Why the Left are such bullies

0:03Camilla: The Telegraph.

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1:28Camilla: Why is the left so nasty? It's a question that perplexes Tim and I as we deal with our social media trolls. Whether it's the trans issue, net zero, vaccines and masks, Israel and Gaza or DEI, everywhere they hold power, liberals are trying to cancel righties and shut down debate, from university campuses to inside the civil service. Today, Tim and I are joined by an American cultural psychologist whose new book goes inside the minds of liberals to understand why they can be such authoritarian bullies. Welcome to The Daily Tea.

2:14Camilla: Joining us now is Luke Conway. He used to be the Professor of Psychology at the University of Montana and is now at Grove City College in Pennsylvania. And Luke, you're here to discuss your book, Liberal Bullies, What Psychology Teaches Us About the Left's Authoritarian Problem. Tim and I quite like the concept of this as righties. We've just been downstairs debating why the left has turned so nasty in recent years. Is that what the book is about, Luke? Partially, yes. It's about understanding the psychology of the liberal bully. What happened? Where did liberal bullies come from? What does psychology research say about it?

2:53That's one of the focuses of my lab. So yeah, that's what the book is about. Okay, so we're on your wavelength with this, but for people who might be skeptical, what is a liberal bully? What are your examples of liberals bullying in the public sphere? Well, firing professors because they express quasi-conservative opinions, gaslighting the public, saying that there is no such thing as Muslim rape gangs when there are, you know, These are examples of liberal bullies. Authoritarianism isn't about wanting an authority figure in charge. That's fine. Authoritarianism, liberal bullies want unequal standards.

3:35They want rules that only apply to other people. So you can go across the board and see examples of firing cancel culture, both here and there, where you have people basically saying you can't do that. You can't say that. putting moms in jail for mean tweets that are now deleted and apologized for. These sorts of activities qualify as people on the left who are basically trying to enforce rules for one side and one side only. And there's a paradox there I want to pick up on, which is the word liberal, right? Because normally when I hear that word, it means to me pluralism, tolerance, openness, it's cosmopolitanism, but what you're describing is something quite different.

4:19So how do you account for the paradox of people being self-perceived liberals, but behaving in an authoritarian way? Yeah, that's a great question. Actually, a British publisher approached me about writing liberal bullies years ago, okay? And George Overs, who was brilliant. And he said, hey, why don't you, you know, he'd seen my work on left-wing authoritarianism, like, why don't you proposed this book. So I wrote it. My original proposal was called The Left-Wing Authoritarian Paradox. And I actually built it around the exact question you just asked. Why do people who say, you know, liberalism is supposed to be anti-authoritarian?

4:59How can they be authoritarian people? And the publisher basically said, that's a stupid idea. And here's what the publisher said. That's an academic question. And we don't care about that. The people know there are liberal bullies, and they want to know how to stop them and what caused them. So ergo the change to the more aggressive sounding, mean spirited sounding title. But so here's what I would say to answer your question. It is a bit of a paradox. You can see this paradox in our own data. One of the most amazing things, correlations I've ever found in my own data was, this was one of the most amazing moments of my career when I saw this correlation.

5:38So we did a simple thing. We gave people an authoritarianism questionnaire. If you score high on that questionnaire, you agree with items like, I want an authority figure to crush my enemies. Then we ask them after they completed that questionnaire, one question, do you think you're an authoritarian person? If you see that to conservatives in the US, I want an authority figure to crush my enemies and say, do you think you're authoritarian? If they scored high on the questionnaire, they said, yes, those two things were highly correlated. For liberals, much to my shock, not only were those things not very highly correlated, they were negatively correlated, which means that a liberal who said, I want an authority figure to destroy and crush my enemies.

6:18And you say, do you think you're authoritarian? And they say, no, no, I don't. And the reason to this gets to your question, you're right. You can see the echoes of the sentiment amongst liberals to this day. So what accounts for that correlation is this. They think their own group norms are anti-authoritarian. So liberals still believe that they're anti-authoritarian, but the more authoritarian they are, the more likely they are to deny their own authoritarianism. Now, to your point, people can be hypocrites. So, okay, conservatives say we want freedom and they will restrict other people's freedom in the name of freedom.

6:57So it's not unique to liberals that they're very hypocritical on this particular dimension, although they are very hypocritical on it. And the other thing I would say is authoritarianism comes from fear. So we wrote a paper about group norms. Group norms on conservatives are more likely to be authoritarian. In other words, around the world, conservatives are more likely to say, I'm okay with authoritarianism. Okay, so that's accurate. But individuals are often become authoritarian because of fear. So even if your group is saying you shouldn't be authoritarian, if you're scared of something, you often turn to an authority figure, a bully, to take care of the problem.

7:38Now, if you're a liberal, you don't want to admit that that's what's happening, but you're still going to do it. Do you see? So the root causes of authoritarianism are kind of the same the world over, left or right, religious or irreligious, they're kind of the same. British or American, they're kind of the same. But the norms that are coming on top of that or what are causing the paradox that you're talking about, in my opinion?

8:03Camilla: What I can't understand is where all of this has crept in, and it could be as a result of social media. So just to break it down very simply, I remember going to school and we were from a Thatcherite family. So we might make arguments for the right. And then some of my lefty friends at school and university would make arguments for the left. And we would all make our arguments and have our debates. And I don't really remember anyone pointing at me and saying, I don't agree with you, so you're wrong. And not only are you wrong, but you're also probably a Nazi, a racist and a bigot. Okay, that didn't really happen.

8:43Camilla: People just agreed on some stuff. They disagreed on other stuff. And then they went off their merry way. How has cancel culture crept in to the extent that, and this is what worries me about having three children, I'm not sure that any of my children who might be right wing are actually going to be able to openly express their beliefs in a school and a university environment safely. I genuinely mean that. Like they won't be able to express these beliefs safely. How did it come to this? Yeah, I'd like to point out and circling back to the original question, that that is an evidence of liberal bullies having a lot of power that you're concerned about that evidence suggests you're right to be concerned about that issue.

9:34Okay. I found it kind of curious that my book, Liberal Bullies, which was the product of the British who, okay, I have a British publisher. It was the impetus of British people that kind of encouraged me to write it. But my British publisher told me that it didn't resonate as much, it's doing much better in the US than the UK, that it didn't resonate with the British. And I don't quite get that based on what you just said and what is currently happening in your country. It actually seems like you've got a big liberal bullies problem, as evidenced by what you just said. Part of it is because I'm an American and that's my focus.

10:10And I get that part of the reason it doesn't resonate is because I use a lot of American examples because that's what I can write about authentically. And I'm not an expert in British politics. To your point about how we got here, there's no simple straightforward line, but I'll highlight a couple things. One is it's partially about power. So in the US in particular, so there's a saying from Beecher, says something like the philosophy of one day is the common sense of the next. And it was about education. And I think part of what happened is the universities in the U.S. in particular, but also for sure over there, became increasingly leftist.

10:52They increasingly, that was the place they had the most power, and they increasingly excluded conservatives. That's been happening for years. So we lost that thing you just talked about, which is the world I grew up in. Also, by the way, in the 80s in the U.S., we just talked about politics from time to time. I grew up in the Reagan era. I didn't hate any liberals or liberals hate me. We could talk about it and it wasn't a big deal. But meanwhile, behind the scenes in the universities, conservatives were increasingly being excluded to the point where even talking about conservative, there was no positive examples in the universities of conservative philosophy.

11:28There was no pushback. I didn't know a single person. By the time I left in 2021 at University of Montana, I didn't know a single person there that would openly say they voted for Trump. in a state that voted for Trump by 17%. Now that's been happening forever. That's been happening since the 60s. There's been this movement behind the scenes that has excluded positive conservative examples. So for years, people who go to college have been getting this extremely skewed, at best, left-wing view of the world. And at worst, increasingly, a kind of horrific, hate-filled view of the world that demonizes everybody who votes a certain way as a Nazi, as you said, or a fascist or a racist or an Islamophobe or pick your word.

12:18So that has increasingly happened. To me, what killed us was the media. I don't blame Democrats or politicians for being stupid. Our system sort of rewards that. Democracy's fatal flaw is that it rewards dishonesty. Politicians are going to politic. They're going to lie. But I blame the media in the US for throwing the country under the bus by not being willing to go after this. They substituted the scoop, which used to be their primary motive, for the narrative. So they just ignored obvious truths that we could all see and refuse to go after those truths because they hated Trump more than they loved the truth.

13:01Now, both sides do that. Everybody has a narrative. Fox News does it on the other side. I'm not trying to make a ridiculous case, but we used to have more of a pretense, at least, of being fair in the news. We just threw out the window. So we have this nexus of power. That right there is how authoritarian regimes actually win. If you look at how does China serve? Why is authoritarianism so common? They're often successful because they control the media and they create a narrative that's one-sided entirely. And ultimately, the people just kind of think, well, that's the information they get. And so they start believing the lies of the regime in power.

13:41Now, the caveat here is this, and I think this is still true. Most people in the US are not authoritarian on either side. And I think that's true in the UK too. Most people are not. Like in our data, if you do a dichotomous kind of approach to it, it's probably about 7 % to 8 % on either side. Same thing in data in New Zealand. I don't think that this is a problem where the country, yours or mine, has gone radically authoritarian on the left. I don't think the average Democrat is an authoritarian. In fact, our data suggests they're not. But I do think that the average Democrat is more likely to tolerate authoritarianism from the people in power right now than the average Republican.

14:21My data, four straight study packages have suggested there's slightly more authoritarianism in my own country on the right than the left. So the right still has a problem, but I think the right is better at controlling its own idiots than the left. The left ceded so much of their power to that far left extremist. And the right is more centrist right now because they've ceded less, they've ceded some, but they've ceded less power to their kind of extremist authoritarian nutcases.

14:52Camilla: Well, we've had experience on the right of where that goes very, very badly wrong. And so I'm probably a bit more overcautious. But also when just speaking back to your University of Montana experience of nobody admitting that they were voting for Trump. So this phenomenon of shy conservatism, isn't there something to be said about people who are on the right, because generally capitalism has succeeded versus socialism, that there remain a silent majority because they're kind of secure in the view that the facts of life are conservative, as Margaret Thatcher once famously said. You have this phenomenon of people on the left jumping up about, this vocal minority sort of really screaming in people's faces about rather fringe views, be it trans-extremism or DEI or we must all apologise for our colonial past, which is literally not a great concern to the vast majority of people, not just in the UK, but across the world.

15:54Camilla: It's almost like that phenomenon of people who have bad marriages, constantly putting stuff on social media, telling everyone how much they love their husbands. Deep down, it's just because they're very insecure in their own relationships. If you're secure in your view, you don't really need to impose it very heavily on anyone. If you're insecure in it, you are ramming it down people's throats until they choke on it. I think there's something to that. Data do suggest that conservatives are more, on average, emotionally stable, less neurotic, for example. I think that liberals are more prone to treating politics as the be-all, end-all than conservatives are.

16:38So that means, going to your point, that means in part conservatives have a lot more things they care about than politics like i i thought this when i was in the university montana i was back then i called myself a liberal independent now i would say i'm a conservative independent but i was certainly not very conservative compared to the average montana and i was pretty liberal compared to the average montana but why didn't i speak out partially because i love my family and i cared more about stability and i had a lot of other things going on in my life that were more important to me than my voice in politics.

17:12And data back this up. Conservatives care. It's not like liberals don't care about their family. They just tend to put politics in an elevated position out of proportion with reality. Now, politics matter. They have real consequences for real people. So I'm not trying to say politics are unimportant. They should be important. What I'm rather saying is to your question is that conservatives on average have more things to draw on that are important to them. C.S. Lewis said years ago that, I'm paraphrasing here, something like this, that politics should never be the end. They're a means to an end.

17:46They exist to protect things like children playing in the streets happily and people having joy around warm fires. So I think that conservatives are more likely to treat them as a means and liberals are more likely to treat them as an end. Now you can see this in a lot of different ways. Okay. So data suggests, for example, in the U.S. that liberals are far more likely than conservatives to break relationships over political disagreements. Twice as likely, actually. I'm in a conservative Christian family. Our family motto is literally, family greater than politics. So we think politics are important, but if it came down to choosing between those two things, we pick family.

18:32Part of it is conservatives have more things to draw on. Like I go to a conservative Christian church. I don't even know how my pastor votes. When you elevate politics to such a high level, it can be very psychologically destructive. And I think that's one of the reasons the left is not as good at constraining their authoritarian problem is that they elevate politics to a higher level. And conservatives are more likely to just take it. I think that's accurate.

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19:45Professor Conway, I want to push back on one thing. You touched upon it, and I think it's the thing that most critics would jump on is the fact that you voted for Trump. Here you are writing a book about liberal authoritarians, and liberals would reply, well, I'm sorry, but you voted for the most authoritarian personality to take over the White House. Isn't there some hypocrisy there when it comes to deportations, when it comes to policies like overturning Roe v. Wade? They would say if their pastors talk about politics more nowadays, it's because so many more things have been politicized by the Trump administration.

20:20How do you explain to someone how you can be so concerned about the rise of authoritarianism and then support Donald Trump? It's a good question, a question that I do get a lot when this issue comes up. Look, there's a lot of things at play here, OK? So first of all, I was only given two options. So let's just say that the other option seemed more authoritarian than Trump. So if we're just comparing authoritarianism to authoritarianism, I would ride with the Republicans and Trump any day. over what happened under the Democrats, where they were literally colluding with Facebook and pressuring them to censor American citizens, something unthinkable in the American mindset.

20:59Okay. So they did all sorts of horrid and terrible things for four years to us. I would have preferred DeSantis. I would have preferred a different, okay, so Trump wasn't my top choice, to be honest with you. And I considered breaking my longstanding vow of not aligning with either party and joining the Republican Party to vote in the Pennsylvania primary, because here you have to be a registered Republican to vote in the primary. That's not the case everywhere, to vote for someone else. Now, that said, is Trump an authoritarian leader? No. Is he a fascist? No. That's honestly just CNN talking points to me.

21:36Does he have authoritarian tendencies? Uh-huh. Yeah. Some bad ones. Okay. Part of my problem right now with the left is they're not a credible critical critic. We need them to be credible. Our system depends on a system where we have credible critics. And they're so non-credible. They call everything Trump does authoritarian, and the vast majority of it isn't authoritarian. They called him sending in the National Guard authoritarian. Actually, the law gives him the right to do that. And the Ninth Circuit Court, which was a liberal court in California, said he had the right to do it. That's not authoritarian.

22:12He's just following the law. So that most of the things that you mentioned are actually cases when you get behind them that he didn't do an authoritarian thing. Now, does he have authoritarian tendencies? Yes. Guess what? Almost all executives have authoritarian tendencies. They all engage in executive overreach. They all try to extend their power. That's the genius of the US constitution, frankly, is it the founders of our country knew that and they tried to stop that executive overreach and make it clear what the delineation of powers were. He does a lot of stupid things that are authoritarian to me.

22:47So I'm not trying to deny that. He kicked the AP out of the press room for not changing the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America. He does stuff like that a lot. He wants to annex Greenland. That's actually the most terrifying thing to me is him talking about annexing Greenland. It's a parking lot. People live there. It's not very American to me to say we're going to just annex a group of people who overwhelmingly polling suggests don't want to be a part of our country. He's talking about Canada as the 51st state. I just cringe. I'm producing an authoritarianism tracker. My lab is where we're going to rate authoritarianism.

23:22And we've given him some of the worst scores. So I'm not like what he did with trying to change the election with the fake electors is going to get one of the highest authoritarianism scores in our rating. So I'm not trying to suggest - On the country, you've listed a lot of examples of him being authoritarian and just getting caught and stopped by the law. But it does still suggest that you have voted for an authoritarian personality. I hear what you're saying, and I get what you're saying. I didn't say, I don't think he's had authoritarian personality quite in the way that you're saying. I think he has authoritarian tendencies, and I think he's done some authoritarian things.

23:57He's also done some anti-authoritarian things. He's reduced the size of the federal government. That's a weird thing for an authoritarian to do. He's accused of being a Nazi when he's generally pro-Israel. Here's my point. I used to believe he was more authoritarian than I do now. And part of the reason I don't believe in much as him being the super authoritarian everybody says he is, is because I looked into a lot of the cases that liberals claimed and they just didn't ring true. And I don't like judging people from a distance. I like judging their behaviors. So I don't know him. I don't know his personality.

24:27I'm not. Okay. So I, I'm not saying definitively he is or isn't an authoritarian personality. Okay. I actually don't think he's as authoritarian as much as a narcissist. If you want, in my honest opinion, those two things are related, but I think he's more narcissistic than authoritarian.

24:43Camilla: I mean, it speaks to this whole issue that we can have an open discussion about it. Yeah. Without somebody kind of, again, trying to close it down. And this silencing of debate has been extremely disturbing in recent years. Professor Conway, are the Liberal bullies being defeated? There's a feeling over in the UK, and some of it is a Trump effect, some of it's just people having it up to here with the kind of intolerance of a lot of so-called progressive tolerant policies. It's the hypocrisy of it all that I think has really moved people in the UK to say actually enough's enough. Is the tide turning?

25:22Yes and no. I mean, yes, in some sense, there's superficial victories over the liberal bullies in this country because Trump won the election and he's standing up against them. I couldn't believe that Google went along with Trump on the Gulf of America. You know, they immediately changed the American map. And I always thought they were progressive leftists. And then I realized they just didn't have a spine like they just OK. So yes, it's changing in the superficial sense that currently the people who supported the authoritarian left are out of power across the country. That's true. However, I keep pushing this point over and over and over again on Twitter and in podcast interviews.

26:10The problem is Trump is not doing the kind of things that would actually stop authoritarianism long term. he's actually as much of a problem for that as he is a solution. So I discussed this in Liberal Bullies. The thing that stops authoritarianism the best is an equal standard applied to both sides. That's what stops authoritarianism. Authoritarism cannot survive long term if you have a principle that the people in power apply to both sides equally. It thrives on unequal application. So let's look at Trump. What's Trump doing? So you said earlier that Trump was politicizing all these things. Actually, that's not true.

26:52The Democrats have politicized all these things. Trump's just politicizing them in a different direction. So take Harvard. What should Trump be doing with Harvard? All of the Democrats are saying, how dare he politicize science? How dare he politicize academia? He's not politicizing academia. NIH had excluded conservatives from the playing field for decades. You can't study conservative topics and get money from the federal government at NSA because the academics who ran it didn't self-police. They didn't try to include conservatives and they just made conservatives either have to basically take a bow down to the knee to say we like liberals a lot and we agree with their philosophy or you can't get a grant.

27:37So all Trump is doing is trying to correct that in part. The problem is he's going too far. He's attacking it in the wrong way. He's not creating an equal standard. See, I don't want to exclude liberals from doing research. I just don't want conservatives excluded. And he's kind of like saying no liberals need apply for grants is the message that he's sending. So I have a colleague who said you can't apply for a grant and put the word culture in it. You have to take the word culture out. That's just absurd. That's ridiculous. And a lot of what he's doing with Harvard, and he's breaking the social contract.

28:09I feel heartbroken for the liberal researchers there who are scientists who are doing research on cancer and now they can't get money, which they already had. Like the whole foundation of our system depends on a social contract. The government said they're going to give you money and they're going to give it to you. And so he just broke that. And I could give 100 examples of small and big where I think he's just instead of applying an equal standard, instead of applying equal standard under the law to everybody, he's kind of reversing the polarity of it and applying it too much to one side. So that's not surprising.

28:42I knew that that was the most likely outcome when I voted for him. So that's not surprising. But that's not what I want. I want him to be a bludgeon and a hammer. I just want the end result to be equality under the law. To your original question, it's only going to foment the left wing authoritarians under the rug. I keep telling people this. Academia is not going anywhere. They're going to dig in. The progressives, I know a lot of these people, they're going to dig in and they're just going to wait behind the scenes until Trump does something stupid, until he does something kind of ultimately self-defeating or some other thing happens and the Republicans slip up.

29:18and then they're going to most likely regain a lot of power. They're certainly going to regain power at the midterms in the Senate and in the US Congress. And so I think the victory will be short term. And until we address both left-wing and right-wing authoritarianism together with principles, if you want to have censorship, I don't like censorship. I like free speech. But you can have some censorship as long as the rules are equal. You don't have a chat room and you say, you can't say the word idiot, that's fine. As long as you apply it equally to your group and the other group, that's fine.

29:51But the moment you say, I can say idiot, but you can't, that's when, and that a lot of what's happening right now, I fear is going to foment that cycle.

29:59Camilla: Professor Conway, thank you very much indeed for joining us on The Daily Tea. Thanks. It was great to be here. I appreciate it.

30:09Camilla: what i'm intrigued by tim stanley after that conversation is what made you go from being a lefty to a righty but this is why i wonder if some of it is to do with maturity now i know that sounds so patronizing to young people the church or thing if you're not a communist at the age of 18 you have no heart if you're not a conservative by time you're 30, you've got no head. But chemicals do change your personality. And life experience does change your personality. And I wonder if there was just a part of me as an adolescent, that in the way that you want to break free and control your own life, you have fantasies of redesigning everyone else's.

30:48This is one reason why I think adolescents are drawn towards extremist politics, because they like the idea of taking control of the world and remaking it in their own image. By the time he hit my age of 40, I just don't care anymore.

31:00Camilla: I just want to go to bed. And we're in opposition because we've made politics our life. We make money out of it. But I don't know about you, when I go home, I turn off the telly and I don't think about it or try not to think about it. Whereas the left wing personality type, I don't think ever quite changes from adolescence and just spends their whole time thinking about politics. But I don't think it's making them particularly happy. I don't think it's a healthy approach to take to life. In fact, there was a recent study by Columbia that revealed that conservative adolescents are less prone to depression than liberal adolescents.

31:37Camilla: And I think that's also interesting in terms of our mental health crisis because of the proliferation of left-wing positions, particularly on something like climate change and the impact that has on the mental health of the young. We can have all sorts of arguments about why young people are more anxious and depressed than they used to be. And I personally blame the smartphone for it, really. You can see all these charts and the statistics go off the scale when it comes to the introduction of the iPhone in 2012, 2013. But actually to believe in a lot of left-wing views, you know, the whole planet is about to explode.

32:14Camilla: I'm living in the wrong body. I am being oppressed by capitalists. They're all very, very unhappy premises. Yes. Conversely, if you believe in conservative ideology, which is sort of self-reliance and self-improvement, aspiration, creating something for yourself that you then hopefully pass down to future generations, which then feels quite benevolent. It's not kind of greed is good. It's kind of like, well, if I can pay other people's wages, then, you know, it's the difference between giving somebody a fish, giving them the means to catch fish. There's more longevity to it. Some of these principles just make people happier.

32:54Because they also believe in family, loyalty, country. They're happy with the fact that they're British. They're not stressed about what happened 100 years ago in their country. No, that's right. But Professor Conway said authoritarianism in part derives from fear. And so the more a community is afraid, the more authoritarian it's likely to be. And part of this story is liberals and left-wing people think they're losing. They're frightened. It doesn't seem like they're losing to us. To us, it seems like they run everything. But if you tap into their conversations, they genuinely think that they're being beaten.

33:25And if you take something like the environment, as far as they're concerned, as you said, the world's about to explode, right? Well, if you honestly, seriously believe that we are a decade away from being drowned, then that does justify any kind of government action, doesn't it? And it also makes opponents of environmentalism evil, a charge that they do sometimes, the crazier people, level. As far as they're concerned, if you don't reuse a plastic bag, you're committing genocide. Yes. They have raised those moral stakes so damn high that by the logic of what they're arguing, we are evil.

34:01Camilla: Well, it also justifies the silencing of opponents. So just as it was argued that if you said no, men are men and women are women, somebody pointed at you and said you're a transphobe. We now have this whole debate of people saying, I'm not sure the world is going to drown in a decade's time. And I'm also a bit unsure about the economic sense of net zero by 20 whenever it is these days. And then somebody points at you and says, oh, you're a climate change denier. In a very similar way, we had it during COVID, didn't we? I'm not sure about lockdown. This could be really just a step too far. I don't know about closing schools.

34:42Camilla: Then it was not just you're an anti-vaxxer, but you want to kill teachers. People will die. People will die. You want to kill the elderly. It's such an extreme reaction. Trans people were dying as a consequence of people denying that they were trans. Now, most conservative, small C conservative people, don't care what someone does in their private life. No. And treat people as they find them. The issue was always the attempt to make all of us believe the same thing. Yes. And to change things we had done for centuries in order to accommodate a minority. And when we just reasonably said to that, no, I think that's a step too far, then we were not just guilty of rudeness, impoliteness, intolerance.

35:22We were actually threatening people's lives. Yes. And again, if you keep raising the stakes that hard.

35:28Camilla: Yeah, that's quite scary. You might just think to yourself, do you know what, I'm going to keep my opinions to myself. Yeah. Because I don't want to be accused. And one of the reasons why the professor talked about his book, he said his book didn't have such currency in this country, which I'm surprised by because we have our own woke and authoritarian problems. But I think part of that is because we regard political correctness as politeness. It's a British thing. It's I just I want to make sure I'm calling you the thing you want to be called. And that's actually, again, quite a conservative instinct.

35:55I don't want trouble. I don't want to be illiberal. I don't want to be intolerant. I don't want you to feel hurt. I don't feel the need to make you what I think you should be. So therefore, you tell me what you want to be called and I'll call you that. So conservatives for many years gave in on this one and so many others because they just didn't want to row. Yeah.

36:14Camilla: Also, we then get into this bizarre sort of like spiral of strangeness, really. I mean, it does seem nuts now, looking back, that people were cancelled for inadvertently using the wrong pronouns. I know. I know. I know. It's mad. Will we reflect on this whole period and say... We will. ...what on earth happened? We will. But the same societies that cancelled people for the wrong pronouns cancelled people in the 1950s for being supporters of socialism, right? McCarthyism in America. And whenever I see authoritarians now, whether they're left or right, I just think in a previous time, in a previous society, you'd have been on the side of authoritarianism of whatever ilk it was whether it was Stalin Franco or McCarthy you'd have been signed up to that because I do come back to I think politics is very much shaped by character the character of the individual a certain kind of person votes for a certain kind of politics can I just end on one hopeful note that despite all of the division that we have witnessed over the course of recent years largely fueled by the sewer that is social media, I think, and this ability for everyone to just say whatever they want and expect to be listened to.

37:29Camilla: When before all that, people are like, yeah, whatever. Like, yeah, keep your views to yourself. We're trying to go about our daily lives. If you want to express an opinion, go to Speaker's Corner. What it has done, and I noticed it at the Supreme Court ruling, is, yes, there's been a lot of division, but it's also been quite unifying. I speak to this idea that suddenly I am unified with somebody like Julie Bindle. Yeah. Who, let's be honest, I don't agree with on anything really political. She is an out and out leftist. Yes. And then you just come together as women, you know, and the politics goes out of the window because you're basically agreeing on one fundamental principle.

38:10Camilla: I mean, the other funny thing is about that is J.K. Rowling. I mean, I used to relentlessly slag off J.K. Rowling because I just found her so hand wringingly, irritatingly left-wing. But I think some people in any context would be the authoritarian, some people would be the dissenter in any context. So if you're a dissenting type, you look that kind of person, you feel an innate kinship. Ken Livingston once said, if I'd been born in the Soviet Union, I'd have been a capitalist. And I think he might be right, actually, that there are just some people who whatever you're told is the thing you should believe, they instinctively kick against it.

38:43And journalists are very much that personality type.

38:45Camilla: As ever, Tim, you're right. And we'll be back on Monday with yet more righty views to annoy the Liberal bullies at 5pm.

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