A Reckoning for Western Liberalism

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uh the the thesis of the book we were
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asking
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why is it that democratization produced
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a politics of grievance and resistance
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and resentment and one the simplest
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answer
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is that uh democratization was imitation
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and imitation
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uh uh is associated with the confession
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that the other is superior you’re
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inferior
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and of course that produces resentment
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but more
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particularly if i could give you just
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one i think uh
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very revealing example
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of how this uh how this developed let’s
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take hungary as an example
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the hungarians took standard model
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thatcherite
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privatization which uh uh developed in
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the west
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they tried they applied it in a society
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with no private capital
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the consequence of this was in a way we
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should have seen it ahead of time
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was that managers took the assets of
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their enterprises
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and uh used that to buy the enterprises
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for themselves
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creating their own private wealth and uh
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this was the beginning of the
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development of an appalling inequalities
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in these uh in east european societies
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post-communist societies unjustifiable
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inequalities which were resented but not
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only that
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the the language of liberalism which is
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the language of human rights individual
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rights
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was not able to capture or to articulate
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the grievance uh experienced by those
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who watched the public patrimony of
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their country
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put into the pockets of individuals who
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were insiders
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so the privatization of polypatrimony
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was a uh was was experienced as an abuse
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as a
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as a as a crime but it couldn’t be
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articulated in the language
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of individual rights of liberalism and
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indeed
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the language of liberalism particularly
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the language of private property rights
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be uh beca banned blessed or justified
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this process which was widely viewed as
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illegitimate and unjustifiable and and
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of course
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personally painful if you are your best
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friend
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you have two friends uh uh they’re very
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equal one day
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in a couple years one of them is riding
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around in limousines
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the other can’t afford a bus ticket one
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is eating at fish restaurants every
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night the other
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can’t afford a piece of fresh fruit that
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produces resentment so the
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the the westernization process created
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traumas in these societies which we
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didn’t foresee and didn’t predict
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but that was the seedbed for this
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populist revolt against the liberal
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order
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now for those of us who grew up during
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the cold war this is going to sound
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passing strange but there are many on
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the right
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in eastern and central europe that
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consider the european union to be the
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new
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soviet union how can that be
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yeah this is a very strange development
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interesting and kind of
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complicated so the first thing is that
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reform elites
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in eastern europe were very eager to uh
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to join in the accession process to the
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european union
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and therefore accepted the post-national
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rhetoric
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of the european union that if you
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remember was really developed to help
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germany
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overcome its nationalistic past so it
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was a very post-national language
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and that um meant that this these reform
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elites
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were leaving behind in their own country
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national symbols
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national traditions they kind of didn’t
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speak about them
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and therefore when resentment uh or when
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when the west entered into crisis
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particularly in 2008
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and the western model seemed to be less
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than it was cracked up to be
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and to present problems um a counter
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elite emerged
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in eastern europe in central eastern
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europe mostly of provincial origins
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who blamed everything that went wrong
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on the fact that they the reform elite
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had abandoned the nation
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had abandoned national traditions so
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this was a uh
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the the accession process was a viewed
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as a
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betrayal of national authenticity
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uh in in addition there’s another very
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interesting factor which is that the
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european union was
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asking all in and hungary become
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democratic
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you must learn how to become democracies
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like we in the west
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at the same time brussels was saying we
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are going to write all of your laws
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so while you’re becoming democratic
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actually your laws are going to be
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written in brussels
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this produced also resentment and a
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feeling that there is something
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uh perverse or uh arrogant about
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brussels obviously brussels is not
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moscow it doesn’t have a boot
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on their throats but it did it does did
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convey
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a sense of uh superiority judgmentalism
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and then i i need to uh emphasize that
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although
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the west did not impose democracy and
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liberalization
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it did judge the progress of
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democratization and liberalization
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and in a way westerners when they
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visited eastern europe i saw this a lot
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i worked there of course in the 90s
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uh it was as if it’s in the way tourists
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visit a zoo you know
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you go to the zoo you look at the
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primates you say well
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uh they’re like us but they’re lit
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missing something they don’t have an
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opposable thumb
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or they don’t have the rule of law so
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you’re kind of saying you’re you’re kind
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of a copy of us but you’re not a very
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good copy
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and probably you’ll never be much good
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so there was a feeling of
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being looked down upon uh which also
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stirred resentment uh and let me just
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say one other thing about
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i think authenticity the sense these
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populists are claiming that they
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are those in touch with the authentic
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tradition which has been
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lost by westernization and
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democratization so
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in 1989 uh it’s clear that the
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nationalists were allied with the
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liberals in the revolt against moscow’s
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empire
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so in poland there was a lot of
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basically trying to get away from russia
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was a very important motivation now they
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didn’t
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speak the language of nationalism at the
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time probably because it was not a
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language welcome in brussels
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but also because this was the period of
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milosevic you know the bloody side of
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nationalism and milosevic was a
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communist communist so a man like
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kaczynski would never
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echo milosevic so there was the language
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of nationalism was subdued
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and when after 2008 2014 the immigration
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crisis
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these populist knees near felt freed
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from having to
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to cover their nationalism with the
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language of liberalism so
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it it it had felt like a kind of cage
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in which they were trapped and they
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broke out of it
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and returned to this kind of nativist uh
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way of feeling which had always been
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there but had been muffled so it was
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that’s part of the why populism seems
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authentic to them
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well let’s extend your metaphor a little
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further if we want to talk about the
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number one primate in the zoo boy this
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is a terrible analogy
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uh should we ask about russia here why
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didn’t i i mean
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the the many of the central and eastern
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european countries did sort of flirt
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with
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liberal democracy for a while before
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adopting illiberal democracy that they
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have today but russia never did
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why why did russia never try it well i
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mean first of all you have to remember
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that in the soviet union
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elites have been have found it very easy
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to
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fake democracy have fake elections
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because they’ve been faking communism
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for at least two decades before
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uh they were sort of dressed up this way
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let’s pretend we’re having to
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have elections these are all rigged of
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course uh
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and uh we know he’s going to win and
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there’s not really any competition
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that was very easy for them to do they
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also in russia by the way
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they they had a communist training told
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them that democracy is just
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a trick by which elites uh deceive their
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publics
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and hold on to power capitalism is just
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really an elite project to
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exploit the working classes and so on so
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they were
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very comfortable with that idea of
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capitalist democracy
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but in the end basically uh russia
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was so injured i mean the main thing to
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understand about the russian
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situation is they lost huge part of
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their territory
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uh a huge number of their population
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they lost their superpower status it was
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a
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it was a huge injury to the self-image
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of russians which was not true in
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eastern europe that they didn’t
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eastern europeans didn’t have this
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imperial swagger this imperial
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claims that they were you know on the
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top of the world
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uh and actually exporting their own
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model
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elsewhere so that was a very strong and
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i think the so the russians for
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a couple decades were pretty happy with
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just faking democracy and
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but in the end as putin came to power
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the resentment of being treated as
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second-class
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citizens as being looked down upon as
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being taught lessons
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by the west boiled over and uh the
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russians
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went from this like faking a democracy
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to a what we call aggressive imitation
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uh that is
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imitation of the west which is designed
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to humiliate the west
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uh which is designed to show that the
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west is hypocritical so for example
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in the speech he gave putin gave
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justifying the annexation of
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crimea he basically imitated word for
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word
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uh western speeches about the
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independence of kosovo
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human rights national self-determination
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and so forth but this was
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very much a kind of imitation meant to
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expose the west’s
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hypocrisy and uh yes i think that’s
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i think that’s a good uh way to
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understand the putin regime which is not
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people often uh act as if putin is a
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great strategist and it is true that
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he’s played
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beforehand well but he’s not a great
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strategist his
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his main aim which is not strategic and
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is not
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helping russia redevelop itself is to
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expose the west as hypocritical that’s
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his
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obsession uh and i think that’s a
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blind alley that’s a dead end maybe a
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blind alley but most days of the week
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it’s not that hard to do
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whoops there’s my little editorial
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comment uh let me try this
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do we have to come to the unhappy
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conclusion therefore
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that liberalism as we understand it is
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really not exportable
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to cultures that are if i can put it
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this way wired differently
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from those of us in the west i think
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one of the big lessons of the 2003 war
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in iraq
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is that uh trying to impose a
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democratic system after a six-week
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military campaign
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in a country where three-quarters of the
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population married their first cousin
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and so
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it’s a completely different social world
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you can’t just you know uh
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impose something like this and that that
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was such a lesson even though
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our uh uh international internationalist
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humanitarian internationals uh went over
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there
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with the uh crude and i think uh
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defenseless uh idea that the only
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legitimate authority with whom we are
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going to deal are going to be authority
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that’s elected
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i think it’s very good to help so the
19:38
listeners to contrast what
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how we behaved in afghanistan and how
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the americans behaved in afghanistan and
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how they behaved
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in iraq and afghanistan we had been
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there for decades we
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knew all the warlords we didn’t say to
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the warlords you must be elected
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before we negotiate with you but in iraq
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the religious leaders the tribal shakes
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were set aside we had this
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fake ideological belief that we have to
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create authority by elections which of
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course is a
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is a uh it is based on historical
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ignorance
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democracy is a tiny spot in human
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history
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it has cute enormously complicated
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preconditions
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it doesn’t we we’re confusing the
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absence of obstacles with the presence
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of preconditions we thought if you get
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rid of saddam
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you’re going to have democracy just like
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if you get rid of communist elite you’re
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going to have democracy
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and this was an illusion it’s a
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democratic ideology that
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idea was uh is is is it
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uh uh ex exposes a kind of disgraceful
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historical ignorance which was uh at the
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basis of much of american foreign policy
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in the post-cold war era we’ve got about
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five minutes to go here so let me try a
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couple more questions with you
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your book now suggests that we’ve
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entered an age of illiberal
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imitation how do you see that
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well it’s a strange uh fact that uh
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president trump seems to be uh uh
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accepting putin’s uh a strategic goal of
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dismantling the european union
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of destroying all of the international
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organizations created by the united
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states after world war
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ii uh and he’s at war not only with the
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wto the who in
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all the world america made seems to be
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uh uh
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the liberal world order seems to be
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something that trump himself
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is uh attacking so that is a a kind of
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imitation of and he’s using the rhetoric
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nationalist rhetoric anti-immigrant
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rhetoric
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of orban and kaczynski uh and the
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anti-western
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uh language and also by the way
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uh he’s the first american president who
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has not said we deserve to rule the
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world because we’re morally superior
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i mean that’s a kind of not a very
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likable uh uh position to take but every
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american president has taken that
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basically
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trump says no no we’re just like
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everyone else uh
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well what i was personally don’t you
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think
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is that again be a tough case for him
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personally to make it
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imitate him personally yes i would say
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but he of course
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his basic uh thing is he resents
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this is sort of the trump world view is
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he resents terribly
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the countries that imitate our uh
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economic productivity
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or or are horning in on our market share
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and so on so
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he’s a person who has claimed i think
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the first american president ever
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to say that america is the greatest
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victim of the americanization
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of the world so that’s part of it but i
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wouldn’t like uh to say a word about
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uh the current crisis we’re in and i’m
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i’ve been asking myself and my colleague
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yvonne krustev
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we’ve been speaking about this as well
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what does the was the current pandemic
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tell us about the trauma of liberalism
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and the the competition between
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liberalism and populism
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uh because in a way uh the
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the previous crises of liberalism 19
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uh the uh 2001 in which it turned out
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that
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defending human rights the whole uh idea
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of defending human rights as the primary
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value
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seemed to give way to the battle against
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terrorism in which rights were viewed as
23:17
a trojan horse for our enemies
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2008 which really showed that our
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economic elite
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i didn’t know what it was doing so that
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also uh really hurt our prestige to uh
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2014
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in which the migrant crisis uh made
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people feel like open borders
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were a threat to western civilization
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and so on all these things have
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combined and and we’re under a
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uh we’re living in a time where those
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three crises have seemed to be
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accumulating in the present one
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and weakening the liberal commitment to
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globalization and so forth
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openness uh at the same time
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every political order has its own
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disorders and populism
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is producing its own discontents and
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these populist leaders
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bolsonaro trump authoritarians like
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putin
24:06
strangely enough they are very afraid of
24:09
this crisis
24:10
they are not you know taking hold of it
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and using it
24:13
to uh to uh uh to their benefit
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uh there’s a way in which this kind of
24:19
crisis has
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uh had is is challenging any kind of
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regime
24:24
the archaeon regimes we saw that in
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china where they’re hiding evidence
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we see it in the west some some
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democratic societies have done well some
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authoritarian societies have done okay
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it doesn’t seem to fit well into our
24:36
ideological
24:37
uh polarities so i think that’s and the
24:39
way i would put this in the end the
24:40
question open to us
24:42
is now in the future is is the pandemic
24:45
going to
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increase our reliance on science and
24:49
rationality
24:50
belief in fact consciousness or is it
24:53
going to
24:54
uh create a uh is the panic
24:57
of and fear going to lead to more
25:00
conspiracy theories
25:01
uh and more xenophobia uh uh
25:04
migrant bashing uh so we’re on a knife’s
25:08
edge
25:08
i think and the the fate of the liberal
25:11
model and the liberal commitment to
25:13
rational decision making
25:14
uh and uh the uh uh
25:17
and its competition with these populist
25:21
myth makers
25:22
sloganeers who are always trying to sell
25:24
something has not been decided
25:26
i definitely do not think the populists
25:29
have the upper hand
25:30
i think the populists are also
25:32
struggling and they’re
25:33
not finding this an easy crisis to deal
25:36
with
25:36
so although i don’t believe that the
25:39
west is covering itself with glory
25:41
either
25:42
uh the whale and liberal regimes are
25:44
also struggling because
25:46
uh the the disease is hard to understand
25:49
and it’s hard to master
25:50
i i definitely don’t believe that uh the
25:54
current crisis is going to
25:56
really decide the question in favor of
26:00
of the populists well why don’t i
26:02
freelance then and just uh re-title your
26:05
book the light that’s failed
26:07
so far and we’ll leave it there uh
26:10
i want to thank you very much professor
26:11
holmes for joining us on tvo tonight
26:13
congratulations again on your gelber
26:15
prize
26:15
uh for anybody who wants to pick it up
26:17
yvonne krastieff and stephen holmes
26:18
collaborated on the light
26:20
that failed are reckoning take good care
26:22
and thanks for joining us on tvo tonight
26:25
thank you steve
26:30
the agenda with steve pakin is brought
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26:33
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26:35
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26:41
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26:45
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26:49
thank you

The Flight 93 Election

2016 is the Flight 93 election: charge the cockpit or you die. You may die anyway. You—or the leader of your party—may make it into the cockpit and not know how to fly or land the plane. There are no guarantees.

Except one: if you don’t try, death is certain. To compound the metaphor: a Hillary Clinton presidency is Russian Roulette with a semi-auto. With Trump, at least you can spin the cylinder and take your chances.

.. To ordinary conservative ears, this sounds histrionic. The stakes can’t be that high because they are never that high—except perhaps in the pages of Gibbon. Conservative intellectuals will insist that there has been no “end of history” and that all human outcomes are still possible. They will even—as Charles Kesler does—admit that America is in “crisis.” But how great is the crisis?

.. “even if [Trump] had chosen his policies at random, they would be sounder than Hillary’s”—is unwarrantedly ungenerous. The truth is that Trump articulated, if incompletely and inconsistently, the right stances on the right issues—

  1. immigration,
  2. trade, and
  3. war

—right from the beginning.

.. the unwillingness even to entertain the possibility that America and the West are on a trajectory toward something very bad.

.. conservatives routinely present a litany of ills plaguing the body politic. Illegitimacy. Crime. Massive, expensive, intrusive, out-of-control government. Politically correct McCarthyism. Ever-higher taxes and ever-deteriorating services and infrastructure. Inability to win wars against tribal, sub-Third-World foes. A disastrously awful educational system that churns out kids who don’t know anything and, at the primary and secondary levels, can’t (or won’t) discipline disruptive punks, and at the higher levels saddles students with six figure debts for the privilege.

.. Conservatives spend at least several hundred million dollars a year on think-tanks, magazines, conferences, fellowships, and such, complaining about this, that, the other, and everything. And yet these same conservatives are, at root, keepers of the status quo.

.. Many of them are even good ideas. But are any of them truly fundamental? Do they get to the heart of our problems?

.. If conservatives are right about the importance of virtue, morality, religious faith, stability, character and so on in the individual; if they are right about sexual morality or what came to be termed “family values”; if they are right about the importance of education to inculcate good character and to teach the fundamentals that have defined knowledge in the West for millennia; if they are right about societal norms and public order; if they are right about the centrality of initiative, enterprise, industry, and thrift to a sound economy and a healthy society; if they are right about the soul-sapping effects of paternalistic Big Government and its cannibalization of civil society and religious institutions; if they are right about the necessity of a strong defense and prudent statesmanship in the international sphere—if they are right about the importance of all this to national health and even survival, then they must believe—mustn’t they?—that we are headed off a cliff.

.. But it’s quite obvious that conservatives don’t believe any such thing, that they feel no such sense of urgency, of an immediate necessity to change course and avoid the cliff.

..  But how are they going to save, or even meaningfully improve, the America that Continetti describes? What can they do against a tidal wave of dysfunction, immorality, and corruption? “Civic renewal” would do a lot of course, but that’s like saying health will save a cancer patient. A step has been skipped in there somewhere. How are we going to achieve “civic renewal”? Wishing for a tautology to enact itself is not a strategy.

.. Continetti trips over a more promising approach when he writes of “stress[ing] the ‘national interest abroad and national solidarity at home’ through foreign-policy retrenchment, ‘support to workers buffeted by globalization,’ and setting ‘tax rates and immigration levels’ to foster social cohesion.” That sounds a lot like Trumpism.

.. acknowledgment that the crisis is, indeed, pretty dire.

.. our liberal-left present reality and future direction is incompatible with human nature and must undermine society—and yet also believe that things can go on more or less the way they are going

.. if you genuinely think things can go on with no fundamental change needed, then you have implicitly admitted that conservatism is wrong. Wrong philosophically, wrong on human nature, wrong on the nature of politics, and wrong in its policy prescriptions. Because, first, few of those prescriptions are in force today. Second, of the ones that are, the left is busy undoing them, often with conservative assistance. And, third, the whole trend of the West is ever-leftward, ever further away from what we all understand as conservatism.

.. They will say, in words reminiscent of dorm-room Marxism—but our proposals have not been tried!

.. The tsunami of leftism that still engulfs our every—literal and figurative—shore has receded not a bit but indeed has grown. All your (our) victories are short-lived.

.. The whole enterprise of Conservatism, Inc., reeks of failure.

.. One of the Journal of American Greatness’s deeper arguments was that only in a corrupt republic, in corrupt times, could a Trump rise. It is therefore puzzling that those most horrified by Trump are the least willing to consider the possibility that the republic is dying.

.. It will be coupled with a level of vindictive persecution against resistance and dissent hitherto seen in the supposedly liberal West only in the most “advanced” Scandinavian countries and the most leftist corners of Germany and England. We see this already in the censorship practiced by the Davoisie’s social media enablers; in the shameless propaganda tidal wave of the mainstream media; and in the personal destruction campaigns—operated through the former and aided by the latter—of the Social Justice Warriors. We see it in Obama’s flagrant use of the IRS to torment political opponents, the gaslighting denial by the media, and the collective shrug by everyone else.

.. For two generations at least, the Left has been calling everyone to their right Nazis. 

.. This trend has accelerated exponentially in the last few years, helped along by some on the Right who really do seem to merit—and even relish—the label.

.. the deck is stacked overwhelmingly against us. I will mention but three ways. First, the opinion-making elements—the universities and the media above all—are wholly corrupt and wholly opposed to everything we want, and increasingly even to our existence. (What else are the wars on “cis-genderism”—formerly known as “nature”—and on the supposed “white privilege” of broke hillbillies really about?)

.. Our “leaders” and “dissenters” bend over backward to play by the self-sabotaging rules the Left sets for them.

.. Third and most important, the ceaseless importation of Third World foreigners with no tradition of, taste for, or experience in liberty means that the electorate grows more left, more Democratic, less Republican, less republican, and less traditionally American with every cycle.

.. consider this. Trump is the most liberal Republican nominee since Thomas Dewey. He departs from conservative orthodoxy in so many ways that National Review still hasn’t stopped counting.

.. On trade, globalization, and war, Trump is to the left (conventionally understood) not only of his own party, but of his Democratic opponent.

.. there’s that other issue. The sacredness of mass immigration is the mystic chord that unites America’s ruling and intellectual classes.

.. many of them, also believe the academic-intellectual lie that America’s inherently racist and evil nature can be expiated only through ever greater “diversity.”

.. The junta of course craves cheaper and more docile labor. It also seeks to legitimize, and deflect unwanted attention from, its wealth and power by pretending that its open borders stance is a form of noblesse oblige.

.. The Republicans and the “conservatives”? Both of course desperately want absolution from the charge of “racism.”

.. Do they honestly believe that the right enterprise zone or charter school policy will arouse 50.01% of our newer voters to finally reveal their “natural conservatism” at the ballot box? It hasn’t happened anywhere yet and shows no signs that it ever will.

.. This is the mark of a party, a society, a country, a people, a civilization that wants to die.

.. I want to live. I want my party to live. I want my country to live. I want my people to live. I want to end the insanity.

.. only Trump-the-alleged-buffoon not merely saw all three and their essential connectivity, but was able to win on them.

.. The alleged buffoon is thus more prudent—more practically wise—than all of our wise-and-good who so bitterly oppose him. This should embarrass them. That their failures instead embolden them is only further proof of their foolishness and hubris.

..  When America possessed a vast, empty continent and explosively growing industry, high immigration was arguably good policy.

.. It hasn’t made sense since World War I. Free trade was unquestionably a great boon to the American worker in the decades after World War II. We long ago passed the point of diminishing returns.

.. The Gulf War of 1991 was a strategic victory for American interests. No conflict since then has been.

..  for most of the other #NeverTrumpers, is it just a coincidence that they also happen to favor Invade the World, Invite the World?

.. Trumpism, broadly defined as

  1. secure borders,
  2. economic nationalism, and
  3. America-first foreign policy.

.. We Americans have chosen, in our foolishness, to disunite the country through stupid immigration, economic, and foreign policies. The level of unity America enjoyed before the bipartisan junta took over can never be restored.

.. No more importing poverty, crime, and alien cultures.

.. simply building a wall and enforcing immigration law will help enormously, by cutting off the flood of newcomers that perpetuates ethnic separatism and by incentivizing the English language and American norms in the workplace.

.. These policies will have the added benefit of aligning the economic interests of, and (we may hope) fostering solidarity among, the working, lower middle, and middle classes of all races and ethnicities.

.. Who cares if productivity numbers tick down, or if our already somnambulant GDP sinks a bit further into its pillow? Nearly all the gains of the last 20 years have accrued to the junta anyway. It would, at this point, be better for the nation to divide up more equitably a slightly smaller pie than to add one extra slice

.. ? If you recognize the threat she poses, but somehow can’t stomach him, have you thought about the longer term? The possibilities would seem to be: Caesarism, secession/crack-up, collapse, or managerial Davoisie liberalism as far as the eye can see … which, since nothing human lasts forever, at some point will give way to one of the other three.