot of his

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commentary and stuff. It's very popular, but he's a very

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dense academic writer. And the thing about Paul is he

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has a very wide grasp on all the various contributions,

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and he has the ability to kind of sift through

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all the commentary over the centuries and recognize which sources

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have been the most transformative. You know, which ones you

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have to talk about. You can't talk about liberalism in

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the twentieth century without talking about you know, John Dewey

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or John Gray or people like that. So a lot

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of these more academic aspect of things he captures very well.

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Even even like a lot of us on the dissident right,

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you know, we'll read people, but we don't. Actually he's

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he's much more involved in the the the trajectory of

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the academy, you know, over the over the years, over

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the centuries. So I think Paul is really good if

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you need to get a sense of where the like

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the the the basics of officialdom came from. So in

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terms of this book, after Liberalism, you know, he actually

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discusses this in chapter one. It's impossible to define. We

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don't know what liberalism is. It's it's been used in

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so many different contexts and so many different frameworks that

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it's hard really to pin it down. And you can't

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pin it down. You have to define it every time

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you're going to address it. That's important to remember and

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keep in mind when talking about people like James Lindsay,

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you know, other pro classical liberals out there. We need

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to keep in mind that liberalism is incredibly difficult to

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define because of its historical path. But it's also sort

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of one of those hegemonic phrases that you just assume

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that you know because it's just part of our political discourse.

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But he points out that it's a lot more difficult

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than that, so we'll probably get into some specifics related

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to that, but go ahead. That's my take on the

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overall cool.

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Speaker 1: All right, Well let me let me share the screen

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up here, and yeah, there we go. Very cool. All right,

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So we're hopping over chapter one to chapter two, which

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is liberalism versus democracy, and I think this is really

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where you start getting into the meat of it. And

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he also does a really good job of hitting some

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history here. So if you've heard me do readings before,

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stop me at any time to come in on anything,

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even if it's mid sentence. Yep, I think the only

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person who's there done that to me as AA, but

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I don't mind it at.

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Speaker 2: All, So yeah, okay, I'll see what I can do,

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all right.

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Speaker 1: Liberalism versus democracy liberal and democratic mentalities a process of

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your attention at the turn of the century and even earlier,

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was the movement from a bourgeois liberal into a mass

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democratic society. Not all of those who observed this process

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made the same judgments about it. Some, including the European

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socialists and the founding generation of American social planners welcomed democratization. Others,

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such as Max Weber Max Weber sorry, considered it to

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be an inevitable outcome of capitalism, technology, and the spread

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of the electoral franchise. Still others, typified by Sir James

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Fitzjames Stephen eighteen ninety two to eighteen ninety four, prominent

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eighteen twenty nine to eighteen ninety four, pardon me, prominent

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jurist and a decidedly anti egalitarian liberal, protested that unseemingly haste.

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Protested the un seemingly haste with which John Stuart Mill

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and his friends greeted the new democratic age, quoting the

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waters are out and no human force can turn them back.

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But I do not see why as we go with

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the stream, we need saying hallelujah to the river God.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, let's let's pause right there. I mean, I think

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the idea I mean, for a lot of people, probably

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not new to your audience, but the idea that there

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is this difference between democracy and liberalism, I think is

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new to a lot of people. I mean, we the

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phrase itself liberal democracy or democratic liberalism. The two go

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hand in hand to so many people, but like look

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at look at people like Victor or Bond, and how

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serious he is about the democratic interests of his own

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people require him to be illiberal. So these two don't

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go hand in hand. And we'll get I think a

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little bit more into the differences between liberalism, but I

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think that right there is really important. A lot of

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a lot of the original Like classical liberals in England

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were very anti democratic. They didn't trust this spirit of

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the masth and especially the ability of the new elite,

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the merchant class, the capitalists to basically use democracy as

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a weapon for their own pursuit of material interests.

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Speaker 1: It was obvious to them, where a lot of people

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now are just waking up to the fact that it

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can be used as a weapon, where back then many

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had already seen it or foresaw it. The tension between

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liberalism and a successor ideology in between the social classes

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embodying those ideas provides a recurrent theme in nineteenth century

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political debate. Francois Gusseau seventeen eighty seven eighteen seventy four,

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the Huguenot Prime minister under Frances Liberal July monarchy, and

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a distinguished historian of England considered democracy to be as

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much of a curse as monarchical absolutism. As French Prime

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minister in the eighteen forties, Guseeau fought doggedly against the

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extension of the limited franchise, the sins from property tax

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payers to other French citizens.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean that, I mean that right there is

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important too, Like when we think of democracy, and I

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know it's kind of an overrated point. A lot of

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people make fun of, you know, people distinguishing in American

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you know government between like republican and democracy and stuff,

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and sometimes that that is like overstated, but there is

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a truth to the fact that mass democracy in the

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twentieth century sort of the American twentieth century model is

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not the original republican instinct. In fact, you know, the

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original Republican quote unquote democratic instinct was very much anti

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mass democracy. They did not trust the extension of the

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the What he means by the franchise is the ability

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for everybody to vote regardless of their class, regardless of

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their property status, their race, their sex, et cetera. So

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the original you know, trailblazers of liberalism were definitely not

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pro master modocricy.

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Speaker 1: He distinguished sharply in his speeches and political tracts between

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those civil rights suitable for all citizens, such as freedom

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of worship and the vote. By means of the second,

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Gizo maintained the lower class could destabilize society radically, redistributed, redistributing,

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redistributing pop property, and bringing resourceful demagogues to power. He

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believed the bourgeoisie formed a class capasitid those who would

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be guided by reason and their stake in society in

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directing the actions of government. Indeed, yeah, that's guided by reason,

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because I've studied you know, when you study objectivism at all,

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whatever you see that like those three words together, you

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immediately think it jumps to one thing. Right.

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Speaker 2: It's also I mean, this is this is sort of

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like it is a contribution of like Enlightenment thinking, and

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it affects objectivism obviously, but it also permeates into libertarianism,

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even certain trends of like Marxism and certain certain aspects

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of socialism. Just the idea that we can use reason,

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utilize it and guide to society, you know, by our

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own expertise, is definitely an enlightenment, you know, holdover.

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Speaker 1: Yes. Indeed, Guseeau recommended the idea of creating a state

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through representation which would fully reflect the values of bourgeois

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electoral law aristocracy. Although in eighteen thirty one he fought

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to give representation to government functionaries and other professionals who

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paid lower taxes than required for franchise eligibility, he nonetheless

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argued for the special suitability of the upper middle class

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for political participation. Only that class combined wealth with only

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that class combined wealth with formed intelligence.

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Speaker 2: In other words, the original liberalism was not at all

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interested in, you know, handing a power over to every

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you know, ghetto pop culture, you know, subsumed consumer right.

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That was never the goal of liberalism. Much too probably

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the frustration of people like James Lindsay who think in

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these absolutist individualist terms. You know, these original liberals they

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never would have been interested in, you know, sharing political

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power with the proletariat or the you know, the cultural

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culturally deranged.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, they certainly wouldn't be championing the Civil Rights Act.

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Speaker 2: I mean, if you're if you're confused about your own

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gender and you want to start chopping yourself to bits,

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maybe you shouldn't have the vote.

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Speaker 1: Yeah. The English Juran jurist William Lackey, who admired Gizo,

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devoted his long polemical work Democracy and Liberty eighteen ninety

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six to the pop to the polarity between liberal order

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and democratic equality. Surveying England's parliamentary history in the second

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half of the nineteenth century, Lecky wrote Lericky worried that

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a universal franchise was irreversibly changing both English society and

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the English state. Not surprisingly, his book appeared at a

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time when English socialism was becoming a political power, and

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Leaky devotes more than one hundred and forty pages to

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analyzing the new radicalism. In eighteen ninety three, the Independent

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Labor Party officially came into existence in the Yorkshire town

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of Bradford. Since the elections of eighteen seventy four, however,

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avout socialists had sat in the British Parliament and socialist

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labor unions had been around since the eighteen fifties, to

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the consternation of German liberals. German socialists meeting in the

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Saxon town of Gotha, had drafted a program in eighteen

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seventy six calling for public ownership of the means of production.

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The Gotha Socialists also demanded an entire battery of social

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programs to be introduced by a properly democratized German state.

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In France, the Revolutionary Socialists, this is all right, here

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goes one. Jules Gazzet sat at the sat in the

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Chamber of Deputies from eighteen ninety three on, and as

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like he as he reminded us these days in the Catechism,

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socialist presents the family as an odious form of property,

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one destined to give way to a multiplicity of sexual

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relations for men and women alike.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, I think one of the points here is something

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that we all recognize now. At the origin of these

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liberal or democratic movements, you know, there was a difference

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between them. They didn't stem from the same impulse, I

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guess is what I want to say here that you

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know that came America was sort of the first two

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nite these concepts in its own, you know, for his

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own purposes. But I think Paul's point here is throughout

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the Western European world, Germany, France, England, et cetera, these

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were very different instincts.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, all right, One way to look at such social

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quarrels is to observe how dated they are. These battles

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were supposedly, supposedly waged between reactionary and democratic liberals. Those

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liberals who were just in humanitarian, it has been argued,

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went with changing times, while others who were not, such

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as DiFranco, Italian economists and socialist Elvedo Pereto, fell into

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bad company and even sometimes into fascism. Implicit in such

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a view is the distinction that more and more modern

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liberals have drawn throughout the twentieth century between themselves and

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those they have replaced. It is purely it is a

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purely strategic stance that minimizes the reality of past conflicts.

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Like the mainstream, Like the mainstream new deal liberal his

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storiography in post war America, the liberal historical view stresses

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the natural progression of the progression of things by which

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the new liberals took over from the old.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, this is this is important because like a lot

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of people who have this, I mean, this is this

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is classic like James Lindsay type stuff, Like everything is

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kind of reaching it's its own conclusion. It's been on

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too trajectory for you know, hundreds of years, and in fact,

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this was actually a sort of mentality that Murray Rothbard

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had early on and not later Murray Rothbart who recognized

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the function of the power elite, but earlyer Murray Rothbart

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he saw, like if you read his essay you know,

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left right in the Prospects of Liberty, it's all this, yeah,

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it's all this, like this single merit meta narrative. It's

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all like coming into fruition. Everything's improving over time. He

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definitely drops that at the end of his life when

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he when he talks about there's an essay on you know,

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Mesis's role or whatever, you know, within Austrian economics, but

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he definitely drops this. But the point is that a

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lot of people in the twentieth century America do have

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this mentality where, you know, some people took the wrong path,

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but this has been the liberal projects has been slowly improving,

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you know, over time. And Gottfried's saying that that actually,

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and this is one thing that Gottfried is really I

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wouldn't say it's unique to him, but it's something that

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he really is unique in terms of like overall traditionalist

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conservatives like who have this meta narrative story of things.

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He does emphasize discontinuity. Paul Goffried always recognizes that the

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New Deal replaced something before it, and the you know

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the point the post nineteen sixties left replaced the New

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Deal left, and like there's all these discontinuities. He doesn't

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see things in terms of this overall continuity. That's something

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that Paul always emphasizes that every historical epoch is unique

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to itself.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, you're gonna just did an episode on the same thing.

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Epochs how things change, how but it seems like it

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goes in cycles.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, but the but the current twentieth century, like people

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who see America as sort of like the fruition of

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all the best aspects of Western history and it's all

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culminated into America. They need the overall narrative thing because

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every age has to be like an improvement and it

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has to be this organic process, and America is sort

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of at the top, like the post war America is

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like the ultimate end of history. It's the end of man.

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Is the best and most complete political system in terms

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of justice and wealth and the equality and all these things.

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Whereas Gottfried says, you know, no, he denies he denies

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the continuity there. He says, what we see in liberal

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democracy in our age is basically a repudiation of you know,

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historical epochs.

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Speaker 1: Yeah. Anyone who looks at the what the United States

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has become and says, oh, this is this is dizen ith.

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You're you're in sane, You're insane. Yeah, I mean, it's

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just it's brainwashing. Right, let's move on. It is possible

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to perceive continuity in the movement from a bourgeois liberal

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society into a more democratic one, but that continuity is

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not the same as direct continuation, as was noted by

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Max Weber, Joseph Schumpeter, and other early twentieth century social commentators. Rather,

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we are dealing here with a series of points leading

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from a from a bourgeois into a post bourgeois bourgeois

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is bourgeois age, that is, with a process of displacement

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that went on for several generations. Thus, Weber focused on

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rational rationalization in analyzing the movement from a bourgeois capitalist

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towards a bureaucratized socialist society. A liberal bourgeois world created

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the secularist foundations and economic organization necessary for socialist rule.

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Another pessimistic social commentator with liberal leadings. Joseph Schumpeter believed

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that the middle class concept of readom encouraged the expression

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of critical opposition. This tolerance undermined the belief system of

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an older liberal society and prepared the way for social democracy.

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Speaker 2: Yeah. So I think this is important because here we

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see and Goffrey is going to get into this more,

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I think, and I think he also does later in

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the book. But we always have to keep in mind

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that there's a big difference between what you might call

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historicist liberalism and universalist liberalism. Historicist liberalism was the instinct

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that that labeled itself liberalism, but within the context of

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a certain political paradigm. And so the English, the English liberals,

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you know, saw themselves basically as pursuing new avenues of

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freedom within the context of their own history, within the

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context of their own political uh, you know, horizons. Whereas

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and that's not the mentality that a lot of like

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objectivists on you know, I Randians, but also like some

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libertarians and James Lindsay and other advocates of what they

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call classical liberalism, they have a more universalist liberalism where

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the ethnicity, the cultural context doesn't really matter. Every individual

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has these you know, universal human rights, and it doesn't

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really matter what the context, the political context is. These

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things are eternal and they're sort of transcended over all things.

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That's universalist liberalism. So what Godfrey's trying to say here

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is that, you know, the original liberalism, what's much more

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rooted within particular societies. That's why German liberalism was different

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than English, which was different than French and so on.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, but neither are those attempts by old style European

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liberals to find links between two distinctive social and political

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formations denies the differences between them. Both Vber and Schumpeter

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were looking at the conditions in which social changes took place,

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and they note the overlaps as well as distinctions between

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the epos and question, hasa panjatas condulus, I think that's correct.

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It's gonna that's as correct as I'm gonna get it

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there good enough? Yeah. A German germanophone Greek scholar whose

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work is not yet widely known, breaks new ground in

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this respect. Condolus examines the distinctions between liberal bourgeois and

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mass democratic societies by looking at their literary and cultural artifacts.

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Modern democracies differ from pre modern ones, according to Congdolus,

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in that they disassociate citizenship from cultural and ethnic identities,

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and in the way in which mass production affects society.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, this is this is something I'm personally interested in,

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and I think a lot of younger people might emphasize

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this even more than Paul does. But we have to

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pay attention to how cultures like the market, you know,

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the so called free market, the the the the capitalist space,

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the the production of consumer goods, they don't they don't

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just respond to consumer interests, They often direct them. They

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often change the culture itself, and they're often placed into

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culture with the objective of transforming them. And so the

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emphasis on what has mass production done to society? I

329
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think it's something that right wingers need to continue to emphasize,

330
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you know, much more than liberals. You kind of see

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as this neutral space wherever the free market is, it's

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there's like just you know, cultural neutrality there. But I

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think that Condoleus is entirely correct, that that that the

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entire you know, cultural landscape can change just by the

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introduction of mass production.

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Speaker 1: Well, it also seems like a lot of the economics

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that you see pushed from like libertarians, is doesn't really

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take into account what we've seen as far as globalism,

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as far as to advanced in technology itself, also its

340
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social engineering, things like that exactly. Just it exists in

341
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a vacuum. You can make it work in a vacuum.

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But what when you have to introduce it to I mean,

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can you imagine, like all of a sudden, the United

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States just dropped all its regulations on trade and manufacturing

345
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and just went okay, go yep. I mean that's something

346
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that Mesas would have. Mesas would have been okay with

347
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Rothbard probably would have wanted the state. Rothbard would have

348
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wanted the state out of the way. But you know

349
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it's still you look at that and you're like, Okay,

350
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I understand why you want to do this because you

351
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see what government and what what quote unquote cronyism that

352
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that word that they love so much does. Yet you're

353
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not taking into account what Condoless is talking about here

354
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talking about disassociating citizenship from cultural and ethnic identities. What

355
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that does to what that does when you have because

356
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if you have a free market, you also have no

357
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borders because you're gonna have free trade.

358
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Speaker 2: Yeah. It also it also universalizes and it makes uniform

359
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world culture. I mean, the more you extend, I mean

360
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this is actually this is controversial, but this is actually

361
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a point that Lenin makes. You know, as you extend

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the capitalist order, you're going to do away with old cultures.

363
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It's inevitable that everything is going to become homogeneous culturally

364
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when you do this. Yep, if I can cite him.

365
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Speaker 1: Perfectly, I mean I read through all of State and

366
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Revolution on this show. So yeah, there, Lenin is not

367
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a He's not a friend of the show. Definitely, He's

368
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definitely been a big part of the show.

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Speaker 2: Well, he's got insights that are worth learning from. You know,

370
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I'm not going to be autistic about it.

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Speaker 1: Well, some time times, if you even read Rothbart, it

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almost seems like the dialect like his dialectical style is Lenin's. Yeah, sure,

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like he stole, like he bred Lenin and he decided

374
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to use that dialectical style, which I don't think is

375
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a bad thing because I think Lenin was was definitely

376
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the most intelligent of all of them.

377
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Speaker 2: Right and what and by the way, what Lenin is

378
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critiquing is not some Messissian paradise. But he's critiquing basically

379
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the managerial capitalism, right, yeah, all right.

380
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Speaker 1: The modern as opposed to pre modern, The modern as

381
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opposed to pre modern and democrat is not continually situated

382
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and has a fluid cultural identity being shaped by a

383
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consumer economy. Yep, that's a sentence right there, man, it is.

384
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Speaker 2: Yeah, the consumer economy shapes man. Man doesn't shape the

385
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consumer economy. It's important.

386
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Speaker 1: Yeah, so I said social engineering. It just doesn't. It's

387
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you're not taking that into account when you're talking about

388
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this free quote unquote free market. Yep. He also inhabits

389
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a culture that remains hostile to the older liberal universe.

390
00:24:05,400 --> 00:24:10,440
Postmodernism in literature and literary criticism condolist argues, is the

391
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latest in a series of cultural strategies aimed at subverting

392
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the nineteenth century liberal order. The refusal to recognize a

393
00:24:18,480 --> 00:24:23,119
fixed or authoritative meaning for inherited texts, which is characteristic

394
00:24:23,200 --> 00:24:28,920
of postmodernism, represents an assault upon liberal education. Contrary to

395
00:24:29,000 --> 00:24:32,200
the world of moral and semantic order presided over by

396
00:24:32,240 --> 00:24:38,400
an ethical deity which bourgeois liberals preached, the postmodernists exalt indeterminacy.

397
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They decry the acceptance of tradition and discourse as well

398
00:24:42,759 --> 00:24:46,240
as in political matters as a fasci as a fascist

399
00:24:46,400 --> 00:24:51,480
act of domination, or as the inadmissible allowance of the

400
00:24:51,519 --> 00:24:54,440
past to intrude upon the present. And I would say

401
00:24:54,440 --> 00:24:55,599
even the future.

402
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Speaker 2: In the future, I agree. The other thing I want

403
00:24:58,039 --> 00:24:59,759
to say too, and this is kind of in passing,

404
00:24:59,799 --> 00:25:03,559
but the idea of describing the older this is what

405
00:25:03,599 --> 00:25:06,920
he's describing it, the older liberal order as fascistic, is

406
00:25:06,960 --> 00:25:08,920
something that when Gottfried wrote it, what did he write?

407
00:25:08,920 --> 00:25:10,839
This was this nineteen nineties.

408
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Speaker 1: Right, is it ninety eight?

409
00:25:12,079 --> 00:25:15,160
Speaker 2: Ninety nine, Yeah, ninety nine. So yeah, so the idea

410
00:25:15,240 --> 00:25:17,920
that this would be determined fascist was probably seen by

411
00:25:17,960 --> 00:25:21,759
its readers as like dramatic. But look at everything that's

412
00:25:21,799 --> 00:25:24,720
called fascist. Everything that your grandma held just instinctually is

413
00:25:24,759 --> 00:25:27,119
now fascist. I mean, Gotfrid who's on the cutting edge

414
00:25:27,119 --> 00:25:28,599
of recognizing where all this was going.

415
00:25:29,079 --> 00:25:31,400
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's why when people that's why I tell people

416
00:25:31,599 --> 00:25:34,880
when they're like gushing over James lindsay, I'm like, Paul

417
00:25:34,920 --> 00:25:36,720
Godfrey gave this to you twenty five years ago.

418
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Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly exactly.

419
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Speaker 1: Nowhere does Condalis call for the eradication of postmodernism or

420
00:25:43,160 --> 00:25:47,640
make the facile assumption that by opposing it, the present

421
00:25:47,720 --> 00:25:51,880
generation can resurrect the bourgeoise world. He contends that liberal

422
00:25:52,079 --> 00:25:56,279
and mass democratic societies are not only distinct, but mutually antagonistic,

423
00:25:56,640 --> 00:26:01,960
and that antagonism has expressed itself culturally as well as socioeconomically.

424
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Speaker 2: Yeah, this is where, this is where, this is where

425
00:26:07,920 --> 00:26:12,000
just the neo conservatives. And I say that in a

426
00:26:12,039 --> 00:26:14,680
time when everybody hates the neo conservatives, but I really

427
00:26:14,759 --> 00:26:21,440
just mean twentieth century American ideal, americanist ideology. They they

428
00:26:21,519 --> 00:26:24,039
really people need to recognize and we need to push

429
00:26:24,119 --> 00:26:29,240
this even harder that the mass democracy, democracy, the you know,

430
00:26:29,279 --> 00:26:31,519
the extended vote, and all the people that are pro

431
00:26:31,640 --> 00:26:35,519
civil rights regime, all this stuff, these are the mechanisms

432
00:26:35,519 --> 00:26:39,279
by which the old liberalism are being destroyed. So these,

433
00:26:39,359 --> 00:26:40,839
like a lot of people try to boot like the

434
00:26:40,839 --> 00:26:45,240
mainstream people, they try to balance like democracy and liberalism

435
00:26:45,279 --> 00:26:49,599
as like these unified you know, uh, you know, paths

436
00:26:49,640 --> 00:26:52,000
forward or whatever, but they are not. You know, one

437
00:26:52,079 --> 00:26:55,599
is eating the other. The old American bourgeois liberal order

438
00:26:55,799 --> 00:26:59,400
that existed in the nineteenth century is being eaten alive

439
00:26:59,599 --> 00:27:02,880
by mass democracy.

440
00:27:03,240 --> 00:27:06,240
Speaker 1: For over one hundred years, bourgeois liberalism has been under

441
00:27:06,240 --> 00:27:09,880
attack from authors and artists presenting views about human nature

442
00:27:09,920 --> 00:27:15,759
and the nature of existence antithetical to bourgeois convictions. Materialism, atheism,

443
00:27:15,799 --> 00:27:19,920
and pluralism have been three such worldviews which the bourgeoisie

444
00:27:19,960 --> 00:27:25,279
long viewed with justifiable suspicion. Deconstructionism is a more recent

445
00:27:25,359 --> 00:27:29,680
form of cultural criticism aimed at inherited assumptions about meaning

446
00:27:30,640 --> 00:27:34,039
by now, Condulus maintains, the old liberals have been reduced

447
00:27:34,039 --> 00:27:37,480
to a rearguard struggle while watching I'm not going to

448
00:27:37,480 --> 00:27:42,240
pronounce the German word, while watching their opponents take over

449
00:27:42,359 --> 00:27:48,519
culture and education. But the reduced But the reason for

450
00:27:48,559 --> 00:27:52,279
this reduced liberal presence, Condolus explains, is not an insidious

451
00:27:52,319 --> 00:27:56,160
contamination by a cultural industry separated from the rest of society.

452
00:27:56,880 --> 00:28:00,519
Cultural radicals have done well in mass democracies because they

453
00:28:00,559 --> 00:28:04,359
continue to target the liberal order that the democrats deposed.

454
00:28:05,519 --> 00:28:10,160
The cultural yep, the cultural opposition continues to mobilize even

455
00:28:10,240 --> 00:28:12,359
after the political war has ended.

456
00:28:13,200 --> 00:28:16,119
Speaker 2: Right this is this is also an insight of people

457
00:28:16,160 --> 00:28:19,720
like gramscy right like he recognizes that like they can

458
00:28:19,799 --> 00:28:24,000
capture power. But the cultural revolution it has to continue going.

459
00:28:24,039 --> 00:28:27,279
The moment it stops, it falls apart. Like people think, oh,

460
00:28:27,359 --> 00:28:29,480
the you know, the trance stuff is like ridiculous and

461
00:28:29,559 --> 00:28:32,079
silly and goofy, it's actually not. You have to come

462
00:28:32,160 --> 00:28:35,119
up with something. You have to continue to advance it

463
00:28:35,160 --> 00:28:38,640
in some direction otherwise it stops. And you can't have

464
00:28:38,680 --> 00:28:41,200
a revolution that stops. If you have a revolution that stops,

465
00:28:42,079 --> 00:28:44,079
you could you know, that's that's when you get the

466
00:28:44,559 --> 00:28:47,119
momentum that goes to reactionaries. You know, the second they

467
00:28:47,160 --> 00:28:51,599
stop creating new things to terrorize us with culturally, that's

468
00:28:51,640 --> 00:28:53,839
when we'll gain a footing. So you know a lot

469
00:28:53,839 --> 00:28:55,519
of people think, oh, when is this going to stop it?

470
00:28:55,599 --> 00:28:57,359
You know, why didn't it stop with the gage, Why

471
00:28:57,400 --> 00:28:59,400
is it going to trade? Why is it going to pedophiles?

472
00:28:59,440 --> 00:28:59,599
Speaker 3: Now?

473
00:28:59,720 --> 00:29:01,920
Speaker 2: It's because there has to be a new thing. The

474
00:29:01,960 --> 00:29:05,960
cultural revolution has to continue mobilizing even after the political

475
00:29:05,960 --> 00:29:06,599
war has ended.

476
00:29:07,240 --> 00:29:09,839
Speaker 1: Yeah, if you're going to have progressivism, there has to

477
00:29:09,880 --> 00:29:13,799
be constant progress. That's why people concentrating too hard on

478
00:29:13,839 --> 00:29:16,519
the transgender thing and just concentrating on that. They don't

479
00:29:16,599 --> 00:29:19,400
understand that what you really should be looking at, what

480
00:29:19,559 --> 00:29:22,759
comes next. And I think that by reading what we've

481
00:29:22,759 --> 00:29:25,880
already read before, we could see that Paul. That's the

482
00:29:25,960 --> 00:29:29,519
genius of Paul is he's not stuck where he is.

483
00:29:30,079 --> 00:29:32,640
He's looking twenty years, twenty five years down the road

484
00:29:32,680 --> 00:29:36,200
and he's like, Okay, where are we going to be? Right? Right,

485
00:29:36,440 --> 00:29:41,079
Victorian rigidity, social status, and elitist attitudes about education have

486
00:29:41,240 --> 00:29:45,039
all remained the butts of academic and literary criticism, and

487
00:29:45,079 --> 00:29:48,000
the opposition points back to the conditions of strife in

488
00:29:48,079 --> 00:29:54,440
which mass democracy arose. This cultural insurgency, Condous observes, draws

489
00:29:54,680 --> 00:29:58,519
strength from a subversive source that once served liberalism in

490
00:29:58,559 --> 00:30:00,200
its war against the past.

491
00:30:00,279 --> 00:30:04,000
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. See, liberalism was something that came

492
00:30:04,039 --> 00:30:06,799
about on the scene of world history because it was

493
00:30:06,839 --> 00:30:09,799
attacking something that came before. You know, the political interests

494
00:30:09,799 --> 00:30:12,839
at the time of the rise of liberalism needed to

495
00:30:13,119 --> 00:30:17,599
confront it, you know, subversively. Basically it needed to and

496
00:30:18,079 --> 00:30:21,279
we're talking back, we're talking back at like you know,

497
00:30:21,319 --> 00:30:23,799
Oliver Cromwell and stuff. And when the birth of some

498
00:30:23,839 --> 00:30:28,440
of these tendencies could be found. So today liberalism has

499
00:30:28,480 --> 00:30:31,839
basically you know, come into the establishment. It is the

500
00:30:31,920 --> 00:30:35,039
establishment view of things. So, but but now it's being

501
00:30:35,039 --> 00:30:38,799
opposed by something that also has to be culturally subversive.

502
00:30:39,440 --> 00:30:44,319
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, here here we start getting into rough one feathers.

503
00:30:45,279 --> 00:30:48,640
The Enlightenment tradition of critical rationalism was crucial for the

504
00:30:48,680 --> 00:30:52,440
war of ideas waged by the bourgeoisie and its defenders

505
00:30:52,480 --> 00:30:55,759
against the remnants of an older world. Despite the attempt

506
00:30:55,759 --> 00:30:59,119
to integrate this outlook into a bourgeois vision of life,

507
00:30:59,359 --> 00:31:03,119
Enlightenment rationalism has played a new destructive role as the

508
00:31:03,200 --> 00:31:08,200
instrument of a war against a bourgeoisie on behalf of openness, skepticism,

509
00:31:08,519 --> 00:31:10,680
and material equality.

510
00:31:10,839 --> 00:31:12,640
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean this is uh, you know, not to

511
00:31:12,759 --> 00:31:15,799
not to over oversight, you know, Edmund Burke, I mean,

512
00:31:15,839 --> 00:31:18,000
but this is this is exactly what he said you

513
00:31:18,079 --> 00:31:20,240
in the moment you start playing with society like this,

514
00:31:20,880 --> 00:31:24,960
it has to continue forever, you know. So Enlightenment rationalism

515
00:31:25,000 --> 00:31:27,039
is going to come up with this new you know,

516
00:31:27,119 --> 00:31:31,480
like this new you know series of reasons why you know,

517
00:31:31,640 --> 00:31:35,000
like homosexuality is reactionary, right, It's always going to come

518
00:31:35,079 --> 00:31:38,440
with something crazier, and it's going to be justified with

519
00:31:38,640 --> 00:31:39,880
you know, quote unquote reason.

520
00:31:40,720 --> 00:31:44,680
Speaker 1: Yeah, and this is the reason why maybe you can

521
00:31:44,680 --> 00:31:47,680
look to Lindsay for certain someone like James Lindsay for

522
00:31:47,759 --> 00:31:51,039
certain things, but you can't look to him for answers

523
00:31:51,079 --> 00:31:54,759
because this is his answer is the enlightenment. His answer

524
00:31:54,880 --> 00:31:59,079
is continual change. He just sees his change, the change

525
00:31:59,079 --> 00:32:01,559
that he desired, has taken a detour.

526
00:32:02,079 --> 00:32:04,400
Speaker 2: Mm hmm, exactly what he.

527
00:32:04,319 --> 00:32:07,440
Speaker 1: Wants to go on, the you know, he sees the

528
00:32:07,640 --> 00:32:11,920
trans stuff and all, you know, the wokeness. He sees

529
00:32:12,000 --> 00:32:16,240
that as the enemy of progress, whereas there is a

530
00:32:16,279 --> 00:32:19,960
certain group that sees that as the progress. He's just

531
00:32:20,039 --> 00:32:23,160
they're on. They're on the same road. They're just they're on.

532
00:32:23,480 --> 00:32:26,039
They've just it's a fork in the road. But both

533
00:32:26,039 --> 00:32:27,559
of those roads lead to destruction.

534
00:32:28,200 --> 00:32:31,079
Speaker 2: Exactly. Yeah, all right.

535
00:32:31,759 --> 00:32:34,720
Speaker 1: These pointed observations about the culture of mass democracy do

536
00:32:34,839 --> 00:32:40,559
not deny the fact that cultural differences exist among Democrats, deconstructionists,

537
00:32:40,599 --> 00:32:44,720
and liberal democratic absolutists still fight over the values to

538
00:32:44,759 --> 00:32:48,079
be taught in history and literature courses. And so I

539
00:32:48,119 --> 00:32:49,759
don't even know if they do that anymore. That might

540
00:32:49,799 --> 00:32:51,079
be one that's uh.

541
00:32:51,319 --> 00:32:54,240
Speaker 2: I mean, do they Yeah, I don't, Yeah, who knows.

542
00:32:55,920 --> 00:33:00,000
Speaker 1: And some advocates, well, yeah, go ahead, and some advert

543
00:33:00,119 --> 00:33:03,160
kits of post World War two abstract expressionism, such as

544
00:33:03,240 --> 00:33:06,839
Hilton Kramer, have now come to oppose latter schools of

545
00:33:07,079 --> 00:33:10,279
art as relative cultural traditionalists.

546
00:33:10,599 --> 00:33:13,319
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly, like, yeah, this is this is why, like

547
00:33:13,319 --> 00:33:17,440
like JFK and stuff is now like a right wing traditionalist.

548
00:33:16,960 --> 00:33:22,440
Speaker 1: You know. Nonetheless, radically anti bourgeois movements have remained powerful

549
00:33:22,480 --> 00:33:26,359
in our cultures as mass democracy continues to struggle against

550
00:33:26,400 --> 00:33:29,680
the remains of an older heritage. In the United States,

551
00:33:29,799 --> 00:33:35,119
traditional liberal and agrarian democratic forces state forces stayed alive

552
00:33:35,200 --> 00:33:37,880
into the twentieth century and resisted the inroads of the

553
00:33:37,920 --> 00:33:39,640
democratic administrative state.

554
00:33:41,680 --> 00:33:44,160
Speaker 2: I wonder, I wonder how if you go to the

555
00:33:44,599 --> 00:33:50,079
nonetheless sentence there, I wonder if he would if he

556
00:33:50,079 --> 00:33:53,119
would update this to I wonder how much of a

557
00:33:53,160 --> 00:33:56,039
struggle there actually is between the older heritage and the

558
00:33:56,079 --> 00:33:58,559
mass democracy. I can't. It's it's it's hard to find

559
00:33:58,559 --> 00:34:01,599
an institution that's fighting for some older right, you know.

560
00:34:01,880 --> 00:34:05,839
I think it's like mass democracy versus the new Left basically.

561
00:34:05,920 --> 00:34:10,199
Speaker 1: Now, yeah, I mean it's like who's struggling Chronicles.

562
00:34:12,000 --> 00:34:15,360
Speaker 2: Is exactly. Yeah, there's no one fighting for the older heritage.

563
00:34:15,440 --> 00:34:20,199
Nobody mass democracy needed a cultural as well as political

564
00:34:20,280 --> 00:34:24,159
strategy to triumph, and the values and concepts juggled by

565
00:34:24,159 --> 00:34:27,079
our literary and now media elites are keys to the

566
00:34:27,119 --> 00:34:31,519
emergence of a post liberal society and politics. Condalus also

567
00:34:31,599 --> 00:34:34,599
makes clear that mass democracy could not have developed without

568
00:34:34,639 --> 00:34:38,960
the demographic and economic revolutions that transformed Western Europe in

569
00:34:39,599 --> 00:34:46,239
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Industrialization, agricultural modernization and urban

570
00:34:46,320 --> 00:34:49,960
working class. The disappearance of a family based craft economy

571
00:34:50,280 --> 00:34:54,199
and the operation of assembly line production, where the factors

572
00:34:54,360 --> 00:35:00,880
Condolus observes contributing to mass democracy. Yeah, I mean, master

573
00:35:00,880 --> 00:35:03,719
democracy could not have happened if it wasn't for the

574
00:35:03,760 --> 00:35:07,440
administration the industrial revolution basically is what he's saying.

575
00:35:07,199 --> 00:35:10,679
Speaker 1: Here, right, And this one part here, the disappearance of

576
00:35:10,719 --> 00:35:14,920
the family based craft economy, I didn't. It wasn't until

577
00:35:14,920 --> 00:35:19,960
I read Rhder Sombart that I that it blew my mind.

578
00:35:20,000 --> 00:35:25,719
It was like, yeah, that's when once you you could

579
00:35:25,719 --> 00:35:30,239
see how Walmart exists, once you see how the family

580
00:35:30,280 --> 00:35:35,320
based craft economy, the tailor, the specialty shop, how that

581
00:35:35,440 --> 00:35:39,039
just is moved out and now you get cheap, cheap

582
00:35:39,079 --> 00:35:41,199
crap from pretty much anywhere.

583
00:35:41,159 --> 00:35:43,719
Speaker 2: Right, exactly, you can. It's it's funny, like, I know,

584
00:35:43,719 --> 00:35:46,800
everyone talks about her everything's made in China, but my so,

585
00:35:46,880 --> 00:35:51,239
my family, my wife's family's German. Her her mom basically

586
00:35:51,280 --> 00:35:54,559
came from from Germany in the nineties when she got

587
00:35:54,599 --> 00:35:57,039
married because my father in law was stationed over there.

588
00:35:57,079 --> 00:35:59,760
So she goes back to her village where they, you know,

589
00:35:59,800 --> 00:36:03,719
they've been making crafts for you know, hundreds of maybe

590
00:36:03,760 --> 00:36:06,119
thousands of years, you know, these the same village, the

591
00:36:06,119 --> 00:36:10,440
same rural village, and she was just absolutely dismayed to

592
00:36:10,480 --> 00:36:12,519
go back to the same village. And you see, all

593
00:36:12,599 --> 00:36:14,559
the products that they've been selling for a long time

594
00:36:14,719 --> 00:36:18,159
are basically imitations of the older products, and they all

595
00:36:18,199 --> 00:36:21,119
have stamps made in China. And I know everyone recognizes that,

596
00:36:21,119 --> 00:36:24,039
it talks about it, but it's just it permeates every

597
00:36:24,159 --> 00:36:29,360
aspect of the old European world. And people pretend like

598
00:36:30,519 --> 00:36:34,719
people pretend like consumerist capitalism is culturally neutral. It's a

599
00:36:34,760 --> 00:36:38,559
complete lie, Like the entire rural village has been transformed

600
00:36:39,079 --> 00:36:41,519
just by the mass production of these goods.

601
00:36:42,000 --> 00:36:45,719
Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, I mean, hey, as long as it's cheaper,

602
00:36:46,119 --> 00:36:49,239
that's all that matters, right, As long as the line

603
00:36:49,280 --> 00:36:50,800
is going up, everything's fine.

604
00:36:51,000 --> 00:36:53,079
Speaker 2: Yes, exactly, exactly.

605
00:36:53,719 --> 00:36:58,039
Speaker 1: Although Imperial Realm experienced the concentration of uprooted proletai and

606
00:36:58,159 --> 00:37:02,039
it's swelling strife ridden cities, it could not have produced

607
00:37:02,039 --> 00:37:05,960
a modern political movement because it lacked both mass production

608
00:37:06,199 --> 00:37:10,679
and mass consumption. Earlier societies had to deal with perpetual

609
00:37:10,719 --> 00:37:13,960
scarcity and with the need to share limited resources in

610
00:37:14,000 --> 00:37:18,239
a communal setting. The modern West, by contrast, provides more

611
00:37:18,280 --> 00:37:22,960
and more material gratification to socially isolated individuals.

612
00:37:23,159 --> 00:37:24,480
Speaker 2: Just the way libertarians want it.

613
00:37:25,079 --> 00:37:28,800
Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean, just as long as I have Instacart

614
00:37:28,880 --> 00:37:33,000
and you know, porn on demand, Okay, we're good to

615
00:37:33,000 --> 00:37:39,199
get happy. Yeah. It's politics are therefore predicated on hedonism

616
00:37:39,280 --> 00:37:43,559
and individual self actualization, values that give an ethical dimension

617
00:37:43,639 --> 00:37:45,000
to a consumer economy.

618
00:37:45,559 --> 00:37:49,719
Speaker 2: Yeah, the ethics. The ethics sort of justifies what's happening economically.

619
00:37:49,960 --> 00:37:56,599
Speaker 1: Yes, as democratic politics also advocates material equality, as opposed

620
00:37:56,639 --> 00:38:00,960
to the exclusively formal or legal equality preached by nineteenth

621
00:38:00,960 --> 00:38:02,960
century liberals. M h.

622
00:38:04,719 --> 00:38:08,719
Speaker 2: Actually, sorry keep interrupting, but it's it's it's funny, like

623
00:38:09,519 --> 00:38:12,119
there's one of the essays by Mesus and and I

624
00:38:12,159 --> 00:38:14,639
have these, you know, examples in my head because you

625
00:38:14,679 --> 00:38:16,519
and I both came from that world. But I have

626
00:38:16,639 --> 00:38:20,599
this this story of thesis. I think I'm trying to

627
00:38:20,639 --> 00:38:22,280
remember what book it's in, and it might be in

628
00:38:22,320 --> 00:38:24,840
his interventionist book. But he basically says that, you know,

629
00:38:25,440 --> 00:38:29,679
we capitalists don't disagree with the interventionists in terms of

630
00:38:29,719 --> 00:38:33,639
our shared desire for a material equality. It's just that

631
00:38:33,679 --> 00:38:36,000
we have different paths to get there. So he says,

632
00:38:36,199 --> 00:38:38,159
you know, his view, the liberal view, is that by

633
00:38:38,599 --> 00:38:42,000
the capitalist, free market economy, we can provide the same

634
00:38:42,079 --> 00:38:45,440
type of material equality that the interventionists are also trying

635
00:38:45,480 --> 00:38:47,800
to do by their own memes. But you know, now

636
00:38:47,880 --> 00:38:49,880
becoming a right winger, I actually don't care all that

637
00:38:49,960 --> 00:38:52,480
much for a material equality at all. It doesn't doesn't

638
00:38:52,519 --> 00:38:55,920
phase me, it doesn't enter into my you know, priority scale.

639
00:38:57,880 --> 00:39:02,320
Speaker 1: By stressing the ties between modern democras material pleasure, Condalus

640
00:39:02,320 --> 00:39:06,719
also explains why modern democracy cannot appeal effectively in the

641
00:39:06,880 --> 00:39:10,679
long run to an ethic of austerity. At the end

642
00:39:10,679 --> 00:39:14,440
of the eighteenth century, both both American and French revolutionaries

643
00:39:14,639 --> 00:39:19,719
invoked classical ideals of republican simplicity, a practice found pre eminently.

644
00:39:19,760 --> 00:39:24,159
In the political writings of Rousseau, self indulgence and luxury

645
00:39:24,239 --> 00:39:28,719
were viewed as aristocratic flaws, and among nineteenth century French

646
00:39:28,760 --> 00:39:34,719
Republicans as upper middle class vices. Democrat, democratic and later

647
00:39:34,840 --> 00:39:39,480
socialist revolutionaries even tried to exemplify the moral conduct which

648
00:39:39,519 --> 00:39:43,639
they hoped to enforce in a society of equals. The

649
00:39:43,719 --> 00:39:50,119
Jacobin socialist Louis Auguste Blanci lived and dressed like a priest,

650
00:39:50,639 --> 00:39:56,320
and the self proclaimed republican Senecal in Gustave Flaubert's novel

651
00:39:56,480 --> 00:40:01,800
Le Educashan Sentimentale is made to appeal eccentric in his

652
00:40:01,920 --> 00:40:07,039
extreme pursuit of virtue. Senekal is shown embracing dietary and

653
00:40:07,079 --> 00:40:11,679
sexual restraints and scorning sumptuous living in a similar vein.

654
00:40:12,800 --> 00:40:16,719
Black Marxist President of Zimbabwe Robert Mugabi has denounced the

655
00:40:16,719 --> 00:40:20,840
homosexuals in his homeland. Mugaby is outraged that sodomists and

656
00:40:20,880 --> 00:40:24,280
sexual perverts continue to be found there and scoffs at

657
00:40:24,320 --> 00:40:27,159
the idea of rights for those given to beast reality.

658
00:40:27,360 --> 00:40:29,440
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is so funny to me, because I mean,

659
00:40:29,519 --> 00:40:31,960
I think what Paul Godfrey's trying to communicate here is

660
00:40:32,880 --> 00:40:36,239
a lot of these very anti liberal people are actually

661
00:40:36,320 --> 00:40:40,199
more like just instinctually culturally conservative than today's left and

662
00:40:40,239 --> 00:40:43,039
today's quote unquote right. You know, all the people that

663
00:40:43,079 --> 00:40:46,880
are you know, seeking freedom and liberty against you know,

664
00:40:46,920 --> 00:40:50,920
the democratic lip totalitarianism or whatever. They don't realize that

665
00:40:51,119 --> 00:40:55,239
they're all using the same far left phraseology that we're

666
00:40:55,280 --> 00:41:00,000
opposed by, all these antiliberals. It's fascinating to me. I mean,

667
00:41:00,239 --> 00:41:03,480
I think it's hilarious when these like Marxist revolutionaries in

668
00:41:03,760 --> 00:41:06,719
the Third world are against like sodomy, that's just hilarious.

669
00:41:06,800 --> 00:41:12,519
Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah, Oh and an American American and quote unquote socialists,

670
00:41:12,519 --> 00:41:15,599
they don't get it, and they have to make excuses

671
00:41:15,639 --> 00:41:18,639
for it. And what do they do They make cultural excuses. Oh,

672
00:41:18,679 --> 00:41:19,480
thank you very much.

673
00:41:19,880 --> 00:41:22,320
Speaker 2: Yeah. It's like it's like it's like the Republicans like

674
00:41:22,320 --> 00:41:24,400
when they when they point out that, like you know,

675
00:41:24,639 --> 00:41:27,159
Stalin was anti LGBT, and you're like, oh, so Stalin

676
00:41:27,239 --> 00:41:28,480
was kind of based. It's interesting.

677
00:41:28,639 --> 00:41:30,920
Speaker 1: Interesting, It's like there's something I agree with them on.

678
00:41:32,920 --> 00:41:36,400
All of these revolutionary democratic or socialist appeals to public

679
00:41:36,480 --> 00:41:40,280
virtue hark back to Republican models that Condoleus views as

680
00:41:40,320 --> 00:41:44,719
incompatible with mass democracy. What distinguishes the latter from the former,

681
00:41:44,760 --> 00:41:47,920
in his opinion, is the prevalence of hedonism associated with

682
00:41:48,000 --> 00:41:54,480
mass production and mass consumption. This ethos express itself expresses

683
00:41:54,599 --> 00:41:59,880
itself as a ceaseless desire for consumption combined with resentment

684
00:42:00,000 --> 00:42:02,400
against those who have more access to pleasure.

685
00:42:02,920 --> 00:42:05,280
Speaker 2: Yeah, see, this is like, this is how I would

686
00:42:05,280 --> 00:42:07,719
write here, This is how I would describe the uniqueness

687
00:42:07,719 --> 00:42:10,599
of the American situation. You know, people always want to

688
00:42:10,639 --> 00:42:12,800
say that we're becoming this is this is a classic

689
00:42:13,400 --> 00:42:16,360
James lindsay, Right, we're becoming like communist Russia or whatever.

690
00:42:16,360 --> 00:42:21,519
We're coming like communist China. Actually, those communist experiments were

691
00:42:21,599 --> 00:42:24,559
very much focused on austerity. They were very much focused

692
00:42:24,559 --> 00:42:28,199
on denying material gratification, denying pleasures to the point where

693
00:42:28,320 --> 00:42:31,039
you basically had a miserable life. We're on the opposite

694
00:42:31,079 --> 00:42:33,400
end of the scale. Like the entire point of the

695
00:42:33,400 --> 00:42:36,800
American regime is to make us just absolutely sick and

696
00:42:36,880 --> 00:42:40,440
disgusted with a with titillation with pleasure, Like we're living

697
00:42:40,559 --> 00:42:44,440
on Pinocchio's pleasure island and sort of like mandated prosperity.

698
00:42:47,119 --> 00:42:51,079
Speaker 1: All right, it was the failure of liberals. Excuse me,

699
00:42:51,199 --> 00:42:53,519
it was the failure of liberalism from the standpoint of

700
00:42:53,519 --> 00:42:58,239
mass democracy to move decisively enough toward material equality and

701
00:42:58,360 --> 00:43:03,440
individual self expressive that led to its undoing. The defenders

702
00:43:03,480 --> 00:43:09,039
of bourgeois liberalism temporized when faced by the sociological evidence

703
00:43:09,079 --> 00:43:12,280
of inequality in their own society. They claimed to be

704
00:43:12,360 --> 00:43:17,280
more interested in freedom than in the further pursuit of equality,

705
00:43:17,400 --> 00:43:21,159
but were more were also more committed to family cohesion

706
00:43:21,360 --> 00:43:26,119
and gender distinctions than to individual freedom. The reason for

707
00:43:26,199 --> 00:43:29,440
this is clear. According to condolists, bourgeois liberals were both

708
00:43:29,519 --> 00:43:35,159
economic innovators and perpetuators of an urban civilization going back

709
00:43:35,199 --> 00:43:38,559
to the Middle Ages. In their heyday, they spoke about

710
00:43:38,599 --> 00:43:41,840
sweeping change, but they never but they were never as

711
00:43:41,840 --> 00:43:44,920
dedicated to the social and cultural implications of a consumer

712
00:43:45,000 --> 00:43:47,960
economy as were those who replaced them.

713
00:43:48,239 --> 00:43:51,039
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's so you know, that's so fascinating to me,

714
00:43:52,599 --> 00:43:56,960
just just drawing this distinction between old school liberalism and

715
00:43:57,199 --> 00:44:00,599
how much it would be opposed to James Lindsay's consumer

716
00:44:00,639 --> 00:44:04,280
based liberalism. You know, this is sort of like modern democratic.

717
00:44:04,320 --> 00:44:08,079
Twentieth century American liberalism has almost nothing in common with

718
00:44:08,119 --> 00:44:10,559
the old liberalism. And that's I think what Coffee's trying

719
00:44:10,599 --> 00:44:13,199
to communicate here is we live in a world that's

720
00:44:13,239 --> 00:44:17,559
post industrial revolution. The entire economic world order has changed,

721
00:44:17,800 --> 00:44:20,079
and therefore the type of liberalism that you're going to

722
00:44:20,079 --> 00:44:21,159
see is going to change with it.

723
00:44:23,639 --> 00:44:27,039
Speaker 1: Basic to the thesis is the recognition that liberalism is

724
00:44:27,039 --> 00:44:31,199
a bourgeois ideology, a set of ideas and principles indissolubly

725
00:44:31,320 --> 00:44:34,679
tied to the Western middle class. This does not mean

726
00:44:34,719 --> 00:44:38,159
that liberal principles are reducible to material interest, nor that

727
00:44:38,199 --> 00:44:41,639
they should be dismissed as a pretext for economic exploitation.

728
00:44:42,480 --> 00:44:47,599
In the early nineteen fifties, John Plominets tried to separate

729
00:44:47,679 --> 00:44:52,719
ideology from the pejorative association associations many Marxists have loaded

730
00:44:52,760 --> 00:44:57,679
onto that term. According to Plominots, the word ideology is

731
00:44:57,719 --> 00:45:01,840
not used to refer only to explicitly and theories. Those

732
00:45:01,840 --> 00:45:05,519
who speak of bourgeois ideology often mean by its beliefs

733
00:45:05,559 --> 00:45:09,320
and attitudes implicit in the bourgeois way of speaking and behaving,

734
00:45:09,679 --> 00:45:12,800
and sometimes they speak of bourgeois theories and doctrines as

735
00:45:12,840 --> 00:45:17,000
if they did little more than explicit Then explicit these

736
00:45:17,039 --> 00:45:22,920
beliefs and attitudes understood in the cultural sense, and not

737
00:45:23,000 --> 00:45:27,880
simply as a theoretical instrument of self justification. Liberalism exemplifies

738
00:45:27,920 --> 00:45:32,320
bourgeois ideology. It designates not just liberal ideas, but also

739
00:45:32,360 --> 00:45:36,679
their social setting. That is, the context without which liberalism

740
00:45:36,760 --> 00:45:39,960
becomes merely disembodied concepts or slogans.

741
00:45:40,079 --> 00:45:43,559
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is what I was talking about before. You know,

742
00:45:43,599 --> 00:45:47,159
original bourgeois liberalism came from like what he just said there,

743
00:45:47,280 --> 00:45:49,679
like a social setting. It came from a certain context.

744
00:45:49,960 --> 00:45:51,920
But when you just when you try to rip those

745
00:45:51,960 --> 00:45:54,679
principles out of their context and apply them to the

746
00:45:54,679 --> 00:45:59,119
world today as this universalist and transcendent political principle, you

747
00:45:59,239 --> 00:46:04,599
transform the function of liberalism from a you know, a

748
00:46:04,639 --> 00:46:10,000
culturally contextual function into basically a world revolutionary project.

749
00:46:12,559 --> 00:46:17,119
Speaker 1: When Benjamin Constant and Francois Guiso argued for a political

750
00:46:17,320 --> 00:46:20,440
just Melu in the eighteen twenties in the form of

751
00:46:20,480 --> 00:46:24,679
constitutional monarchy, they were not simply advocating moderation or an

752
00:46:24,719 --> 00:46:30,039
Aristotilian Golden mean. They were looking at the educated bourgeoisie

753
00:46:30,400 --> 00:46:33,480
as a natural leadership class that could maneuver between the

754
00:46:33,519 --> 00:46:40,280
equally disastrous shoals of absolute monarchy and democracy. Guiseau identified

755
00:46:40,280 --> 00:46:43,559
that class with the modern nation state. He believed that

756
00:46:43,599 --> 00:46:47,800
this political order and the bourgeois and the and the

757
00:46:47,840 --> 00:46:53,679
bourgeoisie would benefit from their historically and this necessary association.

758
00:46:54,920 --> 00:46:58,159
This cultural context does not mean that the French doctrinaires,

759
00:46:58,679 --> 00:47:02,960
as the constitutional liberals in post Napoleonic France called themselves,

760
00:47:03,280 --> 00:47:07,239
had nothing to teach our own generation. It is rather

761
00:47:07,320 --> 00:47:13,960
to insist on the need to avoid tendacious to tendentious parallels,

762
00:47:14,400 --> 00:47:18,079
which arrange past figures and past movements and accordance with

763
00:47:18,199 --> 00:47:20,760
current appetites for a usable past.

764
00:47:21,400 --> 00:47:24,239
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is I mean, yeah, we have to avoid it.

765
00:47:24,280 --> 00:47:27,119
But if there's anything that describes the modern age, it's

766
00:47:27,199 --> 00:47:30,639
exactly this. They're arranging all these they're you know, they're

767
00:47:30,679 --> 00:47:33,440
they're lining up past figures that they consider good and

768
00:47:33,519 --> 00:47:36,800
past figures that they consider bad, and basically like this

769
00:47:36,880 --> 00:47:39,000
is this is what the whole thing about, Like everybody is,

770
00:47:39,559 --> 00:47:42,159
you know, Hitler or whatever. That's exactly what's going on here.

771
00:47:42,599 --> 00:47:45,719
They're arranging them in accordance with current appetites, you know.

772
00:47:46,559 --> 00:47:49,559
So that's yeah, that's exactly what he people Paul will

773
00:47:49,599 --> 00:47:51,719
say that we need to avoid this, but this actually

774
00:47:51,760 --> 00:47:56,239
deeply characterized characterizes our ideological formulation today.

775
00:47:58,559 --> 00:48:01,920
Speaker 1: What I am emphasizing here is need for sexualization, the

776
00:48:02,000 --> 00:48:07,400
avoidance of which typifies contemporary zealotry. Appeals to human rights

777
00:48:07,639 --> 00:48:11,760
as historically unbounded absolutes now resound in political debates in

778
00:48:11,800 --> 00:48:17,480
which opposing sides accuse each other of relativizing values. Wards

779
00:48:17,480 --> 00:48:21,480
and social policies are justified by invoking self evident truths,

780
00:48:22,000 --> 00:48:24,840
even though what is true in these truths in these

781
00:48:24,880 --> 00:48:28,679
truths may be different now from what seems self evident

782
00:48:28,679 --> 00:48:32,079
about them two hundred years ago. Pointing this out is

783
00:48:32,119 --> 00:48:35,039
not the same as relativizing all truth. It is only

784
00:48:35,159 --> 00:48:39,239
to question the opportunistic and decontextualized use to which the

785
00:48:39,320 --> 00:48:41,199
past has been has been bent.

786
00:48:43,119 --> 00:48:48,039
Speaker 2: He's basically critiquing He's yeah, he's critiquing historicism, or he's sorry,

787
00:48:48,079 --> 00:48:52,639
he's critiquing universalism from a historicist mentality. You have to

788
00:48:52,679 --> 00:48:56,199
look at things in their original context. English liberalism is

789
00:48:56,239 --> 00:48:58,679
not the same as American liberalism, and to treat them

790
00:48:58,679 --> 00:49:02,440
as the same as basically doing gauge in propaganda.

791
00:49:03,039 --> 00:49:03,199
Speaker 3: YEA.

792
00:49:05,159 --> 00:49:08,800
Speaker 1: The decontextualization of liberalism can happen in two ways, either

793
00:49:08,840 --> 00:49:12,079
when we place liberalism into an eternal present, going back

794
00:49:12,119 --> 00:49:14,800
and forth in time, or else when we make it

795
00:49:14,920 --> 00:49:18,400
real history into a stepping stone to the present. A

796
00:49:18,400 --> 00:49:22,440
particularly striking case of this comes up in FG. Bratton's

797
00:49:22,480 --> 00:49:25,239
The Legacy of the Liberal Spirit nineteen forty three, a

798
00:49:25,320 --> 00:49:29,559
once widely esteemed defense of the liberal heritage. In his preface,

799
00:49:29,639 --> 00:49:32,840
Bratton explains that liberalism is not to be viewed as

800
00:49:32,880 --> 00:49:36,360
a nineteenth century phenomena ending with the Second World War,

801
00:49:37,159 --> 00:49:40,599
as an attitude towards toward life. It has a history

802
00:49:40,639 --> 00:49:44,159
of twenty five hundred years. It goes back to the

803
00:49:44,199 --> 00:49:48,360
Age of Reason and the Reformation, and to earlier distant

804
00:49:48,360 --> 00:49:52,079
attempts to establish intellectual freedom and the life of reasons.

805
00:49:53,239 --> 00:49:56,159
In the journey that follows from Plato through Jesus to

806
00:49:56,239 --> 00:49:59,920
John Dewey, Braton celebrates thinkers who he believes have pointed

807
00:50:00,079 --> 00:50:04,519
it in his own direction. Thus, he favorably favorably contrasts

808
00:50:04,559 --> 00:50:09,960
one North African Christian Platonist origin with another Augustine, presenting

809
00:50:09,960 --> 00:50:13,559
the first as a protoliberal and the second as an obscurantist.

810
00:50:13,920 --> 00:50:18,199
Speaker 2: Yeah basically Paul saying that it's cheating to say that,

811
00:50:18,239 --> 00:50:20,360
like all the good things throughout history were liberal and

812
00:50:20,400 --> 00:50:23,000
anticipated our age right, and all the bad things were

813
00:50:23,039 --> 00:50:25,400
forks in the road that people went in the wrong direction.

814
00:50:25,519 --> 00:50:29,280
It's it's it's basically part of creating an ideological hegemony

815
00:50:29,320 --> 00:50:29,800
in our time.

816
00:50:30,199 --> 00:50:32,519
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you see this, this is this is not

817
00:50:32,559 --> 00:50:37,639
only with liberals, classical everyone knows this, right, everyone does

818
00:50:37,679 --> 00:50:41,800
this in liberalism. John Gray also assigns liberal ratings to

819
00:50:41,960 --> 00:50:47,320
thinkers who lived long before the liberal era. Grape praises

820
00:50:47,360 --> 00:50:54,079
pericles funeral oration or its reconstruction by the historian Thucididies

821
00:50:54,719 --> 00:50:58,800
for its statement of a liberal, egalitarian and individualist principles.

822
00:50:59,039 --> 00:51:02,159
Speaker 2: This is basically what the neo conservatives do, Like if

823
00:51:02,159 --> 00:51:06,480
you read like Leo Strauss. Paul is really critical of

824
00:51:06,559 --> 00:51:09,960
Leo Strauss precisely here where he basically says that you

825
00:51:10,000 --> 00:51:14,199
can find aspects of American liberal democracy in the Greeks,

826
00:51:14,199 --> 00:51:15,599
and then he goes to the Romans, and you can

827
00:51:15,639 --> 00:51:17,400
just go throughout history and find all the good ones

828
00:51:17,400 --> 00:51:20,079
and say this, you know, America perfected all of these tendencies.

829
00:51:20,239 --> 00:51:21,239
You know, it's it's cheating.

830
00:51:21,840 --> 00:51:26,519
Speaker 1: Yeah. He thereby ignores the pervasive stress and that speech

831
00:51:26,599 --> 00:51:29,800
on living for the public good, which was paradigmatic for

832
00:51:29,920 --> 00:51:37,920
ancient Greek democracy. Yeah, modern modern liberal individualism existed only incipiently,

833
00:51:39,000 --> 00:51:43,840
if at all, in Greek antiquity, a point documented in

834
00:51:43,960 --> 00:51:51,480
works by end Fustal des Colange's fust I'm trying to

835
00:51:51,480 --> 00:51:52,599
remember how to pronounce that.

836
00:51:53,000 --> 00:51:55,400
Speaker 2: I actually it's de Coulanganga.

837
00:51:55,880 --> 00:51:59,079
Speaker 1: Yeah, it was Fustyle de Colange, the Ancient City. To

838
00:51:59,159 --> 00:52:04,280
Paul Ros Republican, the Republic's ancient and modern. Among the

839
00:52:04,320 --> 00:52:07,039
readings of liberalism which try to shove its past into

840
00:52:07,119 --> 00:52:12,599
a triumphalist present are the academic apologist apologetics discussed in

841
00:52:12,639 --> 00:52:15,320
the first chapter. In all fairness, it should be said

842
00:52:15,360 --> 00:52:19,039
that even probing critics of contemporary liberalism ascribe it to

843
00:52:19,119 --> 00:52:25,320
an exceed excessively long genealogy. Christopher Lash, John P. Diggins,

844
00:52:25,360 --> 00:52:30,199
and the ethical philosopher Alistair McIntyre have all written critically

845
00:52:30,239 --> 00:52:33,639
on the liberal heritage, which they believe has descended more

846
00:52:33,880 --> 00:52:37,079
or less intact from earlier centuries.

847
00:52:37,920 --> 00:52:40,559
Speaker 2: Yeah. I think one of the things that Paul would

848
00:52:40,599 --> 00:52:45,400
say here is it's what you can't do in history

849
00:52:46,039 --> 00:52:49,159
is reach back into specific contexts and take a phrase

850
00:52:50,119 --> 00:52:52,280
you know, I'm someone who spend a lot of time

851
00:52:52,280 --> 00:52:55,119
in Christian circles. Protestant Christians do this all the time.

852
00:52:55,159 --> 00:52:57,760
They'll reach back in history and take a phrase, and

853
00:52:58,239 --> 00:53:00,199
Catholics do it too, but like they'll take we'll take

854
00:53:00,239 --> 00:53:03,559
a phrase and they'll basically just apply current meanings to

855
00:53:03,599 --> 00:53:07,960
it in order to justify their association with that past figure.

856
00:53:08,559 --> 00:53:10,800
That's that's what he's describing here, is you can't say,

857
00:53:11,239 --> 00:53:15,920
because Greeks use democracy and we use democracy, were basically like,

858
00:53:16,239 --> 00:53:17,639
you know, the Greeks were on our side and we

859
00:53:17,639 --> 00:53:19,920
can cite someone from history. That's that's ridiculous.

860
00:53:20,440 --> 00:53:24,519
Speaker 1: Yeah, Faith and material progress as a means of solving

861
00:53:24,559 --> 00:53:29,239
moral problems, a buoyant skepticism about religious questions, and especially

862
00:53:29,239 --> 00:53:33,079
in Diggin's analysis, individual autonomy at the end of social

863
00:53:33,119 --> 00:53:36,719
policy are all, in their opinion, permanent aspects of the

864
00:53:36,800 --> 00:53:43,400
liberal worldview. So yeah, people who want to hold on

865
00:53:43,440 --> 00:53:50,960
to liberalism and and our Christians Catholics, I mean, inherent

866
00:53:51,079 --> 00:53:55,199
in it all, especially since the Enlightenment has been a

867
00:53:55,199 --> 00:54:01,760
boyant skepticism about religious questions. I mean that anyone could

868
00:54:01,840 --> 00:54:05,119
deny that, dismiss it, or try and pooh pooh it

869
00:54:05,159 --> 00:54:10,639
away is insane to me. It's just what it is. Yep.

870
00:54:11,599 --> 00:54:14,679
This worldview is thought to define liberalism, which it preached,

871
00:54:14,840 --> 00:54:17,639
which whether it preaches a free market economy or the

872
00:54:17,679 --> 00:54:23,400
need for social democracy. Diggins and other perceptive commentators contend

873
00:54:23,440 --> 00:54:26,239
that people would not go on for generations speaking about

874
00:54:26,239 --> 00:54:30,760
a liberal heritage unless one truly existed. Those who admire

875
00:54:30,840 --> 00:54:33,679
John Dewey and John Rawls could for the same reason

876
00:54:33,840 --> 00:54:36,519
find something in Adam Smith and John Locke to admire,

877
00:54:37,280 --> 00:54:41,679
otherwise they would not fix the same label upon upon

878
00:54:41,840 --> 00:54:45,559
all of those, meter and a pen said, I don't

879
00:54:45,599 --> 00:54:48,960
know what that means. I didn't look it up. The

880
00:54:49,079 --> 00:54:51,920
view of a liberal heritage is furthermore, based on a

881
00:54:52,000 --> 00:54:55,800
reliable axiom and historical research that a long term and

882
00:54:55,840 --> 00:54:59,239
widely held belief in the persistence and integrity of a

883
00:54:59,280 --> 00:55:04,880
movement cannot be entirely illusory. Note that while classical liberal

884
00:55:04,960 --> 00:55:10,000
John Gray sees his own liberalism transformed by modern social democrats,

885
00:55:10,239 --> 00:55:14,519
he nonetheless searches for shared ground between himself and them.

886
00:55:15,920 --> 00:55:21,079
But this approach raises its own methodological difficulties. It overlooks

887
00:55:21,079 --> 00:55:25,440
several generations of agitated debates between liberals and democrats. These

888
00:55:25,480 --> 00:55:30,320
debates include Guzeau's warnings about the sovereignty of numbers and

889
00:55:30,440 --> 00:55:36,039
Stevens assaults on John Stuart Mill's faith that all people

890
00:55:36,079 --> 00:55:40,599
should live in a society as equals. Indeed, much of

891
00:55:40,639 --> 00:55:43,079
the political debate in Western Europe from the second half

892
00:55:43,079 --> 00:55:45,440
of the nineteenth century into the early decades of the

893
00:55:45,480 --> 00:55:50,159
twentieth testifies to the deep divisions between old fashioned liberals

894
00:55:50,199 --> 00:55:51,719
and democratic reformers.

895
00:55:52,559 --> 00:55:57,639
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean liberal democracy as this natural, historically prevalent

896
00:55:57,800 --> 00:56:01,639
uniting force is what but Paul's deconstructing here.

897
00:56:02,119 --> 00:56:09,679
Speaker 1: Yeah. The French anthropologist Louis demon in Homo Akilus treats

898
00:56:09,760 --> 00:56:13,000
as the unifying theme of modern of the modern West,

899
00:56:13,079 --> 00:56:19,159
the rise of individualism within the world. Would you argue that, Yeah?

900
00:56:20,440 --> 00:56:23,519
Speaker 2: Uh no, I think are you asking if I think, uh.

901
00:56:23,679 --> 00:56:24,639
Speaker 1: You think he's right there?

902
00:56:25,519 --> 00:56:28,079
Speaker 2: Oh No, No, I don't. I don't think. I don't

903
00:56:28,079 --> 00:56:30,079
think that's the unifying theme of the modern West. I

904
00:56:30,079 --> 00:56:34,239
think I think that's an aspect of certain tendencies within

905
00:56:34,280 --> 00:56:35,360
the modern West.

906
00:56:36,320 --> 00:56:39,800
Speaker 1: I think it's a weapon. I think it's I.

907
00:56:39,719 --> 00:56:42,440
Speaker 2: Think it's well, I think what it is, it's something.

908
00:56:42,480 --> 00:56:45,440
It's part of the American you know, the American ideologies

909
00:56:46,559 --> 00:56:49,400
version of things, I would say.

910
00:56:49,400 --> 00:56:55,119
Speaker 1: Okay, sounds good. Unlike the ascetic ideals of medieval Christianity

911
00:56:55,159 --> 00:56:59,719
and Eastern contemplative religions, Western modernity has been characterized by

912
00:56:59,719 --> 00:57:03,480
the belf that individual fulfillment should take place within society.

913
00:57:04,760 --> 00:57:09,159
This individual consciousness, Dumont explains, does not require that people

914
00:57:09,199 --> 00:57:13,039
withdraw from a hierarchical world based on status relations. To

915
00:57:13,119 --> 00:57:17,000
the contrary, it has encouraged individuals seeking success and self

916
00:57:17,000 --> 00:57:22,239
expression to find it in a changing and increasingly atomized society. Yeah.

917
00:57:22,320 --> 00:57:25,480
Speaker 2: I really do think though that, you know, the idea

918
00:57:25,639 --> 00:57:29,360
of modernity being defined in this way, I think it's

919
00:57:29,360 --> 00:57:31,559
I think this is actually the unique expression of the

920
00:57:31,559 --> 00:57:34,880
American version of the modern age. I don't think you

921
00:57:34,920 --> 00:57:37,519
can see a lot of this. I mean, because, like

922
00:57:37,559 --> 00:57:39,280
you would, you would have to consider a lot of

923
00:57:39,320 --> 00:57:43,519
the reactionary movements in France and Germany and England, anyone

924
00:57:43,519 --> 00:57:49,199
from like anyone from like Mosley to Miscellini, anyone like that.

925
00:57:49,239 --> 00:57:52,199
You know, all these people were basically modernists, and none

926
00:57:52,239 --> 00:57:54,639
of them had an individual individualist view of the world.

927
00:57:55,400 --> 00:58:01,079
Speaker 1: Right, Okay, Yeah, I'm talking about America. Okay. Months analysis

928
00:58:01,239 --> 00:58:03,679
treats the intellectual history of the Western world as a

929
00:58:03,679 --> 00:58:07,719
steady movement towards expressive individualism from the Protestant Reformation to

930
00:58:07,760 --> 00:58:11,000
the rise of a contractual view of civil society. In

931
00:58:11,119 --> 00:58:15,400
John Locke and in other early liberal theorists. I agree.

932
00:58:15,440 --> 00:58:17,119
Speaker 2: I do agree with that. I do agree that there

933
00:58:17,199 --> 00:58:20,719
was a major strain of this individualism, perhaps working itself

934
00:58:20,760 --> 00:58:22,320
out for sure.

935
00:58:24,000 --> 00:58:27,519
Speaker 1: Implicit in this interpretive perspective is distressed by the German

936
00:58:27,559 --> 00:58:34,079
sociologist Fernandotonis on the movement from traditional communities to functionally

937
00:58:34,440 --> 00:58:39,280
oriented and highly mobile societies. Dumal focuses on the cultural

938
00:58:39,360 --> 00:58:46,239
and intellectual basis underlying Tony's transition from Geimnschaft to guy Sellschaft,

939
00:58:46,519 --> 00:58:49,639
and he places that transition into a continuum of thought

940
00:58:50,000 --> 00:58:56,159
going back to the early modern period. Dumont's thematic stress

941
00:58:56,199 --> 00:59:00,440
on individualism within the world underscores a problem found in exportations.

942
00:59:00,480 --> 00:59:03,679
Appealing to root causes, they account for both too much

943
00:59:03,719 --> 00:59:06,599
and too little. By citing a single force that is

944
00:59:06,639 --> 00:59:10,800
made to account for modern culture, duma ignores the distinctiveness

945
00:59:10,800 --> 00:59:15,880
that marks specific phases of Western history from the Reformation onward.

946
00:59:16,920 --> 00:59:20,639
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's what I was saying it's because I was

947
00:59:20,639 --> 00:59:23,559
saying it accounts for too much. So I agree here.

948
00:59:23,599 --> 00:59:27,039
Speaker 3: I agree with Paul, though clearly he knows that the

949
00:59:27,079 --> 00:59:30,119
Protestant idea of the individual experience of divine grace has

950
00:59:30,159 --> 00:59:33,599
little to do with contemporary views of individual self gratification.

951
00:59:34,199 --> 00:59:38,039
Speaker 1: Dumal's interest and cultural continuity leads him to play down

952
00:59:38,079 --> 00:59:41,880
such a difference. His study of individuality in the West

953
00:59:41,920 --> 00:59:45,760
causes him to overlook short term cultural changes, even those

954
00:59:45,840 --> 00:59:50,719
with powerful cumulative effects. To the extent that our own

955
00:59:50,760 --> 00:59:55,519
study deals with two successive epochs, which Dumal disregards, is

956
00:59:56,000 --> 01:00:00,840
for us significant. Moreover, liberal democracy has a accelerated some

957
01:00:01,039 --> 01:00:05,079
aspects of that long range process outlined by Dumont, while

958
01:00:05,159 --> 01:00:10,360
making others less important. Material redistribution as a means of

959
01:00:10,400 --> 01:00:14,559
individual fulfillment has become basic to our own liberal democratic age,

960
01:00:14,559 --> 01:00:18,079
while the cohesion of the nuclear family has grown weaker

961
01:00:18,119 --> 01:00:23,119
as liberalism has lust out to liberal democracy. Differences and

962
01:00:23,199 --> 01:00:27,440
values can be perceived in short term political transformations, even

963
01:00:27,440 --> 01:00:31,559
if the general trend of modernity is what Dumont describes.

964
01:00:33,920 --> 01:00:37,800
Critics of the old bourgeois liberalism are finally too hasty

965
01:00:37,800 --> 01:00:42,119
and linking liberal concern about the social question to economic interest.

966
01:00:42,679 --> 01:00:47,239
As Gertrude Himmelfarb has demonstrated with regards to Victorian attitudes

967
01:00:47,280 --> 01:00:51,079
about work and philanthropy, questions of character formation and family

968
01:00:51,119 --> 01:00:54,559
responsibility were tied together in the Victorian middle class mind.

969
01:00:55,760 --> 01:00:58,480
Himil Farb argues that such an association was not a

970
01:00:58,480 --> 01:01:02,000
threadbare defense of low facts three wages or of the

971
01:01:02,159 --> 01:01:04,280
lack of public works programs.

972
01:01:04,599 --> 01:01:10,159
Speaker 2: Did you know him? A? Farb was at Bill Crystal's mom. What, Yeah,

973
01:01:10,199 --> 01:01:14,679
that's I think it's Bill Crystal's mom. Yeah, she's yeah,

974
01:01:14,679 --> 01:01:16,119
she married Irving Crystal.

975
01:01:18,159 --> 01:01:20,320
Speaker 1: Okay, I'm I have to look that up after this.

976
01:01:21,039 --> 01:01:24,480
I hope I'm right. I'm pretty sure I'm right, Okay. Rather,

977
01:01:24,599 --> 01:01:27,599
it came from widely shared assumptions about the social good.

978
01:01:28,119 --> 01:01:31,039
The broad middle class, extending from bankers and mill owners

979
01:01:31,039 --> 01:01:35,280
to shopkeepers and church canons, rejected a welfare state conception

980
01:01:35,400 --> 01:01:38,760
of government because of what they assume were it's socially

981
01:01:38,840 --> 01:01:40,079
destructive effects.

982
01:01:40,599 --> 01:01:46,400
Speaker 2: It's interesting here that the old liberals he's describing as

983
01:01:46,440 --> 01:01:50,239
being opposed to welfare and all that. Like if you

984
01:01:50,320 --> 01:01:52,800
asked a current day liberal, like like someone from the

985
01:01:52,840 --> 01:01:56,079
Libertarian Party or like James Lindsay or something. You know,

986
01:01:56,159 --> 01:01:58,679
why we should be opposed to welfare. Well, first of all,

987
01:01:58,760 --> 01:02:00,880
Jim James Lindsay wouldn't be that oupposed to welfare. But

988
01:02:01,599 --> 01:02:03,480
generally I would say because it, you know, treads on

989
01:02:03,519 --> 01:02:06,360
individual rights and their freedom and all this. But you know,

990
01:02:06,440 --> 01:02:11,119
these these within the social context, the socially situated situation

991
01:02:11,280 --> 01:02:16,119
where old liberalism found itself. They were mostly concerned to

992
01:02:16,400 --> 01:02:19,079
about the socially destructive effects, you know, the effects on

993
01:02:20,079 --> 01:02:24,079
their ability as a family to function cohesively and continuously

994
01:02:24,079 --> 01:02:26,840
throughout the generations. I mean, this is very much the

995
01:02:26,880 --> 01:02:30,679
old liberalism was very much a historicist instead of a universalist.

996
01:02:30,960 --> 01:02:31,840
It's interesting to me.

997
01:02:32,679 --> 01:02:38,880
Speaker 1: Yeah, where did I? Where'd I? Okay? Even if modern

998
01:02:38,920 --> 01:02:42,440
liberals disagree with these judgments, their disagreement does not justify

999
01:02:42,519 --> 01:02:47,360
substituting their own adaptation for the liberal tradition. Whether welfare

1000
01:02:47,400 --> 01:02:50,960
state democrats and public administrators have refined or degraded the

1001
01:02:51,000 --> 01:02:54,360
original articles beside the point. What they have done is

1002
01:02:54,440 --> 01:02:57,519
changed that article in ways that would make it unrecognizable

1003
01:02:57,519 --> 01:03:00,840
to earlier generations. Nor will it Due to speak of

1004
01:03:00,880 --> 01:03:04,559
the failure of earlier liberals to see the world see

1005
01:03:04,599 --> 01:03:07,400
the world like modern liberals. If they had seen the

1006
01:03:07,440 --> 01:03:10,239
world differently, they would not have been liberals, but social

1007
01:03:10,280 --> 01:03:17,920
democratic advocates of public administration. American historian John Kloppenberg accounts

1008
01:03:17,960 --> 01:03:22,000
for Weber's liberal skepticism about such concepts as the will

1009
01:03:22,039 --> 01:03:25,559
of the people by pointing to the longer context of

1010
01:03:25,679 --> 01:03:31,320
German history. Weber, as interpreted by Kloppenberg, could not imagine

1011
01:03:31,320 --> 01:03:35,800
the meaningful practice of egalitarian politics because quote, Germany had

1012
01:03:35,840 --> 01:03:39,480
no tradition of popular sovereignty and liberals repeatedly put their

1013
01:03:39,519 --> 01:03:45,360
faith in elites rather than democracies to accomplish their goals. True,

1014
01:03:45,440 --> 01:03:48,639
nineteenth century German bourgeois thought did not produce as much

1015
01:03:48,719 --> 01:03:53,119
radical ferment as its English and French counterparts, but Weber's

1016
01:03:53,119 --> 01:03:56,199
liberal doubts about the people's capacity to rule were not

1017
01:03:56,239 --> 01:04:01,079
restricted at the turn of the century to germanophone observers. Kloppenberg,

1018
01:04:01,159 --> 01:04:03,880
as a social democrat who thinks of himself as liberal,

1019
01:04:04,199 --> 01:04:08,239
looks for larger contexts i e. The particular, the particularity,

1020
01:04:08,440 --> 01:04:13,320
the particularities of German history for his own ideological use

1021
01:04:13,800 --> 01:04:17,079
to detach the liberal tradition from traditional liberal views that

1022
01:04:17,159 --> 01:04:21,280
he finds distasteful. Yeah, that's that's just a common it's

1023
01:04:21,320 --> 01:04:26,079
a common trick, right, Yeah, It's just a dismissal of

1024
01:04:26,880 --> 01:04:30,960
It's a dismissal of the opinion or belief of somebody

1025
01:04:31,159 --> 01:04:34,559
because of a social opinion or because they come from

1026
01:04:34,559 --> 01:04:38,239
a different culture, they have a different cultural background. Simple

1027
01:04:38,280 --> 01:04:44,199
stuff like that. Yes, yeah, unlike today's liberals traditional one. Well,

1028
01:04:44,239 --> 01:04:49,880
and when you look at it's also wrong. I mean Prussia,

1029
01:04:50,400 --> 01:04:55,960
Prussia had a welfare state Prussia. Yeah, so it's but

1030
01:04:56,119 --> 01:04:59,159
and it seems to operate very well. Why because it

1031
01:04:59,239 --> 01:05:01,280
was homogenous as society people.

1032
01:05:01,400 --> 01:05:04,280
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, they thought of themselves as part of a

1033
01:05:04,280 --> 01:05:07,480
greater community rather than a bunch of you know, individuals

1034
01:05:07,800 --> 01:05:09,679
from from all over the world.

1035
01:05:10,480 --> 01:05:16,519
Speaker 1: Exactly. I've been talking about that. I've been reading from

1036
01:05:16,559 --> 01:05:19,159
Imperium Yaki and he talks about that. He talks about

1037
01:05:19,159 --> 01:05:22,000
how as soon as as soon as you have two

1038
01:05:22,039 --> 01:05:28,679
cultures clash within within one one land, you're going to

1039
01:05:28,840 --> 01:05:34,239
even by trying to repair that rift, it actually makes

1040
01:05:34,280 --> 01:05:35,119
it worse.

1041
01:05:35,239 --> 01:05:38,559
Speaker 2: Right Yeah, yeah, it can't be done. Yeah, which is like,

1042
01:05:39,119 --> 01:05:42,400
this is why things are so bad now, not only

1043
01:05:42,400 --> 01:05:45,440
because we have the all these you know, cultures coming

1044
01:05:45,480 --> 01:05:47,519
into one place to try to but we also have

1045
01:05:48,039 --> 01:05:51,159
like hysterical experts who think that they can. They they

1046
01:05:51,159 --> 01:05:54,199
are the ones by doing more, they have more tools

1047
01:05:54,239 --> 01:05:56,599
at their disposal. They are the ones that can finally

1048
01:05:57,320 --> 01:06:00,400
unite all these cultures. And that's why it's especially beat here.

1049
01:06:01,039 --> 01:06:07,840
Speaker 1: Yeah. Unlike today's liberals, traditional ones entertain deep reservations about

1050
01:06:07,880 --> 01:06:12,320
popular rule. A belief that democracy leads inevitably to socialism

1051
01:06:12,400 --> 01:06:14,760
was common to French liberals at the eighteen thirties and

1052
01:06:14,800 --> 01:06:19,000
eighteen forties, and it is equally apparent to Lakey, Pereto, Weber,

1053
01:06:19,119 --> 01:06:22,039
and other liberal observers at the end of the century.

1054
01:06:22,400 --> 01:06:25,880
Preto and Lakey feared that democracy would bring forth a

1055
01:06:25,960 --> 01:06:30,320
trade union approach to economic policy. Unless put under some

1056
01:06:30,400 --> 01:06:33,920
kind of control. Democratically elected trade unionists would add to

1057
01:06:34,000 --> 01:06:37,440
unemployment by driving up wages, which would then harm the

1058
01:06:37,440 --> 01:06:42,679
most expendable workers. Democratic spokesmen would also agitate to impose

1059
01:06:42,760 --> 01:06:47,280
tariffs on foreign goods, and this would hurt domestic consumers,

1060
01:06:47,519 --> 01:06:52,239
while unleashing reprisals from those countries whose goods were being excluded.

1061
01:06:52,800 --> 01:06:57,639
Also unfamiliar to you, yea. The effects from such economic

1062
01:06:57,880 --> 01:07:01,039
measures would then be blamed on the owners and captains

1063
01:07:01,039 --> 01:07:06,119
of industry, and social democratic governments would cite this accusation

1064
01:07:06,199 --> 01:07:12,519
to justify their confiscation of the means of production. The

1065
01:07:12,559 --> 01:07:19,480
Finnasia sequel prediction about trade union democracy revealed the persistent

1066
01:07:19,599 --> 01:07:22,280
liberal fear about a seizure of property that would take

1067
01:07:22,320 --> 01:07:26,159
place at the urging of socialists. Despite the French Revolution

1068
01:07:26,280 --> 01:07:29,440
of eighteen forty eight, in which bourgeois and social democrats

1069
01:07:29,480 --> 01:07:32,599
went from being allies to violent enemies, a liberal view

1070
01:07:32,679 --> 01:07:39,000
did persist that democratized governments would become radical ones, socialism

1071
01:07:39,119 --> 01:07:42,719
or rampant social order would accompany the advent of a

1072
01:07:42,840 --> 01:07:48,840
universal franchise. Thus, Fitzjames Stephen declared with finality in eighteen

1073
01:07:48,920 --> 01:07:52,000
seventy four, quoting, the substance of what I have to

1074
01:07:52,079 --> 01:07:54,679
say to the disadvantage of the theory and practice of

1075
01:07:54,800 --> 01:07:58,199
universal suffrage is that it tends to invert what I

1076
01:07:58,239 --> 01:08:01,559
should have regarded as the true and natural relation between

1077
01:08:01,599 --> 01:08:05,320
wisdom and folly. I think that wise and good men

1078
01:08:05,400 --> 01:08:08,800
ought to rule those who are foolish and bad. To

1079
01:08:08,880 --> 01:08:11,840
say that the sole function of the wise and good

1080
01:08:12,000 --> 01:08:15,400
is to preach to their neighbors, and that everyone indiscriminately,

1081
01:08:15,440 --> 01:08:17,880
should be left to do what he likes, should be

1082
01:08:17,920 --> 01:08:21,399
provided with a rat with a rateable share of the power,

1083
01:08:21,560 --> 01:08:24,039
sovereign power in the shape of the vote, and that

1084
01:08:24,119 --> 01:08:26,600
the results of this will be the direction of power

1085
01:08:26,640 --> 01:08:30,159
by wisdom. Seems to me the wildest romance that ever

1086
01:08:30,199 --> 01:08:34,199
got possession of any considerable number of minds and glow.

1087
01:08:34,600 --> 01:08:38,840
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is a critique of the entire twentieth century

1088
01:08:38,880 --> 01:08:41,479
American spirit. I mean, the idea that we're going to

1089
01:08:41,520 --> 01:08:45,439
disseminate political power to every I mean, look at the people,

1090
01:08:45,680 --> 01:08:47,319
like you want to give every person the vote, Look

1091
01:08:47,359 --> 01:08:50,000
at the people that you're giving the power to, I mean,

1092
01:08:50,319 --> 01:08:52,319
and then the idea that this is going to result

1093
01:08:52,359 --> 01:08:57,399
in a wiser governmental direction is absolutely insane. He calls

1094
01:08:57,439 --> 01:08:59,119
it a wild romance, and I think that's kind of

1095
01:08:59,199 --> 01:09:02,800
understating it. But this is basically the mentality that captures

1096
01:09:02,840 --> 01:09:06,319
the Republican Party, the Democratic Party, and all major you know,

1097
01:09:06,720 --> 01:09:11,119
voices and advocates within within that entire regime ideological sphere.

1098
01:09:11,199 --> 01:09:14,399
This is the Americanist impulse in the world, is to

1099
01:09:14,439 --> 01:09:17,239
share political power with every person. This is why the

1100
01:09:17,279 --> 01:09:21,479
civil rights regime is so crucial to the way the

1101
01:09:21,479 --> 01:09:25,000
American power sees the world. But it has been proven

1102
01:09:25,119 --> 01:09:28,359
so fundamentally wrong. I can't think of anything more disastrous

1103
01:09:28,479 --> 01:09:31,199
than handing out the ability to vote to all of

1104
01:09:31,239 --> 01:09:35,840
these all these groups that have been very easy to radicalize.

1105
01:09:36,039 --> 01:09:39,199
I mean, Paul, even Paul S. Gottfried who's writing this.

1106
01:09:39,479 --> 01:09:41,119
You know, he talks about the fact that he would

1107
01:09:41,119 --> 01:09:45,720
have opposed the central mandate, you know, the national mandate,

1108
01:09:45,800 --> 01:09:48,920
that that all blacks have the vote, because he recognized

1109
01:09:49,239 --> 01:09:53,000
that these people would could very easily be radicalized and

1110
01:09:53,039 --> 01:09:55,880
they could be fueled in order to pursue you know,

1111
01:09:55,960 --> 01:09:59,000
various you know, far left objectives. And so this is

1112
01:09:59,079 --> 01:10:02,960
exactly what's happened. We've lost wisdom in at the same

1113
01:10:03,039 --> 01:10:05,479
time as we've gained the right to vote for more

1114
01:10:05,479 --> 01:10:06,079
and more people.

1115
01:10:06,920 --> 01:10:10,399
Speaker 1: Yeah, these ten lines on paper just perfectly described the

1116
01:10:11,359 --> 01:10:13,520
religion of civic nationalism in America.

1117
01:10:13,800 --> 01:10:15,960
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. And this and this is this is a

1118
01:10:16,439 --> 01:10:19,520
not only is this against like, you know, the Democrat Party,

1119
01:10:19,520 --> 01:10:23,680
but this is specifically against the impulses of the neo conservatives,

1120
01:10:23,720 --> 01:10:27,520
the conservative incorporated, not just neo conservatives, but conservative establishment

1121
01:10:27,560 --> 01:10:31,520
conservative you know, uh, you know, political commentators. This is

1122
01:10:31,920 --> 01:10:34,439
this is against them, specifically, they're the ones that are

1123
01:10:34,439 --> 01:10:36,920
pushing for the Martin Luther King view of the world.

1124
01:10:37,039 --> 01:10:40,560
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, Martin Luthervig Yeah.

1125
01:10:40,600 --> 01:10:45,079
Speaker 2: And Abraham Lincoln yeah, yeah, exactly. Well, Abraham Lincoln wouldn't

1126
01:10:45,079 --> 01:10:47,800
have been you know this bad.

1127
01:10:48,000 --> 01:10:53,039
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, yeah, he yeah, he would have given the differences.

1128
01:10:53,319 --> 01:10:55,039
Speaker 2: Yeah, he wouldn't have given them the right to vote,

1129
01:10:55,039 --> 01:10:55,479
for sure.

1130
01:10:56,000 --> 01:10:59,159
Speaker 1: The well, I guess the mythological Lincoln that we hear about.

1131
01:10:59,439 --> 01:11:00,520
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, for sure.

1132
01:11:01,239 --> 01:11:05,119
Speaker 1: Like Steven Lakey feared that democracy, by overwhelming and sweeping

1133
01:11:05,159 --> 01:11:09,439
away any national leadership, would leave to capricious and unstable government.

1134
01:11:09,880 --> 01:11:12,359
He predicted almost twenty years before it happened, that the

1135
01:11:12,399 --> 01:11:15,159
House of Lords would be disempowered, and in the eighteen

1136
01:11:15,239 --> 01:11:18,439
nineties he also warned that quote the disassociation of the

1137
01:11:18,560 --> 01:11:22,920
upper classes from public duty is likely to prove a

1138
01:11:23,039 --> 01:11:28,159
danger to the community. Yeah, no, Boyd said, nobless abuge.

1139
01:11:28,760 --> 01:11:31,880
Just that goes right out the window, and it's what

1140
01:11:32,159 --> 01:11:38,239
kept society going for centuriesennia from millennia, right liberal critics

1141
01:11:38,279 --> 01:11:42,399
of mass democracy offered differing but equally grim predictions about

1142
01:11:42,439 --> 01:11:45,560
the disposition of power in a democratic age. In the

1143
01:11:45,600 --> 01:11:49,239
eighteen seventies, Stephen could find no cohesive group of political

1144
01:11:49,319 --> 01:11:52,399
leaders that might create stable rule in the world as

1145
01:11:52,479 --> 01:11:57,079
imagined by John Stuart Mill. His opponents were mere dreamers

1146
01:11:57,159 --> 01:11:59,880
who liked the radicals. The term by which he did

1147
01:12:00,000 --> 01:12:03,159
degated Mill in his circle. Look forward to an age

1148
01:12:03,239 --> 01:12:06,760
in which an all embracing love of humanity will regenerate

1149
01:12:06,880 --> 01:12:12,520
the human race. Not only is it you get this

1150
01:12:13,640 --> 01:12:17,479
kind of egalitarian language, but you also get a you

1151
01:12:17,520 --> 01:12:20,399
get a theological language thrown in there as well. Of course,

1152
01:12:22,439 --> 01:12:25,479
though the radicals complain of the political of the petty

1153
01:12:25,560 --> 01:12:29,239
social arrangements in Victorian England, they lack the hardness of

1154
01:12:29,319 --> 01:12:33,439
mind Steven observes to change things for the better. In time,

1155
01:12:33,520 --> 01:12:37,680
they would be swept aside by better organized fanatics. Another

1156
01:12:37,760 --> 01:12:41,079
liberal critique of democracy, widespread among the doctrinaires of the

1157
01:12:41,079 --> 01:12:45,239
eighteen twenties was its primitive character, which made it unsuited

1158
01:12:45,239 --> 01:12:51,840
for the nineteenth century. Charles Remusot and Guiseeau both stressed

1159
01:12:51,880 --> 01:12:55,640
the idea that democratic republics were a product of classical antiquity.

1160
01:12:56,359 --> 01:13:02,079
Given their need for cultural homogeneity, severe public morals, and

1161
01:13:02,239 --> 01:13:08,399
highly restricted citizenship. Popular polities did not seem destined to

1162
01:13:08,439 --> 01:13:13,239
flourish in the nineteenth century. We need to read that again.

1163
01:13:15,720 --> 01:13:19,520
Given their need for cultural homogeneity, severe public morals, and

1164
01:13:19,640 --> 01:13:24,079
highly restricted citizenship, popular polities did not seem destined to

1165
01:13:24,159 --> 01:13:28,000
flourish in the nineteenth century. Why would they flourish now?

1166
01:13:29,039 --> 01:13:29,760
Speaker 2: Right exactly?

1167
01:13:30,239 --> 01:13:37,760
Speaker 1: Yeah. Unlike Guiseau's democratic Unlike Useau's democratic critic and traveler

1168
01:13:37,760 --> 01:13:40,960
of the New World, a Lexus Totakville, the doctrinaires did

1169
01:13:41,000 --> 01:13:44,720
not believe that the European future belonged to democracy. They

1170
01:13:44,800 --> 01:13:49,640
viewed the American experience as as sui genries. According to Gizo,

1171
01:13:50,319 --> 01:13:55,199
Americans had established popular sovereignty because they had been able

1172
01:13:55,279 --> 01:14:00,359
to build a regime without an inherited class system. Phil's

1173
01:14:00,800 --> 01:14:05,079
depiction of localism as the essence of American democracy seemed

1174
01:14:05,079 --> 01:14:09,319
to confirm Guizau's judgment. It offered a political picture that

1175
01:14:09,359 --> 01:14:12,680
Guizeau and other doctrinaires thought had no bearing for France

1176
01:14:13,159 --> 01:14:16,760
or for Europe in general. A Europe of highly centralized

1177
01:14:16,840 --> 01:14:20,960
nation states required a stable social pillar drawn from the

1178
01:14:21,119 --> 01:14:27,359
educated bourgeoisie in order to maintain political stability. Democratic primitivism,

1179
01:14:27,680 --> 01:14:30,520
as revealed in the chaos of the French Revolution was

1180
01:14:30,520 --> 01:14:35,279
the political alternative Guizau complained into which his democratic critics

1181
01:14:35,279 --> 01:14:37,760
would plunge France and the rest of Europe.

1182
01:14:38,199 --> 01:14:40,439
Speaker 2: So I don't know if people caught this or read

1183
01:14:40,479 --> 01:14:42,640
this out of it, but you know, getting to know

1184
01:14:42,720 --> 01:14:45,520
gotfried over the years. The way I read this is

1185
01:14:46,680 --> 01:14:49,760
it is basically that it's insane for America to export

1186
01:14:49,800 --> 01:14:52,199
its own model, which by the way, is a complete

1187
01:14:52,239 --> 01:14:55,000
aberration from its original model. But it's insane for America

1188
01:14:55,199 --> 01:14:58,239
to export its own model back to Europe. These things

1189
01:14:58,239 --> 01:15:03,279
don't work. I think localism in America is has a history,

1190
01:15:03,520 --> 01:15:07,199
has an organic history that is just completely non transferable

1191
01:15:07,319 --> 01:15:09,920
to the Old World. So you can't. You can't transport that.

1192
01:15:09,920 --> 01:15:13,520
That's why nationalism in the Old World in Western Europe

1193
01:15:13,520 --> 01:15:16,520
makes much more sense than localism does in terms of

1194
01:15:16,680 --> 01:15:21,279
dealing with the political emergency. Whereas nationalism in America, you know,

1195
01:15:21,359 --> 01:15:24,840
for whatever, you know, political, whatever political advantages we can

1196
01:15:24,880 --> 01:15:27,399
gain from it right now, it's over the course of

1197
01:15:27,399 --> 01:15:30,199
the last two hundred years, it's tended to be more

1198
01:15:30,239 --> 01:15:33,960
progressive than anything. But you can't. So you can't. But

1199
01:15:34,039 --> 01:15:37,720
you can't export the original Tokuoville's model of local democracy

1200
01:15:37,760 --> 01:15:39,960
back to Europe. It doesn't work like that, and the

1201
01:15:39,960 --> 01:15:43,199
attempt to do so is basically let in all of

1202
01:15:43,239 --> 01:15:45,199
the radicals, and it's led in all of the far

1203
01:15:45,319 --> 01:15:48,600
left movements and allowed them to capture power.

1204
01:15:49,239 --> 01:15:55,399
Speaker 1: Yeah. The doctrinaires pointed portentiously to the Jocoman rule in

1205
01:15:55,439 --> 01:15:59,600
seventeen ninety three as a precedent for democratizing experiments. As

1206
01:15:59,640 --> 01:16:03,479
Gizo explained in the essay de la democracy that duns

1207
01:16:03,800 --> 01:16:08,199
on society modern air. Democracy is a cry. Democracy is

1208
01:16:08,239 --> 01:16:10,920
a cry of war. It is a flag of the

1209
01:16:10,960 --> 01:16:15,239
party of numbers placed below, raised against those above. A

1210
01:16:15,359 --> 01:16:18,039
flags sometimes raised in the name of the rights of men,

1211
01:16:18,479 --> 01:16:21,840
but sometimes in the name of crude passions, sometimes raised

1212
01:16:21,840 --> 01:16:29,560
against the most iniquitous usurptions, but also sometimes against legitimate superiority. Yeah.

1213
01:16:30,079 --> 01:16:32,800
Speaker 2: Yeah, democracy knows no higher principle.

1214
01:16:32,880 --> 01:16:38,560
Speaker 1: Basically, While Tokville and Guizeau underlined the link between American

1215
01:16:38,600 --> 01:16:42,520
democracy and America's decentralized republic, a new and faithful view

1216
01:16:42,560 --> 01:16:45,880
of the American regime surfaced in the theorizing of George

1217
01:16:45,920 --> 01:16:52,119
Bancroft eighteen hundred and eighteen ninety one, Jacksonian Democrat, Jacksonian

1218
01:16:52,159 --> 01:16:56,039
Democrat career diplomat and author of the ten volume History

1219
01:16:56,039 --> 01:17:00,520
of the United States. Bancroft admired German idealist philosophy, which

1220
01:17:00,520 --> 01:17:03,640
he popularized in the United States. As a young man,

1221
01:17:03,680 --> 01:17:08,119
he had studied in Gottengen, Berlin, and Heidelberg, and while

1222
01:17:08,159 --> 01:17:11,640
in Germany he had become intimately familiar with the historical

1223
01:17:11,680 --> 01:17:17,119
speculation of Hegel. His own work incorporated several unmistakable Hegelian

1224
01:17:17,159 --> 01:17:21,479
themes that history showed the progressive unfolding of the divine personality,

1225
01:17:22,000 --> 01:17:25,840
that this process was reflected in the advance of human liberty,

1226
01:17:26,199 --> 01:17:28,960
and that liberty had developed most fully in the Protestant

1227
01:17:29,000 --> 01:17:34,960
Germanic world. For Bancroft, unlike Hegel, however, this progress toward

1228
01:17:35,159 --> 01:17:41,079
liberty reached its culmination on American soil. Bancroft presents the

1229
01:17:41,119 --> 01:17:45,520
American people as the ultimate bearers of divine, divinely ordered liberty,

1230
01:17:45,560 --> 01:17:48,680
and makes this point explicit at the end of his

1231
01:17:48,680 --> 01:17:51,199
History of the Formation of the Constitution of the United

1232
01:17:51,239 --> 01:17:54,880
States eighteen eighty two, quote, A new people has arisen

1233
01:17:54,920 --> 01:17:59,279
without kings or princes or nobles. They were more sincerely religious,

1234
01:17:59,399 --> 01:18:03,119
better educated, and of nobler minds, and of purer morals.

1235
01:18:03,199 --> 01:18:07,000
Than than the men of any former republic. By calm,

1236
01:18:07,000 --> 01:18:10,880
meditation and friendly counsels, they had prepared a constitution which,

1237
01:18:11,039 --> 01:18:13,960
in the union of Freedom, with strength and order, excelled

1238
01:18:14,119 --> 01:18:15,479
everyone known before.

1239
01:18:17,039 --> 01:18:24,479
Speaker 2: It's interesting, It's a fantasy. It's a fantasy, but you know,

1240
01:18:24,840 --> 01:18:27,600
it's it's funny to me that people can take the

1241
01:18:27,640 --> 01:18:31,760
American situation in the nineteenth century, eighteenth century, or the

1242
01:18:31,760 --> 01:18:38,520
eighteenth century or even earlier, and in disregard the ethnic

1243
01:18:38,640 --> 01:18:43,520
and cultural roots of that society and basically universalize it,

1244
01:18:43,600 --> 01:18:45,800
bring in tons of people and expect to remain the same,

1245
01:18:46,479 --> 01:18:48,760
you know. So the idea that that you can take

1246
01:18:48,840 --> 01:18:52,479
this you know, you know, fantastical situation and just universalized

1247
01:18:52,520 --> 01:18:57,399
it has been the foundation for all sorts of you know,

1248
01:18:57,439 --> 01:18:59,600
egalitarian terror in the Western world.

1249
01:19:00,640 --> 01:19:02,760
Speaker 1: A discussion I've been having privately with a friend of

1250
01:19:02,760 --> 01:19:07,359
mine recently is whether the United States as a colony

1251
01:19:07,920 --> 01:19:14,880
could even transport the culture, the high culture of the

1252
01:19:15,039 --> 01:19:16,720
home country to the colony.

1253
01:19:17,479 --> 01:19:20,720
Speaker 2: Right, it proved, it proved, you proved that you couldn't

1254
01:19:20,720 --> 01:19:24,920
do that. Yeah, well it couldn't. It couldn't outlast the

1255
01:19:24,960 --> 01:19:28,720
first generation that had you know, absorbed it firsthand. You know,

1256
01:19:28,760 --> 01:19:32,039
that the longer those things are separated, and the more

1257
01:19:32,600 --> 01:19:35,279
you know foreign elements you interject into something, you can't

1258
01:19:35,399 --> 01:19:36,319
you can't keep that up.

1259
01:19:36,960 --> 01:19:39,359
Speaker 1: Well, you also have to take into consideration that while

1260
01:19:39,399 --> 01:19:47,600
this uh, while this new colony is growing, it's the

1261
01:19:47,680 --> 01:19:51,720
enlighten the enlightenment injected into it. You're getting all of

1262
01:19:51,760 --> 01:19:56,680
these ideas injected into it which are going to clash

1263
01:19:56,760 --> 01:20:02,560
with its original high culture. I don't know the conversation,

1264
01:20:02,880 --> 01:20:07,000
the conversation goes on. The spirit of the people, thus described,

1265
01:20:07,079 --> 01:20:10,079
was held to be democratic, and Bancroft described to Americans

1266
01:20:10,079 --> 01:20:13,560
a collective wisdom which found expression in their political architecture.

1267
01:20:14,119 --> 01:20:16,880
The American Federal Union, as he saw it, was no

1268
01:20:17,039 --> 01:20:20,399
mere convenient state, but the only hope for renovating the

1269
01:20:20,439 --> 01:20:24,560
life of the civilized world. The political institutions fashioned and

1270
01:20:25,279 --> 01:20:29,880
inspirited by America's democratic people assumed in Bancroft's writing a

1271
01:20:29,920 --> 01:20:33,560
mystical quality, and his insistence that the voice of the

1272
01:20:33,560 --> 01:20:36,800
people is the voice of God led Tokeville to remark

1273
01:20:36,920 --> 01:20:45,600
that Pantheism is the religion most characteristic of democracies. Yeah,

1274
01:20:45,920 --> 01:20:49,840
the American capacity for self government that Bancroft exalted was

1275
01:20:49,880 --> 01:20:53,479
not in the end, the American propensity for local self rule.

1276
01:20:53,880 --> 01:20:57,600
Bancroft glorified a national democratic will, and his history of

1277
01:20:57,600 --> 01:21:01,640
the United States ends appropriately with a topic consolidating the union.

1278
01:21:03,239 --> 01:21:06,520
According to Bancroft, an American people and an American national

1279
01:21:06,560 --> 01:21:12,359
government were both incotly present even before the colonies formed

1280
01:21:12,399 --> 01:21:16,600
a nation state. Quote for all the one of government,

1281
01:21:16,680 --> 01:21:19,600
they're solemn pledged to one another, and mutual citizenship and

1282
01:21:19,640 --> 01:21:23,239
perpetual union made them one people. And that people was

1283
01:21:23,319 --> 01:21:27,119
superior to its institutions, possessing the vital form which goes

1284
01:21:27,159 --> 01:21:29,520
before organization and gives its strength.

1285
01:21:31,119 --> 01:21:34,720
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is sort of the foundation of like propositional nationhood, right,

1286
01:21:34,880 --> 01:21:39,560
Like it's these things were formed independent of our own past,

1287
01:21:39,680 --> 01:21:42,479
you know, and anyone can anyone can jump in and

1288
01:21:42,520 --> 01:21:44,800
be part of it, be part of the people.

1289
01:21:46,520 --> 01:21:51,079
Speaker 1: That I'm gonna go one because starts talking about Okay,

1290
01:21:51,520 --> 01:21:54,000
one does not have to strain to find here a

1291
01:21:54,119 --> 01:21:59,720
Jacobin imagination hidden behind Hegelian language. A consolidated American national

1292
01:21:59,760 --> 01:22:03,680
govern a powerful executive representing the popular will, and a

1293
01:22:03,720 --> 01:22:07,600
global civilizing mission are the visionary exceptions that one can

1294
01:22:07,640 --> 01:22:12,000
read into Bancroft's patriotic scholarship. Although his history of the

1295
01:22:12,119 --> 01:22:15,520
United States deals predominantly with the colonial period, it points

1296
01:22:15,560 --> 01:22:18,640
more toward the American future than back to the eighteenth century.

1297
01:22:19,159 --> 01:22:22,800
Bancroft is celebrating the progress of the democratic spirit as

1298
01:22:22,800 --> 01:22:27,279
embodied in the American nation. In the process, he replaces

1299
01:22:27,319 --> 01:22:31,760
an older American liberal constitutional identity with one that Guizeau

1300
01:22:31,880 --> 01:22:36,159
and Toakville might have associated with their own eighteenth century

1301
01:22:36,199 --> 01:22:37,199
French Revolution.

1302
01:22:37,800 --> 01:22:43,119
Speaker 2: Yeah, the original vision of the American situation was basically

1303
01:22:43,119 --> 01:22:45,760
replaced by neo Jacobinism, for sure.

1304
01:22:49,039 --> 01:22:53,720
Speaker 1: While Bancroft celebrated the triumphant course of democracy in America, others,

1305
01:22:53,840 --> 01:22:58,119
among them European liberals, grew increasingly agitated about the inevitability

1306
01:22:58,159 --> 01:23:02,880
of popular rule. I actually this we're starting a new

1307
01:23:02,920 --> 01:23:05,000
and we only have a few pages left, so we're

1308
01:23:05,039 --> 01:23:08,319
just gonna you don't mind going to the Okay, all right?

1309
01:23:08,560 --> 01:23:13,760
This news section is entitled liberal Pessimists. While Bancroft celebrated

1310
01:23:13,760 --> 01:23:17,199
the triumphant course of democracy in America, others, among them

1311
01:23:17,239 --> 01:23:24,439
European liberals, grew increasingly agitated about the inevitability of popular rule.

1312
01:23:24,760 --> 01:23:27,479
This anxiety, in some cases became more pronounced As the

1313
01:23:27,520 --> 01:23:30,439
twentieth century began to unfold and social problems in Europe

1314
01:23:30,640 --> 01:23:34,239
appeared to be worsening, the most detailed critical treatment of

1315
01:23:34,279 --> 01:23:40,720
democratic rule produced by European liberal was Transformation of the Democracy.

1316
01:23:41,159 --> 01:23:44,880
By this, I'm just translating that from me by the

1317
01:23:44,920 --> 01:23:50,840
sociologists economists. Pereto. Preto's example, as John Gray remarks, makes

1318
01:23:50,920 --> 01:23:54,720
dramatically clear how the pre nineteen fourteen liberal mind was

1319
01:23:54,720 --> 01:23:59,359
placed irreversibly at a crossroads. In the face of a

1320
01:23:59,399 --> 01:24:04,560
democratic franchise, riotous trade union strikes, and the intrusive presence

1321
01:24:04,560 --> 01:24:10,479
of public administration, some liberals embraced authoritarian solutions of the host.

1322
01:24:10,479 --> 01:24:14,359
Pereto was perhaps the best known and the most deliberate,

1323
01:24:14,720 --> 01:24:17,079
as can be judged from his social writings.

1324
01:24:17,279 --> 01:24:22,439
Speaker 2: It's funny. It's funny that today's liberals, you self describe liberals.

1325
01:24:22,840 --> 01:24:25,920
They'll never talk about that, the importance of an authoritarian

1326
01:24:25,960 --> 01:24:29,159
solution in the midst of a crisis or emergency. You know,

1327
01:24:29,239 --> 01:24:31,319
it's really interesting how they never bring that up.

1328
01:24:34,920 --> 01:24:38,680
Speaker 1: In Transformation, he outlines the characteristics of the democratic epoch

1329
01:24:38,760 --> 01:24:41,760
and its relationship to the period that had preceded it

1330
01:24:41,840 --> 01:24:45,000
in the nineteenth century of parliamentary regime had come to

1331
01:24:45,079 --> 01:24:47,880
Italy as the result of a faithful alliance between a

1332
01:24:47,920 --> 01:24:53,960
demagogic plutocracy and the popular classes, both that opposed a

1333
01:24:54,039 --> 01:24:57,640
rule of landed wealth and the ecclesiastical establishment, but drew

1334
01:24:57,680 --> 01:25:02,079
apart after a liberal, cost institutional and unified Italy had

1335
01:25:02,119 --> 01:25:06,840
come into existence. Thereafter, the labouring class had worked to

1336
01:25:06,880 --> 01:25:09,319
seize the wealth of the liberal middle class, and by

1337
01:25:09,319 --> 01:25:12,560
the twentieth century hit it also turned against the parliamentary

1338
01:25:12,600 --> 01:25:18,399
institutions on which the plutocracy had built its political legitimacy.

1339
01:25:19,319 --> 01:25:21,520
In the aftermath of the First World War, from which

1340
01:25:21,520 --> 01:25:23,840
Italy had emerged on the side of the victors but

1341
01:25:23,920 --> 01:25:28,199
financially crushed, unions took over the railroads, iron works and

1342
01:25:28,239 --> 01:25:32,159
factories in Milan and throughout the industrialized North. Red Guard

1343
01:25:32,279 --> 01:25:35,800
units were formed to police the worker occupied areas, and

1344
01:25:35,880 --> 01:25:38,720
though these units carried out the summary executions of the

1345
01:25:38,800 --> 01:25:42,039
enemies of the working class, the national government, then under

1346
01:25:42,079 --> 01:25:48,640
revolving premierships, avoided military force. There was political calculation behind

1347
01:25:48,680 --> 01:25:52,479
this hesitancy. The largest block in the postwar Italian parliament

1348
01:25:52,560 --> 01:25:55,560
was a socialist who in nineteen nineteen had voted to

1349
01:25:55,680 --> 01:26:00,720
nationalize key industries. They and the Catholic Social Democrat Popolari

1350
01:26:01,520 --> 01:26:04,840
held enough votes to bring down any government, and both

1351
01:26:04,880 --> 01:26:10,680
were afraid of estranging their constituents by releasing armed forces

1352
01:26:10,800 --> 01:26:18,960
against the Sindicilasti syndicalists. Meanwhile, land peasants landed, landless peasants brong.

1353
01:26:19,600 --> 01:26:20,640
Do you know what that word.

1354
01:26:20,439 --> 01:26:25,159
Speaker 2: Means, Broccianti, I think it's just the landless, the peasants.

1355
01:26:24,880 --> 01:26:28,359
Speaker 1: Like, okay, we're grabbing land from large estates. As a

1356
01:26:28,399 --> 01:26:35,279
paralyzed national government conferred on these expropriations ex post facto approval,

1357
01:26:37,880 --> 01:26:43,560
Paredo vented particular contempt on Giovanni Gioliti, the aged Prime

1358
01:26:43,600 --> 01:26:48,079
minister who formed his fifth and most disastrous government. Among

1359
01:26:48,239 --> 01:26:53,319
amid these trials, Paredo mac Giolitti's cowardice when he responded

1360
01:26:53,319 --> 01:26:56,319
to Redguard violence with the statement that intervention would be

1361
01:26:56,399 --> 01:26:59,840
tantamount to capital punishment, which would be inappropriate at the

1362
01:27:00,119 --> 01:27:05,039
as in time. Parreto contested Gilti to those fascist squadrons who,

1363
01:27:05,079 --> 01:27:07,640
in the fall of nineteen nineteen moved against the Red

1364
01:27:07,680 --> 01:27:12,520
Baronies in Bologna and Pole Valley. For Peretto, the plutocracy

1365
01:27:12,600 --> 01:27:18,039
had become timorous and moronic, and the only groups which

1366
01:27:18,079 --> 01:27:23,199
now seemed capable of exercising power were nationalists and union leaders. Quote.

1367
01:27:23,319 --> 01:27:26,640
Among the propertied class, the sentiments of self defense and

1368
01:27:26,720 --> 01:27:30,439
property are largely spent and have begun to transform themselves

1369
01:27:30,520 --> 01:27:35,239
into a nebulous, uncertain social responsibility which others call social duty,

1370
01:27:35,560 --> 01:27:42,079
used interchangeably with work, now defined as a right. In

1371
01:27:42,119 --> 01:27:45,359
some parts of Italy, workers invade the land and perform

1372
01:27:45,479 --> 01:27:49,560
useless tasks, thereafter claiming the right to receive wages which

1373
01:27:49,560 --> 01:27:52,800
the owner has a duty to pay them. I guess

1374
01:27:52,800 --> 01:27:56,399
that's labor theory of value. Huh. The response of many

1375
01:27:56,479 --> 01:28:01,119
bourgeois is approval. Elsewhere, Parreto notes that the hatred and

1376
01:28:01,199 --> 01:28:05,079
combativeness manifested by the union ast towards the propertied class

1377
01:28:05,119 --> 01:28:09,039
no longer elicited resistance. Quote. On one side of the

1378
01:28:09,039 --> 01:28:11,720
class divide, one sounds the trumpet and moves on to

1379
01:28:11,760 --> 01:28:14,920
the assault on the other one. On the other, one

1380
01:28:15,000 --> 01:28:18,960
bows one's head, capitulates, or better yet, joins the enemy

1381
01:28:18,960 --> 01:28:24,960
and sells one property for thirty pieces of silver. In

1382
01:28:25,039 --> 01:28:28,119
two political commentaries published in nineteen twenty three, following the

1383
01:28:28,159 --> 01:28:32,000
fascist advent of power, in October nineteen twenty two, Peretto

1384
01:28:32,399 --> 01:28:36,119
expressed the hope that Mussolini's regime would restore economic and

1385
01:28:36,159 --> 01:28:40,359
political order. In January nineteen twenty three, he perceived as

1386
01:28:40,359 --> 01:28:43,800
the major difference between past and present governments that one

1387
01:28:43,880 --> 01:28:49,439
ignored economic issues, paying attention to demagogic sentiments and particular interests,

1388
01:28:49,600 --> 01:28:51,880
while the new government is seeking to re establish an

1389
01:28:51,880 --> 01:28:56,640
equilibrium between social forces. At the same time, Perreto warned

1390
01:28:56,680 --> 01:29:00,000
against the danger of taxing heavily those who were salary

1391
01:29:00,039 --> 01:29:04,079
read or small landowners, and he recommended that modern moderate

1392
01:29:04,159 --> 01:29:10,239
unionists be consulted in setting economic policy. In September nineteen

1393
01:29:10,279 --> 01:29:13,039
twenty three, he also suggested how the fascist regime might

1394
01:29:13,039 --> 01:29:17,640
be might best reform the structure of government. Pereto urged

1395
01:29:17,720 --> 01:29:21,000
Mussolini to maintain a free press, let the crow's call,

1396
01:29:21,640 --> 01:29:29,680
but be indefatigable in repressing rebellious deeds. Experience demonstrates that

1397
01:29:29,800 --> 01:29:33,239
leaders who embark upon this path of censorship find headaches

1398
01:29:33,520 --> 01:29:37,319
rather than benefits. It may help to imitate ancient Rome,

1399
01:29:37,560 --> 01:29:41,760
not occupy oneself with theology, but attend only to actions.

1400
01:29:42,560 --> 01:29:45,079
Parreto also advocated the putting into place of a new

1401
01:29:45,119 --> 01:29:49,319
parliament which would express popular sentiments without crippling the executive.

1402
01:29:49,800 --> 01:29:54,199
Though he readily admitted the failure of Italy's earlier parliamentary experience,

1403
01:29:54,479 --> 01:29:57,479
he nonetheless thought that the new regime should not operate

1404
01:29:57,520 --> 01:30:03,000
without elected institutions. He believes such institutions necessary to stabilize

1405
01:30:03,279 --> 01:30:05,399
and legitimate the fascist order.

1406
01:30:06,600 --> 01:30:10,720
Speaker 2: So, and Paul, here's going on a long winded example

1407
01:30:11,000 --> 01:30:16,399
of you know, the tendencies of the democratic tendencies of

1408
01:30:17,439 --> 01:30:20,279
you know, the fascist experiment. Basically, I think he's trying

1409
01:30:20,279 --> 01:30:24,600
to demonstrate that democracy and liberalism are not always mutually.

1410
01:30:24,760 --> 01:30:29,000
They're not always like you can have aspects of liberalism

1411
01:30:29,079 --> 01:30:34,119
and democracy within non liberal democratic political orders.

1412
01:30:35,720 --> 01:30:39,479
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's exactly what I'm reading here In assessing these

1413
01:30:39,479 --> 01:30:42,199
comments written shortly before Pereto's death, that is important to

1414
01:30:42,279 --> 01:30:46,079
keep in mind to critical factors. First, there was no

1415
01:30:46,479 --> 01:30:49,560
reason for Peretto and others to believe in nineteen twenty

1416
01:30:49,560 --> 01:30:52,600
two that the Italian fascist rezime regime would later go

1417
01:30:52,680 --> 01:30:56,640
berserk and ally itself ideologically and politically with Nazi Germany.

1418
01:30:57,279 --> 01:31:00,560
In the early twenties, the Italian fascist express either racist

1419
01:31:00,680 --> 01:31:03,439
or anti Semitic ideas, and they were willing to offer

1420
01:31:03,600 --> 01:31:06,560
leadership in a country that had broken down economically and

1421
01:31:06,680 --> 01:31:08,359
was on the vergi of political collapse.

1422
01:31:08,680 --> 01:31:11,600
Speaker 2: I actually personally disagree with this part. I think that

1423
01:31:11,760 --> 01:31:14,960
Italian fascists, I think, like so many regular Europeans over

1424
01:31:15,039 --> 01:31:21,560
a thousand years, had you know, racial prejudices. Yeah, well,

1425
01:31:21,600 --> 01:31:24,760
you know, and I mean maybe they didn't consider it

1426
01:31:24,800 --> 01:31:27,079
as like official part of like you know, a political

1427
01:31:27,159 --> 01:31:32,560
agenda or anything, but like they were aware within their

1428
01:31:32,560 --> 01:31:37,760
own context of you know, the dangers of multiculturalism, multi racialism,

1429
01:31:38,119 --> 01:31:39,880
and also you know, the Jewish threat.

1430
01:31:39,920 --> 01:31:40,119
Speaker 3: You know.

1431
01:31:40,399 --> 01:31:43,359
Speaker 2: To say that the Jewish threat is a post nineteen

1432
01:31:43,399 --> 01:31:47,720
thirties or nineteen forties European phenomenon, I think is overstating it.

1433
01:31:48,079 --> 01:31:51,079
Speaker 1: Yeah, to say that Italians were not aware of the

1434
01:31:51,199 --> 01:31:57,960
of the Jewish question right exactly is Yeah. Second, Parreto

1435
01:31:58,039 --> 01:32:01,960
saw his own class to bourgeoisie as spent and demoralized,

1436
01:32:02,319 --> 01:32:05,079
and though he hoped to preserve some of its creations,

1437
01:32:05,159 --> 01:32:08,159
particularly a free market, a free press, and religious liberty,

1438
01:32:08,399 --> 01:32:11,239
he did not believe that his own social class would

1439
01:32:11,279 --> 01:32:13,920
be able to do so. He therefore thought it was

1440
01:32:14,000 --> 01:32:18,600
necessary to turn to what he, like Machiavelli, designated as

1441
01:32:18,640 --> 01:32:22,199
the lions, bold warrior forces to save what had been

1442
01:32:22,239 --> 01:32:26,479
devised by those who had become foxes, parliamentary schemers and

1443
01:32:26,520 --> 01:32:32,199
finessing plutocrats. What Pereto saw happening in Italy seemed to

1444
01:32:32,199 --> 01:32:35,960
belong to a broader civilizational context. Throughout his writing, he

1445
01:32:36,079 --> 01:32:39,760
used the concept of uniformities, which he applied to both

1446
01:32:39,800 --> 01:32:42,600
economic and social affairs, and which he claimed to have

1447
01:32:42,720 --> 01:32:47,720
derived from an experimental research method. The long term invariability

1448
01:32:47,800 --> 01:32:51,800
of the income curve and the equivalent advantages of to

1449
01:32:51,960 --> 01:32:56,079
producers of a perfectly organized monopoly and of an unimpended,

1450
01:32:56,840 --> 01:33:00,920
unimpeded free market are two such laws that are worked

1451
01:33:00,960 --> 01:33:08,199
out in Prereto's major economic works. In Trezado the Social General,

1452
01:33:09,159 --> 01:33:13,279
he developed a theory of psychological predispositions to explain social behavior.

1453
01:33:14,079 --> 01:33:17,760
In this analysis we find six such predispositions, which Prereto

1454
01:33:17,840 --> 01:33:23,000
called residues and associated with changing movements and ideologies, also

1455
01:33:23,079 --> 01:33:27,359
known as derivations. The six residues underlying group behavior are

1456
01:33:27,359 --> 01:33:31,800
the instinct for combination, the persistence of aggregates, the desire

1457
01:33:31,880 --> 01:33:37,159
to manifest one's beliefs sociality, and the integrity of the individual.

1458
01:33:38,319 --> 01:33:42,279
The integrity of the individual and the sexual drive. It

1459
01:33:42,359 --> 01:33:45,399
is the instinct for combination and related residues three and

1460
01:33:45,560 --> 01:33:49,800
four that actuate groups on the rise, while the persistence

1461
01:33:49,840 --> 01:33:53,479
of aggregates and the concern about individual interests are most

1462
01:33:53,600 --> 01:33:59,520
characteristic of established elites. Paredo discussed those residues operating within

1463
01:33:59,560 --> 01:34:03,920
Italian society in the context of his social observations. He

1464
01:34:04,039 --> 01:34:08,119
believed that the waning of liberalism, conspicuous in his own country,

1465
01:34:08,560 --> 01:34:12,840
was taking place throughout the industrialized West. The liberal bourgeoisie

1466
01:34:12,880 --> 01:34:15,560
had lost its assertiveness in the face of its insurgent

1467
01:34:15,600 --> 01:34:19,600
working class and of other democratic forces expressing instincts for

1468
01:34:19,680 --> 01:34:24,640
combination and group solidarity. In the First World War, according

1469
01:34:24,640 --> 01:34:28,800
to Pereto, the parliamentary plutocrats had triumphed over the German

1470
01:34:28,880 --> 01:34:33,600
military aristocracy, but had succumbed to the democratic classes, without

1471
01:34:33,640 --> 01:34:35,720
which they could not have hoped to win the war.

1472
01:34:36,399 --> 01:34:39,760
The only force now able to resist a revolutionary socialists,

1473
01:34:39,760 --> 01:34:43,319
Preto maintained, were the nationalists, who drew upon the same

1474
01:34:43,399 --> 01:34:48,960
residues prevalent among the socialists. Socialism and nationalism seemed to

1475
01:34:49,000 --> 01:34:53,600
be related derivations, both resulting from residues leading to collective

1476
01:34:53,680 --> 01:35:00,000
action Among his last published remarks were those on Italian

1477
01:35:00,199 --> 01:35:04,479
constitutional reform, addressed to the new fascist government on September

1478
01:35:04,479 --> 01:35:08,560
twenty fifth, nineteen twenty three. Under democratic ideology runs the

1479
01:35:08,600 --> 01:35:12,000
current of fascism, which overflows at the surface, but beneath

1480
01:35:12,000 --> 01:35:16,920
that runs a countercurrent. Beware lest that countercurrent overflow. Beware

1481
01:35:17,039 --> 01:35:20,800
lest you bestow upon it power to power by trying

1482
01:35:20,840 --> 01:35:24,720
to close it off completely. Bretto believed that the fascists

1483
01:35:24,720 --> 01:35:28,279
and their socialist enemies were harnessing the same democratic enthusiasm

1484
01:35:28,319 --> 01:35:31,520
that in now declining liberal society had given up trying

1485
01:35:31,560 --> 01:35:34,479
to oppose. He felt that the fascists would have to

1486
01:35:34,520 --> 01:35:37,720
coexist with social democracy, but hope they would do so

1487
01:35:37,920 --> 01:35:43,239
on their own terms. Bredo's appeal to some aspects of

1488
01:35:43,319 --> 01:35:45,680
liberal heritage occurred in the face of what he took

1489
01:35:45,800 --> 01:35:52,079
to be an irre irrevocable, irrevocable political change. The march

1490
01:35:52,159 --> 01:35:55,359
towards democracy would continue no matter what, and the decadence

1491
01:35:55,359 --> 01:35:58,640
of the Roman plutocracy was only a portete of the

1492
01:35:59,039 --> 01:36:05,000
destiny tower above our own plutocrats. An activist and redistributionist

1493
01:36:05,039 --> 01:36:09,359
democratic government was about to arrive, and, unlike Lackya generation earlier,

1494
01:36:09,680 --> 01:36:12,880
Parretto had no doubt that a corresponding elite was arising

1495
01:36:12,960 --> 01:36:17,439
to take charge of modern democracy. Political upheavals did not

1496
01:36:17,520 --> 01:36:21,640
transpire randomly, but were the work of purposeful elites who

1497
01:36:21,680 --> 01:36:24,039
took advantage of their consequences.

1498
01:36:25,079 --> 01:36:30,960
Speaker 2: Of course, yeah, I mean, it's just classically theory. Yeah.

1499
01:36:31,119 --> 01:36:33,520
Speaker 1: Faced by the Italian nationalists and the priesthood of the

1500
01:36:33,520 --> 01:36:37,279
social proletariat, Parreto opted for what he considered to be

1501
01:36:37,359 --> 01:36:40,760
the more moderate democratic leadership. In fact, he chose what

1502
01:36:40,840 --> 01:36:43,359
turned out to be less far sighted of the two

1503
01:36:43,439 --> 01:36:46,880
aspiring democratic elites. In the twentieth century, it was the

1504
01:36:46,920 --> 01:36:51,800
exponents of working class democracy, not of democratic nationalism, who

1505
01:36:51,920 --> 01:36:57,680
made the more compelling claim to represent liberal democracy. Significantly,

1506
01:36:57,760 --> 01:37:00,920
social democratic planners took over a form of discourse more

1507
01:37:00,920 --> 01:37:04,800
closely akin to Perettos than to that of Italian fascism

1508
01:37:04,920 --> 01:37:09,520
fascists in Scandinavia, England and the United States. They appeared

1509
01:37:09,520 --> 01:37:14,239
to experimental scientific methods in education and public policy, and

1510
01:37:14,319 --> 01:37:17,560
they presented their takeover of civil society as an act

1511
01:37:17,600 --> 01:37:22,359
of liberating individuals and upholding their rights. But they also

1512
01:37:22,439 --> 01:37:27,600
appealed effectively for several generations to democratic legitimacy, unlike the

1513
01:37:27,640 --> 01:37:31,119
Italian fascists, who were forced to manufacture popular endorsements for

1514
01:37:31,159 --> 01:37:35,119
their plans. It is not surprising that by the end

1515
01:37:35,119 --> 01:37:38,039
of the century, social democratic planning had given rise to

1516
01:37:38,079 --> 01:37:42,720
what Charles Croudhammer calls reactionary liberalism, holding fast to the

1517
01:37:42,720 --> 01:37:48,600
structures and constituencies of the welfare state come What may

1518
01:37:49,199 --> 01:37:51,960
more interesting is the fact that this liberal democracy held

1519
01:37:52,039 --> 01:37:56,479
up for more than half a century in the most

1520
01:37:56,760 --> 01:38:00,880
prosperous and literate areas of the world, with popular approval.

1521
01:38:04,199 --> 01:38:07,720
This result indicates that some European liberals read the political

1522
01:38:07,720 --> 01:38:12,399
future with clearer eyes than others. Despite his demonstrated polemical skills,

1523
01:38:12,640 --> 01:38:17,000
Fitz James Stephens Stephen underestimated J. S. Mill's capacity to

1524
01:38:17,079 --> 01:38:20,720
plan a popular regime. Mill did not intend to leave

1525
01:38:20,760 --> 01:38:23,359
the uninstructed masses to do it as to do as

1526
01:38:23,399 --> 01:38:27,880
they please. Maurice Colling notes that Mills staked his democratic

1527
01:38:27,920 --> 01:38:31,800
hope on a religion of humanity quote, a better religion

1528
01:38:31,880 --> 01:38:34,720
than any of those which are ordinarily called by that

1529
01:38:34,760 --> 01:38:39,000
title unquote, and on a new claricy which would work

1530
01:38:39,079 --> 01:38:44,640
to instill a universal faith in rationality. Unlike the Anglican

1531
01:38:44,680 --> 01:38:50,000
clergy and most of the English professariat. Mills claricy would

1532
01:38:50,079 --> 01:38:54,880
propagate scientific method and political sociology, seen as the true

1533
01:38:54,920 --> 01:38:58,880
science of society. This elite would arise in response to

1534
01:38:59,000 --> 01:39:02,960
social need and to the spread of secular rationalism. It

1535
01:39:02,960 --> 01:39:06,600
would train citizens to emulate its own rationality and bring

1536
01:39:06,640 --> 01:39:10,279
them into fellowship with the advocates of social progress everywhere.

1537
01:39:12,000 --> 01:39:15,359
Speaker 2: Yeah, like he's described, he's describing the rise of like

1538
01:39:15,399 --> 01:39:19,239
the managerial state. You know, the ability for the reasoned

1539
01:39:19,439 --> 01:39:24,319
experts using rationality in their own training to basically create

1540
01:39:24,399 --> 01:39:27,199
something ongoing and something that was more stable.

1541
01:39:30,000 --> 01:39:33,880
Speaker 1: Calling further argues that Mill's devotion to intellectual freedom was

1542
01:39:33,920 --> 01:39:37,720
conditioned by his concern about great minds being crushed by mediocrity.

1543
01:39:38,560 --> 01:39:41,119
Mill was less of a libertarian than someone looking out

1544
01:39:41,199 --> 01:39:45,000
for the highest nature's noblest minds and the advancement of

1545
01:39:45,039 --> 01:39:49,479
scientific truth. Note that Mill favored extensive state intervention in

1546
01:39:49,520 --> 01:39:54,079
the economy and the ongoing redistribution of incomes. He also

1547
01:39:54,239 --> 01:39:56,239
hoped that his own elite would take charge of the

1548
01:39:56,279 --> 01:39:59,720
general culture. It would thereby become possible to teach a

1549
01:40:00,319 --> 01:40:05,279
his own utilitarian ethic, which Mill assumed would bring forth

1550
01:40:05,319 --> 01:40:10,600
a new social morality. All enlightened citizens would eventually accept

1551
01:40:10,600 --> 01:40:14,840
the utilitarian notion that the good is that which maximizes

1552
01:40:14,960 --> 01:40:20,079
general happiness. But as Calling perceives, the highest end that

1553
01:40:20,159 --> 01:40:23,720
men here were imagined to pursue in quest of pleasure

1554
01:40:24,119 --> 01:40:28,520
was whatever Mill and his confreres desired for themselves. They

1555
01:40:28,640 --> 01:40:31,680
never doubted that their own social preferences would come to

1556
01:40:31,760 --> 01:40:38,039
prevail in a democratic age. Clearly, fitz James Stephen and

1557
01:40:38,079 --> 01:40:43,840
his younger brother Leslie Stephen, though both sagacious critics of Mill,

1558
01:40:44,239 --> 01:40:47,760
did not see fully his authoritarian side. They did not

1559
01:40:47,880 --> 01:40:53,479
grasp the inquisitorial the inquisitorial certainty which Calling exposes at

1560
01:40:53,479 --> 01:40:56,760
the core of his method of inquiry. Nor did they

1561
01:40:56,800 --> 01:41:00,680
appreciate the dogmatic way in which Mill generalized about subjects

1562
01:41:00,720 --> 01:41:04,199
he never studied. Mill knew little in detail about the

1563
01:41:04,239 --> 01:41:06,680
history of British society in the two hundred and fifty

1564
01:41:06,720 --> 01:41:10,279
years before he was born. His denigration of its polity

1565
01:41:10,800 --> 01:41:14,520
and religion was based neither on close observation nor on

1566
01:41:14,680 --> 01:41:16,520
exact historical knowledge.

1567
01:41:16,960 --> 01:41:19,920
Speaker 2: Well, if that doesn't describe the current liberal spirit like

1568
01:41:19,960 --> 01:41:22,399
they just, they have no bearing in history of no idea.

1569
01:41:22,399 --> 01:41:26,199
What happened they just have the solutions will of course

1570
01:41:26,199 --> 01:41:29,760
include much worse solutions than Mill ever put forth.

1571
01:41:30,560 --> 01:41:34,079
Speaker 1: Well, and to know what happened, they'd have to understand why.

1572
01:41:34,760 --> 01:41:35,920
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, for sure.

1573
01:41:36,279 --> 01:41:38,600
Speaker 1: And that's one question no one wants to ask anymore.

1574
01:41:38,640 --> 01:41:41,640
It's like, oh, this happened, Well, why did it happen? Well,

1575
01:41:41,680 --> 01:41:42,920
because people are mean.

1576
01:41:43,279 --> 01:41:47,279
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly, Okay, you can't look at specific political dynamics.

1577
01:41:47,439 --> 01:41:51,039
You just have to rely on generalities like that. Yeah.

1578
01:41:51,199 --> 01:41:54,920
Speaker 1: Finally, Mill's liberal critics underestimated the power of his vision

1579
01:41:54,960 --> 01:41:58,159
of a new claricy crafting and directing in democratic order.

1580
01:41:58,720 --> 01:42:01,960
However we may have been his grasp of the past,

1581
01:42:02,239 --> 01:42:05,880
Mill evoked a society of democratic planners which would arise

1582
01:42:05,960 --> 01:42:09,560
after his death. His twisting of historical data and fudging

1583
01:42:09,560 --> 01:42:12,640
of laws of human progress were of less significance than

1584
01:42:12,680 --> 01:42:16,880
Mill's ability to foresee mass democracy at work. No other

1585
01:42:16,960 --> 01:42:22,039
mid nineteenth century figure, including Tokville, exhibited such understanding of

1586
01:42:22,079 --> 01:42:26,239
the dawning democratic age, even if that understanding, in Mill's case,

1587
01:42:26,479 --> 01:42:31,600
was ideologically colored, and only one European liberal, Max Weber,

1588
01:42:32,039 --> 01:42:37,000
revealed comparable insight in plotting the likely course of modern democracy.

1589
01:42:37,720 --> 01:42:41,079
Unlike those liberals, who trembled over the fate of property

1590
01:42:41,359 --> 01:42:46,199
and parliamentary civility. Faber associated democratic life with the aid

1591
01:42:46,399 --> 01:42:51,279
with the iron case of iron cage of bureaucracy. Like Pereto,

1592
01:42:51,359 --> 01:42:56,880
he was willing to entrust democratic government to plebisatory leaders

1593
01:42:57,239 --> 01:43:00,439
not because of the fear of anarchy, but because of

1594
01:43:00,479 --> 01:43:08,600
his dread of bureaucratic despotism yeah very In an off

1595
01:43:08,640 --> 01:43:12,399
quoted letter from Weber to the sociologist of elites, Robert Michelle's,

1596
01:43:12,640 --> 01:43:15,560
at the end of the First World War, Weber questions

1597
01:43:15,600 --> 01:43:19,560
the intelligence or honesty of those who exalt the will

1598
01:43:19,600 --> 01:43:23,079
of the people. He goes on to admit that genuine

1599
01:43:23,119 --> 01:43:25,640
wills of the people have ceased to exist. For me,

1600
01:43:26,199 --> 01:43:30,399
they are fictitious. All ideas aiming at abolishing the dominance

1601
01:43:30,439 --> 01:43:34,680
of man over man are utopian. In nineteen eighteen, Weber

1602
01:43:34,760 --> 01:43:39,880
observed even more incisively, in large states everywhere, modern democracy

1603
01:43:39,960 --> 01:43:44,359
is becoming a bureaucratized democracy. And it must be so,

1604
01:43:44,520 --> 01:43:47,920
for it is replacing the aristocratic or other titular for

1605
01:43:48,279 --> 01:43:53,199
officials by a paid civil service. It is the same everywhere.

1606
01:43:53,520 --> 01:43:56,600
It is the same within parties too. It is inevitable,

1607
01:43:56,920 --> 01:43:59,880
despite the attempt by Weber's critics to attribute such are

1608
01:44:00,119 --> 01:44:04,600
marks to the anemia of German liberalism. What they indicate

1609
01:44:04,760 --> 01:44:08,720
is Weber's deep perception of a secular trend, the intertwining

1610
01:44:08,760 --> 01:44:12,760
of mass democracy and public administration as the shape of

1611
01:44:12,800 --> 01:44:13,520
things to come.

1612
01:44:14,039 --> 01:44:18,399
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is such a powerful narrative. I mean, the

1613
01:44:18,600 --> 01:44:24,720
entire ethos of conservative Incorporated and the liberal establishment is

1614
01:44:24,760 --> 01:44:30,920
that America represents like the triumph of individual freedom. And

1615
01:44:31,199 --> 01:44:33,920
I think Weber is much more perceptive to the fact

1616
01:44:34,039 --> 01:44:36,680
that actually what it represents is the triumph of the

1617
01:44:36,720 --> 01:44:40,640
managerial state, the triumph of the administration, the triumph of

1618
01:44:41,720 --> 01:44:45,880
bureaucratized or what you know, bureaucrats basically just running people's

1619
01:44:45,920 --> 01:44:48,000
life and trying to arrange the world in the way

1620
01:44:48,000 --> 01:44:52,079
that they see fit. And that's exactly this spawn. This

1621
01:44:52,159 --> 01:44:56,279
administrative state that Weber had his sits on, basically spawned

1622
01:44:56,319 --> 01:44:58,720
the multiculturalism in which we exist. We don't exist in

1623
01:44:58,760 --> 01:45:01,359
a world of increased individ dual freedom. We exist in

1624
01:45:01,439 --> 01:45:05,680
the world of mandated cultural degradation. You know, That's what

1625
01:45:05,720 --> 01:45:09,439
we existed, and it's and it's handed down, it's politically derived.

1626
01:45:09,840 --> 01:45:12,319
I mean, I think the people that say, like Aaron

1627
01:45:12,399 --> 01:45:14,920
McIntyre and others who say that culture is downstream from

1628
01:45:14,960 --> 01:45:17,880
politics recognize the fact that the administrative state, the thing

1629
01:45:17,920 --> 01:45:22,479
that Max Weber learned about, is characteristic of the American

1630
01:45:22,960 --> 01:45:27,319
function in world affairs. You know, everything, our culture, everything

1631
01:45:27,359 --> 01:45:30,319
is handed down from politics. Everything is handed down from above,

1632
01:45:30,640 --> 01:45:36,000
and it comes from not individual freedom, but from breureaucracy. Yeah.

1633
01:45:36,039 --> 01:45:39,119
Speaker 1: And in order it has to be that way if

1634
01:45:39,119 --> 01:45:42,479
you understand that the managerial state, it's one purpose is

1635
01:45:42,479 --> 01:45:46,239
to perpetuate itself. It has to control everything, it has

1636
01:45:46,319 --> 01:45:48,680
to control the culture, it has to guide everything.

1637
01:45:49,680 --> 01:45:49,880
Speaker 2: Yeah.

1638
01:45:50,439 --> 01:45:53,399
Speaker 1: Yeah, and that's why the you know, was Jonathan Bowden

1639
01:45:53,439 --> 01:45:55,960
famously saying, the only way you change this is to

1640
01:45:56,039 --> 01:45:56,840
clear it all out.

1641
01:45:57,399 --> 01:46:01,399
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So I think I think the overall

1642
01:46:01,479 --> 01:46:06,880
lesson here for Paul is that liberalism and democracy are

1643
01:46:06,920 --> 01:46:11,760
not the same, but their unity is the particular characteristic

1644
01:46:11,880 --> 01:46:15,359
of American totalitarianism. The attempt at at unifying these two

1645
01:46:15,359 --> 01:46:18,920
themes has created an ideological hegemony that people don't know

1646
01:46:18,920 --> 01:46:21,880
how to oppose, that the dissident right is only now

1647
01:46:21,920 --> 01:46:25,039
figuring out how to oppose. But this is this is

1648
01:46:25,039 --> 01:46:27,520
one of the sacred caws of the American ideology is

1649
01:46:27,560 --> 01:46:30,680
the union of democracy and liberalism.

1650
01:46:31,079 --> 01:46:33,399
Speaker 1: And the real genius of it is the fact that

1651
01:46:33,479 --> 01:46:38,439
you you have this left right paradigm, this democrat Republican paradigm,

1652
01:46:38,560 --> 01:46:41,880
let's call it, where they do not realize that they're

1653
01:46:41,920 --> 01:46:46,079
both operating within the same system, and that all conservatives

1654
01:46:46,199 --> 01:46:52,119
are working to do is to conserve this system exactly. Yep.

1655
01:46:52,199 --> 01:46:55,199
If they're if they're working to concern to keep any

1656
01:46:55,239 --> 01:46:59,319
of it, they're perpetuating the system. So there's a certain

1657
01:46:59,359 --> 01:47:02,359
genius to its design and that you have if you

1658
01:47:02,439 --> 01:47:05,359
only have two factions that are that are allowed to

1659
01:47:05,800 --> 01:47:10,720
genuinely fight within it, they're both working to they're both

1660
01:47:10,720 --> 01:47:12,000
working to keep the system going.

1661
01:47:12,720 --> 01:47:15,880
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is why like people, I mean people as

1662
01:47:15,920 --> 01:47:17,880
they're becoming more radicalized on the right, you know, the

1663
01:47:18,000 --> 01:47:22,279
recognizing that there's something more substantial needs to be done.

1664
01:47:22,279 --> 01:47:25,000
But I've never found I've never found the solution really

1665
01:47:25,000 --> 01:47:27,880
in Republican politics, you know, Republican party politics. I mean,

1666
01:47:28,039 --> 01:47:31,600
sometimes it's fun, but really that's not where change has

1667
01:47:31,640 --> 01:47:35,239
to happen. Because both of these parties are reinforcement mechanisms

1668
01:47:35,279 --> 01:47:38,399
for this regime, and it have to be It's built

1669
01:47:38,399 --> 01:47:40,640
into the cake like that, you have to clear it out.

1670
01:47:41,159 --> 01:47:44,800
Speaker 1: Yep. So all right, man, promote whatever you want. Thank

1671
01:47:44,840 --> 01:47:46,760
you well, first of all, thank you for this. This

1672
01:47:46,920 --> 01:47:48,840
is great and I didn't know it was going to

1673
01:47:48,880 --> 01:47:50,600
go this long, but thank you for.

1674
01:47:50,920 --> 01:47:54,359
Speaker 2: Yeah, Paul is such a dense a dense writer, so's

1675
01:47:54,399 --> 01:47:57,560
it's really hard to get through sometimes. But at contramordor

1676
01:47:57,720 --> 01:48:01,159
is my Twitter and then my name CJ dot sub stack.

1677
01:48:01,279 --> 01:48:03,319
You can you can find me there, and that's basically.

1678
01:48:03,399 --> 01:48:06,319
I also do the Chronicles magazine, which is small now

1679
01:48:06,359 --> 01:48:08,399
and we're making some changes for next year, so that'll

1680
01:48:08,439 --> 01:48:08,880
be fun.

1681
01:48:09,000 --> 01:48:11,439
Speaker 1: We always have a fose magazine podcasts, right yeah.

1682
01:48:11,439 --> 01:48:14,520
Speaker 2: Chronicles magazine podcasts, and so we're doing some more stuff

1683
01:48:14,560 --> 01:48:16,640
next year for that, but in anticipation of that, you

1684
01:48:16,640 --> 01:48:18,479
can always check it out on YouTube, et cetera.

1685
01:48:19,159 --> 01:48:20,520
Speaker 1: All right, I'll link to it.

1686
01:48:20,800 --> 01:48:23,000
Speaker 2: Thanks a lot, I appreciate you