Radical Ideology and the Nihilistic Void | Douglas Murray | EP 152

[Music] I have the great good fortune on this January 15th, 2021, of talking to Mr. Douglas Murray, the author of "The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race, and Identity." Douglas and I met a couple of years ago and got along quite remarkably well, I think we did. Douglas was gracious enough to mediate a discussion that I had with Sam Harris in what was the Olympic Stadium in London, if I remember correctly. We haven't talked a little bit since then, but it's been a couple of years.

So, I've just been reviewing "The Madness of Crowds" this week again. I read it when it first came out, but I was looking at it again. I'm looking forward to discussing a whole variety of things with you, some associated with the book and some not. But let's start with the book, at least some of the themes of the book, if you don't mind. You talked about the collapse of grand narratives, and that's a theme that's very interesting to me.

I have a hypothesis that I'd like to run by you and see what you think. I've been talking to a friend of mine here, and we've been hypothesizing that maybe there are two large-scale grand political narratives with an archetypal or mythological basis. One would be the promised land, so that would be the bright future that we're all headed to. Different versions of that would be put forth by the right and the left, but the hook is that something better awaits us. There are certain strategies that we could use to attain that.

If that fails, then we have something like the infidel, which is us versus them. One of the things that struck me when I was reading your book was that it isn't obvious that we have a promised land narrative that's functional in the West anymore. Partly I think, perversely, because things have improved so much on the material front that it's not even obvious how we could extend our mastery of the material world to produce a better future. We've plucked all the low-hanging fruit. For most people, I mean, I know inequality exists. I know there's relative poverty, but there are no straightforward solutions for those either or even solutions that necessarily would appeal to the imagination.

So maybe we're stuck with some variant of the infidel, which is certainly not a grand narrative designed to bring about peace. I don't know what you think about that, but I'd also like your take on grand narratives as such and why you think they've collapsed.

Well, first of all, it's really, really good to see you, Jordan. Thank you. I can't tell you what a pleasure it is, and I've missed you, as very many people have. It's wonderful to see you. I appreciate that I've missed being around, believe me. All the things that I was engaged in hopefully will start up again with this as part of it. I really hope so.

Yes, it's been on my mind for a long time. I've written around this subject in a couple of books now that the oddity of the position of Western man at this point is that he and she lack a grand narrative, lack an overarching explanation of what on earth we're doing here. I think you and I probably have the same experience that when we were allowed to still congregate in public spaces, whenever you addressed anything around this issue, the hall fell silent.

I've noticed for years that there are all sorts of minutiae that our societies are exceptionally good at talking about, but we've become not only poor at talking about, but apparently uninterested in the most important questions of all, such as what exactly we're meant to be doing with our lives and what we meant to be doing with our time. We all know we've got a finite amount of time, so how should we occupy that time?

Well, it's funny because I would say in the past, to some degree, that question was answered for us by deprivation. It was obvious what we were lacking. When it's obvious what you're lacking, when you're hungry, when you're truly hungry, there's no question about what you should do: you should eat. If you're freezing and if you're overheated, all of those things, the desirable future manifests itself automatically in front of you. In some sense, we've been deprived of deprivation and are suffering from an enemy of prosperity.

Yes, and I think for some people, a form of boredom. Too much time on their hands and much more. There are different ways of circling around the same answer to the problem, but it's been very striking to me for a long time that particularly in political terms, the left has been really quite interested in this gap. It's recognized the size of it and has sought to fill it.

As I say at the beginning of "The Madness of Crowds," the most obvious way of filling it is with the horrible and dysfunctional and retributive replacement religion, which is identity politics, intersectionalism and all of this. As I point out, it's in some ways a curiosity, perhaps also an inevitability that, let's say, the respectable right, at any rate, has been pretty uninterested in answering these questions and hasn't even nodded to their absence.

The right has, in our lifetimes, been very interested in issues of economics. That's of course crucial, as you alluded to earlier. I mean, if the economics are going well, a lot of other things go well as well. When they go bad, absolutely everything goes bad. In some ways, it's understandable that the right has been interested in economic questions, but it has left the, as I said, the sort of respectable bit of the right has basically left identity and meaning questions to say, "Well, find the meaning of things where you will." If you come across it, great, we couldn't be happier for you, but it doesn't seek to address these questions.

Well, maybe it's partly because the collapse of religious belief hasn't been as thorough on the right as it has been on the left, and still there are still more people who are oriented in the conservative direction who have some, at least some vestiges of their traditional religious belief. But you know—

Yes, well—and I would say too, though, that it isn't the left that's been concerned with our questions of identity precisely. I would say more this is definitely the case in the United States. I think it's true in Britain and Canada too, that it's the radical left. Because the moderate left—I have a friend in LA who's been working on messaging for the Democratic Party. He’s been doing that pro bono as part of an independent group of Hollywood writers who’ve produced about a billion dollars' worth of advertisements.

They've been attempting to craft a centrist Democrat message, and it’s quite difficult because, well, and the reason they’ve been doing that is because the radical left has a narrative. Regardless of what you might think about it, it has motivating power. In the absence of any other narrative, it tends to dominate. The problem with generating a centrist narrative is that it tends to be incremental, and incremental narratives tend not to have much persuasive power.

So you might say that what's happened is that there's still a subset of people who for one reason or another—and that might be race or gender or sexual identity or any of those things, any minority status that would bring about a felt sense of alienation—that the narrative is clear, which is to either restructure society so that alienation disappears or to... well, like that. The narrative is to restructure society so that that alienation disappears, yes.

And yes, even though that may not be a narrative that works for everyone, the fact that nobody can construct one that's more compelling leaves a terrible void in the middle, and it isn't obvious at all how that can be solved.

Yes, well, by the way, also... we get back to one of the problems that always exists for people on the right, or certainly for small-c conservatives, which is that they always end up fighting the next battle they're going to lose precisely because of this phenomenon that the left and the radical left advances ideas the right doesn't know how to defend.

Things such as precedent, tradition, just doing things the way you've always done them, and recognizing that there's a virtue in that. It isn't that easy to sell a story that's, "Well, things are pretty damn good and try not to do anything stupid to muck it up." The reason for that is that there's no real direction in it, and that's especially true for people who aren't fully ensconced within the society and feeling that they have an integral role to play.

So it doesn't work for conservatism; it doesn't work for felt outsiders. Yes, it looks self-satisfied. I think it's one of the reasons why a certain radical young person rejects a conservative narrative, because they say it only works if things are going well for you. I mean, again, I would dispute that, but it's a tendency people have.

The other issue, though, on this is that conservatives, in general, it's part of the conservative mind, are resentful of and distrustful of people coming along with grand narratives. This is obviously a Burkian insight, why Burke takes a view he does of the events in France and writes about them in the "Reflections." It's the most common trend for conservative thought is a suspicion of thought, a suspicion of thinking and of philosophy and of grand ideas, precisely because of an innate recognition that such ideas can go very badly.

Yes, yes, it leaves. I've always thought that this is mainly seen as a disadvantage of conservatism. In fact, of course, it can be a very distinct advantage, but it only works as an advantage if things are going very badly wrong in whatever the utopian grand narrative project is that's being proposed.

You know, it's only when everything goes badly wrong with the utopianism that people realize the virtues of the conservative system. It's only after the French Revolution, when you've got the famines because you've killed all the people who know what to do. It's only after the Russian Revolution, when everyone's starving because the Bolsheviks don't know how to do the most basic things in food production, that people start to realize the virtue of the kind of conservatism that I'm describing.

But until that moment of total collapse, the utopian radical left is always going to be at a distinct advantage. It's got a sexier product to sell.

Well, the other problem is, of course—and this has to do, I think, with the way people are wired biologically with regards to their emotional responses—is that if everything is going well, everything that's going well is invisible. We habituate to anything that's predictable, and we're very sensitive to threat.

So even when many things are going wrong, we're going to pay attention to those things that aren't, and we're not going to pay attention to everything that is working to maintain, say, this amazing infrastructure around us, which a conservative would say, "Well, it's very unlikely that this degree of stability and wealth can exist, let alone be maintained, and we should be very careful with it."

But it's hard to keep the impulse going for that narrative because that's not how we work emotionally, partly because it's not efficient to constantly be grateful for things that are predictable. It takes too much mental energy. Now, that doesn’t mean... that doesn’t mean that the grand narrative that's put forth by the left—and you talk about this particularly in terms of, let's say, identity politics and intersectionality—identity politics seems to be predicated on the idea that certain rather arbitrarily selected features of individuals constitute the core element of their identity.

I've never been sure exactly why it's those particular elements that are concentrated on: race, sexuality, gender, sexual proclivity, say. Why those tend to be the hallmark? And maybe it's because... do you think it's reasonable to posit that it's because the leftists look at groups that have, in fact, experienced some degree of prejudice or alienation in the past, and then they make that whatever it was that produced the alienation the central characteristic of their identity?

Yes, and well, there's that, and there's also the other one, which is the illusion that you can do very much about it. I mean, in our age—and obviously there are the issues I write about in "Matters of Crowds"—the presumption seems to be, and the selection seems to be, something around the idea of there's something you can do about it.

Now, by the way, this is a very confused narrative because it both says that there are, as I say in the book, hardware issues and software issues, and it pretends that the software issues and the hardware issues can be software, and it doesn't really know what to do. For instance, it says that sexuality is definitely hardware, whereas sex is software. That just doesn’t run as a simultaneous program.

And it says we don't really know what race is, and it gets into a hell of a lot of trouble and dodges it on race. It says that the only thing people are legitimately born into as an identity is being trans. So all of this is incredibly messily ill thought out.

But I have wondered whether it has something to do with this thing of, "You can do something about it." Because if you selected height, which is obviously one of the other ones you could do, which has a profound impact on people's lives, yes, or attractiveness, yes, there's just at some point you have to come across the thing that there's nothing you can do about it.

And I would have thought that the age would be grown up enough—or could be grown up enough—to recognize that that is the issue on a set of identity questions, as well. That, you know, when a famous pop star says, as he did recently, that he'd like to be a mummy by the age of 35, the age treats him as the people doing Monty Python's "Life of Brian" and says, "Where's the fetus going to stay? In a bucket? In a box?"

In other words, the age wouldn't simply keep saying, "Oh yes, that's possible, that's plausible." So it's deeply confused. I'm trying to analyze it in some way, adding confusion to it. I simply, I'm simply struck by the fact that there are a number of very major issues that occur in people's lives that are ducked by the age.

I don't know why they've ducked them other than—and this is the best approximation I can do—is that they've chosen the ones they've chosen because they know that they will cause maximal annoyance to conservatives. That they have the best chance of breaking down some of the most reliable structures that we still have in our society and that they baffle and confound people.

Well, it could be simpler than that though, and maybe less in some sense less conspiratorial. Is that the identity politics... identity politics coalesces around any group where there's a sufficient number of people with at least one thing in common who do in fact feel alienated and resentful about the general culture for valid and invalid reasons.

And so it's a crapshoot in some sense. It doesn't matter if there's consistency in category structure across the different categories of identity politics. All that matters is that enough people will coalesce around each term.

Yes, I think that's reasonable because many terms have been generated, like ageism, for example, although we haven't seen much of a politic of identity politics emerge around age. But that's probably because it didn't coalesce. You know, you could think about it as a Darwinian process in some sense, is that there's a hundred terms of alienation and ten of them generate enough social attention to become viable sociological and political phenomena and they continue to breed. But that's because they breed whenever there's enough people to garner enough attention.

Now, the problem I have with that, and this is something else I wanted to talk to you about in detail, is that because I've been thinking about this for a long time is the notion of identity that lurks at the bottom of this. Because I think part of the problem with the identity politics grand narrative is that partly because of its incoherence, it doesn't offer anything that looks like a real solution.

So, well, and that's partly because of its definition of what constitutes identity seems to me to be almost incomprehensibly shallow, especially for social constructivists. So, the idea—I don't think I'm parodying this—the central idea seems to be that identity is something that you define yourself and it's a consequence of your lived experience.

And so no one has any right to state anything about your identity other than you because they don't have access to your own subjective experiences. And look, I don't want to—I wouldn't want to make the claim that there's nothing in that, because there is a domain of subjective experience that's unique, and like pain, for example, and there's no doubt that it's real and that it's vital and important. But the problem with that seems to me to be is that identity isn't only a consequence of your subjective experience.

In fact, it's not even a label for your subjective experience. Identity seems to me to be a handbag of tools that you employ to make your way in the natural and social world. So it's more like a pragmatic—it's something more pragmatic. It's like the role you might play if you were playing a game with other people.

And you can pick your role; you can pick your role, but it has to be part of the game. And that means that people have to accept you as a player and that there are certain functions that you have to undertake when you fulfill that role, and that's actually beneficial to you, right? Because partly what you want from an identity is a set of guidelines for how it is that you should act in the world.

And the problem with a lot of these newer categories—and I think trans is a good example of that—is that even if the category was accepted as valid on the grounds of its proposed validity, which is the felt sense of being a man if you're a woman, or being a woman if you're a man, it isn't obvious what that buys you.

You know, and I just interviewed Abigail Schreier, who wrote "Irreversible Damage," and she talks about some of the consequences. Now, obviously, her book is quite controversial. In fact, I was terrified to even talk to her, to be honest. She's a very brave person, and I’ve had a fair bit of that beat out of me, I'm afraid.

But it isn't obvious—it’s obvious that adopting the identity of trans and then pursuing that down the medical alteration route carries with it some vicious consequences.

Oh yeah, yeah. So let's talk about identity.

Yes, I agree. It provides you with a path. That's one thing that I've noticed when I was interviewing various trans people for "The Madness of Crowds." I noticed that it provides a path of what you're going to do, and this is one of the things I noticed early about that question.

It seemed to be an explanation of a kind. For instance, you feel slightly alien in the world. It will be solved in this manner, and there's a place you can go. Well, all of us at some level and some people throughout their lives feel great disjunction with the world that we find ourselves in.

It isn't at all clear to me that there is any answer whatsoever to that. No, it's a permanent existential problem, right? That's man against society, essentially, and we're all crushed and formed by society to our detriment and to our benefit.

Yes. And not just what society does to us, but our experience of life with or without society, to the extent that we can study man outside of society. It's what Kierkegaard and others keep going around—what it is that we cannot know, what it is we intuit about our condition in the world, which we still can find no way of expressing or finding our way to.

There are great mysteries about ourselves which we intuit and we cannot answer, and obviously, it's what philosophy continually returns to, it's what religion attempts to answer, and these are the deep questions of humankind.

It's why all of this constantly crosses against—and it goes across, for instance, aesthetics—because our senses—our late friend Roger Scruton often described better than anyone—our sense of beauty is so important because it gives us a sense of that thing we know and we know we cannot approach, something which is telling us something from a realm which we know we cannot access or can never access fully.

These are central aspects of being a human being, and one of them, as I say, is the sense which exists in all our lives at some point, and for some people, semi-permanently, that the world is totally unknowable to them.

And therefore they are highly vulnerable to anything that comes along and says, "This is the answer."

I know, you point out in your book—this is something quite interesting that supports this line of reasoning, which is you talk about the stripping of a particular identity from someone who if they evince the wrong political platform.

So Peter Thiel, for example, can't be gay because he's a Republican, and Kanye West can't be black because he came out in favor of Trump. That does argue the fact that that occurs—that the stripping of the identity occurs—does indicate that the identity has a function.

And yes, and a purpose, right? So it's a way, it has a platform, it has a party manifesto, it's something to sign up to. Yeah, and in the absence of nothing, or in the absence of anything else, it might be better than nothing.

Absolutely. The question is how tenable it is. And the fundamental flaw that I see in identity politics is that even though it's predicated on the idea—or at least it's simultaneously predicated on the idea that, so that identity is a social construct and that it's a felt sense, and it can't be both of those.

And it is, in fact, a social construct with biological roots. The fact that it's a social construct means that it's something that is by necessity negotiated with others, not imposed upon them by fiat. And it has to be negotiated with others because otherwise, they won't play with you.

This is one of the reasons why, to an extent, I think I say somewhere in the book that trying to find the exact methodology of the prevailing ideology of our era is to a great extent like trying to find meaning in the entrails of a chicken. And we do just keep coming across the same set of unexplainable, inexplicable, contradictory, self-contradictory, ill-thought-out ideas.

The most obvious ones I say somewhere, and a number of other people are pointing this out now as well, is you must understand me; indeed your primary role in the world almost is to understand me if I'm in the right set of categories.

And simultaneously, you will never understand.

Right, right. Now, I mean, as I say, I think actually it's fairly obvious that if you can never understand where somebody else is coming from, then there’s no point in discourse. There’s no point in speaking with other people or of reading or of learning.

We just—we are in solitude. All these things—that's a Hobbesian state. That's absolutely—that's a state of war.

Absolutely. When conversation ceases, war emerges. Exactly. We can't understand each other. There's no recourse except for force, and this is why this obviously worries me so much when I hear this done by particularly by identity politics people in relation to race, and particularly obviously to do it if you happen to be black, is if people say you can never understand my experience.

I think, but if a person who is not black can never understand the person who is, then we're in for a hell of a lot of trouble. Step back from that.

We have to work hard at trying to understand each other, including each other's historic pain, including each other's current situations. But we have to keep open the possibility that we can and will try to understand each other and to speak across these alleged vast divides, which I don't think are remotely as big a divide if they are a divide as the various as I say people who believe this ethos of our time claim.

But this is the one that worries me most, and it's profoundly anti-human apart for anything else because if you say, "Sign up, be a part of one of these groups," and then you've got this sort of— as I say, party manifesto set out, it completely ignores what most of us find to be our experience.

I think if we're honest, as human beings, which is that we like to be able to absorb, we like to be able to understand, we like stories, we like to hear about people who are not like us.

From the very beginning, we read stories about people who have no connection with our kind. Why do children across the world read about princesses and princes and all sorts of other people who are nothing like the state they are? Because we like to hear other people's stories. It's not just that they're architects; we want to find out about other people. We don't just want the experience that we happened to have been born into.

That's because that broadens our identities.

Yes. It gives us more tools to use in the world, and we’re obviously very good at that. And it is a matter of throwing your hands up in despair if you say that’s impossible.

It's difficult. I mean, we’re each a solitude in some sense for multiple reasons, for maybe multiple intersectional reasons for that matter. But that doesn't mean that communication is impossible, or that it should be forgotten unless you want the alternative, and the alternative is conflict, combat.

Yes, if I can't understand you, you're nothing like me, and there's no way that we can negotiate any peaceful way to occupy the same space.

That's right.

And so that’s maybe that’s the catastrophe you're after, but it’s not an optimal outcome. No, and it’s one of the reasons why my ears have been particularly pricked in recent years by a certain retributive, rebarbative, deliberately callous discussion of certain groups of people, certain types of voters, and much more—a gleeful, willful desire not to even bother to try to understand their pain, which is of course as far as I can see it nothing more than an expression of assumed, general vengeance.

Well, that brings us to another—okay, so let’s dive into that a bit. Obviously, at least to some degree, you're referring to what happened in the United States with regards to Trump voters, and that’s basically half the population.

Well, let's start there because that's a good rat's nest to try to investigate. So, what I see and have seen happening in the West, but particularly in the United States in recent years, is the beginnings of something that resembles an out-of-control positive feedback loop.

A positive feedback loop—you know this, but I'll just outline it quickly—a positive feedback loop occurs when the inputs of a system and the outputs are the same. And so you hear this when you hear feedback at a rock concert when a microphone gets too close to a speaker because the microphone picks up the speaker noise and then transmits it to the speaker and then runs it through the microphone, amplifying it each time until the whole system goes out of control essentially.

And a lot of forms of psychopathology are positive feedback loops, like depression. When you get depressed, your mood goes down, and then you start to isolate yourself and get estranged from the people that you love and your friends, and that makes you more depressed, and that makes you more estranged, and then you start not going to work, and that alienates you and makes your depression worse, and you spin downwards.

Positive feedback loops can erupt in societies too, and you get that in societies that are in permanent feuds, which is part of the reason that the state has to exercise a monopoly on violence. It's to stop vengeful retribution from spilling out of control. It's a real danger.

What I see happening right now is that the right and the left are engaged in a process of positive feedback where one hits the other, and the other hits back slightly harder, and then... Well, I don't have to belabor the point. And I think that if you're temperamentally inclined to be on the right, you point to the left and you say, "Well, they started it."

And if you're temperamentally inclined to be on the left, you point to the right and say, "Well, they started it," and you—or, and here's how they're contributing to it, and you can point to innumerable examples.

Where it all started is a rather arbitrary choice on your part. The question for me is how to dampen it down. You know, conservatives have a real problem at the moment I believe because of what happened with Trump in recent weeks.

And so let me tell you what I understand, and you tell me what you think. Okay? I mean, I regarded Trump as a reaction to Clinton essentially and to her playing identity politics, and I believe that Trump didn't win so much as Hillary lost. She lost because a sizable proportion of her base—the working-class white males, basically—who were traditionally Democrat, when push came to shove, choosing between her and Trump chose Trump mostly as an up-yours to the Democrats.

And so I don't see Trump—Trump's a symptom, although he's also a causal agent now. Unfortunately, what's occurred in the last couple of weeks has made things unbelievably complicated because it does look like Trump went down the rabbit hole of the stolen election narrative and has caused a substantial amount of grief and misery as a consequence of that.

And so, well, I'd like your opinion about all that, and then we can discuss what might be done about that from the conservative perspective or indeed period.

Yes, I will just speaking agree with what you just said. I was in the States for a month and a bit more before the election, traveling around covering it. I hadn't been to the U.S. for a couple of years as it happened. I travel a lot, as you know, in normal times, but I hadn't been to the U.S. for a couple of years, and I was horrified by the fact that just normal discourse seemed to be impossible across political divides.

All dinner tables erupted in exactly the fashion that you would expect. Everyone's darkens in their own positive feedback loops, but you did this first, but your side did that. As you say, you could start from anywhere, but that was the nature of it.

But there was something else, by the way, which was— I mean, my fairest estimation of the critique that the left has of the right is that they hate the right for allowing Trump to happen, and that isn't such a bad reason to dislike the right at the moment.

How did you allow this man out? How did you allow them to win? That seemed to be their criticism, and there is a criticism to make of the American right over that. I think it could have been a hell of a lot worse.

But it’s a reasonable criticism for the right to contend with. The problem is, well, the right has to contend with the potential power of a kind of mindless populism, just as the left has to contend with the constant potential to be swamped by intellectual ideology.

And so if the left tends to go out of control in an intellectual direction, an ideological intellectual direction, and a lot of that is explicit in say in the identity politics ideology that's paramount now, and maybe it was explicit in the form of Marxism earlier, the right can easily respond to that with a pronounced implicit anti-intellectualism.

I think that's exactly what Trump represented. I mean, it's funny because he was a kind of elite. Obviously, he comes from a wealthy background, but he wasn't markedly part of the insider intellectual elite, and he was able to express the frustration of the common person, so to speak, with the idiocy of the intellectuals in the manner that he acted essentially and in whom he had contempt for, I suppose.

And you could blame that on the stupidity of the people who voted for Trump, but you could equally point to the red flag that was being waved in front of their face by the identity politics types.

And again, that's another place where a positive feedback loop can easily become instantiated. The issue is how to dampen this down.

Well, what—so one of the other things I noticed was, of course, on the right, there was a certain type of voter on the right in America who didn't just make peace with Trump, which was something that you could do. I wrote about this a number of times. You could say, "Well, these are the things he did which are reasonable," or, "You know, we're in power so we should try to make sure that we exercise it well and have whatever impact we can to improve the administration."

There was something else going on, which was people recognizing that Trump hurt their opponents. You know, that he was a low tool to get back at the left.

Now I've heard that everywhere over weeks, you know, that like they've—you know, there was definitely an element of vengefulness.

Exactly. It was an up-yours. So the left have kept producing people who've been provoking us and prodding us, and we on the right in America keep producing sort of, you know, third presses of the Bush family or various other dynastic politics that corrupt America.

We keep producing them, and we're just not giving anyone of equal vengefulness, lowness, a willingness to just hit people nastily if they come. Trump was willing to do a lot of that stuff, if not all of it, and a certain type of right-wing voter had had enough and was willing to—was willing to get the only person willing to play the left on equal terms.

And one other thing from that, of course, he did something that again the right has historically not been very good at, which is having a program of his own, not just fighting the next battle you're going to lose.

You know, if the battleground—people tend to think of the battleground of politics as being sort of level, and it isn't. At times it tilts more one way than the other. So at times historically, it's harder to advocate left-wing proposals on certain things, and then it suddenly becomes all downhill; it becomes easy to do it.

It's in the same way that the right tends to be at a disadvantage, constantly having to push uphill. Inevitably, what it does is make a compromise with the latest left-wing command. Therefore, the left actually accumulates a bit more power, a bit more influence, a bit more furtherance of its ideology.

And that slightly sloped situation had existed in American politics in the views of a lot of people on the right for some years. Donald Trump comes along and seems to do that to it. He seems to be willing to say, "No, no, we're not just going to be on the back foot fighting the next thing the left's going to win. We're actually going to do stuff of our own."

And that is a dynamic that had been missing in American politics, and I think to that extent, a certain type of right-wing voter was willing not just to be—to make peace with Trump, but actually willing to give him the benefit of the doubt—and indeed to allow him to use the tools of government.

When I channeled my inner redneck—which wasn't that difficult, given that I'm from Alberta, which is a rather conservative and sort of self-consciously proud redneck Texas of Canada, I suppose. And I’m not saying that in an entirely disparaging way; there's certain advantages to that.

Anyways, when I was channeling my inner redneck, I could certainly come into contact with feelings of exactly that type. It was because I could imagine myself in the ballot chamber reaching out to put the check mark next to Hillary’s name and saying, "Oh, to hell with it," which is a hell of a thing to say in the ballot room, and putting a check by Trump's name.

You can do that quite easily too when you think, "Well, it's just your vote. It's one among millions of votes, and what difference does a little impulsiveness on and a little vengefulness on my part make?" Trump was definitely a candidate of resentment, although I think you could say exactly the same thing about Hillary.

And the fact that we had candidates of resentment is a bad—that's bad because resentment is a terrible, terrible motivation. Absolutely one of the worst, and it is tended to be identified with the left on politics.

And I think now it is equally at least able to be identified with the right. But here we come to the real challenge and to answer the deep underlying question of how we try to improve this.

In America, the thing that struck me most was this—and I wrote about this in "Spectator" recently— I was very worried by one thing in particular, which is what happens when you don't just have different interpretations of events, but the thing that you've just seen you disagree on the nature of what it was you saw.

Oh yeah. Opinions—nothing, man. It's disagreement about facts. That's everything, and that's perception.

Now, in political terms, in democratic terms, this is of course an absolute catastrophe because, as I was saying to some friends in Britain recently, the great—one of the great things about democratic politics isn't just that it gives you a winner; it gives you a loser.

You know, by 1997, the conservatives had been in power for 18 years, most of them under Margaret Thatcher and then under a weak successor. By 1997, the British public had had enough of the conservatives.

The best interpretation is that they had become weak and were very, very weak. They also appeared to be slightly corrupt around the edges. They seemed to be all sorts. They seem to be hypocritical on morality issues and much more. The country had had enough of them, and they voted them out in a landslide.

For 13 years, the Conservative Party is in the wilderness trying to work out how to be appealing to the electorate again, and it manages it. In the same way, by 2010, the Labour Party—the Labour left have frankly become a bore to the public.

They've been in office long enough. We've got the successor to Tony Blair, just like we had the successor to Margaret Thatcher. We're on the weak and falling apart slightly—slightly. I don’t use the word in a real sense but in a sort of corrupted part of the political system.

It's late in the day, and the public vote the conservatives back into office, albeit only in a coalition at first. But the important thing about this is what does the party do in the interim?

In the case of the UK, the left, after it loses the 2010 election, goes slightly further to the left and then crazily far to the left, and then last year in 2020 the British public, in its genius, totally rejects the far left-wing politics of Jeremy Corbyn.

Now the Labour Party is in the process of trying to make itself electable again and coming into the center. Why do I give this most of your viewers an obscure lesson in the last few decades of British politics? Because the most important thing in a way was not who won, but who lost, and what they did when they knew they lost.

Yes, and yes—as you know, psychologically this is one of the most important lessons Freud writes about this in the essay on melancholy. That you have to be able to recognize that the thing has been lost in order to be able to even love again.

You have to bury the thing that has been lost to recognize that it is gone. What I am horrified by in American politics is the fact that that mourning process is not allowed to occur. They cannot bury the dead; they cannot grieve for the loss because they don't think they lost.

You know, half of the—again, I don't make... there’s a technical problem there too, which is that the margin of victory wasn't much greater than the margin of error. You know, and that has been a problem for multiple elections now, right? Four elections in a row it’s been being too close to call.

And you know there is always a certain amount of corruption in any electoral process. Maybe it’s half a percent or a quarter of a percent in a pristine system, but when your margin of victory is of the same magnitude then—

Yeah, well then you can make a plausible case that corruption has potentially undermined the validity of the process.

It's absolutely—and you know both sides—I am not simply making an equivalence here—but I mean both sides have tried this in American politics in recent years. You know, it’s not like it was obscure Democrats who pretended that Trump was an illegitimate president who had not been legitimately voted in in 2016.

It was not obscure figures. It was the woman who was defeated by him at the ballot box, who was among the people who played with the idea first of all.

We had that the Russians had actually manipulated the ballot machines, remember that? You know they all walk back from it now, or they pretend they didn't do it, but they were literally pretending and claiming that the Russians had managed to get access to the voting machines in America in 2016.

And then they sort of slowly stepped it back, and they had that the Russians had sort of financed stuff, and then it was Russian bots. But for four years, the Democrats played with that.

Trump then, totally reprehensibly, takes that even further and says that the election results can't be accepted and he won't even leave office as his first reaction, which obviously is playing with the most dangerous elements of the democratic process.

And so now, nine out of ten Trump voters now still say they believe he won the election. In terms of healing this, the first thing I can come up with on this—the most basic thing is that Joe Biden, after coming into office, has to make sure this never happens again.

How does that happen? I'm not an American. I can only make, as it were, friendly suggestions. I would just make sure that the next president makes sure this can never happen again.

That there is some bipartisan, non-partisan way in which they agree who wins the election next time around.

And that four years from now, whoever—hypothetically—that's what the electoral college was supposed to be doing. Absolutely, and I suppose it didn't perform that function.

But still, I think again, it's a problem of margin of error, a technical problem of margin of error. You know, you can't expect anything other than for there to be questions about the validity of an election when it's that close.

It's going to happen.

Well, you know, you can have these questions, but as long as you respect the outcome. I mean, you can have very close elections and still accept them.

Yes. In 1997, there was a conservative seat which I think was lost by nine votes. They got recount after recount, and eventually, actually there was a re-vote and the Conservatives lost by about 20,000 votes because the voters were so fed up with the Conservatives making them vote again.

Now, but the point is, is that it was very close, but it would have been respected. It isn't just the closeness of the elections in America, although I agree.

I'm certainly not trying to justify it either. I'm just saying that this eventuality is much more likely under those circumstances.

Absolutely. But this process that they're now stuck in of just not agreeing on what they just saw is lethal.

So, okay, so let's talk about that for a minute too because this brings up another technical issue. Because you opened the can of worms by stating that people now don't have differences of opinion about the facts; they have different facts.

Yes. And the question is, in part, how is it under normal circumstances that people do see the same facts but then have different opinions?

It means there’s a very deep consensus on top of which there’s relatively trivial dispute. That's a much better situation.

But part of the way that people do that is by using—well, look at it this way—you have five senses, each of which depend on a very different physiological mechanism. And that’s because you can see things that aren’t there and you can hear things that aren’t there and you can touch things that aren’t there.

But you can't see, hear and touch things that aren’t there. So you use this multi-dimensional process of triangulating—you actually use pentangulating, I suppose, with your five senses, and you determine what’s real.

But even that's not enough; then what we do is we seek consensus. We say, "Okay, well, here’s what the phenomenon appears to be to me. What do you see?"

And then if you see it and someone else sees it—and this would especially be good if we didn’t share the same opinions but we could agree on what we saw—then we think it's real.

Now the technical problem is now, no matter what you believe, you can find a like-minded group that's discussing this avidly to confirm your confirmation bias.

And what that means—and I'm seeing this happening; I can't believe how rapidly it's happening. I'm seeing people degenerate into a conspiratorial paranoia, and I'm seeing it in family members and friends and—in absolutely...

Absolutely. And in broader society, and it's really, I think we're driving ourselves insane with the net.

Yes, I absolutely agree. I'm very, very worried about where we are. In political terms, I mean, it's obviously deeper. But in political terms, I’m worried about it because I think the right is about to go off in America like the left in America has gone off.

Well, that was the likely outcome five years ago. It looked to me like that was—it's why I tried to—I was concerned back in 2016 that things were starting to degenerate and that the left would wake up the sleeping right.

You know, the radicals on the far end of the spectrum who prefer action to words, let's say, by a large margin and who are truly dangerous. I could see them being prodded into awakeness.

And it was a very frightening thing. It still is a very frightening thing. I mean, one of the things I've thought about a lot in recent years about this is of course— is not just there’s that possibility of the two sides fighting against each other, but there ends up being no place to trust each other.

This is the—I mean, this seems to me in my conversations with people of different political types. What I notice is that there’s the most important thing if you're actually going to solve a problem—and you know better than anyone how much the political talk, shall we say, is actually not set up to solve problems.

It's set up for a performative thing. It's set up for people to just play their part and read the script. Almost none of our political discussion is actually problem-solving oriented—almost none of it.

But when you do get close to solving a problem, it exists. And it exists—the possibility only exists if the other person is able to be trusted by you, not to pull some funny stuff when you're not looking.

And I was thinking about this recently—I was thinking about this reason—I was in America, and I was talking at one point with Brett Weinstein on his podcast. You know, I completely...

Brett is from a very different political tradition from me. We have very different instincts on an awful lot of things and a lot of very similar instincts, but when I talk with Brett about problems like, I know we talked about poverty and homelessness and things, I completely trust him.

And he allows me to concede where I'm not willing often to concede because I'm slightly worried that, for instance, let me give the obvious one. I worry about the inequality discussion, like a lot of people on the right, not because I don't believe inequality exists, but I worry that the people who've been thinking about it most are the ones with the worst possible answer.

Yes, that's another thing we should discuss because inequality is a terrible, terrible problem. It's a society-devouring problem. The only thing worse than inequality are the purported solutions frequently.

Exactly. And it’s perfect example of it because every political side has a version of this. I think I think, well, we’ve talked about this a bit in the past.

I think one of the reasons that the right finds it so hard to persuade the left to talk about immigration, for instance, is the left just doesn't want to acknowledge it's a serious debate, it is, because it notices the right is the side that's been thinking about it most, and it doesn't trust the answers the right has.

So it’s definitely something that both sides have as an instinct. So how do you solve a problem in this situation? Only by people from across the political divide trusting each other that they don’t have something funny they’re going to pull when you're not looking, or to put another way, they're not going to do something when you're beyond your own competency on the subject you're trying to solve.

So that’s how you actually solve a problem. Now of course, as I say, we're not solving any problems at the moment, and I noticed this. I said that the last couple of years were like the eye of Sauron. Our society, particularly whipped up by the wretched social media companies that make them rich, have turned our societies into a great eye of Sauron which scours across the land.

And it looks at one thing dementedly, and then it moves on to another thing. And the problem about it is it doesn’t solve a damn thing. None of the things it focuses on—none of the things it focuses on, you know. It focuses on...

Oh, what did we have? We had a green issue in January. It was meant to be a climate emergency of January of last year. Every democratic government was meant to announce a climate emergency. Then we have the COVID emergency; then we have the BLM emergency.

You know, it’s been emergency after emergency, and we don't seem to solve them. In fact, it seems we seem to make them worse when we address them because we can't agree on the thing that we're meant to be addressing.

So as I say, if I were to try to come up with the things to solve this, it would be that people from the left and right who could trust each other...

And just one other thing on that, the thing about that is the reason why I think we haven’t been able to do that, particularly in America, is this, in my view. The American left has an incorrect approximation of the proximity of fascism to the American political system, or white nationalism to the center of the political system.

And obviously, Trump has given them a heck of a lot of ammunition, but they were willing to use it anyway. They've been using it for years. They wanted to claim basically that fascism was very, very close.

Now you see scenes like the reprehensible scenes at the Capitol the other day, and you see the ammunition that these reprehensible people have just given the left to continue to pretend that the American right—all of the right...

You know, CNN presenters and others have said all of the right is now with the Nazis, with the fascists, with the white supremacists. And if that’s the case, you can't—if you're on the American left, communicate with anyone on the American right because when you're not looking they're going to smuggle fascism in and get you all.

And the problem is that an element of the right—look, sometimes it's a reasonable critique—distrusts the left because it doesn't trust that its social welfare instincts aren't going to be then subsumed into their socialist instincts, aren't then going to be subsumed by a deep desire to have communism.

So the right doesn't trust. Now, I think there are elements of the right that have particularly in America deeply overstated the proximity of communism to the American political system.

Just do you think I'm one of those?

No, I don't.

Why not?

Well, I think it's something I worry about. You know, when I'm looking at this positive feedback loop situation arise, you know, I can't help but see similarities in the social identity movement and the Marxist movement.

And I—I mean you make that case in your book, so maybe you're one of them too.

You know, I don’t know if this is a situation where the left purports to see fascism lurking behind every right-wing move.

And do you think the right is just as culpable with regards to seeing communism behind every left-wing move?

I mean, I think it's complicated. Let me give you a statistic here. A friend of mine just told me the other day: you know there's only two self-described democratic socialists sitting in the congressional house in the United States on the Democrat side; there's only two.

The rest of them are moderates, and most of the moderates are moderate moderates. You know now those two attract a disproportionate amount of attention, partly because they’re incredibly savvy social media users, whereas the moderates aren’t at all, and our technology—are blind technologically in that sense.

But, you know, I guess I wonder how much conscience scouring everyone's asking themselves that I suppose now.

How much conscience scouring is in order after the events on the hill last week or two weeks ago?

Well, I think that would have been—it would have been shocking to a lot of us and should be. I mean it's obviously a concern.

I understand much more in the European context because I know it much better. I do... I don't know. I think I have a fairly good idea of what's hiding in the woodshed, in America to use the coal comfort farm analogy.

I think I know that there is something nasty in the woodshed on the right, but I've never believed that it's got any chance of persuading the GOP to adopt its platform.

You know, I think there are some nasty things in the woodshed in every society and on both political sides. The question of maturity in your political system is the extent to which you keep that woodshed locked.

Right now it seems to me that in Britain, for instance, as a country I know best, I’ve spent more time in than any other country, in Britain, I’m fairly confident in our politics that we have that woodshed very closely locked.

You know, when a maniac killed a Labour MP several years ago, the late Jo Cox and shouted Britain first, we had nobody in Britain, nobody on the political right who said, "I think we've got to understand the grievances of the attacker."

We had nobody there. Nobody. Nobody wants that anywhere near the political system.

So what about the grievances? What do you think is happening in the US on the right with regards to the grievances of the Capitol Hill protesters?

Well, here seems to me to be the problem. But on the political left, and I saw this myself, that I was in Portland and I was in Seattle on my travels before the election, and I saw the immiserated state that Antifa and BLM have turned those cities into.

I was disgusted by what I saw. I was disgusted by the fact that I spent several nights with Antifa in Portland, and seeing them and being mixed up with them, undercover obviously, seeing what they were doing to attack federal buildings and so on.

I was just horrified. I've seen quite a lot of the world. I've seen a number of war zones. I've traveled all across Africa and the Middle East and the Far East. I've seen a lot of things. I've never seen a first-world city like that.

I've never seen that in a democracy. Never, and it’s horrific. And I was horrified once more by the fact that my left-wing friends— with noble exceptions, like Brett, who I mentioned earlier—my left-wing friends in America didn't want to hear about it or even concede that I've seen with my own eyes what I’d seen because they just feared that if you concede that’s happening, then you allow Trump in.

And so they’ve been willing on the American left for years now to excuse, and in many cases at a very senior level, actually extol political violence.

We have CNN presenters and Democrat representatives willing to say things like the protesters not only—you know—mustn't stop; they shouldn’t stop. They should keep going. And these aren't obscure figures; they're people like Kamala Harris, the vice president-elect, who were willing to play with encouraging along the protests that were roiling America last night and so on.

In that situation, it wouldn't surprise me for a moment if there were people on the political right willing to say all make all sorts of excuses and say, "Well, the election is happening." But that's where the right will go wrong.

That's where the right will go wrong, and I think it has to be totally clear. And instead of just pointing out a double standard, it has to actually do something different and say, "You know, we are not going to excuse for a moment people assaulting federal agents and breaking their way into federal buildings and causing the death of a policeman."

We on our side will not in any circumstances give cover to people doing that. We will say it's wrong, and we will say it's wrong even if the left keeps on saying that its form of violence isn't wrong, because the only way out of this is if we show people, by demonstrating, by living, by extolling, that this is the only answer.

Okay, so let's ask you another question. You know, I can hear the voice of a liberal friend of mine—a good friend of mine—in my head while you’re talking, and saying it’s disingenuous at a time like this, two weeks after the Capitol Hill assault, to talk about the Antifa movements in Portland and in Seattle because they're of a different magnitude.

What happened in Washington was on the order of an insurrection, and so that's the first objection.

And the second one is that I had a brief discussion with my wife about Trump's claim that the election was stolen. And so I've been running this margin of error problem over in my head, say, there was a—he was defeated by a small margin, a relatively small margin.

Now, the compelling piece of evidence that he lost, in my estimation, is the fact that—and I believe this is right—that of 90 court challenges that the Trump administration has brought forward, only one has been upheld.

And that includes the decisions of the judiciary where the judiciary was fundamentally Republican in its nomination and in its origin. And so, but I mean, I'm just—not—I'm not willing to go that far. I don't believe for a moment that Republican-nominated judiciary members have been corrupted by left-wing propaganda to the point where they overthrew the American election.

But it’s the fact that that idea emerges is a real indication of breakdown in this trust that you've been—you know, in this fundamental level of trust that we've been describing.

Alright, so I'm going to let you riff on those.

Well, first of all, yes, in order to look, I have endless messages, as I'm sure you do now, from people on the American right, GOP voters, who want to persuade me that the election was stolen, and that everybody has let Trump down.

In order to believe that, you have to not only believe that all of those courts were wrong and were corrupted in some way, but for instance, Vice President Pence was corrupted and Mitch McConnell was, right?

Exactly, yes. All the senior—you know, people who—okay, so it’s worth dwelling—it’s worth dwelling on this for a moment because lots of viewers are going to have this as a question. They're going to be wavering with regard to their attitude towards the election.

So what we're saying is that the fundamental—here's the reasonable perspective: it was very close. No doubt there were irregularities. However, yes, when Trump challenged the integrity of the vote, even the judiciary that would have been ideologically tilted towards him, and even nominated by him in some circumstances, overruled his objections in the vast majority of cases.

Plus, you just said, you also have to hypothesize that Mike Pence was somehow got to and that all of the right-wingers, the Republican people on the right who refused to go along with Trump’s claim that the election was stolen, all those people were subject to the same corruption.

So the only person that's allowed to be pristine from that perspective is Trump himself everywhere. Or else there's betrayal, and I would strongly urge people, apart from anything else, to look at the absurdity of that idea.

That the only perfect person in the United States is Donald J. Trump? Really, have you never had any doubts about his character? Have you never wondered about his priorities?

And have you never allowed yourself to succumb to the temptation of gleefully using Trump as a weapon against people who have annoyed you in the past?

And is your attraction towards Trump not generated in large part by a kind of resentment that you wouldn't be willing to proudly admit publicly?

You have to learn—and now you're in a situation where you have to think that he's the only paragon of virtue.

This is not a—this is not a road that I would recommend traveling down.

Absolutely, and I worry, I worry that among other things, if the opportunity cost to the Democrats of not—of not recognizing the Democrats had four years where they could have realized that they lost to Trump in spite of the American public knowing who he was.

Yes. Not that they didn't know his character or his flaws, but they knew all of them, and they voted for him anyway. That's a heck of a lesson to learn from, and they should have spent four years trying to learn from it.

And they didn't—well, I don't know if they didn’t. I think this tangles us back up with the problem that we were discussing to begin with.

Like I've worked reasonably closely with the Greg Hurwitzes who did these ads. I met him with you, that's right, you did do that, I forgot about that.

And we've talked also about the collapse of the grand narrative. Like, it's not easy for the moderates on the Democrat side to get the stage, partly they don't know how—they're not social media experts by any stretch of the imagination, and they may have some—some of the contempt that is associated with inability with regard to using the new media forms.

They're not savvy in that regard, and they may have learned at least in part, but I don't think they know how to control the ideologues on the left, and it's partly because they don't know how to put forth an alternative narrative.

Well, here’s one very straightforward one that the American left could do. It could recognize you can be proud of your country and feel this broadly speaking has been a great force for good in the world without being a reprehensible person.

Yes, absolutely. That's a very good place to start.

Well, I would say the message messages that have been put out by this particular group and the candidates that they have supported would agree with that statement.

And okay, so they’re—but the problem is—they could have worked more on that. They could have worked to try to make the deplorables feel somewhat that they heard, that they didn’t want to make their lives more painful.

They wanted to lessen the pain. That could have been cheese, but the point is that now there’s a risk of the same opportunity cost on the American right, that they’re going to spend four years with this obsession over the election that’s just past.

That massive amount of attention of voters and of thinkers and of outlets and of money and much more is going to be dedicated, first of all, to this attempt to prove everyone other than the Trump family let America down in the last few months.

And secondly, that of course he’s going to continue to be caught up with the Trump train, and that he will haunt not just American politics, but specifically, Republican politics.

Okay, so let’s talk about this impeachment move then. So my sense was that, my sense is that in some way, Trump is better ignored than persecuted.

Yes. And the reason I believe that is because of this move towards paranoid, conspiratorial thinking that I see emerging everywhere.

And the last thing you want to do to people who are becoming paranoid is to persecute them. And absolutely, for the Democrats have—if the Democrats are going to prosecute Trump—I shouldn’t say persecute—not in that context anyways.

If they’re going to prosecute Trump, they need to figure out how to detach the prosecution of Trump from the persecution of people who voted for him. Yes, right? That’s a very tricky thing to do.

And so I think it would be better to let him go with a whimper than to let him go with a bang.

Well, he is—here’s one way, by the way—I mean, I know when I was writing about BLM protests last summer. I at any rate, by the way, I make a suggestion here.

By the way, the American media is much, much more corrupted than the British media. You know, we still have a much wider variety of platforms in the UK, and allow people a wider and better array of opinion than the American media, which is almost totally sunk—not completely but almost totally.

In Britain, we don’t have quite simple—why do I say that? Because no editor of mine would allow me to claim that everyone who went on a BLM march looted.

No editor of mine would allow me to write that. If I even tried it, I would immediately have my first edit back saying you can’t claim that because everybody who was upset at the death of George Floyd last summer did not go and loot the local Nike store.

Some people did; it was too large a number, and there were too many people giving cover for them and so on. But you can't say they all did.

Right.

So let's play the same standard. Are you allowed to pretend that everyone who attended the Capitol Hill demonstration the other week was responsible for the most reprehensible people and their actions?

No, you shouldn't do that.

Are you allowed to pretend that all Republican voters or Trump supporters were responsible for it?

No, you shouldn't be allowed to do that.

I mean, we could try to encourage—not unless you want to live with the consequences. Absolutely.

We could try to hold people to that standard. It's a perfectly reasonable—it would have been journalism 101 in America until a few years ago.

It's only, as they say, because of the totally corrupted nature of the American media that that it's possible for that to happen.

By the way, can I just give a quick—as it were, a parenthesis on that? I was just writing a piece yesterday about Andy Ngo and his forthcoming book, "Unmasked," which I blurbed, and is now the number one best-selling book on Amazon happily.

But I read one of the reports on the—again, I don't want to get stuck on the antifa thing because the left-wing—or the Democrat friend in your head will be saying he's talking about Antifa again.

I want to get this possible. Point to an example of the corruption of the American media—the American media reporting on the Antifa protests outside the bookstore in Portland and other places trying to force them not to stock Andy's book.

The reports on that said things like—and these weren't, you know, unusual or fringe publications, but ABC and other networks said things like, "Andy Ngo, who claimed to have been assaulted and hospitalized by Antifa in 2019."

I said, "What is this? Claimed to be?" Either the journalist in question was hospitalized or he was not. It’s not hard to find that out.

It’s not hard to satisfy it so that you accurately represent to your readers what happened one day in 2019. You don't need to do these things that signal that you don't agree with the interpretation of the individual in question, which you believe might be attributed to you if you accurately report the facts.

It's in these little slippages that the American media has gone so badly wrong, and as a result, the American political debate has helped to go so badly.

So let me offer something that might be an analog to that maybe, and this might also be viewed by listeners or viewers as concentrating on rearranging the deck chairs when the ship is sinking.

But in any case, last week the Biden-Harris organization put out a tweet with a little video, and it was Joseph Biden discussing what he was going to do to small business owners that had been decimated by this terrible pandemic.

And then he listed all the identity politics groups that would be preferentially treated. Now, he could have—I watched that and I thought that was a big mistake.

He could have—because he's at the height of his ability to set his own agenda and not to pander to the radicals on the left. If he can't do it right now, he's never going to be able to do it.

He should have said, "People have been devastated by this pandemic—small business owners. We’re going to do everything we can to help them starting with those who have been affected the most," which is a perfectly reasonable place to start.

But he had to list Asians, Latinos, women, people of color, he may not have listed that particular category, certainly blacks.

Yeah, and it seemed to me to be completely superfluous. And one of those small slips of the sort that you're describing that leads to this tip this positive feedback loop.

Exactly.

I saw that video as well. I was horrified. I thought you, if you’re the incoming president, you won the election. You have the most important opportunity now to help heal America, and you're pulling this?

Well, and you also have something obvious to do in front of you. All Biden has to do—there's nothing he has to do except immunize the population as fast as possible.

It's like he's got a—the clearest mandate of any president that I can remember because the problem is self-evident. It's like the pandemic is terrible. It's killing people, and it's driving them crazy.

That’s absolutely, I mean, we should get on that because this is one of my other big fears—that the era of the pandemic, it's the worst possible time to have an overarching conspiracy narrative introduced to the system by the American president.

I mean the outgoing American president. It’s a very, very bad time, that’s for sure. Donald J. Trump must know this.

It's one of the fears that conservatives always had about him was that he was going to pull some crap like this at the end. You know, it was one of the reasons why a lot of good people wouldn't join the administration, why they wanted to keep a million miles away from him.

And this is a very, very dangerous and reprehensible thing for him to have done in recent years.

Yes, well you can see his essential narcissism manifest itself. Like, it seems to me quite likely that a large—75% of Trump believes what he's saying, can't conceive of the fact that he lost the election.

And I’m—I mean maybe that's not relevant, although I think it's it—I’m always trying to understand him from a psychological perspective. But I think his narcissism is so great that he’s willing to risk—it appears that he’s willing to risk everything in order to maintain his belief in victory.

Yes, including the Republican—including conservative voters.

And yes, and more importantly, the Republic. I think it’s completely reprehensible, and I know there will be people watching who support Trump and will be furious.

I still think it's very, very important.

Well, look, we already walked through why supporting Trump at the moment is something that needs to be rethought, and we should—we want to get back to that just for one moment.

Look, the problem is that if you want to maintain your support for Trump under the current conditions, that you're going to make yourself a lot more politically radical than you were last week because you have to swallow so much more than you did two weeks ago, say.

You have to believe that absolutely every institution in American life is totally corrupted, and that the only uncorrupted thing is Donald J. Trump—really?

And me, right?

And both of those—like each of those things is not true, and the combination of them is even less true.

Yes, so it’s very, very important that people realize that Donald Trump was in a society that was very close already to conflagration, and he started playing with the matchbox in a very dangerous way from the moment of the evening of the election when he said that he thought he’d won it already.

And his insistence that he has won it still to this moment is a deeply corrupting influence on all of American politics, and it's going to do enormous damage to everyone on the right of politics everywhere in the world for the foreseeable future.

So I think it was reprehensible he did, however I add this to the fact that we’re all ready—we're already—we already walked through.

I mean, since we last spoke, Jordan, if we had—when we last spoke, if either of us had said to the other that the citizenry of all of our countries will be confined to our houses throughout 2020 and 2021 and made not to see our friends and our closest family in many cases, and not to be allowed to go to the funerals of loved ones and much more, and that just basic things like shopping for essential goods would become problematic—if either of us had sent this to the other one when we last spoke, we wouldn't be able to foresee the circumstances in which such a horror show occurred.

We’ve been in the middle of this horror show. We’re still in it in our respective countries, and so again we already have a very dangerous situation occurring where we are all even more in our solitudes than the social media systems have already made us.

We've already lost almost all of our remaining social antennae. We don't have the ability to feel exactly what it is in a normal situation, like down the pub or talking with friends in a normal situation over a cup of coffee.

We've lost all of that in the last thing. So it's a very bad idea.

There’s nowhere that isn’t catastrophe and so it's very easy to believe that there's catastrophe everywhere, even where there isn't, because—and in this situation our most important duty, it seems to me, is to hold on as much as we can in this very, very choppy time and not fall into conspiratorial thinking or vengefulness or excuse of violence or resentment legitimization of actual political or non-political means, and much more.

That’s what we could point out. We could point out, you know, that the Democrats are making a conservative argument with regards to the election.

They're saying, "Look, the institutions worked, therefore we're the valid government."

But before they can make the claim that they're the valid government, they have to accept the claim that the institutions worked.

And the conservatives shouldn't object to that because the conservatives believe that the institutions are valid.

And so it's up to everyone right now to maintain their faith in the validity of the institutions and to not overreact and to remember that we've all been driven half out of our minds—or maybe more—by this enforced isolation and the fear that the pandemic has produced.

And that’s also opened the door to a political catastrophe on the heels of the biological catastrophe. Yes, everyone needs to breathe deeply and wait for the damn vaccination.

It's only going to be a few more months before, with any luck, before this is brought under control. We don’t want to burn down the ship just before it gets into port.

This is one of the reasons why, you know, I’ve again—I mean, you get criticism from making this point and largely at the moment from an increasingly conspiratorially inclined right, but I don’t believe that the last year is simply some kind of prelude for democratic governments coincidentally across the entire world to fundamentally reprogram our species or something like that.

I don’t—I don't see it. I think there are all sorts of criticism. I think that we've made the economy too secondary in a discussion on the public health for my taste.

But again, if we had a mature political discussion in any of our countries, it wouldn't—it would have involved, as you know, I've discussed this before in Aristotelian terms to do with immigration, but I can do the same thing in relation to the pandemic, which is you have competing virtues of eating almost seriousness.

You have the public health and you have the economy. For a time in all of our societies, we over-prioritized the public health maps and under-prioritized the economy.

And if you don’t have an economy, then at some point you don’t have a public health system or anything like it, and you end up in a situation of a country where the poor are just much more likely to just die.

Right? And so we sacrificed—we sell what we're doing is sacrificing long-term public health for short-term gains on the hospital front, and that's actually not surprising.

Like I've thanked my lucky stars many times in the last year that I'm not in a position to be making those decisions because it must be hell.

What we need to all step back and think look, we might get lucky, there's a dozen vaccines that are that are making their way to market. Many that have already arrived and a few months is a hell of a long time when you're living through it, but not a very long time when you think about it in retrospect.

And so if we're smart, we're going to ride this out. Here’s an example of where the whole thing can both be mended and can go aw