Conversations with Bill Kristol Guest: Andrew Ferguson, Author, Staff Writer, The Atlantic Taped January 10, 2019 Table of Contents I: Identity Politics & American Culture 0:15 – 29:24 II: The Decline of the Academy 29:24 – 51:38 I: Identity Politics & American Culture (0:15 – 29:24) KRISTOL: Hi, I’m Bill Kristol, welcome back to CONVERSATIONS. And I’m joined again by my colleague at the late, lamented Weekly Standard, Andrew Ferguson, author of so many excellent articles which you can still read, luckily, in the archives, weeklystandard.com. Some of which were collected, including articles you did earlier, in your fine book, Fools’ Names, Fools’ Faces. And then the great book on Lincoln, Land of Lincoln. And Crazy U, your tribute to our excellent institutions of higher education. FERGUSON: [Laughter]. A love letter. A love letter to higher education. KRISTOL: Yeah, some of your pieces are love letters to your subjects, you know. KRISTOL: Anyway, you should certainly all read Andy’s work, but here we’re going to talk about the state of our culture. FERGUSON: I think it’s probably a combination of it’s crazier, and we’re saner. Or it’s dumber, and we’re wiser. Although I doubt that very much actually, at least I’m that much wiser. To use a word I hate, the parameters of everything has changed ,and what’s permissible, what’s understood as common place, what’s considered extraordinary, what’s out of bounds, what’s mandatory, obligatory. So many things are simply a matter of etiquette now that never would have been before. And a lot of matters of etiquette from 30 years ago are now considered offensive, to one degree or another. The great change has been what was in train by the time we came here in Washington is the rise of identity politics which has filled a bunch of – lots of different kinds of vacuums intellectually, I think. And sort of substituted for a politics that was grounded more in, let’s say, economic realities or cultural realities and those sorts of considerations. KRISTOL: Yeah, that’s interesting. I hadn’t really thought of that as the key element. Explain that? What, as opposed to ideas? Or? FERGUSON: Well, you started to see it – I guess the groundwork was laid in the infamous phrase, “the personal is the political.” And I’ve noticed – this is slightly off the subject but not quite, it’s an extension of the subject – I’ve noticed in watching people speak, people when they were just sort of talking off the 350 WEST 42ND STREET, SUITE 37C, NEW YORK, NY 10036 cuff, they’d say, “well, I think that that’s really not the best approach to that issue.” Now what you’ll hear people say more often, and not just younger people but, “I feel that that’s not the right approach.” So there’s been a kind of a shift in wanting to sound smart, to wanting to sound sensitive. And a lot of that comes in either from or through identity politics, where everything is a matter of personal sensitivity towards people different from yourself. Different being defined not as different ideas, but as different socio-economic background, a different cultural background, racial background. KRISTOL: I mean, you would think the personal would be more individual, not more group identity. FERGUSON: Right. Well, see I think that’s where a lot of people thought that that was going when it started. And I think a lot of people, like me, conservatives like me, who are kind of nostalgic for the ’60s, where “the personal is political” started, thought that that’s where it was going: a kind of a celebration of eccentricity and individualization, individualism. One of the big pieces I did for the Standard last year was about the Summer of Love, and there were several huge exhibits in San Francisco at museums there. And when you went back and you looked at the art that was created right there at kind of the dawn of the ’60s, the Pop Art. KRISTOL: This is ’68, the Summer of Love itself was ’67. FERGUSON: It was ’67, yeah. And of course it quickly went down the tubes. But a lot of the art and of course the music, but the fashion, was highly individualistic. It was expressive but also disciplined in the kinds of art that resulted from it. And you really got the sense, like, wow, there’s a lot of crazy people in charge and this is great. When that started to go bad, it was replaced by this really kind of humorless, un-exuberant, deadening identification of groups. Of, you’re in your group – And so the idea of diversity wasn’t diversity of ideas. It wasn’t diversity of approaches to life. It was diversity of very strongly defined groups. KRISTOL: And I wonder, did that have to happen? Or was there a key moment when –? FERGUSON: I don't know – I’ve thought about that. Was there something built into it at the very start that led it to this point? I don’t necessarily think so. I don’t know quite what the intellectual origins of all that kind of pre-hippie or early hippie kind of thinking was. But clearly there was something destructive that entered into it and that had this deadening effect. KRISTOL: And I supposed you could say if it was a Tocqueville point of view, that these assaults on conformity and all that in the name of individuality, end up, in a democracy or in a modern democracy, not really being about individuality. FERGUSON: Right, because people tend to coalesce and join a group. And I think that’s a very deep insight of his. KRISTOL: And which groups strike you as – I guess feminism was a huge part of this. FERGUSON: Yes, right. Well I have been thinking a lot about this, the new Congressman who everybody is thinking a lot about and talking about, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez from the Bronx in Queens, who’s 29 years old, the youngest member of Congress, and proudly identifies herself as a feminist, and as a long list of other things. And I noticed from one of her – I guess it was a Twitter feed, one of the respondents to her Twitter feed, said something like, “If it weren’t for AOC,” which is her initials obviously when people call her, “I never would have heard about feminist intersectionality.” 2 And I was thinking, well, now there’s an argument against a Twitter feed if I ever heard one. But it’s – intersectionality, which – there are many people who can speak about that more eloquently than I can, and you’ve talked to Christine and others – is a way of trying to juggle these group identities and without ever kind of asserting any given individuality, without sort of breaking out into your own self, as opposed to just being a member of a series of groups. KRISTOL: Yes, I hadn’t really focused on intersectionality. It always seemed like this wacky thing from the academy. But I guess you’re right, it’s a very clever way, in a sense, of doing justice to the fact that people are parts of several groups. And letting them claim to be, or take pride in being parts of several groups, without privileging one over the other, I guess. But, as you say without, above all, letting them just be individuals. FERGUSON: Right. And I think you can privilege one over the other, but it’s a shifting privilege. It depends on circumstances whether you get to be a feminist before you’re a Latina, or a trans person before you’re Hungarian or whatever. KRISTOL: So what is the real effect of that? Do you think it really does drive people’s thinking and lives? FERGUSON: Well, it’s very hard for that stuff to soak down into the day-to-day life of ordinary human beings. I think ideas don't have as many consequences as we would like to think they do. But I think in a general sense, it’s a deadening of the culture. It’s a discouraging of spontaneity and sort of individual exuberance, and the kinds of things that, as I say, some of us thought the ’60s were going to be about. And it also becomes unadventurous. We were talking, using the phrase ‘dumbing down.’ That’s a very important element of all of this. That the lack of intellectual adventure and the sense of like striking out and thinking new and thinking fresh really gets buried in a lot of this. And so the ideas get tired and become more catechisms than they are schools of thought. KRISTOL: And I suppose the kind of pride that I think we took in trying to be different or contrarian – I mean people want to be first, I suppose, with a clever formulation. FERGUSON: That’s true, that’s true. KRISTOL: But not really contrarian, I would say. FERGUSON: No, at least it doesn’t strike me that way. I mean, and this is not a leftist phenomenon exclusively by any means. I think this is really something that transcends politics because certainly the kind of conformity that Trump people want to impose on their fellow Republicans or fellow conservatives or whatever, certainly is not a sign of intellectual adventurousness, or a tolerance for individuality. KRISTOL: I mean, I’ve been struck when I’ve been in arguments and someone says – well, that lost, or the majority disagreed with you.