How They LIED for 60 Years - Eric Kaufmann Exposes the Progressive Myth (#44)
23 October 2025
With Eric Kaufmann
Global
Professor Eric Kaufmann argues that the progressive consensus that reshaped Western institutions over 60 years is now breaking down. His concept of 'cultural socialism' — ideology embedded in universities, health bodies and publicly funded organisations rather than in state economics — helps explain how Irish institutions, including the HSE and universities, came to adopt gender-identity frameworks so quickly and so uniformly. Recorded before his October 2025 report showing a decline in trans identification among young Americans, the conversation offers historical context for a shift that is now becoming visible across policy, law and demographics.
Eric Kaufmann is Professor of Politics at the University of Buckingham and founder of the Centre for Heterodox Social Science, which he established after two decades at Birkbeck. He brings quantitative rigour and historical breadth to questions that are more often treated as purely ideological. In this conversation he argues that the progressive era — the cluster of ideas about race, identity and institutional equity that took root in the 1960s — has run its course, and that the political upheaval now visible across the English-speaking world represents not a crisis but the end of a 60-year consensus. The distinction Kaufmann draws between 'cultural socialism' and economic Marxism is central to his argument. Economic Marxism was largely defeated in the West by the mid-twentieth century. Cultural socialism, by contrast, embedded itself in universities, HR departments, media organisations and publicly funded bodies. It operated through hiring, curriculum, professional standards and the management of language rather than through state ownership of industry. This framing helps explain why so many institutions adopted progressive positions in near-lockstep: the mechanism was not top-down decree but professional acculturation operating across decades. Universities were, on his account, the original incubators. The ideas that emerged at Berkeley in the 1960s — concerning structural privilege, disparate impact and equity of outcome — took a generation to travel from campus seminars into government guidelines, professional codes and funding criteria. By the time they reached health services and public bodies, they arrived not as contested proposals but as settled orthodoxy. The speed with which Irish universities, the HSE and state agencies adopted gender-identity frameworks reflects this dynamic: the institutional pipeline had been running long before the policies became publicly visible. Kaufmann identifies the period from approximately 2022 as a turning point. The reversal of affirmative action in the United States, sustained resistance to DEI frameworks in the UK, and the growing willingness of mainstream politicians in several countries to contest progressive assumptions all point to a loosening of the consensus. The conversation was recorded before Kaufmann published his October 2025 report documenting a significant decline in trans and queer self-identification among young Americans — a finding that suggests the ideological tide may also be turning at the level of individual identity. The episode closes with a discussion of what might replace the progressive settlement and whether the emerging right-of-centre coalition can hold together. The tension between classical liberals, who want a return to neutral procedural norms, and post-liberals, who argue that those norms were never truly neutral, maps onto live debates in Ireland about how to reform captured institutions without simply substituting one form of ideological management for another. Kaufmann offers no easy resolution, but he does provide the historical framework within which those debates need to be understood.
