How They LIED for 60 Years - Eric Kaufmann Exposes the Progressive Myth (#44)
Eric Kaufmann, who left Birkbeck after twenty years to found the Centre for Heterodox Social Science, argues that a 60-year progressive ideological consensus is finally fracturing. For British listeners, this matters: the same institutional capture that shaped American universities also drove NHS gender services, school guidance and the professional resistance to the Cass Review. Understanding the ideology's origins — and why it is now retreating — is essential context for the UK's ongoing reckoning with gender medicine and institutional reform.
Eric Kaufmann spent two decades as a professor at Birkbeck, University of London, before leaving to establish the Centre for Heterodox Social Science — a departure that itself illustrates the central argument of this conversation. In his view, a distinct ideological system, which he calls cultural socialism, took root in Western universities during the 1960s and has since spread outward to dominate nearly every major institution. That process did not happen overnight, and it did not happen only in the United States. The starting point Kaufmann identifies is what he describes as a moral revolution that transformed liberal societies in the decade following the American civil rights movement. White guilt, he argues, became a structuring emotion for progressive politics, producing policies and doctrines that have now been entrenched for more than half a century. The significance of this framing for British listeners is that the same emotional and intellectual architecture was imported wholesale into UK institutions, even where the specific American historical context did not travel with it. For those following the gender medicine debate in Britain, the pattern Kaufmann traces will feel immediately familiar. The NHS's Gender Identity Development Service, the professional bodies that published guidance on trans-inclusive practice in schools, the organisations that lobbied against the Cass Review — all reflect a period in which ideological conformity was treated as the price of institutional legitimacy. Dissent was not merely unwelcome; it was made structurally costly. Kaufmann's account of how universities became the primary incubator for these norms helps explain why clinicians and researchers who raised concerns about child gender medicine so often found themselves professionally isolated. The episode also touches on how different Anglophone countries have responded to the same ideological pressures. Kaufmann describes Canada as a more thoroughgoing example of progressive institutional capture, while the UK has shown at least some capacity for course correction. The Cass Review, the closure of the Tavistock clinic, and the subsequent reconfiguration of NHS gender services represent, in Kaufmann's framework, exactly the kind of institutional retreat that becomes possible when the political and intellectual climate shifts sufficiently. Britain is not the United States, and the legal mechanisms here differ, but the underlying dynamic is recognisably the same. What Kaufmann cannot fully predict — and is candid about — is what replaces the consensus that is now fracturing. The emerging contest he identifies, between classical liberals who want to restore neutral institutions and post-liberals who want to substitute progressive values with conservative ones, is playing out in British politics too. It is visible in debates about university free speech legislation, the reform of equality law, and what the Equality Act's protections should actually mean in practice. This conversation was recorded before Kaufmann published research showing a significant decline in trans identification among young Americans — a finding that adds empirical weight to the argument that a genuine cultural shift is under way. The question for Britain is whether the same pattern will emerge in domestic data, and what that might mean for NHS waiting lists, schools policy, and the legislative questions around gender recognition that remain unresolved.
