1
00:00:01,480 --> 00:00:05,200
Speaker 1: Want to welcome everyone back to the Pekanana Show. Return

2
00:00:05,240 --> 00:00:08,199
into the show. See Jangle, How are you doing, CJ

3
00:00:09,039 --> 00:00:13,519
doing good? Thanks Pete, thank you for coming and agreeing

4
00:00:13,560 --> 00:00:16,000
to do a reading with me. Now, this is a

5
00:00:16,039 --> 00:00:17,879
longer chapter. I don't know that we're going to get

6
00:00:17,920 --> 00:00:21,039
through the whole chapter, but I think this is a

7
00:00:21,120 --> 00:00:27,640
really important chapter in Paul Gottfried's book After Liberalism. So

8
00:00:28,519 --> 00:00:31,399
we were just before we started recording talking about Paul Godfreed.

9
00:00:31,440 --> 00:00:33,840
You actually just finished doing a live stream with him.

10
00:00:35,159 --> 00:00:37,359
Talk a little bit about this book and why you

11
00:00:37,679 --> 00:00:39,719
were eager to read from it.

12
00:00:40,320 --> 00:00:45,039
Speaker 2: Well, anything Paul's written I take very seriously. Paul's a

13
00:00:45,119 --> 00:00:47,479
very academic writer. You know, like a lot of his

14
00:00:47,520 --> 00:00:51,600
commentary and stuff. It's very popular, but he's a very

15
00:00:51,640 --> 00:00:54,000
dense academic writer. And the thing about Paul is he

16
00:00:54,039 --> 00:00:57,920
has a very wide grasp on all the various contributions,

17
00:00:58,320 --> 00:01:00,280
and he has the ability to kind of sift through

18
00:01:00,320 --> 00:01:04,400
all the commentary over the centuries and recognize which sources

19
00:01:04,400 --> 00:01:07,920
have been the most transformative. You know, which ones you

20
00:01:08,000 --> 00:01:10,760
have to talk about. You can't talk about liberalism in

21
00:01:10,799 --> 00:01:13,439
the twentieth century without talking about you know, John Dewey

22
00:01:13,519 --> 00:01:15,359
or John Gray or people like that. So a lot

23
00:01:15,359 --> 00:01:20,239
of these more academic aspect of things he captures very well.

24
00:01:20,560 --> 00:01:22,840
Even even like a lot of us on the dissident right,

25
00:01:22,920 --> 00:01:25,760
you know, we'll read people, but we don't. Actually he's

26
00:01:25,799 --> 00:01:29,400
he's much more involved in the the the trajectory of

27
00:01:29,480 --> 00:01:31,760
the academy, you know, over the over the years, over

28
00:01:31,760 --> 00:01:35,079
the centuries. So I think Paul is really good if

29
00:01:35,120 --> 00:01:38,280
you need to get a sense of where the like

30
00:01:38,359 --> 00:01:41,640
the the the basics of officialdom came from. So in

31
00:01:41,760 --> 00:01:44,920
terms of this book, after Liberalism, you know, he actually

32
00:01:45,000 --> 00:01:47,519
discusses this in chapter one. It's impossible to define. We

33
00:01:47,519 --> 00:01:49,879
don't know what liberalism is. It's it's been used in

34
00:01:49,920 --> 00:01:52,799
so many different contexts and so many different frameworks that

35
00:01:52,879 --> 00:01:54,519
it's hard really to pin it down. And you can't

36
00:01:54,560 --> 00:01:56,319
pin it down. You have to define it every time

37
00:01:56,359 --> 00:01:58,680
you're going to address it. That's important to remember and

38
00:01:58,760 --> 00:02:01,680
keep in mind when talking about people like James Lindsay,

39
00:02:01,959 --> 00:02:04,640
you know, other pro classical liberals out there. We need

40
00:02:04,680 --> 00:02:08,520
to keep in mind that liberalism is incredibly difficult to

41
00:02:08,599 --> 00:02:12,680
define because of its historical path. But it's also sort

42
00:02:12,680 --> 00:02:16,319
of one of those hegemonic phrases that you just assume

43
00:02:16,400 --> 00:02:19,280
that you know because it's just part of our political discourse.

44
00:02:20,039 --> 00:02:21,840
But he points out that it's a lot more difficult

45
00:02:21,879 --> 00:02:24,479
than that, so we'll probably get into some specifics related

46
00:02:24,560 --> 00:02:28,039
to that, but go ahead. That's my take on the

47
00:02:28,280 --> 00:02:29,120
overall cool.

48
00:02:29,159 --> 00:02:32,199
Speaker 1: All right, Well let me let me share the screen

49
00:02:32,319 --> 00:02:39,039
up here, and yeah, there we go. Very cool. All right,

50
00:02:39,120 --> 00:02:44,080
So we're hopping over chapter one to chapter two, which

51
00:02:44,159 --> 00:02:47,360
is liberalism versus democracy, and I think this is really

52
00:02:47,360 --> 00:02:49,000
where you start getting into the meat of it. And

53
00:02:49,039 --> 00:02:50,800
he also does a really good job of hitting some

54
00:02:51,039 --> 00:02:54,599
history here. So if you've heard me do readings before,

55
00:02:54,800 --> 00:02:56,800
stop me at any time to come in on anything,

56
00:02:56,840 --> 00:02:59,400
even if it's mid sentence. Yep, I think the only

57
00:02:59,439 --> 00:03:01,439
person who's there done that to me as AA, but

58
00:03:02,039 --> 00:03:03,240
I don't mind it at all.

59
00:03:03,280 --> 00:03:05,120
Speaker 2: So yeah, okay, I'll see what I can do.

60
00:03:05,240 --> 00:03:11,560
Speaker 1: All right. Liberalism versus democracy liberal and democratic mentalities a

61
00:03:11,639 --> 00:03:13,719
process of your attention at the turn of the century

62
00:03:13,719 --> 00:03:16,680
and even earlier, was the movement from a bourgeois liberal

63
00:03:16,800 --> 00:03:20,159
into a mass democratic society. Not all of those who

64
00:03:20,199 --> 00:03:23,520
observed this process made the same judgments about it. Some,

65
00:03:23,599 --> 00:03:27,879
including the European socialists and the founding generation of American

66
00:03:27,919 --> 00:03:33,599
social planners welcomed democratization. Others, such as Max Weber Max

67
00:03:33,639 --> 00:03:39,039
Weber sorry, considered it to be an inevitable outcome of capitalism, technology,

68
00:03:39,400 --> 00:03:43,639
and the spread of the electoral franchise. Still others, typified

69
00:03:43,680 --> 00:03:47,560
by Sir James Fitzjames Stephen eighteen ninety two to eighteen

70
00:03:47,599 --> 00:03:51,319
ninety four, prominent eighteen twenty nine to eighteen ninety four,

71
00:03:51,439 --> 00:03:55,639
pardon me, prominent jurist and a decidedly anti egalitarian liberal,

72
00:03:56,000 --> 00:04:01,439
protested that unseemingly haste. Protested the un seemingly haste with

73
00:04:01,479 --> 00:04:04,840
which John Stuart Mill and his friends greeted the new

74
00:04:04,840 --> 00:04:08,840
democratic age, quoting the waters are out and no human

75
00:04:08,879 --> 00:04:11,400
force can turn them back. But I do not see

76
00:04:11,439 --> 00:04:14,280
why as we go with the stream, we need saying

77
00:04:14,319 --> 00:04:16,000
hallelujah to the river God.

78
00:04:16,279 --> 00:04:19,120
Speaker 2: Yeah, let's let's pause right there. I mean, I think

79
00:04:19,160 --> 00:04:21,439
the idea I mean, for a lot of people, probably

80
00:04:21,480 --> 00:04:24,040
not new to your audience, but the idea that there

81
00:04:24,160 --> 00:04:28,519
is this difference between democracy and liberalism, I think is

82
00:04:28,959 --> 00:04:30,519
new to a lot of people. I mean, we the

83
00:04:30,560 --> 00:04:34,199
phrase itself liberal democracy or democratic liberalism. The two go

84
00:04:34,319 --> 00:04:36,759
hand in hand to so many people, but like look

85
00:04:36,839 --> 00:04:39,120
at look at people like Victor or Bond, and how

86
00:04:39,160 --> 00:04:43,120
serious he is about the democratic interests of his own

87
00:04:43,120 --> 00:04:46,800
people require him to be illiberal. So these two don't

88
00:04:46,839 --> 00:04:48,680
go hand in hand. And we'll get I think a

89
00:04:48,680 --> 00:04:51,279
little bit more into the differences between liberalism, but I

90
00:04:51,319 --> 00:04:53,480
think that right there is really important. A lot of

91
00:04:54,040 --> 00:04:56,839
a lot of the original Like classical liberals in England

92
00:04:56,879 --> 00:04:59,720
were very anti democratic. They didn't trust this spirit of

93
00:04:59,720 --> 00:05:04,439
the masth and especially the ability of the new elite,

94
00:05:04,560 --> 00:05:10,360
the merchant class, the capitalists to basically use democracy as

95
00:05:10,399 --> 00:05:13,959
a weapon for their own pursuit of material interests.

96
00:05:14,680 --> 00:05:19,399
Speaker 1: It was obvious to them, where a lot of people

97
00:05:19,439 --> 00:05:21,240
now are just waking up to the fact that it

98
00:05:21,279 --> 00:05:24,720
can be used as a weapon, where back then many

99
00:05:24,800 --> 00:05:29,839
had already seen it or foresaw it. The tension between

100
00:05:29,839 --> 00:05:33,199
liberalism and a successor ideology in between the social classes

101
00:05:33,240 --> 00:05:37,920
embodying those ideas provides a recurrent theme in nineteenth century

102
00:05:37,920 --> 00:05:43,040
political debate. Francois Gusseau seventeen eighty seven eighteen seventy four,

103
00:05:43,279 --> 00:05:47,319
the Huguenot Prime minister under Frances Liberal July monarchy, and

104
00:05:47,360 --> 00:05:50,720
a distinguished historian of England considered democracy to be as

105
00:05:50,800 --> 00:05:55,920
much of a curse as monarchical absolutism. As French Prime

106
00:05:55,920 --> 00:06:00,399
minister in the eighteen forties, Guseeau fought doggedly against the

107
00:06:00,439 --> 00:06:04,680
extension of the limited franchise, the sins from property tax

108
00:06:04,720 --> 00:06:06,639
payers to other French citizens.

109
00:06:06,800 --> 00:06:08,759
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean that, I mean that right there is

110
00:06:08,959 --> 00:06:11,399
important too, Like when we think of democracy, and I

111
00:06:11,399 --> 00:06:13,000
know it's kind of an overrated point. A lot of

112
00:06:13,000 --> 00:06:16,439
people make fun of, you know, people distinguishing in American

113
00:06:16,759 --> 00:06:21,480
you know government between like republican and democracy and stuff,

114
00:06:21,519 --> 00:06:24,720
and sometimes that that is like overstated, but there is

115
00:06:24,839 --> 00:06:27,560
a truth to the fact that mass democracy in the

116
00:06:27,560 --> 00:06:31,160
twentieth century sort of the American twentieth century model is

117
00:06:31,279 --> 00:06:35,439
not the original republican instinct. In fact, you know, the

118
00:06:35,439 --> 00:06:39,839
original Republican quote unquote democratic instinct was very much anti

119
00:06:40,199 --> 00:06:43,600
mass democracy. They did not trust the extension of the

120
00:06:43,600 --> 00:06:46,040
the What he means by the franchise is the ability

121
00:06:46,079 --> 00:06:48,879
for everybody to vote regardless of their class, regardless of

122
00:06:48,879 --> 00:06:52,319
their property status, their race, their sex, et cetera. So

123
00:06:53,079 --> 00:06:58,079
the original you know, trailblazers of liberalism were definitely not

124
00:06:58,439 --> 00:07:00,399
pro master Mindocricy.

125
00:07:02,600 --> 00:07:05,759
Speaker 1: He distinguished sharply in his speeches and political tracts between

126
00:07:05,759 --> 00:07:08,759
those civil rights suitable for all citizens, such as freedom

127
00:07:08,800 --> 00:07:11,720
of worship and the vote. By means of the second,

128
00:07:11,839 --> 00:07:19,000
Gizo maintained the lower class could destabilize society radically, redistributed, redistributing,

129
00:07:19,720 --> 00:07:25,360
redistributing pop property, and bringing resourceful demagogues to power. He

130
00:07:25,439 --> 00:07:31,480
believed the bourgeoisie formed a class capasitid those who would

131
00:07:31,480 --> 00:07:34,920
be guided by reason and their stake in society in

132
00:07:35,000 --> 00:07:41,639
directing the actions of government. Indeed, yeah, that's guided by reason,

133
00:07:43,439 --> 00:07:48,360
because I've studied you know, when you study objectivism at all,

134
00:07:49,480 --> 00:07:52,519
whatever you see that like those three words together, you

135
00:07:52,600 --> 00:07:56,079
immediately think it jumps to one thing.

136
00:07:56,639 --> 00:08:00,399
Speaker 2: Right. It's also I mean, this is this is sort

137
00:08:00,439 --> 00:08:04,879
of like it is a contribution of like Enlightenment thinking,

138
00:08:05,480 --> 00:08:09,519
and it affects objectivism obviously, but it also permeates into libertarianism,

139
00:08:09,879 --> 00:08:14,040
even certain trends of like Marxism and certain certain aspects

140
00:08:14,079 --> 00:08:18,920
of socialism. Just the idea that we can use reason,

141
00:08:19,160 --> 00:08:22,160
utilize it and guide to society, you know, by our

142
00:08:22,199 --> 00:08:26,639
own expertise, is definitely an enlightenment, you know, holdover.

143
00:08:27,160 --> 00:08:31,759
Speaker 1: Yes. Indeed, Griseeau recommended the idea of creating a state

144
00:08:31,800 --> 00:08:36,399
through representation which would fully reflect the values of bourgeois

145
00:08:36,519 --> 00:08:42,759
electoral law aristocracy. Although in eighteen thirty one he fought

146
00:08:42,799 --> 00:08:46,159
to give representation to government functionaries and other professionals who

147
00:08:46,159 --> 00:08:51,559
paid lower taxes than required for franchise eligibility, he nonetheless

148
00:08:51,759 --> 00:08:54,919
argued for the special suitability of the upper middle class

149
00:08:54,919 --> 00:09:01,519
for political participation. Only that class combined wealth with only

150
00:09:01,600 --> 00:09:04,759
that class combined wealth with formed intelligence.

151
00:09:05,080 --> 00:09:08,159
Speaker 2: In other words, the original liberalism was not at all

152
00:09:08,200 --> 00:09:11,799
interested in, you know, handing a power over to every

153
00:09:12,919 --> 00:09:17,919
you know, ghetto pop culture, you know, subsumed consumer right.

154
00:09:18,000 --> 00:09:21,039
That was never the goal of liberalism. Much too probably

155
00:09:21,080 --> 00:09:24,480
the frustration of people like James Lindsay who think in

156
00:09:24,559 --> 00:09:28,840
these absolutist individualist terms. You know, these original liberals they

157
00:09:28,879 --> 00:09:32,559
never would have been interested in, you know, sharing political

158
00:09:32,600 --> 00:09:36,480
power with the proletariat or the you know, the cultural

159
00:09:36,759 --> 00:09:37,879
culturally deranged.

160
00:09:38,600 --> 00:09:42,240
Speaker 1: Yeah, they certainly wouldn't be championing the Civil Rights Act.

161
00:09:42,480 --> 00:09:44,919
Speaker 2: I mean, if you're if you're confused about your own

162
00:09:44,960 --> 00:09:47,159
gender and you want to start chopping yourself to bits,

163
00:09:47,360 --> 00:09:48,559
maybe you shouldn't have the vote.

164
00:09:49,159 --> 00:09:54,639
Speaker 1: Yeah. The English Juran jurist William Lackey, who admired Gizo,

165
00:09:55,039 --> 00:09:58,519
devoted his long polemical work Democracy and Liberty eighteen ninety

166
00:09:58,519 --> 00:10:02,080
six to the pop to the polarity between liberal order

167
00:10:02,159 --> 00:10:06,799
and democratic equality. Surveying England's parliamentary history in the second

168
00:10:06,840 --> 00:10:11,320
half of the nineteenth century, Lecky wrote Lericky worried that

169
00:10:11,480 --> 00:10:16,080
a universal franchise was irreversibly changing both English society and

170
00:10:16,120 --> 00:10:20,679
the English state. Not surprisingly, his book appeared at a

171
00:10:20,720 --> 00:10:24,279
time when English socialism was becoming a political power, and

172
00:10:24,360 --> 00:10:27,960
Leaky devotes more than one hundred and forty pages to

173
00:10:28,120 --> 00:10:33,320
analyzing the new radicalism. In eighteen ninety three, the Independent

174
00:10:33,399 --> 00:10:36,480
Labor Party officially came into existence in the Yorkshire town

175
00:10:36,519 --> 00:10:40,159
of Bradford. Since the elections of eighteen seventy four, however,

176
00:10:40,440 --> 00:10:43,840
avout socialists had sat in the British Parliament and socialist

177
00:10:43,960 --> 00:10:47,679
labor unions had been around since the eighteen fifties, to

178
00:10:47,720 --> 00:10:51,440
the consternation of German liberals. German socialists meeting in the

179
00:10:51,480 --> 00:10:56,200
Saxon town of Gotha, had drafted a program in eighteen

180
00:10:56,320 --> 00:10:59,679
seventy six calling for public ownership of the means of production.

181
00:11:00,559 --> 00:11:05,440
The Gotha Socialists also demanded an entire battery of social

182
00:11:05,480 --> 00:11:09,279
programs to be introduced by a properly democratized German state.

183
00:11:11,159 --> 00:11:15,799
In France, the Revolutionary Socialists, this is all right, here

184
00:11:15,799 --> 00:11:20,759
goes one. Jules Gazzet sat at the sat in the

185
00:11:20,840 --> 00:11:23,639
Chamber of Deputies from eighteen ninety three on, and as

186
00:11:23,720 --> 00:11:27,639
like he as he reminded us these days in the Catechism,

187
00:11:27,679 --> 00:11:32,679
socialist presents the family as an odious form of property,

188
00:11:33,120 --> 00:11:37,559
one destined to give way to a multiplicity of sexual

189
00:11:37,600 --> 00:11:39,759
relations for men and women alike.

190
00:11:40,480 --> 00:11:42,919
Speaker 2: Yeah, I think one of the points here is something

191
00:11:42,919 --> 00:11:47,240
that we all recognize now. At the origin of these

192
00:11:47,360 --> 00:11:53,080
liberal or democratic movements, you know, there was a difference

193
00:11:53,120 --> 00:11:55,480
between them. They didn't stem from the same impulse, I

194
00:11:55,480 --> 00:11:57,399
guess is what I want to say here that you

195
00:11:57,440 --> 00:11:59,879
know that came America was sort of the first two

196
00:12:00,120 --> 00:12:02,480
nite these concepts in its own, you know, for his

197
00:12:02,559 --> 00:12:06,039
own purposes. But I think Paul's point here is throughout

198
00:12:06,039 --> 00:12:09,519
the Western European world, Germany, France, England, et cetera, these

199
00:12:09,519 --> 00:12:10,919
were very different instincts.

200
00:12:12,039 --> 00:12:15,840
Speaker 1: Yeah, all right, One way to look at such social

201
00:12:15,919 --> 00:12:19,919
quarrels is to observe how dated they are. These battles

202
00:12:19,919 --> 00:12:25,159
were supposedly, supposedly waged between reactionary and democratic liberals. Those

203
00:12:25,240 --> 00:12:28,120
liberals who were just in humanitarian, it has been argued,

204
00:12:28,320 --> 00:12:31,679
went with changing times, while others who were not, such

205
00:12:31,679 --> 00:12:36,559
as DiFranco, Italian economists and socialist Elvedo Pereto, fell into

206
00:12:36,679 --> 00:12:41,360
bad company and even sometimes into fascism. Implicit in such

207
00:12:41,360 --> 00:12:44,000
a view is the distinction that more and more modern

208
00:12:44,039 --> 00:12:47,279
liberals have drawn throughout the twentieth century between themselves and

209
00:12:47,360 --> 00:12:50,639
those they have replaced. It is purely it is a

210
00:12:50,759 --> 00:12:55,240
purely strategic stance that minimizes the reality of past conflicts.

211
00:12:55,840 --> 00:12:59,879
Like the mainstream, Like the mainstream new deal liberal his

212
00:13:00,039 --> 00:13:04,720
storiography in post war America, the liberal historical view stresses

213
00:13:04,759 --> 00:13:08,039
the natural progression of the progression of things by which

214
00:13:08,120 --> 00:13:10,720
the new liberals took over from the old.

215
00:13:11,039 --> 00:13:13,360
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is this is important because like a lot

216
00:13:13,399 --> 00:13:15,519
of people who have this, I mean, this is this

217
00:13:15,559 --> 00:13:18,759
is classic like James Lindsay type stuff, Like everything is

218
00:13:18,879 --> 00:13:22,120
kind of reaching it's its own conclusion. It's been on

219
00:13:22,200 --> 00:13:25,360
too trajectory for you know, hundreds of years, and in fact,

220
00:13:25,360 --> 00:13:28,000
this was actually a sort of mentality that Murray Rothbard

221
00:13:28,039 --> 00:13:31,120
had early on and not later Murray Rothbart who recognized

222
00:13:31,759 --> 00:13:34,559
the function of the power elite, but earlyer Murray Rothbart

223
00:13:34,600 --> 00:13:36,879
he saw, like if you read his essay you know,

224
00:13:36,960 --> 00:13:40,480
left right in the Prospects of Liberty, it's all this, yeah,

225
00:13:40,519 --> 00:13:43,399
it's all this, like this single merit meta narrative. It's

226
00:13:43,399 --> 00:13:46,360
all like coming into fruition. Everything's improving over time. He

227
00:13:46,519 --> 00:13:49,639
definitely drops that at the end of his life when

228
00:13:49,639 --> 00:13:52,840
he when he talks about there's an essay on you know,

229
00:13:52,879 --> 00:13:57,279
Mesis' role or whatever, you know, within Austrian economics, but

230
00:13:57,320 --> 00:13:59,279
he definitely drops this. But the point is that a

231
00:13:59,279 --> 00:14:02,039
lot of people in the twentieth century America do have

232
00:14:02,080 --> 00:14:06,120
this mentality where, you know, some people took the wrong path,

233
00:14:06,159 --> 00:14:09,360
but this has been the liberal projects has been slowly improving,

234
00:14:09,759 --> 00:14:12,480
you know, over time. And Gottfried's saying that that actually,

235
00:14:12,799 --> 00:14:16,440
and this is one thing that Gottfried is really I

236
00:14:16,480 --> 00:14:18,519
wouldn't say it's unique to him, but it's something that

237
00:14:18,559 --> 00:14:22,360
he really is unique in terms of like overall traditionalist

238
00:14:22,360 --> 00:14:25,759
conservatives like who have this meta narrative story of things.

239
00:14:26,039 --> 00:14:31,519
He does emphasize discontinuity. Paul Goffried always recognizes that the

240
00:14:31,559 --> 00:14:35,000
New Deal replaced something before it, and the you know

241
00:14:35,039 --> 00:14:37,960
the point, the post nineteen sixties left replaced the New

242
00:14:38,000 --> 00:14:41,399
Deal left, and like there's all these discontinuities. He doesn't

243
00:14:41,399 --> 00:14:45,360
see things in terms of this overall continuity. That's something

244
00:14:45,360 --> 00:14:48,559
that Paul always emphasizes that every historical epoch is unique

245
00:14:48,600 --> 00:14:49,120
to itself.

246
00:14:50,039 --> 00:14:56,399
Speaker 1: Yeah, you're gonna just did an episode on the same thing.

247
00:14:56,480 --> 00:15:00,679
Epochs how things change how, but it seems like it

248
00:15:00,720 --> 00:15:01,559
goes in cycles.

249
00:15:01,879 --> 00:15:05,120
Speaker 2: Yeah, but the current twentieth century, like people who see

250
00:15:05,159 --> 00:15:07,720
America as sort of like the fruition of all the

251
00:15:07,759 --> 00:15:11,399
best aspects of Western history and it's all culminated into America.

252
00:15:11,720 --> 00:15:15,080
They need the overall narrative thing because every age has

253
00:15:15,120 --> 00:15:16,799
to be like an improvement and it has to be

254
00:15:16,840 --> 00:15:19,720
this organic process, and America is sort of at the top,

255
00:15:19,840 --> 00:15:23,399
like the post war America is like the ultimate end

256
00:15:23,399 --> 00:15:25,240
of history. It's the end of man. Is the best

257
00:15:25,480 --> 00:15:28,919
and most complete political system in terms of justice and

258
00:15:28,960 --> 00:15:32,679
wealth and the equality and all these things. Whereas Gottfried says,

259
00:15:33,200 --> 00:15:35,679
you know, no, he denies, he denies the continuity there.

260
00:15:35,679 --> 00:15:38,519
He says, what we see in liberal democracy in our

261
00:15:38,559 --> 00:15:43,440
age is basically a repudiation of you know, historical epochs.

262
00:15:43,759 --> 00:15:47,360
Speaker 1: Yeah. Anyone who looks at the what the United States

263
00:15:47,399 --> 00:15:51,240
has become and says, oh, this is this is dizen

264
00:15:51,320 --> 00:15:57,000
ith' you're insane. You're insane. Yeah, I mean, it's just

265
00:15:57,480 --> 00:16:01,519
it's brainwashing. Right, let's move on. It is possible to

266
00:16:01,600 --> 00:16:06,080
perceive continuity in the movement from a bourgeois liberal society

267
00:16:06,120 --> 00:16:10,039
into a more democratic one, but that continuity is not

268
00:16:10,159 --> 00:16:14,039
the same as direct continuation, as was noted by Max Weber,

269
00:16:14,320 --> 00:16:19,159
Joseph Schumpeter, and other early twentieth century social commentators. Rather,

270
00:16:19,440 --> 00:16:22,000
we are dealing here with a series of points leading

271
00:16:22,039 --> 00:16:26,000
from a from a bourgeois into a post bourgeois bourgeois

272
00:16:26,960 --> 00:16:30,799
is bourgeois age, that is, with a process of displacement

273
00:16:30,879 --> 00:16:34,840
that went on for several generations. Thus, Weber focused on

274
00:16:35,639 --> 00:16:41,120
rational rationalization in analyzing the movement from a bourgeois capitalist

275
00:16:41,399 --> 00:16:46,799
towards a bureaucratized socialist society. A liberal bourgeois world created

276
00:16:46,840 --> 00:16:52,320
the secularist foundations and economic organization necessary for socialist rule.

277
00:16:52,960 --> 00:16:58,000
Another pessimistic social commentator with liberal leadings, Joseph Schumpeter believed

278
00:16:58,120 --> 00:17:01,639
that the middle class concept of readom encouraged the expression

279
00:17:01,720 --> 00:17:06,839
of critical opposition. This tolerance undermined the belief system of

280
00:17:06,880 --> 00:17:11,359
an older liberal society and prepared the way for social democracy.

281
00:17:11,759 --> 00:17:13,880
Speaker 2: Yeah. So I think this is important because here we

282
00:17:13,960 --> 00:17:16,759
see and Goffrey is going to get into this more,

283
00:17:16,759 --> 00:17:18,720
I think, and I think he also does later in

284
00:17:18,759 --> 00:17:21,240
the book. But we always have to keep in mind

285
00:17:21,240 --> 00:17:24,000
that there's a big difference between what you might call

286
00:17:24,079 --> 00:17:30,519
historicist liberalism and universalist liberalism. Historicist liberalism was the instinct

287
00:17:31,119 --> 00:17:35,799
that that labeled itself liberalism, but within the context of

288
00:17:35,839 --> 00:17:40,359
a certain political paradigm. And so the English, the English liberals,

289
00:17:41,079 --> 00:17:45,640
you know, saw themselves basically as pursuing new avenues of

290
00:17:46,039 --> 00:17:48,799
freedom within the context of their own history, within the

291
00:17:48,799 --> 00:17:52,480
context of their own political uh, you know, horizons. Whereas

292
00:17:52,640 --> 00:17:54,640
and that's not the mentality that a lot of like

293
00:17:54,720 --> 00:17:57,960
objectivists on you know, I Randians, but also like some

294
00:17:58,119 --> 00:18:01,400
libertarians and James Lindsay and other advocates of what they

295
00:18:01,440 --> 00:18:04,960
call classical liberalism, they have a more universalist liberalism where

296
00:18:05,880 --> 00:18:11,599
the ethnicity, the cultural context doesn't really matter. Every individual

297
00:18:11,720 --> 00:18:16,200
has these you know, universal human rights, and it doesn't

298
00:18:16,200 --> 00:18:18,799
really matter what the context, the political context is. These

299
00:18:18,839 --> 00:18:22,200
things are eternal and they're sort of transcended over all things.

300
00:18:22,359 --> 00:18:25,880
That's universalist liberalism. So what Godfrey's trying to say here

301
00:18:26,440 --> 00:18:29,279
is that, you know, the original liberalism, what's much more

302
00:18:29,359 --> 00:18:33,160
rooted within particular societies. That's why German liberalism was different

303
00:18:33,160 --> 00:18:35,640
than English, which was different than French and so on.

304
00:18:36,519 --> 00:18:41,680
Speaker 1: Yeah, but neither are those attempts by old style European

305
00:18:41,759 --> 00:18:45,039
liberals to find links between two distinctive social and political

306
00:18:45,079 --> 00:18:49,319
formations denies the differences between them. Both Weber and Schumpeter

307
00:18:49,839 --> 00:18:53,000
were looking at the conditions in which social changes took place,

308
00:18:54,079 --> 00:18:57,039
and they note the overlaps as well as distinctions between

309
00:18:57,079 --> 00:19:04,400
the epos and question, hasa panjatas condulus? I think that's correct.

310
00:19:04,720 --> 00:19:06,559
It's gonna that's as correct as I'm gonna get it there,

311
00:19:06,759 --> 00:19:12,079
good enough? Yeah. A German Germanophone Greek scholar whose work

312
00:19:12,160 --> 00:19:15,119
is not yet widely known, breaks new ground in this respect.

313
00:19:15,519 --> 00:19:20,960
Condolus examines the distinctions between liberal, bourgeois and mass democratic

314
00:19:21,039 --> 00:19:27,359
societies by looking at their literary and cultural artifacts. Modern

315
00:19:27,400 --> 00:19:31,240
democracies differ from pre modern ones, according to Congdolus, in

316
00:19:31,359 --> 00:19:37,559
that they disassociate citizenship from cultural and ethnic identities, and

317
00:19:37,599 --> 00:19:41,000
in the way in which mass production affects society.

318
00:19:41,839 --> 00:19:45,240
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is this is something I'm personally interested in,

319
00:19:46,519 --> 00:19:48,960
and I think a lot of younger people might emphasize

320
00:19:48,960 --> 00:19:52,240
this even more than Paul does. But we have to

321
00:19:52,240 --> 00:19:55,799
pay attention to how cultures like the market, you know,

322
00:19:55,839 --> 00:19:59,559
the so called free market, the the the the capitalist space,

323
00:19:59,680 --> 00:20:04,000
the the production of consumer goods, they don't they don't

324
00:20:04,039 --> 00:20:07,160
just respond to consumer interests, They often direct them. They

325
00:20:07,200 --> 00:20:10,519
often change the culture itself, and they're often placed into

326
00:20:10,519 --> 00:20:14,359
culture with the objective of transforming them. And so the

327
00:20:14,400 --> 00:20:18,319
emphasis on what has mass production done to society, I

328
00:20:18,319 --> 00:20:22,559
think is something that right wingers need to continue to emphasize,

329
00:20:22,720 --> 00:20:24,359
you know, much more than liberals. You kind of see

330
00:20:24,359 --> 00:20:26,920
as this neutral space wherever the free market is, it's

331
00:20:27,000 --> 00:20:31,039
there's like just you know, cultural neutrality there. But I

332
00:20:31,359 --> 00:20:34,440
think that Condoleus is entirely correct, that that that the

333
00:20:34,599 --> 00:20:38,680
entire you know, cultural landscape can change just by the

334
00:20:38,720 --> 00:20:40,079
introduction of mass production.

335
00:20:41,240 --> 00:20:46,119
Speaker 1: Well, it also seems like a lot of the economics

336
00:20:46,160 --> 00:20:54,359
that you see pushed from like libertarians, is doesn't really

337
00:20:54,359 --> 00:20:57,880
take into account what we've seen as far as globalism,

338
00:20:57,920 --> 00:21:04,920
as far as to advanced in technology itself, also social engineering,

339
00:21:05,359 --> 00:21:08,839
things like that exactly. Just it exists in a vacuum.

340
00:21:09,079 --> 00:21:12,400
You can make it work in a vacuum. But what

341
00:21:13,119 --> 00:21:15,559
when you have to introduce it to I mean, can

342
00:21:15,599 --> 00:21:18,720
you imagine, like all of a sudden, the United States

343
00:21:18,799 --> 00:21:23,599
just dropped all its regulations on trade and manufacturing and

344
00:21:23,720 --> 00:21:29,680
just went okay, go yep. I mean that's something that

345
00:21:29,680 --> 00:21:33,200
Mesas would have. Mesas would have been okay with Rothbard

346
00:21:33,240 --> 00:21:35,799
probably would have wanted the state. Rothbard would have wanted

347
00:21:35,839 --> 00:21:38,839
the state out of the way. But you know it's

348
00:21:38,880 --> 00:21:42,799
still you look at that and you're like, Okay, I

349
00:21:42,880 --> 00:21:45,440
understand why you want to do this because you see

350
00:21:46,359 --> 00:21:51,400
what government and what what quote unquote cronyism that that

351
00:21:51,440 --> 00:21:55,839
word that they love so much does. Yet you're not

352
00:21:55,880 --> 00:22:00,599
taking into account what Condoless is talking about here talking

353
00:22:00,599 --> 00:22:05,960
about disassociating citizenship from cultural and ethnic identities. What that

354
00:22:06,160 --> 00:22:10,160
does to what that does when you have because if

355
00:22:10,200 --> 00:22:12,400
you have a free market, you also have no borders

356
00:22:12,400 --> 00:22:13,680
because you're gonna have free trade.

357
00:22:15,519 --> 00:22:22,079
Speaker 2: Yeah, it also it also universalizes and it makes uniform

358
00:22:22,240 --> 00:22:24,920
world culture. I mean, the more you extend I mean,

359
00:22:24,920 --> 00:22:28,119
this is actually this is controversial, but this is actually

360
00:22:28,160 --> 00:22:30,680
a point that Lenin makes. You know, as you extend

361
00:22:30,799 --> 00:22:34,559
the capitalist order, you're going to do away with old cultures.

362
00:22:35,480 --> 00:22:38,839
It's inevitable that everything is going to become homogeneous culturally

363
00:22:39,160 --> 00:22:43,200
when you do this. Yep, if I can cite him.

364
00:22:43,359 --> 00:22:45,640
Speaker 1: Perfectly, I mean I read through all of State and

365
00:22:45,680 --> 00:22:49,519
Revolution on this show. So yeah, there, Lenin is not

366
00:22:49,640 --> 00:22:53,039
a he's not a friend of the show. Definitely, He's

367
00:22:53,039 --> 00:22:54,359
definitely been a big part of the show.

368
00:22:54,400 --> 00:22:56,640
Speaker 2: Well, he's got insights that are worth learning from. You know,

369
00:22:57,400 --> 00:22:59,000
I'm not going to be autistic about it.

370
00:22:59,359 --> 00:23:01,839
Speaker 1: Well, some time times, if you even read Rothbart, it

371
00:23:01,880 --> 00:23:07,400
almost seems like the dialect like his dialectical style is Lenin's. Yeah, sure,

372
00:23:07,880 --> 00:23:10,799
like he stole, like he bred Lenin and he decided

373
00:23:10,839 --> 00:23:12,799
to use that dialectical style, which I don't think is

374
00:23:12,839 --> 00:23:15,160
a bad thing, because I think Lenin was was definitely

375
00:23:15,160 --> 00:23:18,000
the most intelligent of all of them.

376
00:23:18,000 --> 00:23:19,920
Speaker 2: Right and what and by the way, what Lenin is

377
00:23:19,960 --> 00:23:23,519
critiquing is not some Messissian paradise, but he's critiquing basically

378
00:23:23,599 --> 00:23:25,240
the managerial capitalism.

379
00:23:25,319 --> 00:23:30,599
Speaker 1: Right, yeah, all right, the modern as opposed to pre modern,

380
00:23:31,400 --> 00:23:33,799
The modern as opposed to pre modern and democrat is

381
00:23:33,839 --> 00:23:38,240
not continually situated and has a fluid cultural identity being

382
00:23:38,319 --> 00:23:40,559
shaped by a consumer economy.

383
00:23:41,079 --> 00:23:45,240
Speaker 2: Yep, that's a sentence right there, man, it is. Yeah,

384
00:23:45,279 --> 00:23:48,799
the consumer economy shapes man. Man doesn't shape the consumer economy.

385
00:23:48,839 --> 00:23:49,519
It's important.

386
00:23:50,000 --> 00:23:53,440
Speaker 1: Yeah, so I said social engineering. It just doesn't. It's

387
00:23:53,559 --> 00:23:55,519
you're not taking that into account when you're talking about

388
00:23:55,519 --> 00:23:58,240
this free quote unquote free market.

389
00:23:58,680 --> 00:23:58,960
Speaker 2: Yep.

390
00:24:00,039 --> 00:24:02,880
Speaker 1: He also inhabits a culture that remains hostile to the

391
00:24:02,920 --> 00:24:09,880
older liberal universe. Postmodernism in literature and literary criticism, condolist argues,

392
00:24:10,240 --> 00:24:13,200
is the latest in a series of cultural strategies aimed

393
00:24:13,200 --> 00:24:17,599
at subverting the nineteenth century liberal order. The refusal to

394
00:24:17,680 --> 00:24:22,200
recognize a fixed or authoritative meaning for inherited texts, which

395
00:24:22,240 --> 00:24:27,240
is characteristic of postmodernism, represents an assault upon liberal education.

396
00:24:28,400 --> 00:24:31,799
Contrary to the world of moral and semantic order presided

397
00:24:31,839 --> 00:24:36,000
over by an ethical deity which bourgeois liberals preached, the

398
00:24:36,079 --> 00:24:42,279
postmodernists exalt indeterminacy. They decry the acceptance of tradition and discourse,

399
00:24:42,359 --> 00:24:45,440
as well as in political matters as a fasci as

400
00:24:45,480 --> 00:24:51,160
a fascist act of domination, or as the inadmissible allowance

401
00:24:51,200 --> 00:24:54,000
of the past to intrude upon the present. And I

402
00:24:54,000 --> 00:24:55,599
would say even the future.

403
00:24:55,880 --> 00:24:58,000
Speaker 2: In the future. I agree. The other thing I want

404
00:24:58,039 --> 00:24:59,759
to say too, and this is kind of in passing,

405
00:24:59,799 --> 00:25:03,559
but the idea of describing the older this is what

406
00:25:03,599 --> 00:25:06,920
he's describing it, the older liberal order as fascistic, is

407
00:25:06,960 --> 00:25:08,920
something that when Gottfried wrote it, what did he write?

408
00:25:08,920 --> 00:25:10,839
This was this nineteen nineties.

409
00:25:10,599 --> 00:25:12,640
Speaker 1: Right, is it ninety eight? Ninety nine?

410
00:25:12,720 --> 00:25:15,519
Speaker 2: Yeah, ninety nine. So yeah, so the idea that this

411
00:25:15,559 --> 00:25:18,480
would be determined fascist was probably seen by its readers

412
00:25:18,480 --> 00:25:22,480
as like dramatic. But look at everything that's called fascist.

413
00:25:22,480 --> 00:25:25,400
Everything that your grandma held just instinctually is now fascist.

414
00:25:25,519 --> 00:25:27,759
I mean, Gotfrid who's on the cutting edge of recognizing

415
00:25:27,759 --> 00:25:28,599
where all this was going.

416
00:25:29,079 --> 00:25:31,400
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's why when people that's why I tell people

417
00:25:31,599 --> 00:25:34,880
when they're like gushing over James lindsay, I'm like, Paul

418
00:25:34,920 --> 00:25:36,720
Godfrey gave this to you twenty five years ago.

419
00:25:36,960 --> 00:25:38,160
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly exactly.

420
00:25:39,519 --> 00:25:43,119
Speaker 1: Nowhere does Condalis call for the eradication of postmodernism or

421
00:25:43,160 --> 00:25:47,640
make the facile assumption that by opposing it, the present

422
00:25:47,720 --> 00:25:51,880
generation can resurrect the bourgeoise world. He contends that liberal

423
00:25:52,079 --> 00:25:56,279
and mass democratic societies are not only distinct, but mutually antagonistic,

424
00:25:56,640 --> 00:26:01,960
and that antagonism has expressed itself culturally as well as socioeconomically.

425
00:26:02,960 --> 00:26:07,440
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is where this is where, this is where

426
00:26:07,920 --> 00:26:12,000
just the neo conservatives. And I say that in a

427
00:26:12,039 --> 00:26:14,680
time when everybody hates the neo conservatives, but I really

428
00:26:14,759 --> 00:26:21,440
just mean twentieth century American ideal, americanist ideology. They they

429
00:26:21,519 --> 00:26:24,039
really people need to recognize and we need to push

430
00:26:24,119 --> 00:26:29,240
this even harder that the mass democracy, democracy, the you know,

431
00:26:29,279 --> 00:26:31,519
the extended vote, and all the people that are pro

432
00:26:31,640 --> 00:26:35,519
civil rights regime, all this stuff, these are the mechanisms

433
00:26:35,519 --> 00:26:39,279
by which the old liberalism are being destroyed. So these,

434
00:26:39,359 --> 00:26:40,839
like a lot of people try to boot like the

435
00:26:40,839 --> 00:26:45,240
mainstream people, they try to balance like democracy and liberalism

436
00:26:45,279 --> 00:26:49,599
as like these unified you know, uh, you know, paths

437
00:26:49,640 --> 00:26:52,000
forward or whatever, but they are not. You know, one

438
00:26:52,079 --> 00:26:55,599
is eating the other. The old American bourgeois liberal order

439
00:26:55,799 --> 00:26:59,400
that existed in the nineteenth century is being eaten alive

440
00:26:59,599 --> 00:27:02,880
by mass democracy.

441
00:27:03,240 --> 00:27:06,240
Speaker 1: For over one hundred years, bourgeois liberalism has been under

442
00:27:06,240 --> 00:27:09,880
attack from authors and artists presenting views about human nature

443
00:27:09,920 --> 00:27:15,759
and the nature of existence antithetical to bourgeois convictions. Materialism, atheism,

444
00:27:15,799 --> 00:27:19,920
and pluralism have been three such worldviews which the bourgeoisie

445
00:27:19,960 --> 00:27:25,279
long viewed with justifiable suspicion. Deconstructionism is a more recent

446
00:27:25,359 --> 00:27:29,680
form of cultural criticism aimed at inherited assumptions about meaning.

447
00:27:30,640 --> 00:27:34,039
By now, Condulus maintains, the old liberals have been reduced

448
00:27:34,039 --> 00:27:37,480
to a rearguard struggle while watching I'm not going to

449
00:27:37,480 --> 00:27:42,240
pronounce the German word, while watching their opponents take over

450
00:27:42,359 --> 00:27:48,519
culture and education. But the reduced But the reason for

451
00:27:48,559 --> 00:27:52,279
this reduced liberal presence, Condolus explains, is not an insidious

452
00:27:52,319 --> 00:27:56,160
contamination by a cultural industry separated from the rest of society.

453
00:27:56,880 --> 00:28:00,519
Cultural radicals have done well in mass democracies because they

454
00:28:00,559 --> 00:28:04,359
continue to target the liberal order that the democrats deposed.

455
00:28:05,519 --> 00:28:10,160
The cultural yep, the cultural opposition continues to mobilize even

456
00:28:10,240 --> 00:28:12,359
after the political war has ended.

457
00:28:13,200 --> 00:28:16,119
Speaker 2: Right this is this is also an insight of people

458
00:28:16,160 --> 00:28:19,720
like gramscy Right Like he recognizes that like they can

459
00:28:19,799 --> 00:28:24,000
capture power. But the cultural revolution. It has to continue going.

460
00:28:24,039 --> 00:28:27,279
The moment it stops, it falls apart. Like people think, oh,

461
00:28:27,359 --> 00:28:29,480
the you know, the trance stuff is like ridiculous and

462
00:28:29,559 --> 00:28:32,079
silly and goofy, it's actually not. You have to come

463
00:28:32,160 --> 00:28:35,119
up with something. You have to continue to advance it

464
00:28:35,160 --> 00:28:38,640
in some direction otherwise it stops. And you can't have

465
00:28:38,680 --> 00:28:41,200
a revolution that stops. If you have a revolution that stops,

466
00:28:42,079 --> 00:28:44,079
you could you know, that's that's when you get the

467
00:28:44,559 --> 00:28:47,119
momentum that goes to reactionaries. You know, the second they

468
00:28:47,160 --> 00:28:51,599
stop creating new things to terrorize us with. Culturally, that's

469
00:28:51,640 --> 00:28:53,839
when we'll gain a footing. So you know a lot

470
00:28:53,839 --> 00:28:55,519
of people think, oh, when is this going to stop it?

471
00:28:55,599 --> 00:28:57,359
You know, why didn't it stop with the gage, Why

472
00:28:57,400 --> 00:28:59,400
is it going to trade? Why is it going to pedophiles?

473
00:28:59,440 --> 00:28:59,640
Speaker 1: Now?

474
00:28:59,720 --> 00:29:01,920
Speaker 2: It's because there has to be a new thing. The

475
00:29:01,960 --> 00:29:05,960
cultural revolution has to continue mobilizing even after the political

476
00:29:05,960 --> 00:29:06,599
war has ended.

477
00:29:07,240 --> 00:29:09,839
Speaker 1: Yeah, if you're going to have progressivism, there has to

478
00:29:09,880 --> 00:29:13,799
be constant progress. That's why people concentrating too hard on

479
00:29:13,839 --> 00:29:16,519
the transgender thing and just concentrating on that. They don't

480
00:29:16,599 --> 00:29:19,400
understand that what you really should be looking at what

481
00:29:19,559 --> 00:29:22,759
comes next? And I think that by reading what we've

482
00:29:22,759 --> 00:29:25,880
already read before, we could see that Paul. That's the

483
00:29:25,960 --> 00:29:29,519
genius of Paul is he's not stuck where he is.

484
00:29:30,079 --> 00:29:32,640
He's looking twenty years, twenty five years down the road

485
00:29:32,680 --> 00:29:33,960
and he's like, Okay, where are we going to be?

486
00:29:34,599 --> 00:29:40,240
Right right, Victorian rigidity, social status, and elitist attitudes about

487
00:29:40,359 --> 00:29:44,440
education have all remained the butts of academic and literary criticism,

488
00:29:44,920 --> 00:29:47,880
and the opposition points back to the conditions of strife

489
00:29:47,920 --> 00:29:53,640
in which mass democracy arose. This cultural insurgency, condous observes,

490
00:29:54,039 --> 00:29:58,319
draws strength from a subversive source that once served liberalism

491
00:29:58,400 --> 00:30:00,200
in its war against the past.

492
00:30:00,279 --> 00:30:04,000
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. See, liberalism was something that came

493
00:30:04,039 --> 00:30:06,799
about on the scene of world history because it was

494
00:30:06,839 --> 00:30:09,799
attacking something that came before. You know, the political interests

495
00:30:09,799 --> 00:30:12,839
at the time of the rise of liberalism needed to

496
00:30:13,119 --> 00:30:17,599
confront it, you know, subversively. Basically, it needed to and

497
00:30:18,079 --> 00:30:21,279
we're talking back, we're talking back at like you know,

498
00:30:21,319 --> 00:30:23,799
Oliver Cromwell and stuff, and when the birth of some

499
00:30:23,839 --> 00:30:28,960
of these tendencies could be found. So today liberalism has basically,

500
00:30:29,759 --> 00:30:32,440
you know, come into the establishment. It is the establishment

501
00:30:32,519 --> 00:30:35,480
view of things. So but but now it's being opposed

502
00:30:35,480 --> 00:30:38,799
by something that also has to be culturally subversive.

503
00:30:39,440 --> 00:30:44,319
Speaker 1: Yeah, okay, here here we start getting into rough one feathers.

504
00:30:45,279 --> 00:30:48,640
The Enlightenment tradition of critical rationalism was crucial for the

505
00:30:48,680 --> 00:30:52,440
war of ideas waged by the bourgeoisie and its defenders

506
00:30:52,480 --> 00:30:55,759
against the remnants of an older world. Despite the attempt

507
00:30:55,759 --> 00:30:59,119
to integrate this outlook into a bourgeois vision of life,

508
00:30:59,359 --> 00:31:03,119
Enlightenment rationalism has played a new destructive role as the

509
00:31:03,200 --> 00:31:08,200
instrument of a war against a bourgeoisie on behalf of openness, skepticism,

510
00:31:08,519 --> 00:31:10,680
and material equality.

511
00:31:10,839 --> 00:31:12,640
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean this is uh, you know, not to

512
00:31:12,759 --> 00:31:15,799
not to over oversight, you know, Edmund Burke, I mean,

513
00:31:15,839 --> 00:31:18,000
but this is this is exactly what he said you

514
00:31:18,079 --> 00:31:20,240
in the moment you start playing with society like this,

515
00:31:20,880 --> 00:31:24,960
it has to continue forever, you know. So Enlightenment rationalism

516
00:31:25,000 --> 00:31:27,039
is going to come up with this new you know,

517
00:31:27,119 --> 00:31:31,480
like this new you know series of reasons why you know,

518
00:31:31,640 --> 00:31:35,000
like homosexuality is reactionary, right, It's always going to come

519
00:31:35,079 --> 00:31:38,440
with something crazier, and it's going to be justified with

520
00:31:38,640 --> 00:31:39,880
you know, quote unquote reason.

521
00:31:40,720 --> 00:31:44,680
Speaker 1: Yeah, and this is the reason why maybe you can

522
00:31:44,680 --> 00:31:47,680
look to Lindsay for certain someone like James Lindsay for

523
00:31:47,759 --> 00:31:51,039
certain things. But you can't look to him for answers

524
00:31:51,079 --> 00:31:54,759
because this is his answer is the enlightenment. His answer

525
00:31:54,880 --> 00:31:59,079
is continual change. He just sees his change, the change

526
00:31:59,079 --> 00:32:03,359
that he desired, has taken a detour mm hmm, exactly

527
00:32:03,359 --> 00:32:06,000
what he wants to go on, the you know, he

528
00:32:06,400 --> 00:32:11,039
sees the trans stuff and all, you know, the wokeness.

529
00:32:11,359 --> 00:32:16,000
He sees that as the enemy of progress, whereas there

530
00:32:16,039 --> 00:32:19,119
is a certain group that sees that as the progress.

531
00:32:19,559 --> 00:32:22,319
He's just they're on. They're on the same road. They're

532
00:32:22,359 --> 00:32:25,319
just they're on. They've just it's a fork in the road.

533
00:32:25,599 --> 00:32:27,559
But both 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 --> 00:34:05,240
I think it's like mass democracy versus the new Left

561
00:34:05,359 --> 00:34:06,319
basically now.

562
00:34:07,000 --> 00:34:10,199
Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean, it's like who's struggling Chronicles.

563
00:34:12,000 --> 00:34:15,360
Speaker 2: Is exactly, Yeah, there's no one fighting for the older heritage.

564
00:34:15,440 --> 00:34:20,199
Speaker 1: Nobody mass democracy needed a cultural as well as political

565
00:34:20,280 --> 00:34:24,159
strategy to triumph, and the values and concepts juggled by

566
00:34:24,159 --> 00:34:27,079
our literary and now media elites are keys to the

567
00:34:27,119 --> 00:34:31,519
emergence of a post liberal society and politics. Condalus also

568
00:34:31,599 --> 00:34:34,599
makes clear that mass democracy could not have developed without

569
00:34:34,639 --> 00:34:38,960
the demographic and economic revolutions that transformed Western Europe in

570
00:34:39,599 --> 00:34:46,239
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Industrialization, agricultural modernization and urban

571
00:34:46,320 --> 00:34:49,960
working class. The disappearance of a family based craft economy

572
00:34:50,280 --> 00:34:54,199
and the operation of assembly line production where the factors

573
00:34:54,360 --> 00:34:57,800
Condolus observes contributing to mass democracy.

574
00:34:59,000 --> 00:35:02,760
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, master democracy could not have happened if

575
00:35:02,800 --> 00:35:06,679
it wasn't for the administration the industrial revolution basically is

576
00:35:06,719 --> 00:35:07,440
what he's saying.

577
00:35:07,199 --> 00:35:10,679
Speaker 1: Here, right, And this one part here, the disappearance of

578
00:35:10,719 --> 00:35:14,920
the family based craft economy, I didn't. It wasn't until

579
00:35:14,920 --> 00:35:19,960
I read Rhder Sombart that I that it blew my mind.

580
00:35:20,000 --> 00:35:25,719
It was like, yeah, that's when once you you could

581
00:35:25,719 --> 00:35:30,239
see how Walmart exists, once you see how the family

582
00:35:30,280 --> 00:35:35,320
based craft economy, the tailor, the specialty shop, how that

583
00:35:35,440 --> 00:35:39,039
just is moved out and now you get cheap, cheap

584
00:35:39,079 --> 00:35:42,119
crap from pretty much anywhere, Right, exactly you can.

585
00:35:42,320 --> 00:35:44,719
Speaker 2: It's it's funny, like, I know, everyone talks about her

586
00:35:44,719 --> 00:35:47,639
everything's made in China, but my so my family, my

587
00:35:47,679 --> 00:35:52,760
wife's family's German. Her her mom basically came from from

588
00:35:53,039 --> 00:35:55,719
Germany in the nineties when she got married because my

589
00:35:55,719 --> 00:35:58,360
father in law was stationed over there. So she goes

590
00:35:58,360 --> 00:36:00,480
back to her village where they, you know, they've been

591
00:36:00,480 --> 00:36:04,639
making crafts for you know, hundreds of maybe thousands of years,

592
00:36:04,719 --> 00:36:07,119
you know, these the same village, the same rural village,

593
00:36:07,400 --> 00:36:10,920
and she was just absolutely dismayed to go back to

594
00:36:10,920 --> 00:36:13,199
the same village. And you see, all the products that

595
00:36:13,239 --> 00:36:16,079
they've been selling for a long time are basically imitations

596
00:36:16,119 --> 00:36:19,079
of the older products, and they all have stamps made

597
00:36:19,079 --> 00:36:21,440
in China. And I know everyone recognizes that and talks

598
00:36:21,440 --> 00:36:26,519
about it, but it's just it permeates every aspect of

599
00:36:26,559 --> 00:36:31,119
the old European world. And people pretend like people pretend

600
00:36:31,159 --> 00:36:35,599
like consumerist capitalism is culturally neutral. It's a complete lie,

601
00:36:35,719 --> 00:36:39,440
Like the entire rural village has been transformed just by

602
00:36:39,440 --> 00:36:41,280
the mass production of these goods.

603
00:36:42,000 --> 00:36:45,719
Speaker 1: Yeah. Well, I mean, hey, as long as it's cheaper,

604
00:36:46,119 --> 00:36:49,239
that's all that matters, right, As long as the line

605
00:36:49,280 --> 00:36:54,519
is going up. Everything's fine, Yes, exactly exactly. Although Imperial

606
00:36:54,519 --> 00:36:58,880
Realm experienced the concentration of uprooted proletai and it's swelling

607
00:36:59,119 --> 00:37:02,559
strife ridden cities, it could not have produced a modern

608
00:37:02,599 --> 00:37:07,400
political movement because it lacked both mass production and mass consumption.

609
00:37:08,519 --> 00:37:11,840
Earlier societies had to deal with perpetual scarcity and with

610
00:37:11,880 --> 00:37:14,920
the need to share limited resources in a communal setting.

611
00:37:15,760 --> 00:37:19,039
The modern West, by contrast, provides more and more material

612
00:37:19,079 --> 00:37:22,960
gratification to socially isolated individuals.

613
00:37:23,159 --> 00:37:24,480
Speaker 2: Just the way libertarians want it.

614
00:37:25,079 --> 00:37:28,800
Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean, just as long as I have Instacart

615
00:37:29,159 --> 00:37:33,000
and you know, porn on demand, Okay, we're good to

616
00:37:33,000 --> 00:37:39,199
get happy. Yeah. It's politics are therefore predicated on hedonism

617
00:37:39,280 --> 00:37:43,559
and individual self actualization, values that give an ethical dimension

618
00:37:43,639 --> 00:37:45,000
to a consumer economy.

619
00:37:45,559 --> 00:37:49,719
Speaker 2: Yeah, the ethics. The ethics sort of justifies what's happening economically.

620
00:37:49,960 --> 00:37:56,599
Speaker 1: Yes, as democratic politics also advocates material equality, as opposed

621
00:37:56,639 --> 00:38:00,960
to the exclusively formal or legal equality preached by nineteenth

622
00:38:00,960 --> 00:38:01,840
century liberals.

623
00:38:02,719 --> 00:38:08,599
Speaker 2: M h. Actually, sorry keep interrupting, but it's it's it's funny,

624
00:38:08,639 --> 00:38:12,000
like there's one of the essays by Mesus and and

625
00:38:12,039 --> 00:38:14,599
I have these you know, examples in my head, because

626
00:38:14,599 --> 00:38:16,400
you and I both came from that world. But I

627
00:38:16,440 --> 00:38:20,519
have this this story of thesis. I think I'm trying

628
00:38:20,559 --> 00:38:22,079
to remember what book it's in, and it might be

629
00:38:22,199 --> 00:38:24,840
in his interventionist book. But he basically says that, you know,

630
00:38:25,440 --> 00:38:29,679
we capitalists don't disagree with the interventionists in terms of

631
00:38:29,719 --> 00:38:33,639
our shared desire for a material equality. It's just that

632
00:38:33,679 --> 00:38:36,000
we have different paths to get there. So he says,

633
00:38:36,199 --> 00:38:38,159
you know, his view, the liberal view, is that by

634
00:38:38,599 --> 00:38:42,000
the capitalist, free market economy, we can provide the same

635
00:38:42,079 --> 00:38:45,440
type of material equality that the interventionists are also trying

636
00:38:45,480 --> 00:38:47,800
to do by their own means. But you know, now

637
00:38:47,880 --> 00:38:49,880
becoming a right winger, I actually don't care all that

638
00:38:49,960 --> 00:38:52,480
much for a material equality at all. It doesn't doesn't

639
00:38:52,519 --> 00:38:55,920
phase me, it doesn't enter into my you know, priority scale.

640
00:38:57,880 --> 00:39:02,320
Speaker 1: By stressing the ties between modern democra material pleasure, Condalus

641
00:39:02,320 --> 00:39:06,719
also explains why modern democracy cannot appeal effectively in the

642
00:39:06,880 --> 00:39:10,679
long run to an ethic of austerity. At the end

643
00:39:10,679 --> 00:39:14,440
of the eighteenth century, both both American and French revolutionaries

644
00:39:14,639 --> 00:39:19,199
invoked classical ideals of republican simplicity, a practice found pre

645
00:39:19,239 --> 00:39:23,559
eminently in the political writings of Rousseau, self indulgence and

646
00:39:23,679 --> 00:39:28,480
luxury were viewed as aristocratic flaws and among nineteenth century

647
00:39:28,480 --> 00:39:34,360
French Republicans as upper middle class vices. Democrat, Democratic and

648
00:39:34,480 --> 00:39:39,199
later socialist revolutionaries even tried to exemplify the moral conduct

649
00:39:39,199 --> 00:39:42,400
which they hoped to enforce in a society of equals.

650
00:39:43,599 --> 00:39:49,559
The Jacobin socialist Louis Auguste Blanci lived and dressed like

651
00:39:49,599 --> 00:39:55,280
a priest, and the self proclaimed Republican Senecal in Gustave

652
00:39:55,360 --> 00:40:01,480
Flaubert's novel Le Educashan Sentimentale is made to appeal eccentric

653
00:40:01,559 --> 00:40:06,159
in his extreme pursuit of virtue. Senekal is shown embracing

654
00:40:06,239 --> 00:40:10,920
dietary and sexual restraints and scorning sumptuous living in a

655
00:40:10,960 --> 00:40:16,159
similar vein Black Marxist President of Zimbabwe Robert Mugabi has

656
00:40:16,199 --> 00:40:20,039
denounced the homosexuals in his homeland. Mcgaby is outraged that

657
00:40:20,119 --> 00:40:23,679
sodomists and sexual perverts continue to be found there and

658
00:40:23,719 --> 00:40:26,199
scoffs at the idea of rights for those given to

659
00:40:26,280 --> 00:40:27,159
beast reality.

660
00:40:27,360 --> 00:40:29,440
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is so funny to me, because I mean,

661
00:40:29,519 --> 00:40:31,960
I think what Paul Godfrey's trying to communicate here is

662
00:40:32,880 --> 00:40:36,239
a lot of these very anti liberal people are actually

663
00:40:36,320 --> 00:40:40,199
more like just instinctually culturally conservative than today's left and

664
00:40:40,239 --> 00:40:43,280
today's quote unquote right. You know, all the people that are,

665
00:40:44,039 --> 00:40:46,960
you know, seeking freedom and liberty against you know, the

666
00:40:47,280 --> 00:40:51,320
democratic lip totalitarianism or whatever. They don't realize that they're

667
00:40:51,360 --> 00:40:55,880
all using the same far left phraseology that we're opposed by.

668
00:40:55,880 --> 00:41:00,000
All these anti liberals. It's fascinating to me. I mean,

669
00:41:00,239 --> 00:41:03,480
I think it's hilarious when these like Marxist revolutionaries in

670
00:41:03,760 --> 00:41:07,239
the Third world are against like sodomy, that's just hilarious. Yeah.

671
00:41:07,360 --> 00:41:12,519
Speaker 1: Yeah, Oh and an American American and quote unquote socialists,

672
00:41:12,519 --> 00:41:15,599
they don't get it, and they have to make excuses

673
00:41:15,639 --> 00:41:18,639
for it. And what do they do They make cultural excuses. Oh,

674
00:41:18,679 --> 00:41:20,079
thank you very much. Yeah.

675
00:41:20,119 --> 00:41:22,480
Speaker 2: It's like it's like it's like the Republicans like when

676
00:41:22,480 --> 00:41:25,000
they when they point out that, like, you know, Stalin

677
00:41:25,119 --> 00:41:27,280
was anti LGBT, and you're like, oh, so Stalin was

678
00:41:27,360 --> 00:41:28,480
kind of based. It's interesting.

679
00:41:28,639 --> 00:41:30,920
Speaker 1: Interesting, It's like there's something I agree with them on.

680
00:41:32,920 --> 00:41:36,400
All of these revolutionary democratic or socialist appeals to public

681
00:41:36,480 --> 00:41:40,239
virtue hark back to Republican models that CONDOLEUS views as

682
00:41:40,320 --> 00:41:44,719
incompatible with mass democracy. What distinguishes the latter from the former,

683
00:41:44,760 --> 00:41:47,920
in his opinion, is the prevalence of hedonism associated with

684
00:41:48,000 --> 00:41:54,480
mass production and mass consumption. This ethos express itself expresses

685
00:41:54,599 --> 00:41:59,880
itself as a ceaseless desire for consumption combined with resentment

686
00:42:00,000 --> 00:42:02,400
against those who have more access to pleasure.

687
00:42:02,920 --> 00:42:05,280
Speaker 2: Yeah. See, this is like, this is how I would

688
00:42:05,280 --> 00:42:07,719
write here, This is how I would describe the uniqueness

689
00:42:07,719 --> 00:42:10,599
of the American situation. You know, people always want to

690
00:42:10,639 --> 00:42:12,800
say that we're becoming this is this is a classic

691
00:42:13,400 --> 00:42:16,360
James lindsay, Right, we're becoming like communist Russia or whatever.

692
00:42:16,360 --> 00:42:21,519
We're coming like communist China. Actually, those communist experiments were

693
00:42:21,599 --> 00:42:24,559
very much focused on austerity. They were very much focused

694
00:42:24,559 --> 00:42:28,199
on denying material gratification, denying pleasures to the point where

695
00:42:28,320 --> 00:42:31,039
you basically had a miserable life. We're on the opposite

696
00:42:31,079 --> 00:42:33,400
end of the scale. Like the entire point of the

697
00:42:33,400 --> 00:42:36,800
American regime is to make us just absolutely sick and

698
00:42:36,880 --> 00:42:40,440
disgusted with a with titillation with pleasure, like we're living

699
00:42:40,559 --> 00:42:44,440
on Pinocchio's pleasure island and sort of like mandated prosperity.

700
00:42:47,119 --> 00:42:51,079
Speaker 1: All right, It was the failure of liberals. Excuse me.

701
00:42:51,199 --> 00:42:53,519
It was the failure of liberalism from the standpoint of

702
00:42:53,519 --> 00:42:58,239
mass democracy, to move decisively enough toward material equality and

703
00:42:58,360 --> 00:43:03,440
individual self expressive that led to its undoing. The defenders

704
00:43:03,480 --> 00:43:09,039
of bourgeois liberalism temporized when faced by the sociological evidence

705
00:43:09,079 --> 00:43:12,280
of inequality in their own society. They claimed to be

706
00:43:12,360 --> 00:43:17,280
more interested in freedom than in the further pursuit of equality,

707
00:43:17,400 --> 00:43:21,159
but were more were also more committed to family cohesion

708
00:43:21,360 --> 00:43:26,119
and gender distinctions than to individual freedom. The reason for

709
00:43:26,199 --> 00:43:29,440
this is clear. According to condolists, bourgeois liberals were both

710
00:43:29,519 --> 00:43:35,199
economic innovators and perpetuators of an urban civilization going back

711
00:43:35,199 --> 00:43:38,559
to the Middle Ages. In their heyday, they spoke about

712
00:43:38,599 --> 00:43:41,840
sweeping change, but they never but they were never as

713
00:43:41,840 --> 00:43:44,920
dedicated to the social and cultural implications of a consumer

714
00:43:45,000 --> 00:43:47,960
economy as were those who replaced them.

715
00:43:48,239 --> 00:43:51,039
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's so you know, that's so fascinating to me,

716
00:43:52,599 --> 00:43:57,440
just drawing this distinction between old school liberalism and how

717
00:43:57,519 --> 00:44:02,400
much it would be opposed to James Lindsay's consumer based liberalism.

718
00:44:02,480 --> 00:44:04,599
You know, this is sort of like modern democratic. Twentieth

719
00:44:04,639 --> 00:44:08,159
century American liberalism has almost nothing in common with the

720
00:44:08,199 --> 00:44:10,679
old liberalism. And that's I think what Coffee's trying to

721
00:44:10,920 --> 00:44:13,559
communicate here is we live in a world that's post

722
00:44:13,599 --> 00:44:17,880
industrial revolution. The entire economic world order has changed, and

723
00:44:17,960 --> 00:44:20,280
therefore the type of liberalism that you're going to see

724
00:44:20,320 --> 00:44:21,159
is going to change with it.

725
00:44:23,639 --> 00:44:27,039
Speaker 1: Basic to the thesis is the recognition that liberalism is

726
00:44:27,039 --> 00:44:31,199
a bourgeois ideology, a set of ideas and principles indissolubly

727
00:44:31,320 --> 00:44:34,679
tied to the Western middle class. This does not mean

728
00:44:34,719 --> 00:44:38,159
that liberal principles are reducible to material interest, nor that

729
00:44:38,199 --> 00:44:41,639
they should be dismissed as a pretext for economic exploitation.

730
00:44:42,480 --> 00:44:47,599
In the early nineteen fifties, John Plominets tried to separate

731
00:44:47,679 --> 00:44:52,719
ideology from the pejorative association associations many Marxists had loaded

732
00:44:52,760 --> 00:44:57,679
onto that term. According to Plominots, the word ideology is

733
00:44:57,719 --> 00:45:01,840
not used to refer only to explicitly and theories. Those

734
00:45:01,840 --> 00:45:05,519
who speak of bourgeois ideology often mean by its beliefs

735
00:45:05,559 --> 00:45:09,320
and attitudes implicit in the bourgeois way of speaking and behaving,

736
00:45:09,679 --> 00:45:12,800
And sometimes they speak of bourgeois theories and doctrines as

737
00:45:12,840 --> 00:45:17,000
if they did little more than explicit then explicit these

738
00:45:17,039 --> 00:45:22,920
beliefs and attitudes understood in the cultural sense and not

739
00:45:23,000 --> 00:45:27,880
simply as a theoretical instrument of self justification. Liberalism exemplifies

740
00:45:27,920 --> 00:45:32,320
bourgeois ideology. It designates not just liberal ideas, but also

741
00:45:32,360 --> 00:45:36,679
their social setting. That is, the context without which liberalism

742
00:45:36,760 --> 00:45:39,960
becomes merely disembodied concepts or slogans.

743
00:45:40,079 --> 00:45:43,559
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is what I was talking about before. You know,

744
00:45:43,599 --> 00:45:47,159
original bourgeois liberalism came from like what he just said there,

745
00:45:47,280 --> 00:45:49,679
like a social setting. It came from a certain context.

746
00:45:49,960 --> 00:45:51,920
But when you just when you try to rip those

747
00:45:51,960 --> 00:45:54,679
principles out of their context and apply them to the

748
00:45:54,679 --> 00:45:59,119
world today as this universalist and transcendent political principle, you

749
00:45:59,239 --> 00:46:07,199
transform the function of liberalism from a culturally contextual function

750
00:46:07,599 --> 00:46:10,000
into basically a world revolutionary project.

751
00:46:12,559 --> 00:46:17,119
Speaker 1: When Benjamin Constant and Francois Guiso argued for a political

752
00:46:17,320 --> 00:46:20,440
just melu in the eighteen twenties in the form of

753
00:46:20,480 --> 00:46:24,679
constitutional monarchy, they were not simply advocating moderation or an

754
00:46:24,719 --> 00:46:30,039
Aristotilian Golden mean. They were looking at the educated bourgeoisie

755
00:46:30,400 --> 00:46:33,480
as a natural leadership class that could maneuver between the

756
00:46:33,519 --> 00:46:40,280
equally disastrous shoals of absolute monarchy and democracy. Guiseau identified

757
00:46:40,280 --> 00:46:43,559
that class with the modern nation state. He believed that

758
00:46:43,599 --> 00:46:47,800
this political order and the bourgeois and the and the

759
00:46:47,840 --> 00:46:53,679
bourgeoisie would benefit from their historically and this necessary association.

760
00:46:54,920 --> 00:46:58,159
This cultural context does not mean that the French doctrinaires,

761
00:46:58,679 --> 00:47:02,960
as the constitutional liberals in post Napoleonic France called themselves,

762
00:47:03,280 --> 00:47:07,239
had nothing to teach our own generation. It is rather

763
00:47:07,320 --> 00:47:13,960
to insist on the need to avoid tendacious to tendentious parallels,

764
00:47:14,400 --> 00:47:18,079
which arrange past figures and past movements and accordance with

765
00:47:18,199 --> 00:47:20,760
current appetites for a usable past.

766
00:47:21,400 --> 00:47:24,239
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is I mean, yeah, we have to avoid it.

767
00:47:24,280 --> 00:47:27,119
But if there's anything that describes the modern age, it's

768
00:47:27,199 --> 00:47:30,639
exactly this. They're arranging all these they're you know, they're

769
00:47:30,679 --> 00:47:33,440
they're lining up past figures that they consider good and

770
00:47:33,519 --> 00:47:36,800
past figures that they consider bad. And basically like this

771
00:47:36,880 --> 00:47:39,000
is this is what the whole thing about, Like everybody is,

772
00:47:39,559 --> 00:47:42,159
you know, Hitler or whatever, That's exactly what's going on here.

773
00:47:42,599 --> 00:47:45,719
They're arranging them in accordance with current appetites, you know.

774
00:47:46,559 --> 00:47:49,559
So that's yeah, that's exactly what he people Paul will

775
00:47:49,599 --> 00:47:51,719
say that we need to avoid this, but this actually

776
00:47:51,760 --> 00:47:56,239
deeply characterized characterizes our ideological formulation today.

777
00:47:58,559 --> 00:48:01,920
Speaker 1: What I am emphasizing here is need for sexualization, the

778
00:48:02,000 --> 00:48:07,400
avoidance of which typifies contemporary zealotry. Appeals to human rights

779
00:48:07,639 --> 00:48:11,760
as historically unbounded absolutes now resound in political debates in

780
00:48:11,800 --> 00:48:17,480
which opposing sides accuse each other of relativizing values. Wards

781
00:48:17,480 --> 00:48:21,480
and social policies are justified by invoking self evident truths,

782
00:48:22,000 --> 00:48:24,840
even though what is true in these truths in these

783
00:48:24,880 --> 00:48:28,679
truths may be different now from what seems self evident

784
00:48:28,679 --> 00:48:32,079
about them two hundred years ago. Pointing this out is

785
00:48:32,119 --> 00:48:35,039
not the same as relativizing all truth. It is only

786
00:48:35,159 --> 00:48:39,239
to question the opportunistic and decontextualized use to which the

787
00:48:39,320 --> 00:48:41,199
past has been has been bent.

788
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,

789
00:48:48,079 --> 00:48:52,639
he's critiquing universalism from a historicist mentality. You have to

790
00:48:52,679 --> 00:48:56,199
look at things in their original context. English liberalism is

791
00:48:56,239 --> 00:48:58,679
not the same as American liberalism, and to treat them

792
00:48:58,679 --> 00:49:03,199
as the same as basically doing gauge in propaganda yea.

793
00:49:05,159 --> 00:49:08,800
Speaker 1: The decontextualization of liberalism can happen in two ways. Either

794
00:49:08,840 --> 00:49:12,079
when we place liberalism into an eternal present, going back

795
00:49:12,119 --> 00:49:14,800
and forth in time or else when we make it

796
00:49:14,920 --> 00:49:18,400
real history into a stepping stone to the present. A

797
00:49:18,400 --> 00:49:22,440
particularly striking case of this comes up in FG. Bratton's

798
00:49:22,480 --> 00:49:25,239
The Legacy of the Liberal Spirit nineteen forty three, a

799
00:49:25,320 --> 00:49:29,559
once widely esteemed defense of the liberal heritage. In his preface,

800
00:49:29,639 --> 00:49:32,840
Bratton explains that liberalism is not to be viewed as

801
00:49:32,880 --> 00:49:36,360
a nineteenth century phenomena ending with the Second World War,

802
00:49:37,159 --> 00:49:40,599
as an attitude towards toward life. It has a history

803
00:49:40,639 --> 00:49:44,159
of twenty five hundred years. It goes back to the

804
00:49:44,199 --> 00:49:48,360
Age of Reason and the Reformation, and to earlier distant

805
00:49:48,360 --> 00:49:52,079
attempts to establish intellectual freedom and the life of reasons.

806
00:49:53,239 --> 00:49:56,159
In the journey that follows from Plato through Jesus to

807
00:49:56,239 --> 00:49:59,920
John Dewey, Braton celebrates thinkers who he believes have pointed

808
00:50:00,079 --> 00:50:04,519
it in his own direction. Thus, he favorably favorably contrasts

809
00:50:04,559 --> 00:50:09,960
one North African Christian Platonist origin with another Augustine, presenting

810
00:50:09,960 --> 00:50:13,559
the first as a protoliberal and the second as an obscurantist.

811
00:50:13,920 --> 00:50:18,199
Speaker 2: Yeah, basically Paul saying that it's cheating to say that

812
00:50:18,239 --> 00:50:20,360
like all the good things throughout history were liberal and

813
00:50:20,400 --> 00:50:23,000
anticipated our age, right, and all the bad things were

814
00:50:23,039 --> 00:50:25,400
forks in the road that people went in the wrong direction.

815
00:50:25,519 --> 00:50:29,280
It's it's it's basically part of creating an ideological hegemony

816
00:50:29,320 --> 00:50:29,800
in our time.

817
00:50:30,199 --> 00:50:32,519
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you see this, this is this is not

818
00:50:32,559 --> 00:50:37,679
only with liberals classical everyone knows this, right, everyone does

819
00:50:37,679 --> 00:50:41,800
this in liberalism. John Gray also assigns liberal ratings to

820
00:50:41,960 --> 00:50:47,320
thinkers who lived long before the liberal era. Grape praises

821
00:50:47,360 --> 00:50:54,079
pericles funeral oration or its reconstruction by the historian Thucididies

822
00:50:54,719 --> 00:50:58,800
for its statement of a liberal, egalitarian and individualist principles.

823
00:50:59,039 --> 00:51:02,159
Speaker 2: This is basically what the neo conservatives do. Like if

824
00:51:02,159 --> 00:51:06,480
you read like Leo Strauss. Paul is really critical of

825
00:51:06,559 --> 00:51:09,960
Leo Strauss precisely here where he basically says that you

826
00:51:10,000 --> 00:51:14,199
can find aspects of American liberal democracy in the Greeks,

827
00:51:14,199 --> 00:51:15,599
and then he goes to the Romans, and you can

828
00:51:15,639 --> 00:51:17,400
just go throughout history and find all the good ones

829
00:51:17,400 --> 00:51:20,079
and say this, you know, America perfected all of these tendencies.

830
00:51:20,239 --> 00:51:21,239
You know, it's it's cheating.

831
00:51:21,840 --> 00:51:26,519
Speaker 1: Yeah. He thereby ignores the pervasive stress and that speech

832
00:51:26,599 --> 00:51:29,800
on living for the public good which was paradigmatic for

833
00:51:29,920 --> 00:51:37,920
ancient Greek democracy. Yeah, modern modern liberal individualism existed only incipiently,

834
00:51:39,000 --> 00:51:43,840
if at all, in Greek antiquity, a point documented in

835
00:51:43,960 --> 00:51:51,480
works by end Fustal des Colange's Fostell. I'm trying to

836
00:51:51,480 --> 00:51:56,239
remember how to pronounce that. I actually it's de Coulang. Yeah,

837
00:51:56,400 --> 00:51:59,360
it was Fustyle de Colange, the Ancient City. To Paul

838
00:51:59,440 --> 00:52:04,719
Ros Republican, the Republic's ancient and modern. Among the readings

839
00:52:04,760 --> 00:52:07,199
of liberalism which try to shove its past into a

840
00:52:07,239 --> 00:52:12,719
triumphalist present are the academic apologist apologetics discussed in the

841
00:52:12,719 --> 00:52:15,480
first chapter. In all fairness, it should be said that

842
00:52:15,559 --> 00:52:19,280
even probing critics of contemporary liberalism ascribe it to an

843
00:52:19,320 --> 00:52:25,440
exceed excessively long genealogy. Christopher Lash, John P. Diggins, and

844
00:52:25,480 --> 00:52:30,320
the ethical philosopher Alistair McIntyre have all written critically on

845
00:52:30,400 --> 00:52:33,880
the liberal heritage, which they believe has descended more or

846
00:52:34,039 --> 00:52:37,079
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 matter, 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
00:55:52,519 --> 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 --> 00:56:20,000
the rise of individualism within the world. Would you argue that, Yeah?

900
00:56:20,440 --> 00:56:22,840
Speaker 2: Uh no, I think are you asking if I think?

901
00:56:23,199 --> 00:56:24,639
Speaker 1: Uh 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 --> 00:56:48,039
version of things.

910
00:56:48,400 --> 00:56:53,800
Speaker 1: I would say okay, sounds good. Unlike the ascetic ideals

911
00:56:53,800 --> 00:56:58,760
of medieval Christianity and Eastern contemplative religions, Western modernity has

912
00:56:58,800 --> 00:57:01,960
been characterized by the belf that individual fulfillment should take

913
00:57:02,000 --> 00:57:07,880
place within society. This individual consciousness, Dumont explains, does not

914
00:57:07,960 --> 00:57:11,559
require that people withdraw from a hierarchical world based on

915
00:57:11,679 --> 00:57:15,719
status relations. To the contrary, it has encouraged individuals seeking

916
00:57:15,760 --> 00:57:18,800
success and self expression to find it in a changing

917
00:57:18,880 --> 00:57:22,239
and increasingly atomized society. Yeah.

918
00:57:22,320 --> 00:57:25,480
Speaker 2: I really do think though that, you know, the idea

919
00:57:25,639 --> 00:57:29,320
of modernity being defined in this way, I think it's

920
00:57:29,360 --> 00:57:31,559
I think this is actually the unique expression of the

921
00:57:31,559 --> 00:57:34,880
American version of the modern age. I don't think you

922
00:57:34,920 --> 00:57:37,519
can see a lot of this. I mean, because like

923
00:57:37,559 --> 00:57:39,280
you would, you would have to consider a lot of

924
00:57:39,320 --> 00:57:43,519
the reactionary movements in France and Germany and England, anyone

925
00:57:43,519 --> 00:57:49,199
from like anyone from like Mosley to Miscellini, anyone like that.

926
00:57:49,280 --> 00:57:52,199
You know, all these people were basically modernists, and none

927
00:57:52,239 --> 00:57:54,639
of them had an individual individualist view of the world.

928
00:57:55,400 --> 00:58:01,079
Speaker 1: Right, Okay, Yeah, I'm talking about America, Okay. Months analysis

929
00:58:01,239 --> 00:58:03,679
treats the intellectual history of the Western world as a

930
00:58:03,679 --> 00:58:07,719
steady movement towards expressive individualism from the Protestant Reformation to

931
00:58:07,760 --> 00:58:11,000
the rise of a contractual view of civil society. In

932
00:58:11,119 --> 00:58:15,400
John Locke and in other early liberal theorists agree.

933
00:58:15,440 --> 00:58:17,119
Speaker 2: I do agree with that. I do agree that there

934
00:58:17,199 --> 00:58:20,719
was a major strain of this individualism, perhaps working itself

935
00:58:20,760 --> 00:58:22,320
out for sure.

936
00:58:24,000 --> 00:58:27,519
Speaker 1: Implicit in this interpretive perspective is distressed by the German

937
00:58:27,559 --> 00:58:34,079
sociologist Fernandotonis on the movement from traditional communities to functionally

938
00:58:34,440 --> 00:58:39,280
oriented and highly mobile societies. Dumal focuses on the cultural

939
00:58:39,360 --> 00:58:46,239
and intellectual basis underlying Tony's transition from Geimnschaft to guy Sellschaft,

940
00:58:46,519 --> 00:58:49,639
and he places that transition into a continuum of thought

941
00:58:50,000 --> 00:58:56,159
going back to the early modern period. Dumont's thematic stress

942
00:58:56,199 --> 00:59:00,440
on individualism within the world underscores a problem found in exportations.

943
00:59:00,480 --> 00:59:03,679
Appealing to root causes, they account for both too much

944
00:59:03,719 --> 00:59:06,599
and too little. By citing a single force that is

945
00:59:06,639 --> 00:59:10,800
made to account for modern culture, duma ignores the distinctiveness

946
00:59:10,800 --> 00:59:15,880
that marks specific phases of Western history from the Reformation onward.

947
00:59:16,920 --> 00:59:20,639
Speaker 2: Yeah, that's what I was saying. It's because I was

948
00:59:20,639 --> 00:59:23,559
saying it accounts for too much so I agree here.

949
00:59:23,599 --> 00:59:24,119
I agree with.

950
00:59:24,039 --> 00:59:27,920
Speaker 1: Paul, though clearly he knows that the Protestant idea of

951
00:59:27,960 --> 00:59:30,599
the individual experience of divine grace has little to do

952
00:59:30,679 --> 00:59:35,320
with contemporary views of individual self gratification. Dumal's interest and

953
00:59:35,400 --> 00:59:38,920
cultural continuity leads him to play down such a difference.

954
00:59:39,840 --> 00:59:42,559
His study of individuality in the West causes him to

955
00:59:42,599 --> 00:59:48,360
overlook short term cultural changes, even those with powerful cumulative effects.

956
00:59:49,639 --> 00:59:51,800
To the extent that our own study deals with two

957
00:59:51,960 --> 00:59:58,719
successive epochs, which Dumal disregards, is for us significant. Moreover,

958
00:59:58,840 --> 01:00:02,119
liberal democracy has a accelerated some aspects of that long

959
01:00:02,199 --> 01:00:06,719
range process outlined by Dumont, while making others less important.

960
01:00:08,079 --> 01:00:12,280
Material redistribution as a means of individual fulfillment has become

961
01:00:12,320 --> 01:00:15,519
basic to our own liberal democratic age, while the cohesion

962
01:00:15,599 --> 01:00:19,199
of the nuclear family has grown weaker as liberalism has

963
01:00:19,280 --> 01:00:23,840
lust out to liberal democracy. Differences and values can be

964
01:00:23,880 --> 01:00:28,079
perceived in short term political transformations, even if the general

965
01:00:28,119 --> 01:00:34,599
trend of modernity is what Dumont describes. Critics of the

966
01:00:34,639 --> 01:00:38,679
old bourgeois liberalism are finally too hasty and linking liberal

967
01:00:38,719 --> 01:00:43,320
concern about the social question to economic interest as Gertrude

968
01:00:43,360 --> 01:00:47,719
Himmelfarb has demonstrated with regards to Victorian attitudes about work

969
01:00:47,760 --> 01:00:52,159
and philanthropy, questions of character formation and family responsibility were

970
01:00:52,199 --> 01:00:56,320
tied together in the Victorian middle class mind. Himil Farb

971
01:00:56,440 --> 01:00:59,400
argues that such an association was not a threadbare defense

972
01:00:59,440 --> 01:01:02,559
of low facts three wages or of the lack of

973
01:01:02,639 --> 01:01:04,280
public works programs.

974
01:01:04,599 --> 01:01:10,159
Speaker 2: Did you know him? A? Farb was at Bill Crystal's mom. What, Yeah,

975
01:01:10,199 --> 01:01:14,679
that's I think it's Bill Crystal's mom. Yeah, she's yeah,

976
01:01:14,679 --> 01:01:16,119
she married Irving Crystal.

977
01:01:18,119 --> 01:01:20,320
Speaker 1: Okay, I'm I have to look that up after this.

978
01:01:21,039 --> 01:01:24,480
I hope I'm right. I'm pretty sure I'm right, Okay. Rather,

979
01:01:24,599 --> 01:01:27,599
it came from widely shared assumptions about the social good.

980
01:01:28,119 --> 01:01:31,039
The broad middle class, extending from bankers and mill owners

981
01:01:31,039 --> 01:01:35,280
to shopkeepers and church canons, rejected a welfare state conception

982
01:01:35,400 --> 01:01:38,760
of government because of what they assume were it's socially

983
01:01:38,840 --> 01:01:40,079
destructive effects.

984
01:01:40,599 --> 01:01:46,400
Speaker 2: It's interesting here that the old liberals he's describing as

985
01:01:46,440 --> 01:01:50,239
being opposed to welfare and all that. Like, if you

986
01:01:50,320 --> 01:01:52,800
asked a current day liberal, like like someone from the

987
01:01:52,840 --> 01:01:56,079
Libertarian Party, or like James Lindsay or something, you know

988
01:01:56,159 --> 01:01:58,679
why we should be opposed to welfare. Well, first of all,

989
01:01:58,760 --> 01:02:00,880
Jim James lindsay, wouldn't be that oupposed to welfare, But

990
01:02:01,599 --> 01:02:03,480
generally I would say, because it, you know, treads on

991
01:02:03,519 --> 01:02:06,360
individual rights and their freedom and all this. But you know,

992
01:02:06,440 --> 01:02:11,119
these these within the social context, the socially situated situation

993
01:02:11,280 --> 01:02:16,119
where old liberalism found itself. They were mostly concerned to

994
01:02:16,400 --> 01:02:19,079
about the socially destructive effects, you know, the effects on

995
01:02:20,079 --> 01:02:24,079
their ability as a family to function cohesively and continuously

996
01:02:24,079 --> 01:02:26,840
throughout the generations. I mean, this is very much the

997
01:02:26,880 --> 01:02:30,679
old liberalism was very much a historicist instead of a universalist.

998
01:02:30,960 --> 01:02:31,840
It's interesting to me.

999
01:02:32,679 --> 01:02:38,880
Speaker 1: Yeah, where did I where'd I? Okay? Even if modern

1000
01:02:38,920 --> 01:02:42,440
liberals disagree with these judgments, their disagreement does not justify

1001
01:02:42,519 --> 01:02:47,360
substituting their own adaptation for the liberal tradition. Whether welfare

1002
01:02:47,400 --> 01:02:50,960
state democrats and public administrators have refined or degraded the

1003
01:02:51,000 --> 01:02:54,360
original articles beside the point. What they have done is

1004
01:02:54,440 --> 01:02:57,519
changed that article in ways that would make it unrecognizable

1005
01:02:57,519 --> 01:03:00,840
to earlier generations. Nor will it due to speak of

1006
01:03:00,880 --> 01:03:04,559
the failure of earlier liberals to see the world see

1007
01:03:04,599 --> 01:03:07,400
the world like modern liberals if they had seen the

1008
01:03:07,440 --> 01:03:10,239
world differently, they would not have been liberals, but social

1009
01:03:10,280 --> 01:03:17,920
democratic advocates of public administration. American historian John Kloppenberg accounts

1010
01:03:17,960 --> 01:03:22,000
for Weber's liberal skepticism about such concepts as the will

1011
01:03:22,039 --> 01:03:25,559
of the people by pointing to the longer context of

1012
01:03:25,679 --> 01:03:31,320
German history. Weber, as interpreted by Kloppenberg, could not imagine

1013
01:03:31,320 --> 01:03:35,800
the meaningful practice of egalitarian politics because quote, Germany had

1014
01:03:35,840 --> 01:03:39,480
no tradition of popular sovereignty and liberals repeatedly put their

1015
01:03:39,519 --> 01:03:45,360
faith in elites rather than democracies to accomplish their goals. True,

1016
01:03:45,440 --> 01:03:48,639
nineteenth century German bourgeois thought did not produce as much

1017
01:03:48,719 --> 01:03:53,119
radical ferment as its English and French counterparts, but Weber's

1018
01:03:53,119 --> 01:03:56,199
liberal doubts about the people's capacity to rule were not

1019
01:03:56,239 --> 01:04:01,079
restricted at the turn of the century to germanophone observers. Kloppenberg,

1020
01:04:01,159 --> 01:04:03,880
as a social democrat who thinks of himself as liberal,

1021
01:04:04,199 --> 01:04:08,239
looks for larger contexts, i e. The particular, the particularity,

1022
01:04:08,440 --> 01:04:13,320
the particularities of German history for his own ideological use

1023
01:04:13,800 --> 01:04:17,079
to detach the liberal tradition from traditional liberal views that

1024
01:04:17,159 --> 01:04:21,280
he finds distasteful. Yeah, that's that's just a common it's

1025
01:04:21,320 --> 01:04:26,079
a common trick, right, Yeah, it's just a dismissal of

1026
01:04:26,880 --> 01:04:30,960
It's a dismissal of the opinion or belief of somebody

1027
01:04:31,159 --> 01:04:34,559
because of a social opinion or because they come from

1028
01:04:34,559 --> 01:04:38,239
a different culture, they have a different cultural background. Simple

1029
01:04:38,280 --> 01:04:44,199
stuff like that. Yes, yeah, unlike today's liberals traditional one. Well,

1030
01:04:44,239 --> 01:04:49,880
and when you look at it's also wrong. I mean Prussia,

1031
01:04:50,400 --> 01:04:55,960
Prussia had a welfare state Prussia. Yeah, so it's but

1032
01:04:56,119 --> 01:04:59,159
and it seems to operate very well. Why because it

1033
01:04:59,239 --> 01:05:01,280
was homogenous as society people.

1034
01:05:01,400 --> 01:05:04,280
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, they thought of themselves as part of a

1035
01:05:04,280 --> 01:05:07,480
greater community rather than a bunch of you know, individuals

1036
01:05:07,800 --> 01:05:09,039
from from.

1037
01:05:08,880 --> 01:05:15,079
Speaker 1: All over the world exactly. I've been talking about that.

1038
01:05:15,719 --> 01:05:18,480
I've been reading from Imperium Yaki and he talks about that.

1039
01:05:18,559 --> 01:05:21,599
He talks about how as soon as as soon as

1040
01:05:21,599 --> 01:05:26,800
you have two cultures clash within within one one land,

1041
01:05:28,000 --> 01:05:33,159
you're going to even by trying to repair that rift,

1042
01:05:33,519 --> 01:05:35,119
it actually makes it worse.

1043
01:05:35,239 --> 01:05:38,559
Speaker 2: Right Yeah, yeah, it can't be done. Yeah, which is like,

1044
01:05:39,119 --> 01:05:42,400
this is why things are so bad now, not only

1045
01:05:42,400 --> 01:05:45,440
because we have the all these you know, cultures coming

1046
01:05:45,480 --> 01:05:47,519
into one place to try to but we also have

1047
01:05:48,039 --> 01:05:51,159
like hysterical experts who think that they can. They they

1048
01:05:51,159 --> 01:05:54,199
are the ones by doing more, they have more tools

1049
01:05:54,239 --> 01:05:56,599
at their disposal. They are the ones that can finally

1050
01:05:57,320 --> 01:06:00,400
unite all these cultures. And that's why it's especially beat here.

1051
01:06:01,039 --> 01:06:07,840
Speaker 1: Yeah. Unlike today's liberals, traditional ones entertain deep reservations about

1052
01:06:07,880 --> 01:06:12,320
popular rule. A belief that democracy leads inevitably to socialism

1053
01:06:12,400 --> 01:06:14,760
was common to French liberals at the eighteen thirties and

1054
01:06:14,800 --> 01:06:19,000
eighteen forties, and it is equally apparent to Lakey, Pereto, Weber,

1055
01:06:19,119 --> 01:06:22,039
and other liberal observers at the end of the century.

1056
01:06:22,400 --> 01:06:25,880
Preto and Lakey feared that democracy would bring forth a

1057
01:06:25,960 --> 01:06:30,320
trade union approach to economic policy. Unless put under some

1058
01:06:30,400 --> 01:06:33,920
kind of control. Democratically elected trade unionists would add to

1059
01:06:34,000 --> 01:06:37,440
unemployment by driving up wages, which would then harm the

1060
01:06:37,440 --> 01:06:42,679
most expendable workers. Democratic spokesmen would also agitate to impose

1061
01:06:42,760 --> 01:06:47,280
tariffs on foreign goods, and this would hurt domestic consumers,

1062
01:06:47,519 --> 01:06:52,239
while unleashing reprisals from those countries whose goods were being excluded.

1063
01:06:52,800 --> 01:06:53,760
Also unfamiliar to.

1064
01:06:53,679 --> 01:06:54,360
Speaker 2: You, yea.

1065
01:06:56,039 --> 01:06:59,679
Speaker 1: The effects from such economic measures would then be blamed

1066
01:06:59,679 --> 01:07:02,960
on the owners and captains of industry and social democratic

1067
01:07:03,400 --> 01:07:09,000
governments would cite this accusation to justify their confiscation of

1068
01:07:09,039 --> 01:07:16,920
the means of production. The Finnasia sequel prediction about trade

1069
01:07:17,039 --> 01:07:21,039
union democracy revealed the persistent liberal fear about a seizure

1070
01:07:21,079 --> 01:07:24,159
of property that would take place at the urging of socialists.

1071
01:07:24,920 --> 01:07:27,719
Despite the French Revolution of eighteen forty eight, in which

1072
01:07:27,760 --> 01:07:31,599
bourgeois and social democrats went from being allies to violent enemies,

1073
01:07:31,840 --> 01:07:36,239
a liberal view did persist that democratized governments would become

1074
01:07:36,360 --> 01:07:41,880
radical ones, socialism or rampant social order would accompany the

1075
01:07:42,000 --> 01:07:47,599
advent of a universal franchise. Thus, Fitzjames Stephen declared with

1076
01:07:47,719 --> 01:07:51,400
finality in eighteen seventy four, quoting, the substance of what

1077
01:07:51,440 --> 01:07:54,000
I have to say to the disadvantage of the theory

1078
01:07:54,039 --> 01:07:57,119
and practice of universal suffrage is that it tends to

1079
01:07:57,280 --> 01:08:00,119
invert what I should have regarded as the true and

1080
01:08:00,239 --> 01:08:04,519
natural relation between wisdom and folly. I think that wise

1081
01:08:04,559 --> 01:08:07,519
and good men ought to rule those who are foolish

1082
01:08:07,559 --> 01:08:10,920
and bad. To say that the sole function of the

1083
01:08:10,960 --> 01:08:13,800
wise and good is to preach to their neighbors, and

1084
01:08:13,840 --> 01:08:16,800
that everyone indiscriminately should be left to do what he

1085
01:08:17,000 --> 01:08:20,159
likes should be provided with a rat with a rateable

1086
01:08:20,479 --> 01:08:23,039
share of the power, sovereign power in the shape of

1087
01:08:23,039 --> 01:08:25,319
the vote, and that the results of this will be

1088
01:08:25,359 --> 01:08:28,479
the direction of power by wisdom. Seems to me the

1089
01:08:28,520 --> 01:08:32,600
wildest romance that ever got possession of any considerable number

1090
01:08:32,600 --> 01:08:34,159
of minds and glow.

1091
01:08:34,600 --> 01:08:38,840
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is a critique of the entire twentieth century

1092
01:08:38,880 --> 01:08:41,479
American spirit. I mean, the idea that we're going to

1093
01:08:41,520 --> 01:08:45,439
disseminate political power to every I mean, look at the people,

1094
01:08:45,680 --> 01:08:47,319
like you want to give every person the vote, Look

1095
01:08:47,359 --> 01:08:50,000
at the people that you're giving the power to, I mean,

1096
01:08:50,319 --> 01:08:52,319
and then the idea that this is going to result

1097
01:08:52,359 --> 01:08:57,399
in a wiser governmental direction is absolutely insane. He calls

1098
01:08:57,439 --> 01:08:59,119
it a wild romance, and I think that's kind of

1099
01:08:59,199 --> 01:09:02,800
understating it. But this is basically the mentality that captures

1100
01:09:02,840 --> 01:09:06,319
the Republican Party, the Democratic Party, and all major you know,

1101
01:09:06,720 --> 01:09:11,119
voices and advocates within within that entire regime ideological sphere.

1102
01:09:11,199 --> 01:09:14,399
This is the Americanist impulse in the world is to

1103
01:09:14,439 --> 01:09:17,239
share political power with every person. This is why the

1104
01:09:17,279 --> 01:09:21,479
civil rights regime is so crucial to the way the

1105
01:09:21,479 --> 01:09:25,000
American power sees the world. But it has been proven

1106
01:09:25,119 --> 01:09:28,359
so fundamentally wrong. I can't think of anything more disastrous

1107
01:09:28,479 --> 01:09:31,199
than handing out the ability to vote to all of

1108
01:09:31,239 --> 01:09:35,840
these all these groups that have been very easy to radicalize.

1109
01:09:36,039 --> 01:09:39,199
I mean, Paul, even Paul S. Gottfried who's writing this,

1110
01:09:39,479 --> 01:09:41,119
you know, he talks about the fact that he would

1111
01:09:41,119 --> 01:09:45,720
have opposed the central mandate, you know, the national mandate

1112
01:09:45,800 --> 01:09:48,920
that that all blacks have the vote because he recognized

1113
01:09:49,239 --> 01:09:53,000
that these people would could very easily be radicalized and

1114
01:09:53,039 --> 01:09:55,880
they could be fueled in order to pursue you know,

1115
01:09:55,960 --> 01:09:59,000
various you know, far left objectives. And so this is

1116
01:09:59,079 --> 01:10:02,960
exactly what's happened. We've lost wisdom in at the same

1117
01:10:03,039 --> 01:10:05,359
time as we've gained the right to vote for.

1118
01:10:05,359 --> 01:10:08,920
Speaker 1: More and more people. Yeah, these ten lines on paper

1119
01:10:09,079 --> 01:10:13,520
just perfectly described the religion of civic nationalism in America.

1120
01:10:13,800 --> 01:10:15,960
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. And this and this is this is a

1121
01:10:16,439 --> 01:10:19,520
not only is this against like, you know, the Democrat Party,

1122
01:10:19,520 --> 01:10:23,680
but this is specifically against the impulses of the neo conservatives,

1123
01:10:23,720 --> 01:10:27,520
the conservative incorporated not just neo conservatives, but conservative establishment

1124
01:10:27,560 --> 01:10:31,520
conservative you know, uh, you know, political commentators. This is

1125
01:10:31,920 --> 01:10:34,439
this is against them specifically. They're the ones that are

1126
01:10:34,439 --> 01:10:36,920
pushing for the Martin Luther King view of the world.

1127
01:10:37,039 --> 01:10:40,560
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, Martin luthervig Yeah.

1128
01:10:40,600 --> 01:10:45,079
Speaker 2: And Abraham Lincoln yeah, yeah, exactly. Well, Abraham Lincoln wouldn't

1129
01:10:45,079 --> 01:10:47,239
have been you know this.

1130
01:10:47,319 --> 01:10:53,039
Speaker 1: Bad Yeah yeah, yeah, he yeah, he would would have differences.

1131
01:10:53,319 --> 01:10:55,039
Speaker 2: Yeah, he wouldn't have given them the right to vote,

1132
01:10:55,039 --> 01:10:55,479
for sure.

1133
01:10:56,000 --> 01:10:59,039
Speaker 1: The well, I guess the mythological Lincoln that we hear.

1134
01:10:58,880 --> 01:11:00,520
Speaker 2: About, Yeah, yeah, for sure.

1135
01:11:01,239 --> 01:11:05,119
Speaker 1: Like Steven Lakey feared that democracy, by overwhelming and sweeping

1136
01:11:05,159 --> 01:11:09,439
away any national leadership, would leave to capricious and unstable government.

1137
01:11:09,880 --> 01:11:12,359
He predicted almost twenty years before it happened, that the

1138
01:11:12,399 --> 01:11:15,159
House of Lords would be disempowered, and in the eighteen

1139
01:11:15,239 --> 01:11:18,439
nineties he also warned that quote the disassociation of the

1140
01:11:18,560 --> 01:11:22,920
upper classes from public duty is likely to prove a

1141
01:11:23,039 --> 01:11:28,159
danger to the community. Yeah, no, Boyd said, nobless abuge.

1142
01:11:28,760 --> 01:11:31,880
Just that goes right out the window, and it's what

1143
01:11:32,159 --> 01:11:38,239
kept society going for centuriesennia from millennia. Right liberal critics

1144
01:11:38,279 --> 01:11:42,399
of mass democracy offered differing but equally grim predictions about

1145
01:11:42,439 --> 01:11:45,560
the disposition of power in a democratic age. In the

1146
01:11:45,600 --> 01:11:49,239
eighteen seventies, Stephen could find no cohesive group of political

1147
01:11:49,319 --> 01:11:52,439
leaders that might create stable rule in the world. As

1148
01:11:52,479 --> 01:11:57,079
imagined by John Stuart Mill. His opponents were mere dreamers

1149
01:11:57,159 --> 01:11:59,880
who liked the radicals the term by which he did

1150
01:12:00,000 --> 01:12:02,800
the gated Mill in his circle look forward to an

1151
01:12:02,840 --> 01:12:06,039
age in which an all embracing love of humanity will

1152
01:12:06,079 --> 01:12:12,399
regenerate the human race. Not only is it you get

1153
01:12:12,399 --> 01:12:16,920
this kind of egalitarian language, but you also get a

1154
01:12:17,359 --> 01:12:19,720
you get a theological language thrown in there as well.

1155
01:12:19,960 --> 01:12:24,920
Of course, though the radicals complain of the political of

1156
01:12:24,960 --> 01:12:28,640
the petty social arrangements in Victorian England, they lack the

1157
01:12:28,680 --> 01:12:32,359
hardness of mind Steven observes to change things for the better.

1158
01:12:32,960 --> 01:12:36,479
In time, they would be swept aside by better organized fanatics.

1159
01:12:37,359 --> 01:12:40,960
Another liberal critique of democracy, widespread among the doctrinaires of

1160
01:12:41,000 --> 01:12:44,560
the eighteen twenties, was its primitive character, which made it

1161
01:12:44,680 --> 01:12:51,359
unsuited for the nineteenth century. Charles Remusot and Guiseeau both

1162
01:12:51,439 --> 01:12:54,319
stressed the idea that democratic republics were a product of

1163
01:12:54,359 --> 01:13:01,760
classical antiquity. Given their need for cultural homogeneity, severe public morals,

1164
01:13:02,000 --> 01:13:08,279
and highly restricted citizenship, popular polities did not seem destined

1165
01:13:08,319 --> 01:13:12,840
to flourish in the nineteenth century. We need to read

1166
01:13:12,840 --> 01:13:19,359
that again. Given their need for cultural homogeneity, severe public morals,

1167
01:13:19,439 --> 01:13:23,960
and highly restricted citizenship, popular polities did not seem destined

1168
01:13:23,960 --> 01:13:28,000
to flourish in the nineteenth century. Why would they flourish now?

1169
01:13:29,039 --> 01:13:29,199
Speaker 2: Right?

1170
01:13:29,319 --> 01:13:37,359
Speaker 1: Exactly yeah. Unlike Guiseau's democratic Unlike Useau's democratic critic and

1171
01:13:37,399 --> 01:13:39,920
traveler of the New World, the Lexus to Toakville, the

1172
01:13:40,000 --> 01:13:44,079
doctrinaires did not believe that the European future belonged to democracy.

1173
01:13:44,560 --> 01:13:49,159
They viewed the American experience as as sui genries. According

1174
01:13:49,159 --> 01:13:53,399
to Gizo, Americans had established popular sovereignty because they had

1175
01:13:53,479 --> 01:13:58,560
been able to build a regime without an inherited class system.

1176
01:14:00,000 --> 01:14:04,640
Phil's depiction of localism as the essence of American democracy

1177
01:14:04,760 --> 01:14:09,159
seemed to confirm Guizau's judgment. It offered a political picture

1178
01:14:09,199 --> 01:14:12,279
that Guizeau and other doctrinaires thought had no bearing for

1179
01:14:12,319 --> 01:14:16,079
France or for Europe in general. A Europe of highly

1180
01:14:16,119 --> 01:14:20,840
centralized nation states required a stable social pillar drawn from

1181
01:14:20,880 --> 01:14:27,359
the educated bourgeoisie in order to maintain political stability. Democratic primitivism,

1182
01:14:27,680 --> 01:14:30,520
as revealed in the chaos of the French Revolution, was

1183
01:14:30,520 --> 01:14:35,279
the political alternative. Guizau complained into which his democratic critics

1184
01:14:35,279 --> 01:14:37,760
would plunge France and the rest of Europe.

1185
01:14:38,199 --> 01:14:40,439
Speaker 2: So I don't know if people caught this or read

1186
01:14:40,479 --> 01:14:42,640
this out of it, but you know, getting to know

1187
01:14:42,720 --> 01:14:45,520
gotfried over the years. The way I read this is

1188
01:14:46,680 --> 01:14:49,760
it is basically that it's insane for America to export

1189
01:14:49,800 --> 01:14:52,199
its own model, which by the way, is a complete

1190
01:14:52,239 --> 01:14:55,000
aberration from its original model. But it's insane for America

1191
01:14:55,199 --> 01:14:58,239
to export its own model back to Europe. These things

1192
01:14:58,239 --> 01:15:03,279
don't work. I think localism in America is has a history,

1193
01:15:03,520 --> 01:15:07,199
has an organic history that is just completely non transferable

1194
01:15:07,319 --> 01:15:09,920
to the Old World. So you can't. You can't transport that.

1195
01:15:09,920 --> 01:15:13,520
That's why nationalism in the Old World in Western Europe

1196
01:15:13,520 --> 01:15:16,520
makes much more sense than localism does in terms of

1197
01:15:16,680 --> 01:15:21,279
dealing with the political emergency. Whereas nationalism in America, you know,

1198
01:15:21,359 --> 01:15:24,840
for whatever, you know political, whatever political advantages we can

1199
01:15:24,880 --> 01:15:27,399
gain from it right now, it's over the course of

1200
01:15:27,399 --> 01:15:30,199
the last two hundred years, it's tended to be more

1201
01:15:30,239 --> 01:15:33,960
progressive than anything. But you can't. So you can't. But

1202
01:15:34,039 --> 01:15:37,720
you can't export the original Tokuoville's model of local democracy

1203
01:15:37,760 --> 01:15:39,960
back to Europe. It doesn't work like that. And the

1204
01:15:39,960 --> 01:15:43,199
attempt to do so is basically let in all of

1205
01:15:43,239 --> 01:15:45,199
the radicals, and it's led in all of the far

1206
01:15:45,319 --> 01:15:48,600
left movements and allowed them to capture power.

1207
01:15:49,239 --> 01:15:55,399
Speaker 1: Yeah. The doctrinaires pointed portentiously to the Jocoman rule in

1208
01:15:55,439 --> 01:15:59,600
seventeen ninety three as a precedent for democratizing experiments. As

1209
01:15:59,640 --> 01:16:03,479
Gizo explained in the essay de la democracy that duns

1210
01:16:03,800 --> 01:16:08,199
on Society modern air. Democracy is a cry. Democracy is

1211
01:16:08,239 --> 01:16:10,920
a cry of war. It is a flag of the

1212
01:16:10,960 --> 01:16:15,239
party of numbers placed below, raised against those above. A

1213
01:16:15,359 --> 01:16:18,039
flags sometimes raised in the name of the rights of men,

1214
01:16:18,479 --> 01:16:21,840
but sometimes in the name of crude passions, sometimes raised

1215
01:16:21,840 --> 01:16:28,520
against the most iniquitous usurptions, but also sometimes against legitimate superiority.

1216
01:16:29,279 --> 01:16:33,359
Speaker 2: Yeah Yeah, Democracy knows no higher principle. Basically.

1217
01:16:34,920 --> 01:16:39,239
Speaker 1: While Tokville and Guizeau underlined the link between American democracy

1218
01:16:39,279 --> 01:16:42,640
and America's decentralized republic, a new and faithful view of

1219
01:16:42,680 --> 01:16:46,520
the American regime surfaced in the theorizing of George Bancroft

1220
01:16:46,640 --> 01:16:52,640
eighteen hundred and eighteen ninety one, Jacksonian Democrat. Jacksonian democrat,

1221
01:16:52,840 --> 01:16:56,079
career diplomat and author of the ten volume History of

1222
01:16:56,119 --> 01:17:00,600
the United States. Bancroft admired German idealist philosophy, which he

1223
01:17:00,680 --> 01:17:03,760
popularized in the United States. As a young man, he

1224
01:17:03,800 --> 01:17:08,319
had studied in Goettengen, Berlin, and Heidelberg, and while in

1225
01:17:08,359 --> 01:17:12,319
Germany he had become intimately familiar with the historical speculation

1226
01:17:12,479 --> 01:17:17,560
of Hegel. His own work incorporated several unmistakable Hegelian themes

1227
01:17:17,760 --> 01:17:21,479
that history showed the progressive unfolding of the divine personality,

1228
01:17:22,000 --> 01:17:25,840
that this process was reflected in the advance of human liberty,

1229
01:17:26,199 --> 01:17:28,960
and that liberty had developed most fully in the Protestant

1230
01:17:29,000 --> 01:17:34,960
Germanic world. For Bancroft, unlike Hegel, however, this progress toward

1231
01:17:35,159 --> 01:17:41,079
liberty reached its culmination on American soil. Bancroft presents the

1232
01:17:41,119 --> 01:17:45,520
American people as the ultimate bearers of divine, divinely ordered liberty,

1233
01:17:45,560 --> 01:17:48,680
and makes this point explicit at the end of his

1234
01:17:48,680 --> 01:17:51,199
History of the Formation of the Constitution of the United

1235
01:17:51,239 --> 01:17:54,880
States eighteen eighty two, quote, A new people has arisen,

1236
01:17:54,920 --> 01:17:59,279
without kings or princes or nobles. They were more sincerely religious,

1237
01:17:59,399 --> 01:18:03,119
better educated, and of nobler minds, and of purer morals

1238
01:18:03,199 --> 01:18:07,000
than than the men of any former republic. By calm

1239
01:18:07,000 --> 01:18:10,880
meditation and friendly counsels. They had prepared a constitution which,

1240
01:18:11,039 --> 01:18:13,960
in the Union of Freedom with strength and order, excelled

1241
01:18:14,119 --> 01:18:15,479
everyone known before.

1242
01:18:17,039 --> 01:18:24,479
Speaker 2: It's interesting, It's a fantasy. It's a fantasy, but you know,

1243
01:18:24,840 --> 01:18:27,600
it's it's funny to me that people can take the

1244
01:18:27,640 --> 01:18:31,760
American situation in the nineteenth century, eighteenth century, or the

1245
01:18:31,760 --> 01:18:38,520
eighteenth century or even earlier, and in disregard the ethnic

1246
01:18:38,640 --> 01:18:43,520
and cultural roots of that society and basically universalize it,

1247
01:18:43,600 --> 01:18:45,800
bring in tons of people and expect to remain the same,

1248
01:18:46,479 --> 01:18:48,760
you know. So the idea that that you can take

1249
01:18:48,840 --> 01:18:52,479
this you know, you know, fantastical situation and just universalized

1250
01:18:52,520 --> 01:18:57,399
it has been the foundation for all sorts of you know,

1251
01:18:57,439 --> 01:18:59,600
egalitarian terror in the Western world.

1252
01:19:00,640 --> 01:19:02,760
Speaker 1: A discussion I've been having privately with a friend of

1253
01:19:02,760 --> 01:19:07,359
mine recently is whether the United States as a colony

1254
01:19:07,920 --> 01:19:14,880
could even transport the culture, the high culture of the

1255
01:19:15,039 --> 01:19:16,720
home country to the colony.

1256
01:19:17,479 --> 01:19:20,720
Speaker 2: Right, it proved, it proved, you proved that you couldn't

1257
01:19:20,720 --> 01:19:25,239
do that. Yeah, it couldn't. It couldn't outlast the first

1258
01:19:25,239 --> 01:19:28,720
generation that had, you know, absorbed it firsthand. You know

1259
01:19:28,760 --> 01:19:32,039
that the longer those things are separated and the more

1260
01:19:32,600 --> 01:19:35,279
you know, foreign elements you interject into something, you can't

1261
01:19:35,399 --> 01:19:36,319
you can't keep that up.

1262
01:19:36,960 --> 01:19:39,359
Speaker 1: Well, you also have to take into consideration that while

1263
01:19:39,399 --> 01:19:47,600
this uh, while this new colony is growing, it's the

1264
01:19:47,680 --> 01:19:51,720
enlighten the enlightenment injected into it. You're getting all of

1265
01:19:51,760 --> 01:19:56,680
these ideas injected into it which are going to clash

1266
01:19:56,760 --> 01:19:58,119
with its original high culture.

1267
01:20:00,720 --> 01:20:01,199
Speaker 2: I don't know.

1268
01:20:01,840 --> 01:20:06,159
Speaker 1: The conversation, the conversation goes on. The spirit of the people,

1269
01:20:06,199 --> 01:20:09,359
thus described, was held to be democratic, and Bancroft described

1270
01:20:09,399 --> 01:20:12,319
to Americans a collective wisdom which found expression in their

1271
01:20:12,359 --> 01:20:16,560
political architecture. The American Federal Union, as he saw it,

1272
01:20:16,680 --> 01:20:19,680
was no mere convenient state, but the only hope for

1273
01:20:19,720 --> 01:20:23,960
renovating the life of the civilized world. The political institutions

1274
01:20:24,000 --> 01:20:29,039
fashioned and inspirited by America's democratic people, assumed in Bancroft's

1275
01:20:29,119 --> 01:20:33,319
writing a mystical quality, and his insistence that the voice

1276
01:20:33,359 --> 01:20:36,239
of the people is the voice of God led Tokeville

1277
01:20:36,239 --> 01:20:45,600
to remark that pantheism is the religion most characteristic of democracies. Yeah,

1278
01:20:45,920 --> 01:20:49,840
the American capacity for self government that Bancroft exalted was

1279
01:20:49,880 --> 01:20:53,119
not in the end, the American propensity for local self

1280
01:20:53,199 --> 01:20:57,520
rule Bancroft glorified a national democratic will, and his history

1281
01:20:57,560 --> 01:21:01,039
of the United States ends appropriately with a topic consolidating

1282
01:21:01,079 --> 01:21:05,520
the union. According to Bancroft, an American people and an

1283
01:21:05,560 --> 01:21:11,479
American national government were both incotly present even before the

1284
01:21:11,479 --> 01:21:16,000
colonies formed a nation state. Quote for all the one

1285
01:21:16,039 --> 01:21:18,840
of government, they're solemn pledged to one another. And mutual

1286
01:21:18,880 --> 01:21:22,760
citizenship and perpetual union made them one people. And that

1287
01:21:22,840 --> 01:21:26,560
people was superior to its institutions, possessing the vital form

1288
01:21:26,600 --> 01:21:29,520
which goes before organization and gives its strength.

1289
01:21:31,119 --> 01:21:34,720
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is sort of the foundation of like propositional nationhood, right,

1290
01:21:34,880 --> 01:21:39,560
Like it's these things were formed independent of our own past,

1291
01:21:39,680 --> 01:21:42,479
you know, and anyone can anyone can jump in and

1292
01:21:42,520 --> 01:21:44,800
be part of it, be part of the people.

1293
01:21:46,520 --> 01:21:51,079
Speaker 1: That I'm gonna go one because starts talking about Okay,

1294
01:21:51,520 --> 01:21:54,000
one does not have to strain to find here a

1295
01:21:54,119 --> 01:21:59,720
Jacobin imagination hidden behind Hegelian language. A consolidated American national

1296
01:21:59,760 --> 01:22:03,680
govern a powerful executive representing the popular will, and a

1297
01:22:03,720 --> 01:22:07,600
global civilizing mission are the visionary exceptions that one can

1298
01:22:07,640 --> 01:22:12,000
read into Bancroft's patriotic scholarship. Although his history of the

1299
01:22:12,119 --> 01:22:15,520
United States deals predominantly with the colonial period. It points

1300
01:22:15,560 --> 01:22:18,640
more toward the American future than back to the eighteenth century.

1301
01:22:19,159 --> 01:22:22,800
Bancroft is celebrating the progress of the democratic spirit as

1302
01:22:22,800 --> 01:22:27,279
embodied in the American nation. In the process, he replaces

1303
01:22:27,319 --> 01:22:31,760
an older American liberal constitutional identity with one that Guizeau

1304
01:22:31,880 --> 01:22:36,159
and Toakville might have associated with their own eighteenth century

1305
01:22:36,199 --> 01:22:37,199
French Revolution.

1306
01:22:37,800 --> 01:22:43,119
Speaker 2: Yeah, the original vision of the American situation was basically

1307
01:22:43,119 --> 01:22:45,800
replaced by neo Jacobinism. For sure.

1308
01:22:49,039 --> 01:22:53,720
Speaker 1: While Bancroft celebrated the triumphant course of democracy in America, others,

1309
01:22:53,840 --> 01:22:58,119
among them European liberals, grew increasingly agitated about the inevitability

1310
01:22:58,159 --> 01:23:02,880
of popular rule. I actually this we're starting a new

1311
01:23:02,920 --> 01:23:05,000
and we only have a few pages left, so we're

1312
01:23:05,039 --> 01:23:08,319
just gonna you don't mind going to the Okay, all right?

1313
01:23:08,560 --> 01:23:13,760
This news section is entitled liberal Pessimists. While Bancroft celebrated

1314
01:23:13,760 --> 01:23:17,199
the triumphant course of democracy in America, others, among them

1315
01:23:17,239 --> 01:23:24,439
European liberals, grew increasingly agitated about the inevitability of popular rule.

1316
01:23:24,760 --> 01:23:27,479
This anxiety, in some cases became more pronounced as the

1317
01:23:27,520 --> 01:23:30,439
twentieth century began to unfold and social problems in Europe

1318
01:23:30,640 --> 01:23:34,239
appeared to be worsening. The most detailed critical treatment of

1319
01:23:34,279 --> 01:23:40,720
democratic rule produced by European liberal was Transformation of the Democracy.

1320
01:23:41,159 --> 01:23:44,880
By this, I'm just translating that from me by the

1321
01:23:44,920 --> 01:23:50,840
sociologists economists. Pereto Preto's example, as John Gray remarks, makes

1322
01:23:50,920 --> 01:23:54,720
dramatically clear how the pre nineteen fourteen liberal mind was

1323
01:23:54,720 --> 01:23:59,359
placed irreversibly at a crossroads. In the face of a

1324
01:23:59,399 --> 01:24:04,560
democratic franchise, riotous trade union strikes, and the intrusive presence

1325
01:24:04,560 --> 01:24:10,479
of public administration, some liberals embraced authoritarian solutions of the host.

1326
01:24:10,479 --> 01:24:14,359
Pereto was perhaps the best known and the most deliberate,

1327
01:24:14,720 --> 01:24:17,079
as can be judged from his social writings.

1328
01:24:17,279 --> 01:24:22,439
Speaker 2: It's funny. It's funny that today's liberals, you self describe liberals.

1329
01:24:22,840 --> 01:24:25,920
They'll never talk about that, the importance of an authoritarian

1330
01:24:25,960 --> 01:24:29,159
solution in the midst of a crisis or emergency. You know,

1331
01:24:29,239 --> 01:24:31,319
it's really interesting how they never bring that up.

1332
01:24:34,399 --> 01:24:37,520
Speaker 1: Where was it? In Transformation? He outlines the characteristics of

1333
01:24:37,560 --> 01:24:40,439
the democratic epoch and its relationship to the period that

1334
01:24:40,479 --> 01:24:44,159
had preceded it. In the nineteenth century of parliamentary regime

1335
01:24:44,479 --> 01:24:46,800
had come to Italy as the result of a faithful

1336
01:24:46,840 --> 01:24:53,359
alliance between a demagogic plutocracy and the popular classes, both

1337
01:24:53,359 --> 01:24:57,039
that opposed a rule of landed wealth and the ecclesiastical establishment,

1338
01:24:57,239 --> 01:25:01,399
but drew apart after a liberal, cost institutional and unified

1339
01:25:01,479 --> 01:25:06,479
Italy had come into existence. Thereafter, the labouring class had

1340
01:25:06,479 --> 01:25:08,960
worked to seize the wealth of the liberal middle class,

1341
01:25:09,039 --> 01:25:11,760
and by the twentieth century hit It also turned against

1342
01:25:11,800 --> 01:25:15,760
the parliamentary institutions on which the plutocracy had built its

1343
01:25:15,800 --> 01:25:21,079
political legitimacy. In the aftermath of the First World War,

1344
01:25:21,119 --> 01:25:23,199
from which Italy had emerged on the side of the

1345
01:25:23,279 --> 01:25:27,720
victors but financially crushed, unions took over the railroads, iron

1346
01:25:27,760 --> 01:25:31,039
works and factories in Milan and throughout the industrialized North.

1347
01:25:31,640 --> 01:25:35,359
Red Guard units were formed to police the worker occupied areas,

1348
01:25:35,720 --> 01:25:38,560
and though these units carried out the summary executions of

1349
01:25:38,640 --> 01:25:41,600
the enemies of the working class, the national government, then

1350
01:25:41,800 --> 01:25:47,640
under revolving premierships, avoided military force. There was political calculation

1351
01:25:47,720 --> 01:25:52,000
behind this hesitancy. The largest block in the postwar Italian

1352
01:25:52,000 --> 01:25:55,239
parliament was a socialist who in nineteen nineteen had voted

1353
01:25:55,439 --> 01:25:59,880
to nationalize key industries. They and the Catholic social Democrat

1354
01:26:00,079 --> 01:26:04,479
Popolari held enough votes to bring down any government, and

1355
01:26:04,600 --> 01:26:10,079
both were afraid of estranging their constituents by releasing armed

1356
01:26:10,079 --> 01:26:18,079
forces against the Sindicilasti syndicalists. Meanwhile, land peasants landed, landless

1357
01:26:18,079 --> 01:26:20,640
peasants brong. Do you know what that word.

1358
01:26:20,439 --> 01:26:25,159
Speaker 2: Means, Broccianti. I think it's just the landless the peasants.

1359
01:26:24,880 --> 01:26:28,359
Speaker 1: Like, okay, we're grabbing land from large estates. As a

1360
01:26:28,399 --> 01:26:35,319
paralyzed national government conferred on these expropriations ex post facto approval,

1361
01:26:37,880 --> 01:26:43,560
Paredo vented particular contempt on Giovanni Gioliti, the aged prime

1362
01:26:43,600 --> 01:26:48,079
minister who formed his fifth and most disastrous government. Among

1363
01:26:48,239 --> 01:26:53,319
amid these trials, Paredo mac Giolitti's cowardice when he responded

1364
01:26:53,319 --> 01:26:56,319
to Redguard violence with the statement that intervention would be

1365
01:26:56,399 --> 01:26:59,840
tantamount to capital punishment, which would be inappropriate at the

1366
01:27:00,119 --> 01:27:05,039
as in time. Parreto contested Gilti to those fascist squadrons who,

1367
01:27:05,079 --> 01:27:07,640
in the fall of nineteen nineteen moved against the Red

1368
01:27:07,680 --> 01:27:12,520
Baronies in Bologna and Pole Valley. For Peretto, the plutocracy

1369
01:27:12,600 --> 01:27:18,039
had become timorous and moronic, and the only groups which

1370
01:27:18,079 --> 01:27:23,199
now seemed capable of exercising power, were nationalists and union leaders. Quote.

1371
01:27:23,319 --> 01:27:26,640
Among the propertied class, the sentiments of self defense and

1372
01:27:26,720 --> 01:27:30,439
property are largely spent and have begun to transform themselves

1373
01:27:30,520 --> 01:27:35,239
into a nebulous, uncertain social responsibility which others call social duty,

1374
01:27:35,560 --> 01:27:42,079
used interchangeably with work, now defined as a right. In

1375
01:27:42,119 --> 01:27:45,359
some parts of Italy, workers invade the land and perform

1376
01:27:45,479 --> 01:27:49,560
useless tasks, thereafter claiming the right to receive wages which

1377
01:27:49,560 --> 01:27:52,800
the owner has a duty to pay them. I guess

1378
01:27:52,800 --> 01:27:56,399
that's labor theory of value. Huh. The response of many

1379
01:27:56,479 --> 01:28:01,119
bourgeois is approval. Elsewhere, Parreto notes that the hatred and

1380
01:28:01,199 --> 01:28:05,079
combativeness manifested by the union ast towards the propertied class

1381
01:28:05,119 --> 01:28:09,039
no longer elicited resistance. Quote. On one side of the

1382
01:28:09,039 --> 01:28:11,720
class divide, one sounds the trumpet and moves on to

1383
01:28:11,760 --> 01:28:14,920
the assault on the other one. On the other one

1384
01:28:15,000 --> 01:28:18,960
bows one's head, capitulates, or better yet, joins the enemy

1385
01:28:18,960 --> 01:28:24,960
and sells one property for thirty pieces of silver. In

1386
01:28:25,039 --> 01:28:28,119
two political commentaries published in nineteen twenty three, following the

1387
01:28:28,159 --> 01:28:32,000
fascist advent of power in October nineteen twenty two, Peretto

1388
01:28:32,399 --> 01:28:36,119
expressed the hope that Mussolini's regime would restore economic and

1389
01:28:36,159 --> 01:28:40,359
political order. In January nineteen twenty three, he perceived as

1390
01:28:40,359 --> 01:28:43,800
the major difference between past and present governments that one

1391
01:28:43,880 --> 01:28:49,439
ignored economic issues, paying attention to demagogic sentiments and particular interests,

1392
01:28:49,600 --> 01:28:51,880
while the new government is seeking to re establish an

1393
01:28:51,880 --> 01:28:56,640
equilibrium between social forces. At the same time, Perreto warned

1394
01:28:56,680 --> 01:29:00,000
against the danger of taxing heavily those who were salary

1395
01:29:00,039 --> 01:29:04,079
read or small landowners, and he recommended that modern moderate

1396
01:29:04,159 --> 01:29:10,239
unionists be consulted in setting economic policy. In September nineteen

1397
01:29:10,279 --> 01:29:13,039
twenty three, he also suggested how the fascist regime might

1398
01:29:13,039 --> 01:29:17,640
be might best reform the structure of government. Pereto urged

1399
01:29:17,720 --> 01:29:21,000
Mussolini to maintain a free press, let the crow's call,

1400
01:29:21,640 --> 01:29:29,680
but be indefatigable in repressing rebellious deeds. Experience demonstrates that

1401
01:29:29,800 --> 01:29:33,239
leaders who embark upon this path of censorship find headaches

1402
01:29:33,520 --> 01:29:37,319
rather than benefits. It may help to imitate ancient rome,

1403
01:29:37,560 --> 01:29:41,760
not occupy oneself with theology, but attend only to actions.

1404
01:29:42,560 --> 01:29:45,640
Parreto also advocated the putting into place of a new parliament,

1405
01:29:45,800 --> 01:29:49,960
which would express popular sentiments without crippling the executive. Though

1406
01:29:50,000 --> 01:29:54,199
he readily admitted the failure of Italy's earlier parliamentary experience,

1407
01:29:54,479 --> 01:29:57,479
he nonetheless thought that the new regime should not operate

1408
01:29:57,520 --> 01:30:03,000
without elected institutions. He believes such institutions necessary to stabilize

1409
01:30:03,279 --> 01:30:05,399
and legitimate the fascist order.

1410
01:30:06,600 --> 01:30:10,720
Speaker 2: So, and Paul, here's going on a long winded example

1411
01:30:11,000 --> 01:30:16,399
of you know, the tendencies of the democratic tendencies of

1412
01:30:17,439 --> 01:30:20,279
you know, the fascist experiment. Basically, I think he's trying

1413
01:30:20,279 --> 01:30:24,600
to demonstrate that democracy and liberalism are not always mutually.

1414
01:30:24,760 --> 01:30:29,000
They're not always like you can have aspects of liberalism

1415
01:30:29,079 --> 01:30:34,119
and democracy within non liberal democratic political orders.

1416
01:30:35,720 --> 01:30:39,479
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's exactly what I'm reading here in assessing these

1417
01:30:39,479 --> 01:30:42,199
comments written shortly before Pereto's death, that is important to

1418
01:30:42,279 --> 01:30:46,079
keep in mind to critical factors. First, there was no

1419
01:30:46,479 --> 01:30:49,560
reason for Peretto and others to believe in nineteen twenty

1420
01:30:49,560 --> 01:30:52,600
two that the Italian fascist rezime regime would later go

1421
01:30:52,680 --> 01:30:56,640
berserk and ally itself ideologically and politically with Nazi Germany.

1422
01:30:57,279 --> 01:31:00,560
In the early twenties, the Italian fascist express either racist

1423
01:31:00,680 --> 01:31:03,439
or anti Semitic ideas, and they were willing to offer

1424
01:31:03,600 --> 01:31:06,560
leadership in a country that had broken down economically and

1425
01:31:06,680 --> 01:31:08,359
was on the vergi of political collapse.

1426
01:31:08,680 --> 01:31:11,600
Speaker 2: I actually personally disagree with this part. I think that

1427
01:31:11,760 --> 01:31:14,960
Italian fascists, I think, like so many regular Europeans over

1428
01:31:15,039 --> 01:31:21,560
a thousand years, had you know, racial prejudices. Yeah, well,

1429
01:31:21,600 --> 01:31:24,760
you know, and I mean maybe they didn't consider it

1430
01:31:24,800 --> 01:31:27,079
as like official part of like you know, a political

1431
01:31:27,159 --> 01:31:32,560
agenda or anything, but like they were aware within their

1432
01:31:32,560 --> 01:31:37,760
own context of you know, the dangers of multiculturalism, multi racialism,

1433
01:31:38,119 --> 01:31:40,479
and also you know, the Jewish threat. You know. To

1434
01:31:40,520 --> 01:31:43,760
say that the Jewish threat is a post nineteen thirties

1435
01:31:43,840 --> 01:31:47,720
or nineteen forties European phenomenon, I think is overstating it.

1436
01:31:48,079 --> 01:31:51,079
Speaker 1: Yeah, to say that Italians were not aware of the

1437
01:31:51,199 --> 01:31:57,119
of the Jewish question right exactly it is. Yeah. Second,

1438
01:31:57,560 --> 01:32:01,960
Parreto saw his own class to bourgeoisie as spent and demoralized,

1439
01:32:02,319 --> 01:32:05,079
and though he hoped to preserve some of its creations,

1440
01:32:05,159 --> 01:32:08,159
particularly a free market, a free press, and religious liberty,

1441
01:32:08,399 --> 01:32:11,239
he did not believe that his own social class would

1442
01:32:11,279 --> 01:32:13,920
be able to do so. He therefore thought it was

1443
01:32:14,000 --> 01:32:18,600
necessary to turn to what he, like Machiavelli, designated as

1444
01:32:18,640 --> 01:32:22,199
the Lions bold warrior forces to save what had been

1445
01:32:22,239 --> 01:32:26,479
devised by those who had become foxes, parliamentary schemers and

1446
01:32:26,520 --> 01:32:32,199
finessing plutocrats. What Pereto saw happening in Italy seemed to

1447
01:32:32,199 --> 01:32:35,960
belong to a broader civilizational context. Throughout his writing, he

1448
01:32:36,079 --> 01:32:39,760
used the concept of uniformities, which he applied to both

1449
01:32:39,800 --> 01:32:42,600
economic and social affairs, and which he claimed to have

1450
01:32:42,720 --> 01:32:47,720
derived from an experimental research method. The long term invariability

1451
01:32:47,800 --> 01:32:51,800
of the income curve and the equivalent advantages of to

1452
01:32:51,960 --> 01:32:56,079
producers of a perfectly organized monopoly and of an unimpended,

1453
01:32:56,840 --> 01:33:00,920
unimpeded free market are two such laws that are worked

1454
01:33:00,960 --> 01:33:08,199
out in Prereto's major economic works. In Trezado the Social General,

1455
01:33:09,159 --> 01:33:13,279
he developed a theory of psychological predispositions to explain social behavior.

1456
01:33:14,079 --> 01:33:17,760
In this analysis we find six such predispositions, which Prereto

1457
01:33:17,840 --> 01:33:23,000
called residues and associated with changing movements and ideologies, also

1458
01:33:23,079 --> 01:33:27,359
known as derivations. The six residues underlying group behavior are

1459
01:33:27,359 --> 01:33:31,800
the instinct for combination, the persistence of aggregates, the desire

1460
01:33:31,880 --> 01:33:37,159
to manifest one's beliefs, sociality and the integrity of the individual.

1461
01:33:38,319 --> 01:33:42,279
The integrity of the individual, and the sexual drive. It

1462
01:33:42,359 --> 01:33:45,399
is the instinct for combination and related residues three and

1463
01:33:45,560 --> 01:33:49,800
four that actuate groups on the rise, while the persistence

1464
01:33:49,840 --> 01:33:53,479
of aggregates and the concern about individual interests are most

1465
01:33:53,600 --> 01:33:59,520
characteristic of established elites. Paredo discussed those residues operating within

1466
01:33:59,560 --> 01:34:03,920
Italian society in the context of his social observations. He

1467
01:34:04,000 --> 01:34:08,119
believed that the waning of liberalism, conspicuous in his own country,

1468
01:34:08,560 --> 01:34:12,840
was taking place throughout the industrialized West. The liberal bourgeoisie

1469
01:34:12,880 --> 01:34:15,560
had lost its assertiveness in the face of its insurgent

1470
01:34:15,600 --> 01:34:19,600
working class and of other democratic forces expressing instincts for

1471
01:34:19,680 --> 01:34:24,640
combination and group solidarity. In the First World War, according

1472
01:34:24,640 --> 01:34:28,800
to Pereto, the parliamentary plutocrats had triumphed over the German

1473
01:34:28,880 --> 01:34:33,600
military aristocracy, but had succumbed to the democratic classes, without

1474
01:34:33,640 --> 01:34:35,720
which they could not have hoped to win the war.

1475
01:34:36,399 --> 01:34:39,760
The only force now able to resist a revolutionary socialists,

1476
01:34:39,760 --> 01:34:43,319
Preto maintained, were the nationalists, who drew upon the same

1477
01:34:43,399 --> 01:34:48,960
residues prevalent among the socialists. Socialism and nationalism seemed to

1478
01:34:49,000 --> 01:34:53,960
be related derivations, both resulting from residues leading to collective action.

1479
01:34:56,279 --> 01:35:00,960
Among his last published remarks were those on Italian constitutional

1480
01:35:01,000 --> 01:35:05,039
reform addressed to the new fascist government on September twenty fifth,

1481
01:35:05,079 --> 01:35:09,600
nineteen twenty three. Under democratic ideology runs the current of fascism,

1482
01:35:09,600 --> 01:35:13,239
which overflows at the surface, but beneath that runs a countercurrent.

1483
01:35:13,479 --> 01:35:18,239
Beware lest that countercurrent overflow. Beware lest you bestow upon

1484
01:35:18,319 --> 01:35:22,239
it power to power by trying to close it off completely.

1485
01:35:23,319 --> 01:35:26,039
Bretto believed that the fascists and their socialist enemies were

1486
01:35:26,039 --> 01:35:29,720
harnessing the same democratic enthusiasm that in now declining liberal

1487
01:35:29,800 --> 01:35:33,439
society had given up trying to oppose. He felt that

1488
01:35:33,439 --> 01:35:36,680
the fascists would have to coexist with social democracy, but

1489
01:35:36,840 --> 01:35:42,000
hope they would do so on their own terms. Bredo's

1490
01:35:42,000 --> 01:35:44,640
appeal to some aspects of liberal heritage occurred in the

1491
01:35:44,640 --> 01:35:47,640
face of what he took to be an irre irrevocable,

1492
01:35:48,119 --> 01:35:53,760
irrevocable political change. The march towards democracy would continue no

1493
01:35:53,800 --> 01:35:57,119
matter what, and the decadence of the Roman plutocracy was

1494
01:35:57,279 --> 01:36:02,039
only a portete of the destiny tower above our own plutocrats.

1495
01:36:03,119 --> 01:36:07,359
An activist and redistributionist democratic government was about to arrive, and,

1496
01:36:07,479 --> 01:36:11,119
unlike Lackya generation earlier, Parretto had no doubt that a

1497
01:36:11,119 --> 01:36:15,039
corresponding elite was arising to take charge of modern democracy.

1498
01:36:16,159 --> 01:36:19,720
Political upheavals did not transpire randomly, but were the work

1499
01:36:19,800 --> 01:36:24,039
of purposeful elites who took advantage of their consequences.

1500
01:36:25,079 --> 01:36:30,960
Speaker 2: Of course, yeah, I mean, it's just classically theory. Yeah.

1501
01:36:31,119 --> 01:36:33,520
Speaker 1: Faced by the Italian nationalists and the priesthood of the

1502
01:36:33,520 --> 01:36:37,279
social proletariat, Parreto opted for what he considered to be

1503
01:36:37,359 --> 01:36:40,760
the more moderate democratic leadership. In fact, he chose what

1504
01:36:40,840 --> 01:36:43,359
turned out to be less far sighted of the two

1505
01:36:43,439 --> 01:36:46,880
aspiring democratic elites. In the twentieth century, it was the

1506
01:36:46,920 --> 01:36:51,800
exponents of working class democracy, not of democratic nationalism, who

1507
01:36:51,920 --> 01:36:57,680
made the more compelling claim to represent liberal democracy. Significantly,

1508
01:36:57,760 --> 01:37:00,920
social democratic planners took over a form of discourse more

1509
01:37:00,920 --> 01:37:04,800
closely akin to Perettos than to that of Italian fascism

1510
01:37:04,920 --> 01:37:09,520
fascists in Scandinavia, England and the United States. They appeared

1511
01:37:09,520 --> 01:37:14,239
to experimental scientific methods in education and public policy, and

1512
01:37:14,319 --> 01:37:17,560
they presented their takeover of civil society as an act

1513
01:37:17,600 --> 01:37:22,359
of liberating individuals and upholding their rights. But they also

1514
01:37:22,439 --> 01:37:27,600
appealed effectively for several generations to democratic legitimacy. Unlike the

1515
01:37:27,640 --> 01:37:31,119
Italian fascists, who were forced to manufacture popular endorsements for

1516
01:37:31,159 --> 01:37:35,119
their plans. It is not surprising that by the end

1517
01:37:35,119 --> 01:37:38,039
of the century, social democratic planning had given rise to

1518
01:37:38,079 --> 01:37:42,720
what Charles Croudhammer calls reactionary liberalism, holding fast to the

1519
01:37:42,720 --> 01:37:48,680
structures and constituencies of the welfare state come What may

1520
01:37:49,199 --> 01:37:51,960
more interesting is the fact that this liberal democracy held

1521
01:37:52,039 --> 01:37:56,479
up for more than half a century in the most

1522
01:37:56,760 --> 01:38:00,880
prosperous and literate areas of the world, with popular approval.

1523
01:38:04,199 --> 01:38:07,720
This result indicates that some European liberals read the political

1524
01:38:07,720 --> 01:38:12,399
future with clearer eyes than others. Despite his demonstrated polemical skills,

1525
01:38:12,640 --> 01:38:17,000
fitz James Stephens Stephen underestimated J. S. Mill's capacity to

1526
01:38:17,079 --> 01:38:20,720
plan a popular regime. Mill did not intend to leave

1527
01:38:20,760 --> 01:38:23,359
the uninstructed masses to do it as to do as

1528
01:38:23,399 --> 01:38:27,880
they please. Maurice Colling notes that Mills staked his democratic

1529
01:38:27,920 --> 01:38:31,800
hope on a religion of humanity quote, a better religion

1530
01:38:31,880 --> 01:38:34,720
than any of those which are ordinarily called by that

1531
01:38:34,760 --> 01:38:39,000
title unquote, and on a new claricy which would work

1532
01:38:39,079 --> 01:38:44,640
to instill a universal faith in rationality. Unlike the Anglican

1533
01:38:44,680 --> 01:38:50,000
clergy and most of the English professariat, Mills claricy would

1534
01:38:50,079 --> 01:38:54,880
propagate scientific method and political sociology, seen as the true

1535
01:38:54,920 --> 01:38:58,880
science of society. This elite would arise in response to

1536
01:38:59,000 --> 01:39:02,960
social need and to the spread of secular rationalism. It

1537
01:39:02,960 --> 01:39:06,600
would train citizens to emulate its own rationality and bring

1538
01:39:06,640 --> 01:39:10,279
them into fellowship with the advocates of social progress everywhere.

1539
01:39:12,000 --> 01:39:15,359
Speaker 2: Yeah, like he's described, he's describing the rise of like

1540
01:39:15,399 --> 01:39:19,239
the managerial state. You know, the ability for the reasoned

1541
01:39:19,439 --> 01:39:24,319
experts using rationality in their own training to basically create

1542
01:39:24,399 --> 01:39:27,199
something ongoing and something that was more stable.

1543
01:39:30,000 --> 01:39:33,880
Speaker 1: Calling further argues that Mill's devotion to intellectual freedom was

1544
01:39:33,920 --> 01:39:37,720
conditioned by his concern about great minds being crushed by mediocrity.

1545
01:39:38,560 --> 01:39:41,119
Mill was less of a libertarian than someone looking out

1546
01:39:41,199 --> 01:39:45,000
for the highest nature's noblest minds and the advancement of

1547
01:39:45,039 --> 01:39:49,479
scientific truth. Note that Mill favored extensive state intervention in

1548
01:39:49,520 --> 01:39:54,079
the economy and the ongoing redistribution of incomes. He also

1549
01:39:54,239 --> 01:39:56,239
hoped that his own elite would take charge of the

1550
01:39:56,279 --> 01:39:59,720
general culture. It would thereby become possible to teach a

1551
01:40:00,319 --> 01:40:05,279
his own utilitarian ethic, which Mill assumed would bring forth

1552
01:40:05,319 --> 01:40:10,600
a new social morality all enlightened citizens would eventually accept

1553
01:40:10,600 --> 01:40:14,840
the utilitarian notion that the good is that which maximizes

1554
01:40:14,960 --> 01:40:20,079
general happiness. But as Calling perceives, the highest end that

1555
01:40:20,159 --> 01:40:23,720
men here were imagined to pursue in quest of pleasure

1556
01:40:24,119 --> 01:40:28,520
was whatever Mill and his confreres desired for themselves. They

1557
01:40:28,640 --> 01:40:31,680
never doubted that their own social preferences would come to

1558
01:40:31,760 --> 01:40:38,039
prevail in a democratic age. Clearly, fitz James Stephen and

1559
01:40:38,079 --> 01:40:43,840
his younger brother Leslie Stephen, though both sagacious critics of Mill,

1560
01:40:44,239 --> 01:40:47,760
did not see fully his authoritarian side. They did not

1561
01:40:47,880 --> 01:40:53,479
grasp the inquisitorial the inquisitorial certainty which Calling exposes at

1562
01:40:53,479 --> 01:40:56,760
the core of his method of inquiry. Nor did they

1563
01:40:56,800 --> 01:41:00,680
appreciate the dogmatic way in which Mill generalized about subjects

1564
01:41:00,720 --> 01:41:04,199
he never studied. Mill knew little in detail about the

1565
01:41:04,239 --> 01:41:06,680
history of British society in the two hundred and fifty

1566
01:41:06,720 --> 01:41:10,279
years before he was born. His denigration of its polity

1567
01:41:10,800 --> 01:41:14,520
and religion was based neither on close observation nor on

1568
01:41:14,680 --> 01:41:16,520
exact historical knowledge.

1569
01:41:16,960 --> 01:41:19,920
Speaker 2: Well, if that doesn't describe the current liberal spirit like

1570
01:41:19,960 --> 01:41:22,079
they just they have no bearing in history of no

1571
01:41:22,119 --> 01:41:25,920
idea what happened, they just have. The solutions will of

1572
01:41:25,920 --> 01:41:29,760
course include much worse solutions than Mill, ever put forth.

1573
01:41:30,560 --> 01:41:34,079
Speaker 1: Well, and to know what happened, they'd have to understand why.

1574
01:41:34,760 --> 01:41:35,920
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, for sure.

1575
01:41:36,279 --> 01:41:38,600
Speaker 1: And that's one question no one wants to ask anymore.

1576
01:41:38,640 --> 01:41:41,640
It's like, oh, this happened, Well, why did it happen? Well,

1577
01:41:41,680 --> 01:41:42,640
because people are.

1578
01:41:42,520 --> 01:41:47,279
Speaker 2: Mean, yeah, exactly, Okay, you can't look at specific political dynamics.

1579
01:41:47,439 --> 01:41:51,039
You just have to rely on generalities like that. Yeah.

1580
01:41:51,199 --> 01:41:54,920
Speaker 1: Finally, Mill's liberal critics underestimated the power of his vision

1581
01:41:54,960 --> 01:41:58,159
of a new claricy crafting and directing in democratic order.

1582
01:41:58,720 --> 01:42:01,960
However we may have been his grasp of the past,

1583
01:42:02,239 --> 01:42:05,880
Mill evoked a society of democratic planners which would arise

1584
01:42:05,960 --> 01:42:09,560
after his death. His twisting of historical data and fudging

1585
01:42:09,560 --> 01:42:12,640
of laws of human progress were of less significance than

1586
01:42:12,680 --> 01:42:16,880
Mill's ability to foresee mass democracy at work. No other

1587
01:42:16,960 --> 01:42:22,039
mid nineteenth century figure, including Tokville, exhibited such understanding of

1588
01:42:22,079 --> 01:42:26,239
the dawning democratic age, even if that understanding, in Mill's case,

1589
01:42:26,479 --> 01:42:31,600
was ideologically colored, and only one European liberal, Max Weber,

1590
01:42:32,039 --> 01:42:37,000
revealed comparable insight in plotting the likely course of modern democracy.

1591
01:42:37,720 --> 01:42:41,079
Unlike those liberals who trembled over the fate of property

1592
01:42:41,359 --> 01:42:46,199
and parliamentary civility. Faber associated democratic life with the aid

1593
01:42:46,399 --> 01:42:51,279
with the iron case of iron cage of bureaucracy. Like Pereto,

1594
01:42:51,359 --> 01:42:56,880
he was willing to entrust democratic government to plebisatory leaders

1595
01:42:57,239 --> 01:43:00,439
not because of the fear of anarchy, but because of

1596
01:43:00,479 --> 01:43:08,600
his dread of bureaucratic despotism yeah very In an off

1597
01:43:08,640 --> 01:43:12,439
quoted letter from Weber to the sociologist of elites, Robert Michel's,

1598
01:43:12,640 --> 01:43:15,560
at the end of the First World War, Weber questions

1599
01:43:15,600 --> 01:43:19,560
the intelligence or honesty of those who exalt the will

1600
01:43:19,600 --> 01:43:23,079
of the people. He goes on to admit that genuine

1601
01:43:23,119 --> 01:43:25,640
wills of the people have ceased to exist. For me,

1602
01:43:26,199 --> 01:43:30,399
they are fictitious. All ideas aiming at abolishing the dominance

1603
01:43:30,439 --> 01:43:34,680
of man over man are utopian. In nineteen eighteen, Weber

1604
01:43:34,760 --> 01:43:39,880
observed even more incisively, in large states everywhere, modern democracy

1605
01:43:39,960 --> 01:43:44,359
is becoming a bureaucratized democracy. And it must be so,

1606
01:43:44,520 --> 01:43:47,920
for it is replacing the aristocratic or other titular for

1607
01:43:48,279 --> 01:43:53,199
officials by a paid civil service. It is the same everywhere.

1608
01:43:53,520 --> 01:43:56,600
It is the same within parties too. It is inevitable.

1609
01:43:56,920 --> 01:43:59,880
Despite the attempt by Weber's critics to attribute such are

1610
01:44:00,119 --> 01:44:04,600
marks to the anemia of German liberalism. What they indicate

1611
01:44:04,760 --> 01:44:08,720
is Weber's deep perception of a secular trend, the intertwining

1612
01:44:08,760 --> 01:44:12,760
of mass democracy and public administration as the shape of

1613
01:44:12,800 --> 01:44:13,520
things to come.

1614
01:44:14,039 --> 01:44:18,399
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is such a powerful narrative. I mean, the

1615
01:44:18,600 --> 01:44:24,720
entire ethos of conservative Incorporated and the liberal establishment is

1616
01:44:24,760 --> 01:44:30,920
that America represents like the triumph of individual freedom. And

1617
01:44:31,199 --> 01:44:33,920
I think Weber is much more perceptive to the fact

1618
01:44:34,039 --> 01:44:36,680
that actually what it represents is the triumph of the

1619
01:44:36,720 --> 01:44:40,640
managerial state, the triumph of the administration, the triumph of

1620
01:44:41,720 --> 01:44:45,880
bureaucratized or what you know, bureaucrats basically just running people's

1621
01:44:45,920 --> 01:44:48,000
life and trying to arrange the world in the way

1622
01:44:48,000 --> 01:44:52,079
that they see fit. And that's exactly this spawn. This

1623
01:44:52,159 --> 01:44:56,279
administrative state that Weber had his sits on, basically spawned

1624
01:44:56,319 --> 01:44:58,720
the multiculturalism in which we exist. We don't exist in

1625
01:44:58,760 --> 01:45:01,359
a world of increased individ dual freedom. We exist in

1626
01:45:01,439 --> 01:45:05,680
the world of mandated cultural degradation. You know, that's what

1627
01:45:05,720 --> 01:45:09,439
we existed, and it's and it's handed down, it's politically derived.

1628
01:45:09,840 --> 01:45:12,319
I mean, I think the people that say, like Aaron

1629
01:45:12,399 --> 01:45:15,479
McIntyre and others who say that culture is downstream from politics.

1630
01:45:15,520 --> 01:45:17,960
Recognize the fact that the administrative state, the thing that

1631
01:45:18,359 --> 01:45:23,359
Max Weber learned about, is characteristic of the American function

1632
01:45:23,680 --> 01:45:27,439
in world affairs. You know, everything, our culture, everything is

1633
01:45:27,439 --> 01:45:30,319
handed down from politics. Everything is handed down from above,

1634
01:45:30,640 --> 01:45:36,000
and it comes from not individual freedom, but from breureaucracy. Yeah.

1635
01:45:36,039 --> 01:45:39,119
Speaker 1: And in order it has to be that way if

1636
01:45:39,119 --> 01:45:42,479
you understand that the managerial state, it's one purpose is

1637
01:45:42,479 --> 01:45:46,239
to perpetuate itself. It has to control everything, it has

1638
01:45:46,319 --> 01:45:48,680
to control the culture, it has to guide everything.

1639
01:45:49,680 --> 01:45:49,840
Speaker 2: Yeah.

1640
01:45:50,439 --> 01:45:53,399
Speaker 1: Yeah, and that's why the you know, was Jonathan Bowden

1641
01:45:53,439 --> 01:45:55,960
famously saying, the only way you change this is to

1642
01:45:56,039 --> 01:45:56,840
clear it all out.

1643
01:45:57,399 --> 01:46:01,399
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So I think I think the overall

1644
01:46:01,479 --> 01:46:06,880
lesson here for Paul is that liberalism and democracy are

1645
01:46:06,920 --> 01:46:11,760
not the same, but their unity is the particular characteristic

1646
01:46:11,880 --> 01:46:15,359
of American totalitarianism. The attempt at at unifying these two

1647
01:46:15,359 --> 01:46:18,920
themes has created an ideological hegemony that people don't know

1648
01:46:18,920 --> 01:46:21,880
how to oppose, that the dissident right is only now

1649
01:46:21,920 --> 01:46:25,039
figuring out how to oppose. But this is this is

1650
01:46:25,039 --> 01:46:27,520
one of the sacred caws of the American ideology is

1651
01:46:27,560 --> 01:46:30,039
the union of democracy and liberalism.

1652
01:46:31,079 --> 01:46:33,399
Speaker 1: And the real genius of it is the fact that

1653
01:46:33,479 --> 01:46:38,439
you you have this left right paradigm, this democrat Republican paradigm,

1654
01:46:38,560 --> 01:46:41,880
let's call it, where they do not realize that they're

1655
01:46:41,920 --> 01:46:46,079
both operating within the same system, and that all conservatives

1656
01:46:46,199 --> 01:46:52,119
are working to do is to conserve this system exactly. Yep.

1657
01:46:52,199 --> 01:46:55,199
If they're if they're working to concern to keep any

1658
01:46:55,239 --> 01:46:59,319
of it, they're perpetuating the system. So there's a certain

1659
01:46:59,359 --> 01:47:02,359
genius to its design and that you have if you

1660
01:47:02,439 --> 01:47:05,359
only have two factions that are that are allowed to

1661
01:47:05,800 --> 01:47:10,720
genuinely fight within it, they're both working to they're both

1662
01:47:10,720 --> 01:47:12,000
working to keep the system going.

1663
01:47:12,720 --> 01:47:15,880
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is why like people, I mean people as

1664
01:47:15,920 --> 01:47:17,880
they're becoming more radicalized on the right, you know, the

1665
01:47:18,000 --> 01:47:22,279
recognizing that there's something more substantial needs to be done.

1666
01:47:22,279 --> 01:47:25,000
But I've never found I've never found the solution really

1667
01:47:25,000 --> 01:47:27,880
in Republican politics, you know, Republican party politics. I mean,

1668
01:47:28,039 --> 01:47:31,600
sometimes it's fun, but really that's not where change has

1669
01:47:31,640 --> 01:47:35,239
to happen. Because both of these parties are reinforcement mechanisms

1670
01:47:35,279 --> 01:47:38,399
for this regime, and it have to be it's built

1671
01:47:38,399 --> 01:47:40,640
into the cake like that. You have to clear it out.

1672
01:47:41,159 --> 01:47:44,800
Speaker 1: Yep. So all right, man, promote whatever you want. Thank

1673
01:47:44,840 --> 01:47:46,760
you well, first of all, thank you for this. This

1674
01:47:46,920 --> 01:47:48,840
is great and I didn't know it was going to

1675
01:47:48,880 --> 01:47:51,119
go this long, but thank you for Yeah.

1676
01:47:51,159 --> 01:47:54,560
Speaker 2: Paul is such a dense a dense writer, so's it's

1677
01:47:54,600 --> 01:47:57,760
really hard to get through sometimes. But at contramordor is

1678
01:47:57,960 --> 01:48:01,319
my Twitter and then my name Cjing dot substack. You

1679
01:48:01,359 --> 01:48:03,479
can you can find me there, and that's basically. I

1680
01:48:03,520 --> 01:48:06,479
also do the Chronicles magazine, which is small now and

1681
01:48:06,640 --> 01:48:08,880
we're making some changes for next year, so that'll be fun.

1682
01:48:09,000 --> 01:48:12,640
We always have a magazine podcast, right yeah, Chronicles magazine podcasts,

1683
01:48:12,640 --> 01:48:15,239
and so we're doing some more stuff next year for that,

1684
01:48:15,359 --> 01:48:17,319
but in anticipation of that, you can always check it

1685
01:48:17,359 --> 01:48:18,479
out on YouTube, et cetera.

1686
01:48:19,159 --> 01:48:20,520
Speaker 1: All right, I'll link to it.

1687
01:48:20,800 --> 01:48:23,000
Speaker 2: Thanks a lot, I appreciate you