Young People Driving March Towards Orwellian Future Where Words Could Land People in Jail: Political Scientist

Eric Kaufmann says 'zero toleration is the new mantra'

Eric Kaufmann, Professor of Politics at Birkbeck College, University of London, being interviewed by NTD's Lee Hall in London in April 2023. NTD

The bulk of the population needs to “wake up to the threat of cultural socialism” or face an Orwellian future where people could be sent to jail for refusing to accept the “dominant narrative” on issues like gender, according to a leading political scientist.

Eric Kaufmann, professor of politics at Birkbeck College, University of London, said young people were “in the vanguard” of cancel culture and he added, “It is often the case that young people and students—[in] the Cultural Revolution in China, we saw that as well—tend to be the most taken in by utopian, unrealistic movements.”

Speaking to NTD’s Lee Hall for the “British Thought Leaders” programme, Kaufmann said: “We get a lot of young people just gravitating to a cultural socialist position because they’ve essentially been socialised in school, by social media, celebrity culture, pop culture, athletes etc., have all been weighing in on LGBTQ, Black Lives Matter, MeToo movement.”

Kaufmann, the author of numerous books examining the impact of ideological and population shifts on identity and politics, said the dominant “woke” narrative in countries like Britain, the United States, and Canada was leading people down a dangerous path.

He said conservative politicians should “stop talking about economics and start confronting this cultural disaster that is unfolding” and he added, “The worst case scenario is they eventually are able to win elections that lead to openly woke governments.”

Warning of Orwellian ‘Ministries of Truth’

Kaufmann said: “Openly woke governments are then going to be able to bring in censorship and a whole Orwellian sort of structure of institutions, ministries of truth, that are going to be able to sort of effectively end your career and your ability to have a livelihood. Maybe even to bank and access public services.”

“It’s a version of China’s social credit system where you will be effectively blacklisted,” he warned.

In George Orwell’s novel “1984”—set in a dystopian future ruled by a totalitarian figure called Big Brother—the Ministry of Truth is a propaganda department which pumps out falsehoods to support a government-approved version of events.

Kaufmann said research suggests the general public in both Britain and the United States are in favour of “cultural liberal” values like free speech, due process, and equal treatment.

But he said, “They’re not in favour of racial preferences to engineer equal outcomes, overwhelmingly, even groups that are supposedly the beneficiaries like African Americans, Latino Americans, are overwhelmingly opposed to racial preferences.”

Police officers walk by the defaced statue of Winston Churchill, in London, on Sept. 10, 2020. Simon Dawson/Reuters

He said there was also widespread opposition—generally two to one—to “woke stances” like the view that author J. K. Rowling should be dropped by her publisher for her position on transgender women or that Winston Churchill’s statue should be removed from Parliament Square.

But he said: “The fly in the ointment is that amongst those 25 and under, it’s more like one to one, so they’re split evenly on a lot of these questions, and on some questions, they’re actually on the woke side. So there’s a big age gradation in the public opinion data, but overall, the public leans overwhelmingly against wokeness, against cultural socialism.”

Kaufmann said schools were at the forefront of this change in young people’s attitudes.

Schools Pushing ‘Radical, Unscientific’ Concepts

“I found in research I’ve done that three in four young people in Britain aged 18 to 20 said they were taught at least one critical social justice concept like white privilege, patriarchy, many genders, at school. In the U.S. it’s 93 percent,” he said.

Kaufmann described concepts like white privilege and systemic racism as “radical, unscientific” and “almost conspiratorial concepts.”

He said there had been a big change in the attitudes of young people since the 1960s, when there was a growth in cultural relativism and the belief that “there’s no fixed right or wrong, there’s just competing values.”

“So this idea of relativism was really what the ‘60s hippies were about, and that was sort of a characteristic of young people. And that begins to change as we get into the 2000s, 2010s in particular. The shift goes from no, there’s no absolute right or wrong, to yes, there is absolute right or wrong,” he said.

Kaufmann said young people, especially those who were highly educated, were now more likely to have an “absolutist view about moral morality” than older people, which was an inversion of the past.

He said: “So they’re now left but they’re morally absolutist left instead of morally relativist left. So they’re much less tolerant. So that growing leftist intolerance is rising in the young population. And so that clashes with classical liberal values like free speech, toleration. Suddenly no, zero toleration is the new mantra.”

The Cultural Revolution in China lasted from 1966 until 1976 and saw millions of people being denounced as “revisionists” by mobs which called themselves Red Guards, swore blind allegiance to communist leader Mao Zedong, and set up kangaroo courts to mete out punishment to those who were considered to be against the dominant narrative.