The New Socialism with Dinesh D’Souza | Interviews

Welcome to Office Hours. I'm Georgia Howe with The Daily Wire. Today, we're sitting down with author, filmmaker, and podcaster Dinesh D'Souza. Dinesh's most recent PragerU video is titled, What is Identity Socialism? And in the video, he discusses the new kind of socialist ideology we're seeing in America today, which is basically socialism based on identity characteristics rather than economic class. Sometimes you'll also hear this concept referred to as cultural Marxism. In the video, Dinesh talks a bit about the history of identity socialism and how the ideas became so popular here in the US. If you haven't seen the video yet, you can find a link to it in the description below. Let's jump right in. Well, I'm really excited to have you here because the things that you're talking about in this video I think are kind of the main theme to American life right now in terms of identity socialism. Yet, I feel like a lot of Americans don't understand what it is or why it's happening right now. You know, if you think about socialism in the classic sense, when Marx talked about it, it was really a class division, an economic division between the rich and the poor, or really between the working class and the capitalist class. Marx said that was the only division that mattered, and every other division kind of comes out of this fundamental one. But today in America, we have this hybrid type of socialism. It has a class component for sure. But even more important than class are the race category, the gender category, the transgender category. So if you go to a socialist conference these days, you'll find people who care a lot more about abortion than the minimum wage. They care more about the transgender athlete or the transgender bathroom than they do about universal basic income. So it's a new type of socialism. And this video is essentially giving a definition to it and showing how we got here. Well, I think a lot of people are watching this stuff kind of unfolding, especially over the past year, protests and kind of the increase in censorship. And they're kind of wondering why this is happening now. And they may be imagining that it's happening organically. And they're not necessarily aware of the broader architecture behind it. Would you mind talking for a minute about the history of this school of thought and kind of how that connects to what we're seeing right now? It really comes out of the failure of the prophecies of Marxism. Marx had predicted there would be this working class revolt. And so all these Marxists, when they saw that this was not happening, it didn't happen in Germany and England. It didn't happen anywhere in the world. It hasn't happened to this day. So these Marxists were like, why isn't it happening? And they go, well, the reason is because of what they call bourgeois culture. So they're talking about not just the capitalist economic system, but they go all these working class people like to go to church and they care about their families and they love their country. They've got all these other attachments. So according to these leftists, they said, listen, what we have to do is take over the universities, take over the churches, take over all the institutions of culture and indoctrinate people, particularly young people in our cultural Marxist ideology. And so this began, I would say, in earnest in the 1960s, a real project by the left to take over the media, the entertainment industry, to take over the universities. And they've done it. They've been largely successful in this project. And so we now see that those have become megaphones for the left. And they're not even really going after the working class anymore. They would prefer like the bohemian student, the kind of they'd like to tap the veins of racial resentment. So they found these new ways to create, you might almost call it a new proletariat, a new working class to displace the real working class, which is not on their side anymore. So you bring up the racial component here, and that reminds me of the BLM movement. So you may recall over the past summer, there was that clip circulating of Patrisse Cullors. She's the leader of the BLM movement, and she was describing herself as a trained Marxist. Could you talk for a minute about the BLM movement and how that connects to cultural Marxism? Well, interestingly, if Marx were alive today, he would consider them to be complete fools, because Marx basically believed that the engine of society is the economic one, not the racial one. That was just not an important fundamental category for Marx. But I think what's happened today is that in America, the leftists have realized, listen, it's kind of difficult to stir up class grievances, because if you find some working class guy, he doesn't hate the capitalist system. He wants to be part of it. He doesn't hate his boss. He wants to become the boss. But on the other hand, there are legitimate and ancient veins of racial grievance. So the left has realized, well, listen, what about if we kind of rub the sores of racial resentment? We can maybe make more headway than we could by appealing solely to class. So understanding kind of how far this is infiltrated into our institutions, schools, government, that kind of thing, do you think there's any way to turn the tide at this point? Or are we destined for a socialist revolution here in the US? No, I think that the last bastion of resistance really is just, I would say, the ordinary sensibility. Because, I mean, hey, if you look around in America today, by and large, far from seeing rampant racism, you see people bending over backwards to be accommodationists. People are so willing to do backwards somersaults almost to accommodate, particularly anyone who's championing a minority cause of any kind, gets deferential treatment that is not made available to everybody else. So the truth of it is we see very little racism, and yet we have nonstop talk about racism. So there's a disjunction between our actual experience and then all the rhetoric our professors throw at us and the media throws at us. So we just have to be like the little kid who recognizes that the emperor has no clothes. We shouldn't buy into this false narrative. And I think if we do that, we just explode it. We refuse to be cowed by political correctness. Ultimately, people will realize that the whole thing, even the outrage is largely made up. The media people who act like, I'm so outraged. I mean, they're play acting. They're not genuinely outraged, but they're using the kind of the exhibition of outrage to try to get you to go down on your knees and kiss their feet. And we just shouldn't do it. So I hate to be a Debbie Downer, and honestly, I kind of go back and forth on this. But how confident are you that Americans are going to wake up to what's going on? They have to hear the other side. That's the key. I find on campuses, a lot of young people don't reject conservatism. They don't even know what it is. You know, and I also think back to when I was 17 and 18 years old, I set foot on the Dartmouth campus. The thing I wanted most of all was to become a kind of sophisticated Ivy League guy. I was so susceptible to the influence of my professors. Literally, had they told me that up is down and near the front is the back, I would have been like, yeah, yeah, as long as you say so, I'm willing to go along. So people ultimately can be suckered on the left dominance of media and academia makes it easy for them to do it. But once we develop rival media, rival ways of reaching people, and they hear the other side, the left is finished. That's why they're so big on censorship. They just don't even want people to hear the other side because they can't stand up to it. So as an immigrant to this country, and especially at a place like Dartmouth, was there ever a time that the Marxist agenda was compelling to you? Well, the strange thing is that no immigrant, and I'm talking here about immigrants, people who voluntarily come to this country. No immigrant is really a liberal. Immigrants, by and large, are inherently conservative. And by the way, many of us come from countries where our ordinary lifestyle is to the right of Pat Robertson. So it's really a puzzle as to why groups like Asian Americans still vote for the Democratic Party. I think the simple reason is this. The Asian Americans end up in very good universities. They want to assimilate. And for them, assimilation means copying the kind of mores that are established by the cultural left on these elite campuses. That's their way of becoming American. So in reality, do they believe any of it? Really? No. Because it is so out of sync with the life that they actually live. Right. But the typical Indian parent, for example, they do not want to raise their kids in the liberal way. They just think that they can sound like liberals, so this way they get their picture taken with Obama. But they still don't want their daughters to get pregnant, go on drugs, or suddenly declare that the girls are actually boys. But in your case, Dinesh, was there ever a time that you were swayed by the leftist rhetoric? Or did you see through it from the beginning? It was my good fortune to be at Dartmouth in 1980 at the time of the Reagan revolution. I saw Reagan campaigning in New Hampshire behind a conservative group of friends and a mentor who was an editor of National Review. So when they described the conservative philosophy, it wasn't that I, quote, became a conservative. I sort of realized, wow, that's what I already am. That's what I've always been. It was more a moment of recognition than it was a moment of conversion. Proponents of socialism here in the U.S., they'll often point to Northern Europe, specifically Scandinavia, as a model of how socialism could work. What would you say to those people? Well, my response would be, number one, that the Scandinavians are capitalist in wealth creation. They're not socialist in wealth creation. They may be socialist in wealth distribution, but they have low corporate income taxes, very little regulation, no minimum wage, no wealth tax, no inheritance tax. So in many ways, they have a more greater free market than we do in this country now. They also have a very big welfare state. But the key point is that they impose the burden on the whole society. Their belief is we're all in the same boat. So this idea of soak the rich, go after the millionaires and billionaires, they're going to pay your bills. The Scandinavians don't do that. They don't demonize their rich. In fact, some of their taxes, like the value-added tax, the so-called VAT, it's 25% on consumption. It falls heavier on the poor than on the middle class, heavier on the middle class than on the rich. So they don't soak the rich. They soak the whole society. So what it sounds like you're saying is the policies that they pursue in Scandinavia more evenly distribute the burden across all of the different classes. So for example, you mentioned the consumption tax, whereas the policies that are being proposed here are more like a tax the rich super high, and they don't really mention the lower classes. Is that correct? Yeah, the Scandinavians have high taxes, but the high taxes kick in at a very low level. So in Norway or in Sweden, you know, you make $75,000 or $80,000 a year, you're in the 50% tax rate. Now, the left knows they can never get away with this in America. If you say to Americans, hey, listen, you make $80,000 or $90,000, you know, take half your paycheck and give it over to the federal government. There'll be a tax revolt in this country like you couldn't believe. So the left is now all about robbing Peter to pay Paul in the hope that they can get Paul's support and Paul's vote. And I'm saying that that's not the politics of the left in Scandinavia at all. Dinesh, thank you so much for joining me. My pleasure. If you want to hear more from Dinesh, check out his new podcast, The Dinesh D'Souza Podcast, which is available anywhere you get your podcasts, as well as on YouTube and Rumble. That's the end of today's Office Hours. Make sure to tune in next week for our next conversation with a new Prager U presenter. I'm Georgia Howe. Thanks for tuning in.