Freedom of Speech vs Media, Government and Corporations

On 3 March, IPA Senior Fellow John Roskam sat down with former CIA analyst and author Martin Gurri to discuss how freedom of speech is under attack from governments, media and corporations. Martin Gurri is the author of the book The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium. The discussion ranged from how the Internet and social media has broken the hegemony that elites had over information to how ordinary people can fight back to reclaim their right to free speech.

IPA Encounters is held live over Zoom, and IPA members join the discussion live. You can become an IPA member here.

Below is a transcript of the interview.

John Roskam:

Welcome to this episode of IPA Encounters. My name is John Roskam. I’m a senior fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs. Today our guest is Martin Gurri, and we’ll be discussing freedom of speech versus the government, versus the media and corporations. I’m speaking to you from the Bay Mayer Media Studio here in the IPA offices in Melbourne, and Martin is with us from Virginia in the United States. IPA Encounters is live and exclusive to IPA members. At the end of our discussion, we’ll be providing this discussion public for the world to see. We’ve received dozens of questions from IPA members. We’re probably not going to be able to get to them all, but we will take as many as we can.

Let me now introduce today’s topic, and Martin. Since it was founded in 1943, the IPA has fought for freedom of speech. From freedom of speech comes freedom of thought. Freedom of speech, freedom of thought are the foundations of our liberties and the foundations of a free society. But as we know, freedom of Speech has now for some years been under attack around the world here in Australia. Of course, we know about the impact of things such as Section 18C. We, as you know, are entering a debate and a referendum on the voice, and we’ve already seen the implications of big tech censorship, of dissenting views. Over the last few years in Australia, we’ve seen the impact of censorship around the debate on COVID. Much of the media here in Australia and around the world have abandoned a commitment to truth and are now partisan players in the political system.

Martin Gurri is one of the world’s most perceptive writers and analysts of these things. After working at the C.I.A as an analyst and studying the relationship of media, government and politics around the world, in 2014 Martin wrote The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium, which foreshadowed much of what happened after 2014, of course. Especially Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump. The Revolt of the Public proved so popular and so important that in 2018 it was republished with a number of reflections from Martin that we will talk about. Martin’s blog, The Fifth Wave, is hugely popular and very influential. Martin is currently a visiting fellow at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University in the United States. Martin, welcome. Thank you for being with us on this episode of IPA Encounters.

Martin Gurri:

Very happy to be here, John.

John Roskam:

Martin, let me begin by talking about the five waves of transformation that’s been the foundation of much of your thinking and much of your work. Could you take us through your arguments about what is happening to information and communications in the world?

Martin Gurri:

Right. If you take a look at me, those of you who have video, you can tell that I am not a young man. Okay? So the world I was born into was a radically different information structure for what we have today. And the institutions that we have inherited from that world were adapted to that framework. Top down, it was, I talk, you listen. It was scarce. There was very little in the way of information. Every institution, the media, the corporations, of course the government, each had its own semi monopoly over a portion of the information. Since we had no alternative, we didn’t know any different. They had authority.

I don’t know how well known Walter Cronkite is in Australia, but here in the United States, he’s long dead, but he’s still an icon. He would do the CBS nightly news, and every night he would finish by saying, “And that’s the way it was.” Okay, he had just finished maybe 25 minutes of mostly visual material, maybe three stories, but that’s all that happened in the world. And we all nodded our head and said, “Thank you, Walter.” Someplace around the turn of the century, this gigantic digital earthquake created a tsunami of information that slammed into these institutions that I’m talking about, and essentially placed them into crisis. And placed them into crisis because suddenly, all this gigantic upsurge of information came from below. It was not top down. It was not, I talk, you listen. And when politicians spoke to us, suddenly we could speak back on the internet.

If some president is tweeting something, and they said… The only president that tweeted like a person was Trump, of course, and we could have done without that. But mostly, some young man who’s pretending to be Joe Biden is tweeting something. But right below that, right next to the President, I can say all kinds of horrible things about him. I’m talking back to the President. They hear it. They hear it all the time. So every mistake that the institutions make, which is many, the pretension of give us enough power, and it will solve all your problems. That all has been washed away by this tsunami, and I think there’s a tremendous crisis of a trust, a tremendous crisis of authority in every institution, including unfortunately the institutions of democracy. So I wrote the book primarily to explain how we need to look at the world very differently than we have. We need to look at the world in terms of the conflict that this new information framework has made possible, which is not between left and right, Not between conservatives and liberals.

When you think about these terms, they are very, very old. And less and less, they describe anything serious in terms of, for example, an ideology. Think more in terms of a public that has been a network public that has been empowered by these new technologies, communications technologies colliding in this very deep tectonic way with the elites who are in charge of our institutions who absolutely do not want to enter the 21st century. And whose ideal of life was that wonderful 20th century where you could be John F. Kennedy, and God knows what you were doing with the ladies every day and every night, but none of us heard about it because you were a protected person. That was a good time to be an elite. Today is a pretty horrible time to be an elite, and that has consequences we can talk about later if you want.

John Roskam:

In 2014 when you wrote The Revolt of the Public and you talked about these things, did you see a Brexit, a Trump happening as soon as they did? What did you see would be the manifestation of this clash between the public and the elites who had their authority ebbing away?

Martin Gurri:

Well, to go back, I was an analyst of Global Media at C.I.A., and there was a shop of us there, so I don’t want to pretend like I was the only man there. In the olden days that I was talking about, as a young analyst, it was fun. It was interesting, but it was relatively straightforward because the trickle of open information was tiny. So if the president would say, “How are my policies playing in France?” Well then, we went to one of two newspapers. Ned Lamont and then the Figueroa, and they were both what we called authoritative. Right? So at some point, the tsunami hit and we were just overwhelmed. We were just overwhelmed, and it became impossible to tell what was authoritative, what was not authoritative, who are these people. But it became clear that as the world digitized, as that tsunami rolled across the world, that happened at different times in different countries, there was this ever-increasing levels of social and political turbulence to be noted. All right?

So I know it sounds naive now, but at the time we were thinking, “Well, that’s kind of weird. This is just a communications device, the little internet. And look, whenever it hits a country, things start to go haywire.” Egypt is a good example. But by the time I left the government, I’m not sure we persuaded them that this was an important thing. I think the crucial moment came in with The Arab Spring where it became clear that you could organize forces in this new mode, this public mode. It’s not like the 20th century where you had radical groups which mimicked, in some way, the hierarchies of power. If you looked at the Bolshevik structure, it mimicked very much Lazarus structure in a tiny way. So they were ready to take over. This is very different from us. It’s a very flat, very invertebrate, very unprogrammable. All right?

And from the year 2011, say late 2010, 20 11, when The Arab Spring began to the year 2019 where there were at least 25 major street insurgencies all around the globe, it just built up momentum. You asked me, did I foresee Trump? No. Did I foresee Brexit? No, I foresaw turbulence. By the way, don’t make specific predictions. My belief is, having lived inside C.I.A., and prophecy is the business model for C.I.A., right? And they’re always wrong. When tomorrow looks like yesterday, which is probably the majority of the time, then they’re right. But when you have a discontinuity, which is of course what the president wants to know about 9/11 or something like that, always wrong. Always wrong.

John Roskam:

Sorry.

Martin Gurri:

So I-

John Roskam:

Oh, sorry.

Martin Gurri:

No, I make no predictions. Go ahead.

John Roskam:

So you placed a lot of emphasis on the role of information and communications. This turbulence that you identify, was the capacity of people to share information in the internet, simply the vehicle for the population to discuss and debate how arguably they’d been let down by the elites’ information, and the internet doesn’t necessarily give rise to the distrust, to the lack of empathy, to the feelings of powerlessness that so much of the public seemed to have and was expressed in Trump and expressed in Brexit?

Martin Gurri:

That’s a very good question. I can say this. The public arrived, center stage on the political scene, angry. Now, we can speculate why it was angry, and I have done so extensively.

John Roskam:

Why do you think the public were angry and are angry?

Martin Gurri:

Well, I think, like I said before, the modalities of the 20th century were essentially utopian. Of course, in places like the Soviet Union, it was expressly utopian. But even in democratic countries like the US or Australia, there was a presumption that very much was present in political rhetoric. That if I’m running for office, for example, I say, “Inequality is a problem. Give me enough power, money and a little bit of time, and I will solve the problem.” It’s a mathematical equation. Usually, we’re talking about deep-seated social conditions. These are not problems. They’re not math problems. They’re conditions. Unemployment is a problem. I can solve unemployment. I think those and the 20th century politicians were judged by the scope of their ambitions. So if you said, “I’m going to solve all these things.” Most of the people who said that failed and failed pretty badly. But many of them have gone down as fairly successful rulers of their country because they thought big. That can’t happen today because even-

John Roskam:

And you talk how in the middle of the century, people like Walter Lippmann believed in this technocracy. They believed in the power of information. They disdain the public and exactly as you said, “We can solve your problems and problems that you are probably not bright enough to understand or solve yourself.”

Martin Gurri:

Oh, explicitly. Lippmann, if you read public opinion, he was explicitly a platonist. He believed that there should be a class of guardians who understand the information. They absorb the information, and then they take action way above the level of the public. All right? Unfortunately, that sounds really good, but when you watch, and as long as the information structure pretty much kept the front of the stage, they would come out and talk to us, and then they would retreat. There were some politicians who were good, politicians were less good, but we had no sense of the scope of the failure of what they were promising. Today, it’s like the whole thing has been ripped open, and we were watching them backstage going, “I have no clue what’s going on. Help me here.” So we’re watching them fail. We’re watching them say silly things. We’re watching them make bad predictions. We’re watching them make promises they cannot possibly keep to get elected. And that’s in part our fault as voters.

To get elected, they must promise to solve these problems. Otherwise, they probably won’t get elected. But once they get elected, they can’t solve the problems because these are not problems at all. They’re very deep-seated conditions. So that’s what I call the… This is such a thing as the dictators’ dilemma. This is the Democrats’ dilemma. If you are a Democratic office holder, you probably got elected on a platform you cannot possibly implement. In the olden days, that was murky and hard to see. Today is wide open. We’re watching. There’s feeling of center stage. We’re all standing back. And I think the anger comes from that. I think in the anger, in part, comes from that sense you spoke of before that when I vote for a representative in my district, he looks just like me. He’s probably living three houses down. He talks just like me. He goes to Washington, and he becomes a different person. He talks differently. He dresses differently, and he doesn’t want to talk to me anymore.

So there’s a sense of distance. These very hierarchical organizations from the 20th century are incredibly steep. There are many, many, many levels between me and the president of the United States. And I think the public presents that. The president at the end is just a citizen, but it doesn’t seem that way in many ways.

John Roskam:

But the argument that the president is just a citizen overturns a century of, the president is wiser than us, the president has better advisors than us, the president has access to information and technology that we can’t possibly understand, or use or utilize for our own benefit. We have to hand it over to the experts.

Martin Gurri:

And that was probably an argument winner in the year 1954. All right? In the year 2023, they laugh at you. You probably know more than the president does because there are so many sources of information just gushing everywhere that the trick isn’t to get the information. The trick is to make sense out of it. And believe you me, the president of the United States has much trouble making sense out of this gusher as you and I have.

John Roskam:

One of the questions that many IPA members are keen for me to ask you, and you talk about it in The Revolt of the Public, is what does this phenomenon mean for political parties? And you talk about it in the book. So in the UK, the US and Australia, there is a view that the mainstream hegemonic political parties, the two major sides of politics are basically identical. There are differences at the margins, but not very great. We are electing a political class who seem to have more in common with each other regardless of whether they’re left or right than with the public. How have the political parties responded to this-

Martin Gurri:

Yeah. That-

John Roskam:

… anger and to information?

Martin Gurri:

Yeah, the political parties, as far as I can tell, on the… I’m going to talk about the United States, which of course I know best. On the one hand, they have paid no attention. But the political parties were in the process of disintegration before even the fifth wave of information, the big tsunami hit because there had been all these reforms. The political party in the US exists mainly to elect presidents. So every four years, something called the Republican Party gathers. The national party gathers together, but mostly these are local things. So they are very much in the 20th century, and they’re very much dying out because they’re not adapting.

What happens in a Darwinian world, when a form doesn’t adapt to a change environment, it dies out. So what you have in the United States, and I think this certainly replicates in other countries, I would not venture Australia. Australia sounds to me like, you’re an earlier stage than we are. But the public, you have to understand, is not one. There is no party of the public. The digital dispensation fractures opinion like a fallen mirror, and the public lives in the broken pieces. But then we have this dual yes or no system, Democrats, Republican system. So what you have on each side… And I think the Democrats have done better at maintaining what you’re talking about for Australia, an establishment class. But they also have, their Bernie Sanders and their crazy radicals that want to upend everything.

The Republicans are a bunch of fragments, and these two sides, the fragments come together. There is a tendency for whoever is loudest and most vehement to gain more traction. So it’s a race to the bottom in a certain way. I think the political parties are in need of drastic reform, certainly in the United States. I think pretty much across the democratic world. You look at what’s happening in France, Emmanuel Macron is, I think, rightly portrayed as a pillar of the establishment. But he was a creature of the revolt of the public. His party, which at that time, I forgot what it was called En Marche, I think. Has changed names because those people change the party names every six months, for some reason. He came up with his party, I think less than a year before the elections. So he was a complete newbie. By the standards of the Fifth Republic, he had no right or reason to run press for presidency. He didn’t have all the credentials that the people expected inside the establishment.

He won. First thing he does is he goes to Versailles and starts strutting up and down Versailles as, somehow that’s going to restore trust in the presidency. I know many, many people who voted for him thinking… And the party, En Marche, was actually a bottom up party. Very much a bottom up party. But once he got to the top, it was one more establishment party. The political parties haven’t learned that we live in a Reddit world, and Reddit people vote what’s the most interesting thing. And the people who voted, it goes to the top. No, no, no. They don’t want that. When you look at the agenda of the established parties and the established elite, and you look at what the public’s in almost every country say is important to them, it’s a mismatch. It’s a complete mismatch.

John Roskam:

Can I then ask, what has been the response of the established elites to the anger and the disenchantment of the public to the capacity of individuals to share information and communicate relatively seamlessly? And this is such an important theme of The Revolt of the Public. How have the elites responded? What have they done? And then we’ll move on to what they did during COVID, what they’re doing to the mainstream media now, and what might the future be?

Martin Gurri:

Yeah, of course what they first did was… Oh, they go through all the stages of grief. The first was denial. This never happened. The internet never happened. Nothing has changed. These are just deplorables. Then I think after Brexit and Trump… This is 2016 we’re talking about now. This had been going on for six years, and it was remarkable to me that whenever there was one of these eruptions, like the Indignados in Spain or the occupiers in New York, the elites were going, “Who are these people, and where are they coming from?” They didn’t belong to any institution. So-

John Roskam:

How did I miss it? How did I not understand that Donald Trump would be elected president?

Martin Gurri:

Right. So they basically did not pay attention to this until Brexit did. It was a double blow of Brexit and Trump. And then they panicked. The word I would describe is, they panicked. For years, they were in a state of panic. And the panicked was reflected in basically trying to de-legitimize anything that was not part of the established framework. So if you were Trump, you couldn’t possibly have been elected. I’m not a fan of Trump. I’m going to put that on the table. But I think the most damage that Trump did was in what he did to his opponents. He drove them crazy. So they pretty much decided that a person that could not have been honestly elected in the United States of America, because he was so much not like them. So they spent years trying to undo that election. First, they had two and a half years of… And it was not just the politics. They have to make it clear. When I talk about the elites, I’m talking about the entire spectrum of American culture, and I think that’s true in most countries. All the media, the arts, the business class-

John Roskam:

Civil society as a whole.

Martin Gurri:

Well, the institutional part of it. The institutional part of it locked shoulders and said, “This will not happen. This will not stand.” So the media, I just read the Russia hacking story for 2016… That honestly, if you’re a media person, and these are media people writing about it, you knew perfectly well that didn’t happen. You didn’t need a tremendous investigation. There have been great deep research done on this, and it didn’t happen, of course. And it didn’t affect anybody, but you didn’t need that. But I read there were half a million stories and TV reports about this, in the two and a half years that it was running. Two and a half million stories about something that turns out to be false. And now, take a deep breath, make it quiet and see if you hear anybody apologizing or saying, “Ooh, we got it wrong.” Not a single one. All right? They just don’t know.

John Roskam:

What does this do to public trust in the mainstream media?

Martin Gurri:

I think it destroys it. In this country I’ve seen various polls give you various numbers. I’ve seen as low as 9% of trust.

John Roskam:

When did the media start barracking in the way they do now? Was it because of this? Around 2016? Was it earlier? Was it a trend that was always going to eventuate as the media started just catering to its own class and its own readers? Is this a long-term trend or something that’s quite recent?

Martin Gurri:

It’s very recent. It’s recent of the century, I would say. I think there are very good business reasons for this. The flagship of the news media is and has always been the newspaper. The newspaper is dying. All right? Forget it, it’s dying. Okay?

John Roskam:

Should we be sad about that?

Martin Gurri:

No. Why should I? What did newspapers add to the world?

John Roskam:

They provided information. They told us the news.

Martin Gurri:

What’s news? Read a lot of books, you get a lot better information. I have spent my entire life analyzing news and the news media, and I find it fascinating that people think of it as this important… I grew up like that. Here in America, they give you this thing when you were school called Junior Scholastic, which had current events. So you basically trained you to be newspaper readers when you were a kid in elementary school. Right? But as a reflective adult, I have realized, the newspapers basically reflected a very narrow band of things that were of interested to the elites. Journalists have always been essentially minor pawns in the games that elites play. Again, if you are… The idea that they tell truth to power. Well, if some elite wants to tell the truth, it might come out. But if you’re John F. Kennedy and you don’t want the fact that you have an eye for the ladies, it will never come out in anything.

John Roskam:

Can I then put to you an argument that’s been put so often to me by my friends in journalism in the media, which is that common bind of what brings us together as a community is what the media provided. It provided a public square, a clearing house for us to agree, to disagree, to share news and information. And of course, some people take that a step further, which is… As is done in Australia that justifies therefore government funding of the media. Because without this public square, how do we build any sense of community? And if we break up into shards of partisan politics, there’ll be nothing that brings us together as a nation, state or as a locality, or as anything else.

Martin Gurri:

Well, if I told you, “My book, The Revolt of the Public is a unifier, it’s going to unify society. We should all read it, and we should all agree with it because it’s unifying. If you disagree with it, you are fragmenting society.” It will sound a tad self-serving, I think, if I said that. All right? So the media has, I’ll call it the ideology of news, which is if you don’t read us, you’re a bad citizen. I just beg to differ. I think the news is a business like every other. The reason they moved from a pretense of objectivity to a very sharp partisan outlook were business reasons primarily. When the New York Times started pummeling the Russia election story, it had 1 million digital subscribers. All right? By the end of the Trump era, it had 8 million. So in a time when every other newspaper was sinking, the Times found a little raft that may keep it going a little bit longer than the rest.

John Roskam:

Can I then move on to a topic which the media once portrayed an interest in freedom of speech. And you recently wrote this about Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter. You said that free speech, once the equivalent of motherhood and warm puppies, is now portrayed as a dire and awful thing. Free speech is portrayed as hate speech, free speech is portrayed as racism. And you quoted one of my favorite comments about Twitter and Elon Musk. You quoted a journalist saying, “If Elon Musk successfully purchases Twitter, it could result in World War III and the destruction of our planet.” When did we lose faith in freedom of speech?

Martin Gurri:

We did not lose faith in freedom of speech. A certain group of people, the establishment, the elites I think are very certain that they can’t win the argument when engaged. So they have recruited the cult of identity. The cult of identity is wonderful in that it cuts off argument. I just say, “You’re racist.” And then, what can you say? Or you’re a destroyer of the earth, or it’s disinformation. It’s a conspiracy theory. So it consists of a series of conversation killers, which if you feel like the things you have to say probably won’t win on their own merit, they come in very handy. Now, I have to tell you, and I don’t want to make light of this, I come from Cuba.

So I know where of I speak. By the time I was 10 years old, I had experienced a right wing dictatorship and a left wing totalitarian dictator. All right? So I know about freedom of speech from the other side. In this country, in my very long life, I have never seen anything like it. I have never seen anything. I have never seen educated, well-meaning, authoritative people stand up and say in public, “Free speech is a bad thing. We need to control it.” That has never happened before.

John Roskam:

This is a really important point, and I think significant for us all in western liberal democracies. Did they ever believe in freedom of speech? Was freedom of speech merely a slogan to achieve power or influence? Because for hundreds of years it was the left that believed in freedom of speech and conservative right that opposed. What do you think has happened? Was it ever a real thing, freedom of speech-

Martin Gurri:

I think-

John Roskam:

… a believe in freedom of speech?

Martin Gurri:

I think what has changed is the structure of information. All right? The structure of information in the 20th century limited public speech to a very small handful of people.

John Roskam:

So it was never really freedom of speech for the public. It was freedom of speech for them.

Martin Gurri:

Well, the public could write letters to the editor or you could go and give a speech in a street corner if you wanted to. There was freedom of speech. Believe me, I was in Cuba. There is a difference. But reaching an audience was limited to a very few people. Whereas now, anybody can… Things can go viral at any moment. Some complete unknown can say three strange things that 10 million people, a 100 million people read within minutes. So this terrifies the elites. It terrifies the elites. To be fair, it’s a new thing. It’s something that we need to understand, but not to shut it down.

John Roskam:

Is that what we saw during COVID, the government control, the government regulation of anything that challenged their authority that they presented as public health measures?

Martin Gurri:

Well, you remember that I did my chronology from The Arab Spring to 2019. So what happened in 2020? 2020 was COVID. My take on COVID is the authorities came down in their good 20th century mode saying, “We know. We represent science. Listen to us.” And I think the public was terrified. It was terrified in part because this was a serious epidemic, terrified in part because the media blew it up to be like the bubonic plague. So there was a lot of fear in the public and a lot of desire to believe that faith that had been lost. So okay, let’s trust these guys. They tell us to wash our hands, we wash our hands. Tell us to stay at home, we stay at home. I think the effects seem to have been very variable. What you say about Australia, that the lockdowns are popular, there are other countries like that.

They have not been popular here in the United States. They’ve been very unpopular. Depending on where you are, more unpopular or less. But the main effect was, it gave the elites a wedge to control social media. In other words, the surgeon general called it an infodemic. And he said, “You can’t be aggressive enough in trying to stop social media.” President Biden literally said social media was killing people for publishing alternative proposals about vaccination and so forth. So social media didn’t want to be accused of killing people, obviously enough. As we now know through Twitter files, this huge bureaucracy was directed, with the FBI and the lead, to essentially tell social media, what was what. Well, it took five seconds of that health oriented, let’s not kill anybody, idea to tip over into politics. Once you can control it on one subject, what is going…

So now it became like, if you say certain words, those are harm. If you say certain things about the Biden administration, that’s a Russian hack. And suddenly, it became very one-sided protection of the establishment. Joe Biden, more than anything, represents this incredibly withered old establishment that is weighing down the United States at the moment. The difference between media in its own self-image, 50 years ago and today… In the olden days, they thought they talked truth to power. It wasn’t true, but they thought that. Today it’s like, no, no, no, no. They’re here to basically smother scandals. We genuflect before power, and we insist that all you rubes out there genuflect and bow before power. It’s remarkable. It’s an amazing thing.

John Roskam:

How then do we make an argument, and how do we win an argument for freedom of speech when exactly as you say, arguments that counter the official narrative are presented as misinformation or worse as disinformation?

Martin Gurri:

Well, I can tell you what causes lack of freedom of speech, having lived it. It’s fear. It’s fear. The system in the US today is maintained by, do you have these institutions and these elites who have embraced identity? And the thing about the identity fanatics is, they can summon the internet mob at any second and they can cost you your job. They can cost you your reputation. You can, in seconds, be out on the streets. So people watch what they say when they’re afraid to lose their jobs. I just think we have to remember the old days of the Cold War. Pope John Paul, when he went to Poland, he said, “Be not afraid. Be not afraid.” And I think the Polls looked at each other. There was hundreds of thousands of them and thought, it’s a lot more of us than we knew.

And they stopped being afraid. And that system, which was based on the denial of freedom of speech, collapsed within 10 years. So I think we just need… This is as much a moral… This is where that gets tricky because I don’t feel like a moral prophet of any kind. But it slides from information to politics, to really a moral dilemma, which is how much should we keep our mouth shut because we’re afraid to lose our jobs? And how much should we say, “I’m a citizen of the United States of America. This is in Cuba. I can say whatever I want. It may be unpleasant. I may be stupid. I may be deplorable, but I can say it and I should be applauded for saying it or debated for saying it. Not shut down, not silenced.”

John Roskam:

How do we reignite bravery? How do we make the next generation brave and make them understand? And just before we started the official part of this discussion, we were commenting upon this, and you said something that I wrote down. You said that once we lose our freedom, it’s very hard to get them back. How do we get the next generation to understand that they cannot be afraid?

Martin Gurri:

That’s a very good question. I wish I had a really good answer for it. All I can tell you is, every pandemic, the cure doesn’t happen a million at a time. It happens one sick person at a time. And a sick culture can only be healed one person at a time. So I think I would just propose this, there is a tendency in the digital age to project. We see all these evils out there, and you can be a left person, and you feel, Trump. Kill Trump. Or you can be a right person and go, “Yeah, the wokes are trying to kill… And there is a tremendous lack of self-reflection. How about if we turn that powerful criticism on ourselves and ask ourselves, to what degree are we living up to our own standards? To what degree am I good enough?

I’ll tell you, my ideal for that is the old Victorians in England. Everybody talks about the Victorians as being hypocrites. Read Gladstone Diaries, okay? The guy was in anguish. One of the most powerful men in the world, most successful. He was in anguish. He was very religious, of course, and he was in anguish. He didn’t feel he was nearly as good as he should be. I think we need a dose of that. I think we need to look at ourselves and say, how can we do better? How can we be strong outwardly, but questioning critical inwardly.

John Roskam:

Does our education system encourage any of that either in schools or colleges?

Martin Gurri:

Not anymore. Not anymore. It’s amazing. I don’t know how far advanced it’s happened in Australia. It might take us that most of the Anglosphere is more or less the same place, but in this country it’s a disaster. It’s just a disaster. If you’re not in the sciences, I don’t know what those poor kids are learning. They are basically being trained as activists. Of course, that’s a limited profession. They all graduate thinking they’re going to have great jobs. They’re going to make them influence the world, and this and that, and the other. But you have to know something about something, and you have to have some sense that there may be people who disagree with you. And you have to understand that there’s a past. Basically, much of this begins with the abolition of the past. The past is basically the place where bad things happened that we are now repudiating, which is a little bit like lobotomizing yourself.

John Roskam:

Can we talk about the abolition of the past? So for example, in The Revolt of the Public, you make reference to the religious wars of the 16th and 17th century. If you were to talk to a young university arts graduate, humanities graduate these days, they wouldn’t have a clue what you are referring to. Is that part of, to be blunt, the agenda to wipe out our history, our common understanding, to remove an understanding of what freedoms were and how we must fight for them and protect them? What’s the agenda behind, I would argue, the abolition of humanities, and we see humanities courses plummeting in enrollments around, as you said, the Western world. What do you ascribe it to?

Martin Gurri:

Well, it’s internally coherent, right? If you believe, for example, that we live in a society that is systemically racist… And I look at the United States of America, look at my neighborhood, I go like, “Okay, if this is systemic racist.” I remember Jim Crow. I’m old enough. But if you believe that, then everything that has gone before is evil. Basically, the job of good people in the world today is to abolish the past and create this very complex system of reparations and compensations where it’s not equality. Nobody wants equality in that group. They want equity. And equity means there’s… It really doesn’t work. Let’s put it this way, it’s just an empty words. But ideally, there would be some kind of algorithm, some kind of magnificent Einsteinian equation that shows you what every segment of the population deserves, given the historical injustices involved. Would be plugged into that equation, and everybody will get just that. Of course-

John Roskam:

And that argument is not… And that algorithm is not sustainable in the same way as the policy promises of the elites in the fifties and sixties, were never able to be delivered. What’s your timeline for the public understanding that this deeply negative realistic project is not going to work?

Martin Gurri:

It’s happening already. And the problem is, in the end there are… identity when it’s pulled, nobody likes it. This is an amazing thing. All right? This is a small minority. Nobody likes it. The people there is support that’s supposed to be protecting the other victim classes. Nobody likes it. Blacks, a vast majority of them don’t want to defund the police, for example, Hispanics, vast majorities of them don’t want open borders up. This is all part of the record. But in the end, we have these two parties, and they dominate one party. The identity of people dominate the Democratic Party. People vote instinctively between those two. And if you have somebody like Trump that’s very scary on this side, then they will vote. They’ll hold their nose. Republicans held their nose and voted for Trump. Democrats hold their nose and vote for identity. So again, we go back to the fact that our parties are failing us.

John Roskam:

We’ve covered many of the questions and the topics that IPA members have provided to me. But there’s a couple of other particular questions that I quickly, in our last 10 minutes or so, want to ask you about. Woke corporations, how have they come about, and what do we do?

Martin Gurri:

Yeah, that’s a good one. That’s a really good one. How they come about is the same as government, same as the news media. I call it the established church. Everybody wants to belong to the established church. Otherwise, you’re the outside looking in. So if you are a great big financial investment corporation, you demand all kinds of governance and environmental and whatnot. There’re all these letters that essentially translate into billionaires and trillion dollar companies forcing buying their politics upon people who can’t say no because they need the money. So I note that there’s a pushback. And here in the states, Ron DeSantis has made it a point. That is fascinating for me. If you watch politics enough, everything happens. Suddenly, the Republicans are fighting with corporations. Right? Big money-

John Roskam:

Everything’s been turned on its head. I thought the Republicans were controlled by big corporations.

Martin Gurri:

Right? Big money and big business, it’s the Ron DeSantis of the world that are attacking them. So that’s an interesting thing. I think there is a sense that we cannot allow people with tremendous amount of money or access to that to dictate, essentially our social and political stances because they have money. They’re purchasing those stances. I think that that will have a short lifespan. I think that is just too crude. But how it happened, it happened because everybody at a certain level of every institution in this country for sure, and most of the western world, belongs to the same church. They all sit at the same pew, and they want to use their political power, and they want to use their gigantic wealth to drag you in and say, “No, you have to worship here too.” I go, “Yeah, I don’t believe in that particular religion.” Nope, you got to do it. You got to do it. No choice.

John Roskam:

A very common question from IPA members, and this is related to, as I said, the debate about the voice in this country here and big tech censorship, is how do libertarians justify government regulation of the private sector and private corporations, which are the big technology companies. Is there a halfway house whereby we maintain some sort of free market system and understand the rules and rights of private property, but still have some sort of public debate and discourse under big tech? Or is that path passed?

Martin Gurri:

Are you alluding to government?

John Roskam:

Should big tech be regulated by government?

Martin Gurri:

Yeah. Again, coming from Cuba, I know that government’s almost invariably, let’s say. Act in well-meaning ways, but almost invariably, it ends badly. All right? So you can make a case, for example, that Google is a monopoly. And under the laws of the United States, it might be broken up. Do I approve that? That’s a technical point. I don’t really know. I don’t particularly like Google. I think it’s bad to have everything centralized like that. But I’m not sure that, again, the government gets involved sometimes to tackle real situations that need fixing, and at the end things are worse. So I don’t know whether that would be the case. I would seriously hesitate to get the government involved because the temptation to make whatever fix gets put in self-serving. And self-serving, either by just government itself, but the elites creating yet another lever that the elites can pull, or the specific crowd that happens to be in office at any moment when those laws get passed, it’s too great. It’s too great.

John Roskam:

In our last moments together, can I talk to you about a way forward? And in the City Journal recently in a wonderful article, you talked about the elements of a positive policy agenda, and you identified some guiding principles. You identified principle of sovereignty of the individual, equality and obligation. And this gets us back a bit to the question of morals that we touched on before. Do you want to talk about the importance of sovereignty, equality and obligation for a moment?

Martin Gurri:

Well, sovereignty of course means something that we seem to have somewhat forgotten, which is that in the United States, when you look at our constitution, it begins with we, the people. A famous phrase. Right? The government is not our kindly uncle trying to help us in our helpless way, so that we don’t harm ourselves. The government is not our mom and it’s not our dad. The government is our tool. It’s our servants. And I feel like the 20th century structure of government is tremendously steep and hierarchical, and that was not… If you want a very quick history of the United States, it began as the constitution basically created a gentleman’s republic. Around the turn of the 20th century, that couldn’t work anymore. Huge millions of people were entering history. They were educated. They were mobile. They were affluent, and they were scooped up into these institutions that were mass institutions. So you had mass party, political parties, mass movement. You had the mass production, mass consumers, everything got scooped up into that-

John Roskam:

And as you talked about mass media.

Martin Gurri:

You’re right. That doesn’t work anymore. That does not work anymore. In terms of equality, we now have to address an institutional world that should be much flatter and much more like Amazon say, than the great pyramid of Egypt. Which is what government feels like when you saddle up to it. So Amazon is a huge bureaucracy, and it’s an enormous thing, but that’s not what you experience. You experience service, and you experience it fast. Government is the great dispensary of services probably in history, but that’s not what you experience. You just feel like you’ve saddled up to this gigantic pyramid, and people condescend, and people are bureaucratic and so forth. So I think part of what we need, in terms of equality, is flattening down the government.

John Roskam:

And can you talk about obligation?

Martin Gurri:

Obligation, basically, right populism, which is what I was writing about, is anti control. That sings to me a little bit because particularly this moment, I feel like there are very many multiple attempts to control us from the top. But no set of propositions that bash away control will succeed unless we control ourselves. So obligation means, we have to be honorable, we have to be honest, we have to basically be loyal to our families, we have to be loyal to our communities, we have to be loyal to our country. That should be given, right? We shall have to obey the laws. We don’t cut corners with the laws. We can’t expect to demand of the elites that they do this, or they do that.

And then I myself, I’m going to squeeze by and not pay attention. So I think obligation is probably the most important part. That’s what gets us back. As you say, it’s the moral agenda of right populism, or it should be that we… It’s not just about us yelling about the other side, is we take on the mantle of, we’re going to walk the walk, we’re going to live the life that we want to see mirrored around us.

John Roskam:

Can I then ask you a final question, Martin? Are you optimistic about the future? Where do we look for for hope going forward?

Martin Gurri:

Yeah. And you know what? I have decided upon five seconds reflection that that’s a temperamental thing. So there are people who can never be optimistic and people who could already be pessimistic. Observable, I split the difference. I’m short-term pessimistic, I think buckle your seatbelt. There’s turbulence ahead. But I’m long-term optimistic. I think there are, in these technologies, a lot of potential for actually enhancing democracy, and enhancing the role of the ordinary person in how decisions are made. This country, having come as an immigrant, I have not lost faith in the common sense of the American people. Unfortunately, it doesn’t get reflected much because the people you hear in the information sphere are the loudest and the angriest and so forth. But if you look at the polls on all the horrible issues that supposedly are so divisive like, immigration, abortion, people tend to take very in between stands. Large numbers of people. Very few are all or nothing, which is what you hear online. So long-term, optimistic.

John Roskam:

Martin, that is a wonderful way to end this episode of IPA Encounters. Martin Gurri, thank you so much for being with us.

Martin Gurri:

Thank you for having me.

This transcript of IPA Encounters from 3 March 2023 with Martin Gurri has been edited for clarity.