Auron MacIntyre, popular YouTuber, podcaster, and columnist for The Blaze, joins the podcast to talk about the origin story of wokeness and how the center-Left’s concept of neutrality cannot hold back the revolution. Auron and Inez also discuss the critical issue of patronage and how the Right might build as powerful a patronage network for its friends and supporters as the Left has for theirs, as well as what the future might hold for a country with two diametrically-opposed notions of the good within its borders.

High Noon is an intellectual download featuring conversations that make possible a free society. The podcast features interesting thinkers from all parts of the political spectrum to discuss the most controversial subjects of the day in a way that hopes to advance our common American future. Hosted by Inez Stepman of Independent Women’s Forum.


TRANSCRIPT

Inez Stepman:

Welcome to High Noon where we talk about controversial subjects with interesting people. Auron MacIntyre is one of my favorite people to follow on Twitter, that’s because I seem to agree with him so often. But he’s a host and columnist with The Blaze. He has a self-titled podcast, Auron MacIntyre, so you can hear his thoughts. And he also has a Substack, where he writes short columns and otherwise puts forward his ideas. You can find him in all of those places. Auron, welcome so much. Welcome to High Noon, I’m really glad to have you.

Auron MacIntyre:

Oh, thanks for having me.

Inez Stepman:

So I feel like we’ve been going back and forth on a lot of the same topics on your show, on Twitter, but I really wanted to start out with asking you what you think the origin story of, for lack of a better term, wokeness is? Because I feel like this is something with which you put forward really well, and then with which I really agree with your version of events, rather than let’s say some of the more centrist versions of events of how we got where we are in 2023. So when do you think the origins of this new ideology really started and how did it seize power? Is this something that happened in the last five years, the last 15 years, the last 50 years, 500 years? From the range of Sohrab Ahmari, 1250 AD to this only happened in 2019 or 2020, where do you put the origin of where we’re at?

Auron MacIntyre:

Well, I think the key thing is pushing it back against the idea that it’s new. That’s the big thing for a lot of kind of centrists, a lot of people who have drifted over from the left, the IDW type people. They think that wokeness is a development of the last 10, 15 years. Liberalism just got a little out of whack, it went a little off the rails and if we could just roll things back maybe to the 1990s, then we could get a handle on this whole thing and return to the good old days of institutional neutrality and free speech and all that stuff. But of course, I think as both of us would probably attest to, this goes back a lot farther. The problem is that the ideology is really multifaceted. So of course you have a big part of it, which is tied to the Civil Rights Revolution in the United States. I think there’s a pretty good case to be made that as well meaning as it was, and Christopher Caldwell puts this forward in his book which I’m suddenly blanking on the name of, “Age of Entitlement.”

But he puts forward the case that a large number of this stuff is built into civil rights law and the incentives that allows for different groups to gain access to a second and more powerful constitution that circumvents the regular rule of law of the United States, but there are many other factors to it. I think the managerial revolution plays a big part in this as well. This is why you’ve seen businesses and government agencies and sports teams, banks. All these things jump on board this doctrine in the last few decade or two very, very powerfully because there’s a high incentive built into that structure as well. There’s also really just the inevitable ideological strain that runs through liberalism and then into progressivism and then into wokeness, that I think eventually leads you to where you’re at. So I think there’s a lot of places you can kind of tie it to.

Inez Stepman:

Yeah, this is something that annoys me as well because there isn’t actually… And I have my disagreements in terms of pushing it all the way back perhaps into the Enlightenment, but it’s no difference between the left in 1968 and the left today except power. All of the same concepts, what we call wokeness was already a large part of the new left in 1968. Yeah, maybe they used a slightly different lingo for it. Maybe they hadn’t quite gotten to the point where they thought that women could have penises, but they had already deconstructed all of the concepts around biological sex for example, in that particular direction or that particular example. A lot of this and a lot of the racial stuff in the framework that we currently work on during the civil rights, was not that distinguishable in the 1960s.

And so it’s very annoying to me when people pretend that this came out of somehow either the summer of 2020 or out of somewhere in between 2015 and 2017, everyone just went insane and there were no antecedents to this. And it seems like a way of not taking responsibility for how more center liberal ideas really did birth this ideology that they now want to disown.

Auron MacIntyre:

Absolutely and this is also really prevalent, let’s be honest, in the conservative movement. A lot of this stuff has been onboarded. A lot of people have a very difficult time separating this ideology and its implications from some of the things they might like about the ability of people to live their lives a certain way or the way that people are treated in different scenarios and so it’s very difficult for people to uncouple this idea of wokeness from again, civil rights law as it pertains to women or racial minorities or other groups as well. And so it’s a very sticky situation because you can’t really avoid the fact that like you said, all of these arguments were present in original feminism or the original civil rights debate when it comes to things like segregation and such. All of these proto arguments were already deeply nested into that and people understandably, in both the center and the right, don’t want to touch some of that stuff.

And so it’s very sticky thing to get into and so they’d rather just pretend that it kind of emerged magically out of the colleges in 2013 or something with consent forms or something when it comes to college sex or whatever, pretending like the campus protests in 2015, where they’re chasing people down and yelling at Ben Shapiro, whatever, that’s the beginning of wokeness. But it’s very clearly not. These things go back much further.

Inez Stepman:

Yeah and I think I’ve always been a little bit skeptical. So to the extent to which it was enshrined in law in 1964, so I read “Age of Entitlement.” I listened to Christopher Caldwell talk about this, and I’ve actually… I think he underestimates the changes that were made in the ’80s and ’90s. Now I think they might be ideologically difficult to fend off, I think that there is an argument there. And the fundamental problem that left and right both have with dealing with this I don’t know, you might call it equity versus equal opportunity. Is the fundamental unequal outcomes? You need an explanation for that. If you have underlying blank slate, everybody absent certain conditions will end up having the same outcomes, especially if you measure per group, then it is like you are stuck in this loop where you have to either say, we need to improve equality of opportunity endlessly and become a perfect meritocracy. Which has its downsides as well, and then be very disappointed when that turns out not to yield equal outcomes.

Or you go the Ibram Kendi route and you say, “Any kind of disparity is evidence of discrimination and every disparity means that the system is incomplete in its revolution towards real equality.” But legally speaking, there were some massive changes into the law in the ’90s, that I think really did create as you always talk about I think so well, an incentive structure for especially the private sector to start aggressively enforcing this stuff, that the Civil Rights Act itself of ’64 really did not until all of those additional incentives, and I’m not going to go into them because they’re quite boring. Actually, I really want to have Gail Heriot on this podcast at some point to explain them, but basically everyone stood to make a lot of money by suing companies.

That’s the short version. And it made it much easier to sue essentially for offense. And I think that those incentives, as you always talk about, it’s very important in terms of how people choose their politics. It’s not like everybody woke up one day in 2015 and suddenly decided we’re all going to buy into this extreme radical version of woke politics. One, there were antecedents built in before that but two, there were a lot of incentives to buy into this. You buy into this ideology. You can get a job like Yoel Roth for six or even seven figures, policing the speech of the President of the United States or just a six figure job that is essentially ideological compliance. If you disagree with these ideas, we punish you severely, institutionally, you won’t have a job. Your friends will turn away from you, you’ll be banned from platforms. These kinds of institutional incentives obviously affect where people land on these issues.

Auron MacIntyre:

No, that’s exactly right. I’m just say I think that the incentive structure and its explosion in the ’90s probably does speak to a lot of the acceleration. It’s just that incentive structure also existed around the events of the 1960s. Great Society, all this stuff is built around building the government infrastructure and creating make-work jobs, handing out all kinds of particular benefits based on this infrastructure. And so what we saw was this move from being strictly mostly a government thing into corporations, built the incentive into your HR management and that kind of thing. And of course at every level, as soon as this becomes something that’s easily actionable in the courts, then you need to build additional compliance into your companies at every level. You need to have people making sure that they’re checking. You have commissars inside, every single organization to double check and make sure that everyone is constantly in compliance with the state edicts across all this stuff.

So that is a huge issue that the right often ignores is how much the patronage is built into this. That every time the left gets to accelerate this, gets to create a new part of the Civil Rights revolution, they get to add additional jobs, additional people who are loyal to the party. Like you said Yoel Roth, I mean you got this guy probably a relatively mediocre life in most ways but all of a sudden he’s going to end up getting to police the President of the United States’ speech. I mean, that kind of power handed down to someone who otherwise probably would not have had a very impressive job or very impressive life is the thing that builds deep bonds of loyalty to a political movement. People will stand in traffic for that power, and so literally do.

And so I think it’s important for the right to understand that when the left is handing these ideological structures over to their activists, they’re doing so because people get paid, people get promoted, people get status, all that is built on that. But I do think that structure goes back a very far away, I don’t think it started in 2010 and I don’t think it started in 1990s either.

Inez Stepman:

What would a patronage network on the right look like? In other words, how can the right start to… And obviously we’re starting from something that has for many decades, and we can fight about exactly how many decades, but has for many decades created all of the in incentives and patronage networks for the left. How does the right now start? Because it seems like actually in a wholly private context, the right has a pretty decent patronage network basically for Conservative Inc. Right?

Auron MacIntyre:

Mm-hmm.

Inez Stepman:

And it’s an interesting thing that it’s been so ineffective in terms of actually creating the change that they say that they’re doing but it has been really effective in identifying young talent, making sure people have a comfortable paycheck. Making sure, especially in this day and age that I mean, something that I’m extremely grateful for to Independent Women’s Forum, and I know my colleagues are grateful as well, is I don’t operate in an environment where I have to worry about losing my job or getting canceled. I can say whatever I want, even if my colleagues disagree with it because we don’t even have a one voice policy the way that for example, Heritage does. So it seems like we have made this wholly private patronage network, but it’s a very tiny percentage of people and it’s only people directly involved in politics.

So it seems like when people say that cancel culture isn’t a thing because if you’re already famous and you get canceled and then you end up making a Substack or whatever and making money like Bari Weiss, that doesn’t mean anything to the typical person who doesn’t want to build a Substack or a podcast or whatever, who just wants to have a non-political job. It’s very difficult for that person, there’s no support from the right for that person. So how do we build that actual, I guess, non-political patronage network?

Auron MacIntyre:

Yeah, it’s incredibly difficult problem. Like you said, there is to some extent the ability of the right to pick up and clean off media figures and protect them and provide them opportunities. And that’s why I think so often when I talk to people who have been doing this for a long time, they say, “Oh well, all we need is people to just stand up and speak the truth and speak their mind, have the courage of a conviction and we’ll solve this problem.” But that’s really easy to say when you’re being paid by an institution which pays you specifically to say your opinions and maybe has the courage not to fire you when some group comes after you, but that’s not the case for the average person. It’s good to have a network that protects these people and there are guys like New Founding out there that are building networks for people who are looking for non-woke employment. Looking for friendly employment, trying to connect themselves with organizations, companies that are aligned with their values and won’t cancel them the first time they step out of line.

So that’s a good thing. That’s really good work that they’re doing, and I think that’s an essential step. If I could wave a wand and change one thing about the conservative movement, it would be have a full scale uncancelable network of employment for people so people can step out and say these things that are important and not have to worry about getting destroyed. That is not itself a patronage network, that’s like an insurance policy and it’s a good one, it’s a necessary one. But if we’re talking about a patronage network, we’re talking about the willingness of using government power in institutions to reward people who are more likely to support your movement. And that’s something that the conservative movement is at this point, basically ideologically opposed to on just basic grounds. We’re the small government guys. We don’t believe in using government power. We don’t believe in this stuff. And so anytime we’re in power, we put the brakes on and anytime the left’s in power, they build a massive network that protects and rewards everyone who is ideologically aligned with them.

So I mean, the first step is just being willing to even protect and reward people who support you politically. And then the right has to ask the question, “Who does that?” Not defense contractors or broadcast journalists, but who are the people that actually vote for the Republican base? And what are you actually going to do to better their lives? What institution are you going to build? What program are you going to create to make it easier for them to have families and protect their businesses and protect their religious convictions? What are you actually going to do with government power to make that tenable, as opposed to just saying, “Well, we’ll just make sure that the government takes 5% less of your money.”

Inez Stepman:

Yeah. I think the average person, even maybe especially on the right, underestimates just how much of the left’s cultural power is directly funded by government and by grants, by every… And those huge budgets, a lot of that is spinning off into NGOs, into grant programs, into scholarship funds, into preferential loaning. There’s a huge amount of federal money and state money honestly too, and the most obvious example is $800 billion a year to K-12 education which is I mean, more or less wholly owned by the left at this point. And same thing with the university network. And those are public funds that are… And so I wholly agree with you that there’s no way. When I say that we’ve created a small private patronage network, I think the only thing it’s really been successful in is exactly supporting a few people, and it hasn’t always done that either because the right is so willing to fire, that it’s often canceled its own. But in its best form it has provided.

I don’t know, Heritage Foundation is an alternative to the university. The Heritage Foundation creates a lot of the same product that universities have, but the big difference is… and perhaps I’m using the word patronage wrong then, and perhaps the real benefit of a patronage network is that it’s elite universities are a pipeline to real power in government and outside of it. Whereas the think tank world on the right is not. It’s just a place to park people who want to say interesting things or maybe do some interesting research that is not going to happen in the universities.

Auron MacIntyre:

Yeah. I think that again, the intellectual pursuits are good, those are essential but I don’t even think that honestly the think tank networks really do a great job of some of that. Many of the most interesting thinkers on the right have been all but cast aside by the movement for many decades. They’ve been ostracized, they’ve been out in the wilderness and so I don’t think honestly much of the intellectual work even being done in the think tank sphere was particularly groundbreaking or producing significant results. I don’t want to cast aspersions on people who are doing work there. I’m sure there are people who are doing very good work but let’s be honest, how’s this materializing anywhere?

Inez Stepman:

Because you’re really thinking about this as intellectuals, I’m not thinking about it that way. It’s policy. The think tank network on the right, writes policy and they do it quite successfully. But the problem is there are ideological constraints that you’re pointing out and so many people are pointing out correctly on the right, that even their policy, when it is effectuated, do not have the… they’re not racking up the w’s that they need to. But in terms of the actual mechanism, that policy work does find its way into legislation, it finds its way into regulation, it finds its way especially on the state level. There is a function there that’s very important, but it misses-

Auron MacIntyre:

But if it doesn’t bear fruit, how much does it matter? I hear what you’re saying, that the language is making it into things but if it doesn’t bear fruit, what’s its actual value?

Inez Stepman:

Right but that’s an ideological problem. That’s the problem of changing what the right is, which I agree with you on, but I’m thinking just structurally, the mechanism of being able to write policy and having it show up, I actually think the right has been quite successful in doing. A lot of the things… The problem is that the policy they choose to work on, as you’ve pointed out, is often not very important to the trajectory of the country. So tax cuts, I like keeping more of my own money and whatever, but it’s obviously not at this point changing the trajectory of the country and it wasn’t changing the trajectory of the country in 1983 either. But that’s an ideological problem, I’m thinking about just purely the structural, what is the purpose? If for example, you had a successful ideological right wing that is producing policy, that is let’s say more closer to the heart of where the left’s power comes from, I think we actually do have a mechanism to implement that through think tanks and stuff.

Which actually, I mean the left is jealous of this, which is hilarious to me because the powers that they hold are so much more effective. But that’s why you have the hysteria over groups like ALEC for example. You have just this utter hysteria on the left because the same language will find itself into in a bunch of bills in different states. So I think we are successful in that, it’s just ideologically… I think that the ideological constraints are what you’re pointing to and that’s the reason that it’s so unsuccessful. Am I wrong? Is there some other modification or other pushback you would make on that concept?

Auron MacIntyre:

No, fair enough. I mean the think tank world is certainly not one I’m super familiar with. So it may indeed be the case that, that’s an effective avenue that just needs a tweak but I wouldn’t know. Like I said, just looking at the fruits of what has come out of there consistently, it does not seem to bear out significant results. There’re results that may end up in legislation, but those that don’t actually bear fruit in actual changes for the country you pointed out.

Inez Stepman:

No, I wouldn’t call it a tweak because it requires ripping out the heart and soul of essentially the conservative movement. So I don’t call that a tweak, but I think structurally there are avenues that actually do function on the right, but they’ve been directed towards ends that are not effective and never are going to be effective. That’s my change of mind over the last, I don’t know, five, seven years. But would the public patronage network look like? Give me an example of what the right could do to create a public patronage network, that would be equivalent say to the fact that there are all these jobs available, there are all these preferential loans available, there are all these essentially to protect our own. What would a Republican party that is interested in making the average Republican voter, making him feel protected and his life improved by some form of actual patronage?

Auron MacIntyre:

Well, I think you’re pointing to the K-12 education system is huge, this is basically a massive donation to the left. It does pretty much everything for them. It gets kids hooked onto ideology from the very beginning. It gets parents used to the idea that the state will care for their children from birth to death, that they’ll be the providers of food and they’ll be the therapeutic culture that actually ends up raising your children and giving them values and all of these things. So it is an amazing just monolith of leftist influence, along with of course all the financial benefits, all the make-work jobs, everything else, the propaganda distribution. So if you have something like that on the left, then you need to figure out what does that look like on the right? Now the right probably doesn’t want to… Just taking over public education probably doesn’t work directly because at this point, public education is just distributed leftism. God bless Chris Rufo and what he’s doing, but getting CRT out of the schools is impossible because CRT is what the schools teach, back to front.

And so it’s very difficult to just dismantle that right away. But of course is it Corey DeAngelis, I believe? With the fund the students not the system, that’s a great movement. That’s a great example of making sure that you can find ways to dismantle this stuff and move the funds in a way that would assist more conservative people. Make sure that you have an incentive for homeschooling. Make sure that parents can keep the funding that they would have and instead, apply it to home schools. Build incentives into homeschooling curriculums, the kinds of places where people are naturally going to have this impetus. There are of course faith-based ministries. There are of course your people who want to have larger families, your natural conservative constituents are going to tend to be people who are interested in all of these things. And so building an infrastructure that supports that stuff does help.

The main thing you want to do is avoid getting this infrastructure all just going to business loans or something. You want to find a way that this is going to consistently get into the pockets of people, or at least create the structures that allow them to do the things they wanted to do outside of the current leftist patronage system. I think it’s very difficult for the right to target a patronage network right now because in many ways, they don’t know who they serve. They don’t know who they would benefit and so it’s very difficult for them to imagine a program where they would create those incentives.

Inez Stepman:

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Yeah, that’s connected to this concept of neutrality, that policy must be made on a neutral basis and without regard to who your friends are, who your enemies are. Without regard to who you want to support and deliver a real benefit to. So you’ve written on how this neutrality is essentially a myth and it hasn’t existed, and that it was used only to unilaterally disarm one side of the actual heart of the values battle, the actual positive advancement of some actual content. Not something that’s purely procedural or neutral, but actual moral and ideological content. I guess, what do you think? Because the difficulty with that and I’m wholly in agreement with this concept, but then it does seem to get real difficult very quickly because we already are such a diverse society. I mean that in the direct way. Even something like religion, when you go back, there’s very strong… Essentially there was a soft Protestant establishment in the United States, and people get mad at me when I say that but it was absolutely true. And I don’t just mean that the states actually many of them had established Protestant churches, Congregationalists, et cetera.

But even after that point, we had a soft Protestant establishment that was essentially, so in the common schools, broken by the advent of Catholic immigration. And with every successive addition to the American fabric, which is now very much actually diverse. Let’s stick with the least controversial of these diversities, which is religious diversity. It’s very hard to actually… the content that was considered neutral, which never was, was a soft Protestantism. And I’m wondering whether you think it’s possible to return to that soft Protestantism and that content or whether… I mean because it seems like a really difficult project to find. Everyone agrees there must be something here in common, but we may not have anything unless it’s at such a high level of abstraction that it ceases to actually be powerful and meaningful in common.

Auron MacIntyre:

So I don’t think we’re actually as diverse ideologically as you’re saying, or religiously. I think the dominant religion of the United States is Progressivism. I think it’s so dominant that it exists in all of our entertainment, all of our schooling, all of our media. It’s the default. It is the null hypothesis when it comes to any interaction in public life. I think the idea that we live in some ideologically diverse or religiously diverse era is pretty laughable. We’re as ideologically unified on this basis as possible, even many people on the right who don’t think of themselves as being in this camp, have onboarded vast amounts of the assumptions built around progressive liberalism. So actually I think that we already have a religion. I don’t think that, that’s particularly controversial but maybe it is.

Inez Stepman:

No, I don’t think that’s controversial. I guess I was thinking about if you were going to displace that as the default religion, it’s very difficult for the right to come up with an alternative that would actually satisfy even the different portions of the right, and even leaving aside how much the right has imbibed liberalism. I don’t know. Here I’m thinking about the fact that we are seeing a religious thaw between the different religious traditions, between Protestants and Catholics and Jews and even Hindus and Muslims to some extent. But that seems to me to be a project that’s very, very difficult to put together. If that group of people were to say, “Okay, we all disagree with the current null hypothesis,” which I agree with you is this secular progressive liberalism. What can that group of people put forward that they would all agree with as an actual content to fill that vacuum?

Auron MacIntyre:

No, I mean that’s a massive problem. This is why liberalism arose in the first place. The whole purpose of liberalism was to create the idea of these neutral institutions that would govern people who could agree to some bare minimum shared morality and would be able to operate in the marketplace. The idea was that there was a way to move beyond these conflicts of moral visions, to create some super moral infrastructure that would allow all of these groups to interact. And after all these different religious wars and things that you can understand how that’s very appealing. That makes plenty of sense. No one wants to constantly be in an existential battle over these issues. But as we saw that really this idea of neutrality was always false, like we’ve been talking about that was never the case. There was never a set of institutions that was simply making decisions based entirely on some objective criteria of efficiency, and instead it went ahead and forced its own values upon the people, through the guise of these neutral institutions. Now that the ideological overtake is so obvious, most people now realize that these things aren’t really neutral.

But they believed at some point that they were and the reason as you pointed out, is because at some point Protestantism was just the water in which Americans swam. And so things felt neutral because you had a certain level of natural cultural hegemony throughout your different institutions in the United States. So the problem is how do you return to that just organically? You probably don’t. But the other issue is do you just ignore the fact that people in all of these different communities and all these different moral bases have pretty substantial ways in which they differ on how children should be reared or how men and women should conduct themselves or how businesses should be operated, or how the criminal justice system should work? Can you just go back to ignoring this again? I think the answer is probably no. The only reason that you had that illusion of it was again, that you had that Protestantism baked in. I don’t think the right can solve this problem. Like I said, I really don’t think the right knows who they serve or how they serve them at this point.

They don’t know how their coalition is constructed, and they don’t know how they would even come to a shared definition of the good, much less figure out how they would then build that shared definition of good into a framework for all these institutions.

Inez Stepman:

So then what happens? Because your critique seems to be running deeper than… even if the right, let’s say they come up with the focus on capturing, recapturing these institutions, creating patronage networks, let’s say they know who votes for them and how to make their lives better, it still seems to me that, I think you’re right, we don’t have a shared enough vision of the good in this country to continue. But what happens then? Because it seems to me like that for example, the breakup of the United States is quite unrealistic. Maybe it gets more realistic as time goes on, but I’ve argued with other folks on this podcast before, a lot of these two sides, one is completely as we just said, fractured. And the other one is dispersed geographically. And it doesn’t seem to me to be a realistic proposition that these are actually two different nations. What they are like a scatter plot of blue cities essentially inside red territory.

I mean, where do you think we go from here if we accept that yeah, we have such radical visions, radically in some ways opposite visions of the good? How do we even come together and make politics happen? How do we form a political unit from something that fractured?

Auron MacIntyre:

Yeah. The problem you’re talking about is the most essential one, is geography. Because in the past, these problems were solved by geography. Empires existed, and empires existed generally by the central sovereign power, more or less granting satrapi to some outlying province. So you might be a subject of Rome, but you’re allowed to basically keep acting like Egyptians and worshiping the people that Egyptians worship and having the customs that Egyptians have, as long as you’re willing to kick back to Rome. You give the taxes, you get the levy and you continue on. It’s not always the case but generally, this is how empires operate and this is how people with fundamentally different values, different cultures, different moral visions, were able to still live under the control of a particular sovereignty. What we have now is a situation where the people who agree with each other don’t live next to each other. Like you said, we could live across the country and have very similar moral visions or political understandings but my neighbor next to me might have a radically different one, and the neighbor next to you might have a radically different one.

And that’s a really big problem because then you can’t really let things go back to federalism and because then you’re really divided more along the sides of urban versus rural as opposed to, it’s zip code, it’s not state. And so I think the very likely thing, and this is not… no one’s going to give me an award for the white pills here, no one’s going to be really excited about this. But the answer is, I don’t know that the right gets it together. If you don’t have a moral vision to replace progressivism, a shared moral vision that people are willing to install into these institutions and protect them against these hostile ideologies that will eventually move into them, then I just think the right doesn’t probably control national politics, which means that you might have areas, you’re going to see this, we’ve already seen it with self-sorting. We’ve already seen people moving to Florida or Texas or Tennessee to flee Covid and other developments in these other places.

You’ll probably see the federal government continue to get very bad about what it does and how it does it. It will probably continue to get more inept at enforcing its policy decisions. And while I’m with you that I doubt we’ll see a hard national divorce, I think most people who are critical of national divorce are right about the fact that it’s very unlikely that you’ll see a formal fracturing of the United States. I think the far more likely thing that will happen is the left will get so bad at governance and DC will get so inept at enforcing its dictates, that eventually the states that are able to secure some right wing governor who’s willing to push back, will simply start ignoring as much of their policies as possible.

And over time, as so is often the case with the collapse of empires, it’s not so much that there’s some formal announcement that America is over but it just turns out that the more successful states, the ones that are able to protect themselves from the complete degeneracy of Washington DC, will eventually just emerge as the winners and the federal government will have a harder and harder time imposing any changes on them.

Inez Stepman:

So that’s not the worst vision I’ve ever heard, but there are two different… and in the terms of… that actually sounds not as bad as some of the alternatives.

Auron MacIntyre:

Yeah, sure.

Inez Stepman:

But there’s two immediate questions about that that would spring to mind or challenges to that happening. One is look, the left is not Rome, they’re not satisfied with the tithing, right?

Auron MacIntyre:

Oh yeah.

Inez Stepman:

They’re not satisfied with the kickback. Florida can’t just write a check to Washington and then just succeed outside of the check, there are a myriad of ways in which Washington, still dysfunctional as it is, is able to enforce its will against states. Funny how sometimes libertarian concerns do pop back up and become relevant in totally different ways than Libertarians actually advance them. But for example, in context of what you just said, it’s very important that the red states are generally in debt to Washington, that they can’t run their budgets without federal involvement. That’s a really important problem to solve. And then the second thing is you can’t conduct a foreign policy in that kind of situation. Those were the two immediate things I was thinking of. I mean, what happens to American foreign policy in that situation?

Auron MacIntyre:

Well, American foreign policy is the machine of the empire. There’s a very clear incentive on both sides of power to keep us in forever wars and discover new and important ways in which we can deliver freedom to the frontiers. In the collapse of empires, the money’s always in the provinces. There’s a reason that we’re basically stripping our bases in the United States and emptying our armories to ship a bunch of ammunition and other weapons over to the Ukraine, to fight a proxy war. This is always late stage empire stuff. And so what’ll happen to the foreign policy of the United States, they’ll keep trying to push this global hegemon thing until it breaks. I mean, a lot of the interest in the conflict with Russia was, is Russia able to push back? And I would like to clarify here that Vladimir Putin is a very bad person. I have no affinity for Russia or Putin here. But what’s interesting in the geopolitical sense was he called the bluff of the world community.

Are they distracted enough? Are the supply chains strained enough? Is the global interdependence of commodities already so far advanced that they can’t really push back against Putin? At first, the answer would be yes. Actually they couldn’t pull it off, the oil prices, everything economic, the impact. But as Russia’s not had a lot of success in certain parts of the war, the question is ongoing. We don’t really know. It’s difficult even at this point to even get accurate reporting on what’s happening there. But I mean, you’re right that the foreign policy of the United States takes a very significant hit, and that’s really unfortunate because there’s a lot of really nasty people who would like to hurt the United States or would like to take over regional control and do very ugly things in their arenas. But if the United States is basically just willing to turn its country into some staging area for global techno capital, then one of the eventual costs that it pays is the degradation of the homeland because they’re too busy trying to affect policies somewhere out in the middle of Eastern Europe.

Inez Stepman:

Yeah. I guess, I’m not sure I agree with the framing first of all, as a proxy war but that’s an entire debate. But it seems to me that the reason that the war didn’t initially, over in three weeks. The way that well, it’s hard to know what Putin actually thought would happen, but in my view he very clearly miscalculated and thought the war would be over quite quickly because he’d be able to topple the government in Kyiv relatively quickly because there wasn’t going to be internal resistance. It seems to me that it’s not so much the United States now, now it’s the United States that’s arming Ukraine and allowing them to continue this war. But initially, I think Putin read us right. I mean I think the West dithered and didn’t actually effectively counter. And the X factor in all of this was the fact that Ukrainians didn’t act like Afghanis, that they actually did have a sense of nationality in a way that was not expected, especially by the ideology in Russia. And that doesn’t seem to me to fit your thesis then about…

So leaving aside Ukraine for a moment though, the larger question for Americans would be, does the American Empire endure abroad while completely collapsing at home? Is it possible that essentially the American empire can be the empire of woke or whatever it is, when that ideology is so unable to produce things at home? Because your thesis or your idea, the evolving power centers within the United States, where it depends on the degradation of this ideology being able to actually be competent in enforcing its will. And my question is, if it’s not competent to enforce its will in Florida, how is it going to enforce it in Ukraine or anywhere else?

Auron MacIntyre:

This is a weird thing because it actually seems hyper competent at enforcing itself outside the United States, which is odd because if you think that the United States is ground zero, that that’s confusing. But actually it’s very common for many of, especially the Commonwealth countries, to be hyper woke. Actually to go well beyond the United States in certain areas to be clear, it’s not uniform across but it’s very common for movements of the United States, BLM to suddenly emerge in places where there is no history of any child slavery or any of this stuff. And in many ways, we look at the reactions to things like the pandemic, and it’s very clear that many countries were willing to go far beyond what the United States was willing to do, even though the United States was pushing for those kinds of things at home. Part of that is because the United States, and then basically the State Department is an arm of blue America and has far more control over the satraps than it does even of regions of the United States.

To be fair, you don’t want to completely just pretend the United States is the center of the world in all issues. These things do unfold differently in different areas. There are regional concerns and reasons that they plug in, and it’s foolish to just entirely be like well, because Harvard declared it, the entire world follows it because America is the center of all policy. But when I do talk to people, I talk to people in places like Romania and they say, “No, if women can’t get abortions in Alabama, that’s the hot topic of conversation in Romania.” So when you have that cultural influence in places that should be just historically completely disconnected from these issues, I think it’s entirely reasonable for actually the wokeness to have more influence in many of these satellite nations, than it does even at home. But the questions of competence was your other one. I don’t want to talk too long there, but we can get to the competence part as well.

Inez Stepman:

No, please do. Because I go back and forth on the competence piece of this because on the one hand, this ideology seems so radically out of step with reality that it’s difficult for me to believe that they can endure with any level of competence for very long. But I mean, wealth is a great solve to that. And the United States is very, wildly wealthy by the standards of the world, and money covers for a lot of things for a long time, it seems to me. I had Aaron Sibarium on this podcast and we were talking about, we used the phrase “planes falling out of the sky.” Ultimately, this is when Delta first announced, “Oh, we’re going to do racial quotas on our pilots. Half our pilots are going to be women and a quarter of them are going to be Black by whatever, 2025 or something.” Eventually, imagine if you complete your hiring that way, you’re going to have more plane accidents, but how long is that going to take? I mean, this is just the analogy for the whole system here, planes are really well designed, they’re very expensive.

Most of flights go on autopilot. It’s a small fraction that ever go down, a smaller fraction of that is pilot error. Even if that increases, you’re talking about maybe one more airplane crash a year, and how many of those are you going to have to have before you tie together all those dots and say oh, it’s actually this affirmative action program essentially, this quota system that is causing this breakdown in competency. When as we’ve been talking about for the last 40 minutes, all of the incentives are the opposite, not to conclude that and not to speak that fact. I mean, one can easily imagine the increase of the rate of planes falling out of the sky from one year to two a year to three a year or whatever. And that process going on for a very long time before anyone is willing to say in any meaningful way, the emperor has no clothes.

Auron MacIntyre:

For those waiting for the natural snapback, you might die of boredom. The question I always get asked is, how can this go on forever? And it probably can’t eventually, but it’s a very long… There’s a lot of runway there to attach to our plane metaphor here. I mean, think about what’s already happening, think about what people are already adjusting in their expectations. You talk to people and there’s this retconning of history that’s going on. They look at the 1950s and they say, “Well, people never really owned homes and they never really had intact families and it was never like this. This is all idealized, it’s never really the case. This was never really true.” And similarly, people will adjust. You see these places where theft is very common, they’re locking Spam in anti-theft containers, this stuff and people will tell themselves the same lie oh no, they always had this stuff. There was never this mythical time where you could just walk the streets safely or you could walk into a store and expect half the stuff not to be locked behind, and have to have an assistant come over and get that.

There was never a time where shoplifters didn’t come in and take half the store while people just stared onward. That just wasn’t the case. It’s amazing what people will adjust to. And CS Lewis wrote this book,
“The Abolition of Man.” And he talks about in “The Abolition of Man,” how basically social engineers over time will adjust what you’re expecting and what you’ll get used to and how you see the world. And over time, they’re stripping the mystification out of the world and through that, they’re able to program people by adjusting their inputs and their outputs and they’re basically getting rid of everything that’s going to make people human. And once you’ve had the generation that’s completely programmed, once you’ve had the generation where every single human impulse has been stripped out of them and they’ve been completely trained on a spreadsheet, through a plan, all their natural impulses replaced by pre-programmed things that they’ve been educated into, at that point you will have actually successfully had the abolition of man because that generation won’t even know what to appeal back to at the end of the day.

They won’t even know how to look backwards into humanity because they never had that frame of reference in the first place. That’s a pretty dire vision. I don’t know if we’re completely there yet, but the process is real and it’s ongoing and we’re seeing how far we can stretch the limits of human social planning. It didn’t die with the Soviet Union, it’s alive and well today, managers are basically top-down trying to reprogram humanity into the most efficient, manageable widgets they can by shaving off basically all the bumps and bruises that make them human. And the question is, how long can you do that before the machine falls apart? Like you said, wealth is a powerful tool, it seems like we can do it for a long time. Eventually you think it’s got to fall apart, but there’s a lot of time between here and there.

Inez Stepman:

Yeah. I mean, look, the Soviet Union lasted a long time too, but let’s close with this. What’s the role of tech in all of this? Because a lot of that shaving of the bumps and bruises, and even a lot of the forgetfulness that you’re referencing, that even it seems a lot of people don’t even remember what life was like in 2019. And that seems glittered over as almost even in our memories, it seems … and I think the ’90s even more so. And I think there’s probably some story here for people exactly around, I think our ages a little older, a little younger because we remember the ’90s, but the ’90s were in some way … there’s a reason that people thought it could reach the end of history. It was a decade with enormous amount of surface level good things, enormous wealth. The culture wars were not as intense in the ’90s as they are today.

There’s a reason that the center left folks we started this podcast talking about, hearken back to the ’90s and say, “Well, why can’t we go back there?” Because on the surface of it was a very nice decade for the United States, right after the victory in the Cold War. But what role does technology play in making that forgetfulness either more or less possible? Because I could see it going either way. On the one hand, we have more video and we can share in the 24 hour news cycle and it’s harder to do anything in private. But on the other hand, it seems like we’re losing our attention span. We’re unable to understand and communicate across generations. We may not even be producing the next generation. So where is the role of technology and perhaps hyper novelty in all of this?

Auron MacIntyre:

I mean, it’s pretty massive. Mark Fisher made a good point about how we basically end up with this eternal culture because we have so many… Now with technology, all cultures available all the time in theory. So if you want to listen to pop songs from the ’70s or metal from the ’80s or Backstreet Boys in the 2000s, you don’t actually have to listen to what’s on the radio. You don’t actually have to watch what’s on TV. You don’t actually have to read when everyone else is reading or experience all the events everyone else is experiencing. You can kind of run away into these subcultures, these niches. And that’s what we’ve seen in a lot of places, as we talked about with the geographic thing. Your cultures are no longer tied to your geography. Your social experiences are no longer tied to the people around you, the people who actually make your society and the community around you function. And so because of that, it’s very difficult to actually form like a real culture.

That’s one of the reasons the ’90s feels like the last real time because it was the last decade to exist before we had this always online, always present, ability to reach backwards and experience anything we wanted at any moment. And so it’s very difficult now for us to coalesce and create something outside of what’s being piped in through all these different institutions. You can run away. If you don’t like what’s being blasted on Netflix or in your local school, you can go run away to one of these time periods but you don’t actually have to go out and create your own counterculture because there’s always some place to escape to. So that, that’s a huge part of it. The other big problem is of course, that technology constantly allows people to interact at every point with the regime propaganda. It forces them in many ways to react, interact with the regime comp propaganda. And that’s a huge problem, I think everyone recognizes the ability of this stuff to completely take over entertainment and all that stuff, and constantly people are connected to this. They get this flow of information constantly that that’s unavoidable.

Their attention spans don’t allow them to kind of do anything else but absorb the bite sized bits that are processed by the regime in its most sleek formations, but obviously this also allows counter information to get in. We have an alternative media in a way that wasn’t possible a few decades ago. You have the complete fracturing of the entertainment world in certain areas, especially when it comes to news and podcasts and that kind of thing. And so people can seek out anything culturally, but they might seek out stuff like this. And so you do have the option for people to explore ideas and solutions that were not going to be talked about on the three major cable networks or are three major broadcast networks or whatever back in the day. So technology’s got a lot of problems around what’s happening with us, it’s a lot of challenges, it creates a lot of symptoms that we’re looking at, but it does give you the opportunity to organize or introduce people to information that they otherwise, would’ve never had a chance to do so beforehand and I think that’s pretty important.

Inez Stepman:

Yeah, and you’re one of those people, so please follow Auron MacIntyre on Twitter, Substack and then his work over at The Blaze. Is there anywhere else people can find your ideas?

Auron MacIntyre:

No. The YouTube channel and the podcast and then everything goes up on The Blaze as well. So those are the best places to find me.

Inez Stepman:

Great. Well, thank you so much for spending an hour with us on High Noon. I really appreciate it, Auron.

Auron MacIntyre:

Absolutely. Thanks for having me.

Inez Stepman:

And thank you to our listeners, High Noon with Inez Stepman as a production of the Independent Women’s Forum. As always, you can send comments and questions to [email protected]. Please help us out by hitting the subscribe button and leaving us a comment or review on Apple Podcast, Acast, Google Play, YouTube or iwf.org. Be brave and we’ll see you next time on High Noon.