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On this week’s show, I talk with Professor Amy Wax of the University of Pennsylvania Law School. As you might have guessed, we get into some very controversial territory. But that’s why I enjoy talking to Amy—she doesn’t pull her punches.
Amy begins by talking about her position at Penn Law, where a group of alumni are attempting to get her fired. It’s not the first time people have tried this—as Amy notes, she’s been “canceled” many times, but she’s still here. We move on to a discussion of immigration. While I think the U.S. has benefitted from the talent and value of non-Western immigrants and will require more of them in the future if we’re going to compete, Amy is more skeptical. She wonders whether immigrants from South Asia and East Asia have democratic sensibilities that are compatible with American culture. She worries, too, that these immigrants will adopt woke political positions. But is it necessary to look abroad for a supply of talented, technically minded people? Why can’t we find them here? Amy and I both think that would be a good idea. Amy asks me how conservatives should deal with the problem of wokeness. I tell her that we have to fight these battles as they come. We spend the last third of our conversation talking about the extremely contentious issues of white identity, European history, and colonialism.
It wouldn’t be a conversation with Amy Wax if we didn’t push every possible hot button. I’m very curious to know what you all think of the conversation. Let me know in the comments!
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0:00 The latest attempt to get Amy fired from Penn Law
5:41 Should we be worried even about elite non-Western immigration?
19:21 Amy: “There’s nothing wrong with stereotyping” when it’s done correctly
26:28 Glenn: America need immigrants if we’re going to compete
34:23 Why aren’t we looking harder for technical talent in America?
40:09 The problem with “equal representation”
47:15 Glenn: Wokeness is a political problem that must be fought politically
59:38 The collective action problem of “commonsense” race politics
1:02:36 Is Charles Murray right to worry about white identity politics?
1:18:12 Glenn: “We need to abandon the identitarian matrix altogether”
1:26:37 Was European colonialism especially bad or an expression of broader human tendencies?
Links and Readings
Glenn’s 2021 National Conservatism Conference speech, “The Case for Black Patriotism” in First Things.
A transcript of Amy’s 2019 National Conservatism Conference speech
Matt Taibbi, “The Red-Pilling of Loudoun County, Virginia”
Yuval Levin, “The Changing Face of Social Breakdown”
Michael Anton, “Unprecedented”
Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghosts: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa
We need a word for that feeling when you realize that someone you've found reasonable and refreshingly heterodox in the past has now run hopelessly off the rails. I've felt it time and time again over the past couple of years.
I first heard about Amy Wax in 2017 when she roused the ire of her hysterical colleagues by proclaiming the virtues of "bourgeois values" in a newspaper article. I've appreciated her no-nonsense punchiness on several previous episodes of the Glenn Show. She struck me then as an intelligent woman staking out unpopular positions and backing them up with data.
The Amy Wax I listened to tonight, however, brought no data to bear on anything. Instead, she offered a stream of bizarre opinions (South Asians in academia are all woke? Jews have "a lot to answer for"?), punctuated by stories about her having dinner with unnamed members of the alt-right and her warm feelings towards Jared Taylor.
She thinks National Review panders too much to the *left* for her taste? How so? The usual complaint I've heard is that NR lurched rightwards since Trump's election. (Is she bothered that NR's senior editor, Ramesh Ponnuru, is - gasp - of Indian descent?) She thinks Charles Murray was wrong to warn of the dangers of white identity politics, but that he should instead have ended his most recent book by criticizing wokeness? To what end? The woke are not reading Charles Murray. And she's "proud to be white"?
I rarely miss a Glenn Show episode, but if Amy appears again, I'll pass.
I think I can offer a formula about European heritage, I'll try to keep it very short:
* Europeans are not genetically superior to other people. Western Europe's rise from a total backwater to a global force cannot be explained genetically - since the time constants of evolution are much much longer than the entirety of known history.
* Europe did, for some unknown reason, develop much faster and farther than other parts of the world in the last 500 years. Europeans are a multitude of people - even as some Europeans perfected humanistic values, others used superior European technology and organization to dominate other peoples, committing various atrocities. Humans are complicated that way.
* Given what is known about the history of non European people, there is no reason to think that said non-Europeans would have used similar superior tech and methods more benevolently than Europeans.
* The benefits of modernity - in science, technology and political philosophy - are indeed for all humanity to share and expand upon - and various other cultures have taken things of value from it, and expanded upon them, and will continue to do so. Famous examples are South Korea and Japan. There was a short time of European exclusivity, but the nature of human beings is to learn from one another.
* The USA is thoroughly Western, and anyone raised there is Western by virtue of having been born into a Western culture. Literally skin-deep variations of phenotypes have no bearing on this.
* European advances stand on the shoulders of other great cultures: Persians, Arabs, Indians, Jews - all contributed to the critical mass of knowledge that later exploded in the West.
* Europeans commited great harms on the world - but so did many other cultures. Western culture is to be credited for taking some great pains to identify its own evils and correct itself. Indeed, I think contemporary left-wing madness is in some sense, an over-correction.
As a side note, even the neo-Marxist, CRT folk who deride Western civilization as the culture of "dead white men" are thoroughly Western. Post-modernism is Western. Marxism is Western. Self examination and criticism of one's own culture is a very Western thing to do.
Glenn, I find your take on the possible white identity politics very sound. I think Prof. Wax does not properly recognize the danger. Sometimes hating the left can lead you off the rails.
I'm not an American, but I take great interest in the American culture wars, since they have a profound effect on my own country due to the importance of the United States in the global arena.