How They LIED for 60 Years - Eric Kaufmann Exposes the Progressive Myth (#44)
Eric Kaufmann argues that the progressive consensus built since the 1960s is now unravelling across the West. For European countries that embedded gender-identity ideology into law and medicine faster than most, understanding how that ideology colonised universities and institutions is the first step toward reversing the damage. This conversation supplies the historical depth that clinical and policy debates alone rarely provide.
Eric Kaufmann is a professor of politics at the University of Buckingham and a senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute. He recently left Birkbeck, University of London, after twenty years, to found the Centre for Heterodox Social Science — a project designed to rebuild research independence inside an academic landscape he believes has become ideologically captured. He speaks with Stella O'Malley, Mia Hughes and Dr Bret Alderman about how a 60-year ideological cycle is approaching its end, and what institutions should expect as it does. Kaufmann traces what he calls the moral Big Bang of the 1960s: the moment when guilt-driven politics reshaped American universities and then, through academic networks and the professional class, spread to every major institution in the Western world. The ideas that germinated at Berkeley did not stay in California. They reached European capitals, EU directorates, and Scandinavian health ministries. What looks like a local dispute about gender clinics or school curricula is, in Kaufmann's framing, the late-stage expression of a far longer ideological arc — one that began not with a manifesto but with a shift in the moral assumptions of an entire generation of administrators, clinicians, and lawmakers. He draws a careful distinction between economic Marxism and what he calls cultural socialism — a form of identity-based politics that operates through language, policy, and institutional culture rather than through wages. This distinction matters for Europe. The continent never fully adopted American-style affirmative action, but it absorbed cultural socialism through different channels: diversity offices in universities, equalities frameworks in EU law, and the rapid codification of gender identity into medical and legal systems. Countries such as France and Germany, which approach these questions through their own secularist or federalist traditions, have absorbed the same underlying pressure even when the surface language differs. The episode was recorded before Kaufmann published his October 2025 report documenting a dramatic decline in trans identification among young Americans — findings that add empirical force to the argument that the ideological tide is shifting. European data point in a parallel direction. Sweden and Finland were among the first to revise their clinical guidelines for minors, decisions that have since been closely watched by health authorities and politicians across the continent. The political realignment Kaufmann describes in the United States is arriving in Europe too, at different speeds and through different democratic traditions. For European clinicians, researchers and advocates who have felt isolated within institutions still committed to the progressive consensus, this conversation offers both an explanation and a form of orientation. The institutions were not captured overnight, and they will not be reformed overnight. Kaufmann's argument is that what is now happening is not an accident or a simple backlash but the predictable conclusion of a cycle. Understanding where that cycle began — in the seminar rooms and funding committees of the 1960s — makes it considerably easier to think clearly about where it might end, and what kind of institutions could replace the ones now under pressure.
