Janet Daley: Like Mccarthyism, America will soon wake up to wokeism | Off Script

the woke movement in america is an another of these nervous breakdowns that america has periodically it's a form of mccarthyism and i think the woke thing is just another example of that america just gets obsessed occasionally and and goes after something and then it like that it's suddenly gone it blows itself up hello and welcome to offscript my name is stephen edgington in 1776 america declared its independence from england however since then the two countries histories and cultures have remained intertwined we share the same language watch the same movies listen to the same music some even say our politics mirror each other and with the rise of the woke movement in america there are fears that britain will head down the same path to talk to me about the relationship between the two countries i'm joined by the sunday telegraph columnist janet daly thank you so much janet for joining us is british politics downstream from america not directly no it can't be because the political culture the national culture is so very different i think because as everybody always says we speak the same language we think that we're like that we're brethren politically we're not i mean america is a nation of displaced people uh people who everyone comes from somewhere else except the indigenous population who are now a very small minority my family arrived at ellis island in 1905. my father didn't speak english until he went to school almost everybody i knew when i was a child had at least one grandparent who didn't speak english there's a sense of dislocation of dispossession of not really knowing where home is i mean you see this even in the popular culture in america everybody's trying to get home but nobody knows where home is anymore and when i first came to britain and settled here i was absolutely startled by the old european tradition of people whose families lived in the same region sometimes in the same town or the same village for ten generations there's nothing like that stability in america and as a result there's a kind of neuroticism a national neuroticism a sort of existential anxiety that's on the one hand nostalgia for the old roots that's why you get these peculiar phenomena of the irish-american phenomena people who've never set foot in ireland but who consider themselves to be irish and it's nothing like what the irish are now um and similarly with the italians as well and the nostalgia clinging to the old nationalities but at the same time knowing that you have no real understanding of those cultures no real contact with them i remember there's a a ellis island has now been turned into a museum of immigration of migration the great wave of migration at the early 20th century and i remember going around it and there of course there were loads of school parties going around for obvious reasons and i remember hearing a party of school kids who um were obviously italian italian-american and they were talking about where they felt where their families had come from and they didn't just know the region you know sicily or calabria they knew the village that their families had come from and yet they had no contact with those that society now so it's a very peculiar mentality the american mentality and that feeds directly into the politics and the reason that there is this tendency toward hysteria you know it goes to extremes of mccarthyism and then left-wing politics and this these terrible bitter divisions is because of that anxiety that lack of rootedness and that is something i think that's probably inerradicable in america and it's nothing nothing like particularly british society but even most old european societies and one of those famous irish americans is currently the president of the united states and just sticking on this issue of politics being downstream from america and britain can kiss dama take any solace in the fact that joe biden was able to beat donald trump in that election in 2020. no it's completely irrelevant it's got nothing to do with anything i mean joe biden was a kind of consensus candidate for the democrats because they had to have somebody to beat donald trump and they had to have somebody who was intensely likable and in not so much anymore joe biden is kind of losing his likability but at the time he was regarded as being the nicest man in american political life i can remember a very you know quite right-wing republican saying to me that joe biden was so dumb that if you'd you have to water him uh but he's he's very very obviously visibly nice and that was such an antidote antidote to donald trump and donald trump found it very difficult to deal with um and it it it it kind of overwhelmed the american psyche that uh you could get this gentle kind tolerant man uh instead of this demagogue and this sort of mussolini-like figure but it had nothing whatever to do i mean the the his appealing to his irishness is significant because there is a big irish vote in america or what considers itself to be irish it isn't really irish most of those people have never visited ireland and would be shocked to see what it's like today dublin is very very sophisticated and it's nothing like the island of their imaginations but he every politician who has any feasibly you know a possible connection with ireland plays it up even presidents who presidential candidates who really are not recognizably irish in any sense managed to find irish ancestors and go visit ireland in a kind of sentimental journey because it appeals to the irish vote um so he made use of it but it's it's neither here nor there really in terms of the reality of american political life and this issue of ireland is interesting because it links him with the so-called special relationship between boris johnson and joe biden joe biden famously compared boris johnson to uh donald trump the previous american president is there any comparison to be made there and we'll get onto this issue of ireland in a bit no i mean boris i know boris i mean he was my colleague for 20 years he is absolutely nothing like donald trump and i did think i mean there was a reason why the johnson people allowed that to be perpetuated to some extent on the american side because they wanted a trade deal and they thought trump would deliver for them uh but it's absolutely absurd i mean whatever his failings and faults boris is a very intelligent wissy classics graduate you know donald trump is an ignoramus uh and uh who doesn't even understand the constitution of his own country um so it it the the comparison was absurd uh and also donald trump was a nativist you know sort of and and boris is not um there's a there's a a complete it's unrecognizable the the the attempt to superimpose the american political culture in any way whether it's trump and and boris or any of the other comparisons that are made it is quite absurd in terms of boris johnson and joe biden's relationship are they political soul mates and you can look to cop 26 they're both kind of climate change you know this this is the biggest issue for them uh they both uh you know support uh this kind of liberal world order they both they've signed this recent deal the ocus deal with submarines are they are they soulmates on that issue orcas yes because that goes way beyond biden and and boris that is the anglosphere that is the five eyes intelligence network that is the the uh english-speaking nations which certainly are sort of liberal uh that they are part of the liberal order and the the rule of law the liberal rule of law that's absolutely consistent but it's not to do with biden and bars i think any british prime minister and any american president would ex maybe except perhaps donald trump uh would have gone for that deal uh that that absolutely sounds well i i slightly disagree with you then and i'm glad you mentioned donald trump because he had this more nationalistic view america first and all of that stuff and boris johnson and joe biden i would argue are both part of this kind of liberal globalist world order right they're from that class of politicians so in that sense i think they are soul mates and that there is not oh yes that's not necessarily inevitable in an american president or british no that's true that's true i mean there's a lot there's a long tradition of isolationism in american politics but the idea of maintaining the liberal world order that is pretty basic because if you remember the the whole premise of the american constitution is that the rights that they are fighting for the rights the declaration of independence was fighting for are considered to be universal human rights uh america isn't supposed to be just um a get out for poor refugees who want to come and make a fortune it's not supposed to be just a bolt hole where you go if you're being persecuted it's there as a model to the world of democratic values and human rights and so the idea that america propagates and stands for the universality of human rights that's very very basic and the presidents who have deviated from that donald trump and earlier isolationists have not succeeded in wiping out that basic idea america stands for something that is to do with as we were saying the liberal world order the law-abiding uh the the law-governed world order and tolerance and the opportunity and equality and all those things that are supposed to be built into the american constitution so i do what i i biden and to that extent biden and boris yes they are bedfellows they are in league in the same way but it's something that goes way back much further than them it isn't a personal thing for them they are simply the embodiment of what has long been the established sort of political shared political culture but that's of the whole anglosphere really australia canada new zealand the whole um that that particular kind of liberalism and rights culture is basic to the anglo-sphere whereas there's been all you know not so much uh on the continent there's been a lot more deviation france is supposed to stand for it too with its 18th century revolution but it hasn't always worked out that way i would say particularly in america and to a certain extent in britain and in the western world there has been a backlash against globalization there has been a backlash against this liberal world order because millions of people have felt that they've been left behind their wages have been stagnating and they've been going to donald trump they've been voting for brexit because they're unhappy with this exact thing you're talking about i think brexit don't don't make a parallel between brexit and what happened with trump two different very very different things um the the donald the trump appeal to the rust belt and the left behind the great left behind cohort of americans that was a very very specific thing about a certain kind of industrialization that had collapsed and the poverty in the rust belt in america is astonishing i mean to people who grew up in my generation it used to be the case that detroit car workers you know uh drove cars as expensive as most sort of suburban new yorkers or californians um the collapse of those industries the steel industry mining the car industry uh has been catastrophic in america and because americans are have got this very strong calvinist instinct about self-improvement self-advancement you should be better off than your parents generation this was the first generation of americans who were worse off than their parents had been so that that had a tumultuous effect and americans do not accept poverty uh in the way that a lot of europeans do um and the the kind of rebellion here the red wall constituencies we all talk about the fact that all these labor voters were deeply disenchanted and were felt that they had been left behind by whatever economic miracle had taken place since the 80s um that was very different um for one thing those were areas of the country that were had a a hereditary memory of being poor and disadvantaged uh and it there was a spurt of hope and optimism uh that made it feel as if you know when that when the steel industries went coal mining when those industries in the rust belt um not the rust belt sorry the red wall constituencies were thriving there was a sense even though you might not be wealthy you were earning your living you were making your own way you were self-sufficient you had dignity and the dignity of your your work um that collapsed and the rest of the country very visibly got richer the southeast particularly london and the southeast and some parts of the midlands so it was there was a particular cruelty about that but it wasn't like what happened in america it's really not the same thing is there not a comparison between the elites who caused the problem in the first place in both countries even if the problem is different so in other words there was this liberal international order that pushed for globalization that pushed for free trade that pushed for open borders massive amount of mass migration in both countries huge de-industrialization since the 1980s and longer in america and in both countries people were railing against the elites and donald trump was an anti-elite candidate you know you can argue he's rich and a billionaire all that stuff but he spoke like the people spoke like and you know there was a big comparison there and in britain with brexit people were just being fed up with these people telling them the exact same thing for decades the the tory party and labor seemed very very similar on so many issues and there was this revolt so that's isn't that the comparison yes there is a degree of comparison um and certainly it was a rebellion against elites but i'm what i'm suggesting is that what the elite was doing in in america everybody is self-made you know there is no to and no significant inherited wealth certainly not of the kind that you get in the european country um there is you know not only no aristocracy but not even any uh tradition of hereditary advantage and privilege and that makes it worse oddly enough because it's your own fault if you haven't succeeded if you're not earning enough to keep your family if you've significantly dropped in prosperity from your parents generation it's your fault this is a very very strong uh puritanical idea in america that you make your own way that's the whole point that was why people went to america because they were prepared to make their own way that isn't true in a really class-based system like in britain there was bitterness in britain but it was it was the kind of feeling that we are the people who've always been last on the priority list we're the people who get left behind uh the people in london and the southeast it's all become terribly cosmopolitan and all these foreigners are allowed to come in and they're allowed to make livings and they're getting wealthier and we're left be literally left behind but that's honestly different it's it's in a sense i think that the british business goes back centuries it's a revival of an old thing what happened in america was a new thing this was the first generation of people who literally did not have a chance to do what every american is supposed to do which is to say get ahead do better than your parents succeed you know and not necessarily get rich but at least get comfortably affluent it's quite different you talk about the american dream there and you know historically the american dream has been people coming to america and making their living and our irish people were a huge community and you mentioned ireland the beginning of the interview let's talk let's link that in with some of the disagreements between boris johnson and joe biden so joe biden has put pressure on to boris johnson over the northern ireland protocol because as you mentioned he sees himself as an american irish and irish american the other disagreement they've had recently is over the afghanistan withdrawal where basically joe biden didn't pick up the phone to boris johnson for 36 hours uh he didn't uh consult the brits or nato over the decision so do you think that there there are some risks there at the same time yeah but how significant are they it's very difficult to say in the short term it probably was significant because it was a kind of humiliation because the british had been partners in the afghanistan um and that whole sort of adventure in that region but that i think was possibly deliberate on the part of biden because he didn't want to be slowed down he was determined to do what he was going to do if he had consulted with allies like like britain he would have to have ameliorated his decision he would have to have mitigated the decision and i think it was a quite conscious i don't think he was calling the shots at all frankly i think this was coming from military advisers in the state department and so on and i think that the advice was just do it and don't talk to people until you've announced it until you're doing it because otherwise we won't be able to go through with it and we have to go through with it so the military leaders in america just to hold you on that point uh they claim that they advised the entire the complete opposite to that so yeah well some of them did i think isn't this but he did have he did have a clutch of people he never does i think it was a political thing rather than the military oh yes yes yes sorry yes i didn't mean advice military personnel i meant um the the the people who advise him on military masses and he has a personal clique of people who advise him on these things and it was a deliberate it was a foreign policy decision more than a military decision if you look over to america and watch cnn and then you've put on fox news you can see the contrast and you can see just how divided the country seems at least on the surface oh no it goes very deep yeah where did this division start and there are some people who say look you know um it was the impeachment trial and of bill clinton or it was the 2000 election can you place a sort of pinpoint in history where this began oh it began long long before that i mean i left america i was part of the original 60s student revolution generation and the divisions began then i'd say the post-war period of the 1950s in america was a a apart of course from mccarthyism i mean there's there have always been terribly bitter divisions in american society and it goes back to the thing i was talking about before about the kind of existential anxiety of the country the hysteria i mean when you listen to the political arguments now in america they're so hateful and so uh vicious um and so personal and this is uh the thing the thing that's really disorienting for a british british perspective looking at america is that america there's no sense of we were talking about the elites a moment ago there's no sense of middle class guilt in america you don't feel guilty because you've become successful and made money and you're affluent even if it was your parents money i mean there are there's now a generation of people who are you know what are called trust fund kids you know who who whose parents are quite rich and who are allowing them not to work for a living but that's very very new i mean when i was young even millionaires children were expected to work they were expected to go out and get a job and they were bums if they didn't get a job everybody worked and there was no sense of bourgeois guilt which is so permeates british society and it's one of the things that makes boris's or any government in this country's approach to poverty so different um you know as i was saying in america if you're poor it's your fault um and you there the differ the relationship between the elites in this country and the elite and and the people who are not elite and the enemy here is is so different from america where everybody arrived with nothing everybody is expected to make his own way and that's what you came to america for and if you didn't succeed you're useless you know you're just to be dismissed um the the it's very hard to bridge that break of communications that by basic misunderstanding and so much of the the viciousness and the hatred if you read carefully what's being said on cnn as opposed to fox news cnn is taking a much more european view if you're well off and you're in a comfortable part of the country and you have a good job and you're earning a good living you should feel guilty and responsible for the people who aren't in fox news is taking much more what you might call a redneck position in america which is the traditional american view that you should make your own way you should not depend on anybody certainly not on the government and you shouldn't expect anybody to treat you with particular generosity or charity just because you're poor or hard up or you're not qualified go out and get a qualification go out and you know study and get a qualification so that you can get a job and move out of your sort of hopeless neighborhood or your hopeless community and go to somewhere where the work is um that is the real split between the european or british attitude and the american attitude and that's what you're seeing in cnn and the kind of what you might call the educated elite media they're trying to behave like europeans and so much of the american population is still behaving like the old americans and that's why they're so nationalist that's why it's america first you know america represents the land of opportunity still and if you've been cheated out of your opportunities you feel guilt you feel on the one hand guilty but also um hugely despairing you know there is nobody who is going to offer you the kind of opportunity that you thought was your birthright so the real divide in america is between the european mindset and the original american dream mindset yeah basically yeah can we see that same those same divisions can we see those heading to britain heading our way and you know we look at the brexit referendum the point is is that brexit showed how divided the country really is and you saw particularly after the referendum a huge attempt to reverse the result by the elites and this caused anger a historic anger that i have i've never seen in my life no but i'm quite young so yeah maybe you can tell me um no it was like nothing i've ever seen either and i think that kind of but that kind of illest arrogance on the part of the remainer establishment was was pretty much par for the course what wasn't was the reaction of the people against it um and i think that it hit at a particularly opportune moment the the brexit for the the what you might call the underclass or you know the the disadvantaged working class because they were really having a bad time and so the the brexit the argument about europe and the argument about membership of the eu hit at precisely the moment when that that class of people were particularly bitter and felt disinherited and so it was a it was a kind of perfect storm in that respect but there were there were people voting there were people supporting brexit for all sorts of different reasons and not all of them because they resented immigrants coming and taking their jobs i've got no problem with immigrants i come from an immigrant family my my support for brexit came out of absolute commitment to the democratic principle that you should elect the people who make your laws and there were an awful lot of people who did feel that way and i think that was a an uh there was too little attention paid to that contingent of people you know who really felt that their institutions were being devalued their laws were being trivialized i mean if you tried a lot of american liberals who couldn't understand brexit and thought it was all about bigotry i i actually had this argument with several of them and i said look if any american presidential candidate had said that we that the united states should join a pan-american union in which its foreign policy would be would be determined in buenos aires and a court it's the decisions of its supreme court could be overruled by judges sitting in rio de janeiro how far do you think he would get i mean he'd be vaporized no no politician in america would dream of advocating such a thing and there were a lot of people in this country who genuinely felt that here and it wasn't just about migrants or you know job opportunities in terms of those divisions though can we see a comparison between the globalists the liberals in london and big cities the students similar in america this european attitude and the people who maybe are the sort of british dream people who have this kind of dignity in their community and they've seen as you say elites forgetting them and leaving them behind and i think immigration you can't ignore it it's an issue because people's oh sure society's changed in such a short in the space of two decades basically completely was revolutionized you know so is there a comparison there between america and the uk and that in that example and also are is britain becoming more divided like america could we in five years time ten years time become the same sort of fox news cnn style thing no and that on your last point no um the british are basically profoundly tolerant um very humorous very rational very grown up i mean the the thing that always strikes me when i visit the united states now is how there is a kind of child-like quality about the irrationality of the american position i understand it i know where it comes from but the no i mean this i mean the british are probably the most reasonable people on the face of the earth um and they're the the kind of extreme viciousness the business of the social divides not going to happen uh that is that is it happens in some european countries too but america specializes in it and it's because it's an outlet for all this kind of neuroticism is the only word i can produce for it's it's a sense of not really belonging i mean the sense in which america creates a kind of belonging the the patriotism the parochialism um the the sort of um the business of the local community loyalties have a strain of desperation and bitterness about them in the way that is not the case here i mean i one of the things the opposite side of the coin here that i did find very disturbing about britain is that this rootedness and this almost complacency if you like about the british character uh leads to passivity and i was very disturbed by the kind of defeatist acceptance of working class people and working class communities there the fact that they not only did they not have a desire to improve themselves but they actually tried to prevent their children from moving out and on you know the people i i used to teach in sort of higher education and i was shocked by the way one had to persuade working-class parents to allow their children to apply for university i mean that's largely gone now or mostly gone but there is still this resistance you know you're loyal to your class you're loyal to your community and that can create this terrible defeatist acceptance of a position in society that you know you could have you could have escaped and that i found that very bewildering about british society but the but that's the the bad the negative side of something that is in very often quite positive which is a kind of rooted emotional stability about being who you are which most americans just don't have but what we are seeing is the rise of the woke movement and i want to talk about that in quite a lot of depth because it's really interesting in both britain you know particularly in america but i think it is spreading to the uk there are lots of people saying we should cancel winston churchill because he was a racist or whatever uh you know all these institutions the universities the bbc the civil service big business you know they're adopting the the same kind of language that people in america are using to describe their history to describe their culture and you say that we're the most tolerant some of the most tolerant people in the world you know these woke people in britain would say that's completely wrong we have this awful history of slavery and colonialism that we should be ashamed of we're intolerant and we're uh steeped in in racism as a country so uh are we kind of in that sense heading down the american path uh no um at least only in the most superficial way i mean there is a terrible tendency for britain to imitate what becomes fashionable in america this was happening even in the 60s and so i mean the the american student rebellions and things and the civil rights movement and the anti-vietnam war and the anti-vietnam war movement was a good example i mean i was very very active in the anti-vietnam war movement when i was at berkeley um and when i got here i discovered that there were lots of students agitating to have just the same sort of demonstrations and rebellions at the lse and that sort of thing and we weren't fighting the vietnam war in britain the only thing the only thing they could object to was the fact that harold wilson hadn't positively repudiated the vietnam activities but we never sent any soldiers to vietnam so i mean australia did but britain didn't uh and so i thought what are you going on about you're not even involved this isn't your fight but they wanted to do it you know here we'd had all these sensational sort of marches and demonstrations in america and they thought that was really cool so they wanted to do that and it was purely imitative and of course it petered out because there was no foundation for it so the woke movement in america is another of these nervous breakdowns that america has periodically it's a form of mccarthyism and mccarthyism was a big deal you know in my sort of childhood it wasn't just what you saw those televised senate hearings it wasn't just that it was it was replicated in workplaces all over the country people were sacked because they were thought to have dangerously left-wing views they might be communist sympathizers people's careers could be ruined by being described as communist sympathizers um it was an epidemic of victimization and within a few years mccarthy died of course you know quite young not long after that everybody was saying what was that about you know it was astonishing it was a witch-hunt mentality and it when it died it died definitively and of course by the early 60s everybody was becoming blatantly left the young were becoming blatantly left-wing they were identifying as marxists and trotskyists and there was no equivalent witch-hunt there was no equivalent sort of mccarthyite because that that had just run its course and i think the woke thing is just another example of that america just gets obsessed occasionally and and goes after something and then it like that it's suddenly gone it blows itself up isn't the danger with the work movement if you make that comparison mccarthyism had a real enemy you know communism communists there are some in america but i mean there was a tangible enemy in this in the soviet union today the woke people's enemy is america itself it's it's kind of turning in on itself that's why does that not make it even more difficult yes yes it's more well it's more erotic um it's but if you you well i mean you wouldn't remember this but the mccarthyite period it wasn't just about fellow travelers it wasn't just about people who might actually be soviet assets it wasn't just about spying you know there were people alger hiss and sort of people who were identified as actual sort of agents of the soviet union but it was about thought control as well it was about you know are you thinking the wrong thoughts do you have any sympathies with this kind of socialist expansionism uh it wasn't just specifically aimed at russia and the soviet union and so it's not all that different um you you know it was in inspect your consciousness and see whether there's anything wrong with your thoughts purge yourself of any tendency to go in for this to be sympathetic to these ideas um and it's always in america it's always like that it's always ultimately about police your thoughts and that is so alien to the british idea that the british imitation of it here it may look on the face of it as if it's gaining ground you know in all the sort of institutions and it is to some extent the way the institutions are buckling under the pressure of this is shameful absolutely shameful since it's being driven by such a small minority of people um but it's it's self parody it becomes immediately ridiculous and it's possible to say that it's ridiculous and as a result it will it will blow itself out pretty quickly because it's so self it it's beyond parody at this point and it seems ridiculous because when you look around you at british life it's not the way the peop the people who are creating this character are trying to present it so you know the idea that this i mean this is com i come from a racist country okay this is not a racist country i mean the the the the um attitudes toward ethnic minorities in this country except in tiny pockets ignorant pockets of you know crowds of drunk football supporters or something i mean for the most part the the racial tolerance in this country is extraordinary it's a model to the world do british people confuse british history and american history in that sense i hope not uh because they're completely different um and but what is being said about american history i mean there are people apparently now who are labeled labeling abraham lincoln a racist the man who abolished slavery you know i mean it's just um i mean the thing is it's ludicrous in america too it's ridiculous but they don't see it as ridiculous it's ridiculous here and we see it as ridiculous that's the big difference to understand wokism i think we have to talk about american history and then we can get to sort of more contemporary stuff and for british viewers they might not understand particularly younger ones what the american dream is what the american dream was we've talked about that a lot in this interview and to help people understand i want to talk about your own family's history you know we talked about russia the soviet union i think that's a really good place to start in the early 1900s so can you talk about how your family came to america and how they succeeded uh well whether they succeeded in the first generation is debatable um my family arrived at ellis island in 1905 escaping from the pogroms in russia but that was led by azar not by the communist party um and they arrived in boston um got to boston um and like many members of ethnic communities they spoke virtually no english and they went to their community this is something that a lot of people don't understand about american ethnicity the reason that you know we were talking about biden and his irish roots there was no welfare system at all in in the early 20th century in fact there wasn't one really until you got to the 1930s and so if you arrive penniless you know with all your belongings in a sack on your shoulder um you went to your community and if it was um the jewish community you ended up in certain parts of boston the lower east side of new york if you were italian you ended up in what was called little italy in manhattan or uh you know there were but you went to your people who would help you to find work to and so to support you and to become your extended family and that's one of the reasons that that kind of ethnic loyalty is still so strong in america you know you're an italian american or you're you know a german american because the ties among those communities became very strong they were your only welfare support um the idea was that you were you would get no help from the government you would get no help from anybody except your family your community and you would make your own way and the result was that they were very resilient people they were very industrious and they were absolutely determined to succeed because they had left behind whether it was persecution or poverty or hopelessness they had come to this country which was going to give them the opportunity to succeed and that is so fundamental to the american mentality it's inerradicable it's why did they choose america and not britain or france or germany because america was making the offer i mean you could come in you know that give me your tired your poor the statue of liberty seeing the statue of liberty america was a big empty country and it was actually soliciting mass migration that was the whole point of it uh dispossessed people you know sort of people who had nothing were invited to come and the ellis island museum if you ever get a chance to visit it is an inspiration i mean people were brought into this extraordinary reception hall and queued up for hours with their kids and their relatives and they had to give the name of some contact to somebody who was prepared to meet them and kind of take responsibility for them within the country and it was always a member of your own community or your extended family and that that was it you know you you you it was interesting actually this is a side point that's worth remembering about the ellis island museum um you remember there was a big row here about whether migrants should be allowed to come in if they had certain kinds of illnesses or if they had aids or whatever there was a hospital at the ellis island at ellis island connected to the reception center and if you had any communicable disease you had to be isolated in the hospital before you were allowed to go to the country it happened to one of my aunts when my grandparents were coming she had measles and they all had to wait and not be isolated until she was clear of measles in before they would be allowed in the country and there was there was also a rule that if you were mentally unstable you couldn't be accepted because you were like as they put it you were likely to become a charge upon the state which is very interesting the idea is you are bringing in independent strong healthy people willing to work willing to improve themselves that was the whole point so your family came and eventually they did make success well so the first generation weren't hugely successful but they were one of one rather like many asian families here they were absolutely determined to educate their children i had one of those uncles who kept the shop open seven days a week so that he could put his sons through medical school and i feel tremendous bond with the sort of asian shopkeepers who do the same thing here and it was this it wasn't so much that you were going to succeed or become wealthy some of them did become wealthy but you were going to work every hour that god sent you were going to work your fingers to the bone whether you were a tailor or a shopkeeper or whatever and you were going to put your children through university and they would be the success your son would be the doctor or the lawyer not maybe you're not your daughter she would marry a doctor but the you know the idea was that you were you were doing it for the next generation and eventually janet daly becomes the columnist for the sudden yeah that was a long route before we get to that though uh interesting listening to that story because from if you listen to woke people they would say america's history is steeped in discrimination racism it was this complete hellhole of the country so why would anyone want to immigrate to america in the first place i mean so there's a contrast there between and in america it is a country of contrast and a country of hypocrisy isn't it because at the same time as your russian pogrom uh kind of refugees if you like were coming to america there was this huge discrimination i mean the the slavery had been abolished long before my family came but the point is 50 years yes yes i mean but the point is the people who came one of the real difficulties with racial politics in america and racial identity is that the only group of people who didn't come of their own choice were the people who were brought in chains from africa and it's absolutely true that slavery is the original sin which america does not seem to be able to transcend it's horrendous and american slavery was particularly brutal and um murderous and it was horrendous um and the fight not only to abolish slavery but then to abolish segregation i was very aware of that because as well as being active in the in the anti-vietnam war movement i was also participating in civil rights marches and civil rights demonstrations and the uh abolishing what was called de facto segregation in the north as well as segregation in the south was a very big deal and that was what the 60s was all about and the the there were so many points at which they thought they'd licked it you know martin luther king in his march on washington the passing of the civil rights act and the lyndon johnson everybody thought right it's over now and it's never over it's just heartbreaking it's never over um the disadvantage of the black communities and they become more and more desperate and politically politically almost psychosic because it's so hopeless the despair of it um that that that is an inherent evil uh in the american society which is very difficult to expunge but you don't you don't expunge it by tearing down statues of abraham lincoln i mean you know somehow you've got to come to terms with it and do something that actually remedies the existing problems rather than trying to rewrite the history but it's important to know or to mention that america has made huge progress since 1865 you know and you talk about the civil rights movement huge leaps and bounds have have happened in america for black people and yes you know we've got to obviously recognize that the other thing about the civil rights movement that's interesting is that people today on the woke side would say that they are the new civil rights leaders that they're for example with trans rights they would they would argue and human rights they would argue look we're just simply furthering this fantastic cause from the 1960s so perhaps you're just a simple reactionary a kind of bill connor of the 20 of sort of 20 21. no it's an it's imitative everybody immature imitates the civil rights movement because it's such a great moral triumph you know the the bravery and the i mean i you know i was you know was i in america no i think i'd come here already when there were civil rights workers murdered in mississippi and the murderers got off because the local the local courts the local juries wouldn't convict and it had as a result murder you know in pursuit of a civil rights in in the civil rights context had to become a federal crime because you couldn't get local juries to convict i mean it was horrendous um but the what what is happening now is that every group that decides that it has a grudge or a disadvantage or is being interested unjustly takes that as a model and it's completely inappropriate you know it's it's it's a parody in fact it's a travesty of that you know people were being killed people were being lynched the the kind of discrimination against the black minority in america was appalling and it's nothing like what it what it's being translated into by every protest movement now which is just trying to to kind of emulate it in the most ridiculous way well the irony is is that martin luther king jr famously said that people should be judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin yes and now the same so-called civil rights movement or the woke movement are doing exactly the opposite of that they're judging you they're judging people on the basis of white privilege for example where basically they're saying because of the color of your skin you hold inherent privileges privileges over other people and therefore you should be treated differently that's just a version of original sin you can't choose not to be white um and if you you know obviously you try to live your life by decent values and you try to be as it were to make amend you can't make amends for historical sins i mean in any other context the idea that a child for example should be impugned because of the the crimes that his father had committed can you imagine any other context in which that would seem just if you suppose your father was a mass murderer does that mean that you should be incarcerated or that you should be cast out of society it's not your fault and it's certainly not your fault if three generations ago there was somebody connected with you in your society who made profits out of the slave trade it's absurd uh and it's it's a kind of um a magical thinking you know that somehow you can extirpate this the the crimes of previous generations by blaming people who are alive now and who are obviously as individuals blameless of course last year we saw the murder of george floyd by the american police officer and that caused international outrage protests but also there was this idea that if you were white you somehow held responsibility for the actions not only in america but in britain or someone thousands of thousands of miles away so it's not just about the ancestors is it you can take you can be responsible for the crimes of others who who live well i mean collective guilt of that kind is a very dangerous idea to say that somehow because you are of the same skin color or the same you know the same in in the same racial category as somebody who committed a heinous offense how does that work i mean it's just disabling it's morally disabling because you're responsible for everything you're responsible for every crime every terrible sort of social sin of anybody who happens to be of the same color as you i mean that makes life unlivable it's impossible to understand these ideas some people look to france and to paris in the 1960s and these sort of post-modern ideas other people compare this to the cultural revolution under mao and where you have you know we talk about collective guilt and punishing your ancestors there are some comparisons oh yes absolutely so how do you understand wokeness fundamentally it's a neuroticism it's and it's a fake religion it's got all the sort of attributes of a religion original sin collective universal guilt sins that can't be expiated the acceptance of your own of your own moral responsibility for things that you never did um it's it's it and it it seems to me to be have a psychodynamic quality about it you know there's something wrong um and it's a cultural neurosis not not necessarily an individual one um but the comparison with the cultural revolution in china is very apt this is it's maoist and you know a whole class has to be held responsible for you know the the the terrible things that happened in the cultural revolution where anyone with a middle-class education or a middle-class job was forced to work in the mines or you know do sort of forced labor um that was extraordinary but it it it's very easy to get to a kind of psychotic breakdown if you allow rhetoric and ideology to run amok without being checked by any responsible decision-making and has it only been enabled to run amok as you say because of the decline of religion and the decline of our sort of social values within society and i think if decline of religion was the problem it would have happened a long time ago in britain this is a very s secular almost irreligious society but i think there is a need a basic human need for certain kinds of credo of something that gives life a sense of moral force and principle um and it's very easy to fill that vacuum if you're unscrupulous or you're self-serving very easy and britain is usually pretty good at resisting that's why it never went fascist it never succumbed to the kinds of things that so many european countries succumbed to um and they were religious you know i mean when when italy was a was still quite a profoundly catholic country when it went fascist so it's not religion that protects you from that um it's it's more um i don't know what it is actually there's something about the national character of the british uh which is skeptical inevitably skeptical uh inevitably reasonable and humane and humorous and self-mocking and that saves you from an awful lot of sins and i don't i cannot see and i i see it still in britain very clearly i mean even especially during the pandemic during that all that social isolation the way people responded to it the way they helped each other the way they reacted to each other the kind of conversations that people had in the streets strangers talking to each other um it that that seems to be absolutely unbeatable that you know that i mean the people who laugh their way through the blitz you know it's still here that character it's what i love about the british and they're so so different from the contagious hysteria that seems to take root so easily in america and in many european countries as well let's go back to the divides in america there are some people who say that america is so divided between the red states and the blue states that it should separate into two countries uh you've got the kind of the coasts and then the sort of center what do you think about that idea is america heading towards complete division no not not not officially no because the constitution will hold it's amazing to say something nice about america that the constitution holds you know i mean even you know when trump had that horrific sort of invasion of the capital um and was trying to get the object of it was to stop them doing the count you know the the vice president pence was having to do the count the electoral college votes to install biden as president um it the constitution held and there are enough people who most americans actually are really pretty serious about the constitution it's it is the national religion the civic religion and when it came to it the orderly succession of one elected government to the next held and the constitution this very peculiar sort of federal arrangement of all these very disparate states that will hold um there might be some a lot of nastiness that will go on in the interim but um you know even under the most incredible circumstances it has held through richard nixon you know and sort of i mean there have been some pretty terrible things nothing quite as terrible as donald trump i don't think but i mean it it it is it's so huge the country and it has such a dispersed population it's really quite difficult for anything to tear it apart it may seem like it when you look at the media coverage and it may seem like it when you look at the voting patterns but when it actually comes to the solid business of american life it just goes on basically under this constitutional rule of law january the sixth is a good example so i'm glad you raised it of how divided america is i would i personally think that um the word insurrection is going a bit too far i think that these were a group of kind of crazed protesters who were going they were just dressed up as these nutters and they kind of walked into this into congress i don't think that they were there to overthrow the government i think and and there has been some rhetoric from some politicians in america including george w bush that these people are comparable to the taliban that this was similar to 911 there's also these this new idea from some democrats of introducing domestic terror legislation to regulate their political enemies and i think these are some really dangerous ideas and quite dangerous rhetoric and it's certainly not the way to heal the divides in america which is what joe biden promised he would do if he became president how can america heal i have no idea but i know that it will eventually happen just because everybody will become exhausted and every generation displaces the next in the 1950s there was a famous time magazine feature on the silent generation and how all these young people were growing up in america in post-war america who had no interest in politics who were conformist all they wanted to do was get good jobs and wear a suit and america was finished you know as a sort of politically active politically conscious country what happened next the 60s you know every decade every generation wants to reverse or rebel against what went before and there's this is so ugly now that it has to immolate itself but i think the january sixth thing you have to understand this is again something probably difficult for british people to understand the invasion of the capital was absolutely shocking america like most revolutionary republics takes its monuments and things and its sacred buildings very very seriously there's nothing that could compare if we had an invasion of the houses of house of commons it wouldn't be anything like as shocking as that the the capital which is the home of the you know houses of congress which if anything is more sacred than the presidency it has more power than the presidency actually um to see it invaded by hordes of well as you say these sort of ludicrous terrifyingly ludicrous people um that that was i can understand why people went overboard in describing the significance of it i have a good friend in america who is a republican and who was a supporter of trump and who is a very educated erudite guy and i emailed him on that night at the height of that horror show and said please tell me that you're appalled by these scenes otherwise we're on different planets uh and he is i would tell you what his reply was but it was less than um you know sort of uh robust and i can't tell you how shocking that is in americans there's no equivalent because britain doesn't have these sacred monuments if you remember there was a there was a a movement called fathers for justice in this country which was doing all kinds of silly pranks and at one point they climbed up into the house of commons onto a balcony and the police spent hours gently talking them down and everything in america they tried the same thing and they i think it was the jefferson memorial that they occupied a swat team went in and bang they were out like that no messing because america regards it's it's practically like the vatican you know it regards those monuments to its history as absolutely sacred but a memorial is one thing the jefferson memorial but the capitol building i mean that i can understand why people became deranged when they responded to that we don't have enough time to talk about the reaction but i do think it's interesting because uh you know after great crisis governments tend to i think overreach and you know 911 is a good example of that where they passed all this legislation that's still there today and it's meant to be temporary legislation to tackle foreign terrorist threats and now some democrats are talking about the domestic threat and i think there is a danger there but anyway look i'm going to wrap it up thank you so much janet for joining us that was fantastic all right

Channel: The Telegraph

Views: 198,305

Keywords: Telegraph, News, woke, woke culture, social justice warrior, sjw, cancel culture, social justice, anti-woke, politically woke, anti woke, freedom of speech, critical race theory, activism, janet daley, daley, janet, joe biden, donald trump, president donald trump, trump, news, prime minister, house of commons, politics

Id: jUlbpfkm7n0

Length: 58min 20sec (3500 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 22 2021