Today’s guest is Eric Kaufmann who is a Professor of Political Science at Birkbeck College at London University. The last time Eric was a guest on this podcast, in june 2021, we focused our discussion on his book Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities (Allen Lane 2018). It’s about the demographic change of the Western world, about the reactions this gives rise to, about right-wing populism and its opposite, left-wing modernism. A great read, so go read it if you haven’t already. And listen to the podcast we did then.
Today we talk more about the threats to academic freedom, and what can be done about it. This is something Eric has been working on a lot lately (read here and here and listen here, for example), and he’s been vocal in defense of the new Freedom of Speech Bill which the Tory government in Britain proposed recently.
He argues that the right need to be more active in combating the left's institutional takeover, which are happening at basically all major institutions. Not only in academia, but in government agencies and private companies as well. It’s not enough to take a step back. Conservatives need to use governmental power to protect individual freedoms from increasingly dogmatic institutions. It’s a tough pill to swallow for many liberally minded conservatives whose ideas of the world were formed during the cold war. But the right needs to rethink how they use political tools.
I have to say it was a delight to talk to Eric again, and the podcast could have been much longer. I will probably bug him enough to come back again in the future.
If you enjoyed our talk give him a follow on Twitter and check him out at Sneps.net where all his public talks and writings are collected.
(This is a rerun. The interview was originally posted in December 2022.)
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