- Prudence means being sensible,
thinking carefully through
what will this mean for the community,
what will it mean for the next generation?
See, what the West has really done
is robbed its children
and its grandchildren
of the things that
we've taken for granted.
(intense gentle music)
- I'm Dave Rubin and this
is "The Rubin Report."
As long as you're here,
don't forget to click
that little subscribe button
and tap that bell over there
so that you actually see
our videos, crazy, I know.
All right, joining me today
is the former Deputy Prime
Minister of Australia,
a relentless fighter for freedom
and the host of "Conversations
with John," John Anderson.
Welcome to "The Rubin Report."
- Great to be with you,
Dave, it really is.
- I am very happy to have you here
because I'll start by
saying that something
that I'd never have told you in person
even though we've met a couple of times,
you reached out to me
about three years ago,
right when we built this studio
and the show was taking off.
There was a nice little
bump in what we were doing.
And you reached out to me or
your people reached out to me
and said, "John Anderson,
former Deputy Prime Minister
"of Australia would like to chat with you.
"He's coming to LA."
And it was really the
first time that I thought,
whoa, this thing is
seriously international,
that the conversations that I'm having
are seriously important,
and we had a great breakfast
where we talked about freedom.
- Yeah, we did.
- Conversation and all of those things,
and since we've done a
couple of events together.
So I guess my first question is,
you've been in this fight for a long time.
When did you start becoming aware
that there was something worldwide
around having decent conversations,
that was sort of becoming the new way
of going about discourse?
- Well, in my initial sort of concerns
around freedom were largely economic.
So, I was part of a coalition
government in Australia
from 1996 to 2007, and we
were a reforming government.
Our emphasis on freedom
was economic freedom
so that we would not pass on debt burdens
and lack of opportunities to young people,
and that was my focus.
I think for me it was after
the great financial crisis
and you saw the blame game
started to really play out,
and I started to see that we needed
to make major adjustments
to the way we run our
economies in the West.
They're all hopelessly indebted,
with the exception of a
few places like Australia,
but we wouldn't do it, we
wouldn't own what we'd done.
And you started to see the
shouting become very shrill.
Now it hadn't started then,
but you asked when I started to realize
this is a real problem.
It was about that point
because I started to see
that actually understood
properly in democracies,
government's downstream of
culture and so is economics.
And the whole Lehman Brothers collapse
was about a collapsing standards,
but again you didn't have a grappling
with what had gone on in
terms of the ethics of it.
Bankers instead of
saying what should I do,
how should I behave, rather
what can I get away with,
how can I build a bigger bundle for me
and for those around
me, and hang the people
who bank with us and who
trusted us and rely on us.
I started to think this
is getting really serious,
but then it was the nature of the debate,
because it wasn't a debate anymore.
Now you can't get good public policy
without a good debate, and
you can't have a good debate
without a reasonable degree of respect
for the other person's
dignity and standing.
- So, it's interesting, because
I was a struggling stand-up
when Lehman Brothers crashed,
and I used to work at a comedy club
handing out tickets in Times
Square right on the corner.
I think it was either
50th or 51st and Broadway.
That's where the Lehman
Brothers building was.
It was this huge lit up massive
digital display building.
And I remember when it went down.
It seems like another lifetime ago.
But what's it like to be
one of the guys going,
"Hey, everybody, we're about
to go off a cliff here."
I mean, that's not what
politicians wanna do.
They wanna always give everybody
all the things that they want.
- That's part of the problem.
There is no doubt we need to understand
that a lot of this rot
started in the 1960s.
We gave up talking about the
big sort of metanarratives.
Who am I, what am I, where do I fit,
how does the world work?
It's all too hard, and you
can understand that in a way.
We've seen horrific wars, we've
seen the Great Depression.
Let's live for us now.
And in an age of cheap credit,
we started to rack up debt
right across the Western world.
It's not as if I'm
singling out one country,
your country or my
country, we're all into it.
- We've all done it.
- We've all done it.
And here's the rub.
In a democracy, so you can
say to Mr. Congressman,
"Now listen, I'll give you my vote
"if you promise me X, Y, or Z."
And Mr. Congressman
might know instinctively
if he knows his stuff.
You wonder how many of them,
well, I shouldn't single
out American congressmen,
but a lot of politicians don't
know as much as they should.
They might if they're honest, say,
"Look, that is not a good way to do it.
"We can't afford it.
"It'll come against your
children and your grandchildren."
Unfunded liabilities have
turned out to be a nightmare,
but we've said, "No, no,
you don't get out of it.
"All right, I'll give it to you
"'cause it's on the never never."
And kings from of old have known
that until the credit runs out,
you could live pretty well.
But when the credit does run out,
it's a very different story.
So it really I think it
has its genesis in the '60s
and this idea that it's all about me,
I will do what I like with my life,
et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
We abandoned the Golden Rule,
do unto others as you'd
have them do unto you.
It's all about me.
Now of course, most people
don't live like that,
but that became the sort
of prevailing ethos.
- Right, we would never live like that
in our own lives, right?
I mean, sometimes you do.
Most of us have been in debt at some point
or racked up too much credit
card stuff or whatever it is,
but you would never just, well, you can't.
I mean, that's the thing.
As an individual, you can't
just keep getting more credit
as you keep not paying things,
but somehow in governments,
we seem to be able to do that.
- Well, I think that
it takes two to tango.
I think the electorate,
the voters if you like,
have demanded too much,
but politicians who
should have known better
right across the West have not
been prudent enough either.
And there's an old-fashioned
word called prudence.
It was a classic virtue.
It went along with integrity and courage
and all of those other ones,
and prudence disappeared.
And the story of Lehman
Brothers in many ways
is the disappearance of prudence.
Prudence means being sensible,
thinking carefully through
what will this mean for the community,
what will that mean for
the the next generation?
See, what the West has really done
has robbed its children
and its grandchildren
of the things that
we've taken for granted.
Look, I don't know what privilege is
because you can adjust it a thousand ways,
but as I understand it, I
think you and I would both say
we're very, very fortunate people.
We've grown up in free society,
we've never really
wanted and and so forth,
but those things should
never be taken for granted.
- Do you see a direct
connection then between a stop,
no longer asking the big
questions in the '60s,
to then directly to, well,
politicians then just say,
"Here's more, here's more,
here's more, here's more,"
because the people no
longer have the tools
to understand why that's
actually not good.
That actually really explains
what's happening here in America, I think.
- Yeah, well, I do think that.
I really do think that.
I think we are paying a terrible price,
as my personal view, for washing out.
You see, I think for a long time,
I don't think, and
particularly in my country,
it was ever particularly religious,
but there was an idea
that broadly speaking,
the Christian view of the
world, love your neighbor,
you're accountable to a higher authority,
you may dislike your neighbor,
but they still have value
and worth and dignity
and I have to respect
that, broadly seen as true.
Then it just became seen
as one of many truths.
Now, of course, we know
there's open hostility
to traditional underlying
beliefs in the West
on the part of, I don't
know what you call them.
Do you call them a lot
of the intelligentsia,
or the politically correct,
or the people who have the
microphones, or the elites,
or whatever word you want to use,
there's enormous
hostility there that says,
"This stuff is dangerous,
"and you shouldn't expose
your children to it."
But what's the substitute?
What are we putting up instead?
The idea of radical autonomy?
I will hazard a guess
that you would understand
exactly what I mean if I said to you
I don't think you ever
find yourself in yourself.
You actually find yourself by
relating to and serving others
and being considerate,
and in looking to see
where you can make a difference,
not just for yourself all the time.
Self-centeredness just destroys.
- Well, that's the, I guess,
real irony of the situation.
As we've removed some of
these traditional beliefs,
we've replaced them with
authoritarian movements.
They don't seem to be
replaced by freer movements.
If there was something so wrong
with them, you would think,
all right, well, then
freedom will replace them.
But no, it seems to
always go the other way.
- Well, very much so.
I'm a great believer in the freedoms,
so I don't think you
can ever unbundle them.
We've had a debate in Australia,
what's the first freedom?
And people say, "Well, obviously,
it's freedom of speech,"
they say, "because that's the one
"by which you defend
all the other freedoms."
But I think I want to
join with Frank Furedi.
And that's an interesting story in itself.
I would be seen as broadly speaking
classic liberal stroke conservative.
He would not, he was a
student radical in the '60s,
wonderful, delightful man.
If you've not had him on,
sometime you should get him.
- No, I haven't.
- Frank Furedi, Kent University.
But he would say, if I said to him,
I did, I said to him, "Do
you think freedom of speech
"is the the first freedom?"
He said, "No, no, no, no."
He said, "You should understand,
"with your Christian convictions,
"that actually it was
freedom of conscience."
Our forebears were burning
one another at the stake,
a dreadful, cruel, appalling thing to do
to another human being, because
they had a minority view.
And after a while, people sort of said,
"Well, this isn't very consistent
with Christian charity,
"and it's pretty
barbaric, and it's stupid,
"because a person with
a minority view today
"that we burn at the stake
"may in fact be part
of a movement tomorrow
"will be in the majority."
- Do you sense that's sort of
where we're heading right now?
- That's where I'm going.
It really worries me.
There's an aura of triumphalism.
I think Douglas Murray's these is right.
You've had a whole series of
movements to correct things
that have needed correcting in the West,
and by the way, what
system delivers the ability
to peacefully correct
things that are wrong
better than liberal
participatory democracy?
And you think of the civil rights movement
and that incredible speech.
I look forward to the day
when my children are judged
by the content of their character,
not the color of their skin.
So all of these movements, I
mean, I have three daughters.
It's incredibly important to me
that they're paid properly for their work
or whatever it happens to be.
As Douglas Murray says,
that train has moved
with a lot of cabooses in its
carriage under the platform.
It's starting to slow down.
We've made tremendous progress.
If you like, in Martin Luther's language,
those who have been
marginalized and sidelined
have been allowed to join the citizenry,
and all of a sudden the
train, the governor's let go,
and just when you're getting
close to the station,
it's taken off.
- So how do you untether
people from that then, right?
So I've heard Douglas talk about this,
I've discussed it with him,
but how do you then untether people
from the idea that they're still oppressed
when they're no longer oppressed,
if oppression can be
used to control people?
That's a pretty addicting
feeling right there.
- Well, this is the great problem I think
of victimhood politics.
Now a way a good friend of mine
from the left in Australia,
a very noble old classic
sort of Australian socialist,
and I've always regarded him
as a man of noble intent,
and he said, "Look, we were
about in the labor movement
"universalism, so if someone
was oppressed or sidelined,
"or not being looked after properly,
"the idea was to elevate their status
"so they were part of the citizenry."
That's what Martin Luther King
was trying to do in this country.
But now we've created a new
caste system, a new aristocracy.
So a victim often self-proclaimed,
will say, "I've got all
of these grievances,
"and I'm owed, and I
need those addressed."
And society's left saying,
"Well, if we say sorry
"and try and meet them, I hope
you'll appreciate it, but no,
"they'll say, 'We were owed,'
"if you don't then you
confirm their victimhood
"and you're a hater or
a racist or a whatever."
But here's the rub, if your
power comes from being a victim,
you have every interest in ensuring
that your victimhood is never addressed,
that you remain a victim.
- And that's why you can't
untether it from that train.
- Well, I actually cannot say to you
I think this is proving to
be such an unsatisfactory
philosophy for people
who find themselves...
The rush for a university student,
"Oh, I'm a victim, I'm owed,
"but as I think it through, I think,"
and you and I have seen this,
I think there's a lot of people realizing
that's not very sustaining,
and in the end, "I don't
want to be a victim.
"I want to be a full member of a community
"and I wanna pull my weight."
And we've got to play
to the better angels.
- Isn't it funny that we know in real life
when you're around friends or family,
people that you socialize with,
nobody wants to be around a victim.
Nobody wants to be around someone
endlessly complaining all the time.
You want to be around
people that impress you,
that inspire you, that make you laugh,
that have joy in the world,
that can share something good with you.
And yet somehow a
movement has been created
that somehow seems sexy based on something
that is so anti how any of us,
if we really thought about our lives,
would ever really want to be.
- Let's be clear, and I think
you and I would agree on this,
there are people who have
very legitimate grievances.
- Absolutely, absolutely.
- The people Martin Luther
King was talking about,
if I can say this in your country
as somebody who's not American,
those grievances were deep
and real and raw and horrible,
for anybody who has studied
Jimmy Crow and what happened,
and then it's extraordinary.
I hope you don't mind me saying that
in your country as your visitor.
- No, of course, well,
you're saying the truth.
- But do you stay there?
I mean, the whole point is
to lift yourself out of it
and join the rest of the community.
Again, they'll hack me to death,
I know everybody talks about it,
but Kennedy asked not what
your country can do for you,
but what you can do for your country.
We've reversed it.
We've reversed the idea of citizenship.
So now we say, "I demand
my country meet my needs."
But as you say, you
don't wanna stay there.
One of the most remarkable
men in Australia,
he's just retired, he's
a very old man now,
was the man Frank Lloyd, behind Westfield,
I see them even here in
America, shopping centers.
- [Dave] Huh, yeah we've
got one right here.
- Now his whole family,
he escaped the Holocaust,
but his family was wiped out.
He was a little boy one day,
watched his father go off to
work and he never came back.
And he talks about how
he sat in the window
day after day after day, sat by the window
waiting for dad to come home.
Dad never did.
- Geeze.
- And the whole Holocaust
thing, and that was appalling.
I mean, how any human being could do
what the Nazis did to other human beings
is beyond my comprehension.
But if a man like that had
spent the rest of his life
saying, "I am a victim, I'm
owed, fix up my victimhood,"
now I feel deeply for
what he went through,
but I respect him hugely for saying,
"I'm not going to play the victim card."
And he's gone out and created jobs
for goodness only knows
how many Australians.
I see shopping centers here in America,
and so it's been a success story.
And we can sympathize
with what he went through,
but we can delight in the fact
that he has chosen to be a
positive forward-looking person,
and if you like has
confronted those demons
by rising above them
and denying them oxygen,
if I can put it that way.
- Yeah, before we go too far
down the political rabbit hole,
because I can sense where the richness
of this conversation is,
I just want to talk about
your story a little bit.
You come from a
sixth-generation farming family,
and somehow went into politics.
Can you explain a little bit of that?
- Yeah, Scottish ancestry,
which is very common
in rural Australia,
and in rural Australia,
farming and grazing was the way to go.
It's a rough country to farm in
because of the unreliable climate.
Scots were very good at it
because Scotland is poor
land and a rough climate.
And so my family's had...
If I've done one brilliant thing,
I chose my parents well
though in Scotland.
- (laughing) Good move, good move.
- The thing is, so I've
been very fortunate.
I've seen them go through
terrible ups and downs.
My family was decimated by both
the first and second World War
because Australia was
deeply integrated in both.
Double the number of Australians died
in the first World War as did Americans.
It was extraordinary
the level of engagement.
International affairs
of Australia's taken up
even when it was very young.
But yeah, I went to school
and University in Sydney,
and I had never contemplated
a political career,
although I was always
fascinated by the great debates
and a voice in our society
as a result of fierce debates
that are not personalized at their best.
We're the result of a
clash of great ideas.
Look at the debates that went into
the independence of America, the thinking,
the depth of understanding,
the belief in the worth
and dignity of all,
which is where your freedom motif
I believe comes from in this country.
But I was literally headhunted
by a retiring federal member
at the precocious age of 27.
(Dave laughs)
He said, "I'm going to retire,
"and I think you should
have a go in my place,"
and I said, "Well, that's a..."
- What did he see in
you, if you were coming
from a farming family?
What did he know about you that he thought
this guy could do it?
- Well, that's an interesting
question in a way,
and I can answer it honestly.
I'd been at a public meeting
where he'd said something about,
he was from the conservative
side of politics,
he'd said something about
the left side of politics,
and I thought he'd
completely missed the point.
So I stood up and remonstrated
firmly but not personally,
and he actually said to me,
"I think you should have a go
"because you said something,
"I said something you disagreed with,
"and you took it up in a good-humored,
"but effective way, without attacking me."
That's what he actually said to me.
- And that's basically
what your guiding principle
has been throughout politics
and now even out of politics.
I mean, you're having conversations.
Jordan and I sat down
with you for your show,
which was in front of
a live group of people,
and it was exactly this.
It was exactly let's
work through this stuff
instead of breaking each other's backs.
- Well, I've just always
deeply, deeply believed,
and it stems from my Christian belief,
that it's not for me to judge others.
It is for me to engage
in the contest of ideas,
and I oughta believe passionately
in a vigorous debate.
Our Parliament in Australia
is very adversarial,
and people often complain about it.
And I say, "Look, let's split
this into its two components.
"You actually want your parliamentarians
"to believe in things deeply,
"and there ought to be a great clash
"over people's versions of how best
"to take the place forward.
"What you're really objecting to, I hope,
"is not that clash of ideas,
but when it's personalized,
"when people give or take offense."
I've just never seen the point of it.
I've never seen that it's
taken anybody anywhere.
- Do you sense that one side of the aisle
is better at that than another?
- Yeah, absolutely, I'm
really starting to sense--
- Do you think there's a reason for that,
like a deep reason for that?
- Yeah, I do, I think Douglas Murray
may have tapped it again as well,
and I think it's getting
worse, not better.
A very clear thinking person from the left
said to me quite recently, he said,
"I was quite deep into
my life before I realized
"conservatives could be nice people."
He said, "I'm from the left,"
and he just looked me straight
in the eye and he said,
"John, understand there's
a fair bit of truth
"in the old saying that
the right thinks the left
"is misguided, but the left
thinks the right is evil."
- Dennis Prager, I quote it constantly.
- Actually, it wasn't
him who said that to me.
- It wasn't?
- No, it wasn't.
- I've been quoting his quote forever.
- No?
- Yeah.
Oh, someone else said it to you.
- And he might have been
reflecting what Dennis said.
I don't know, but I hadn't
heard that connection.
No, it was another another
person and he said it to me.
Then I think you look at David
Goodhart's work on Brexit,
he brings that out again.
He says the families from the left
will do almost anything
to stop their children
relating to and marrying somebody
from the other side of politics,
whereas someone from the conservative end
tends to be quite relaxed and accepting
of somebody of different views.
And here's where I think,
and I don't want to misrepresent him,
but I think Douglas Murray makes the point
that in the current context,
the lack of logic and
intellectual sort of underpinning
for the positioning that much
of the left now dots on issues
means that they have to demonize others
rather than get into a debate about them.
- Well, it's pretty easy
if you can just say they're a Nazi.
That's a lot easier than
going into the philosophical
underpinnings of what you think.
- Isn't it fascinating the way
people bandy the word fascism around?
Now, I've studied enough in university.
I'm not a bright bear,
I don't pretend to be.
As I said, the only
really smart thing I did
was choose Australian parents.
(laughing)
But I do know what a fascist is,
and I do know its origins
and its underpinnings,
and so the left pin this label of fascism
on people in a way that reflects
that they're not interested at all
in any exactitude in language.
In fact, I would say
ambivalence in language
has emerged as the
postmodernist best friend.
It's becoming very hard to have a debate,
not only because of the labels
that are bandied around,
but the way in which words no longer mean
what they should mean.
So our national broadcaster
never stops talking
about the importance of diversity.
The trouble is they don't believe in it,
so they'll make sure
that, yes, you can go,
that they've got every gender.
How many are there?
- Well, it depends what
time it is, I'll check.
- And if they haven't found one to fit,
and I don't want to be flippant about it,
and I shouldn't be flippant,
but in all honesty,
what you will find is that diversity
means anything except
difference in perspectives,
in political perspectives.
So diversity, what does
it really mean now?
And this is a great problem,
very hard to debate,
when not only is language
used to demonize others,
it's used to confuse the argument
to make sure you're not able
to talk on a liberal platform.
- So I know we could
probably spend all day
talking about the the frustrations
that say classical liberals
or conservatives have with leftism.
- We're falling into the
trap of the great fun
of reinforcing one another's grievance.
- I know, so exactly, so I'm
gonna move us out of that.
Watch what I'm gonna do
here, watch the move.
The move is, well, then
what what can conservatives,
say Christian conservatives
or classical liberals,
people that are more
liberty-minded in general,
what can they do right now to make sure
that they don't lose those ideals?
Because we are agreed that
we are facing something
that is pretty bad, and it's
not really rooted in reality
or a consistent philosophical outlook.
So I think there's a tendency sometimes
to go to our worst side, too,
to fight that.
- Yes, oh, there is.
- What do you think we can do,
maybe from a religious perspective,
you could give me an answer on that?
- Look, I think the first thing I'd say
is that we need to practice what we preach
in the sense that we
shouldn't demonize others.
Demonize the ideas, that's different.
I think we should probably
try and see civility
as not just meaning Dave
and John talk politely,
and I don't criticize the way
you hold your knife and fork when you eat.
(laughing)
At least not publicly.
- Not publicly.
(laughing)
- But it means much more--
- That's not a knife.
(laughing)
- It was gonna get in here
somehow one way or another.
- Yeah, I should tell you one of...
I'll come back to that.
- We'll get to that.
I've got several Crocodile
Dundee questions here,
don't worry.
(laughing)
- I think we need to
see civility, actually,
as a tough-minded virtue that says,
picking up on the old
Evelyn Beatrice Hall idea,
that I may disagree with you,
but I'll defend to the
death your right to say it.
It implies two things,
I'll respect you enough
to say you have a right to
put your ideas on the table,
and then the ideas are the issue
because that's where we'll
get the best way forward.
It's not for me to demonize you.
I don't like your ideas, but
absolutely you got the right
to put them on the table.
Let's thrash those out.
Now, it's an unequal playing ground
because that's not the way
the game is being played
at the moment, but I don't see any option,
and even people like Gandhi
kind of got that, didn't he?
I mean, it's about forgiveness,
that's something's washing
out of our culture.
I don't know how relationships ever work
if we can't forgive, and I
think we have to be prepared
to practice that, and say,
"Look, it's okay, I'm sorry.
"I was offended, but that
doesn't matter, let's move on,"
rather than this perpetual,
"I will carry the offense to the grave."
And that's the other great
problem we've got in our culture
because even if you can
try and forgive now,
you can't forget because social media
has stored up absolutely everything.
- So that's also the interesting part,
is that the asymmetry of the rules I think
is what's becoming harder
and harder for conservatives.
So for example, Justin Trudeau
can show up in blackface.
I don't think most people
think he's a true racist
by any stretch, he did something stupid.
Times change, all of those things.
We've had the governor
here, Ralph Northam,
also blackface 30 years
ago, but he's a Democrat,
and the point is that they
are both still in power.
Well, we know if these were conservatives
or Republicans or whatever,
they would be destroyed.
- They would be, I think
that's a really good example.
- Well, because of that then
we see the conservatives
going, "No, we have to destroy them, too."
I think that's the impulse
that you're saying,
no, we have to fight that impulse.
- Yeah, I believe that's right.
I mean, I think there the
point would be to go to the,
frankly, the hypocrisy
of it and highlight that,
but to try and avoid doing...
The triumphalism, remember the lessons
when we stopped burning
one another at the stake.
At the heart of this unique model
of Western harmony where we learn to live
with one another's deepest differences
was a willingness to respect
another person's conscience
and let them live truly to that conscience
as long as they are not
damaging other people,
and I don't mean by that
occasionally offending people.
This idea that you can't give offense,
that is a way to shut down
debate if ever there was,
and if I'm honest about my life,
the times in which I've
grown have been the times
when I've been grossly offended
because somebody else has
told me something about me
I haven't wanted to hear, and
I've had to grow out of it.
Jonathan Hart makes that point.
We tell our kids, we
bring them up to believe
that what doesn't kill
you will make you weaker.
He says actually we
need to build resilience
and when we get the setbacks,
we've got to learn from them
and not just be like a plastic cup
that you drop on the floor
and recovers its shape.
We actually need to be people
when we've had a setback who grow.
He calls it anti-fragility, and
our parents and grandparents
believed that and look at
what the great generation is,
as you call them in this
country, went through.
- So is that then just all
then a function of our success?
You're right, our parents and
grandparents went through it,
grandparents particularly, at
least in an American context,
and because of that, because
of that grit and fight,
that then they sort of got
us to unprecedented wealth,
a growing middle class
in the United States,
and what happened?
Well, we got participation trophies.
- Yeah, I think you may be right.
I mean, I grew up with a father
who had a horrendous Second World War,
and I was born quite late in his life,
and so I always lived
with a man had seen war.
He volunteered, hated it,
could never talk of it,
was almost killed in the
campaign against Rommel
in the Western Desert,
and that's shaped me.
But then I'm conscious that I had a desire
with my four children to
want a snowplow for them.
The tendency was there, I
wanted to remove every obstacle
in a way that my father didn't try for me.
He knew instinctively
that a few challenges
were a good thing for
me, and I knew that, too,
but I had to pull myself back.
It was the instinct all the time
was to make it soft and easy.
And I think Jonathan Hart's
right, it doesn't work,
and he goes on to say that
we either encourage children
to trust their feelings, your
feelings are always right.
We know that's not right.
You have to think things through.
Your feelings must accord with reality.
It's just dangerous to feel something.
I feel that water would be nice
and that the signs saying
that there are sharks in there
shouldn't get in the way
of me having a good swim.
And then the other one, this
problem that gets to the heart
of what we're talking about,
we teach our children
that the dividing line
between good and bad is between people
or that life is a battle
between good and bad people.
That's a disaster, it's a disaster.
- Yeah, most people on the other side
believe that they are good, too.
They may be wrong.
- Well, not only that,
we're all a mixture.
And why can't we go on a journey?
You write quite a bit about
how you've been on a journey politically.
Well, isn't that a good thing,
to think things through and
to learn from your mistakes?
Forgive me, it's not for me to say
that you've made mistakes or
whatever, but I know I have.
- I have absolutely made
mistakes, I promise you.
- Yeah, but you're not allowed
to know in the lexicon,
of those who hold the
microphones in our society.
And you see that with social media.
- Yeah, the thing we were
talking about earlier,
you make a mistake and
it's brought up against you
30 years later to keep
you out of public office,
when you might have grown
enormously as a human being,
and you might have asked those
that you hurt or that you misjudged,
whatever mistakes you
made, for forgiveness.
You've grown enormously
and you've come to a different place.
Why should we not respect that?
- Do you think oddly though
that the end of secularism
leads us to that place of unforgiveness?
Do you think that is sort of
what you were talking about earlier,
that if you remove all of whatever
traditional belief there is,
that you will end up in a place
that will be so subjective
that how would forgiveness
even make sense in that world?
That sort of seems to me where
we're sort of at the moment.
- I mean, this is a great thing now.
It's all about power,
everyone talks about power.
It's very inadequate.
Douglas Murray says this.
If you'd walk up to most
people on the street
and say, "What matters to you
most," they won't say power.
They'll talk about love,
they'll talk about
relationship and so forth.
But I think relationship
in the Western model
draws an enormous amount
from our understanding
of that thing called the cross,
and the central message there was a death,
a life surrendered for our enemies
out of love, loving your enemies.
We can't even love our
friends half the time.
(Dave laughing)
We need to learn to
love our enemies again,
which is why I think I'm
all for vigor in debate.
I love what you do, I love
what Jordan Peterson does.
I mean, this is a big part of the picture.
You've got enormous intellectual vigor
coming back into Western life,
and that's tremendously encouraging,
and it's an enormous privilege
just to play a tiny little bit, I hope,
in facilitating that with my own website,
for example and so forth,
but I say this is
tremendously encouraging.
But we've got to break the very model
that's brought us to that
place in the first place,
which is the rejection of the idea
of the respect and recognition
of the worth and dignity of others.
- Are you amazed how this is a truly
worldwide phenomena right now?
So that's why I started the interview
by saying that you sent me
this email three years ago,
and then flash-forward
basically two and a half years,
and I'm in Australia and I'm
doing this event with you,
and everyone in that room knew who I was,
and now most of them
were there for Jordan,
I can see that point, but the basic idea
that what we're talking about in America
is the same thing you're
talking about in Australia,
it's the same thing they're
talking about in France,
they're talking about it in Mexico.
It's not purely a Western
society idea anymore.
It's everywhere now.
- It is, it is indeed, and
a couple of observations.
The wealthiest countries in particular
where it's been very easy for a long time
have lost sight I think
of the idea of suffering.
And suffering can be very instrumental
in determining character and resilience
and compassion for others
because you understand.
We've got rid of the idea that
suffering is part of life.
We try to pretend we can
build a perfect society,
which is why people make
unreal demands on government.
We don't need God anymore,
none of that stuff.
We don't need suffering anymore,
so Mr. Congressman, I expect
you to solve every ill.
- Give me everything.
- Give me everything.
And Mr. Congressman has been
unwise enough too often.
If there's a congressman listening,
please say I could say exactly
the same about what I was
in the House of Representatives
or a senator in Australia.
We have senators just like you do.
We have a Washminster, and
our House of Representatives
is based on the British House of Commons,
and our Senate is modeled
exactly on your Senate,
so we call it a Washminster.
We've just got to break that cycle again
and rediscover some roots.
A conservative doesn't
believe that the people
who have gone before them were lesser,
but our culture now seems to think
that those who went before
us have nothing to teach us.
That is a fatal flaw.
I've just been reading a remarkable story
about Alexander Hamilton,
one of the founding fathers
who doesn't get a lot of recognition
because he died early in a duel,
and he was a mixed grill of a man.
He was a noble, highly intelligent,
imbued with what might be
called Christian principles,
who because of his cleverness
I think became vain
and got into silly disputes
because of his vanity,
and he died in a duel.
But you read his writings
and what have you
as he played his part, "The
Federalist Papers" and so forth
in establishing the land of the free,
it's brilliant stuff, and to
dismiss the wisdom of the ages
because somehow we're
cleverer and they were lesser,
no conservative should
ever adopt that line.
The wisdom we can learn from those,
we're mad to reject it.
We need to rediscover a lot of it.
- It also strikes me as
deeply personally flawed.
So you asked me this when
we were in Australia,
but I've been in the last year,
I'd say I'm having a bit
of a religious awakening,
or at least a spiritual awakening,
or an awakening let's say
about belief in general,
the importance of belief,
because the idea that
somehow I know something
so much better or more wittingly
than than my parents or my grandparents
or my great-grandparents,
all these people who
lived through so much more
than I've lived through, but
somehow I figured it out,
and it has something to do
with all of our technology
and everything else, it's actually absurd.
It's an erasure of the people before you,
and it feels very weak and thin to me.
- Well, terrific, that's wonderful.
(laughing)
- I guess that wasn't a question.
You're happy with my own answer there.
We'll discuss that on your
podcast, how 'bout that?
All right, how about let's
shift a little bit all together.
Can you just talk a little bit about
what an American watching this
should know about Australia
that we have no idea?
There's sort of this idea, there's okay,
we know Crocodile Dundee,
we know boomerangs
and kangaroos and koalas,
okay, blah, blah, blah.
I absolutely, for the 10 or
so days that I was there,
I loved every second,
every moment I was there.
I thought people were absolutely joyful
and fun and interesting.
Now I know I'm traveling
in certain circles
where I'm gonna meet a
certain type of person,
but people that were
coming up to me everywhere,
and the weather was great,
and just the events we did were fantastic.
But what do we not know about Australia,
besides you're a big landlocked country,
and there's kangaroos
running down the highways?
- Well, it depends where you are, right?
- Well, when we were going from Canberra--
- Canberra to Sydney.
- To Sydney, yeah.
- You saw kangaroos?
- Yeah, yeah.
- Yeah, yeah, you would.
That's an interesting question, isn't it?
'Cause sometimes Americans
I think probably don't know
a lot about Australians.
- No, I truly don't think we do.
- I got lost in the middle
of your country once.
You were talking about knives,
This is a true story, and
I had a little rented car
which had Missouri plates
on it, but I was in Kansas.
I was looking for a good friend of mine
who lives right in the middle of Kansas.
I got lost on Sunday afternoon.
I pulled up outside a
little weatherboard house,
timber house, and there's a lady there
with a pet raccoon on her shoulder.
(laughing)
A pet raccoon standing outside.
- Welcome to America.
- And three children, so a girl about 15
and a boy about 12, and a younger lad.
And I pulled up and I was frustrated.
I don't about you, but when I get lost,
and this is pre-bandwith days,
this is in the mid '90s.
I wind down the window of this little car.
I say, "Excuse me, ma'am,
I've got myself lost.
"Can you show me where I am on this map?"
Well, the boy here, he's about 12,
he looks straight up at
his mother, and he says,
"Hey, mama, this dude talks
just like Crocodile Dundee."
(laughing)
Well, she grabbed those kids
like a hen gathering her chicks
and pulled them back out of danger's way,
as if to say he might have a knife.
- He was the good guy in the movie.
(laughing)
- And she pulls him around
the front of the car.
He had one eye on me, the other one,
I think she said, "Look
at the license plates."
Well, she sees them and all the
tension goes out of her body
and she says to the kids,
"It's all right, you can relax.
"He's not from Australia,
he's from Missouri."
(laughing)
- That's a strict
Missouri accent he's got.
- I said, "Actually, your boy's right.
"I am from Australia."
And she said, "Did you drive here?"
- That's hilarious.
- Yeah, it's a true story.
I got to tell George Bush that
and he laughed his head off.
(Dave laughing)
- That's a hell of a drive,
'cause that flight ain't easy.
So, you know, come on, the
drive is really gonna be...
- That's right, it took a while.
- The drive's really gonna be pushing it.
But what should we know
about Australia really?
- Well, Australia was settled
after America became independent.
The traditional wisdom is
that the Brits were looking
for a new place to dump their prisoners.
In fact, it was nowhere
near as simple as that.
They knew there was a big land down there.
They wanted to put their flag on it
before the French or the
Spanish or the Russians,
et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
It's the same size as continental USA.
It was a prison settlement.
Interestingly, the convicts,
of course, were pretty wild,
and there are all sorts of enlightenment
and Christian thinking went into
how can we turn these people around?
How can we rehabilitate them?
There were those who didn't want to.
They wanted to treat them like slaves.
Interestingly enough, the
signing order said no slaves
in the new colony, one of the
first places in the world.
When slavery was still legal
right throughout the British
Empire and in America,
it was banned in the
new colony from day one.
- Was there a big fight about that there?
There must have been.
- No, I don't think so.
It was very quiet.
- Really?
- Yeah, there wasn't,
and then there were those
who wanted to see it as
a place of rehabilitation
and very sensitive issue,
about arguments too,
about could we bring
enlightenment and education
and salvation to the Aboriginal people,
and of course that became very vexed
because we have our own great
difficulties in that area,
as you do with slavery.
- Yeah, I wanted to ask about that.
- And the amazing thing was
that an incredible effort
was putting into encouraging
those convicts to marry,
and many of them had
illegitimate children,
regularize their arrangements,
and what emerged were known as
the currency lads and lasses.
The first generation of
Australians born on Australian soil
turned out to be model citizens,
and in some ways with some
parallels with your country,
they built a nation.
Now, it's only 6 or 7% of
Australian agricultural land
is high-quality, for example.
A lot of it's desert.
So although it's the same
size as continental USA,
it's nowhere near as productive,
although we're very resource
rich on the other hand.
So it's still only 26 million people,
much smaller than America.
That's smaller than
California, it's fair to say.
But it's one of the so-called
Five Eyes countries,
America, Britain, Canada,
New Zealand, and Australia.
They share everything.
There's enormous trust,
they're democracies.
Traditionally, we'd look
to Britain until 1941,
Pearl Harbor, Australia was
in the direct line of fire,
so to speak, and an
unashamed pivot was made
to seeing America as the
sort of senior friend
to whom we would relate,
and funnily enough my mother
married during the war
an American serviceman and
lived in America for a while.
It was one of those marriages born at war
that didn't work out.
She went back and married my father,
who had been her real childhood
sweetheart, apparently.
So I do have some
connections with the place.
Our own home was modeled on a house
that she lived in and loved in America.
- Wow, huh.
- Yeah,
a little bit of a linkage there.
I think the bonds are quite close.
The left in Australia demonizes
the Republican movement in America,
and I think misunderstands
the nature of the alliance,
but I think in the current context.
Australians look on with concern
with the way the world is going
and recognize the importance
of America's strength.
I certainly do.
We are very committed to the alliance.
- Do you sense that there
is something different
in terms of, we've been talking
about the left a lot here?
I spoke to several classical
liberal organizations in Australia.
I sense that liberalism in and of itself
was still kind of strong in Australia.
Now it's self-selected
group of people I guess
that I spoke to.
- Yeah, self-selected.
See, I say the same in your country.
- No, no, no, I know, so right,
you probably come here
and feel the same thing,
and go, "Whoa, it's not nearly as bad."
But it depends who's inviting you.
- It does.
- Am I completely off in that?
- No, not completely, I don't think,
but I think it's a bit like your country.
When I look at America,
and I love this country
and I love its can-do attitude,
and funnily enough when
I was a constituent,
I had about 60 expat Americans
who lived right in the middle of my area
and they'd brought the cotton industry
from the West Coast of
America to Australia,
and they were terrific citizens.
I love their can-do
attitude, they'd have a go,
where Australians can have a little bit
of the old British, you
know, the world is miserable.
(laughing)
We're out here living,
and the government should
sort it out, these Americans.
I learned a lot from them
just about a positive attitude
and having a go, because I suppose
they were greatest
generation products really.
And it's very important to understand
that Australia didn't fight for
freedom, it was given to us.
A lot of Australians would say,
"What the heck are you
talking about, John?
"Think about our past, we
had to forge a life in a..."
All that is true and
Australians have fought hard
to defend freedom, but
our Democratic traditions
and the institutions of freedom
were really bequeathed
to us by the British
with a fair bit of input from America.
So when the Australian
Constitution was being written,
we had the best perceived wisdom
from what I would say was a great
protestant stream of thinking,
filtering through the
best of the Enlightenment,
and the Australian Constitution proven
to be a very robust document
that secured our freedoms.
We don't have that same
strength of commitment
that's still in this country
in certain strands of your
public life that's richly endowed
with the deep commitment to freedom
that came out of the
independence struggles,
because it was, as I say,
we largely inherited it.
We're very fortunate in that regard.
We'd been prepared to defend it,
but we didn't have to fight
to get it in the first place.
This is particularly
evident in our universities
where there's a remarkable
lack of commitment
to the Western canon, to an
understanding of our culture.
Here you still have great
liberal arts schools.
- It's starting to teeter
here, too, for sure.
We have major--
- It's still stronger
than in Australia.
- Yeah.
So it's there in Australia,
but it's not as strong.
However, the the public debate
has become much more engaged
and vigorous in recent times
and the recent election in Australia
was very, very clear cut.
The coalition which is a
sort of center-right grouping
was not expected to win.
They've been in a bit of chaos.
They've chosen a new leader,
but Australians were sick
of the revolving door leadership stuff,
but they decided this leader
actually represents the Australia
that we still have a great attachment to.
And I think in a way that last election
two or three months ago was
a giant hit the pause button.
It wasn't just about the two
parties economic policies,
important as they were.
It was also Australians saying,
"We're getting a bit sick of being told
"what we can say and
therefore what we can think.
"This stuff's getting out of hand,
"and the other side's too
keen on it for our liking."
- So are you enthused then that obviously
the election basically
went in the direction
that you want it to, but
that's seemingly also happening
in other parts of Europe.
- Yes.
- There's been a couple of
surprise elections lately,
and even if you were to look
at the Canadian election,
which is obviously not
Europe, although Trudeau won,
it's going to be a minority government.
So there is something when
people are looking for hope,
that's one of the
questions I get the most.
It's like I have all these conversations,
and people go, "All right,
Dave, we can start understanding
"the ideas now, we can
have these conversations
"a little bit better,
but where's the hope?"
But the hope is that there have been
in the last two or three years
a couple of elections that
have been sort of center-right
sort of sensible governments.
- Well, I think that's right,
and the other thing, I think
the great danger there though
is particularly in Europe I think,
and I don't want to sound
anti-environmentalism,
but I think what's happened
with the environment movement
is it's moved from the
scientists and from academia
and from solid policy thinking
into the area of emotion
and populism itself.
And so you'll see knee-jerk reactions,
which may instead of helpfully
decarbonizing the economy
in Europe will de-industrialize it,
and then with their levels
of indebtedness and so forth,
I'm not sure that's
going to be very helpful.
I mean, the issue if you're
worried about climate
remains frankly India and China.
When you look at the cleanup here--
- Right, no matter what
we do to clean up here--
- It's never enough.
No, that's right, and you've
made enormous progress.
Your emissions per head is really,
it's quite a remarkable story.
It doesn't get much credit,
but as I understand
it, it's quite a story.
To turn it back and ask
you a question of this,
you've been to Australia, you
were with Jordan Peterson.
I don't wanna put words in your mouth,
but there are a lot of
young people turning out.
They seem to be saying,
"The empathy culture
"doesn't really offer us what it promised,
"there has to be a better way."
Was that your impression?
- My main take was that
people were desperate,
and this this was worldwide.
I definitely saw this in Australia,
but everywhere that we went,
in Europe, in the States, and Canada,
I saw the same thing, which
was people desperately
wanted to think about
their lives seriously.
That was the overriding theme.
So even the way, I mean
I always reference this,
but I was amazed it took me a
couple of shows to realize it
but suddenly I started going,
the amount of people, the way
they dress at these shows,
they're kinda dressed like
us, most of them, young guys,
And I have told this story
about how when I was in Sweden,
I was at H&M, and I was
buying just a baseball cap,
and I'm standing on line,
and the guy in front of
me is telling the cashier
he's buying his first suit
because he's going to see
Jordan Peterson tonight,
and then the cashier says,
"I'm going to see Jordan
Peterson tonight,"
and then he looked at me
and he goes, "You're Dave."
And it was like this is crazy.
I'm on the street in Stockholm,
I'm just at a store in Stockholm,
and here are young people,
these guys were 22, 23.
All they wanted was to just,
I mean, to quote the book right there,
they just wanted to get outta the chaos.
So that was the overriding
theme that I felt.
- I think there's an element too,
a lot of young people
feel rightly I have to say
insulted by the modern debate,
that divides them into
victims and oppressors,
victims and victim makers.
- It's such a simplistic
way of looking at the world.
- Look, both you and I
could invent a narrative
that says we're victims.
- You've got a cough.
(laughing)
- That's right, that's
what I got in England.
- I've got a bum knee, we're both...
(laughing)
- That happened in Australia, I suppose.
- Oh, I was running from a kangaroo.
(laughing)
Actually, I was running
from a syphilitic koala.
I did not know that the koalas
all have syphilis basically.
- Yeah, it's very tragic.
It really is, it's quite
a sad story, chlamydia.
- Oh, is it chlamydia, not syphilis?
- Yeah, same sort of thing.
Both of us could be painted as oppressors.
I've done things that
are wrong, I know that.
But to divide us in that
way and to set us at enmity,
this incredible desire in the West,
it seems now to set women against men,
race against race, and
generation against generation,
now we've got this sort
of despising of adulthood.
We've got to listen to the children.
Some academic in Britain the other day
proffered the children from
six on should have a vote
because they have wisdom that adults...
Have we taken leave of our senses?
But you see, we're all
at war with one another,
and I actually think a
lot of people are saying,
"I don't want to be at war with everybody,
"and I know I'm not always perfect
"and I've done the wrong thing,
"but basically I want
to be a decent person."
And I saw Jordan talk to an
audience of 1,000 in Chatswood.
Oh, it's changed my
outlook on things a lot.
It was enormously encouraging in some ways
because there were a
heap of young men there.
He walks onto the stage, they
give him a standing ovation.
Now he's not a celluloid hero,
he's not a global celebrity in
a sporting sense or anything.
He's there to say, "You're
not the people you oughta be.
"Life can be tough and terrible.
"Go back to your bedroom,
sort yourself out,
"then go out and be noble."
"And an empathy culture
or a victimhood culture,
"it's not going to solve your problems."
And they responded.
In other words, he's calling
out their better angels
at the very time as he's telling
them they're not as good...
We all need to hear we are
not as good as we think we are
nor are we as bad as we think we are.
That's the great irony, isn't it?
We're lost in a lack of self-esteem.
We're over-bloated with pride.
We're such complex beings,
we've got it all wrong.
But here are people
looking who are saying,
"This isn't good enough,
"and I want to rebuild relationships.
"I want to be a responsible citizen."
I'm enormously encouraged by that.
- Do you think some of this
is just the nature of the fact
that the internet exists,
I can put this video out
and someone in Australia can watch it.
- Yes, absolutely.
- The same moment
someone in America can,
and because of that,
that's great, obviously, at some level,
but the negative of that
is that we're constantly
exporting ideas, good
and bad, all the time.
We're commenting on everything.
Everything's going faster
than we can possibly imagine.
We have no idea how this
is all affecting us.
So perhaps for the first 20
years let's say of the internet,
it was good, it was bad,
it was causing tumult,
it was fixing things,
it started revolutions, it
sort of ended revolutions,
I mean, all of that, and
now maybe we're sort of,
I mean, this would be the hopeful part,
is that we're sort of
maturing to the point
that some of the things
you're talking about,
it's like, okay, we can have
that battle of ideas forever,
but now maybe the the global conversation
has to be how do you fix all that?
- I think there's a lot of truth in that.
Niall Ferguson talks about
how the greatest parallel
from the internet age is
probably the printing press,
and it resulted in a
lot of chaos initially,
but in the end, of
course, it was responsible
for the spreading of wisdom
and of learning and of ability
to, if you like, share, that
transform the way that we live.
And so this thing called social media
that in some ways has been so disastrous,
and I think has
unquestionably helped spread
the victimhood culture by the way
not just to wealthy countries,
but even to a lot of developing countries.
And frankly, here we are on
the West Coast of America,
I think Hollywood's had
a bit to do with this.
A friend of mine pointed out
look at the two Supermans.
The first Superman was your
simple, pure childhood dream
of the perfect, all-capable,
powerful person.
The second one still pretty effective
and pretty impressive, but he had issues.
He was a victim.
- Uh-huh, huh.
- That spreads, you
see, it goes everywhere.
Everybody watches Superman,
and so now to be a Superman,
you've gotta have issues, too.
And we all have issues, but
it's how you deal with them.
And so I do think that,
yeah, this turbocharging
of our ability to take
forward our best thinking
and highest ideals at the same time
as we can take forward
the worst is very lumpy.
Maybe it's encouraging that
Mark Zuckerberg has now come out
and said that he will
ensure that his platform
does allow for political debate,
and I see the Democrats are very upset
because they think it
gives Trump an advantage.
But the fact that Mark
Zuckerberg is now seeing
that free speech is really important
for minorities and for the oppressed,
he said that as I understand
it, and he's right,
that surely is a pointer that's
encouraging, do you think?
- I think it's basically encouraging,
and I mean you know my feelings on this,
I would prefer that the government
have nothing to do with
the tech companies.
We know that there's
high-level conversations
and we know that there's ways
that they're tied together
that maybe aren't as
pure as as I would like.
They just are.
But where do you fall on that, actually?
Because when I was watching
the congressional hearings
where they've been grilling
Zuckerberg over and over,
I've basically always
been against intervening
and I would hope that
competition and human ingenuity
can solve some of these things,
and I'm working on some of that myself,
but I thought as I was watching AOC
and and some of the more
far-left Democrats grill him,
I thought the people that
are calling for intervention
are saying those are the people
you want to hand the power to.
Are you nuts?
So in a way, they're just
outsourcing their tyranny to him.
- Well, I'll tell you
exactly what I think.
I hope America displays the common sense
and the leadership on
this that Europe hasn't,
because all of their emphasis has been on,
"Oh, you terrible platform providers,
"you clean up your act or
we will do it for you."
- Yeah, and of course they
don't have the protections
around speech that we have here.
- That's right, a very important point.
Everyone forgets that about America.
Your defense of free speech
is robust, second to none.
It's the American motif.
- So you guys, as great as the
Australian Constitution is,
there's nothing in the Constitution
that it directly enshrines
absolute free speech, right?
- Not the way that yours does.
It assumes it more than states it,
I think would be the way to put it.
Yeah, and there haven't
been the amendments.
Australian people have been very reluctant
to amend the Constitution,
incredibly reluctant,
and the mechanism is set up
to set the high bar quite high as well.
- So when you see these
laws, the hate speech laws,
and then you see social media crackdowns
that happen in Europe,
and then sometimes
people's Twitter accounts,
American people's Twitter
accounts get deleted
because they're violating
a Pakistani blasphemy law
or something, how worried are you
that some of that could get over the ocean
and get to you guys?
- Well, it's always a concern,
but to come back to the essential point,
my great hope is that
America calls this right.
See, the problem and where
you get caught, of course,
is we do expect them to pull down stuff
that might be facilitating
child pedophilia
or instructing kids in how to make bombs.
And so you gotta draw a line somehow
between protecting free
speech and open debate
and getting over this
issue of hate speech.
I mean, it's just used to club everything.
- So how do you actually
draw that line though?
Because, of course, those two examples,
nobody wants child porn online,
nobody wants Isis propaganda,
or how to build a bomb,
something like that.
- That's why I'm so encouraged by what
I understand Zuckerberg said.
Surely in this country,
if we can just get above the
personal and the acrimony
and appeal to the better angels
with America's tradition
of commitment to freedom,
you get people to do what
Mark Zuckerberg's done,
in saying let's sit down
and talk about this properly and maturely,
so that we can protect robust free debate
at the same time as we deny oxygen
to things that are truly dangerous,
because the free exchange of ideas,
even if many of them are
offensive, builds freedom.
There's a sharp difference, we know that.
Let the sun shine in on bad ideas.
Don't push them underground.
Different matter altogether
when you're talking
about facilitating evil people
who are intentionally
going out to blow people up
or to subject them to
sexual harassment damage.
- Are you hopeful, would
you say that you're...
How would you describe your
general outlook on life?
- It's a race against
time, and as I would say,
see, the world has changed dramatically
in strategic terms as well.
We're very conscious
of that where we live.
And so the idea that somehow
or other democracy has won out,
that Francis Fukuyama,
the idea end of history,
that we'll all be free,
open, democratic, capitalist
societies led by America
is really over already, and
it happened very quickly.
The world is now a center of
competing power constellations.
I remain hopeful that America,
because of its pivotal role,
it was an interesting comment
made in the Australian
Parliament by Tony Blair.
He said, "Sometimes we like to criticize
"our American cousins, but the reality is
"that no great global challenge
"can be managed without
their full involvement."
So I remain hopeful that
America will rediscover
a higher degree of unity and purpose
for the sake of humanity,
if I can make that appeal to Americans.
I'd put aside some of this
terrible polarization.
I think Arthur Brooks now talks
about it's not just anger,
it's an anger plus
disgust equaling contempt,
and that destroys relationships.
We've got to end this business
where we're tearing ourselves apart
and not focusing on
our common citizenship,
and we need to do that globally as well.
The leadership role is really important
because as I say I think it is a race,
anything could go wrong
strategically globally,
and in that case, people who love freedom,
led by the Americans, will be critical
in whether the world
breaks the current stalling
of the opening up of democratic freedoms
that followed the falling
of the Berlin Wall,
or whether it retreats,
and more and more countries
see through the restrictions on freedom
and the winding back of the progress
that was being made democratically.
And then the other side
of the foundational issue
is we've gotta avoid eating
ourselves out from within
at the same time as it's
a race against making sure
that we're ready to
defend freedom globally.
I don't think it's a
lay down misere at all,
but there are good
people everywhere I think
who see the dangers and are stepping up.
Let's hope they're in time.
- That's a solid closing
statement, my friend,
and you've been doing this for a long time
from the political side,
and now you're doing it
with all the conversations
that you're having,
and as you mentioned, you
had many of the people,
that their books are right
here, have been on your show.
It's been a pleasure, and now
we're gonna flip the script,
and are you gonna sit in this chair?
- Well, that would be good fun.
(laughing)
I don't have to.
- We'll see.
That would give me a position though,
a feeling of great power and influence.
- There you go, all right.
We're gonna flip the script in a moment,
and I'll be doing
"Conversations with John."
And for more on John, you can
go to JohnAnderson.net.au.
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