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Conversations with Coleman
The Future of Woke w/Eric Kaufmann [PLUS AUSTRALIA SHOW ANNOUNCEMENT]
01:11:10
The conversation examines the future of wokeness, the implications of generational turnover, and much more.
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- [00:00]
Coleman Hughes
Sam, welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coleman. According to YouTube, about 4% of my listeners live in Australia. If that describes you, then I have some exciting news. I'm doing two live events in Australia next month with my friend Josh Zepps, who's a great broadcaster out there. We're doing one event in Sydney at the Festival of dangerous ideas on August 25th, and then we're doing a standalone event in Melbourne on August 28. So if you live in Australia, go to the links in the description below and grab a ticket. My guest today is Eric Kaufman. Eric is a political scientist and formerly a professor at Birkbeck University of London, where he specialized in the study of demographics, immigration and national identity. His last book, White Shift, won Tyler Cowen's Book of the Year at Marginal Revolution. His new book is the third Awokening, a 12 point plan for rolling back progressive extremism. I would say this is probably the best book on wokeness that I've read. We talk about Kaufman's concept of cultural socialism. We talk about the relationship between wokeness and liberalism, the implications of generational turnover and value change. We talk about the gender divide in Woke ideology. We talk about the role of birth rates and religiosity, and much more. As always, if you like what I'm doing, please support the show@patreon.com ColemanHughes so without further ado, Eric Kaufman. Erik Kaufman, thanks so much for coming on my show again.
- [02:04]
Eric Kaufman
Great to be here. Thanks for having me back.
- [02:07]
Coleman Hughes
All right, so congrats on the book. It's really fantastic. It's called the third awokening.
- [02:14]
Eric Kaufman
Yeah, the third awokening. YeahSeal, thanks. Just came out more or less today.
- [02:19]
Coleman Hughes
Beautiful. On this podcast, I've had a series of conversations with many different people about the the phenomenon of Wokeness. There's been a series of books about it. Yasha Monk wrote a book, Chris Ruffo wrote a book asking questions like where did wokeness come from? What's the right way to fight it? What are its consequences? And so forth. And my book in large measure deals with this problem. And I categorize your book as sort of in the same vein in the sense that it's asking the same kinds of questions but coming to different answers. Really interesting and clarifying answers for me. And so I just want to congratulate you on what I consider to be probably the deepest and best treatment of of the questions that I have read thus far. So well done, Eric.
- [03:17]
Eric Kaufman
Well, thanks, Coleman. That's high praise coming from you. Thanks a lot.
- [03:25]
Coleman Hughes
So let's get right into it. One of the most common questions I've gotten over the past two years is whether we have achieved peak woke. This is something many people have noticed that things went crazy in the summer of 2020 after the death of George Floyd and kind of reverberated throughout 2021 with cancellations, just too many absurd stories to go into. And I think Nellie Bowles book is actually a great kind of diary of all of those crazy and just crazy events that risk being memory hold. And I just had her on the podcast so people will remember that. And so people have seen that things aren't quite as crazy now as they were in 2020 and 2021. They see also that there's now a widespread pushback against the DEI in the aftermath, especially of October 7th. And they say, well, it looks like wokeness is on the way out. What do you have to say to that?
- [04:36]
Eric Kaufman
Well, I think it's one thing I'd agree that it hit a peak. Certainly 2020, 21 is a kind of peak. And we can see that in the number of cancellations, no platformings, professor targetings, the number of times terms like white privilege are used in the major media. So there was certainly a stepping back from a, from a sort of high point around then. But I think the mistake people make is to think that, oh, well, this is a fad and, and like McCarthyism, it's going to be gone. And what I'm arguing is that actually there are deep structural reasons why it exists. And it's a bit like we've trimmed the bush back, but it can flare out again at any time. And we've seen a little bit of that, certainly with the, since October 7th with the Israel Palestine conflict, how quickly you can get a sudden upsurge again in no platformings, for example, they were going down and then suddenly they're back up again. So I guess I would really. That's the first caution. But the second thing I would say is the cohort dynamics, the generational turnover. We're going to, at some point see woke generations start to sort of become the median voter and start to take positions of power in organizations. So senior liberals in the New York Times can row back from this. But what happens when they're replaced by much less tolerant generations? And I'm more convinced, you know, I'm very convinced by the survey data that the younger generations are much, much less tolerant than the older generations of liberals.
- [06:07]
Coleman Hughes
Yeah. So we'll get to that. But before we do, I want to get some foundational Definitions here. Let's talk about what wokeness is, in your view.
- [06:17]
Eric Kaufman
So wokeness, I have a relatively simple one line definition. The making sacred of historically marginalized race, gender and sexual identity groups. So the key there is elevating and making sac those groups. And then at the flip side of that, of course, is the fallen, the white, the male, heterosexual, etc. Which would be at the bottom of the pyramid. And so once you've got these groups as sacred, anything that is deemed to offend the totems that might be interpreted by the most hypothetically sensitive member of such a group as being offensive is no longer permitted. And also, any kind of inequality, any race gap, any gender gap is also an outrage and must be closed so that those principles kind of follow from the sacralization. The starting point is making these groups sacred in a way they cannot be offended. Nothing can be. No policy or no statement can be made that would either increase or would lead to the perpetuation of inequality or would lead to some kind of taking such a group being offended or psychologically harmed or emotionally traumatized. That would be seen as essentially blasphemy.
- [07:34]
Coleman Hughes
In the book you talk about cultural socialism, and this is not exactly the same as wokeness, or perhaps you can clarify if there are any differences. But I think it's really useful that you make this analogy from economic liberalism and socialism on the one hand to cultural liberal and socialism on the other. What do you mean by that?
- [07:56]
Eric Kaufman
So economic socialism is the idea of everybody having the same amount, no matter how hard they work or what they contribute to each according to their need, as Marx said. So that's essentially redistribution by class. If we talk about cultural socialism, it's again, redistribution. So everybody has the same, but it's redistribution by race and gender, for example. And so that any kind of race gap in attainment in income and achievement, CEO or gender gap must be closed, typically through affirmative action, some kind of quota. And that is a kind of cultural socialism. Now, I also want to introduce, you know, there is a distinction between woke forms of cultural socialism which are based on race and gender and sexuality. And you can actually, in theory, imagine a different form of cultural socialism based on, let's say, looks, intelligence and athleticism. So Kurt Vonnegut's the Handicapper General was a sort of dystopic little short story about a society where everybody had to be equal, respectively, regardless of intelligence. So smart people had sort of transmitters in their brain that would sort of make a noise so they couldn't take unfair advantage of their brains. And beautiful actors and actresses had to wear disfiguring masks to sort of equalize looks. And actually, there's a new novel by Lionel Shriver, Mania, which talks about this sort of mental parody movement which is similar. So you can imagine a cultural socialism based on, you know, we're gonna. You know, some people got lucky with looks and intelligence. We're gonna kind of make that equal, gonna level that down by quotas. Instead of doing that, we're doing it on the lines of race and gender.
- [09:35]
Coleman Hughes
Yeah. So, I mean, that's an interesting way to characterize it. I mean, one of the things you point out in the book is that cultural socialism differs somewhat from economic socialism in the sense I've noticed, which is the Marxists of the past. Back when they were more relevant in the west, they didn't care so much about the psychological harm and offense given to the proletariat. They really cared mainly about their systematic ideology, which said that the proletariat is going to inevitably displace the bourgeoisie. Capitalism's inherent contradictions, redistribution and so forth. They weren't about microaggressions against the factory workers. In fact, the Marxists of yesteryear were highly logical and rigorous in the way they wrote, in the way that they spoke. They were masculine in the sense of not caring so much about offense. And one of the key differences is that cultural socialists of today care a lot about this sort of harm and care axis and in that way. And also care less about the value of pure logic and rigor. So can you talk about that a bit?
- [11:06]
Eric Kaufman
Yeah, well, you're right. I mean, and you can read Karl Marx in the Communist Manifesto just, you know, raking these sort of humanitarian Victorian liberals over the coals that sort of. He talks about, you know, they're basically Christian socialists and they are just humanitarians. And, you know, he calls him hole and corner reformers of all kinds. So he's sort of. This is sort of seen as bourgeois, these sort of movements. You know, the Fourier. You know, they were setting up these utopian socialist movements. So very sort of scornful of utopian socialism, of humanitarian socialism, Christian socialism. Yeah, those values really weren't there in the orthodox Marxism. And in fact, you would tend to get sort of sidelined as bourgeois up until really quite recently. And in fact, I think Tom Hayden, the New Left activist, talked about being very surprised when mentioning civil rights didn't get him shouted down as bourgeois. I don't know when this was. It was in the early 60s, I think, which was a Sort of inflection point. But prior to that, this was really seen as not something a true Marxist would care about. You know, something like civil rights. That's. That's just bourgeois talk. We care about the revolution and. Yeah, so the humanitarian elements actually come from a. Have a different origin in liberal progressivism, which is a more Victorian humanitarian kind of movement. And then layered onto that from the 60s, this humanistic therapeutic, Carl Rogers, Abraham Maslow kind of new therapeutic lingo which comes in in the 60s, which is all of that adds in and transforms these ideas. So in a way we get to a place that's quite far from that old Marxian socialism.
- [12:55]
Coleman Hughes
One of your observations in the book, and this is one that's also in my book, is that wokeness basically equates to a gut level pre rational association between whiteness and. Whiteness is bad and anything but whiteness is good. And I think this is exactly how I look at it as well. I think it's important to note that it is kind of pre rational. Right. It's actually not that everyone has read postmodern theorists going back to Foucault and Derrida and then Kimberle Crenshaw. It's that they have imbibed in their gut just a basic dislike for whiteness. In your book, you frame it more as majorities in general and in a basic sense that people of color are morally superior and sacred in some way. And then all of the theorizing is post hoc in a way.
- [14:04]
Eric Kaufman
Completely. Yeah, I agree completely. You're probably aware of Jonathan Haidt's term of elephant and the rider. The elephant is kind of the subconscious conscious drives, you know, and this is really about myths and symbols and narratives, emotional stuff. And then you have the writer who's telling a story about why the elephant is moving in a particular direction, but the elephant is really moving because of these emotions. And, and the cognitive stuff is kind of just post hoc rational. And I think that's right. So whether it's, you know, Marxism, critical theory, post structuralism, all of these sorts of things, I think are attempts to systematize what is fundamentally an elephant that's crashing and for reasons to do mainly with particular narratives and stories. You know, could be civil rights, decolonization, it could be the gay rights movement. The attachment, I think is to these concrete, particular emotion draw, you know, energ. Energizing movements. So, so there, so the. What emerges is this kind of empathizing dynamic. So there's this, I think it's Simon Baron Cohen has this Empathizing versus systematizing. One being the more female style and the other being the more male style. And I think definitely here we're talking about empathizing, inductive. So first you're attached to concrete social movements. You find them meaningful and romantic, and so they provide a source of moral direction. Now, out of that, of course, out of that chaos or out of these concrete movements arises a what I would call a fuzzy set of moral impulses, which, crudely put, majority's bad, minorities good. Let's just say at that level, it's very crude. Now, of course, it gets tricky when you have trans against female, you know, gender critical. How do you adjudicate that? Or even, you know, to a lesser extent, Palestinian and Jewish there? What's interesting is one group has more points than the other. So there is a kind of a point system where you have black and indigenous at the top and then you've got gay and, you know, trans and then gay and then females and then white males at the bottom. So there's this kind of, kind of crude, progressive stack, kind of oppression, victimhood, Olympics type point scoring system that emerges out of this. But of course it's not. I don't think it's systematized. I mean, it's just kind of a, an emergent, inductive, fuzzy folk ideology rather than anything that's sort of based on certain conclusions following from premises and first principles.
- [16:39]
Coleman Hughes
Right. And I think, I mean, there's so many ways to see that that's true. I mean, for instance, the whole culture of intersectionality that was the dominant culture when I was at Columbia, whereby basically your social status was in large part determined by how many boxes you checked. Like, if you were a black trans woman, you just, like everyone around campus knew your name and you could just walk into a room and have that sense of social clout that we all intuitively recognize as like, important in life. Right? And if you were a white male, you had to essentially be apologetic for that fact or, you know, try to become gender neutral or something. Give yourself, get yourself some kind of social status so as to not be at the bottom of the hierarchy. That kind of intersectionality has, has nothing to do with actually, actually Kimberle Crenshaw's foundational work on intersectionality. Like there's. If you read her book, if you read her initial papers, it would not be obvious that you could extrapolate a whole culture of doling out status from like a really niche observation about some, like, case law, right? Which is what, what this, which is what intersection. Intersectionality meant when she wrote it. It's. It's only post hoc that once people observe the culture of intersectionality, they go back and search for who is it that initiated this term and draw a connection, draw a causal arrow that may be in the wrong direction in some way. But I wanted to push you, though, on this because in the book you talk about the root impulse of wokeness as being sort of strong majority bad, weak minority good. But that strikes me as not quite precise because you think of a case like apartheid South Africa, you have a black majority, and certainly the woke would want that black majority to be stronger and wouldn't care at all about a white minority in that context. So isn't it really about color? Isn't it really about race?
- [18:49]
Eric Kaufman
Wow. Okay. Yeah, that's a good question. I guess I would say that it's about some notion of power and privilege. So the whites in South Africa are a numerical minority, but would be seen to have economic privilege and past political privilege even if they're no longer in power. And I think that's what's. But you're right that racism is the most sacred of the totems. And with whites, clearly anything that is. That whites were involved in, they're going to be at the bottom of that totem pole now. But I, but I think it's. So what you've got in the South African case is a strong minority that is white. And you know, let's just. I'm trying to think of an example. If you had a minority sexuality that was very powerful. It's very hard to think of one. But there are two dimensions. One is the power dimension and one is the majoritarian dimension. So it is in theory possible have. It is in theory possible to have a dominant minority that the woke will react against and not. But I guess what I mean is that in Western societies, generally speaking, the majority group has been the dominant, powerful group, whereas the dominant minorities, that's places like Iraq and Rwanda and South Africa, which are generally not within the purview of these writers. So generally there is a sort of overlap between majority and the. What is seen as the dominant group in society. And of course, the reason I draw attention to that is because I think what we're also talking about, stepping back from the post 60s development, is a kind of left liberal extremism, actually. So not a socialist far left extremism, not a sort of capitalist extremism, but a left liberal. So left liberalism is a hybrid of the two, which kind of comes in, in the 20th century and becomes quite focused on minorities and trying to. And did a lot of good things. This is the kind of. One of the points in the book is that left liberalism does do a lot of things in trying to get equal rights for minority groups. It just overshoots on the equality part of it. As we enter into the second half of the 20th century, if we go back to the 19th century, there was a lot more focus on rights against powerful minorities, by which I'm talking about the king or elites who didn't want to extend the franchise beyond the upper class or the property class. So you had liberalism in the 19th century was different. It was kind of more pro nation. Nation was seen as opposed to the aristocracy. It's more populist in a way. We come into the 20th century and I think liberalism moves away from that classical liberal position towards this new left liberalism, which again, did some good things. The welfare state is a good thing, you know, taking the edges off 19th century capitalism. But on the cultural side, my argument is that left liberalism has no boundaries. There's nothing to prevent it ratcheting towards extremism. So now they might not say we want 50% women in every prestige occupation, but they will always say we should have more women, we're too male. How are we progressing in terms of our share of women? So there's this constant ratcheting and there's no real limiting principle that says, you know, actually maybe women don't want to work 80 hour weeks, so maybe we might not expect 50, 50 in the boardroom and may, maybe we should be thinking in terms of reaching a comfortable, natural level of inequality. And maybe women are maybe less likely to pursue engineering than psychology. And that's okay. I mean, we can certainly try and make it as easy as possible for them to get into these professions, but we also accept that there are reasons other than patriarchy and discrimination why we don't have a perfectly equal distribution. That's not possible within left liberalism as currently constituted, I would argue. So that this is, I think, partly what we're living through.
- [22:52]
Coleman Hughes
Yeah, yeah. And the check has to come from outside. I think you make a really good analogy in the book, which is in. In the same way that moderate Muslims, though they don't agree at all with Hamas or with ISIS or Al Qaeda, have struggled to disempower them, have. Have to. Have really not done enough by way of delegitimating their brand of Islam. And that one of the reasons they're not not really able to effectively argue back against the fundamentalist fringe is. Because the fundamentalist fringe has the fundamentals correct in the sense that if you read the Quran, you know, back to forth, front to back and the hadiths, it's very easy to get a worldview that is similar to isis. And so if you accept the basic premise that the Quran is a word of God, which most moderate Muslims would, it's very difficult to then argue against ISIS and hair split and say, well, you've got it all wrong. Once you accept that once you walk through that door, it becomes almost impossible to really effectively disempower the most extreme version of it. And part of the argument I think you're making is that liberals have, you know, many left liberals have walked through the door of making sacred race, race, gender and sex, sexuality. So that when someone comes, you know, when a radical comes in and says this profession has to be 50, 50 men, male, female, they're unable to really effectively hold the line because they've already admitted that gender equality is sacred. How can you say it's sacred and then really argue back against someone that is just taking your faith to its logical endpoint?
- [24:57]
Eric Kaufman
Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. I couldn't have said it better myself, is that once you sacralize these, these groups as essentially the top of your moral order. So in a way what occurs is the sort of, with the mid-60s emergence of the anti racism taboo, again, a sacredness around race and that I argue, that becomes the sort of fulcrum of our moral order. And left liberals very much buy into that. You can see that very quickly already by 1966, you know, Susan Sontag talking about the white race as the cancer of human history. You know, she's writing in Partisan Review, which is the anti communist left wing establishment journal, liberal left journal. And I think that was a perfect illustration of they went all in on this and this becomes the top of their, their moral hierarchy. So yeah, you're right. I mean there's no real way for them to argue back. And you can see that for example, with speech codes and cancel culture, for example. It's very tricky when, if they say, well, you know, gender critical feminists are creating a hostile environment for trans people and they're erasing their identities. And what is a left liberal going to say to that when they've already sort of accepted the sacralization of these identities? You know, if someone's, if somebody who is a representative, claims to be a representative of a racial minority, says this speaker is creating a hostile environment for us and is silencing, quote, unquote, silencing our voices. The left liberals will go along with that. And there's quite a bit of survey work that you know is in the book. So I've run a lot of surveys where you can see this sort of 50 to 60% left liberal opinion coming through. Where for example, I have a number of hypothetical scenarios. Should somebody who says that more diversity in an organization leads to worse organizational performance, if they're an academic and they deliver those findings, should they be forced out of the university? Now you don't get a large number of people saying that they should be cancelled, but you get sort of 60% who say, well they shouldn't be cancelled, but I wouldn't be a opposed to them being canceled. You see what I mean? So you have a kind of, these values are very much making it impossible for them to sort of say, no, we should stand up for free speech. Or you ask a question like is political correctness good because it protects minorities or is it a bad thing because it stifles free speech? Three quarters of social science humanities academics will say it's a good thing. So they're clearly kind of inclining towards, at the very least, soft kind of speech restrictions, ostracizing, you know, not hiring, maybe not firing, but short of not firing, essentially creating conditions that would make it very clear that this person isn't welcome and that sort of powers cancel culture. So even something like diversity statements, academics, you know, that I've surveyed three quarter, not three quarters, sorry, by a two to one margin, they support mandatory diversity statements. Again, that's another example where they wouldn't say, say I support firing this individual, but they would support mandatory diversity statements and they would lean towards mandatory race and gender quotas on reading lists as well. But if somebody refuses to abide by, you know, refuses to sign a diversity statement, refuses to sort of decolonize their reading list, most of them would support some kind of punishment, even if that's just social pressure or forcing them to take DEI training. So there is a certain authoritarianism baked into this sort of soft left liberalism.
- [28:39]
Coleman Hughes
Yeah, I think this is one of the biggest misconceptions about poll results and survey data in general. It's actually one of the biggest limitations of poll results and survey data is that if you ask a question like should the police be defunded or are all disparities the result of racism? If you get a poll result on one of these questions where say only 5 or 10% at most agree with this radical proposition. So you can easily dismiss it as fringe. But if the 90% or the 50 or 60% who disagree with it don't feel strongly about their disagreement, whereas the 5 or 10% that agree with this radical view feel really strongly about it, then that is as important as the number numbers themselves. Right? Because our beliefs don't actually come in binary. Yes. No, right. That's not how human behavior works. What, what happens is you can have 5 or 10% of people that feel extremely strongly that something is true, and you can have, you know, 50, 60, 70% of people that will answer no to that if just asked point blank, but they don't feel strongly about it. They don't strongly oppose it. They may even see that it has some truth to it. It may be very low on their list of priorities to oppose it. Right. So then the 5 and 10% can actually just have the run of the place. And I think that's it. To me, that that is a huge feature of what has gone wrong on universities in certain corporations too, is when I was at Columbia, I think, you know, me and my friends that were attuned to it estimated that no more than 5 to 10% of the students were actually radicals in the sense that they really believed the whole catechism of things you're supposed to believe about race, gender, sexuality. And yet they set the culture because the, you know, I guess in your book, the way you put it is like there is no silent majority. And this is, this is an interesting challenge to what I've thought until now because I, I've always felt that there was a silent majority, people who didn't agree. But I think that the truth is that it's not that they. It is that they didn't agree in some sense, but they didn't feel strongly about their disagreement. And that's as important as the numbers themselves.
- [31:17]
Eric Kaufman
Yeah, I think there are a couple of things in there. I mean, I think one is the question, you know, how much is it that they're fearful of being accused of not being an ally or even worse, of being a racist or a transphobe, and how much are they actually taken in by a label that says anti racist, inclusive, diverse on the tiny? So I'm sort of making the argument that a lot of them are taken in by those labels and they see, you know, how could you be against. It's like being against a nice, fuzzy, cuddly pet. I mean, it's just very hard to oppose something called diversity. And I think there's a certain. They're Sort of willing to give the benefit of the doubt to anybody who comes along with that. And so I guess what I'm arguing is I actually think that 60, 50, 60% does matter in a way. So, I mean, if you imagine somebody who, you know, a group of even 10% of academics is strongly anti abortion or wanted to have everybody have the same salary in the department, I think you would very quickly get quite strong opposition to that. It wouldn't go through. But in this case, they're uttering a message that actually has quite a bit of support, even if it's soft support, you know, so if you just take students, we know from the fire data, for example, that something like between 70 and 85% of students say someone who says BLM as a hate group should not be allowed to speak on campus. Somebody who says abortion should be banned should not be allowed to speak on campus. You've got quite high support in the student body. Two thirds of British and American under 25 say James DeBoer should have been fired. And so I guess I would argue that there is. There is actually a lot of support for progressive illiberalism amongst young people in particular. And actually, on all of the academic faculty surveys, what we see is the young faculty, 35 and under, at least twice as intolerant as the older faculty. And what we're comparing here is a young leftist and an old leftist. There's not much difference in the share of left and right between the old and young academics, but boy, is there a difference between the share who would be willing to fire people for speech. And so my concern is actually that there is quite a bit of support there, even if they don't necessarily. If they won't go down and join an encampment, maybe they'd rather be partying, but just as a casual. Almost as a casual attitude. Yeah, of course they shouldn't, you know, of course these people shouldn't be allowed on campus. They're hurtful, they're harmful, they're emotionally traumatizing to historically marginalized groups. Their whole moral worldview has, I think, been shaped. Now, that's, of course, more true of young women than young men, but I. I think it is quite widespread and I think it helps to explain this tenacity and the power of that vocal minority.
- [34:23]
Coleman Hughes
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- [36:55]
Eric Kaufman
Yeah, My view is that actually these beliefs are going to be sticky through the life course. Now we've seen, certainly if you take something like religion, secularization, the people who say they have no religious affiliation is much higher amongst young people in the United States, but also in Britain and some other European countries and as those people age, the population gets less religious. And that's exactly what's happened in Europe and what's happening in the United States. It's not as though young people who happen to say they're non religious at age 20, suddenly by age 40, were attending church at the same rate as their parents. In fact, what we saw was successive generations brought forth value change. We've seen that on other issues. We've seen it on homosexuality, we've seen it on sex before marriage, drug use, all kinds of things. We've seen a kind of shift to the left or certainly to more liberal attitudes on a whole host of these issues with generational turnover or even you could take something like voting, actually generational turnover in the South Southern whites who'd always voted Democrat during the Dixiecrat years, there was actually cohort led change. Those older generations found it very tough to become Republicans. The younger ones actually were much more Republican, young Southern whites anyway. So we have a whole series of studies that show cohort change is very real and driving value change. And similarly, I think in this case, we're going to see that, that the values of this generation are just different, just as they, you know, they're different on religion and they're in terms of them being less religious. And they're also different in terms of prioritizing social justice over freedom of speech, for example. And I think that will bring a cohort led shift in sensibility. Now we also have some evidence from Dennis Chong, Jack Citra and Morris Levy in California. Political scientists, they've been looking at the GSS data from 1972 onwards and they've sort of been asking the same questions. Six categories of people, should they be allowed to speak in public, should they be allowed to teach in school? And that's homosexual, communist, militarist, racist. A couple of other ones which I can't remember off the top of my head. And the one for racists has diverged from the other five over time. Now that starts with the boomers to be. And this is where a lot of these changes begin. It starts with the boomers, but it's been accentuating over time. So millennials and zoomers, that exception for identity groups. So they're getting more tolerant on free speech from all these other groups, militarists, communists, but when it comes to racists, much less tolerant.
- [39:39]
Coleman Hughes
Yeah, so that's one I didn't fully understand. I mean, the way that U shaped, or I guess it was an upside down V shaped graph looked in your book suggested that in the 1910s people were intolerant of racist speech. Was I reading that right?
- [39:56]
Eric Kaufman
You were reading that right. And conservatives were less tolerant of racist speech than liberals. And that was the trend, really.
- [40:04]
Coleman Hughes
So. But what does that even mean? Because I don't. Isn't it the case that even the word racist wasn't really in common parlance until the 1930s or 40s?
- [40:17]
Eric Kaufman
I think there were other terms, you know, I mean, you know, there was the term racialist bigot.
- [40:23]
Coleman Hughes
I think there's definitely prejudices. You saw prejudice written then, but you didn't see the term racist too often back then. And it's just hard, hard for me to imagine there would be so little tolerance in the sort of progressive era where everyone, everyone and their mother was a eugenicist and so forth.
- [40:40]
Eric Kaufman
Well, I mean, eugenics actually was quite an elite thing, so I don't. But, but, but no, I think there was a general. One of the features of conservatives and those without university degrees was this relative intolerance for those who would upset the social order. And that that would include a racist speaking they didn't like was sort of, you know, upsetting to the social order. Similarly with a communist or a militarist or any of these people. They were negative on all of them.
- [41:10]
Coleman Hughes
So who was allowed to speak in 1910?
- [41:14]
Eric Kaufman
Well, it was the liberals were really kind of a smaller group. Who. The aclu. I mean, you just look at the evolution of the aclu, for example. Right. So they were actually pushing for more openness across all of these dimensions quite consistently, but they were in the minority. Often they were unpopular. And when they were allowing Nazis to march in Skokie, I think it was in the 70s, or maybe I've got that date exactly date wrong. But yeah, that was not popular with conservatives. And so. But one of the sort of findings of the social science of that era was that, you know, moral relativism, toleration, that's a liberal thing and that's an educated thing. And what we actually see is now an overturning of that on the just one dimension, which is to do with race, gender and sexuality. There you actually see now there are surveys showing that those who've gone to university, young people who've gone to university, are more morally absolutist. They're more likely to say there's absolute right or wrong. It's not. Morals are not relative. That's now the educated thing to say, which was. I mean, if you showed that to a social scientist, you know, in the 20th century, they would not, Wouldn't have believed you. There's a whole literature around cognitive flexibility leading to moral relativism and so on. But here we now have actually the highly educated who are supposed to be morally more flexible, cognitively more flexible, actually fixating and zeroing in on a set of things which are deemed to be morally moral absolutes. So that's very interesting. Just from a wider social science perspective.
- [42:47]
Coleman Hughes
Are there any exceptions to the rule that people carry their values in youth with them to old age? Are there any examples where the truism about people aging out of a philosophy is in fact true?
- [43:01]
Eric Kaufman
Yeah. Yes. So there are. And this is really what we don't 100% know. So we know from the US and Britain we've seen in the 20th century, and especially in Britain, we've got about 30 years worth of longitudinal. So we ask people the same question every year for since 1991, maybe that's more than 30 years now, but you can see about a 20 point shift from age 20 to, let's say age 65 and over towards the Conservatives. And we've also seen, say support for the European Union in a country like, I mean, prior to the Brexit vote, you saw that, you know, in Europe generally younger people were more supportive of the eu, but overall levels of support for the EU have actually been sliding. So it seemed to be that as people got older, they got more skeptical. What I would say is that it depends on the issue, but certainly on the economics, clearly you have more of a stake in the economy. As you get older, you're probably not as keen on redistribution, you're probably more so. I would think that on the economics it's easier to make the case. On values, I think it's much trickier and I think there are fewer instances. There may be some exceptions. I think the EU might, support for the European Union might be an exception. But certainly a lot of these sort of social and cultural mores have shifted and drifted kind of in a left liberal direction, with youth kind of one of the vanguard groups. Academics, cultural professionals would be another vanguard group that tend to manifest these characteristics.
- [44:34]
Coleman Hughes
So is it fair to say that on certain deeply held values, sacred issues, there are few or no exceptions to the rule that you sort of carry, you carry them with you as you age. But on other issues which are perhaps not sacred, not sanctified, not values based, that you can see a kind of aging out of certain ideas, is that the big picture result?
- [45:02]
Eric Kaufman
I think that's right. I think that would be the result because there is a whole kind of evolutionary psychology argument about our brains forming up until about age 25. There's malleability and then they sort of the synapses. Everything's kind of there by age 25. And so there's a certain receptivity and crystallization of views. And it's true about musical taste, it's true about a whole bunch of different things that, that kind of get set by the mid twenties and after that are not totally set for life, but they're somewhat set for life. And so I just think that when it comes to these deeply held symbolic attachments, that that's quite powerful. It's not to say that nothing can change. So older people have become more tolerant of gay marriage, for example. So there's been movement amongst older people in that direction. So there can be movement. I'm not saying there's. It's impossible to move these attitudes at all, but I'm just saying there can be quite a powerful generational turnover cohort replacement effect. And that's sort of what I. I think that's probably the safest prediction right now at this moment. It's not to say that there couldn't be some sudden change in the future that might also affect people who initially were woke. And maybe when they hit middle age, there'll be some big cultural move. If it's a big cultural movement, it could move them.
- [46:22]
Coleman Hughes
Now even, even the gay marriage example, though, that's in a way a bit of a different thing because that's an older generation moving towards the value of the values of the young in some way, at least partly. Whereas for the young and woke to become less woke over time would mean moving in the direction of their parents and grandparents values, probably.
- [46:50]
Eric Kaufman
Yeah, that's right.
- [46:51]
Coleman Hughes
Which is a heavier lift for people, perhaps.
- [46:54]
Eric Kaufman
Yeah, it's tricky. I mean, there are some societies, you know, the Islamic world, the young sort of led the, you know, the Islamic fundamentalism came from young people, university students in Northern Ireland. The radical, the extreme hard line, whether Protestant or Catholic, nationalist. I mean, that was. Also had a larger young representation in it. Now, I guess the question is, what are the values of the parents? You know, you see young people, in some cases, you know, like in Quebec nationalism, the young people were at the forefront of separatism in the 60s and 70s. Now the young people have moved away from that and they see that as a boomer thing. So you can have these generational cycles. But I. I find it hard, like if we just take the core Western nations, I find it hard to see any sort of Major conservative cultural movement where the young have sort of moved in a conservative direction compared to their parents for quite a while. You know, even sort of the. Yeah, I can't. And I, by the way, the evangelical religious right is not, I don't believe, an exception to that either. It's because, I mean, yes, it is true, what happened there was largely, I think we talked about it last time, you had higher birth rates amongst evangelicals, which was the main driver. So yes, there were more young evangelicals for demographic reasons, but I don't think this was a major reaction by the youth against the liberalism of their parents the way you saw in the Islamic revival, for example.
- [48:29]
Coleman Hughes
Okay, so you have two arguments in your book which I think, at least to me are potentially intention. One is what we've been talking about right now, that the young are much more woke than their parents and grandparents and are probably going to carry those values with them and therefore those values are going to become more ascendant, more entrenched over the Next, let's say 50 years. And then at a different point in the book, you talk about this debate that has been had among many in the anti woke camp, which is do you reform the institutions as they are or do you build new ones? And you seem to side more with the idea that we've got to reform the institutions we have because it's just too difficult to build new ones that actually, really form, that actually have authority. Harvard and Columbia and Princeton, major mainstream media outlets, corporations, they're still going to be what matters even if you try to build your own versions. And so we've got to work on sort of reclaiming injecting real liberalism into those institutions rather than trying to build parallel ones. This seems a little bit intention though, because that begins to seem like a futile effort if it's really the case that wokeness is going to, it's only going to become stronger because of the generational issue that would seem to lean more in the direction of start anew, build your own university. Because you're probably going to lose this fight in the long run if you're reforming, if reform is the strategy.
- [50:18]
Eric Kaufman
Yeah, no, and I think, yeah, I mean, it's a good question. I mean I'm sort of a both and rather than an either or type. So there are certain sectors such as media, where the barriers to entry aren't particularly high and you can start new institutions, your podcast, others, and that's worth doing. And that's hugely important for the battle of ideas because I think Greg Lukianoff is right in a way, is that even with the First Amendment, I mean, if you have a population that's hostile to free speech, eventually that's going to crumble. So no laws or political structures can protect you if your culture is not a free speech culture. So that's totally right. Now, however, there's a big however, I would say a couple of things. One is that these legacy institutions have built up a lot of goodwill and cultural capital. And a lot of people just think, oh well, the New York Times said it and Harvard University said it, so I'm going to sort of give them the benefit of the doubt. Now, I know that's. I know trust has fallen a lot amongst Republicans, but there's still a lot of people who will grant a certain amount to these legacy institutions because of their accumulated reputational capital. And it's very hard to. I mean, you can, you can start new institutions which I think are important. University of Austin, for example, that's important. But it's difficult. It's a bit like if you compare Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter with Gab Parlor and Truth Social and these other small startups, like the small startups can do certain things, but it's pretty hard to match a takeover of an established legacy institution. I think we have to do both. We have to work wherever we can. The one thing I would say is the reason, for example, on school choice versus public school reform, the reason I would say reform of the existing institutions is extremely important is that I've done a study with Zach Goldberg, for example, which shows that actually critical race and gender theory indoctrination in schools does change minds of young people. They're quite impressionable at that age. Now, school choice, if you have very highly informed parents that want classical education and really don't want gender ideology in their schools, they may be able to have an option to select out of it. I would argue that that's only a very small minority of parents. Even with large scale school choice, and even, even if you have school choice, most of the teachers, most of the curriculum materials are still going to come from the same sort of cultural socialist ethos. Whereas if you actually able to reform the public schools where the vast major kids are being indoctrinated, you're going to have a much bigger impact potentially on how those kids are formed. Again with the caveat that, you know, schools are not going to be the most important formative factor social media is, but schools matter to some extent. I mean, our study showed, for example, that if you take a pupil at 18? Well, we surveyed 18 to 20 year olds and ask what they heard in school. You compare a pupil who's heard no critical race or gender in class to a pupil who's heard six concepts of critical race and gender, such as patriarchy, many genders, white privilege, and so on. You compare those two students and the one who's heard the six concepts has more or less a twice, twice as likely to express a woke view on something like reparations or affirmative action or white guilt or any of these questions. So there is, there's a powerful effect, I would argue, of school indoctrination, and it's massive. So I think really, if we really want to start to try and get this generation away from these ideas, we're going to have to start with the curriculum. Instead of just learning about, you know, the American state, conquering indigenous people and Trail of Tears or slavery or whatever, you have to learn that, but you have to, I would say you should have to learn that alongside understanding Ottoman slavery, Comanche genocide, Aztec conquest, and so on. Understand it in a world historical perspective so that it takes the edge off this exceptionalism that. I mean, a lot of these students are getting this very black and white morality play, which is completely divorced from context. But that's going to take a sustained political campaign to take on the teachers unions, to take on the educational establishment, to maybe even push it to the point of strikes or. I actually think that battle has to be fought and won in order to start to change the kinds of socialization that these young kids are getting.
- [55:04]
Coleman Hughes
How would you rank these three factors in determining a kid's worldview? Parents, social media and schooling.
- [55:14]
Eric Kaufman
Schooling is probably third of that hierarchy. However, again, if we just take the study that I did with Zach, I mean, you can look at somebody with a Republican mother, a Republican mother, if you're not exposed to any critical social justice in school. It's about 61% of the kids identifying Republican. If you take somebody with a Republican mother exposed to the maximum of six concepts, it falls to about 30% Republican. So there's a. Now that's just talking about partisanship. So we've controlled for your mother being a Republican, and we can do it with father and mother. It's the same effect. So parents are, yeah, they're hugely important in the data, but so is schooling hugely important. And by the way, we have various ways of taking account of whether parents sent their kids to, you know, more woke schools or less woke schools. So this is, I'm pretty confident that we've largely dealt with that problem. And so I would say schools have a big effect. It's not as much as social media. No, but it is a big effect and I think it reinforces instead of challenging messages they're getting from social media.
- [56:19]
Coleman Hughes
Him. What do you, what do you think you can glean as someone analyzing wokeness from the fact that there is such a huge gender divide between young women and young men? What, what are the implications of that? Why does that matter?
- [56:41]
Eric Kaufman
Yeah, it matters. I mean, I guess it matters for the dating market, which obviously can be complicated by this, you know, which. Will that have an effect on family formation down the road? I don't know. That's a question. I mean, if what we see now continues as these people become 40 year old median voters, then we're gonna see a big gender gap in the vote. I mean, the gender gap in the vote is much larger amongst young people than it is amongst older people in which there's very little gender gap actually in the vote. So that could, you know, bring in a new kind of politics. South Korea has a big politics of gender, which is quite unhealthy in many ways. Now why? One of the questions is why we see that gender gap. I mean, Corey Clark and Beau Weingart and a number of others would say this is due to evolutionary psychology and women as the carers having that more empathetic worldview. My take on it is somewhat different. I mean, I think that the ideology, you can have ideologies that are feminized or feminine without there being any women involved. And if you look back historically, for example, moving away from dueling and rude table manners, you could call that feminine. And there's a book called the Civilizing Process which makes that argument wasn't driven by women. But in this case, what we've got, I think is a set of ideas which have moved in a feminine direction, largely initially under the tutelage of men. But that resonates better with women. However, the question with empathy and the reason I don't find it that satisfying as an explanation is are you going to be empathetic towards the trans woman who wants to play in women's sports teams and access a women's locker room or empathetic towards the women who don't want a biological male in their locker room? So the ideology tells you who to have empathy for. In the south in the 30s, actually you had progressives, you know, who had. Were empathetic towards southern white women, which is why they more or less thought, well, actually lynching there's something to it here because they're protecting the vulnerable southern white woman from the nasty black rapist. So if you direct your empathy at one group and away from another group, then you know, that's a different thing than when you should. So the question, what I'm saying is the ideology tells you who to direct your empathy towards. So empathy on its own, just pure empathy as an emotion, I think doesn't get us very far. So I think this, this ideology, somehow women have bought into it, that, this idea, the idea that, you know, the person with more oppression points is who you should be empathetic for. Whereas there's not a whole lot of empathy for, you know, religious groups who do badly, like Seventh Day Adventists, for example, or even, even if you take say, black Americans, no one's jumping up and down because most of the black students in the Ivy League are from an African or West Indian background. That doesn't seem to matter. But it does matter if they're white or black. So the ideology tells you which groups are important and which groups you don't have to care about. We don't have to care about unintelligent people and feeling sorry for them because ideology hasn't elevated or sacralized that particular category. And just like we don't have to care about American black versus West Indian black, the ideology sort of tells you what to care about and what to be empathetic about.
- [60:06]
Coleman Hughes
I think it was Joe Lonsdale I heard recently say women just in general have, have, have almost always been more religious than men in the west. And this is the new religion. And so there's, you know, qed.
- [60:25]
Eric Kaufman
There'S a lot to that. I think that's right. You know, if you look at the freshmen, the university freshman data, which go back to 1970, you know, women were more conservative than these are 18 year old female students compared to 18 year old male students. The female students were more conservative than the men and less liberal than the men in 1970. And it's really only since 2004 that consistently the female students are more liberal than the male students at age 18. So it's quite a recent phenomenon that women are kind of identifying more as liberal. And I agree with you. I think what's going on is the prestige values, the established community values which women tend to uphold are those of the left, liberal, progressive, you know, this identity left. And so that's really why they're sort of herding towards those values, whereas men are more likely to be contrarians and a Bit more cantankerous. So that's kind of how I'd interpret the. The growing gender gap amongst young people.
- [61:31]
Coleman Hughes
Okay, so you're the other topic you, you've touched in your book that's probably 14 years ago now. You were one of the early analysts to really look at the consequence of different birth rates which we and certain high birth rate communities that are highly religious and actually taking seriously how that will change demographics and politics over the long run. I've noticed this issue has become more mainstream in the past year since the last time we spoke. I'm curious if you're paying attention to it. Has anything in your analysis changed on the issue of birth rates and religiosity in the past year or two or is it pretty much playing out the way that you think it would?
- [62:17]
Eric Kaufman
I think it's pretty much playing out the way I thought it was. I mean, I think on our last conversation I mentioned the Mormons seem to be the one group that has sort of undergone this somewhat sect to church liberalization and they seem to be converging. We'll have to see how that plays out in, in the future. But basically for everybody else, it's interesting we talk about this. I just boarded a plane from Detroit to New York and it was sort of most of the plane was acidic Jews and I was sort of thinking this is going to be more common in like 20 or 30, 50 years. Yeah, I don't see anything to change that. I mean, if anything, I think the trends have been moving, you know, in a direction that will reinforce that, particularly this continued decline in fertility rates in the entire developed and even much of the developing world really to very low levels. If that really continues. I mean, there's no question that we're going to be going into a population bottleneck and the highly religious are going to be the ones that are going to be left standing as we come out of that bottleneck. I don't really see much now. It's interesting we could relate this to the whole woke question because there's also a relationship between essentially having a set of views that are very culturally to the left and having low birth rates. I mean, not least because of the connection with high LGBT identification amongst those with far left identification amongst young people. So you're getting up to some of the liberal arts colleges in the US have majority LGBT identification. I think Smith College and Oberlin. It sort of bounces around year by year. You can see it in the fire data, which is, you know, each of those schools we'd have three or 400, I think, samples. So we can tell with some kind of accuracy what's going on. So when you're talking about half of your cohort having an LGBT identity, I mean, what does that mean for completed fertility 25 years down the road? But of course the question that would suggest that this will be self correcting and the woke will essentially, you know, they won't breed and they'll be bred out of existence. I mean, one of the question marks, of course it all depends on how much switching there is from the sort of call it unwoke to the woke. And with the ultra Orthodox Jews, they've got very strong barriers between their world and the mainstream world. The barriers between, you know, the conservative or normie world and the woke world are not as high. They could become higher. And certainly if these dating apps continue to feature political allegiance and whether you identify as Christian or non religion, we might see these populations start to segregate more. Now if we get that segregation say in the United States between people who identify as Christian and as non religious or as Republican and as Democrat, then you might start to see the same kind of dynamics playing out and you may start to see the population become more conservative and anti woke as a result of simply demographic replacement. But I wouldn't bet the farm on that yet, because we know there's quite a lot of, certainly a lot of students who identify as left say their views are different from their parents. So the direction of switching right now, certainly amongst us students is from people with conservative parents moving to identify as left more than the other way around.
- [65:53]
Coleman Hughes
Okay, so last question. What is the path forward? You lay out kind of 12 step program for the west at the end of the book. Can you give us the summarized version?
- [66:05]
Eric Kaufman
Yeah. So my argument is really this has to start with right of center parties. The left is not going to take it up for the reasons we've been talking about. The left liberals essentially concur in a lot of the same sacred values as the radical left. And so what needs to happen, I think, is that conservative parties need to start to campaign on these issues and raise their salience in elections. Then if they start to win elections on these issues, the sensible left, the James Carville's and David shores of this world, will be able to win the argument within the Democratic Party or the Labour Party in Britain. You can already see it to some extent. So Keir Starmer of the Labour Party now will no longer say trans women are women. He will admit that. He will at least respond what A woman is. That's an example of where if there is a high political cost, the left will move as well. So I think that has to happen now. The only way to get there, of course, is for right of center parties to actually raise the priority of cultural issues above those of foreign policy. Economics, which I think has become much more of a technocratic issue again, is, in my view, that is not a positional issue. Conservatives should not be basing their identity on economics as much or even foreign policy as much. Ideally, I think even the Ukraine issue, even, you know, these are not issues that I think should be front and center as much for conservatives because you're trying to build as large a coalition as possible, move to the center on those issues and actually elevate these culture war issues where in most cases there's a 2 to 1 split, the population leans 2 to 1 against whatever it be, whether it be trans women in women's sports, whether it be youth, gender reassignment surgery, whether it be teaching kids that America's a racist country, all of these things. The population is heavily with you, so you want to actually be raising the profile. Those issues that, that of course does require mobilization and organization, which is lacking if you look at the pro life movement on the right. It's very well organized, even though its position is actually not that popular in the population. On the other hand, how many states, even red states, have banned affirmative action? Only four. They could have done it. They didn't do it. Why? Because essentially elected representatives didn't have to sort of sign up to pledges that they would abolish it. They weren't scored against that in a scorecard by some lobby group. So it's going to have to require more of a mobilization in order to put pressure on politicians to elevate these issues. And only when they do that are we going to get school reform. And then the left will, I think, eventually go along with it if it's seen to be an electoral loser. They're not going to defend critical race theory in the bureaucracy or in schools or any of the rest of it. And we'll eventually come round, I think, to a new curriculum. I think those battles are very winnable. I don't go for the view that liberalism has failed, liberal democracy has failed. I don't think it's been tried, actually. And so I'm very much of the view that we've seen innovations in the US States, for example, some of them have gone too far. For example, universities, academics have free speech, so you can't be banning critical race theory in universities, but you can do it in schools. I think that's legitimate. So I just think pursuing those kinds of reforms, but raising the profile of those issues. Because a lot of people don't understand woke, but they do understand if they can't control their border, if they can't control crime, if homelessness is getting out of control, if education standards are falling, if all of those things, you've got to show that those things are linked to woe, which they are. I mean, the reason you can't deport people is because you'll be accused of being racist. That's a component of woke, which is a sort of suppression of free speech around immigration. That's just one example. Crime, you know, differences by race and incarceration, schooling, similarly, classroom discipline, differences by race. One of the reasons we don't have sufficient discipline in the class is for these reasons. All of that probably needs to be elevated. You've seen politicians in other jurisdictions. I use Britain as an example. Take a low salience issue that voters weren't paying much attention to, the European Union. Tie it to an issue they were paying attention to, immigration, and therefore raise the salience and the priority of the EU for voters. I think that can be done also for these culture war issues. And I think it needs to be done if we're going to make progress because it's. It's probably too easy to just pay lip service to it and not do anything.
- [70:53]
Coleman Hughes
Yeah. All right. Eric Kaufman. Fantastic book. Everyone should pick it up. It's really just brilliant. Well done. It's called the Third Awokening. Thanks so much for coming on my show.
- [71:03]
Eric Kaufman
It's been a pleasure. Coleman.