Heritage Foundation’s Dr. Kim Holmes on Groupthink, Intolerance, and More

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Welcome to Secure Freedom Radio. This is Frank Gaffney, your host and guide for what I think of as an intelligence briefing on the war for the free world. It is an extraordinary pleasure to have with us a man that I’ve come to know and regard as both a friend and colleague for many years during his service both in government and at the Heritage Foundation. He is Dr. Kim Holmes. He served with considerable distinction as an assistance secretary of state for international organisations at the George W. Bush administration’s state department. He is these days a distinguished fellow of the Heritage Foundation, where he worked for many years as a vice president with responsibility for the foreign and defence policy portfolio. These days he has, I’m very pleased to say, some time to write and he has done so with great effect in a brand new book, The Closing of the Liberal Mind: How Groupthink and Intolerance Define the Left. He is giving us a full hour of his time to discuss his findings in this important book and what we should take away from it in terms of not only insights into the challenges we’re facing here at home, but also to understand much about what’s going on in the world at large in terms of groupthink and in terms of the radical left. Kim Holmes, welcome back to Secure Freedom Radio. And thank you for giving us an hour of your time.

KIM HOLMES:

It’s my pleasure, Frank. It’s really great to be with you.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Well, good. Let’s start with some of the terms that are at the core of your analysis here, Kim. You help by reminding us of what liberalism, historically, traditionally, classically has been as a point of departure for finding how far we’ve come from it. Talk about that a little bit if you would.

KIM HOLMES:

Sure. There’s two elements of it. One is the actual history of liberalism as an intellectual movement. I’ll say a bit about that in a minute. But there’s also sort of the dictionary definition of what liberalism or liberal-minded means. Apart from the way we used the word liberal in America for an ideological movement. If you go to the – any dictionary, liberal-minded means somebody who’s open-minded, tolerant of opposing views, may have disagreement in principle with somebody, but believes strongly in the right to disagree and to have your own opinions. That’s what liberal-minded means. As far as the history of liberalism as an intellectual movement is concerned, it has two elements. One is the American version, which really goes back to the American founding, to Thomas Jefferson, Madison, and even John Adams to a certain extent. Where those people, our leaders and founders, were channelling the intellectual tradition of the moderate enlightenment, mainly from the British Isles, from Scotland and England, philosophers John Locke and the like, believed in the social contract, individual rights, checks and balances on the government. And the idea that liberty was basically to protect the individual rights against government tyranny. That was the philosophy of the founding, for the American founding, and it’s worked its way through our history over the last two and a half centuries. But there was a European component as well in France and also in England. But France and even in Germany. Where you had philosophers like de Tocqueville in France and Francois Guizot, prime minister of France, who were reacting to the excesses of the French Revolution and the terror and the revolutionary violent movements that happened in the left in the French Revolution and also in 1830 and 1848 in Europe. And so the developed, also, a European version of liberalism, which was similar to the American in the sense that they believed in individual rights. They were very concerned about too much government tyranny, too much government power. And that’s the classic liberal tradition in Europe. And so the two of them together still have a lot more in common than differences, but the basic idea is that the rights of people reside in the individual and there is a – very much a concern about too much concentration of power, particularly in the government, not only, but particularly in the government, that could deny individuals their rights.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

So that’s where things began. And –

KIM HOLMES:

That’s where it began.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

— what you’ve traced, really, in your new book, The Closing of the Liberal Mind, Kim Holmes, is a sort of radical transformation of that tradition of limited government and tolerance of others’ views and the necessity, really, for the competition of ideas. And you’ve introduced a couple of terms, and I want to make sure we also nail down, along the trail towards progressivism and postmodern leftism, there’s been a phenomenon that you describe very well as groupthink. Give us a flavour of the meaning of some of these terms and phenomena.

KIM HOLMES:

Yeah, groupthink refers today to the radical left in America. The progressive liberalism as it’s become. We can recognise it in our university campuses to where you find speech codes and demands for safe spaces, shouting down people that you disagree with, disinviting prominent speakers from campuses. Very authoritarian, almost totalitarian mind set. That’s probably the worst. But it’s not the only place. And we’ll probably talk more about that as the time goes on. But what I mean by groupthink is that if you go across the board, not only ideologically and philosophically, in the university, you find a monolithic view, a very strong monolithic ideological view, where everyone pretty much instinctively agrees and there’s a consensus about what is right and what is wrong, what is true and what is not. And it’s not only in the universities, but it is in the media, it’s in – certainly in the government officials, state and local and federal, on the progressive side of things. Journalists, academics, activists, researchers, many of whom are actually funded, either directly or indirectly, by the government. These make up what I call the ruling class, the new ruling class in America. Their numbers probably, you know, anywhere between fifty to a hundred thousand people, but they’re very influential, very wealthy. The ones – they’re the ones who are, pretty much occupy the commanding heights of American institutions and the federal government and Hollywood and our legal professions and even increasingly mainstream churches. And they all share pretty much a progressive liberal outlook on life, particularly in cultural matters. They intermarry. They live in the same neighbourhoods. They’re concentrated a great deal on the eastern and western seaboards and in large cities. And Charles Murray’s talked about them in his work, particularly his book, Coming Apart. And they are pretty much ideologically and culturally in synch. And so this makes their coordination of their policies and their preferences rather easy to do. You don’t have to sit in a smoke filled room and plot, although that does happen in some cases at the activist level, but in the boardrooms, corporate boardrooms and elsewhere, everyone pretty much shares a kind of similar outlook. Culturally, liberal —

FRANK GAFFNEY:

That would be the groupthink you’re speaking of, right.

KIM HOLMES:

That’s the groupthink. That’s it right there.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

And it’s being enforced, I guess is the point that you’ve also made, Kim Holmes, that this is not something that if one ticks it in your mind to deviate from the group’s thinking, the correct view – politically correct I guess is the layman’s term for it these days, it is not without consequence.

KIM HOLMES:

No, it’s not. Curt Schilling the other day was fired from ESPN for posting something on his private Facebook page. And this happens in, all the time, in the media and the corporate world where people who step out of line, particularly if they take a position on one of the more controversial issues in identity politics or, you know, gender issues and the like, you know, that’s the new battlefront for determining who’s in and who’s out and who’s good and who’s bad. And it becomes increasingly coercive in the public shaming rituals that are used and the exclusion of people who disagree. And it’s pretty – it used to be called culture wars, but now it’s gone beyond that. It’s now actually entered into almost every aspect of our day to day lives, in the schools, secondary, primary, and certainly in the universities, the workplace –

FRANK GAFFNEY:

You have so many great terms for what we’re dealing with here. One of which we’re going to talk about more in a moment, is authoritarian cool. As a means of establishing that you have to conform and if you don’t, it’s certainly not cool and it’s not going to be good for your career. Kim Holmes is our guest. He is the author of a new book, The Closing of the Liberal Mind: How Groupthink and Intolerance Define the Left. And we’ll be visiting with him about how this is manifesting itself, this groupthink, this, well, authoritarian cool, among other things, in our schools, in our churches, in our government and more. Right after this.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Welcome back for a very special conversation with Kim Holmes, long time fellow and vice president at the Heritage Foundation and assistant secretary of state for international organisation affairs under George W. Bush and the author of several books, including most recently The Closing of the Liberal Mind, which is our topic today. Kim, we’re defining terms. There’s another one that I wanted to make sure we nailed down. Radical multiculturalism. Give us a flavour of what that is and how it manifests itself in what you’ve described as sort of the illiberalism of contemporary liberalism.

KIM HOLMES:

Yeah, it has two elements. Probably the ideological root is the same, but two elements. One is legal and one is cultural. It goes by the common everyday term of diversity, of cultural diversity. But if you go back and you look at the history of the idea in the academic world and the like, the legal side of it was, starting off with, actually a long time ago, back in the 1920s, but in the 60s it accelerated, wherein law schools, so-called realists were rejecting the idea that there was a universal point of justice in law that derived from natural law or religion, however – whatever the source may be. And sort of a pragmatic and a realistic view is what they called it. And so therefore, law and the ethics of law were situational and so there was no one point. So it was kind of a radical relativistic view that entered into the bloodstream of our law schools. And this actually happened before the 60s. Then you add into that, from the 1960s and the 70s, the cultural – multicultural movement, what we call diversity and it is spinoff identity politics where racial and gender and sexual preference groups started insisting on specific rights based upon their identity in a group and then creating, you know, workplace regulations and expectations for quotas and the like.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Our guest is Dr. Kim Holmes of the Heritage Foundation. And we’re discussing his extraordinarily important new book, The Closing of the Liberal Mind: How Groupthink and Intolerance Define the Left. And Kim, you were describing this radical multiculturalism and identity politics. Again, as a kind of battering ram, I’d say, against the culture and illiberal in the extreme. When you look at this, it seems as though there’s sort of a case study playing out at the moment in the repudiation, really, of Bill Clinton as a sort of archetypal, at least latter day liberal by, among others, his wife. Talk a bit about that if you would.

KIM HOLMES:

Yeah, this is actually a very significant development. It’s probably no secret to most Americans who follow politics that progressive liberalism in today’s Democratic Party is more radical than it was twenty years ago, but here’s the significant thing to realise is that it is indeed a direct repudiation of the so-called new Democrat third way approach to politics that President Bill Clinton, back in the 1990s, pursued. You’ll recall that at one time Bill Clinton had his so-called Sister Souljah movement where he repudiated the black militant movement at that time. And just a couple of weeks ago, he was faced with some activists from the Black Lives Matter movement and he showed his old self by saying, wait a minute, you know, I care about my people, too. I mean, after all, you know, look what all I did. And then two days later he was forced to apologise for that. And if you look at his wife, Hillary Clinton is actually far more of a 1960s new left cultural warrior than Bill Clinton himself was. And so it’s more natural for her, given her interest in radical feminism back when she was doing some research back in the 60s and 70s when she was in law school, for her to kind of return to the radical roots of that decade.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Yeah. To say nothing of her study of Alinsky –

KIM HOLMES:

Well, that was part of it.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

— and his techniques. Yeah.

KIM HOLMES:

And then you have Bernie Sanders. Bernie Sanders was a typical hippie socialist from the 1960s, you know, going to communes, visiting the Soviet Union and the like, I mean –

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Cuba.

KIM HOLMES:

— back in those years, it was nothing unusual. And now here he is, getting forty-five percent of the Democratic Party vote. It’s just quite amazing. It shows you how much has changed.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

It does and I guess what I want to sort of explore further with you is one of the ways in which this has clearly been incubated, and you’ve touched on this several times, but just to drive the point home, is in academia. And the revolution, cultural revolution if you will, of the 1960s and the establishment, as you say, of an orthodoxy, a groupthink, an absolutely illiberal radical multiculturalism on campuses is evident in a lot of ways. You’ve talked about some of them, notably in this idea that students are now entitled to safe spaces, you know, where they will be free throughout their career in the university from micro-aggression and they’ll get trigger warnings if someone’s going to upset them. This would seem to be the absolute antithesis of the kind of classic liberalism that you’ve talked about. And give us sort of a sense, Kim Holmes, of the implications of inculcating these attitudes in generation upon generation of young Americans.

KIM HOLMES:

Well, you’re absolutely right. It is – if you go back to the 1960s, 1964 when the – back then, the so-called free speech movement, so at that time, everybody on the left loved dissent because they felt they were a minority. Well, now many of them are in charge or their allies are in charge. Then now the conservatives are the ones in dissent and they want no part of it. And so it’s like the old story, once you get in power you close the door behind you. But the implication is devastating because these universities and the colleges and our education system is the place where all of our values and expectations are inculcated and taught to our young people. And if you just casually watch some of these videos where some of these students at our best universities, at Harvard and Yale, are not only asked questions about American history, they have no clue, but are asked very simply questions about what identity politics actually mean, it’s frightening some of the things they’re saying. And the thing we got to realise is that these students, these young people, didn’t invent these ideas themselves. They were taught it in school. And they were taught it in an environment where there was no disagreement allowed, no critical questions could be raised. Cause if you raised a critical question, you could get kicked out of the classroom. This is an extremely authoritarian mind set. I would say, given the extreme, even totalitarian. That you find in regimes around the world that try to control not only what people say, but what they think. And for it to be happening in our universities is extremely dangerous to not only our democracy but to our liberties.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Yeah. You describe it as a zero tolerance culture in your new book The Closing of the Liberal Mind and that really, you know, it may sound like it’s hyperbole, but what one discovers in even the sort of passing acquaintance with what’s going on in academia these days, Kim, to be, if anything, an understatement. There really is no room now for, well, Western Civilisation, for crying out loud. You know, Stanford University had a full scale, you know, vote on the question of whether Western Civilisation should even be taught on campus any longer. And it went down to a crushing defeat. It does seem as though what we’re setting up here is the environment in which, essentially, an authoritarianism politically is inevitable. It’s not just in the minds, it’s not just in the academic institutions. We’re going to pause for a moment and when we come back, we’re going to talk more about the war on dissent and how that’s translating into, well, a kind of authoritarianism, for sure, with Kim Holmes. The author, most recently, of The Closing of the Liberal Mind: How Groupthink and Intolerance Define the Left. That and more right after this.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Welcome back for what I am persuaded is perhaps one of the most important conversations we’ll have on this program. It is with Dr. Kim Holmes. These days he is a distinguished fellow and former vice president of the Heritage Foundation. He has also served with distinction in his government role as assistant secretary of state for international organisations. A position in which he interacted with a lot of the folks that we’re now talking about in connection with the liberal mind and how it is being closed. And Kim, you were describing before the break the phenomenon of a kind of authoritarianism on campus. And I’d like to ask you to, you know, sort of develop more fully how this is working. How the silencing of dissent, particularly but not exclusively in academia, is kind of the leading edge of this, well, radical multiculturalism and postmodern left.

KIM HOLMES:

Well, ideologically it’s happening because the ideology of multiculturalism as we have described it is the reigning ideology in the university. And when I say reigning ideology, I mean it’s basically official. It’s written into not only what is taught but also even into the regulations and management of the universities. So it’s not only the professors, it’s actually the administrators who believe in this ideology and they believe – and they enforce it. The second thing is, is that – this is really important to realise, no authoritarian ideology has ever imposed or, more importantly, successfully imposed unless there are a large number of people believe that somehow it’s the right thing to do and it’s being done for the public good. And in some ways, well, not in some ways, essentially the classic liberal view is that nobody knows for certain what the ultimate answer is in government and so therefore we need to keep things pluralistic and not impose one view on everyone else. That’s the liberal view. But the illiberal view of progressive liberals today is they’ve found the answer to all questions, science is settled, history is over, we have found the answer to all of our social and political problems. Now it’s just a mopping up operation. We’re going to enforce it. And it’s all done in the name of tolerance, it’s all done in the name of being open-minded, it’s all done in the name of inclusion. The surface of it looks perfectly beautiful, wonderful, and tolerant. But the fact is, is that when the rubber meets the road, when the enforcement comes down, they cannot tolerate anybody who disagrees with them. And so they must find ways to exclude them from the public debate, from the classroom, because they’re using the moral model of the civil rights movement from the 60s where anybody disagrees with you is the moral equivalent of being a racist. And so therefore you have the moral approval, if you will, of the public to exclude them. Because they are so heinous, they are so evil they have no right to express their point of view. And to keep in mind that the point of view I’m talking about being expressed is the Western American traditional view that we had for two hundred and fifty years. And so everything about our past has to be excluded. You know, Jackson has to be eliminated from our currency. History has to be rewritten. Everything has to be changed because we cannot tolerate an alternative point of view.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

A case in point that has come to light in recent days as a result of the action of a number of attorneys general around the United States, we were talking about this with Myron Ebell at the Competitive Enterprise Institute last week, Kim, is the assault on what are now called climate deniers, including using instruments of the state against them, whether it’s a think tank like CEI or a corporation like Exxon/Mobil, discuss that as kind of a case study of the phenomenon you’re describing.

KIM HOLMES:

Yeah, this is very, very concerning. The US attorney general from the Virgin Islands has issued a subpoena against the Competitive Enterprise Institute and this is very, very dangerous in my opinion. I think the thing to realise is that the progressives start first with the culture and then they move towards the law. It happened with their moving into hate crimes and hate speech and the like. They start off with making the philosophical and moral case about what can be said and what cannot be said or what is right and what’s wrong. And then once they convince a number of people to be on their side, then they start moving into the law to try to enforce it. So it matters a great deal. And the popular culture, what we Americans actually tolerate and allow to happen in our schools and elsewhere, because the next step is, if you reach a consensus, they’re going to start moving into the law. So therefore, this whole debate about climate change, which many people thought, well, it’s just, you know, a disagreement over science and the like and, you know, yeah, there are these so-called sceptics and the like and so you had all these disagreements. And the next thing you know, you got attorney generals issuing subpoenas if you happen to disagree with the consensus on climate change. Well, this started in the culture. You had people like Bill Nye, the science guy, who was very popular, you know, he was asked a question and he didn’t rule out actually jailing climate sceptics as war criminals. An idea that was proposed by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. And when this happened, it was kind of like, ho-hum, you know, or when you have Sean Penn and other Hollywood people making statements about, well, Ted Cruz should be put in an insane asylum. And actually be put on television, interviewed as if it’s a serious proposition. The popular culture is enabling these views. Everybody’s getting used to them. It seems to be not only the right thing to do, but the cool thing to do. And that is where the problem really lies –

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Yeah. The authoritarian cool as you call it.

KIM HOLMES:

— because the next thing is, is it gives permission for these lawyers, these attorney generals to take it to the next step and start coercing people.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Yeah. Kim, let me turn to something that you just alluded to and that is this organised effort to use so-called hate crimes and hate speech as a legal instrument for restricting freedom of expression, one of our constitutionally guaranteed freedoms. I mentioned, of course, that you’ve served in the United Nations sort of rubric in connection with your responsibilities as assistant secretary of state for international organisations. And one of the sort of forces at work in the United Nations, as you know so well, is the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation. Which has had for ten years, the tenth anniversary was marked in December of last year, ten years, a plan, they call it a program of action, to essentially criminalise expression that gives offence to Islam. And the partners that have enabled them to make huge strides in implementing that kind of infringement, even on our First Amendment freedoms, of course, have been on the left. Notably, again, Hillary Clinton, who talked about using old fashioned techniques of shaming and peer pressure to try to accomplish this kind of restriction of speech. As an example, and I don’t mean to suggest this is the only one, but as an example of the trajectory we’re on, talk a bit about how important freedom of expression is and how mortally dangerous to a free society an attack like this can be.

KIM HOLMES:

Well, it’s no accident that freedom of expression and also religious freedom is in the First Amendment of the Bill of Rights to the Constitution. The founders thought it was the key freedom and liberty upon which all others ultimately depended. And if you don’t have that, you really can’t count on having any other liberties at all in the long run. Thankfully, when issues of freedom of speech have come before the supreme court, at least in the past years, the supreme court usually is pretty protective of freedom of speech. But that hasn’t stopped progressives over the last fifty years trying to find ways to get around it. And it’s had many different avenues. Radical feminists have been the ones to push the envelope the most, to people like Catharine MacKinnon, a lawyer, radical feminist lawyer, and others have tried to make the argument that freedom of speech was actually just a fiction and it was used to discriminate against women. And so they created this category called hate speech where certain things that were said could be considered to be hateful and therefore criminalised. So this has been going on for thirty-five or forty years. And then the most recent development, as you mentioned, with the Islamic issue is to try to make any type of criticism of Islam so-called Islamophobic and therefore put that in the category of hate speech and therefore it can either be regulated or curtailed in some ways.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

And that’s clearly where this goes, let’s make no mistake about it. It may not have gotten there yet, but it’s – there’s a resolution that’s been introduced in the House as you probably know, Kim Holmes, by a number of Democrats, that would essentially try to formalise this sort of restriction. We’ll talk about that and identity militants and much more with Kim Holmes in our next segment right after this. 

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Welcome back. We are visiting for a full hour with Kim Holmes. He is the author of numerous books, including Rebound: Getting America Back to Great and Liberty’s Best Hope: American Leadership for the 21^st Century. His most recent book, brand new in fact, is The Closing of the Liberal Mind: How Groupthink and Intolerance Define the Left. And Kim, we’ve been sort of working our way through kind of a buffet here of examples of how this operates, this militant, authoritarian even, multiculturalism and progressive liberalism and postmodern leftism and it is a very chilling picture indeed. As we were talking about speech codes and restrictions of our expression. One of the places in which this seems much in evidence at the moment is in connection with what you call identity politics. And specifically this whole agenda of those who insist that there are certain sexual identities that deserve, well, as they – I think it was Orwell who put it in Animal Farm, more equal rights than others. And so give us a flavour of how this works, specifically in the context of the brouhaha that we’re now facing over whether men who claim to be feeling female that day are entitled to use not just the bathrooms but the locker rooms with women, girls even.

KIM HOLMES:

It started off sounding very liberal, back in the 60s with the sexual revolution and the like, where the idea of sort of expanding the boundaries of what was allowed in one’s sexual preferences and practices seem – well, it was becoming the dominant culture in America. And most Americans were, for better or worse, were buying into it. And so it opened the door for what you rightly describe as identity politics where some of the theories about rights being derived from one’s group, whether it’s one’s racial group or one’s sexual preference group or whatever it is and the whole notion that I – that my rights are based upon what I say I am and who I am and I get to decide what the rights are, you don’t. This – there was a marriage of these two streams in what you rightly called identity politics. And at the time, people would be warning about slippery slopes and, you know, well, what’s next? Men wanting to go into bathrooms, women’s bathrooms? And people would be laughed out of the room at that time, some twenty or thirty years ago, by saying you’re just being paranoid and, lo and behold, here we are. And that’s because identity politics is really the avant garde or the battlefront for the culture wars. Because many of the identity activists, whether they’re in racial division or the transgender movement and the like, they know that they are at the avant garde of expanding the boundaries not only of their own personal freedom, but also it can be used as a way to deconstruct and shut down the old traditional moral order and legal order that they think blocked their expression of their rights. But you see, the thing is, is that –

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Or, more generally, a sort of fundamental political transformation, as the president would call it, that they’ve cottoned to.

KIM HOLMES:

Absolutely. And cultural, too.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Yeah, cultural, too.

KIM HOLMES:

Yeah, because they can’t tolerate – in order for them to be, considered to be normal and have a legal regime that recognises them as such, the rest of us have to be seen to be abnormal and so they can’t tolerate any criticism.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

And, Kim, that’s the thing that really gets me about this. And, you know, the issue of a man going into a girls’ locker room because he has a right to do so on the basis of this sexual identity agenda, at the expense of the rights of all of those girls, is something that does seem as though the world’s turned upside-down. Where in even the feminist agenda would one find such a subordination of women’s rights? Women’s rights to privacy? Women’s rights to, you know, freedom from potential sexual predators and the like? Where has that gone in this agenda, Kim Holmes?

KIM HOLMES:

You know, it’s a very interesting point that you make there. Actually, there are some radical feminists who are not happy with the transgender movement because they think it’s dominated by men, men pretending to be women. And they want to say, the real women are the ones who define what our rights are, not you pretend women who are men. I mean, it’s –

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Boy, that sounds politically incorrect, doesn’t it? Pretend women.

KIM HOLMES:

Yeah, well, it’s coming from — Germaine Greer, for example, made this point and some others as well –

FRANK GAFFNEY:

And so she, I guess, is allowed to get away with it because she is very much of the progressive left, of course.

KIM HOLMES:

That’s right. Exactly right. But you’re right about the point about how Orwellian it is, because it’s basically turning reality on its head. And as a matter of fact, by the way, one thing that’s important to remember is, that if you look at the North Carolina law and some of these other religious liberty laws, it happened in Indiana, if you read the newspapers, watch the media, it’s supposedly these radical conservatives out there trying to impose their world view on people. They’re responding to the progressives trying to change the law. In North Carolina, it was Charlotte – Charlotte, North Carolina, that tried to change an ordinance, the bathroom ordinance, so they passed the North Carolina law in response to that. And so it’s basically –

FRANK GAFFNEY:

It’s truly conservative in trying to preserve the existing law and order. Kim, let me turn quickly, because you’ve got such a wealth of background and bring it to bear so well in this book, The Closing of the Liberal Mind, but speaking of identity, one of the things it seems the progressive left has very much in mind is eliminating the idea of national identity. That at the same moment that they’re promoting it at the individual level, left and right, with all kinds of manufactured identities, I guess, the nation and the idea that you are identified as a citizen of that nation seems to be one of the things that they’re determined to dispense with and the, you know, the president has talked about this being a matter of citizenship of the world, as have others on the radical left. What are we to make of that agenda and its implications, again, for a state, a nation, a culture like ours?

KIM HOLMES:

Yeah, well, multiculturalism has been internationalist now for decades. And it’s been trying to deconstruct the national identities, the national cultures, because most of these national cultures and identities were considered to be conservative or blocking them. And, you know, this is what you find at the United Nations, you find it at the European Union, you certainly find it in the progressive left here in America. But, you know, I have a suspicion about this. And this is not something I would have said ten years ago. And I didn’t even say it in the book, but I’ve been thinking about it. The more successful they are in gaining control, whether it’s internationally or nationally, they will be all too happy to turn around a kind of national patriotism, if you will, in the interests of their agenda, if it serves it. If you look at the way president Barack Obama carries himself, he says, I’m very patriotic. I love America. But I love the America that I love, the one in my head, the one I imagine, the one I’m trying to create. I’m not – the one that he’s replacing he doesn’t much like. And so if they ever get to the point where they’re actually in charge, I wouldn’t be surprised if they completely aligned themselves with national patriotic values. That’s sort of similar to what Stalin did in the Soviet Union, when you had communism in one state. Communism started out as an international movement. I just wouldn’t be surprised, I mean, I think we’re already sort of moving in that direction. It just depends on what in their minds nationalism means.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Yeah. It’s a redefined nation, that’s for sure. And they’ll embrace it when they’ve got it perfect, I guess, but in the meantime, it’s all about subordinating nations to transnational agendas and arrangements. And when we come back, Kim, I want to talk a little bit about that idea specifically, the president professing to know who’s on the right side of history during his travels in Europe. And specifically whether that’s the side of history that we should be on. We’ll talk more about that with Dr. Kim Holmes of the Heritage Foundation, the author of The Closing of the Liberal Mind: How Groupthink and Intolerance Define the Left. Straight ahead.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

We’re back for the final instalment of our extraordinary conversation with Dr. Kim Holmes of the Heritage Foundation. We’re describing the challenges of our time in many ways as they relate to and are brilliantly described in his new book The Closing of the Liberal Mind: How Groupthink and Intolerance Define the Left. And Kim, we were discussing before the break this question of national identity. The president has, in the course of his recent trip to Europe, discussed in several different places in different ways the right side of history, really, I guess as he sees it. It’s Euro-statism as it relates to the British. It is open borders as it relates to the continent. These are aspects of history that I have the feeling very much conduce to the kind of rising authoritarianism and indeed perhaps totalitarianism of which you warn. Do you see it that way?

KIM HOLMES:

Yeah, I think the – what president Obama and like-minded people have in mind is to use the international bureaucracies, the United Nations, internationalist ideas about open borders and the like, is a battering ram to break down the national and cultural structures here in the United States that they think is blocking their ideological agenda. So it’s partly a strategy and a tactic and a political move. Because many in the United Nations and the European Union, these are institutions that are thoroughly engrossed with a very progressive liberal view of the world, both politically, socially and culturally. So it’s both, partly it’s ideological, partly it’s tactical. And I think in the long run, you’ve seen how in the European Union, how the breakdown of national restrictions on what can be done, of its creating a complete backlash in the United Kingdom, where they’re going to have a referendum on getting out of the European Union, and there’s a lot of countries in the east that are also concerned about this overlay of absent bureaucratic and almost undemocratic control from a few bureaucrats in Brussels. There’s a backlash against this in Europe. The problem here is the United States, with president Obama, is we’re moving in the direction of the European Union at the same that the Europeans are having – they’re also having a crisis about the welfare state there, too. Which president Obama wants to enforce.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

And, of course, he’s promoting that program in Europe, as you say, Kim Holmes, he is very much about bringing it here as well. And I just, as you’re describing this phenomenon and the extent to which it is far advanced in parts of the free world, you’ve sort of touched on the Eurocrats, as they’ve been called, being sort of quasi-democratic, I mean, it seems as though it’s less and less the case that they are and I think that’s feeding this backlash, particularly in Europe at the moment – in the United Kingdom at the moment, but Kim, as you look at this, I want you to sort of develop, if you would, the antidote. I mean, the closing of the liberal mind and the things that are flowing from it haven’t been, you know, accomplished overnight and it will take time inevitably to reverse, but what should we be doing to begin that process of reversing the trajectory we find ourselves on here?

KIM HOLMES:

First thing is understand what we’re up against. That’s why I wanted to write the book. I think that what we’re up against is a lot more complex and pervasive than even many conservatives realise. Frankly, some moderate liberals are even a bit perplexed by what is happening in the name of progressive liberalism. So educate yourself. Hopefully read my book. Understand the history of why they are doing what they’re doing. If you don’t know what you’re up against, you can’t defeat them. The second thing is, is just absolutely draw the line on attacks on freedom of speech, freedom of expression, and religious liberty. Do not let your opponents use illiberal methods to shut down your rights to freedom of speech and freedom of expression. That is a good place to fight. Because, frankly, progressive liberals are on the wrong side of the liberal tradition on that case and it’s an easier case to make. And the third is, in the long run start paying more attention to the culture. We all love politics, we all think that, you know, presidents are going to save us, but they seldom do. The progressive left has been marching through the institutions for a half a century if not longer. They’ve had a long range plan in view. They want to occupy the institutions because they know once they do that, the politics follows as surely as night does day. And so we need to reengage, have serious intellectuals involved in this conversation and this research and not just leave the universities up to progressive liberals, because the more we leave them alone, the more we just kind of go along, the worse it gets.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Yeah. And inevitably, as we talked about earlier, instils in another generation these same tendencies and expectations. Kim, there’s so much food for thought there, the thing that I guess I would just say is as you describe this, as you describe what’s been developing, I suspect that you will be accused, as am I from time to time, of, well, embracing some sort of conspiracy theory here. The evidence seems to me to be overwhelming and I think you’ve documented it thoroughly well in The Closing of the Liberal Mind, but very quickly, how would you respond to that claim that what is afoot here is actually a plan of action that has been very transparently enunciated and is being fairly obviously pursued, not some conspiracy theory?

KIM HOLMES:

Yeah, you don’t need a conspiracy if you have a consensus. If everyone more or less agrees and you’re just nodding constantly in agreement with everybody around the table, and there’s nobody presenting a point of view, you don’t have to sit around and develop some kind of a dark conspiracy. It’s an easy thing to do because you just make sure you only choose like-minded people to be in the room with you. And that’s what’s going on here. And the one thing that conservatives, I think, could learn, frankly, from progressive liberals is conservatives are individualists. You put three conservatives in a room and they’re going to start arguing over some point. And if it’s not exactly the way they want it, they’re going to – you’re going to get all kinds of arguments. Progressive liberals have a way of, they argue, they disagree, but they understand what the basics are and they learn how to not only coordinate their activities, but they – they seem to instinctively know what the lodestar is they’re heading towards. And I think conservatives could learn from that. And I don’t know exactly how they can do it, but I can tell you that if even with my book, I’m spending as much time, you know, sometimes dealing with critics from the right as I do from the left. And if you’re going to try to win this battle of ideas, you’re going to have to make sure that at least you have somebody on the same team.

FRANK GAFFNEY:

Yeah. And you have clarity about the nature of the problem that we’re up against. And I think you’ve rendered an incalculably important service in that regard, Kim Holmes, in terms of helping lay out what is the nature of the, well, the adversary, the enemy if you will, foreign and domestic. You also, I think, helpfully in kind of an homage to a man who’s written a book with a similar title, The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom, reminded us of his insight that you – tyranny starts, really, with removing awareness of other possibilities, so this call to protect freedom of speech, this call for asserting that very important awareness of those other possibilities and the extent to which it is the purpose of the postmodern progressive left, authoritarian, you know, mind control types, the radical multiculturalists that you’ve identified here so well, to do exactly the opposite. It is the challenge, as I say, of our time. And we appreciate, as always, your service in trying to help us rise to it. Kim Holmes, thank you for this important work. The Closing of the Liberal Mind: How Groupthink and Intolerance Define the Left, the work you do at the Heritage Foundation, and for joining us for this full hour. I hope you’ll come back to us again very soon. And the rest of you will come back to us again tomorrow. Same time, same station. Until then, this is Frank Gaffney, thanks for listening.