Here's the link. This is a bit too long for my taste, but I had the time so I gave it a listen. For the first time, I found myself disagreeing with almost everything that was said. The topic of the video was popular sovereignty and the arguments were of considerable quality, so I think many of the populists here will find the video very helpful. For my part, I should note that I am not a populist, and that my sympathies for the populus and populism are personal, not doctrinal - in my view, populism is doctrinally incoherent and wrong.

The main issue I have with popular sovereignty is that it is nonsensical - it is not a fact of life, but merely a PR strategy utilised by certain vested interests in order to protect their power. The idea that the Right should do what these vested interests do and tell people that they are "sovereign" when they do not even understand what is going on in their society or have the slightest ability to change it is, in my view, very flawed. If I recall correctly, Davis in fact states that popular sovereignty is government for the people but not necessarily government by the people. In this case, however, it is not at all clear to me how the populus is "sovereign", when it is evidently being governed by something other than itself. Moreover, I think this is the worst possible way to formulate popular sovereignty, because it attributes legitimacy to any system that can present itself as ruling in the name of and for the benefit of the people, including liberalism, which has been very adept at manufacturing consent across the centuries. In my view, that is also what "popular sovereignty" put in practice in general tends to boil down to - manufacturing consent. In any case, we are dealing with a phenomenon which does not present an eternal truth and is neither inevitable nor constant, but rather precariously maintained, even as a fiction or an illusion. Since popular sovereignty is not something which exists on its own, but has to be affirmed, it is not clear why one would want to affirm popular sovereignty over aristocracy in the true sense, namely government by the most noble and able, whose rule would be in harmony with the well-being of the populus not because of any popular or social theories but simply because of shared loyalties, transcendent traditions, and virtues. Since according to Woods and Davis the only advantage of the Right today is that it speaks the truth, this problem becomes all the more difficult for them to overcome, because the only sensible reason that could be given for raising up popular sovereignty is simply that it has been a popular idea in the past couple of centuries.

Additionally, one idea that featured prominently in this video was the idea of natural law. If you are on the Right, you probably hear about natural law every now and again. Natural law is a whole other topic that would be best discussed elsewhere, but there is a general problem that I have notice with the way this concept is used, not only in the Right as a whole but also in this video. It seems to me that natural law has become a materialist deus ex machina that serves the role of handwaving away the need to justify the claims one makes. In the first place, natural law was a concept invoked by antitraditional thinkers in the past in order to explain the world without any reference to God, so it is strange to see Rightist theorists today, and especially religious theorists like Davis, make use of this concept in order to affirm their worldview. Not to mention that, as I said earlier, I do not see how popular sovereignty can be considered justified by invoking natural law, since popular sovereignty plainly does not exist either in nature or in human society.

Watching this video has convinced me that while there is indeed great value in philosophy, a broad, high-quality historical education would probably be a lot more useful to Rightists today. It is not easy to read history correctly, but it offers many excellent refutations of ideas which are otherwise difficult to decisively disprove, such as popular sovereignty, for example. History, when examined carefully and from the correct perspective, allows us to understand where various ideas come from, what purpose and whose goals they served or continue to serve, and what ideas are correct and incorrect. Obviously not everything can be explained by history, various wrong explanations can also be provided by a poor reading of history, and ultimately history is best studied when one has a clear understanding of the ideas he is studying, for which philosophy is indispensable. Nevertheless, history still seems to me like a sounder, more practicable way of arriving at truth today. The problem is lack of structure and a Rightist historical tradition. One of Evola's main contributions was, in my opinion, a Rightist theory of history, and his work even provides some practical examples of that theory put to action, but I am not sure if there is any significant amount of historical literature written from that perspective.

At any rate, not to digress too much, it seems to me that a clear identity and understanding of history are of utmost importance today. Identity is what would provide the shared loyalties, and history would help dispel illusions by pointing out to us what has been and has not been correct in our past, and how incorrect developments follow one another - this refers not only to the history of the great political ideas, including popular sovereignty and self-determination, but also the history of words and of worldviews, and of many other things foundational to our understanding of the world, which receive almost no attention today. A genuine, proper study of history could also prove very illuminating for theorists in regard to what is and is not proper to the European people and the European civilisation.

Finally, there are also some strange statements of the optics variety made in this video which could probably be glossed over since they did not play a role in any of the core arguments. Nevertheless, the claim Davis makes that liberals basically want you to oppose popular sovereignty and to take a hard line principled stance on these issues is indeed very strange. Given that both Davis and Woods are very intelligent and well-educated, I don't think any of the more optics-related statements would survive rational deliberation, and I consider these to be the result of the unscripted discussion format of the video. Davis does raise some good and factual points about how developing a cohesive worldview results in losing a lot of polemical, ideological baggage, but I think he extends this observation a bit too far, since a lot of people develop their own cohesive worldviews without accepting "normal" beliefs like popular sovereignty.