 Hello and welcome to Crosstalk, where all things are considered, I'm Peter Lavelle. What is left of the political left to see voters across the western world look to new parties and leaders? Does liberalism and today's liberals have any answers to the problems we face? Or are they the problem? Crosstalking the political left, I'm joined by my guest John Lachlan in Paris. He is director of studies at the Institute of Democracy and Cooperation. In Amsterdam, we have Case Bender-Pale. He is a fellow of the Center for Global Political Economy at University of Sussex. And in Montgomery, we cross to Jeff Deis. He is president of Mises Institute. All right, gentlemen, Crosstalk rules and effect, that means you can jump in anytime you want, and I always appreciate it. John Lachlan, if I can go to you first in Paris. We have a number of elections looming all across Europe. They're very, very important. They're telling us the direction of where voters are going and, you know, and looking at what happened with Brexit, looking what happened in the United States with Trump here. Of course, the left has a lot of reasons to blame for, or even the right have to blame for their own demise. But I don't, they're not in touch with the voters and they're not listening to the voters. And I don't see a whole lot of introspection. And I see the traditional left, the champion, the working class, the disadvantaged. I just see they're so hollowed out right now. And I think it's created a huge vacuum in the political spectrum. Go ahead, John. Yeah, I think that's absolutely right. But on the other hand, it's not a new phenomenon. Let's not forget that in Britain, for example, the Conservatives under Mrs. Thatcher attracted a very significant section of the working class electorate and deprived labour of many of its traditional votes. So we have to go back a few decades to see this, the beginning of this process. I also think that there's much too much talk about far right and extreme right. And there's much too much head scratching about the rise of parties like the National Front in France and the Freedom Party in the Netherlands. What has happened, in fact, is not that these parties have risen. It's instead that the centre of gravity across Western Europe has shifted inexorably to the left. When I say to the left, I'm not referring, of course, to old style socialism, which indeed has been abandoned. I'm referring instead to that body of liberal left-wing opinion, which believes in the end of the nation state, which believes in progress and progressivism and so on. And which is daily fighting and winning new battles on completely unexpected things like transgender and gay marriage and all the rest of it. The centre of gravity having moved to the left and the political class having become increasingly dominated not by any relationship to reality, but instead increasingly by ideology. Yes, voters feel alienated and they feel alienated precisely because of this ideology which dominates and which means that political decisions are taken not with respect to reality, not with any desire to influence reality or to react to it, but instead within the self-referential terms of the ideology of left liberalism. So political decisions are taken to justify, even on a symbolic level, the ideology to which these people apply. And that's why in my own articles I've increasingly said that politicians, including the famous Brussels bureaucrats, are not politicians or bureaucrats or technocrats. They are instead a kind of clergy engaged in a series of symbolic acts which have meaning for them, but which don't have any meaning outside their point of reference and certainly not to an increasing number of voters. Jeff, let me go to you in Montgomery because John Lachlan I think is on to something because I think what we have also going on right now is a crisis of terminology, a crisis of lexicon because you can look at political parties that are hovering around power. They're more interested in power than representation. They're more interested in ideology than the will of the voters. And of course it's crashing what conservative and liberal really mean. I mean, I really think that we have a crisis of lexicon. Go ahead, Jeff, in Montgomery. I think that's true and I think that the left in the U.S. is a very different animal than the left in various European countries. But when John when John mentions clergy, I think that's correct because I think what we're talking about here is a faith. We're talking about a faith in neoliberalism that doesn't necessarily match the facts. And I do think that the old left right paradigms are breaking down. He mentioned Margaret Thatcher stealing votes away from labor. Well, Donald Trump did the same thing in the United States by taking blue collar working class votes away from Democrats. And at some point, we have to ask ourselves, I think, a question, which is what does that blue collar union truck driver in a state like New Jersey, who likes American football and beer, what does he really have in common with a left wing professor of feminism at Berkeley? What does he really have in common with a nonprofit ideologue at a place like Sierra Club? And the answer might be not much. And so I think we're reaching a point where we're populism is a healthy thing. I think when when elites become corrupt and when they become corrupt by virtue of their relationship with sort of a state and finance nexus, then I think anti-elitism or populism can be healthy and warranted. You know, the case, you know, you we can also see the example I'll use the example of the United States here is that, you know, if you have the Republicans and the Democrats, again, you have these elites and then they have these party labels on them. But you can look at a lot of the elites in both parties, particularly the Democratic one that are obstructing Trump every step of the way, irrespective of how you feel about Donald Trump. But you have Republicans that are just as obstructionist in many ways as well because they're not representing their party. They're representing their interests inside this. And we're going to use this word again that John gave us this clergy. And I would call it a clergy of ideology and power. Go ahead, Case. Well, I would be a bit more specific. I mean, of course, it's good as an opener to start talking about a clergy, but the people who keep the Trump administration hostage in the United States are not a clergy. They are acting for a very specific interest. And I would say the interests are those of the military industrial complex and the forces that want the United States to intervene all across the world. So also, if I may, saying that the voters are moving to the left is not what I see. Well, beginning here in Holland, which is easiest for me, the voters are moving to the right, not all of them to Wilders and his anti-Islam party, but the other parties are also adopting that language, you know, the xenophobia, fear of the foreign. And yeah, of course, at the same time, and that was already mentioned, they are ignoring legitimate concerns of people who are faced with a massive inflow of newcomers, often not integrated and certainly without any chance of being integrated at some point in the future. Sure. You know, John, one of the things and I think it's people traditional, let's say, liberals. And I'm thinking of more like old school Democrats, you know, working class people and then you can have people that are further to the right. The word progressive was brought up and I can see across the board. A lot of people are very tired of identity politics because identity politics doesn't give you a job. It doesn't give you prosperity. It doesn't give you security. It gives small groups of people good feeling inside. OK, nice and fluffy and warm, but it doesn't make in a material, physical sense of better society. Go ahead, John. Yeah, just to respond to the last speaker. I didn't say that voters were moving to the left. I said that the political class and the center of gravity of political debate was moving to the left and voters, if you like, have stayed where they are. So when we describe the extreme, the rise of the extreme right, I'm implying that voters have more or less stayed where they are and the politicians have moved to the left, leaving the space open for Yeah, that's correct. In my view, wrong people far right. I agree. OK, very much. Yeah, yeah, I very much agree with also with with Jeff who talked, who mentioned and perhaps we can develop this point that it's true that the left, of course, has abandoned its traditional values and its traditional electorate, but the right has as well. Exactly. I speaking as a as a conservative, I believe very strongly that on balance, the left has won battle after battle in the last 25 years since the collapse of state socialism in the Soviet Union and in its satellite states in Eastern Europe. The left has not given up its basic ideology of progressivism, revolution, anti-authoritarianism and so on, anti-traditionalism. Instead, it simply transferred itself away from state socialism. Yes, so it's completely abandoned that aspect of its policy, but it hasn't abandoned any of the underlying ideology of constant revolution and constant progress. Indeed, to the extent that it has adopted the free market and the ideology of globalization, it has done so only because it sees in those things, as Marx himself incidentally did, an instrument for dismantling traditional structures like the nation and the family. So I see in the last repeat in the last 25 years since the collapse of the Soviet system, I see left and right actually converging around what is ultimately a left liberalism where conservative values are basically absent or they come out in a very mangled and somehow and sometimes rather extreme way, but a straightforward conservative party does not exist in Western Europe. Jeff, weigh in on that, because there are some very interesting points mentioned right there because it's all about how also about how conservativism has been doing. And I would say very, very poorly the Republican Party isn't a conservative party. When I look at their leadership, go ahead. Conservatism Inc. is on life support in America. Trump does not represent some sort of resurrection of the GOP. On the contrary, exactly. The GOP is dead and buried when it comes to ideas and deservedly so. No one is going to die on a hill for Ryan care. Progressives have shown time and time again they will die on a hill for all kinds of things that the American public cares very little about. And so when you Peter mentioned that this isn't an economic left or a party that represents populist economic blue-collar interests, that's so true today. I mean, this is a party that doesn't organize in union halls. It organizes in the sociology department of some wretched university somewhere. This is a left in America that has suffered a black eye with Trump, perhaps, but this is a speed bump, not a roadblock. The left in the West, I won't say America only, controls academia. It controls media. Jeff, gentlemen, I'm going to have to jump in here. We have to go to a hard break after our short break. We'll continue our discussion on the political left. Stay with our team. Do you see homelessness as freedom to live anywhere? If you're homeless, you can't sleep anywhere. You're not allowed. So it's just moving from spot to spot until we get kicked out. Want to leave home as a teenager and be independent from parents? Don't come running outside and be like, I'm going to be homeless. It's the cool thing. Because once you're out here, you're pretty much stuck without mommy and daddy's help. So stay at home and go to school. Returning from a war zone and expecting your country to be grateful? I just wish this country would help veterans like me. And many more out there. I see many more veterans out there in wheelchairs that have no place to live behind dumpsters. You're sure you won't ever be homeless, aren't you? They were too. Homeless people didn't come from a homeless farm. They came from parents. And so what happened? They came from parents. And so what happened to that individual? And what happened to that family? And what happened to those children? Why homeless? We're in Nepal to find out why whole villages chose to sell their organs. People who haven't sold organs or at least who haven't admitted to it are often jealous of the help victims receive from charities. Welcome back to Crosstalk where all things are considered. I'm Peter Lebel. To remind you, we're discussing the political left. Okay, and I have to go back to our guest case in Amsterdam. I consider myself very old school and I'll even say it. I consider myself a conservative. And when I think of politics in a normative sense, politics and politicians are supposed to resolve problems. That's what we elect them to do. I don't elect people to moralize and tell me what my values should be. And I think this is the speed bump. I like that from Jeff in Montgomery. This is a speed bump we've been hitting for decades right now. We're not solving problems. We're just told how to think about them and usually not your own problems but some other person's problems. Yeah, I agree with that. But we shouldn't forget that Jacques Chirac, the French politician, was once asked about the power of politics and he said actually politics has no power. We are the ones who see the train go by and we make sure that the barriers are down on time. And society was developing along the entire post-war period in a progressive way. There was work for people, there was excellent education and healthcare and so on and so forth. And from the late 70s that has been dismantled. Now in that situation, people who call themselves left and we shouldn't think of that as a sort of fixed entity which always remains the same. People who call themselves left will then have to replace their original role which was helping good education, good healthcare and employment continue. They have to come up with something to replace it and that gave us the moralising doctrines, the transgender problematic which only covers a very minor slice of society, the gay marriage. For the people who are affected of course that's an important thing perhaps but not for society at large and certainly it's not something that moves society as a whole in the direction of the things that I just mentioned which we are losing. And in that sense I think society is also moving to the right because it's in a state of stagnation, profound stagnation and crisis. You know John if we can use the metaphor here this is going to hurt you into the program of metaphors here but I like this you know keeping the trains running making sure the barriers are all down but what I see is I see people that call themselves conservative who are not, people who call themselves from the left who are not, they have just created one train wreck after another and this is why people are voting in angry ways. They want some new solutions because what we hear is just a new tread on a tire over and over again, it's retreads. Go ahead John. Peter if I could just come back to you I think Jeff's speed bump metaphor was meant to imply that the election of Trump is a minor obstacle and will not prevent the onward march of the left and Jeff is absolutely right, I very strongly agree with this to emphasize the extent to which the left dominates the world of the media, the world of culture and so on. You know look we're 100 years after the Russian Revolution and Lenin thought that the way to state socialism to socialism was by controlling the state but there is a far more powerful revolutionary figure whose influence goes way beyond that of Lenin and that is Antonio Gramsci who theorized this idea that indeed the left to win had to colonize the great institutions of universities, schools and so on and you know we are and as, exactly and as I believe Andrew Breitbart used to say politics is downstream of culture that's why a case, Jack Shearac said that politicians just watch the train go by or watch the caravan pass, whichever metaphor you like it's because politics is downstream of culture and you know we've observed haven't we the collapse of the Soviet system 25 years ago what people perhaps forget in watching this spectacular historical event is that Marxism was alive and well in the west, in western universities throughout the entire Cold War period there were strong communist parties exactly and plus there were strong pro-Soviet communist parties so you had a vast reserve of people in the west, never mind people in the east people in the west who believed in Marxism and in left wing politics generally and whereas in the east nobody really believed in Marxist ideology including senior Soviet leaders they didn't actually believe it anymore they stopped believing it a long time ago that was not true of the west having collapsed, we are now left with the inheritance of these generations of people who've been educated in a broadly Marxist system and those people educated as I say in those universities, those people who were young in the 1960s and who were affected by the other great revolutionary not Lenin but John Lennon those people of course are now in their 60s and they have been governing us now for decades I've had the opportunity to live in Poland and in Hungary before they joined the European Union and I've lived in Russia for almost 20 years but I told Poles and Hungarians that you think your culture is important and that's your right but you want to join a club that doesn't really care much about your culture and your values and voila! We have two countries in the European Union that are being criticized severely by the clergy I'm going to keep using this term in the future thank you for that but culture does matter and I think this is again the political class is don't want to respect culture and if you do you're backward you're primitive, you're old fashioned but they're wrong and we're right go ahead Jeff in Montgomery Poland will forever be a renegade the simple fact that they're a religious country within the EU this is not allowed or accepted anymore it's interesting when John mentioned all this blathering about the far right and AFP and Garrett Wilders and Marine Le Pen as being white noise and nonsense it is white noise and nonsense because the real authoritarians are in every public school in America in every university in America these are the petty people on the left who would control us, who would govern us who would restrict our speech and you know there's one thing they're right about I don't like to call them liberals because I don't think it's a term that's earned but I will say there's one thing that the left is correct about and that is that Trump and Le Pen and Garrett Wilders they are reactionaries this is a reaction the question is a reaction to what and the answer is a century of progressivism that has never been popular in a pure democratic sense in any western country this has always been imposed from the top down it has never arisen from the bottom up it is absolutely a march through institutions and people don't like it there's still a pulse there's still a heartbeat that says I want transgender people to be treated well and to have happy lives but I don't think it's the momentous issue of our day where they go to the bathroom for God's sake and I think we've reached a point where left and right doesn't matter and that heartbeat, that pulse does matter you're the one that brought up the transgender issue and I'm glad you did and I don't want to give more time to it on this program than it deserves but see that's just the point isn't it this is what people are told to talk about to think about when the infrastructure of Europe is in decay the infrastructure in the United States is in decay and we need more space for those issues and I will never stop talking about the need for people to have work and well-paid work because that's where you get dignity in our society and I don't see the political classes addressing those issues okay go ahead Kace exactly, yeah exactly in 2012 Francois Hollande was elected on the promise that he would end austerity one trip to Berlin was sufficient forget about that promise and gay marriage was then the compensating factor it was what he then had to offer which cost him for instance the Muslim vote in France which he had won because of his promises on the economic front what I would like to get back to if I may when John said that in the left is still strong in universities and so on well I am in the university and I was on the left but I can say that in the 1960s and 70s our relevance was not because of our brilliant ideas because behind us there was a powerful working class which was unionized behind that was the Soviet Union with unrelated etc but it was there and now we can have fantastic ideas and Gramsci and this and that but there is nothing behind us that is why we are completely ignored and go along also what I hear in this conversation is the tremendous gulf between how things are being experienced in the United States and by Americans and by people in Europe here we are really moving to the right and there is also real conservatism in the sense that people cling to their traditional way of life of what they think is their traditional way of life in the face of challenges to digest and which their politicians no longer care for you know John one thing that seems to be prevalent in all of this again is the United States went through an election cycle and now Europe is facing its own the lack of introspection on what has gone wrong and I think you can anticipate what I am going to say because all you do is blame Russia for it I mean that is one of the most pathetic reactions to not knowing what to do and not owning up to your own mistakes go ahead John yeah I mean it's just it enters a sort of psychiatric territory really doesn't it where every single conceivable evil is projected onto Russia with no evidence whatever I think that this is a consequence of a more general trend when I said just now quoting Andrew Breitbart that politics is downstream of culture I was referring to what I believe to be political culture in universities but there is a cultural problem in more general terms as education has declined as people have fewer cultural references fewer external cultural references as they have fewer religious references they just don't have the fabric the intellectual or moral or spiritual fabric to do anything other than what they heard the political herd or the political caste tells them to do so as you have this narrowing of the cultural basis so you have an ever increasing series of taboos which dictate I have to jump in here another heartbreak we've run out of time gentlemen many thanks to my guests in Paris, Amsterdam and in Montgomery and thanks to our viewers for watching us here at RTC see you next time and remember crosstalk rules RTC RTC I love you