Britain’s future is woke Canada if the Left wins culture war | Eric Kaufmann interview

Canada is sort of where I think the future lies if wokeness gets the upper hand hello and welcome to offscript my name is Stephen Edgington as new research shows young people in Britain are unpatriotic unconservative and increasingly exposed to left-wing ideas I'm joined by Professor Eric Kaufman to discuss the politics of the future is conservatism dead no I mean it depends which country we're talking about I think that the conservative party in Britain uh represents ideas that come from the 1970s and 80s for the most part and aren't very relevant today um but I also think that within conservative intellectual spaces and even in pockets in the conservative party and pockets in the think tanks uh there's Vitality there and I think people understand what some of the emerging issues are where to go politically in terms of where the voters are but that thinking has yet to penetrate into this real decision-making centers of the conservative party can you tell us a little bit about you and your recent research so yeah I've gone uh two reports on culture wars broadly speaking topics for policy exchange one of them is on uh young British people and it's based on a survey with yougov of 18 to 20 year olds mainly concentrating on what they were taught in school and then the second is just a general adult survey based on the entire adult population where we're looking at people's support or opposition to culture wars Topics by which I'm talking chiefly about issues around critical race theory in the past and the teaching of history in schools or cancel culture and threats to free speech Enlightenment values so I'm trying to get a sense of where the British public is on these issues I should say that I've done U.S versions of both of these surveys as well um so yeah that is sort of the basis of the report and the I guess one of the top line findings really is that in British schools basically three quarters of British school children have heard one of five critical race Theory or radical gender and sexuality Concepts in school from adults and those Concepts that I pulled on were three race Concepts around unconscious bias white privilege and systemic racism and then two sort of gender sexuality topics one the idea of many genders and the other patriarchies so three and four of these British 18 to 20 year olds and the 18 year olds were still in school the 19 and 20s recently graduated said that they had heard from an adult or teacher these terms um at least one of these terms moreover the 18 year olds 78 of them had heard one of these terms the 20 year olds it was like 68. so it's increasing over time the exposure levels which means this stuff is permeating more intently so the argument that some on the left had made that it's not being taught oh it's just small it's just a few isolated incidents the American School in London this survey which is a random draw of young people really lays that to bed this is a random sample random draw we found three and four have exposure to this um and so that's the sort of Top Line finding in terms of school indoctrination for example and these are by the way I should say these are radical concepts that lack a basis in scientific quantitative measurement they come from radical theories and they are arguably bordering on conspiracy theory so that's being taught in schools even though schools have a duty uh not to indoctrinate and to treat all issues impartially and the other question we asked by the way was when these Concepts were taught were you taught in opposing view um and only well in seven in ten cases they were taught this as fact with no opposing view or they were taught that this is the only respectable view is to have the kind of critical social justice view only in three out of ten cases were they obeying the law if you like and actually presenting an alternative respectable view so what we have essentially is you know a significant majority of British school children are being taught radical theories on race and gender as fact um and that is indoctrination it is in violation of the law so that is the number one the other thing we found is in the wider adult survey in the water adult survey if you actually look at people's answers to questions around critical race Theory or cancel culture what you find is the public as a whole it's over two to one against what I would call the cultural socialist perspective which is the kind of woke perspective that says um all identity groups must have equal outcomes number one and number two we have to be hypersensitive to the to offending a member of any one of these groups even if it's not an actual uh you know not just an average member of these groups but the most sensitive member of these groups and by the way that's obviously going to incentivize a certain weaponization of claims of I've been emotionally harmed by such and such a concept JK Rowling being being on you know in the reading list or whatever um so what we see that's so that's the overall Top Line there is that most of the public are against this stuff they would be against teaching school children that Britain is a racist country for example um however if you take the young population 18 to 25 they diverge quite a bit from the average so this is the other finding is that the young people are actually a lot more woke now that's a very big generalization um they're actually split they're split 50 50 but the older population is sort of like 70 80. in some cases 90 percent um opposed and so there's quite a big gap give you a couple of a couple of examples one is JK Rowling should she be dropped by her publisher you know and there you see the young 18 to 25s are split 50 50. 50 of them who have an opinion say yeah she should be dropped which is a deeply kind of for anyone who's into the Enlightenment and Free Speech that's deeply worrying um so we have a lot of this Progressive liberalism in that young population um particularly the young female population and I'll talk about that in a minute much less so amongst young male population the other thing is that we if we take a question questions that impinge on Britain's history and tradition and national identity so should Winston Churchill statue be removed from Parliament Square again the 18 to 25s are split whereas if you take the 50 plus as with JK Rowling they're like 85 to 5 absolutely not um and so we're seeing big differences on generational lines as well so those are kind of like the overall the things that really jumped out the most I'd say from those reports okay there's a lot to unpack there yeah so let's start with um this idea that young people are increasingly woke or illiberal hasn't that always been the case that young people have been left wing not necessarily I mean the Gap say if you take voting in this country uh support for labor and support for the conservatives and you look at the under-25s and the over 65s we can go back to 1964 in the British election study and that's varied between sort of five to twenty points roughly right the way through to about 20 20 2010 even even pushing towards 2015 and then suddenly after 2015 the gap between the The Young and the old is at 40 or 45 points so there is a much wider Gap politically than there historically has been that's the first thing now of course younger people have historically been to the left of older people but it's just that the scale the Gap is much larger than it's been um so that's one thing the other thing I would say is that the young have been more to the left but they've been more tolerant so they've been more tolerant of say homosexuality sex before marriage it's a sort of in the direction of liberalism let's call it uh freedom I should be free to do what I want what we're seeing now actually is we're seeing illiberalism amongst the Young so no people shouldn't be free to do what they want if they offend group X Y or Z and that's new and in fact in the U.S where we see pretty much exactly the same Trends to some degree more extreme than here but we're seeing very similar Trends there and there we've got data going back to the early 1970s so we can look at an 18 year old in 1980 1990 2000 2010 2020 and what that shows is the 18 year olds it's the same age but they're getting less tolerant on certain things so not for a communist a militarist to speak that's fine um but a racist to speak right these questions have been asked for 50 years and on that one question there's been a Divergence now it's not I shouldn't say that this is all of a sudden with this Young Generation no it's been a process that has been gaining speed since well Beginnings sort of at a slow level with the baby boom generation but accelerating so actually what I would say is this generation is simply reflecting Decades of gradual cultural institutionalization of what I would call a cultural socialist world view um and so yeah I think this is new that there's no question we've seen a growth of of intolerant absolutism amongst young people compared to young people in the past so young people now are more intolerant than young people in the past around anything to do with historically disadvantaged identity groups now there's this old adage that as people grow up they become more conservative yeah do you think that's still true was that ever true um it was true we've got U.S and British studies that show about a 20-point change between under 25 and over 65 so it it's true and not expected to be true in the future but that's typically around a 20-point change over the life cycle um when we're talking about you know a 40 45 point gap between young and old there's no way that's going to be able to make up that distance even half that distance now of course events could happen and things can change but I I would sort of caution against people who say oh well you know young people once they get a home and they get a job and they have a mortgage and they have a family then they'll become conservative um I don't think that's the case they may I think they will move to the right economically but they're not that far to the left economically anyway um they're not distinct they're not so distinctive in their economic views from older people it's their cultural views um views on this this boundary between Say speech and sensitivity it's those sorts of issues where they are really diverging uh and I don't see how that's going to be changed by acquiring material possessions because it's fundamentally a spiritual and cultural thing it's not a material thing um and we can already see for example young people who happen to have jobs happen to maybe have children in a home are not radically different from those who don't have those things so I don't think anything material I mean the conservative party who thinks somehow these people are going to morph magically mandatory voters no I don't think they are they're going to probably vote their values and that means they're going to we're going to see progressively I would argue say in 20 years the median voter in Britain I think will look more like the median voter and where I come from in Canada which is that the conservatives are are a natural party of opposition they come into power every so often but they're not a national party of government their National Party of opposition and I think Britain's heading towards that future if I were to predict um given the views of younger people now having said that I think I should say that the views of young men are much less different from the population in its young women who are the most different um and so it's going to be interesting and that gender gap is there amongst young people in Canada and the US it's like a massive gender gap what happens to that going forward is going to be really interesting to watch um what I would say is I think that as this generation becomes the median voter we're going to see big polarization on these cultural questions it's already there and I think it's going to be even more pronounced why are women more woke oh and also does that have an impact on The Men Who sort of want to follow their politics to uh gain advantages in life well I mean I think it might because you know in these dating sites where politics is increasingly being listed uh and and Studies have shown that has a bigger impact than a lot of other attributes probably there's an incentive to at least fake it um given where a lot of women are so yeah I think it may have that impact I mean some of the stats are really astounding I mean in the US not as much in Britain but in the U.S case for example um you know the vast majority of women female students for example I think something to the tune of 90 are not Trump supporters um in the top sort of 15 to 20 percent of U.S universities you know if you take non-trump supporting uh women the percentage who would feel comfortable dating a trump supporter is seven percent so I mean that's kind of giving you an impression of and even if we go outside the student population to The Wider uh young population it looks almost as Extreme as that so clearly that is a massive issue um but yeah what is what's going to happen in the future will be very interesting I think I think you know we see certain divisions say within the female population now in the U.S for example people who are stay-at-home mums uh are massively more Republican than those who are have a career for example um so how many you know how these things are going to play out over time is going to be really interesting to watch in the recent midterm elections one of the major indicators of whether you're a Republican or a Democrat is whether you're married or married and particularly women there was a big there was a big gap once they came married they basically became much more Republican leaning yeah I mean I guess the question there is to what extent does marriage change views uh or to what extent do people with certain views are they more likely to get married which which getting married is now not as automatic as it used to be and so to some degree getting married is associated with certain things like maybe being Christian maybe being Suburban you know a number of things which are not necessarily something everyone will go through so I I just don't think that these necessarily these life Milestones are going to going to be magically to change it now what I think we we already know that in Britain for example people who don't go to university who right now are not that different in their politics from people who do go to university so this is already there by the time people set foot on campus universities aren't having that much effect but um what we see is the ones who don't go to university do become more conservative much more quickly and now I'm not saying they become radically more conservative but it looks like their views converge more whereas the ones who do go to university um they converge less but it's early days on the data on that I want to talk about some of the reasons why you think particularly in Britain woke ideas have become so popular among young people okay and that might be because the opposite I.E tourism or Tories are seen as so unpopular and the sort of the status of being a Tory is so low I mean from my own experience that word Tori is used as an insult among you know people earlier it's my age and it's really seen as a as a sort of stigma you know if you're a Tory you're you're uncaring or or your mean or whatever so how much does status come into this I think it comes into this but I think there's a there's a famous sociologist called Max Faber who had this metaphor that it's the culture that that it's a bit like the switch man on a track for a railroad the culture kind of decides where which track the train is going to go down and then self-interest like status making more money earning more profit all of that stuff is the locomotive and it's and it's moving down a track so what I'd say is the culture came first sets up the incentive system tells you what's prestigious and then you go after it right so and I also say you know you asked about women as well so women will always tend to take on whatever is the communal Norm they will tend to back the community Norm much more so in in 1970 female students were more conservative than men they were more religious than men you know those were the norms now the Norms are cultural Socialism or wokeness so they're going to be more uh you know they're going to in I won't say enforce but they're going to support those they're going to back those more whereas the men are more likely to be contrarians and so this is one of the reasons why we're seeing a difference now of course it is also the case that to some degree this ideology is a better deal for women to the extent that it is about you know equal opportunity equal results let's say in the boardroom and women are underrepresented it's a good deal now obviously we know on the you know gender critical feminist issues there are perhaps threats as well coming out of this for women but those so far haven't landed in their Consciousness I still think the main reason that they are supporting this is because they tend to back whatever are the community norms and particularly in Elite spaces and youth culture spaces the community Norm is a kind of culture of anti-tourism as you said Ed West's book small man on the wrong side of History talking about the culture which has really been there for decades of anti-tourism it's not that new but yet it's kind of penetrated more deeply and perhaps more in importantly the the sort of nature of the ideology of left that the left has has pushing has really pivoted from class to Identity and and that change really took began in the 60s began with Herbert Marcus and the new Left switching away from the proletariat to African-Americans and and decolonization uh you know of non-european peoples they became the Stars rather than the proletariat but it took some time for that to kind of permeate the Consciousness uh and but now it now it very much has it's taken over uh the left it dominates Academia in terms of the left as well um and and yeah I think they are now of course that's what's being taught in schools that's what's the influencers on social media and the celebrity culture in the movie industry are all in the tech industry are all pushing these um sacred values and so I think that really informs a lot of this wokeness so I'll give you an example that these sorts of you know the belief that Tories are kind of racist or are sexist or transphobic but especially say racist you know that lies at the core of a lot of the political Prejudice over dating which by the way bleeds into hiring Prejudice um and so the people who are who say they wouldn't date a brexiteer are much more likely to say they wouldn't hire a brexiteer right so this isn't just you know a playful thing around freedom of Association this is actually bleeds into breaking the law on on you know you can't discriminate on the basis of philosophical belief that's in the EU law that's now in British law um but it comes you know the people who most believe that like in the U.S case you know white leftists who believe that white Republicans are racist for example um who agree to that statement are just much more likely to to say that um people who disagree with me politically are immoral so they're kind of moralizing politics into a sort of black white thing rather than they have different values and maybe different assessments of how the world works so you mentioned Ed West's book yeah and in his book he basically argues that workism or whatever you want to call it is the new religion it's the new Christianity and and he also talks about the collapse of religion and this is something that you know many people comment on as sort of the decline in Christianity are people taking up Politics as a as a sort of replacement for a religion is that what you see I mean you talk about morality if people were gaining their sort of moral values from workers are more celebrities or whatever is that what is that what's happening um I I actually just to some degree with Ed West and Douglas Murray on this in the sense that you know Britain wasn't a particularly religious place even 20 30 years ago actually um I'm not sure that's the big change now that's changed more in the United States yes that's true um but if you kind of look in detail at the survey data for example you know whether you're religious or not doesn't make a huge difference to your attitudes on these woke issues when we take into account your party identification and your ideology for example now yes being religious does influence whether you're a Republican or not it does influence whether you're conservative but if you're secular and conservative or secular and Republican then you're going to be anti-woke um so and and we've had these sort of secular belief systems you know socialism and we've you know even to some degree nationalism is to some degree one of these call them secular religions I don't think it's so very important this idea about religious loss as it is that we've just got a new version a new ideology a new secular religion compared to the old secular religions we've got a new one it is a mind virus it's like covet and if you contract it you can then spread it and and if institutions become super spreaders then you know so so it's that model of a kind of uh um epidemiological model and I would go with rather than necessarily this kind of psychological argument like oh people have a whole and the reason wokeness is there is because religion is gone I don't necessarily think that's right I mean there are there is obviously a certain degree to which that's true but I think you could equally say that it's the decline of patriotism or or or of some or the decline of social you know right so I think this is more about a new ideology that um has infiltr it started off in Academia we can see that there's a studies of you know 75 million academic abstracts look and you can see that terms like sexism and racism were being heavily used already in the 80s in the 70s and 80s and it's not really until the 2010s the media catches up so something happens in the 2010s with Twitter and social media that allows academics and journalists to influence each other uh and then clickbait journalism also maybe throw Trump in there throw brexit in there and all of that kind of leads to this very partisan media space emerging I don't know how much you've studied the cultural revolution in China but it's an interesting interesting thing that people always refer to and they make these comparisons you know you can look at students destroying their teachers and I mean much more violent way um but but there are comparisons do you think that's a legitimate thing to look at and to study and just and to sort of make conclusions from yeah I think it absolutely is and and George Orwell in 1984 in a way foreshadows the cultural revolution um so why is it you know why is it it's sort of the right metaphor okay a couple of things one the same things that today's cultural socialism are attacking um the past historical narratives proper names Traditions uh the cultural revolution was going after what it called the four olds you know old Chinese traditions it wanted to wipe the Slate clean to the year zero so we're seeing that uh occurring with all the statue toppling and and the sort of rewriting of history but then the other part of this is the is the George Orwell two plus two equals five you must believe it say it until you believe it that that truth becomes political the meaning of words becomes political and that that also um I think is is something that comes out of that cultural revolution that reality and science is is essentially doesn't exist it's all what's whatever's politically correct um and we're seeing that now if you just you know what is a woman for example or is is sex a spectrum and you know we're seeing the denial of Science in in this area um we're seeing sort of uh let's just say well unbel you know incredible disinformation on the extent of racism for example the Canada has I mean it's worse in North America in many regards but Canada has something called the the it had a what is called the residential school system for indigenous Canadians um which the government essentially the media has all called a genocide and there was an incident and it's not even remotely close to that it's a sort of an assimilationist element there was a schooling element to it there were you know there were people who were undoubtedly mistreated but what there was there's no actual attempt to sort of say well were the children who went to these indigenous you know these residential schools where they treated worse than children who went to day schools on the reserve what are their health outcomes compared to people in non-indigenous settings at that time you know no attempt at anything objective or truth seeking it's a narrative and everyone's got to Bow and the whole Canadian Parliament even endorsed a sort of genocide resolution and it's it's just Mass hysteria it's unbelievable now it's nothing as Extreme as that has occurred in this country but it's just to say that yeah people are jumping on these bandwagons of Hysteria and it's not fact-based and that is very much the way the cultural revolution operated incidentally my my dad was briefly in China during the cultural revolution and saw all these red books and all these kids sort of attacking different states it's quite a quite a remarkable episode um and then but the same thing was happening in stalinus Russia too and and with that cultural revolution there's I mean from what I've read there's somewhat of a myth that it was all orchestrated by Mao whereas I think that the role of the Chinese state was perhaps limited compared to the sort of as you say the virus element of this this would have infection the natural infection among young people of sort of this Mass hysteria that sort of grew not not by government but by just ordinary people so perhaps that's an interesting comparison as well let's talk about the minority of conservatives who of of young people who are conservatives because that is an interesting I'm interested in that group of people I mean I've found myself as one of them um I see a lot of social media posts that are that are conservative conservative memes I said of young people my age or who I know just you know looking at the stuff on tick tock on Instagram and all of the you know so I think there is a sort of I don't know there's a counter-cultural um movement or something what do you make of that do you think there has been is there any significant conservative minority has there been any sort of counter-cultural movement that you've seen in the UK or in the US among young people yeah absolutely absolutely there has been and you're right about this and and it's obviously the survey data some surveys will pick this up like so there has been the odd server that shows gen Zed which is sort of the youngest your generation probably compared to the Millennials being more opposed to cancer culture than the Millennials um there is some there are some countries like Canada where Jen said also is more is is relatively conservative compared to the Millennials so there's there are some places where we're seeing something that's distinct and also there's been surveys showing that higher sort of internet use or getting most of your news or or I'm trying to remember what the actual metric was but I think more time online was correlated with being more conservative and I think part of what's going on is that the online space is where is much more even and in fact a lot of the big influencers are right of Center uh online because it's more of a free space yes there are there's Shadow Banning and there are ban you know there are things that Tech firms can do but only really at the edges um there's it is still a much Freer place than the institutions which tend to be more captured right so something like universities it's it's very difficult to get a job be promoted get published if you are breaking taboos whereas in the media and also it's very hard to create a new University right you can't just open up a new University there's an established hierarchies and rankings and donations and all this so yeah because that media spaces is more open um we're seeing that there are more uh you know counter-cultural influences online and young people are accessing those now there is still a big gender difference I mean again I mentioned like in Britain the young men are really not actually that woke in in many ways even if you compare them to older Generations so it's it's very much certain categories I mean women LGBT which on some surveys at least if you ask people I mean in my survey it was 29 of the 18 to 20s were LGBT um in the U.S surveys that I've seen it's anywhere from like 21 to 30 now just sorry just just to clarify that number yeah is that representative of young people you know 29 represents a sort of identifying as LGBT or is that that seems really high to me but right so there's a couple of things to note you know one is that that number might be inflated so this the census number is where we have them are you know a half or a third of that now I I still think the the pro the actual number is is somewhere around 15 but a lot of so the the fast the largest segment of that would be say female bisexuality um a lot of that female bisexuality is just identification not behavior and we know that again from U.S surveys where they actually ask about sexual partners uh so so yeah an increasing number of of these LGBT identifiers are not actually LGBT in terms of behavior they may have flickering sentiments but what I'm saying is in a way that there are these certain subgroups within the young population that chunk who will say I'm LGBT even when they're probably not uh would be one of them women much more so than men that's interesting so fashionable to be LGBT well yeah so so this sort of social pressures are different and this and maybe it's interesting or it's seen as being marking you out from the herd um it is interesting that ethnic minorities in Britain are less woke on these surveys for example they were less likely to support political correctness than whites and I think that's interesting because I think they're com they're not as immersed in the same youth culture to the same extent perhaps um so and and what you actually see is that it's the same in the U.S the white uh young populations and well the white population is more politicized more polarized than the minority population and and that's showing up as well uh in the survey but but yeah so I would say I don't if I had to predict I don't think that the young people in this country are going to get more left wing and there is some evidence let's say from the last sort of you know 18 to 21 is a little bit more conservative in this country than 22 to 30 let's say so I don't think it's going to get any more left uh and any more woke um and then there are reasons for this including psychological reasons but also the fact that unlike the cultural revolution or stalinist Russia because of the online space because of the counterculture that actually despite the shadow Banning and despite the censorship or whatever it's still reasonably free to get its message out so between that and people's psychology I I don't see it getting any any more work I think it's probably reached about as far as it'll go but having said all that I think that if you have a population that's 50 50 on JK Rowling becoming uh the median voter then the power of that ideology is just going to be hugely increased especially in the elite institutions where these people are going to be overrepresented people like Andrew Tate are interesting I mean you can debate whether he's conservative I don't think he really is conservative but he's certainly not woke and he's very anti-woke and he was fantastically popular among among many young men and as you say they despite all the They banned him from everything but he's still he's he's still seen by many people I'm sure you know he can get past all these bands or whatever and Jordan Peterson is another one and you know so there are some figures who who really are popular who aren't work among young people and and that is a phenomenon that perhaps is explained by your answer let's talk about the schools I'm interested in in British schooling in particular and and and the research that you've done how reliable is the data on this stuff so I'd be interested to know whether for example in your polling you asked a sort of control question perhaps a made-up term that no you know I mean that no one had ever heard of and see how many people were just instinctively answering yes yeah that's a really good question and think that's sort of been put to me and I think you know if I had to do it over again I might have asked you know that were you taught that the moon landings were faked or something I mean my hunch on this is we're not going to get we may get a few percentage points um but I I could be wrong I'm willing to be disproven by someone wants to do that and I may do it in the future what would I what I would say is this however if you look at um the terms that we polled on there's a lot of variation so only 20 percent said they were taught that there were many genders now you it could be that you know the question is is that number actually zero and therefore we should subtract 20 from everything I'm a bit skeptical I mean I think that maybe the number maybe less than 20 I don't know exactly what it is um but I don't think it's zero and there were other terms where we had you know I think 55 I think for patriarchy it was something like 55. so there's a lot of variation within the terms that we polled on so it's not just oh yeah tick tick tick I think there is a a meaningful difference there that people are are picking up on also there were some differences in exposure levels depending on you know so for example more diverse urban areas there was more of the critical race Theory terms being taught which kind of makes some sense in a way right so so I just think that uh it may be the case I'd like I'd love to go back and do it again but um I don't think it's going to amount to much is this down to teachers activists teachers who are sort of more to the left uh it's a combination so we asked whether people had heard it from teachers or heard it from an adult which might be for example a member of an activist organization in assembly or giving a talk and it's kind of a rough split 50 50. in most cases so there are activist teachers that are pushing this and there are external third-party contractors who are bringing in race and gender ideology and there are a lot of these providers which report from don't divide us ddu did using Freedom of Information requests and they picked up like in the councils that actually responded to them which was only a minority you know a significant number uh were essentially telling their schools to teach this stuff so that research pretty much reinforces what we've found and it makes us makes sense so you have these external organizations and radical teachers do I think most teachers are doing this no um but I think the question is whether radical teachers are doing it and whether head teachers are allowing people to come in and essentially push these these radical theories and I think for the most part they are because a lot of this is also in the education schools so teacher training particularly the more prestigious education schools and the the curriculum they're teaching is sort of shot through with these assumptions around white privilege and systemic this and that uh again which are not scientifically based but then that discipline in education is not also necessarily they're not going to stick to uh what I would call positive fist falsifiable scientific type studies they're going to go for these meta theories quasi-conspiracy theories such as systemic racism and patriarchy which is all about academic citing academic citing academics who are essentially more or less Conjuring this stuff up as a theory rights in yeah but those ideas aren't actually in the curriculum as in the National curriculum obviously the conservatives aren't that stupid um so why are they well I'm not I'm not sure whether they are that stupid I mean but I would say that um teachers have a lot of freedom of course to to you know to go off-piste and to use download materials and teach them in class so it's not not the case I think that they are only teaching to the letter of a national curriculum and so a lot of this material is kind of coming in that way and so part of what ddu are trying to do is you know provide counter materials but of course unless you have teachers who are interested in using those counter materials they're not going to get taught it's interesting because I imagine if I was a head teacher unless I was overtly political or anti-woke then I probably you know the sort of default position is probably to let this stuff happen um or you know to teach the stuff for all the reasons that people can can talk about but has there been a significant shift in teachers becoming more left-wing in recent years that's an interesting question so I yeah I think that you know in the days of corporal punishment I mean I'm not sure they always were left-wing and obviously there were a lot more male teachers but that's not even the male female thing I I just think there's probably been a shift now we know where we've got proper measures um is in Academia and in journalism and in the case of the U.S for example the shift has been something like one and a half left to one on the right in the mid 60s too sort of five to one left to right in journalism and about six to one in in Left Right In Academia but that's including that's right down to the sort of two-year colleges in the sort of not particularly at least universities and in all disciplines if we just take social sciences it's gone so from something like three to one left to right in the mid 60s to anything between 12 and sort of 20 I mean it's gone probably let's say 12 to 14 to one in the U.S in this country it's about nine to one left to right and that's been a big change from about one and a half to one in the mid 60s so now the teachers the data that I've seen from yougov's panel would suggest the teachers are not as left-wing as academics academics if academics are sort of 75 on the left teachers might be say 60 65 they're not as left-wing because they're different ways to become a teacher so I don't think this is Extreme as in universities but what I would say is the there's no question that the dominant strand of the dominant share are are leaning left and as has probably been true for a while but the content of what left means has shifted from you know class and and socialism to cultural socialism and identity Okay so we've had a conservative conservative government for 12 years this has happened under their watch are they aware of the problem do they understand the problem and why have they let this happen well a couple of reasons I mean I think the conservative party are are largely a business Liberal Party a bit like the fdp in Germany they're not for the most part they are not a sort of national conservative or populist conservative party or even a cultural conservative party um most of the MPS there have been MP surveys one was conducted by Tim Bale and his colleagues and published a few years ago which showed that the typical Tory MP surveyed was very far to the left of the typical Tory voter and actually to the slightly to the left of the average voter on cultural questions on economic questions they're way to the right of their base and of the average voter so who are these people they are basically people who came through Elite universities became thatcherites read their Hayek and are essentially libertarian economic liberal types and you saw that very much you see that in Johnson you see it in trust and despite Johnson's to some degree populism but he's actually in many ways a you know Global capitalist liberal trusts inquiring again are even more that way inclined so the sort of dominant intellectual strand in the party is is from the 1980s and hasn't really shifted um the cultural conservative people like the common sense group and can be bad knock and and maybe swella and a few of these people they are a minority and they're not really in control of candidate selection and so until that occurs now and you can see through the Cameron Administration Theresa may they actually put this stuff on steroids I mean the uh 2020 you know the the equality acts uh 2010 and burning injustices and all of these things um very much yeah they they've been fueling this they kind of wanted to be on the good side of the race industry of the activists um and so they've they've helped to perpetuate all of this stuff with very little pushback do you think there's a there's a complete void in conservative ideology in Britain at the moment and what I mean by that is conservative politicians today would probably be sort of vocally anti-woke you know in some in their statements some would many of them as you correctly actually you're completely right many of them wouldn't be but but you would expect Rishi sunak or or Sue Ella braveman or whoever you know some senior conservative positions would probably be anti-working in their statements but do they present their own philosophy do they present their own vision of society or their own sort of uh conservative belief on how on how we should structure our lives or whatever I mean where that perhaps that void was was filled by Christianity before but I don't know but but there's no it seems to me they have no sort of viable alternative that they're proposing no I mean that you have sort of they've got economic philosophies you know whether it be more trust site libertarianism or the one nation economic conservatism they're much more comfortable talking about uh bread and butter economic issues because you're not going to get canceled for for talking about economic conditions you're not going to be accused of being a racist on the BBC um what's lacking is the kind of the courage to be able to say actually we're going to have an audit and we're going to remove funding for Dei initiatives across the Civil Service that are taught in this way so that's diversity and sorry diversity equity and inclusion diversity training um and also we are going to to ensure we're going to write guidance so for example they could insist that the guidance from the Department of Education defines anti-racism only as traditional individual on individual racism not as systemic so what they should be saying is systemic racism does not fall under the consensus value of anti-racism it's a contested concept should not be taught in the schools if you had a government that had a the understanding be the knowledge and see the the guts that's what they should do now of course you're going to have a fight with with the woke establishment that runs the teachers unions Etc but you got to have that fight I mean if you compare politicians here in the conservative party with people like Glenn young can Ron DeSantis in the United States who have been much more vocal and not only willing to say some things but to to enact policies to join up the policies with the campaigning to campaign centrally Force the other party to answer okay you're teaching this that the U.S is is a racist country in schools and and you're you know whites have privilege I don't think we should do that uh you know or you're teaching about that there are many uh Sexes or whatever it happens to be um I don't think that should be in the curriculum and force the other side to actually defend that practice and if they defend it they get punished at the polls and that hasn't happened here and one of the other problems and we may be getting to inside base yeah yeah a bit but uh this is something that I've I've looked into for a long time you know particularly in the Civil Service why workism has become so prevalent examples of it Etc and um you know the conservative the way that the civil service is structured in the UK is different to in the US obviously in the US they have political appointments so they have I think over 40 000 roles that are politically appointed Republicans come in they put their own people in there they've got ideologically those people are generally on the Republican side whereas in the UK we have this sort of supposedly impartial Civil Service which I think some of the stories that you you know that we've done at the telegraph would perhaps challenge this idea that the civil service is in any way impartial when it comes to woke and cultural issues anymore so the conservative party have to or and politicians they have a couple of advisors spads who are who are concerned you know who are potential supposed to be conservative many of them aren't right um they've got a lot of their plate they've got to be dealing with a series of crises that the country is facing you know do they even have time to to think about this stuff to to start to tackle any of this stuff I I doubt it I mean I've spoken to spads and they do a brilliant job some of them but you know how how can how can they as sort of the Dozen people change this change this stuff you know what I mean so so to be weirdly to be fair to the conservatives they actually uh face a structural problem in the UK in particular whereas in the US maybe it's slightly different I yeah I don't actually think it's they're all that different I mean a lot of the same problems uh occur in terms of the age with the agent government agencies in the US and they tend to be you know woke and it's very hard to sort of get people to get them changed um so I think it is a similar problem I mean I think that actually in some ways things are more favorable in the UK because central government has more power there's not a state level to deal with and there's not necessarily the same courts as your constraint um but when you really if you really look at the differences the differences have to do with candidate selection because of the primary system because of the way Trump and I disagree with many things Trump has done and certainly with the whole Trump cult but there is no question that the older Republican establishment was just about low taxes had to be be replaced with uh candidates that more or less reflected that reflect their voting base much more closely that hasn't occurred here yet it is still a kind of establishment that's running the conservative party and they have not been overthrown the way the Republican National Congress establishment has been overthrown and that's I think the key process now of course it's the case in an economic crisis economic issues are the most important issues but this is you know my point on this is this is a management issue this isn't really shouldn't necessarily be the way you define yourself as a conservative yes we want to manage we want to give shorter waiting times in the NHS we want to have lower taxes we want to have more economic growth maybe we have to sacrifice one maybe we can't do lower taxes when we're in an economic crisis fine I mean I just think these are kind of very narrow parameters you're operating in strict constraints I don't think economics should be the way in which conservatism is defined now when especially since the major threat I mean these are not just tiny little culture wars on campus this is sort of core Western values I mean do you believe in freedom of speech freedom of conscience and objective truth science um National cohesion all of these things are kind of core these should be more important than a few points you know tenths of a point on GDP and yet it's no it's all the obsession with defining conservatism by hey we're gonna you know have a higher GDP somehow um I think that's mistaken and so I think what we need is a Kind of Revolution Within conservatism to somehow deselect the MPS that are just essentially don't care about culture they only care about libertarianism I just very briefly to any interview this is slightly off off track but I just do want to talk about Canada for a second um that's where you're from yeah and there's Canada has I've keep reading these incredible articles about about Canada recently in particular about their um uh euthanasia um programs um and could you see is Britain heading in that direction and can you just talk a little bit about how Canada or the sort of the politics of Canada and the social Politics as well yeah I mean Canada is sort of where I think the future lies if wokeness gets the upper hand so in Canada for example lokeness is not just in the institutions like universities or the media it's it's actually we've got a woke prime minister a woke Administration they're trying to enact uh for example um uh laws that'll make it very you know very easy for the government to censor freeze bank accounts as we saw with the trucker protest to pursue episodes of collective Mass hysteria like the the claim that there were 215 bodies and mass Graves found in this indigenous school it's complete nonsense never been walked back despite no evidence for this but that's sort of where a country goes when there is no conservative opposition or it's a weak conservative opposition I should say that the only real difference between Canada and Britain is that or or in the U.S is that in Britain in the U.S they're like they're right and the left in the electorate are roughly evenly balanced whereas in Canada and this has been true for a long long time the left has had about a 60 versus the right 40 excluding Quebec which which is more like like Britain in the rest of Europe but if we take the English part it's there's been sort of a 60 40 split and that allows it just changes everything essentially means that the party that's naturally in power is going to lean left and it's going to be difficult for the right to get in they have to the right has to kind of compromise on a lot of these things political correctness is much more intense or or is more intense there you can't talk for example about limiting immigration it's impossible so that sort of level of uh the Overton window of acceptable debate is just much now so all Canadian conservatives far more left-wing than even British conservatives for example they are on cultural in cultural issues so even the current populist leader of the conservatives is um extremely timid on anything to do with immigration wokeness the only thing he'll talk about is economics except for the only place he's sort of gone a bit out on the limb is abolishing funding for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation which is I'm 100 behind that but it's not enough you've got to start the ruling this industry and so far even a so-called populist like pauliev has not been willing to do that so that kind of shows you the difference uh but yeah in terms of you know Canadian universities will openly advertise for only say black or indigenous candidates they you know they will it's open discrimination uh you know you have these laws which would essentially criminalize you know it seems like it would criminalize saying a woman is an adult human female you know so there's a whole range of these quite censorious bills that the Trudeau government has been trying to enact so if you are a young conservative in Britain and you know I'm sure many of them are maybe thinking about immigration uh you know where where uh where would they go where should they go should they obviously they shouldn't go to Canada I mean that's not definitely not but maybe Florida maybe Hungary I mean where do you think is sort of well I know so so yeah I mean Europe is obvious the I think Europe is in many ways more conservative than Britain number one I mean most European countries I would say North America so the U.S is is more like 50 50 and yes of course red states are going to be conservative majority places like Florida um and Texas and especially because the Latino population has been shifting to the right so um yeah I mean I don't you know I certainly wouldn't give up on Britain I I would say that uh you know there's probably going to be a labor government wokeness will probably get worse but on the other hand it's not as much of a lost cause I think Canada is is in a much worse place than Britain so Britain is certainly not the worst I'm an optimistic note thank you so much Eric for joining us thanks Steve

Channel: The Telegraph

Views: 101,333

Keywords: Telegraph, News, woke, woke culture, wokeness, woke ideology, woke activism, anti-woke culture, woke activists, stay woke, eric kaufmann, eric kaufmann whiteshift, immigration, populism, religion, debate, leadership, joe rogan, cancel culture, great britain, whiteshift, anti woke, jordan peterson, ben shapiro, critical race theory, gender dysphoria, gender identity, bill maher, pro free speech, trans

Id: 4V3Ni8_8Z70

Length: 55min 10sec (3310 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 16 2022