How They LIED for 60 Years - Eric Kaufmann Exposes the Progressive Myth (#44)
Eric Kaufmann traces the 60-year ideological project that reshaped Western institutions — universities, health services, schools — and argues it is now unravelling. For Irish listeners, the stakes are immediate: Ireland absorbed the progressive consensus with remarkable speed, embedding it in gender policy, school curricula and healthcare. This conversation asks whether Ireland's institutions are prepared to interrogate assumptions they adopted so uncritically, and what a post-progressive settlement might mean on this side of the Atlantic.
Eric Kaufmann is one of the most forensic analysts of how ideology spreads through institutions. A professor of politics and founder of the Centre for Heterodox Social Science, he spent two decades at Birkbeck before concluding that the university could no longer accommodate the kind of research he needed to do. In this conversation, he maps the arc of a 60-year ideological project — from the campus revolts of the 1960s to the diversity and inclusion bureaucracies of today — and argues that it is finally, visibly, beginning to collapse. Kaufmann's central argument is that the civil rights era produced not just legislative reform but a moral transformation of elite culture. What he calls the "moral Big Bang" of the 1960s — centred initially at Berkeley — gradually reconfigured how major Western institutions understood themselves and their obligations. Affirmative action, disparate impact doctrine and what Kaufmann distinguishes as "cultural socialism" (as distinct from economic Marxism) spread from universities into government, healthcare, media and schools. The cumulative effect was the entrenchment of a progressive consensus that became, in many institutions, effectively mandatory. Ireland is a particularly instructive case. A country that threw off religious conservatism with remarkable speed in the 1990s and 2000s absorbed the new progressive consensus with equal enthusiasm — arguably with less resistance than either the United States or the United Kingdom. The capture of Irish universities, the speed with which gender ideology entered SPHE curricula, the HSE's approach to gender-questioning young people: all of these reflect the institutional dynamics Kaufmann describes. Stella O'Malley, who has worked as a psychotherapist through this period and seen first-hand how professional norms shifted, brings a distinctly Irish weight to this conversation. What makes Kaufmann's analysis useful is that he is not describing a conspiracy but a logic — the way ideas that seemed reasonable in one decade became litmus tests for institutional belonging in the next, and how dissent came to carry professional risk. That dynamic is familiar to many Irish professionals in education, healthcare and social work who found that questioning gender identity doctrine carried consequences for their standing. The question Kaufmann raises — whether the collapse of this consensus in the United States will produce a similar reckoning elsewhere — is one Irish policymakers and parents have reason to take seriously. Kaufmann's October 2025 report, published after this conversation was recorded, found a dramatic decline in trans and queer identification among young Americans. Whether similar trends will emerge in Ireland remains to be seen. But the broader point — that identity claims among young people are shaped by social and institutional environments, not simply discovered within them — has direct implications for how Ireland's schools, clinics and government respond to the cohort of gender-questioning young people currently navigating the system. This episode does not offer easy comfort to any side. Kaufmann distinguishes carefully between classical liberals — who want open inquiry and procedural fairness — and post-liberals, whose reaction to progressive excess risks producing its own forms of coercion. What the conversation ultimately asks of Irish listeners is something straightforward: whether the institutions charged with the welfare of children and the integrity of public life have done enough to examine the assumptions they absorbed, and whether they are now prepared to do that work.
