“YM: How did those ideas win? Not with a new political party, not with some grand new law or anything like that but through public debate, through influencing how people think, and through gaining a kind of — ironically, this is a postmodern concept — discursive hegemony. And so how do we change that, again? By convincing people and speaking up and winning the argument.”
TLDR: it’s nice that YM is so hopeful. But I think the conditions for liberalism & winning arguments like that have long gone.
(Hard-core cynics – e.g. from elite theory – would say the whole thing was a charade in the first place).
Here are a few of the problems I see:
The Left/progressive/identitarian view gained dominance in a world where liberalism and free speech were taken for granted. We’re not in that world any more. You can get arrested for tweets. So ‘free debate’ in public can’t be held in the same way.
Media is completely different. We don’t all watch the same news, entertainment & documentaries. There are a million different versions, radically different from each other.
Now that identity politics is so prominent & vociferous, I don’t see it being maturely put back in the box. The instinct for tribalism is very strong, particularly racial & religious tribalism. There’s a strong case that liberalism is the historical anomaly, and we’re now just returning to our more ‘natural’ condition. Whatever, I don’t think the current tribalism is going to go away through arguments. More likely it would take a huge conflict to end it. (Human beings are not good at seeing the consequences of their actions – and it’s only catastrophes, or the utter defeat of one side over another, that bring them to their senses).
Demographics have drastically changed. Today we have a huge march in London in support of Palestine, and a large proportion of these people are Muslims or originate from Muslim countries. As far as I can tell, they weren’t interested in liberalism in the first place. And they are influencing politics and how MPs discuss topics. So… another big problem.
Cathy Carron
6 months ago
I have so many smart-stupid friends who just can’t seem to see the forest-from-the-trees as of late. Seemingly, they are clutching at the liberalism of the Kennedy Era when it just no longer exists. More radical elements have entered and distorted the institutions. Their intellectual or moreso, their emotional ‘virtue-seeking’ selves are running the narrative. So I guess they are really just stupid-smart friends. Very disappointing and at this point alarming indeed.
Last edited 6 months ago by Cathy Carron
G Lux
6 months ago
Yascha Mounk’s credibility on this issue is entirely suspect. As a “populism researcher”, he made his name as a fanatical advocate for multiculturalism and open borders. He is on record saying (on German TV) that Germany is
“a historically unique experiment, namely to transform a mono-ethnic and monocultural democracy into a multi-ethnic one.”
In a 2018 interview with Vox.com on the subject of populism, he had this to say:
A lot of this discontent is driven by economic concerns, but the form it takes is cultural or racial. We have to recognize that we’re in the middle of a unique historical experiment: We’ve never managed to transform countries that thought of themselves as being monoethnic and monocultural into multiethnic ones, which is what’s happening in Europe and, to a lesser degree, in the United States. Some of these countries were always multiethnic, but they also had a clear racial hierarchy in which some people had advantages over others.
Nevertheless, for all of Merkel’s efforts in throwing open Germany’s doors to mass migration, he was someone for whom Germany’s 2015 “Wilkommenskultur” was not welcome enough – he left the Social Democratic Party over doing “too little” for migrants. For Yascha Mounk, opposing migration was an inexcusable sin on par with nazi advocacy.In 2015, he immigrated to the US, where he immediately started rattling about the US not being open borders enough. A 2017 March piece in the New York Times is titled “How Did I Celebrate Becoming American? Protesting Trump“, and it is a paean to Third World immigration. This was later followed by “America is Not a Democracy” in The Atlantic (2018), and several others. As recently as 2020, he was championing Robin diAngelo’s White Fragility on his Twitter.
Yascha Mounk’s agenda is clear, and given his position around various think tanks (including the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change), he is not a random person with an opinion. He is an influential policy wonk who has fervently advocated for the ideology he is now softly criticising, and whose advocacy has been of great harm to the West. If you had expressed the same positions on wokeness in 2018 or 2020 he now claims to hold, Yascha Mounk would have called you an enemy of open society, and he would have tried to get you cancelled.
elaine chambers
6 months ago
The influence that America is having on our British way of life, I see as destructive. Take BLM for example: my view is, FGS get back to America and sort out that apartheid life you all lead there.
Thank goodness we now have black British born young men saying the same and actually pointing out on radio 4 (sorry no date. I didn’t think I was going to need it as a reference) that in the UK the poorest people are white. Yes we have racism here. Its sourse is different, the racial types we don’t like or get angry about are different and consequently our remedlies have to be different. The UK has a huge number of mixed marriages far greater than America.
One example of this very destrucive influence America has on us: Some years ago I was walking along a road in Hampstead, in front of me were two tall thin black guys sashaying in a very camp manner. They were wearing long white T-shirts on which was written, “Don’t shoot”. This in Hampstead UK! The only people likely to have a gun in this vicinity would be Lord Hobnobb getting into his range rover to drive to his country estate with his air gun and two labradors.
While I strongly felt that George Floyd should not have been murdered in any civilised society but allowed his voice to be heard in a court room, I was applalled at the glorifiction of this unsavoury man with people here in the UK wearing T-shirts with his name on them.
You can see I’m anti-America. I really despise its influence on our country, we do much better with out you.
As an American I have deep gratitude for the contributions of British culture…but you might take notice that Race Marxism is an exclusively Anglosphere phenomenon. Remind me where Karl Marx fled to proliferate his ideas?
One more thing-
Nato funding by billions:
United States — 811,140
United Kingdom — 72,765
Germany — 64,785
France — 58,729
Italy — 29,763
Canada — 26,523
Spain — 14,875
Netherlands — 14,378
Poland — 13,369
Turkey — 13,057
Mr Bone, Race Marxism is an exclusive Anglosphere phenomenon! No it is not it came from the USA. So you think BLM began here in England, just because Marx lived in England, and is indeed buried here. This does not entail that everything that emerged from his theories had to be English!
No, BLM began in the US. I don’t dispute that you can apportion some blame to America if we’re creating some kind of National blame chart. My point is that it’s a dumb way to apportion blame because I could make a historical argument just as easily for France, Germany and England (not to mention China and Russia).
What we’re looking at is two different fundamental worldviews with only one promoting freedom and stability. One based on John Locke’s response to Hobbes and another on Rousseau’s response.
Progressives are from the Rousseau wing. They believe in a Global Interconnected world where a Global Centralized Authority full of “Credentialed Experts” determines who should have things and how the world should operate in the interest of “Common Humanity” and “The Planet.” This wing believes Social Experts get to assign a social credit score to Groups and the most marginalized Groups are given authority to enact social change. BLM and every form of Collectivism arises out of this line of thought.
The Locke wing is the Liberal, representative democracy where individual rights, private property and Capitalism are seen not as the perfect solution but the best possible solutions for a fair world guided by merit. This is the foundation of America. Pull yourself up and succeed on your own merit.
Has America lost it’s way? Yes, the Rousseau line seized the means of cultural production. But this issue is far from an “American phenomenon.” Go watch how Thatcher was treated by the British labor unions. Take a look at Britain’s highly nihilistic culture and preference for welfare state grievances. Britain has been affected by this way of thinking since the 1800s just like the rest of Europe. Part of America’s fall was precipitated by the self-loathing progressivism that initially started in Europe and was very prevalent in the UK.
That’s a bit harsh. If it hadn’t been for the US we would have LOST the Great War*, and much else besides.
However I do tend to agree with you over the late George Floyd Esq. A more worthless piece of human detritus would be hard to imagine. And to think than an upstanding US Policeman of 20 years standing has been “thrown to wolves” over this is simply appalling.
Sadly ‘we’ ourselves are guilty of such barbarism as the recent case of the late Corporal Major Dennis Hutchings ( Life Guards.) so clearly showed to our everlasting shame.
Charles, True, America did reluctantly lend a helping hand near the end in WW2 after getting Henry Ford to reliquish his desire to support Hitler. Nevertheless, the real help, the real turn of events that gave Britain its victory was the intervention of Russia, but that doesn’t go down well with the Americans.
Reluctantly? Near the end? Roosevelt aided the British through the lend lease program before Pearl Harbor and America was 100% involved in the war afterward, on multiple fronts. And no, the Allied victory wasn’t due solely to Russia. You’re entitled to your own opinions, not your own facts.
Neither Russia nor America won the war against the Nazis…it took the intervention of both to end it when it did end. Both suffered tremendous losses. But only one was actually invaded by troops, let’s recall. Obviously Russia would suffer more losses for this reason alone – not heroics.
But which country then decided to essentially take over and/or control one third of Europe for the next 50 years? Not the United States.
Yes, let’s glorify Russia for saving England. Good call, comrade.
Lord Hobnobb’s firearm would be a shotgun, apart from which minor detail your comment is spot on.
starkbreath
6 months ago
In answer to the last question, Mounk mentions people who disagreed with Kendi now speaking out. They’re only speaking out now that Kendi’s house of cards is falling apart. What good is that? The fact that the woke far left are statistically a minority points out the cowardice of the majority, not enough of whom challenge them and consequently give them their power.
Well said. We really need to stop being polite and start treating the woke scum as the racist, homophobic, misogynist, sadistic paedophilia-pimping, antisemites that they have shown themselves time after time to be.
Simon Wells
6 months ago
In response to the headlines – no. Any progress the Left are making is in the wrong direction.
100% agree.
In looking at the “wake of the woke”, it is clear the Left is well on its way to eating itself – as it historically has always done.
I draw great comfort from that reality.
And as usual, once woke is finally dead, we’ll have to work hard to clean up the massive mess it leaves behind. But that’s ok. Hard work never hurt anyone.
Progressive left is about surrendering the Western civilization to the least productive, biologically and intellectually barren, and the most entitled segment of the society. How could it possibly be reconciled with liberalism? And why would I ever ask a globalist bootlicker like Yascha Mounk for the opinion on this subject?
Gayle Rosenthal
6 months ago
Universalism ? Not likely. Identity politics is the new tribalism but the tribes are not organic. Universalism doesn’t answer any problems between Christians, Jews, Muslims and Hindus. Law answers these problems and the law has become immaterial with progressives and the identitarian left. Immigration law has been shattered. The US Constitution is under attack as “old and out of date”. Bureaucrats reign where elected representatives used to make the rules.
And why on earth do you start with Israel ? There’s nothing identitarian about Israel – in fact it has the most universal set of values of any faith or philosophy and anti-semitism is all the rage now. Nope – it is stupidity that is reigning and the progressives have been the instigators of mass stupidity.
If you want to clam a set of values, along with progressive totalitarians, look at the ideology of political Islam. Islam will be the death of us unless people wake up.
Rohan Moore
6 months ago
From UN OCHA:
Jan 2008- Sep-2023
Palestinian deaths: 6,407
Israeli deaths: 308
Palestinian injuries: 152,560
Israeli injuries: 6,307
Many of us find no home in either the left’s obsession with Palestinian advocacy or the right’s obsession with Israel’s right to defend itself. But data heads with no skin in the game can’t see the above numbers and believe Israel’s the greater victim in this sorry affair.
Perhaps true, but this last attack takes the Palestinians fairly out of the “just a victim” status they promoted for decades.
They literally just handed Israel an excuse and cover to retaliate at an unprecedented scale. This benefits whom? Not the Palestinians.
Protesting college kids will not save them and the world’s governments will not judge harshly any response that would look the same if this had happened in another Western country. See 9/11.
What have the Palestinians gained here? Nothing but death and chaos. This will not motivate the sympathy that past Israeli responses to minor incursions generated. IMO.
In fact, I have read a few journalists who had been pretty squarely in the Palestinian camp say that this attack does not fit the narrative they believed in. So, if anything, they have lost some support.
Will leftist universities be able to save Palestine? I do not think so. But, if in the end they do, it will only be because tens of thousands of Palestinians die this time.
That is a terrible price to pay to restore sympathy they already had. A sympathy that will not win you back your ancestral lands, I might add. Not in this lifetime for sure.
Phillip De Vous
6 months ago
It’s rather shocking at how evasive and superficial Mounk’s answers to most of the questions are. The bottom line is that only identity he finds acceptable is a commitment to the liberal state, while failing to acknowledge the liberal state administered by people just like him has led to the very illiberality he sort of dislikes. Further, he condemns “both sides-ism” but the engages in a healthy dose of it as it relates by worrying more about atrocities Israel MIGHT commit rather than the nihilistic violence Hamas has committed. Israel and Hamas’s problem is NOT that they don’t share a common history as fellow citizens in a liberal state with a liberal history. Their problem is that they inhabit completely different and opposed epistemes. One inhabits the episteme of the Judeo-Christian Western episteme and the other the episteme of nihilistic ideology and violence and brutality by any means necessary. That is the problem.
Mounk is one of those allegedly “big thinkers” regularly trotted out to provide the illusion of explanatory depth. But when you look just below the surface, there’s not much there other than socially acceptable banalities his cohort traffics in.
patrick macaskie
6 months ago
I related to most of that but I didn’t understand the point about British food and our constitution. Both seemed a bit naive and perhaps chucked in for effect (uncharacteristically). I will try it on the under 35s in my extended family as a basis from which to start discussion, without hurling insults at each other. a big problem I find is what they think I think. I don’t feel I start the conversation with any credit
“YM: How did those ideas win? Not with a new political party, not with some grand new law or anything like that but through public debate, through influencing how people think, and through gaining a kind of — ironically, this is a postmodern concept — discursive hegemony. And so how do we change that, again? By convincing people and speaking up and winning the argument.”
TLDR: it’s nice that YM is so hopeful. But I think the conditions for liberalism & winning arguments like that have long gone.
(Hard-core cynics – e.g. from elite theory – would say the whole thing was a charade in the first place).
Here are a few of the problems I see:
The Left/progressive/identitarian view gained dominance in a world where liberalism and free speech were taken for granted. We’re not in that world any more. You can get arrested for tweets. So ‘free debate’ in public can’t be held in the same way.
Media is completely different. We don’t all watch the same news, entertainment & documentaries. There are a million different versions, radically different from each other.
Now that identity politics is so prominent & vociferous, I don’t see it being maturely put back in the box. The instinct for tribalism is very strong, particularly racial & religious tribalism. There’s a strong case that liberalism is the historical anomaly, and we’re now just returning to our more ‘natural’ condition. Whatever, I don’t think the current tribalism is going to go away through arguments. More likely it would take a huge conflict to end it. (Human beings are not good at seeing the consequences of their actions – and it’s only catastrophes, or the utter defeat of one side over another, that bring them to their senses).
Demographics have drastically changed. Today we have a huge march in London in support of Palestine, and a large proportion of these people are Muslims or originate from Muslim countries. As far as I can tell, they weren’t interested in liberalism in the first place. And they are influencing politics and how MPs discuss topics. So… another big problem.
I have so many smart-stupid friends who just can’t seem to see the forest-from-the-trees as of late. Seemingly, they are clutching at the liberalism of the Kennedy Era when it just no longer exists. More radical elements have entered and distorted the institutions. Their intellectual or moreso, their emotional ‘virtue-seeking’ selves are running the narrative. So I guess they are really just stupid-smart friends. Very disappointing and at this point alarming indeed.
Yascha Mounk’s credibility on this issue is entirely suspect. As a “populism researcher”, he made his name as a fanatical advocate for multiculturalism and open borders. He is on record saying (on German TV) that Germany is
In a 2018 interview with Vox.com on the subject of populism, he had this to say:
Nevertheless, for all of Merkel’s efforts in throwing open Germany’s doors to mass migration, he was someone for whom Germany’s 2015 “Wilkommenskultur” was not welcome enough – he left the Social Democratic Party over doing “too little” for migrants. For Yascha Mounk, opposing migration was an inexcusable sin on par with nazi advocacy.In 2015, he immigrated to the US, where he immediately started rattling about the US not being open borders enough. A 2017 March piece in the New York Times is titled “How Did I Celebrate Becoming American? Protesting Trump“, and it is a paean to Third World immigration. This was later followed by “America is Not a Democracy” in The Atlantic (2018), and several others. As recently as 2020, he was championing Robin diAngelo’s White Fragility on his Twitter.
Yascha Mounk’s agenda is clear, and given his position around various think tanks (including the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change), he is not a random person with an opinion. He is an influential policy wonk who has fervently advocated for the ideology he is now softly criticising, and whose advocacy has been of great harm to the West. If you had expressed the same positions on wokeness in 2018 or 2020 he now claims to hold, Yascha Mounk would have called you an enemy of open society, and he would have tried to get you cancelled.
The influence that America is having on our British way of life, I see as destructive. Take BLM for example: my view is, FGS get back to America and sort out that apartheid life you all lead there.
Thank goodness we now have black British born young men saying the same and actually pointing out on radio 4 (sorry no date. I didn’t think I was going to need it as a reference) that in the UK the poorest people are white. Yes we have racism here. Its sourse is different, the racial types we don’t like or get angry about are different and consequently our remedlies have to be different. The UK has a huge number of mixed marriages far greater than America.
One example of this very destrucive influence America has on us: Some years ago I was walking along a road in Hampstead, in front of me were two tall thin black guys sashaying in a very camp manner. They were wearing long white T-shirts on which was written, “Don’t shoot”. This in Hampstead UK! The only people likely to have a gun in this vicinity would be Lord Hobnobb getting into his range rover to drive to his country estate with his air gun and two labradors.
While I strongly felt that George Floyd should not have been murdered in any civilised society but allowed his voice to be heard in a court room, I was applalled at the glorifiction of this unsavoury man with people here in the UK wearing T-shirts with his name on them.
You can see I’m anti-America. I really despise its influence on our country, we do much better with out you.
How profound!
As an American I have deep gratitude for the contributions of British culture…but you might take notice that Race Marxism is an exclusively Anglosphere phenomenon. Remind me where Karl Marx fled to proliferate his ideas?
One more thing-
Nato funding by billions:
United States — 811,140
United Kingdom — 72,765
Germany — 64,785
France — 58,729
Italy — 29,763
Canada — 26,523
Spain — 14,875
Netherlands — 14,378
Poland — 13,369
Turkey — 13,057
Mr Bone, Race Marxism is an exclusive Anglosphere phenomenon! No it is not it came from the USA. So you think BLM began here in England, just because Marx lived in England, and is indeed buried here. This does not entail that everything that emerged from his theories had to be English!
No, BLM began in the US. I don’t dispute that you can apportion some blame to America if we’re creating some kind of National blame chart. My point is that it’s a dumb way to apportion blame because I could make a historical argument just as easily for France, Germany and England (not to mention China and Russia).
What we’re looking at is two different fundamental worldviews with only one promoting freedom and stability. One based on John Locke’s response to Hobbes and another on Rousseau’s response.
Progressives are from the Rousseau wing. They believe in a Global Interconnected world where a Global Centralized Authority full of “Credentialed Experts” determines who should have things and how the world should operate in the interest of “Common Humanity” and “The Planet.” This wing believes Social Experts get to assign a social credit score to Groups and the most marginalized Groups are given authority to enact social change. BLM and every form of Collectivism arises out of this line of thought.
The Locke wing is the Liberal, representative democracy where individual rights, private property and Capitalism are seen not as the perfect solution but the best possible solutions for a fair world guided by merit. This is the foundation of America. Pull yourself up and succeed on your own merit.
Has America lost it’s way? Yes, the Rousseau line seized the means of cultural production. But this issue is far from an “American phenomenon.” Go watch how Thatcher was treated by the British labor unions. Take a look at Britain’s highly nihilistic culture and preference for welfare state grievances. Britain has been affected by this way of thinking since the 1800s just like the rest of Europe. Part of America’s fall was precipitated by the self-loathing progressivism that initially started in Europe and was very prevalent in the UK.
Ok then. Great rant.
Lovely to see that bigotry and nationalism is alive and well in the UK, dear.
What specifically do you disagree with Elaine Chambers about?
With respect: Read her comment again.
Now. What, specifically, do you disagree with my statement about?
That’s a bit harsh. If it hadn’t been for the US we would have LOST the Great War*, and much else besides.
However I do tend to agree with you over the late George Floyd Esq. A more worthless piece of human detritus would be hard to imagine. And to think than an upstanding US Policeman of 20 years standing has been “thrown to wolves” over this is simply appalling.
Sadly ‘we’ ourselves are guilty of such barbarism as the recent case of the late Corporal Major Dennis Hutchings ( Life Guards.) so clearly showed to our everlasting shame.
(* And the second one TOO!)
Charles, True, America did reluctantly lend a helping hand near the end in WW2 after getting Henry Ford to reliquish his desire to support Hitler. Nevertheless, the real help, the real turn of events that gave Britain its victory was the intervention of Russia, but that doesn’t go down well with the Americans.
Reluctantly? Near the end? Roosevelt aided the British through the lend lease program before Pearl Harbor and America was 100% involved in the war afterward, on multiple fronts. And no, the Allied victory wasn’t due solely to Russia. You’re entitled to your own opinions, not your own facts.
Neither Russia nor America won the war against the Nazis…it took the intervention of both to end it when it did end. Both suffered tremendous losses. But only one was actually invaded by troops, let’s recall. Obviously Russia would suffer more losses for this reason alone – not heroics.
But which country then decided to essentially take over and/or control one third of Europe for the next 50 years? Not the United States.
Yes, let’s glorify Russia for saving England. Good call, comrade.
Lord Hobnobb’s firearm would be a shotgun, apart from which minor detail your comment is spot on.
In answer to the last question, Mounk mentions people who disagreed with Kendi now speaking out. They’re only speaking out now that Kendi’s house of cards is falling apart. What good is that? The fact that the woke far left are statistically a minority points out the cowardice of the majority, not enough of whom challenge them and consequently give them their power.
Well said. We really need to stop being polite and start treating the woke scum as the racist, homophobic, misogynist, sadistic paedophilia-pimping, antisemites that they have shown themselves time after time to be.
In response to the headlines – no. Any progress the Left are making is in the wrong direction.
100% agree.
In looking at the “wake of the woke”, it is clear the Left is well on its way to eating itself – as it historically has always done.
I draw great comfort from that reality.
And as usual, once woke is finally dead, we’ll have to work hard to clean up the massive mess it leaves behind. But that’s ok. Hard work never hurt anyone.
Well said.
Progressive left is about surrendering the Western civilization to the least productive, biologically and intellectually barren, and the most entitled segment of the society. How could it possibly be reconciled with liberalism? And why would I ever ask a globalist bootlicker like Yascha Mounk for the opinion on this subject?
Universalism ? Not likely. Identity politics is the new tribalism but the tribes are not organic. Universalism doesn’t answer any problems between Christians, Jews, Muslims and Hindus. Law answers these problems and the law has become immaterial with progressives and the identitarian left. Immigration law has been shattered. The US Constitution is under attack as “old and out of date”. Bureaucrats reign where elected representatives used to make the rules.
And why on earth do you start with Israel ? There’s nothing identitarian about Israel – in fact it has the most universal set of values of any faith or philosophy and anti-semitism is all the rage now. Nope – it is stupidity that is reigning and the progressives have been the instigators of mass stupidity.
If you want to clam a set of values, along with progressive totalitarians, look at the ideology of political Islam. Islam will be the death of us unless people wake up.
From UN OCHA:
Jan 2008- Sep-2023
Palestinian deaths: 6,407
Israeli deaths: 308
Palestinian injuries: 152,560
Israeli injuries: 6,307
Many of us find no home in either the left’s obsession with Palestinian advocacy or the right’s obsession with Israel’s right to defend itself. But data heads with no skin in the game can’t see the above numbers and believe Israel’s the greater victim in this sorry affair.
Perhaps true, but this last attack takes the Palestinians fairly out of the “just a victim” status they promoted for decades.
They literally just handed Israel an excuse and cover to retaliate at an unprecedented scale. This benefits whom? Not the Palestinians.
Protesting college kids will not save them and the world’s governments will not judge harshly any response that would look the same if this had happened in another Western country. See 9/11.
What have the Palestinians gained here? Nothing but death and chaos. This will not motivate the sympathy that past Israeli responses to minor incursions generated. IMO.
In fact, I have read a few journalists who had been pretty squarely in the Palestinian camp say that this attack does not fit the narrative they believed in. So, if anything, they have lost some support.
Will leftist universities be able to save Palestine? I do not think so. But, if in the end they do, it will only be because tens of thousands of Palestinians die this time.
That is a terrible price to pay to restore sympathy they already had. A sympathy that will not win you back your ancestral lands, I might add. Not in this lifetime for sure.
It’s rather shocking at how evasive and superficial Mounk’s answers to most of the questions are. The bottom line is that only identity he finds acceptable is a commitment to the liberal state, while failing to acknowledge the liberal state administered by people just like him has led to the very illiberality he sort of dislikes. Further, he condemns “both sides-ism” but the engages in a healthy dose of it as it relates by worrying more about atrocities Israel MIGHT commit rather than the nihilistic violence Hamas has committed. Israel and Hamas’s problem is NOT that they don’t share a common history as fellow citizens in a liberal state with a liberal history. Their problem is that they inhabit completely different and opposed epistemes. One inhabits the episteme of the Judeo-Christian Western episteme and the other the episteme of nihilistic ideology and violence and brutality by any means necessary. That is the problem.
Mounk is one of those allegedly “big thinkers” regularly trotted out to provide the illusion of explanatory depth. But when you look just below the surface, there’s not much there other than socially acceptable banalities his cohort traffics in.
I related to most of that but I didn’t understand the point about British food and our constitution. Both seemed a bit naive and perhaps chucked in for effect (uncharacteristically). I will try it on the under 35s in my extended family as a basis from which to start discussion, without hurling insults at each other. a big problem I find is what they think I think. I don’t feel I start the conversation with any credit