Paul Gottfried on Wokeism, Marxism, and Christian Nationalism

Conversations That Matter

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Welcome once again to the Conversations That Matter podcast. I'm here with Dr. Paul Godfrey who is the editor -in -chief of Chronicles Magazine which

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I encourage everyone to subscribe to Former professor of humanities at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania, and you've written

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I don't know how many books a lot teen is it 15 15 yeah And and well worth the time to read those books the latest one.

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I know is on paleo conservatism an anthology Yeah, it's like 90 bucks Yeah, that one is is vastly overpriced, but the my book on my books on fascism

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Antifascism revisions and dissents they're all published by Cornell, and they're much cheaper, okay

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So I recommend any of those books if you can't afford 90 right right so I want to talk a little bit about liberalism

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Wokeism how you conceive of these things you just wrote an article, and I think this is a good springboard

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On how Marx wasn't woke essentially and it's got a lot of attention most notably

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James Lindsay calling you an idiot and saying you didn't know what liberalism was And I'd like to just hear from you because I read the article.

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I thought it was excellent and What were you trying to what was the thesis that you were trying to communicate well one of the things

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I have that obviously has Exasperated me in recent years is that the conservative movement claims that they're fighting communism or socialism

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That's the real enemy at the same time I see The conservative movement to what there is on neo

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TV media conservatism Making its peace with gay marriage Transgendered providing the

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Republican transgender And you know talking with him about the dangers of socialism

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And it dawned on me that there are ulterior motives for this number one

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By talking about the enemy being socialism you continue a form of rhetoric that was taken over during the

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Cold War Against communism and the the right is you know fighting against socialism, which is a return to serfdom and so forth

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So what you're doing is you're telling people reassuring them to give the same enemies as before Depicting the

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Chinese as communists Rather than as as radical ruthless natural nationalists, you know, but stressing the communist

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Affiliation is also a way of keeping old associations alive. And finally,

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I think the conservative who doesn't want to fight The woke left, you know, it prefers fighting an easier enemy, which is socialism

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And they seem to ignore however, there's a close alliance between corporate capitalism and wokeness

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Now you did have people who were Marxist Claimed to be Marxist who were rich and occasionally, you know

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Expanded their wealth. I mean someone like George Soros is obviously wealthy And he's clearly on the left so that that that is possible

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But but I argue is that wokeness has a very little to do with Marxism It does use a narrative or a

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Sort of structure its narrative around the struggle of the the suffering just against the

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Virtuous people who are going to win in the end, but then this is a biblical thing that has been Recycled by any number of movements for the last few thousand years.

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So there's nothing peculiarly Marxist about this There's rather that Marx used

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Or recycled in his own way a biblical narrative that whether it's the messianic age in the

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Old Testament the the victory of Of the righteous in the

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New Testament who the followers of Christ who will win in the end This is not

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Anything peculiar to Marxism and what I do is I try to define what is the nature of wokeness?

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and You know, I say it is of the left because It is claims to be universalist it talks about Helping the downtrodden

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Which has become pretty but not not entirely but mostly a leftist theme

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And talks about equality Compensatory justice. These are all leftist themes. But once you move beyond that we're clearly not talking about Marxism Marxism is about class struggle

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Within a dialectic materialist historical framework woke ism has nothing to do with this

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Marxist in practice have been very conservative. I mean they've put homosexuals in concentration camps

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They favor traditional marital relations all the things that wokeness rejects in in the end

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Also Marxists are not Specifically anti -white, you know, you have

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Marxist to support even support nationalist movements and Marxist today

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Certainly the Communist Party's in Eastern Europe take conservative positions in Russia The the

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Communist Party or its successor party voted against gay marriage and teaching gay

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Gay doctrines in public schools. So so clearly the Marxist in the woke

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The woke agendas are very different So that that that is one argument the other the other point that I made in that article to which you yes refer is that liberalism

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Is not something which? People are now defending against wokeness

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Rather what you have is some kind of decadent liberalism liberalism in its last phase

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Represented by people who are on the cultural social left like Barry Weiss or Douglas Murray, right?

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James Lindsay, who's a Crusading atheist

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These are hardly are hardly traditional liberals certainly in the sense in which

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I use the term in my book after liberalism Which is people who favor what is a bourgeois idea of limited government?

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Limited for a restricted franchise and who accept traditional biblical views on family relations

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This is what liberals were in the 19th century They also favored academic freedom

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But up only up to a point and the point was it had to be compatible with social decency such as Thomas Jefferson Yes would be a liberal but then in Europe you have many liberals like Francois Guizot in France Who is the

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Protestant premier prime minister under under Louis Philippe in the 1830s and 1840s?

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Who wanted a restricted franchise? because he thought that most people were incapable of Exercising sound political judgment, you know, and they were not part of what he calls like class

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Capacitor the class that is capable Of exercising proper political judgment liberals did not favor feminism.

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They typically were against women to vote So I mean this to me is the liberal tradition.

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So not egalitarian Favoring a natural aristocracy of some kind right natural aristocracy and constitutional restraints on government.

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Yeah, you know and Accepting a distinction between civil society and government, which is totally broken down by now

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Yeah, I want to talk about the failures of liberalism. I want to but before I do though just to put to put to rest the

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Assertion that you don't know what you're talking about when it comes to Marxism I know you had reviewed my book for Chronicles Christianity and social justice and in that book

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I want to see if you agree with this. I tried to take a step back I started at the French Revolution as you might remember and just talk about this egalitarian impulse to flatten everything

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All the hierarchies and that this Marxism is one iteration of this right, but it's only one iteration that there are many

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Is that how you conceive of absolutely? Okay. Absolutely that there is a left broadly understood

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This is the right broadly understood And the left believes in equality and a strong government to enforce equality and they go big beyond You know giving everybody giving everybody the vote is instrumentalist it's it's it's an attempt to create a government and a pull it and a social system in which there'll be

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Redistribution of income and it typically assumes a very powerful administrative state

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They're also universalist. They do not like particularity Right like nations with a with alone friends.

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Now you have people who call themselves, you know Left -wing nationalists, but if you look at them, they're they're basically nationalists

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And you know, they're they're universalist. They're globalist the left I mean even the left that we have now and you know, which hates white people hates males hates

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Christians and whatever They still call themselves globalist because the globalism is the essence

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Of left it's it's ports ports part of its essence together with equality and ultimately

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I think with this powerful Government that engages in massive social engineering.

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So those are all features of the left the right accepts hierarchy The right accepts nationalism or particularity, right?

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It accepts gender distinctions, right? And it is generally sympathetic to Christianity So liberalism failed in your estimation, which has paved the way for woke ism

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I should probably read this is one of the closing lines in your article You say this at some point in the last 20 years the very ideal of open discussion and debate fell into disrepute

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Both in institutions of higher learning and in the media would have become a shrunken the nature liberalism was abandoned for a successor ideology woke ism that's so This is the question.

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I think a lot of people have is if liberalism as you described it has failed How do we fight back against this?

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What do you do if you're not going to use liberalism as the way to fight back? Again, yeah, what I'm saying is it's becoming more increasingly ineffective as a weapon and you know

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I think we're discussing and what do you do with universities for instance? Well, you know, they're these Organizations which are going to defend you against extreme openness

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But if you look more closely you find that they simply are made up of people who are on the left

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Right, you know and we're still essentially leftist but things, you know, things have just gone too far Right and what

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I do is they typically idolize the way the world was where universities were 20 or 30 years ago well having attended universities back in the 1960s

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Having done my graduate work at Yale and so forth. Let me assure you that they weren't that much better You know and there was there was still hostility toward the right that was very much evident and we had was simply a civil war on the left and What is losing side now want to take back power from the the more extreme left?

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So they're not going to really have open discussion. They're not going to run around hiring conservatives or even conservative libertarians

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A Conservative Christians are not going to be what they want are more people at the University of Austin which

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Barry Weiss put together there were just just Left liberals who had falling outs with people who are farther to the left and that this is what

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I mean that you cannot return To this because by the time, you know people turned on Barry Weiss It was pretty much over and she and she and her friends do not represent

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You know a an ideal of a real ideal of open discussion that is open to the right Right.

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Yeah, so, you know, I remember a few years ago. This was in 2020 at CPAC I I'll probably never go to the conference again personally, but I right

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I was still under the impression this is a very conservative conference and you know, I show up and there's a

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Transgendered person like the Miss Matt Lady Maga and they had you know Atheists for Liberty and all these different rainbow flags at the

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Tea Party USA booth There was hardly a Christian presence at all, right? There was nothing about the founders nothing and James Lindsay actually was there and I remember talking to him and he said one of the

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Things he said was interesting. He said I never thought I would be at CPAC. He says because I'm not a conservative I'm I'm more kind of like a moderate left.

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He didn't say leftist but liberal liberal liberal But of course that probably means moderate leftist today.

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It is usage so it's interesting though now he's categorized on the right and He's very accepted at a place like CPAC and the intelligent

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So so is this a crucial mistake that pale conservatives are making in?

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Alliancing themselves with this losing faction on the left. Mm -hmm. You think so? Well, it's it's losing for us because we don't agree with this

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But if you're part of the conservative establishment you want friends on the left because that's where the action the money

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That's professional advantages for you. So what you want to is you always cultivate good friends on the left and You push out or you black you you engage in gatekeeping when it comes to people on your right

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Because you don't need them really right? What do you have to worry about the right? You just need you just want friends who have influence and who are acceptable to the media the

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German words alone face comes here, there's sort of, you know people who be led into it to a salon or a party and The people on the right don't belong there.

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So from their point of view what they're doing makes perfectly good sense It's professionally useful to do this.

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They don't want me they want we want but then to you they want right they they want The people right for the

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Atlantic right or the New York Times. They want to write for the New York Times. They'd love to yeah We see this in Christianity with Russell Moore.

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Oh, yeah, David French. Yeah, and you know, I could go on You picked the two best example that I did. Yeah. Well Tim Keller's another one

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They they all write for outlets like the Washington Post the New York Times and then they just slam the very people they're supposed to represent right and that's somehow being prophetic or being winsome or one of the things that I think the

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Huge strength that you have is Explaining true authentic conservatism you call it paleo conservatism

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What's for those who just listen to Fox News or the Daily Wire? Could you break that down for?

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Specifically a Christian audience who is right wanting they're interested in protecting marriage and those kinds of things

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But they've been listening to Sean Hannity and Ben Shapiro. How do you introduce paleo conservatism?

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What is it? Well, no the word paleo conservatism is one that a term that I coined in Writing the the first edition of what became the conservative movement and I don't know whether Tom Fleming or I who's my co -author came up with that term but I think

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What it what referred to were those people on the right who resisted?

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Neoconservative takeover in the 1980s and You know, I think the term is fine, but I'm not wedded to that term, you know

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And we have a younger generation and they sometimes use is like Pedro Gonzalez assistant editor

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And he says well, we're paleo as you don't even have to use that term. They're not required

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It's my generation. We need a term. We need something to describe, right? No, but you're on the traditional, right?

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You know traditional religious right or something like that and obviously you're not going to accept, you know

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You're not going to be happy with gay marriage align yourself with Transgendered right or critical race theory now.

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I'm sure David French has no problem any of these things No, he says he's conservative too, which is the funny right, right?

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And you remember National Review wanted to run him for president in 2016. He was their choice.

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That's right Yeah, and to see where he's gone since 2000 I mean in 2015

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I don't if you remember he wrote an article for National Review defending the Confederate flag Displayed and I can send it to you

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It's in National Review It's a picture of the Confederate battle flag and he's he's defending it and and this is

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I can't even believe David French wrote it Because today that would be considered so on the right that he would want to run from it

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Well, they do move very fast to the left. Yeah That breakneck speed right, but but the whole pale I mean some younger conservatives as you just mentioned they don't use paleo, but they'll say something like I'm a

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I'm based I'm a based conservative. That's a new term or they just want to distinguish themselves from these compromisers

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What's the the essence though of whatever that is whether it's paleo conservatism or there's another term?

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You described some of it, but there's a rootedness It seems to it that's much richer and deeper than the neoconservative, right?

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No, no, it's it's it's it's richer because these are the people who are defending an older conservatism

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Not necessarily the conservatism of Bill Buckley and National Review You know even in the 50s and 60s some of them were defending the conservatism of the 1930s, you know

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And you know become part of this coalition But in any case they rejected what the neoconservatives were doing which was basically making an alliance with the left

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Excluding people who've been part of the conservative movement before Demeaning the southern heritage

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You know, why would you do this? These people were were integral parts of the conservative movement. They always have been right

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Why are you kicking them out? and then of course trying to build bridges to the left And committing the

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United States to a global democratic foreign policy, which I thought was sheer insanity That that that's why they went after me and destroyed me professionally because I dared to Challenge their their

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Their globalist and neo -wilsonian foreign policy. It was that was not another issues It was it actually it started that late later on what they do is they tar their opponents as anti -semites or Racist or some the the war was pretty much over for and and it's interesting that so you get served now you get

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Neo -isolationism people who want to restrain foreign policy all these things are acceptable

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And it's in a certain part of the right even in the conservative movement You can say these things you couldn't say them back in the 1980s when the neocons were taking over So do you have hope then it sounds like you might yeah have some hope for the movement

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You know, I I do have hope for the populist. Yeah elements of the younger younger people who are populist

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I wish them well, and they tend to be more conservative on social cultural issues just about everything on all these other things and Basically, they see themselves in alliance with but I suppose it's predominantly white working -class they don't exclude other people, but it's white working -class in America and You know, it's traditional religious cultural base

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So there are cultural social conservatives who also On economic positions are not really allied to corporate capitalism or the

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Wall Street Journal View of what's good for America, right? Well, you know one of the things and I want to close with this is

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Because it because what you've said I think is so important for people to start exploring some of the you've written books on this

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Chronicles Talks about this When I discovered some of this it was like I was fulfilled in a way that I hadn't been before right everything else seems so flat on the political, right

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But we have we're in a dire Position right now trying to resist this woke incursion.

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This is right herbal and the assumption that a lot of conservatives people self -proclaims conservatives seem to take is that And evangelicals in particular is that you know, this is gonna get so crazy

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People are just going to abandon it as if the moderates in the center are going to Restore order and reject woke ism, and I don't see that happening anywhere

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It always seems like it's like the rainbow. It's right around the bend You know the next innovation of the left is the last one they'll have because we'll realize we'll be on to them

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You've said something in a recent interview You said that the change never comes from the center and I just wanted you to expand on that a little where does the change?

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Come from for if you want to you know resist this well I mean the change the change in this case is going to come from two sources

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One is going to be the right and you need a right that hangs tough that that you know These are our principles, but we do not accept gay marriage.

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This is an utter perversion of marriage This transgendered people are are mentally ill, you know

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Dysphoria is like my son is a physician. Is it you know, it's like telling somebody that It has

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I've one extra arm cut one of my arms off for these people obviously need all kinds of spiritual mental counseling, but to treat them, you know as Respected victims of society or people have special is insane

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Anti -white racism has to be ended and You know people have Confederate flags, there's proud son fine

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You know as I say blacks may have a different historical narrative from from whites. That doesn't mean we have to cancel the whites narrative there, you know the

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Southern whites have at least is the same They're more of they have the same and they've been in this country or they certainly have the same rights as black people do

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They the same right to their history the same right to honor their ancestors So, I mean all all of this has to be ended

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I would argue this this double standard Against white people against white Christians against Southerners.

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It's all has to be ended and Attempts to pull down monuments this all of all of this has to be treated as criminal activity

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By organized vandals and by the way, I consider this to be every bit as dangerous as what the

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Nazis did in Germany I see very little difference And they just get away with it again and again with riots anything they wanted this has to be ended

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And there is no reason to apologize for it. I also don't believe that That Americans have to weep over January 6th

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I think still this narrative has been blown up in order to justify giving more power to police state against the rest of us

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Yeah, so but the other the other thing that I think we can count at some point

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The left is going to fall apart Because of the incompatible elements that make up that make up the the the left.

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I don't see Muslims Muslim fundamentalist and homosexuals in any kind of long -term alliance or black nationalists and feminists

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But none of this makes any sense to me. All that holds them together is hate They hate normal white male

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Christians or something and that's intersectionality right there. It's just a complicated Complicated nonsense,

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I mean and it is going to fall apart the right though has to hang tough in the in the meantime don't make any concessions and Make it very clear to the to the

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American people and this is going on in Europe, by the way in Western Europe in Canada As well as well as in the United States make it clear.

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This is our position, you know, and we're not going to compromise Yeah, and if they you know, it's they're gonna get a lot worse

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We haven't even seen it and they're gonna rig elections and do everything else You know if they if they can get away with this, but I think it has to bet

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I think that's something there'll be a breaking point. I also think a point will come when even these

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Soccer moms will become annoyed. Oh, yeah Yeah, I mean, you know, I I don't believe deeply in their morality or political capacities

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But at some point, you know, their family lives are going to be well moms for liberties already, right some of that Yeah, yeah

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One of the things that I just thought of as you were describing that in the Christian world is Christian nationalism Nature reports a vacuum and when we are leaderless it seems to me that the

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Christian nationalism movement is rising up to fill that vacuum and Tried to restore some of these things that have that you're talking about like they're very aggressive stands on marriage

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Stephen Wolfe You know is one of the leaders in that and I don't we don't have time to get your full take on Christian nationalism, but I'm do you see hope in things like that that these are the things that are going to push back?

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Yeah, well the I assume the Catholic and Protestant Christian nationalists are divided Okay, but but the the

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Protestant ones make more sense because America's found that it's a Protestant country, right? Right. So I mean it has to the circles back to the origins of the country but I you know,

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I I think that there is a good chance for for this to to make headway and I think there is a lot of room on the right on the real right not not on you know

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Ben Shapiro and Sean Hannity, but in the real right I think there is there's room for more movements

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And I think they can cooperate, you know, the populist and the Christian nationalists can cooperate But the most important thing is not to make concessions to the left

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Right. No, no more concessions and you have to just hang tough. These are our positions. Yeah.