 Well, the topic on which I have been asked to speak is about how the left absorbs the right. And sometimes this, for me, provides the occasion to editorialize against my proverbial enemies, the neoconservatives in the United States. I will not, however, use this occasion to continue my polemic against them. Rather, I would like to discuss in a more general historical context in which it would seem to me that the left has become, in a sense, the only ideology, the only the dominant ideology, and what the French would call la culture unique, there really is nothing else except the left, which frames and shapes the political debate. Not only in the United States, but I think throughout most of the Western world. A few weeks ago, I was struck by a remark that I heard the American journalist and Fox News celebrity Charles Krauthammer provide as a Republican and as a self-described man of what I suppose passes for the right in the United States, that the Obama's presidency will fail because most Americans are on the right politically. They are conservative and they have not changed their views and they've been conservative for the last 50 years. And as I was thinking about this, it struck me that Krauthammer and I, whose lives are not fully co-extensive, which have covered or have been contaminous with many of the same events and changes, certainly should result in, I would think, a shared perception that the left has moved from one giddy triumph to the next over the last 50 years. The issues over which conservatives and liberals debated 50 years ago, certainly in the United States, are not even part of the political discussion anymore because the left won every single one of those political ideological battles. One has to keep in mind that 50 years ago, what conservatives resisted were federal attempts to integrate schools racially in the South. They fought against the notion that men and women should be treated in exactly the same way, arguing instead that there were some ineradicable gender differences, traditional social roles were defensible, certainly as existed in the Western world at this time. And the conservatives doggedly resist the feminist movement. The gay movement was not even on the horizon. From what I could guess on social issues today, the authorized established conservative movement in the United States would argue that feminism was a great Western achievement. You just don't want to push it a little too far. And in fact, as Jonah Goldberg, one of our leading conservative journalists, argued a few weeks ago in a, I suppose, a widely syndicated, widely read column, it would be proper for us now to bring feminism to the rest of the world, to those parts of the world that are united and do not enjoy this blessing. Because we've already, it has become a conservative achievement in the United States. Gay rights are treated now, or they will be treated soon in the future as a conservative accomplishment. Most things that the left are able to push through, conservatives will consecrate at some point in the future and recreate as a conservative accomplishment. Therefore, the civil rights leader, Martin Luther King, who expressed Marxist economic views, who was certainly not a traditional Christian, but a social radical, is now praised by all the leading conservative foundations, self-described conservative foundations in the United States and by the Republican press as a conservative Christian theologian and a conservative thinker. Now in this sense, of course, Krauthammer is correct, that there was something called conservatism 50 years ago that people believed, and those who sort of accept the status quo are therefore conservatives and they accept the same whatever propositions are accepted now as conservative. They just are the party of resistance to further change. That is until the Democrats come along and introduce Obamacare and it becomes established at which point the Republicans will accept it as a conservative measure, which has to be properly managed. So it's simply a matter of consecrate, for the conservative consecrating those things the left has already done and redefining them as conservative achievements. The question is why has the left been successful? Why is the right always retreating? And I think in order to understand this, this one has to sort of do first things first and understand what we mean by right and we understand by left. And I know I'm probably going to offend many people with my definition of the right, which I've done repeatedly at these conferences in the past, but I shall do it again. What puts you on the right is you oppose the belief in human equality, the doctrine of human equality, that you believe that human beings are by nature unequal and if you are a traditional conservative you defend hierarchies as better than its alternatives. And in any case, you oppose any state attempt to level down differences, social differences, gender differences. A second criterion I would suppose is a preference, more than just a preference, a strong commitment to traditional social morality. Whether or not you want to use the instrument of the state to enforce it, and I do not, basically because I think the state is pernicious and will always work in the opposite direction and therefore I am strategically a radical libertarian. But it is not because for a moment I think that people should have right to any sort of lifestyle, they have a human right. I think that sort of given what is the political configuration or situation at the present time and what it is likely to be in the future, I would like to remove the state as much as possible from private or from public life. But a traditional conservative believes that those moral principles upon which society have rested, certainly in the Western moral, and we might, was very often referred to contemptuously as bourgeois morality, should be defended, that they are necessary for the social good and they are necessary even for the individual development. Left on the other hand is opposed to this and I suppose a person who believes in some sort of Catholic natural law doctrine would say they are opposed to nature itself. But they believe that nature is malleable and society as it existed until now was based on social, cultural and justice and the modern therapeutic welfare state that I write about in my books is the ideal, certainly the convenient, expediential instrument to change everything and to create a more egalitarian world in which national boundaries, other things that have divided us in the past, gender differences, religion, all of these things will be removed and human beings for the first time will become sensitive and just. The more radical, I suppose, the more radical multiculturalists would argue that these things already exist in non-Western societies. They just, the West is behind and what this of course requires that we do is radically reconstruct every other non-Western society to make it look more progressive in terms of this model, this future model that we would like to introduce into the Western world. The right in any case opposes what is called the leftist project which I've tried to describe, but the leftist project has done extremely well and it seems in my, as far as I can see, to be unstoppable. It may stop at some future point, however, when the Western world is gonna be repopulated by non-Westerners who have absolutely no commitment to any of these leftist propositions. At that point, all bets will be off and if one were to ask me what is to happen, I would say this is the likely consequence of the left going on and on. Another point that I would make is we're not talking about the Marxist Leninist left. What the Cold War did was bring about the end of the garrison state reactionary, geriatric form of socialism. That is not what the left is. The left exists in the United States. That United States previews this model. It is multicultural, it is bureaucratic, it uses public administration to make us like each other and to create a world in which we constantly fight against discrimination, hate speech, hate thought, and in which we use all public institutions, particularly public education, to carry this on. Another thing which has been absolutely indispensable is the growth of, for the left's triumph, is the growth of public administration. Now everything else I would argue is ancillary or derivative from public administration. I will say I'm a political determinist. Culture is shaped by public administration. It pays for culture. It educates people. It passes anti-discrimination laws. You cannot separate culture from the modern democratic, in quotation, welfare state. It's almost impossible to. You talk about society. Society is being constantly reshaped by the state. We are not talking about a medieval state. We're not talking about the American government of 1820, federal government. We're talking about a state that reaches into the lives of all of its people. One that you can never vote out of office because both political parties are extensions of the state. They are the authorized national parties. After the Second World War, when the Americans reeducated the Germans, where they did the, in order to have democracy, Germans must be instructed in democracy. There are to be X numbers of parties which correspond to the American political parties, and there's to be a large public administration which will reeducate the Germans. Now this is the model that established itself in the United States. Which they, the Americans feel free then to export to countries which they've defeated in war and which they're going to reeducate. So as I said, the Americans really preview this public administration committed through social engineering to the creation of a pluralistic society. The word pluralism is used and then replaced eventually in the last 20 years by multiculturalism. Now you asked me, am I against all pluralism? I am not against natural pluralism. You heard me yesterday speak fondly of the Hapsburg Empire and the Ottoman Empire because they had various groups and they were able to sort of live together. What the American project or American experiment is about is bringing as many people in as you can and then socializing them through the state. It involves a social experiment. It is not simply the acceptance of what already exists. In the case of the Hapsburg Empire, they were dealing with a medieval political and social structure. I mean, these are the things that a particular territorial prince or ruler faces. It is not an attempt to undertake an experiment in social interaction, which I think American pluralism does become at a certain point in time. An event which I think is sometimes misunderstood and yet which I think helps the left-take power in many ways is the Cold War. It is very popular, especially in my youth, to describe the anti-communism as an ideology of the right or of the far right. And through most of my life, even my early academic life, the people on the left were typically pro-communist or anti-anti-communist. The people on the right were in favor of prosecuting the Cold War and were against the Soviet Union. That was the defining issue, okay? Now, later the civil rights issue, but I would say even the civil rights issue is a secondary issue. If you remember, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was passed predominantly with Republican votes. And the Republican Party supported civil rights. I mean, they've been badly repaid by the black voters, but in fact, the Republicans were generally behind all the civil rights, even when the Democrats were the party of segregation in the United States. But the civil rights issues were not as important as what one American conservative, James Burton, speaks of as the protracted conflict, which is a struggle against Soviet communism. Just about every issue of national review, the conservative, the then conservative or traditional conservative magazine, which it no longer is, was about communism and anti-communism. This was the overriding issue. It was not the issue of whether the government should pass laws, again, dealing with discrimination against women, whether it should be affirmative action for gays or whatever defines our politics now. It was simply a foreign policy issue. And I met some people who were profoundly conservative on many domestic issues, but whom I considered to be pinkos or reds or radicals because they were soft on the Soviets. Through most of my life, I considered George Kennan, who was probably one of the most conservative figures in American intellectual life, who had been a leftist because he was soft on the Soviets. If one reads him, he was equally soft on Kaiser Wilhelm and equally soft on a whole bunch of other things, but he was soft on the Soviets. Therefore, in my mind, he was a leftist. This was the issue. Now, what happens, of course, is that the anti-communist side will gradually be taken over by the left, or at least by the anti-communist left. And it becomes an extension of what an America's liberal internationalism, which goes back to Woodrow Wilson in the First World War. And it is based on the view that the United States is to bring democracy to other countries, that American foreign policy is to serve missionary ends, democratic missionary ends. And it sounds very much like Bolshevism or French Jacobinism. But this is not to be done in the name of the French Revolution or the Bolshevik Revolution, but in the name of American values. And by the 1960s, certainly by the 1970s, the dominant form of anti-communism becomes liberal internationalism. I would say something that I did not even know or suspect at the time, because in my mind, I still identified anti-communism with the right, and McCarthyism in the United States, and Pope Pius XII who got up and declined against the communists. But anti-communism, slowly, and I think in a way that was unknown to many Europeans, became in the United States, into the ideology or the carrier of liberal internationalism. And the civil rights acts and civil rights laws were justified as being necessary to win the war against the Soviets. This was an argument made by Lyndon Johnson, by Hubert Humphrey, by the American so-called conservative writer, Harry Jaffa. It was an argument I found, you know, finally popping up in national review in the 1970s, that we have to accept all these things because they are necessary to carry on the struggle against the Soviets. So in Europe, I think they have the same kind of ideological division. And I remember reading the work of some right-wing Italian publicist, Marco Tarky, in which he talks about how he became a right winger. And in fact, he is what joins the Movimento Sociali d'Italia, which is sort of the kind of neo-fascist group, because he went and saw a John Wayne movie, the Green Beret, and he was so moved by the struggle against the communists in Vietnam that he joined the Italian right. And it almost made sense to me, but then I was thinking, you know, really would, you know, if you liked the Green Beret movie, why would you do it? The Italian right has nothing to do with this. And in fact, if you look at your, many of these extreme right-wing parties were anti-American throughout the Cold War, something which came as a surprise to me in which I discovered about 10 years ago after the Cold War was over. But it does turn out that, you know, the Movimento Sociali d'Italia was strongly anti-communist, strongly supported the Americans in Vietnam, so that there was also a widespread perception in Europe that anti-communism was the issue that defined the right, right? Meanwhile, I think in the United States, anti-communism becomes identified more and more with the anti-communist left, where the left center, not the far left, but sort of the left center, and you have the labor movements, Humphrey, Scoupjacks, and Democrats, founded the neo-conservatives who end up taking over the conservative movement, who are really part of the liberal internationalist, pro-labor union, Zionist, moderate left. But there was certainly anti-communists or they were anti-Soviet. And, but I think it is inevitable that this happens because all of the momentum, the cultural, political momentum in these countries and in the United States is on the left. So much so that by the time you get what is, I think, improperly or incorrectly viewed as a conservative revolution with the election of Ronald Reagan, there's no revolution of any kind and is simply a brief interruption in the continued movement's leftward of the American government and American society. There is no conservative revolution of any kind that occurs in the United States. And, but the liberal media, of course, are happy to run with this and so are conservative think tanks because people are gonna give you money because see you carried out a conservative revolution. And you can't say, no, we failed. No one's gonna give you any money if you failed. We didn't even try. They'll give you even less money. This is actually what happened. So you say we actually carried out a revolution. You just didn't notice it, but there's a revolution. And the official liberal neo-conservative view in the United States is now that there was a great conservative revolution in the 1980s and it continues with the election of George H.W. Bush. You get four more years of the counter-revolution and then it is resumed with George H.W. Bush who is really a counter-revolutioner. I remember picking up a French newspaper, Kudman Le Monde, Le Monde est de mer in the United States and they're explaining to me that the thinker who most influenced George H.W. Bush was the Catholic counter-revolutionary Joseph Domestre. And I was like looking at this saying that these people aren't seen, you know. I mean George H.W. Bush, you know, is a kind of fraternity member who drank too much, who politically always sounds to me like a leftist. He's talking about global democracy, women's rights. Even as Christianity is usually, you know, comes down to we have to give everybody democracy and human rights. How is he Joseph Domestre? But for the French, secularism is such a dominant militant ideology that any American who says I'm a reborn Christian is automatically identified with the counter-revolution in France. So the European press will play along very happily. The liberal press will play along because the right has proclaimed what is really inaction and nothing in terms of a counter-revolution to the counter-revolution. And when I say the left is able to continue winning all the cultural, political wars, but claiming that it's either a stalemate or they're losing because a counter-revolution is taking place. The most interesting thing about this, I give me back to, is that American militarism is what I describe as left-wing militarism. It is not the militarism of the fascist movement. It is not the militarism of the Catholic counter-revolution in Spain. It is nothing but pure Jacobinism. It is wars carried out to spread human rights, now women's rights, et cetera. Why these things should be considered part of the right is unclear unless one looks at American party politics. And there you discover that the campaigns to spread democracy are only attacked as right-wing fascistic enterprises when Republicans undertake them. When Bush does it, it is fascistic, it is evil, it is the Catholic counter-revolution or whatever. When President Obama comes into office, car isn't the same war, we all have to get behind him and help. Which, you know, has been pretty much the view that I've been encountering in the American liberal press. There's one black journalist, Herbert Matthew, who's his name, who writes for the New York Times, who said that it's really a shame how people are not volunteering for the military. This is after Obama came in. Before that, he was screaming against these, he said, not that I'm defending these wars, but now that we're in these wars, we should not embarrass President Obama. So all of this is a function of party politics. The left is not inherently pacifistic now any more than it was in the past. I remember once hearing George McGovern, who deplored the bloodshed of the Vietnam War, say he bombed Zaldsburg or other cities in Austria during the Second World War, and he's proud of his record. Well, he murdered civilian population, but that was okay because he was fighting fascism. When you fight communism, it's a different matter. Then you are supposed to weep over the life of every communist guerrilla that gets lost or that's lost. So I think a lot of what is seen as the anti-militarism of the left is purely for show. And it depends whether their guy is in power, whether their guy is out. In the United States, there's also a tendency to identify conservatism with the Republican Party and liberalism with the Democratic Party. This, I think, is mostly arbitrary. The Republicans repeal very little of what the Democrats do, although they occasionally use the rhetoric of the Christian right in order to pull in the votes of religious Protestants in the United States and possibly get anti-abortion Catholics to vote for them. Once they're in power, they change very little and they typically manage the programs of the other side. The problem is that for journalistic purposes in the United States, dividing up people into Republican and Democratic camps is very useful. This way, all politics will center or be structured around these two parties and their alterations, which one is elected at a particular time. And then the international media will proclaim Democrats to be progressives and liberals and Republicans to be counter-revolutionaries. The overall picture, however, is very different, that the left continues to win on the cultural front, the social front, and that the indispensable means by which it does this is the role of the state, a public administration. And if someone were to ask me, how do you ask me, this would be my concluding remarks, how does one address this problem? How do you engage this problem? The only solution I would give is to destroy the state, public administration. And I say this not as an anarchist, not even as a libertarian, but simply as someone who does not want to see the left win all the battles. And the state must go down. What it must be replaced by is local government, distributed power, and I'd be very happy to see the United States divide up into seven or eight or 20 different parts. I think the American Empire is a leftist project. It also accelerates leftist changes at home. And that is the main reason that I'm opposed to it. Now this is different from saying that the country should not protect itself against enemies. I'm all in favor of doing that, real enemies. I'm not in favor of trying to change the opinions of Afghans about gender relations, something which seems to obsess George W. Bush. It's not enough to fight, it's enough to vote the remainder of his life to changing sexual relations or gender relations in Central Asia. And I'd be very happy if he moved out there, together with his wife and his family, tried to carry on the project in that part of the world. But I think it is important that state power be controlled, that power be decentralized. I think the attempt by Ron Paul and people of that ilk to play down cultural social issues is correct. You're not gonna win any points on that. You don't even wanna raise those issues. They've also been used in a totally demagogic fashion. The Republican Party pulls out the social card every time it wants the vote of some poor Rube in Iowa or something. They make very few, they make very few differences in terms of changing. They let that continues to win. The only practical solution is decentralization. And decentralization that would allow different regions, different communities to do what they want. Which does not mean that you'll have anti-abortion laws passed throughout the entire country. Which anyhow would be inconsistent with the American Constitution. It does mean that people in certain regions would be able to be culturally and socially more traditional than Americans are required to be now. And I think this is a point that John O'Sullivan raised about Poland. That once Poland became part of the European Union, even if people had Catholic conscience and did not wanna carry out an abortion, they'd be required to. And this is the danger of this international bureaucratic class which is committed to multicultural, socially anti-traditional values. That they are going to push and push not just for economic arrangements. They're gonna try to change everything in society. And the only protection that those who resist may have is to be able to break down this monolithic central power or wherever it is. Whether it is the American government which is monolithic central power or the European Union. Or even I think what have become nation states which are not even what remain of nation states which are no longer nation states. What they represent is simply regional public administration. They do the same things I think as Tony Daniels Paul correctly pointed out to me as the European Union is doing at the super national level. So the more and more power is decentralized, the more chance there is of at least in the short and middle term of being able to preserve what there is of a more or less traditional society. Finally I would note that I have no answer to what is going to happen in terms of immigration into Europe or even in the United States. I think it's gonna go on and on. Decentralization will only have an effect if decentralized regions can control immigration. And I think the position of the flams block is absolutely correct. You break off and you also insist you have a right to determine who can come and live in a region. I think that's absolutely indispensable in order to preserve these regional liberties and regional communities. So for want of a better solution, this is the closest I can come to suggesting an alternative to what I see as the continuing march of the left through all of our political and social institutions. I thank you for listening.