Hello class mates and welcome to the show. I'm John Gillam and today I'm speaking with Eric Kaufmann. In this episode, Eric and I talk about why the spread of Woke ideas contributed to him leaving his long-held post at Birkbeck College, University of London for the University of Buckingham, how to define woke academically, whether universities can be reformed, how public and private leaders have become more culturally aligned to the left over the years, the nature of cultural socialism, cultural liberalism, and cultural conservatism, and why the former doesn't lead to flourishing, whether diversity, equity and inclusion can be reformed, how we came to be governed by the anti-racism taboo, whether there is a link between woke and mental health, and the impact of cultural leftism on the ability to have public discussion about salient political topics like immigration.
Eric Kaufmann is Professor of Politics at the University of Buckingham. He is the author of Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities (Penguin, 2018; Abrams, 2019), Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth (Profile, 2010), Taboo: How Making Race Sacred Produced a Cultural Revolution (Forum, 2024) and numerous academic books and papers. He is an editor of the journal Nations & Nationalism, and has written for New York Times, Times of London, Financial Times, Newsweek International, Foreign Policy and Prospect magazines.
We cover a lot of ground in this episode. Eric shows the benefits of taking a clear-eyed analysis to popular ideologies that have spread. I've nothing but admiration for him standing up to the mob and for forging a respectful path for the rest of us to follow in talking about the issues of the day without being governed solely by emotion.
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Enjoy the show class mates.
#025 - Eric Kaufmann - Resisting Woke Taboos Will Restore Cultural Flourishing