The Attack on Western Values

[Music] afternoon ladies and gentlemen it's great pleasure to welcome you all to another event at the danube institute my name is john o'sullivan i'm the president of it and we have we are fortunate today in having two extremely distinguished um professors of uh history and ideas but more particularly than that people who are able to debate and discuss these questions in a continually fresh and interesting way now our speaker today is going to be professor david starkey um and he will come to the podium in a moment after which we will then i will then ask professor fonte to respond to his remarks and um and then we will have a conversation for another half hour or so so um that's the format and then um we shall we are very relaxed here um we would like to promote a dialogue back and forth uh nothing too formal and and at the end of the uh and then when we run out of um things to say we will adjourn and have a drink so um thank you so once again thank you for being here professor starkey is a well-known figure in um in the modern world of uh politics and of communications as well as um in the academic life yeah he was a professor he is a historian from cambridge initially um having been born and brought up in the north of england quite near where um i was born and brought up in a similar time and in fact we have a conversation uh which covers many things but including our origins in um which is going to come out shortly in the podcast um but today where and and his um his work as a historian and has been led to a great um interest in the tudors um and he is at the moment working on a major biography of henry viii but of course he has written a great deal uh else and and more to the point too he has managed to become a famous figure a television and radio historian who has brought these issues and these controversies from the past alive in an extraordinarily fresh and interesting way so his topic today is somewhat different it is the crisis that we are facing in today's world the crisis of west western civilization on the one hand a crisis also of um that walkery um which is is an attack on western civilization um um and and and provides the basis for an enormous clash so i'm very interested myself to to see how he's going to reimagine and re-anchor the western values which at the moment has the western values have become so to speak um a set of ideas and a set of achievements which are very ashamed of themselves even though they are remarkably um valuable by the store any standard in today's world so i am going to begin by asking um professor starkey to address us and following that uh i will invite um a response from professor fonte um who has just received a distinguished award from the hungarian government um to to follow on so thank you very much gentlemen professor starkey [Applause] john well rather the two johns it's a very great pleasure to be speaking and indeed debate is the wrong word uh discussing with with john fontaine and extraordinarily the word opportunistic has got unfortunate uh connotations perhaps better fortunate which isn't intended as a parody or indeed a pun on his name his book of course which was the background to the award challenges the ideas of francis fukuyama and reasserts the values of the nation state and that's going to be one of the things that i shall be talking about i'd like to begin with a war a wider picture john talked about um talked about western values i'm not sure i understand what western values are i would like to talk about something else i would like to talk about what i think is fundamentally the crisis of liberalism that what we're seeing now is the collapse or the undermining or the disintegration of a particular approach and understanding of human society of the relationship between the individual and the group of states to each other and so on that we can we can put on into a sort of very large envelope labeled liberalism what has happened i'm sure we're all familiar with um fukuyamas first of all was the article the end of history and then i'm afraid like many american books it was really a slightly overblown version of the article was it not um the the article is effectively applying a notion that in 1989 history came to an end and it came to an end essentially because the liberal state and liberalism and liberalism of politics liberalism of society liberalism of everything had triumphed and there was an absolute certain bond between uh free market economics and a free society and so on and so on and there was an inevitable triumph of all of this of course 1989 is there because of the fall of the berlin wall but i think to understand the full arc of what fukuyama is talking about we need actually to begin in 1945 and the attempted reconstruction of the world in the wake of the second world war and a reconstruction which was of course very aware of what they all thought had gone wrong and this is a very appropriate place to talk about what had gone wrong in the wake of the settlement after the first world war and what you have in 45 is a very conscious assertion of liberal universalism a liberal universalism which purports to be a general account of human nature and based upon a general understanding of human nature it is of course a doctrine which goes back to the enlightenment itself which in some respects actually goes back to the first enlightenment the real enlightenment of late 17th century england as opposed to the fancy dress of 18th century france and it's a doctrine that um the basis itself is thought it's a it's a doctrine that bases itself on things that we are of course completely familiar with but let me put it slightly differently i think the essential thing to understand about liberalism is that is a doctrine that rests on the notion of human similarity that fundamentally all human beings are the same that underneath the superficiality of national difference under the superficiality of race of class and everything else we are fundamentally the same difference is accidental similarity is substantial and everything that that we see being constructed in 45 and and as it were reasserted in 1989 is based on that simple principle the uh the idea of of particularly of the international declaration of human rights heavily sponsored of course and and seen through by eleanor roosevelt now it will look that all of those things that developed from that ideas of liberal democracy the ideas of uh the uh of the rule-based international system of the uh of the idea of globalization itself we can see all of them as it were presented by fukuyama in this idealized form as what is any of you are any of you familiar with the work of of the great erasmus at the time of the reformation and the time of the renaissance he's his picture of what should have been the world if martin luther hadn't happened in which there would be universal peace and justice and war would be abandoned and fukuyama is really that kind of figure unfortunately of course the liberal account of humanity is wrong we are not the same differences are not accidental differences are fundamental and as it were all the things that that fukuyama held up before us are foreign to pieces he summarized his idea that the future of man was of course the abandonment of the nation-state and instead there would be the emergence of this thing that we call the universal homogenous state which all forms of ideological difference have vanished because of course liberal democracy has triumphed so there are no longer any fundamental questions and no longer any serious debates about politics the only debate is how we become yet more prosperous and the as it were the embodiment of all of this is of course the eu perceived as an ideal construct well the eu had brexit extraordinary direct challenge to those assumptions we look again at john has already mentioned one of the other things that fukuyama was absolutely convinced about was that because it satisfies all human needs the universal homogenous state is also peculiarly stable its framework of values is fundamentally unchallengeable there's nothing that you can get beyond democracy well of course as he pointed out woke challenges absolutely fundamentally every one of the assumptions of liberalism of the liberal state and so on and then we've had of course the idea of a globalized international order uh partly financial partly industrial of course by the way going back to those well sort of liberal enterprises the british empire and the semi empire of america constructed on the ruins of the british empire challenged radically by the financial crisis of 2008 and what is going on now in response to the ukraine crisis the staggering reversal of trends from superfluity remember we have all grown up people of john's age and myself of a world in which everything has got cheaper and cheaper in which labor costs have got high but the cost of actual material goods have got lower so living standards have constantly risen everything with exceptions occasionally the fuel and whatever has got cheaper and cheaper suddenly a violent reversal of this pattern so everywhere you look and of course particularly in international relations the crushing failure in the last few months of the united nations held up before us all as a simple absurdity guterres doing nothing more do we all know what guterres actually did in new york at the time of the outbreak of of the ukrainian war he issued a statement which said literally quoting lenin give peace a chance the sheer preposterous futility of the thing on which so many hopes had been built so what do we do where do we go what foundation do we find for ourselves and putting it more sharply should we necessarily be very surprised because i would like to advance a point which is that liberalism this this this doctrine of the of the the individual who is it were born free of human and social con of historical context of human context this individual entering as a matter of will into all relations with others essentially to achieve his or her or its or theirs depending on whichever pronouns you use liberty there is no reason for liberalism ever to stop it is by definition self-destructive and this is one of the great problems i think we have not fully registered then you know if we've been having this conversation 100 years ago in the 19th century liberalism was the doctrine fundamentally identified with the nation state and though hence all hence hence ends the liberation move the various movements of national liberation all over europe many of which was were sponsored by britain and with of course gladstone the great liberal politician of the late 19th century the famous speeches about the turkish horrors in the balkans and and and and driving the turks out bag and barrage bag and baggy bag and baggage and and whatever so we've got to i think have a fundamental understanding of the fact that liberalism is a self-destructive doctrine that is to say it is no accident that the if you like the early enlightenment the enlightenment of voltaire even to an extent uh the the the enlightenment of russo finishes in revolution finishes on the scaffold finishes in the terror so we shouldn't then perhaps be too surprised by woke we shouldn't perhaps be too surprised by the way liberation doctrines have become self-consuming so we've got then an attempted foundation of political uh political organization stability international order and whatever in a reading of human nature which i would say i think is fundamentally wrong now why do i think it's wrong i'm going to invoke a name quite a lot which is that of senator gustin said augustine gives i'm sure we're all familiar a very different picture of human nature he he emphasizes the absolute passivity the absolute dependence of the human being and also of course his or the the fact of the literal biological fact if you think of the opening of of of russo's social contract that man is born free yet everywhere is in chains have a sillier three words than man is born free ever been written every woman here knows how man and woman is born to quote augustine in a more respectable form than the original latin you're born amidst urine and feces you're an absolutely dependent creature of time place and circumstance so this notion of the abstract individual is the merest construct and is therefore of use only if the construct works and we've seen the construct doesn't actually work so how then do we many of us most of us i think would call ourselves conservatives how do we answer this failed liberalism with a conservatism that has some chance of standing up and the conservatism that might survive that's the question that i really want to ask and i would like then to pick up with the remark that i made just now that's to say that liberalism is essentially founded on a doctrine of human similarity i think what the conservative wishes to do is on the continent and therefore is unnatural despite all its paradigm of natural law is fundamentally unnatural does not answer the human circumstance or to the reality of the human condition whereas the account that's given by augustine unpleasant and brutal though it is is actually accurate human beings vary enormously in their physical capacity their mental capacity their emotional stability and of course above all they vary in the inheritance of their culture liberalism ignores culture it regards culture merely as superficial which is why many of the catastrophes of liberalism happen it's liberalism the idealism the absurdity of liberalism is responsible for has there ever been a more fatuous military adventure and a more horrible of course in its consequences but fatuous in its inspiration than the invasion of afghan afghanistan which had as one of its aims to enable women to wear mini skirts you know the sheer fatuousness of it the absurdity the the cultural indifference and so on so i think then i want as a conservative to say we begin with a notion of human specificity of difference of initial dependence of cultural derivation that's where we should start now this raises of course some profoundly uncomfortable questions the first of which of course is to recognize as adelaide stevenson put it magnificently the beginning of the 1960s what we talked about as universal values were western values they were no more and the entire enterprise of the united nations was as a soviets often and accurately argued effectively a piece of american ideological imperialism which has met united accuracy very awesome very oddly we can discuss i think i won't go into this in detail it actually oddly enough provided precisely the machinery that the soviets used to limit things like freedom of speech or whatever using the the gap between these vast general claims of universal declarations of human rights and the reality of of of race discrimination in america or imperialism in britain you're able in fact to undercut magnificently the the grandiose claims of the west uh and of course to pander to uh the emerging nations or form former colonists or whatever uh of of of the old western empires so then having said those things about diversity rootedness experience and whatever how do we find the ground for politics within them well once again i would like to go back to saint augustine augustine of course is famous for one of the most important books in the history of western civilization and indeed it lies at the foundation of the history of the west it's the city of god because of course all the questions we are asking now the questions that i'm asking the questions about what is the roots of the legitimacy of government its relationship to human nature and so on are not new questions we talk about them as though they were relatively new questions on the contrary they're profoundly old questions and augustine again is doing precisely what edmund burke did when he wrote in reaction to the french revolution what israeli did when he was dealing with the gigantic changes of late 19th century english societies did a broadening of the franchise in other words they are responding to extraordinary crisis written times of their own that are undergoing vast change and so the dustin of course let's put him in in his context i've been arguing with the importance of context saint augustine is arguing and writing in the immediate response to the cataclysmic event that effectively ends the roman empire in the west that is the capture of rome twice in a single year not so much it's sacking but the looting of its treasures by alaric the visigoth that moment at which and remember a city which had been untouched for 800 years falls and it falls of course when it's adopted christianity and the great question is is there a relationship between the fall of rome and the adoption of christianity if you're familiar with gibbons much later great account of the roman empire and its fall the decline and fall of the roman empire he argues as far as he dared in 18th century england that the the adoption of christianity is directly responsible for the fall of rome that is an antithetical set of values and designing again is where we should debate this this i think is how we should really see woke woke in many ways is a perverted form of christianity if you think of what it's trying to do in reversing the power structure it's the magnificat translated into bad english he shall cast down the mighty from their seats and exalt them of low degree that's good it's these these things are perverted forms of religion and particularly perverted forms of some aspects of christianity so what augustine has got to do augustine has got to address the question was christianity responsible for the fall of rome interestingly enough he avoids the question like so many of us when the question is very difficult what he says instead he simply denies that the pagan roman state had any moral value at all he denies that human society because of course he is arguing for the fallen state of man he believes in original sin as it were the badge of what i was talking about about being born amidst the sins of the flesh and an excrement and whatever is that you carry this this badge of mortal sin from from the beginning therefore nothing that human hands can do can this this is the diversity of the the fragility of the human condition interpreted in the most literal and hostile fashion nothing that you can do will actually be of lasting value nothing will have moral sanction or moral validity and it's very interesting when everybody tries to deduce notions of the state from an idea of god or religion the real founder of the western church rejects absolutely any such notion according to saint augustine the only society that has value is the city of god which is both the church militant upon earth and the church as as the faithful have ascended to heaven but that of course raises this absolute fundamental question does human society have values can we find a route of value and here because we've only got a few minutes i will have to leap over centuries with with with with you the kind of gesture of the television presenter and say these kind of questions as we all know in the middle ages there are attempts at the sac various forms of the sanctification of the state that the extraordinary at fact that in the west very much again following what had happened in rome in 410 you actually developed two rival institutions of earth both earthly and spiritual power uh the the pretensions of the holy roman empire on the one hand and of the papacy on the other and as i've been arguing repeatedly in discussions in the few days that i've been here i see the origins of western freedom essentially as the conflict of these two but let's leap over all of that to my own particular period my period of the 16th century the english in the 16th century debate exactly what augustine set out they take the the debate is framed by augustine it's expressed by the great genius of thomas moore or saint thomas more depending on on on your views of the man in two of the most famous works of not simply the 16th century but of of of the human spirit one of them of course is utopia and the other his account of the idealized society which is pagan but nevertheless embodies what he regards as christian values of the rejection of earthly wealth and a kind of quasi-communist managed society on the one hand this imaginary island the no the the no place here is what it literally means and then they're very much in other words the abstract place the city of god without as it were god and utopia is the city of god without god it's a consideration of what an earthly working version of the city of god might actually look like the other very much place here that's the somewhere that is actually a place is and the linkage is not normally made but i can demonstrate the closeness of it is his history of the reign of richard iii and his history of the reign of richard iii is intended to do what the first part of of of um the uh the city of god does which is to demonstrate that the english state is so morally and absolutely corrupt that you cannot derive value from it that's that is why of course you and richard the third is the absolute ideal king to do this the the murder of his nephews the the the brutality the cynicism i mean there are there are powerful streaks in in richard iii as represented by shakespeare of either the the absurdist king or indeed of donald trump if you actually look at the behavior of richard iii on stage the the the laughing the joking the the the bizarre undercutting sinister humor the whole thing is a conte deliberate contempt of value the thing that is striking that should strike us is that this challenge was picked up the english decide or most immigration side thomas moore loses the argument i think it's fair to say thomas more loses every argument but you know that's why he becomes a martyr and and lives on in all our memories but thomas more loses the great argument about the validity of the english state and you can see a sequence of writers building up from only a few years after him who consciously say thomas moore talked about an ideal commonwealth i'm not interested in an ideal commonwealth i want to talk about england as it is now so you get thomas elliott in the book of the governor showing how the new renaissance uh the the the new renaissance techniques uh in other words the political and and uh political social rhetorical inheritance that you've got from rome can be applied to the english ruling class you can make roman gentlemen out of english gentleman by a process of education uh my namesake thomas starkey in the uh in an unpublished work but a very very important one the dialogue between pool and lupset written in the 19 written in the 1530s does something even more astonishing he sees the english aristocracy as a new roman senatorial aristocracy who can actually restore virtue to england that they can be the people who will reform government under the king and finally by the time that you've got to thomas smith at the beginning of elizabeth reign and work again with with a latin title but actually very very much england and about england the devi public and glorum about the english republic he begins in this extraordinary way he says thomas moore wrote about an ideal world i want to write about my country now on the 24th of june 1569 in the reign of queen elizabeth the first and this is the best place to live so there and he then develops the study of english institutions the patterns of english government the patterns of english law and sees in them the basis for a proper functioning fundamentally fair polity in other words he is looking not to abstracts not two philosophical principles he is you he's looking to a historical tradition and to a tradition of institutional continuity and it seems to me that already there you have the actual foundation of what we should be doing but of course and again this is shot across once again by religion this is the moment when the reformation hits england well it doesn't hit england it's directly adopted by henry viii henry viii actually makes himself the head of the church which on the one hand of course elevates the monarchy to a gigantic picture of power but on the other hand in an age of controversy means that the monarchy is the target of opposition in a way which has never been before because of course in an age where religion matters more than politics the only important political question is if you're a catholic is the monarch catholic or protestant or if you're a protestant the other way around and strikingly in the middle of the 16th century one of the most extraordinary and little known books bishop ponets treatise of political treatise of political power is a kind of sunday times exposing it's like richard iii but what it does it gives you a blow-by-blow account of how wicked his own men the protestants of the reign of edward ii were but he does it with a biblical text put not your trust in princes again exactly that same pulling back from from politics so here we've then got this picture of an england which sort of recognizes itself and recognizes institutional continuity and can i just say this is actual matter of fact already by the 16th century you are looking at the structure of government which is nearly 450 years old and moreover a structure of government which after that has never been radically challenged saving the unsuccessful revolution of the middle years of the 17th century and even with the repeated challenges of the 18th and the 19th and the early 20th century over questions like we were the representation of new social groups whereas in every i think every other european state existing structures had to be pulled down to accommodate the new groups the traditions of english politics as they were praised by thomas smith by thomas starkey and and and and by thomas elliot so they're all thomas by thomas elliot actually held they were strong enough and tensile enough to open in other words in england you do not campaign to tear down parliament of the monarchy you campaign to be represented in parliament in other words it's a leg it's what we have in england is a legacy of reform not revolution and this this i think will form one of the natural points of which i begin to draw to a conclusion if we look then again more closely i've referred to them both briefly if you look to burke and israeli the two founders of real conservatism uh more closely we will actually see how these ideas shape and determine theirs burke is a remarkable figure burke is like me he's a convert i'm a convert to conservatism as i said i was i was quite straightforward uh radical liberal i suppose sort of liberal universalist more particularly a libertarian uh until i wakened up i saw what was happening beginning about ten years ago and realized that who were confronting a genuine threat to everything that mattered and everything that was of value burke of course having b burke was a radical week burke burke was incomplete with a weak tradition he was uh he believed in economical reform he resisted the power of the monarchy he denounced most aspects of the british empire and then he suddenly confronts the horror of the french revolution and the way he describes it is exactly as i've been talking about he says the french revolution is about abstract reason it is about reason removed from contact with reality so you decide and he he gives many illustrations of it but the obvious illustrations are things like the fact we decide everything should be to base 10. well of course quite good for decimal currency moderately good for uh the metric system but rather silly if you try and make you know 10 hours in the day 10 days in the week and 10 months in the year with the catastrophes of the french revolutionary calendar the obliteration of every single internal geographical frontier in france in other words the attempt as the liberal enterprise demands that you begin simply from the individual and reason you wipe the slate clean you extirpate the the the variousness the irrationality of history and you begin clean and you construct new you construct big and you construct beautiful and you are a bit like a modernist architect and we all know what the results of modern architecture are and burke then gives us this radically different picture a picture that we should recognize history that we should recognize the embeddedness the inheritance of value that we should recognize and this again is profoundly important conservatism is not simply stasis the past is not a straight jacket history is not determinism what burke is clear about what is really unclear about completely on the contrary is that you that society changes the issue is not stopping change the issue is how you change do you change in accordance with the values of your country or do you change in accordance with the values of abstract reason let me give you an illustration from the catastrophe that england underwent in the 90s in the 1990s with the then labor government using simply the model the preposterous model of the separation of powers based on montesquieu's fantastic misunderstanding of the english constitution it it deliberately created because of course what did we do we actually had a supreme court effectively that sat in the upper house of the legislature you can't possibly have that so you create a supreme court which immediately starts to behave like an american supreme court which is a very bad idea in my view as we can see from the whole dispute over roe versus wade again you had a highly functioning head of the legal system who was also a cabinet minister was also the speaker of the house of lords and was also a politician of course which contrives to challenge every single one of the principles of the separation of powers so we half abolish the office of lord chancellor and the legal system has never recovered so that's the wrong application of of of of of reform and whatever and what i want to finish on finally is why english history escapes the woke challenge if we look in america the challenge of the 1619 project that there is a fundamental and irredeemable gulf between the high claims of the revolution and the low reality of slavery and race relations i'm afraid you have to admit there's some very substantial truth in the statement on the other hand if you look at the statement which is the intent of transferring it to england that there is in fact uh that's the history of slavery in the british empire acts as exactly a similar process of delegitimization of that history that i was talking about then i think you've got a very very straightforward answer it is absolutely true that for a brief moment in the 18th century the british empire was because it was the world power it was the leading slaving power it is all unfortunately of course every power when it had the opportunity was the world's leading slave power and it had the opportunity the british had the opportunity and they took it what makes them unique is they then abolish slavery and they then not only abolish slavery they deliberately extirpate it throughout the world at enormous cost enormous political cost so you have this this curious business in british history that it is a kind of solution to itself that the contradictions resolve i know that sounds very hegelian because it's not simply the business of slavery the british empire again is unique following the rebellion of the american colonies there is the durham report into canada which consciously envisages that canada will become an independent dominion under the crown and that rule is generalized in the statute of westminster 1931 the british empire in other words is unique in that it wills its own end and survives in the form of what we call the anglo-sphere of states which have inherited the whole in the literal inheritance of england in other words to a substantial extent what i've been talking about the english experience is genuinely transmitted to america canada new zealand wherever even indeed to to to for example to israel which consciously incorporates english law and the parliamentary system and so on and this seems to me this and of course culminating finally in the extraordinary fact that we are a royal republic that every single act of parliament is still we were talking about decorations every single act of parliament its only authority is that of the queen the formal statement is be it therefore enacted by the queen's most excellent majesty with merely the advice and consent of the lord's spiritual and temple but as we all know it's a useful historical fiction fiction and history and this merging and telling of stories seems to me to be the grounds to which we have to hold the grounds on which we have to persuade others to communicate that sense of the past and its continuing ability to fertilize the present and to shape the future thank you [Applause] david i i want to thank you very warmly for that address i think when you in a sense start with senator gustin and end with the woke you have a real tour door is all a political and religious thought and um i think it's been an extremely not just a tour durison but tour de rezan conducted on a roller coaster so a fantastically uh interesting moment now i now welcome to the stage john fonte professor fonte is a man who has done his best to prevent the left getting seizing control of the historical standards in american education and did in fact fight an extremely effective battle um in in the 1980s and 90s to prevent that happening unfortunately a lot has gone wrong since then he is now devoted his attention to more recently to preventing a globalist and um a globalist movement eradicating all the boundaries of different countries and states and instituting a kind of deracinated international law on societies of a very different kind his book sovereignty or submission which i'm happy to say is just about to be translated into hungarian is an important book i had the pleasure of actually writing the introduction to it um very important book which i think reflects the the the the increasing um wisdom we have as we see the chaos of woke wokism um being approaching us and attempting to inflict itself on us so john perhaps i could ask you to come to the lectern and deliver your own approach [Applause] well thank you david that was uh that was quite interesting and uh i agree with uh i think most of it um talks about the crisis of liberalism um liberalism of course has uh has morphed into something else uh earlier this morning when uh i received a uh this award from the hungarian government i made the point that the hungarians were among the first to rise against communism in 1956 and are also among the first to rise against what's called vocism today so and woke-ism itself is not new goes back perhaps to you could say lucifer's rebellion or um in the early middle ages um the gnostics the experts who had power then obviously the french revolution finally the bolsheviks the maoists now in a much at this point at least a softer form the present woke a revolution which is happening throughout the world particularly in the west and particularly uh in the united states and britain so this is the challenge from and i i think david started sketching it out uh rather well and that vocism is in a sense a form of perverted religion now david's talk was uh as an englishman was uh anglo-centric uh so as an american uh i'm gonna have a more uh american-oriented uh conception first of all we're both i think in agreement on what conservatives should do or what what is the reaction what is the resistance uh to locism and uh from what i gathered and what he was saying uh it's to go to our history to go to our inheritance and to go to to our realism rather than a an abstract or ideal uh situation and i agree with all of that but there is again probably an agreement no universal answer for conservatism conservatism is uh well there are some generalities but again it's uh it's a separate it depends upon the nation it depends upon their history it depends upon the circumstances hungarian history british history american history are different and therefore the conservatism uh in those countries is different now i'm gonna i think david will probably probably disagree with some of the things i'm going to say now because it's we had some discussions the other last night and talked about natural rights laws of nature this sort of thing so i think i'm going to uh back uh provoke him a little bit on this amir american what americans conservatives want to do is to conserve america and that means the regime and the way of life that was established by the american founders and that would be all of the american founders and the american founders the basic american regime was founded on uh two pillars uh the culture that uh that david mentioned so that's the story of america it's the history and also the creed the ideological philosophical elements which i'll get to in a moment i think we'll we'll start with the culture the culture uh of course is is um uh this story which has certain certain highlights whether it was the uh the tenacity and the character of george washington uh valley forge the expansion across uh the western plains the creation by entrepreneurs in the late 19th century of uh the greatest economy that the world has ever known uh the civil war gettysburg which sort of purged uh at least began to purge the uh some of the the past slavery in the past the emergences of world power beginning in the 20th century the return to the old world and the rescue of the old world against national socialism uh and communism so this is sort of the story the traditional story of america and the traditional inheritance and this is repeated by right of center politicians you look at president trump's uh speech um on mount the mount rushmore speech went to mount rushmore went through all of this and the american story would include jazz and and uh um that whole and the whole uh cultural aspects of let's say modern and popular culture as well um so that uh that's part of the history of america the history of america also uh includes the creed and that's really in a sense part of the of the culture i mean the uh the at the at the center of the creed is the declaration of independence and the constitution of the united states the declaration of independence was not simply a document written by thomas jefferson it was it was a document representing the congo the continental congress it represented was the the thought of uh uh of the american revolutionaries at that time um and what jefferson said in uh he was asked a little after the after the declaration what did you mean by the declaration where did you get your ideas what was this all about and he said something very interesting he said there was nothing new in this declaration it is simply uh civil it's simply the wisdom of of mankind up to now it's what we uh it's the accumulated wisdom and he mentions uh four people i said for example the accumulated wisdom and then he mentions four specific figures in political philosophy uh i mention he says aristotle it's the ideas of aristotle of cicero of sydney the english republican and john locke um but essentially um his what people thought of his civilization uh and that's why he talked about uh the laws of nature and nature's god so there was all of the founders were jefferson and madison on the uh let's say leftist center the democratic republicans and all of the federalists the more conservative parties which is washington and hamilton um and adams and john jay and this their this was exemplified so more or less in the federalist papers well madison was part of that too all of them believed in uh natural rights i mean they believe that all men are created equal that's a big argument or what does it mean that we discussed this a little bit at dinner they didn't mean of course that everybody is exactly equal they meant they're equal in the sight of god and they should be equal before the law now obviously this wasn't totally the case uh with slavery and voting property rights or some property rights are voting until until andrew jackson came along so then we had a civil war which sort of fulfilled some of this and that it wasn't completely fulfilled because uh there was segregation for another 100 years jim crow in the south and then finally we had the civil rights act which ended some of this but brought in as christopher caldwell's brilliant book of last year it also brought in it was it was distorted instead of having equal rights before the law we now have woke-ism which is group rights and rights based on race ethnicity and gender so this is a perversion of the american regime and a version of of the natural rights document doctrine um and i'm going to pope uh professor starkey a little bit here we had a discussion last night so american culture is british it's totally british you know you accepted the common law well let's take a look at that for a moment we do have a common law system which is of course it's case law it's not we it's not the european continental it's not the european system it's based on cases so in that sense it is inherited for britain but our concept of citizenship is is different from um the common law and different from in fact it's ex expressed repudiation of it american citizenship which wasn't codified right away was hinted at by the founders uh men but again was based on natural law and based on social the social compact which means one voluntarily becomes a citizen of course someone is born they're not they're not going to make a decision at that point but some of the founders are saying well when you're 18 or 19 you can make a decision if you don't like the system you can you can go to england or you can leave if you stay that's sort of implied consent you've given your consent so the question of implied consent your consent your consenting of the social contract so you're saying staying here so that was the beginning of the sort of concept of natural rights voluntary citizenship then came citizens american citizenship then was clearly defined during reconstruction right after the civil war there was a reconstruction congress so they had to define citizenship because earlier there had been a supreme court decision that said blacks were not citizens the dred scott decision so they defined it the civil rights act of 1866 saying all people born in the united states but not subject to a foreign power so eight children who were say the children of europeans who were visiting americans uh were not supposed to necessarily be citizens uh so they they passed then the expatriation act which said uh you could which specifically in the language and in the debates in congress said we repudiate the common law uh concept of a perpetual allegiance once an englishman always an englishman that was reputed in fact it was more or less of a that was one of the causes of the war of 1812 between britain and the us uh was american sailors were impressed who had previously been british subjects in fact the whole the uh the great uh lawmakers of britain uh coke and blackstone never used the word citizen it was always a subject so the america the uh reconstruction congress when they created the civil rights act 66 the expatriation act of 186 uh 1868 and finally the citizenship clause of the 14th amendment of 1868 uh all they said we specifically repudiate uh the concept of birthright citizenship um a birthright subject chef because that's a feudal doctrine that was the words used a feudal doctrine uh which is different from a a subject being different from a citizen so they passed that all then later there i'm not going to go into all their various controversies because there's a question of whether someone's born united is a citizen but what my whole point of saying this is this the culture was originally english but it was a break uh on certainly on the question of citizenship it was it was a break on some aspects of what is this is in uh in in context of uh uh the whole question of the common law so it was a break on some of those points um but getting back to i think the major point that professor starkey was making is that conservative the conservative resistance to woke-ism is going to be different in every country although we have formed a national conservative uh movement we've had several conferences i've seen mario uh the editor here of uh of the european conservative he's been i think to all of the national conservative conferences i think i got this award partly because i've been involved in the national conservatism and emphasized the importance of hungary and poland as resistance to um to the globalists and and also this is exactly what brexit has done but professor starkey just gave us a brilliant rendition of british history but this is british conservatism it's different from american conservatism but we're all in the same boat uh in the battle against uh the woke revolution and i'm going to stop there [Applause] now let's begin a brief discussion i'm going to ask david and john a couple of questions and then i'm going to invite you to uh throw in some questions too and indeed points that you might make want to make it i want to take a quotation which i know is dear to your heart david namely um israelis remarks in the free trade speech and sit and wonder if that isn't um a good definition of the way in which national conservatives conservatives in different countries can be different and will produce different policies which is i think the israelis words were something like in a in a progressive society change is constant and the question is not whether you should have change but whether it should be conducted in accordance with the customs and traditions of the people or in deference to abstract philosophical principles now um that's what israeli said i think you agree with both of it i'd like to both of you agree with it i should say i'd like to wonder if you would like to both comment on it and suggest um how it it what kind of policies and reforms follow from that uh distinction i will absolutely and indeed i indirectly quoted it in what i was saying the problem it seems to me is self-evidently conservatism it has to be different in every country because we're drawing upon history we're drawing upon the locality of experience and human indifference and this of course has been the disaster of liberalism the assumption that all countries should follow the same model it is an absurdity a complete absurdity you've only got to look at actually even within the european union how wildly different the political context of france or germany of italy is it is simply conditioned by their history but there's a bigger problem as as john illustrated very clearly from what he said america incorporates liberalism into its very heart it is actually written into the constitution slightly and fundamentally into the declaration of independence this makes it peculiarly vulnerable to the crisis of liberalism we have to address that woke is fundamentally an anglo-saxon phenomenon even though its philosophical background is is german philosophy in its most degenerate phase of german idealism refracted through even worse philosophers in trance and but but it america's vulnerability comes precisely from the penetration of liberalism into its heart and i'm sorry i do think and i'm going to say i'm i'm now going to be deliberately provocative i think america actually faces the prospect of another civil war precisely on those grounds and i i think what what what what what i think you failed to do is to recognize the fact that the conservative interpretation of the american revolution can be so easily overthrown with the faintest touch of either both logic and history okay good we have a clear disagreement which is always good uh america is not based on liberalism it's based on republicanism uh liberalism didn't even exist in the 18th century uh in any city i mean the word liberal uh was not used in in a political sense the only way the only way that george washington used the word liberal was uh i'm liberal in the sense of i'm an open a gentleman right it's not it was had nothing to do with politics uh what what it's clear from all the races the word was republican we're republic which is government by consent of the of the governed uh it's a consensual regime uh liberalism came to view in the 19th century and the early liberalism uh was not a problem that was free speech freedom association freedom of the press it was the liberalism of of matsini of of uh of kashut of uh abraham lincoln and uh daniel webster of gladstone and so right so but the american regime itself was not a liberal regime and it was not a completely modern regime so if i can uh i'm more or less a fellow traveler of the cl west coast uh straussian's the claremont uh uh in hillsdale school and uh drawing on say harry jaffa uh leo strauss uh their argument was that uh you know america is usually seen as a modern state it's a modern regime it's lock and and hobbs and and hume and it's 18th century and it's a rejection of the ancients uh the ancient worlds the rejection of uh of um at least religion as a powerful political force but i think with jaffa who was the great uh teacher of claremont for maybe 50 years said well actually america is not a completely uh liberal regime america is partly an ancient regime it goes back it's um it has pre-liberal roots and those pre-level routes are are basically two things they're uh the the the conception of the ancients that would be uh the greeks uh plato and aristotle and the romans uh their belief in human nature and natural rights that human nature is unchanging that's clear in the in the federalist papers uh they don't not accept a a fluid fluid form of human nature but say it's unchanging drawing uh from the ancients and christianity and religion certainly was was a a key factor in the american revolution the uh uh the american revolution is founded on had a couple of um sources and one was uh christians and particularly uh dissenting protestant ministers who were sort of rallying uh the forces in new england uh in the american revolution that was one of the aspects one is what professor starkey says is you know locke and and hume and david adam smith and the scottish enlightenment the more moderate wing not the continental french wing with more moderate wing of the enlightenment uh greece and rome i mean they read plutarch they they modeled themselves after the after the ancients so these are not liberal roots these are pre-liberal i mean greece and rome christianity uh concept of natural rights going right back to the beginning plato and aristotle is i mean aristotle and cicero as uh jefferson mentioned um these are all these are all non-liberal roots all pre-liberal roots so i'd say america is not fundamentally liberal in formation and obviously there is some element of liberalism uh that that's come in into being uh the 19th century and then later we had uh the liberalism of the late 19th century but that turned into progressivism so progressive liberalism is the offshoot this is what we now call woke so i don't think it's i mean that's a common statement though that america is a liberal regime america's the quintessential level america is essentially founded on the concept of unchanging and universal natural right that is the catastrophe of america okay well yeah that's the declaration of independence so if we abandon that we abandon everything because that's that's part of the history that's part of the inheritance so that that is central the declaration of independence and the constitution are central to america and what it means to be an american can i tell you so it's beyond uh it's beyond simply a question it's also historical it's also a cultural artifact so it's not simply a question it's not simply an ideological artifact but it's it's it's tied in with the culture uh and there is that when we talk about uh natural rights we talk about all men are created equal again we're not talking about and lincoln talked about this in his debates with douglas that doesn't mean everybody's exactly the same it doesn't mean even as he said at the time that the races were exactly equal in their uh in in their acceptance modernity or what they're doing uh that doesn't mean that people are different in intelligence and size some are uh good-looking some are not some are intelligent some are not but they're all equal in this in the in the eyes of god so that was uh that was that's a that's a pre-modern non-liberal view of the of the american founding they're all they should be equal before the law that wasn't uh exactly established in the 18th century but it eventually was it's certainly the case here and i would contend that the american the the leadership of the american of the american founders the american revolution uh washington adams um jefferson franklin um so i'm going to take a very chauvinist statement here this was the greatest leadership it beats the british leadership of of the israeli and gladstone they were great but i put the american founders as a leadership class against any leadership class that has ever existed in the history of the world that goes back to greece and rome it includes the papacy it includes renaissance figures it includes the france of louis xiv 19th century britain i would i would put those against any leadership form against any leadership class any elite in world history and what they came up with was the regime the most the closeness to what we could do with with human nature and that was examined in both you know that's clear in both the declaration of independence and in the um and in the constitution just i'll just say one more thing about the declaration before professor starkey could could respond um it has two it has two parts uh one is is uh um we're laying out our position for all of mankind so it was an explanation why we were breaking this why it was necessary to sep why one people is separating from another um so we as 18th century gentlemen we're going to explain to the world or explain to others that's part of it and then he laid out all of the the reasons uh the king stirring up the indians and this and that and not accepting that stopping immigration from coming in the united states they listed a series of reasons and then they gave the overall philosophy of the regime which was uh a form of of a type of christianity that all men are created before uh created equal in the eyes of god nature's nature and nature's god uh and it also has the the secular aspect so if we give the if americans surrender say we don't believe in the declarative principles of the declaration we don't believe in natural rights we don't believe in this uh then we're doomed because that is america that is a good part of america backed by this culture so it's a creed and a culture and they both they work together and if we are going to stop wokism if we're going to do this uh this is the only way that an american nationalist resistance to what is going on today uh can be effectuated david please do reply if you wish to what johna said i then want to turn to you and ask you a question about the english tradition um i want to be very very brief i'm i would agree broadly with what you said about both america and the founding fathers i've what i was trying to point out is that for the very reason that i gave at the beginning that a doctrine of universal natural rights has demonstrated itself completely clearly to be one that self destructs we see this everywhere we look now the fact that america has sort of held that process off is a tribute to the structure that was created but i think rather than just trumpeting what happened you need to look at why you were so vulnerable you need to look at why work has taken off in the way that it is and how it is genuine cancer and it can even draw on aspects of the american historical tradition and i think we should stop we've both set up both set up our relative positions of positions well my question is um aren't you reading aren't you getting england off scot-free in relation to liberalism in many respects isn't england the place from which liberalism was founded it wasn't it the the revolution of 1688 that first introduced it into the political world um and if it went wrong it went wrong in english history as well as in um the labour party as well that sort of thing yes exactly and i was wondering where where you thought it did go on well the foundation of the labour party is perhaps your reply but over to you uh what i think you've got to understand is that ins that john locke did not shape the revolution of 1689. john locke was a series of abstract doctrines that were not applied at all by the revolution of 1689. the revolution of 1689 deliberately avoided lock the revolution of 1689 on the contrary did something extremely clever it told a series of lies almost as big about as the lies about george iii in the declaration of independence it sold a series of lies about the fact that james ii had abdicated and therefore preserved an illusion of continuity but it did the very wise thing of forcing the incoming king to swear to the bill of rights and so in other words it sets up a series of dots and in the same way when you gave that lineage going back you know cicero through sydney and all the rest of it you're looking at an extraordinarily selective thread of western thought which far from representing the whole inheritance represents a single important but skewed version of it and one that i think does not provide unlike the catholicity of the english inheritance where we have contrived to i think digest both conservatism and liberalism in a way which is unrevolutionary and that seems to me to be the key yours is a revolution which is successful only because it's a rather half-hearted one that it deliberately doesn't do what the french revolution did or what the russian revolution did um yeah but but that that is again you know use america straddles um exactly the point that you made that it's a sort of ansi regime but draping itself in new dress i don't think you can actually produce that story of reconciliation of opposites that i tried to offer the current attack on the statue of the confederacy that deliberate obliteration of a hundred years of american history thank god so far is inconceivable in britain well they're operating though in opposition to the american way of life and regime they've said that specifically uh they're anti-american uh so arch was a was a political revolution not a social revolution obviously that's correct and a great difference of the french revolution is we ours was in accordance with human nature and there was the attempt to transcend and transform human nature and that's exactly what uh the current woke revolutionaries want to transcend human nature we've been having transhumanism is one of the uh one of their one of their goals so yeah this is a repudiation of the american regime it's not part of it well now let us do as professor starkey suggested um there's a lady with a microphone um would anyone like to intervene with some questions to either or both of the speakers um i i must say that um i grew up thinking that you know history was history you know that i could sort of count on it it was it was what happened in the past and and in my mind you know this business of rewriting history in six with 1619 project that was done by hannah jones just it doesn't make sense to me what i don't quite understand is how it has taken on so much life um you professor starkey seem to say that it's because of the basis that liberalism will kill itself and i'm trying to understand how that can happen i think that the reason that the 1619 project has has developed in a quite extraordinary way is that america does have i fear a fatal inheritance which is the contradiction between everything the declaration and slavery and that simply cannot that simply cannot be glossed over so you see what i mean in a sense why not slavery existed for a period of time previous right again you see this let me be fairly brutal back the the the extraordinary the extraordinary flaw in the american experience was seized in a single brilliant sentence by a great english story by samuel johnson who says nobody yelps more loudly for liberty than a yankee slave driver and this is this is the key point if you actually look uh in british the same is true in british politics the radicals uh in if you go into the guild hall in london you look at the statues of people like beckford and these are the people who are most closely associated with the real the the real radicals like wilkes the british empire is not a tory enterprise it's a wig enterprise it's why there are so many places called pitt i would pit pit in it in america it's william pitt the elder um and the the again is the roman inheritance made this completely natural you you have liberals who are free and you have the unfree and that it's perfectly normal for gentleman to have slaves but of course that's becomes this source of division and tension as i said there's an attempt to doing it with english history which doesn't work because of the extraordinary enterprise of of the abolition of slavery as as you know as the universe it begins simply within the british empire and then then the attack on the global slave trade um stopping slaves going to brazil you know the enterprise of the british navy about a third of it devotes itself to stopping that as you know portugal continued the by far the largest slave power can we get this right is portugal uh uh about five million of the ten million that go across the atlantic go there so but i'm sorry that's my take i'm sure yeah well our abolition just before you come back yes would you incorporate into your reply the um question of whether or not um henry clay's plan of buying out slavery which was in effect followed in the british empire would have changed things or should have changed things in david's view uh yes that was a plan and then lincoln at one point supported this so that may have improved the situation but uh i'm gonna make two two core points uh uh one our our abolition wasn't it's uh naval activity and this sort of thing but our abolition was the uh was the civil war which in which two percent of the population uh were killed so it'd be like today with six million people were killed so uh that's you know we we paid in blood for this uh gettysburg was one of the greatest slaughters of all time the uh antietam i mean it was a new type of warfare um and uh they say two percent of the population that's that's quite a bit uh that's um so that was paid for and then it's continued um the other point i mean i think a key point i want to make is the woke revolutionaries uh from the beginning of time have have come been in every it's not simply this is not an american issue it's a universal question every practically every uh leading powerful empire or powerful nation at some point in their history they're developed an adversarial intelligentsia uh and ever so that is people who are at the top of that society or you know somewhat pampered or whatever who are some are intellectuals who then became uh antagonistic and adversarial to the regime itself we look at ancient athens you have the the tyranny of the ten the uh the students of uh um of plato and socrates uh uh they they supported sparta i mean they were adversarial they were woke adversarial intellectuals who actually went over to the enemy uh this has so it happened in ancient greece it happened with other city-states uh whether they're intellectual whether an adversarial there's intellectuals who support the regime and then an adversarial block who opposed it uh the same thing in the roman empire obviously it was very much the situation in 18th century france the entire french enlightenment the deitero the encyclopedias they were adversary intellectuals who who were part of uh you know the one one of the great societies of that time in history when they were pampered they lived well but they turned against the regime so that happened in france it's happened uh it's happened in practically every country uh that uh so this is what wokism is i don't think it's uh it's a product of american liberalism and it is or particularly american liberalism it is probably a product of this progressive uh view but in a broader sense um it's what's hap it's an adversarial group of intellectuals which has been uh which is has a universal phenomenon and has existed in practically every regime in the history of the world that's what this is thank you another question yes the gentleman right yes uh first of all i want to thank you three of you are you making such a clear positions a british position or u.s position to say that i hate walkism it's a understatement i basically lost my son i have a son in new york put into and white in nyt new york town university spend hundreds of thousands of dollars i end up with a son whose walk smart and everything you sir mr stark made the point that our constitution i'm putting aside the creation of independence eiffel my son tells me the constitution took on their old piece of paper you're talking about teacher university charter whatever article design okay i took him throughout the world not just some crazy guy in the basement okay who never had the job and i couldn't reply to him what am i supposed to say so just to become maybe more factual for both of you how do we fight this work situation in reality and i tell you what happened yesterday very quickly state farm insurance came out and tried to distribute some gender fluid lgbt booklets through their engines to their customers all hell broke loose including me on true social i reached a million people in three hours they back down which means go walk go broke so as an american that's one solution we found what suggestions do you guys have that's my question okay i don't wanna go walk i don't want to live in a world that is walk i'm not 18 anymore i don't feel like changing my life and a lot of the people here i don't think even the younger people they don't want to grow into work so you put half of america let's say does want to be walk an estimate how much of the rest of the world you think doesn't want to be work so to question what do we do about and what do you think about the rest of the world outside of america uh well you just said you asked what do we do well and you answer partly answered your question i mean with state farm that when boycott was one thing the other thing is what political leaders are doing in florida uh disney was brought into uh they have to obey the same rules as everybody else so people are starting to fight back i'm i'm actually encouraged this is getting very political there's so changes in the republican party uh people are awake is the other term well lincoln had a group they call the wide awakes that was actually his they weren't woke they were anti-woke um so i think people are starting you know getting the message i mean the problem i think um one of the issues of woke is it's it's against human nature uh the whole the whole transgender argument and then something where when you have biological men entering and defeating women and women's sports i mean i think we've got 85 90 percent of the kind of of the world in the country and probably the world i think that's something wrong so i think the the woke forces in the end are going to push they're going to push too far and then it's already happening there's always any revolutionary situation there's always a thermador like in the french revolution i guess the question is what um whether whether those revolutionary advances are kept or whether they're reversed but i starting to see a reversal so we need regular people let's happen with with state farm and we need elite political leadership also uh to push back on that so that was the answer to that part of your question and what else okay the constitution is our achilles health what i was saying well i tried to the adoption of universal human rights is i'm sorry i think false it's described by bentham as nonsense on stilts it is for the simple reason that uh saint paul didn't talk about equal in the sight of man he talked about equal in the sight of god and it it it just seems to me as i tried to begin at the beginning that the americans put this fatal is it's very easy to see why you had to come forward with a better argument than merely we decided to rebel because we actually don't want to monarchy and by the way we are tired of paying taxes to you even though you've defeated the indians and the french and all the rest which is why it happens but i think it is in the k as you said it is it is an achilles heel and it's really important that one understands that it's why woke begins in america um it it derives from particular aspects of american society and indeed of american history and it spreads to countries which share something of those inheritances in other words it's essentially an anglo-saxon phenomenon it has very much less purchase in the rest of the world um now what do we do about it i'm somebody was actually cancelled i have full experience the the the the key things to understand is that woke spreads fundamentally by cowardice it spreads by the cowardice of elites but the reason that the elites give way is because they are liberal elites who were riddled by self-doubt and they of course they were people who were radical when they're young and they don't want to be out radicalized when they get old and i'm afraid i think it's true in america and it's certainly true in britain they they are simply in strategic command of virtually everything and how one gets rid of them it is very difficult to know and it may be the fact that we are witnessing a very broad structural crisis in our societies will remove that soft world that you talk about correctly because again what's very striking and i was interested with what you said about that sense of imperial self-doubt the it used to be the british intellectuals were almost unique for hating britain i mean it's talked it's a phenomenon talked about extensively by george orwell um he's that wonderful phrase all well again brilliantly brilliant use of language they're the kind of people who would rather steal from a poor box than sing god save the queen and it just it gives you the the the sort of person that they are but american intellectuals until very recently were totally on side with america and it's this is that there is an extraordinary change again very few french revel very few french intellectuals of of the 19th and 20th centuries hated france um the it seems to me that we we're seeing a peculiarly anglophone phenomenon um and therefore we should be looking the recipe that i've given we should be looking in our own history and the things that we take seriously and because you know if you compare if you compare the students of socrates and and whatever the the word for them is traitors and woke is woke are traitors but it's a very particular form of treachery in that it actually aspires to dissolve and invert the complete institutions of society it's it's antinomial it's it's much broader than just defund the police it is defund societies again what is what is the code it is abolish whiteness well that effectively evolved involves abolishing human civilization that's the message white old men who invented everything i mean like all the people the founding fathers all of whom i'm afraid are quite old and emphatically white and invariably men well i i agree absolutely agree with most of that the well i i'm going to get support we don't agree an answer known me and absolutely uh as far as i have to get back to the 18th uh the declaration of independence one thing well we revolted in the 18th century because we wanted to rule ourselves it's called the declaration of independence so that's that's fairly clear as far as the french now it was interesting that mccrone said there was no such thing as french culture i would think that that's exactly what so he was doing a little woke dance too so i wouldn't say that the french are totally out of this uh i mean there was there was a strong communist element too uh with sartre who was uh you know sort of a poor man's heidegger in a sense uh so and then when you go back to bloomsbury yeah there was this adversarial in intellectual set in britain so it wasn't uh and you're right the american adversarial intelligentsia came late uh i mean the people they are the old liberals of franklin roosevelt and john f kennedy and arthur schlesinger celebrated america in the laid the 1950s so i am just trying to show that you're dealing with a continuing body of thought and you see this pattern repeatedly as i said with the early in the day i would say it's a break not rather than a continuation jonathan israel is right i think they're continuing um and this is why burke rejects his wiggering and rein because again also conservatism is a new word by the way which arises exactly the same time as liberalism the two things are twin phenomena but they they do describe earlier tendencies um which is why we've been using them in a rather lazy fashion with music and the lazy example right um another question yes gentleman in the front row uh i'm going to play devil's advocate advocate for a moment uh but this but this is an issue that i think is related to the concept of universal natural rights but do you think perhaps that the reason why america has proven to be more vulnerable to wokeness is because i think in britain people have very little doubt about who the british people are they're people who've been living on that land for thousands of years there's no doubt about that whereas in america i'm american myself i have ancestors who have been in america since the 17th century uh but the way i was raised was to think that well being an american just means that you're somebody who happened to be born on american soil or that somebody who came a few years ago and took a test and then they're magically the same as somebody whose ancestors were around before the time of the revolution of course the founders did not think of america this way because they defined citizenship as being uh reserved for white people of good character uh now of course putting slavery aside i mean i think we can all agree that that that's bad and of course this conception of citizenship is is related to that but i think it does point to a fundamental problem that there is no actual sense of what the american identity is anymore and i think the woke crowd is just exploiting this and taking it to its radical but also logical extreme i would think well um i would say a couple of things here um one is you talked about you know people coming from other kind of whole immigration issues i invented the term patriotic assimilation so that that that that's a form of assimilation that that works that has worked and worked with in the past had worked with the the people coming from ellis island it works to with some people today not with everyone patriotic assimilation would mean that uh the immigrant who becomes american citizen identifies with the whole story of america and they see washington say some say let's take a korean american let's say a 9th grade girl whose a parent family came from korea so when she reads american history um we fought the revolutionary war against britain is she thinking of we we americans that's washington and hamilton and so on she identified there or she identified with well that was uh we i'm korean so uh those people that's what uh white people did in the 18th century it's not what uh does it's not in that case she's not patriotically assimilated if that's how she thinks if she thinks yeah they're they're my ancestors she adopts washington and lincoln as her ancestors and the story of america good and bad uh let's say okay we had slavery that was bad but she's korean she had nothing to do with it um that's a form of that's true that's what sort of made america successful up until now is patriotic assimilation the new conversation and we have i think we have a better assimilation i think we're a little better at that than than by most countries in the world historically my parents came from uh from sicily my father did he was born and the others are all italians they assimilated pretty quickly there wasn't any doubt in world war ii that uh they were for america and not from mussolini um so this this uh that that's the heart of the uh uh that question was your other you had another point that i wanted to address um well i i was just uh suggesting that perhaps yeah the lack of a sense of what is the american identity right well we've had american identities been i think fairly strong for 200 until very recently i mean i reviewed the national history standards uh that was one of my job it was part of education and then later opposing it and they got part of the story right but they started changing it they started moving in the whole direction so i think this is a um as i've said it's not unique to america it's an an adversarial intellectual intelligence you have this in hungary you had bella and and lukas who was the leading marxist you had the belt where did these people come from the bella revolutionaries of of 1919 so you now you've had this in every society and you had it in china i don't know that much but china compared to europe but you had an adversarial intelligence group there you've had it it's a universal phenomenon so that's how it answered that i think the difference between britain and america now is much less than you suggest we have in britain an identical principle of nationhood of nationality that is that it is legally determined it's not racially or linguistically determined as i think is still for example the case in germany um that is that it is simply a fact of either being born there or process of naturalization secondly of course the scale of immigration in britain in the last decades which is described rather wittily as the empire coming home has altered things very substantially and i what i'd like to do is slightly to um elaborate on the point that john was making about patriotic assimilation both of our societies have responded with this dreadful phenomenon called multiculturalism which means that there is a renunciation of any dominant culture and all cultures are seen free and equal can i just say that despite everything that i was saying about human difference and whatever i have absolutely no doubt whatever that my culture without being too patriotic my english culture is absolutely superior to everybody else's and i can produce i can produce a litany of greats that knocks america into a cocked hat if i if i if i look at my history on the other hand what we then have to do because we can no longer be monocultural we've got to decide how we negotiate plurality whilst retaining unity and i think we should start talking which is actually the truth of america americans in on the whole didn't simply assimilate they became bicultural so you and the degree of biculturalism it varies from grouped group and varies within groups and what is striking about immigration in britain is that all the successful immigrants are bicultural i first experienced this when i was doing my performances on the moral maze and i had a wonderful sparring relationship with rabbi hugo grin on one occasion said rooney david you're not half as nasty as you seem to which i fluted back and you know hugo you're not half as nice either but we had it was it was a wonderful relationship and he had invited myself and my late partner to a passover i have never experienced anything like here was a man moving on the public political debating stage in britain and then becoming a high priest in his household it was profoundly moving and if we look at the chinese we look at particularly hindu a wonderful experience when i found myself in a country house after there'd been a wedding of a british man to to a hindu woman they'd had three weddings so they decided to have a registry office wedding in which they bought business attire they had um a church wedding in which she wore white and he wore tails and then they had a hindu ceremony in which they all got up in fantasticated gear and you just saw this our child look at look at britain now we are chance with the exchequer of our home sec you know compared with america you're so far behind if you and these are first and so these are second generation immigrants well unfortunately we have kamala heroes yeah but but you know no but it is but it is genuine it is seriously it is genuinely astonishing but all of these correspond to that bicultural variety there are some immigrant groups which it is probably tactful as we are being recorded not to name that emphatically reject that this is the problem word on the biculture which we call hyphenated americans that disappears after a while because people intermarry and that's uh and then you after a while the irish cherished agreements against the british going from generation to generation look at the absurd performance of your president i mean uh on that issue but but there we are um i think we have time for one more question thank you one word i don't think i've heard this evening is uh aristocratic as in the aristocratic tradition and political thought and i wonder um of course it might be implied or contained what john fonte said about the conception of the ancient world being one of those streams that feeds into the american political tradition but i wonder if that aristocratic thought uh if it doesn't exist as a distinct strain and influence on american political thinking if if that is what helped to offset or mitigate some of the uh extreme excesses of liberalism that we inherited from the old world and whether or not our move away from that aristocratic tradition in political thought uh particularly through the 1960s is what has contributed to the sorry state of affairs of today where everything has gone to extremes well jeff uh i'll just take a quick stab at this um jefferson and adams of course wrote many letters back and forth and the only aristocracy they talked about was a natural aristocracy an aristocracy of talent i mean they're both saying that the so it was a meritocracy i mean that's what they aim for and they're both saying that this is because the american revolution wasn't essentially a rejection of of of a inherited aristocracy uh but they did they did favor a uh the term was natural aristocracy an aristocracy of talents where the people could rise and that was uh that was the idea but but as far as inherited nurse talkers you know i think there was a rejection of that but surely what happens in america is you get the emergence of plutocracies of extraordinary political dynasties and so on manifestly the case look at hereditary presidents you know um in in a fashion that would do credit to any banana republic but the except real intervention real elections did intervene i think you've got a fundamental point i think in both of our countries we don't use the word aristocracy if we use a slightly different word america had something like a clear political class we had a clear political class those classes committed suicide and in britain we've never really recovered from the loss of the gentry class that's which again i think characterized a lot of america because it comes from the same source that sense of inherited obligation that sense of public service that sense that wealth has a public duty all of these things and much of that simply committed suicide in the 60s and beyond and i don't think and particularly because of the unwritten nature of the english constitution we've never really recovered from that the substitution of mere party appointees uh through our local government and and uh involuntary society and whatever has been disastrous absolutely disastrous um and anyway i i presented a deliberately sort of heightened picture of continuity i mean we've seen massive ruptures what i have would have to argue for are processes of you know to an extent reconstruction as is manifested taking place here and now literally and physically uh uh i i i i wa once seen what's going on in this astonishing reconstruction of the city societies do have moments when they have to be reconstructed you have a period of reconstruction one of the ways we will have to fight woke is a conscious looking back as to what is made and we can both talk about it legitimately our country is great and try to revive it it can be done israeli began with with young england israeli began as a reviver curious enough on an idea of the relationship between the aristocracy and the people excluding the liberal middle class i think i'm going to ask a final slightly pessimistic question um the national aristocracy which you're referring to john in america and um you were saying something the same thing david has actually become part of the work movement today and and yes now that's and this seems to me to be a key point because you're both historians looking back over the sweep of history we can see occasions when leaders have come forward and attempted to arrest the decline i'm thinking you know in the roman republic the general sulla who had a conservative regime but have any of those resistance conservative resistance movements um actually won out in the long run well it's at this point it's ongoing i mean so we don't know yet i mean the resistance to this latest after the woke revolution in the united states i mean um the beginning of the resistance was from a very strange man and we know who he was the orange man as he's sometimes called uh he uh he sort of said no on certain thing i mean in in a non-strategic way uh so he totally triggered the uh the woke revolutionaries they didn't quite know how to handle now the next whether there be somebody in the future who does it perhaps in a more sophisticated way it looks like it's going i think it's going to happen so i'm i'm more optimistic well one society that did it rather successfully was britain in the first half of the 20th century particularly uh extraordinary uh figures um like the the the the backroom trap who invents that we we began by having little jokes about pendant orders of chivalry and cbes and whatever and the manner was fundamental in all of this and reinvented the british monarchy in the first part of the 20th century is a man called red is is um um going completely out of my head um via county is a man called vice count esha and that vikrant issue is consciously aware of the decline of the aristocracy he's consciously aware of the french revolution uh he's he is his surname is brett he's half french and the extraordinary success of the reinvention of the british monarchy at a time of the disintegration of the great imperial monarchies of continental europe is one of the most interesting examples of a kind of counter-cultural movement and one with why why doesn't britain experience communism or doesn't experience um uh fascism a central part of that it i've given the story of that broadening reform tradition but it is a reinvention of the role of the monarchy um a contra i mean what we joke about as the house of windsor of 1917 is the invention of this unique thing genuinely democratic monarchy extraordinary i suppose de gaulle would be sort of an example though he he didn't last either and uh uh reagan to an extent but they didn't last he didn't last yeah right right right right so he there was some restoration there and i suppose it's true that if you wait long enough nothing lasts so yeah the obvious example of the british restoration of 1616 you actually throw back horrors of puritanism and uniquely genuine but how stupid yes it's a very good note to end on and a good note to follow that is to thank both uh david and john for an absolutely stimulating discussion which covered enormously important questions but did so in a consistently interesting and entertaining and indeed gripping way gentlemen thank you both very much indeed [Music] you

Channel: David Starkey Talks

Views: 36,115

Keywords: David Starkey, History

Id: HTc6yDjqcUU

Length: 107min 25sec (6445 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 08 2022