Unpacking the Failures of the Millennial Left: A Conversation with Alex Hochuli

Could the millennial left's political failures be traced back to a misalignment with historical Marxist frameworks? Join us on VarmVlog as we unpack this and more in an eye-opening conversation with Alex Hochuli, author of Omelets with Eggshells: On the Failure of the Millennial Left and co-host of Aufbungabunga Podcast.

We dive into the heart of millennial left politics, pulling apart the complexity of its evolution and examining the personal experiences and organizational challenges faced by key figures and societies. From the importance of understanding local contexts to the critical need for clear demands and structured organization, this episode is packed with insights for anyone wondering where the millennial left went wrong.

The rise and fall of leftist movements like Podemos and the institutionalization of BLM and Me Too are central to our discussion. We'll contrast the short-term gains and long-term struggles of these movements, and how they intersect with the entrenched political systems in Anglophone countries. We touch on the nuanced role of media and social media in shaping these movements, and the constraints that have stifled their potential within the American political landscape. This episode also delves into the speculative nature of political investments and the discomfort with radical change that has plagued recent leftist efforts.

In reflecting on the broader political landscape, we explore the crisis of contemporary political progress and the decline in labor organization. Alex O'Chilly shares his thoughts on the generational gaps within the left and how historical amnesia affects current movements. From the fragmentation of elite-driven politics to the nostalgia for mid-20th century frameworks, we question the left’s readiness to embrace uncertainty and ambition. Tune in to understand why the left needs to move beyond nostalgia and face the unique challenges of the 21st century head-on.

Chapters

• 0:00 Failure of the Millennial Left Analysis
• 12:20 Analyzing Millennial Left's Evolution
• 22:05 Crisis of Politics and Populism
• 37:27 Politics of Speculative Continuity and Comfort
• 43:23 Crisis of Contemporary Political Progress
• 53:46 Political Degeneration and Historical Amnesia
• 58:10 Decline in Labor Organization and Politics
• 1:11:18 Post-Democracy and Political Conflict
• 1:15:13 Political Crisis and Democratic Disillusionment
• 1:26:39 Nostalgia and Political Hauntology
• 1:35:23 Navigating Current Political Turmoil
• 1:45:03 Critiquing the State of Contemporary Politics"
• 1:55:10 Navigating Hyper-Political Landscapes

Transcript

C. Derick Varn: 1:34

Hello and welcome to VarmVlog. I'm here with Alex O'Chilly of Off Bunga Bunga fame and also author of many things. But of relevance today is a piece you wrote, probably about six months well, I don't know when you wrote it, but it was published probably about six months ago called Omnibus with Eggshells and the Failure of the the millennial left, addressing a kind of trio of books that are beginning of what is likely going to be a long post-mortem on, uh, the politics of, let's say, 2008 and to 2022. Um, and as a person who's also writing one of these kinds of books, I'm going to go ahead and state that I have a little bit of skin in the game here.

C. Derick Varn: 2:27

I actually found your article to be fairly exhaustive. As you know, I did like a seven hour engagement with it. Seven hour engagement with it, um, uh, so I I do want to talk a little about it, but I want to talk about the choice of books too. Like there are some other books you could have thrown in this, some, uh, you know, books about, uh, political economy that try to explain the failure of the left in those regards. Uh, uh, even issues of jacobin that I remember that happened about, you know, early on the Biden administration, about how that whole social democratic left was seemingly already losing theme within a year of the Biden admin. So why did you pick these three books, and we can kind of go into them a little bit each.

Alex Hochul: 3:21

Yeah Well, thanks for having me on Um and thanks for your engagement with, with this um, which is, you know, it's ultimately a book review. It's not um, I don't know if it's not original work, but you know I'm trying to um, synthesize and digest and engage with a conversation that's obviously going on, one that, as you allude to, is a conversation that's obviously going on, one that, as you allude to, is a conversation that will probably continue and should continue. Actually, I think the risk is that the conversation is kind of buried because other events come to intercede and we don't want to think about, well, you know, how we failed and how things didn't work out as we wanted to. In fact, it probably worked out worse than we expected and therefore only too happy to sort of bury that.

Alex Hochul: 4:06

You know, we can note that, even something more recent than the failures of left populism which really, I think, had its definitive end in early 2020, you know something that came immediately after that, which was the pandemic we're already, you know, have kind of memory hold, not wanting to really talk critically about and re-examine that. So, obviously, the temptation for short-termism and for burying discussions and not having, you know, unflinching critical analysis is very present. So anyway, it's good to kind of continue this conversation. I'm looking forward to what your continue the the this conversation. I'm looking forward to to what your contribution is on it. Actually, can you hear more on that?

C. Derick Varn: 4:45

Yeah, it's, it's it started as well. Well, tokyo descends in the barbarism and then it's just been renamed recently. Barbarians. And it is increasingly about the way in which unanswered questions of prior generations of left and unanswered questions of the way political economy intersects with that leads to cycles of repetition. Because it gets weirdly specific in the American context how much this pattern repeats itself from the end of the popular front left into the exile of the 1950s, into non-Marxist academics that were somehow untouched by the Red Scare, emerging Marxist sectarians catching up with it late, then dominating the conversation, then splitting back off into multiple sectarianisms as things continue to fall apart, leading up to and including the left's inability to have a cogent response to Reaganism. And seemingly that happened in an accelerated format with the millennial left. Like what the patterns?

Alex Hochul: 5:57

that.

Alex Hochul: 5:57

I described with the new left happened in the millennial left in the term of like, eight years like and so 20 um which is, which is, you know, probably looking, putting this in a longer historical timeline, uh, probably reflect back on this and go well, why was everyone so excited? Or even forget that people were excited? Because it was. It was very brief, um, and I think that briefness is itself a reflection of um, a short-termism that was on show, and probably my essay is um, I mean, it's called omelets with eggshells. It's about not, um, you know, I guess my main point is about not wanting to, uh, broach rupture, and that's kind of. You know, if I'm going to summarize it for those who haven't read it or whatever, like that's kind of one of my main points, and probably the secondary one is about short termism as well, and so you know, as I may be saying the article, that I can't remember anymore, as you say, who was writing this at the end of last year, so I don't recall exactly. But basically, you know, if the left isn't going to be short, it's not going to think in long, the long term, then no one is and we're all fucked, um, so, you know, I think that as a primary responsibility to be thinking in a 20 year time span or something like that, um, and not in four-year electoral cycles or whatever it is that, um, that was occupying the, the minds of, of left populists, or the millennial left, depending on how you wish to characterize what we're talking about. Anyway, to kind of try to, I don't have a good answer to your question as to why these books. To me they seemed obvious, they were the ones that were on my radar. There are also people that I Chris Kutron aside know in person or kind of am friendly with or whatever, and who either I've had a drink with or have discussed politics with and have been on BungaCast before, so it's a kind of for me, a kind of ongoing engagement with their work and you know, and so on, and maybe vice versa, probably as well, vice versa, probably as well. So in fact, it was.

Alex Hochul: 7:59

I think I hadn't seen Cutrone's book out and I was writing it actually on Jaeger and Borriello's book, which is, and about Vincent Bevan's book, and why I started with those two is that they deal with different phases of the 2010s, or of the millennial left or of left populism, in that, you know, bevin's deals with the protest moment, the sort of in kuwait, horizontalist occupation of squares that took place from the arab spring through to southern europe, which actually is not something that he deals with that much, but in brazil and turkey, uh, even south korea, etc. Hong kong, um, and those are. That's like the first phase. And then suddenly, um, our generation, I guess, or whatever just pivots and goes actually let's engage in formal politics. Um, almost an about phase which is too extreme, most likely, um, in some regard, in terms of being overly institutionally focused and overly well, maybe not insurrectionist enough. Anyway, we can get into the details of that and the way that those two moments contrast with one another, but my interest setting out was like, okay, you've got Jaeger and Bordiello talking about the second phase and Vince and Bevan's talking about this first phase.

Alex Hochul: 9:22

Before it was, you know, not about elections, it's just about occupying squares and realizing the change that you want, without a really clear direction, to suddenly being like, hey, we can win, we can win elections and, as I say in the piece, the phrase you know the terminology of winning a victory suddenly entered, reentered the left lexicon, and I mentioned Bhaskar Sankara, former editor of Jacobin and of Aaron Bastani, you know also, I guess, former kind of editor or whatever of Navarro Media, who both, I remember, struck me quite a bit that they suddenly started talking about winning around like 2014 or 15. And I thought that was good. You know that was something positive and to be welcomed. So to trace through this and to try to put these books into dialogue was my objective. And then, you know, chris Couturne's book I saw was coming out and I added that one in because it I think is useful also to kind of stand it up against the others. It does have a kind of distinct perspective and it's also, interestingly, the one not written by a millennial, so someone who perhaps has different baggage. But yeah, I guess we can talk a bit more about that.

Alex Hochul: 10:33

I don't know what books I could have talked about which I didn't bring in here, other than my own, written with my colleagues at Bunkercast, which was itself a kind of early salvo in this discussion about what happened with the millennial left. I mean, we were writing our book in 2019, and we were finishing it in early 2020. So we were able to make mention of the pandemic, but not really know entirely how it would unfold, um, but we did get the defeat of sanders, we did get the defeat of corbin and um and were able to kind of, yeah, reflect on that in in the book, um, but anyway, it's not about my book, but yeah yeah, um, one of the things that I find interesting about, about talking about the millennial left as a person who's been commenting on it god, 13 fucking years um is that it very much starts off in a resistance mode, in a very in a broader, like 1980s, 1990s sense, um, and right now it's ended.

C. Derick Varn: 11:40

Well, it's really not the millennial left anymore, it's whatever the hell zoomers are doing, but, uh, we're talking about people who were, you know, 20 to 16 when covet started, um, uh, so so it does feel like, you know, going through this is like going through my period of active commentary, and I think another thing that makes Catron's book a little different is that parts of it are written contemporaneously to parts of the millennial left, whereas the other books are all written in hindsight, and I guess I should put my baggage out.

C. Derick Varn: 12:19

Insight, um, and I guess I should put my baggage out. The only one of these individuals I have never, uh, had interaction with, author borrello, but I've had several interactions with anton, yeager and um, and chris in some ways, is my, uh, let's say, anxiety of influence marxist track coach, of whom I've been fighting since I was about 23 years old and left his organization. So, you know, although, interestingly enough, while I have sat down and had beers with other members of the Platypus-affiliated society's leadership, chris and I have never been in the same room, so in some ways I'm still like you in that regard.

Alex Hochul: 12:57

Yeah, but I mean Platypus, you know.

Alex Hochul: 12:58

I mean I know lots of people who've been through platypus and I think it's probably a better formation than in terms of not a group as a formation, but it's a formation of the self right, a better education than a lot of other places, whatever its faults may be and I kind of maybe gesture at some of them, uh, here, uh, in the, in the, in the review, but anyway, um, you know, I think, like the, the perspective that is provided there is useful because it does stand a little bit further um, away from, uh, from the millennial left than the other two books do and it tries to put it in in a larger historical perspective.

Alex Hochul: 13:44

But, as I comment, in the thing, you know, ultimately there's no going back to the 19th century. And I don't know, you know there's a kind of, you know there's a critique which is, like always going to be true if we are taking 19th century Marxism as our lens and to critique the contemporary age. But the reality is, you know, if even Platypus is kind of true to their self-conception, is that the left is dead and indeed politics is dead, or politics has died and maybe has made somewhat of a partial return, albeit in very kind of confusing ways. Albeit in very kind of confusing ways, and dealing with that seriously means, to a certain extent, not trying to kind of not imposing the demands and expectations of kind of the late 19th century or the early 20th century on today.

C. Derick Varn: 14:35

It's one thing that you talk about and is the seeming impossibility of mass politics. My comment and my response to this was like, well, yeah, but mass politics is also historically actually quite rare Like we see it after World War I and World War II. We see it at some degree in like things that emerged in the 19th century after a series of devastating civil wars and economic depressions emerged in the 19th century after a series of devastating civil wars and economic depressions like, on the scale of which, comparatively, we are not yet anywhere near um, and so I always think that that historical like context for the period that we're also valorizing does have to be looked at right, and I think you're saying the same thing. And while I will not include, when I read over these I had not read all these books, now I have. So I don't think Yeager and Borriello really have a. Their book felt to me the most almost journalistic, even though they're both scholars about describing what's going on, even though they're both scholars about describing what's going on.

C. Derick Varn: 15:39

Bevins is also pretty journalistic. He spells a lot of stuff out. However, while he is better than a lot of the people he was critiquing in that he speaks a lot of the languages that he's referring to. Thank God, so he can interview people in their native tongue, as opposed to when Democracy Now went to Tahrir Square in 2011 and were only speaking to English speakers, and I was like, okay, like you know, having lived in Egypt a good four years after that, I was like, yeah, you need to speak Arabic to have any idea what's going on, and even then, you have to know the right people, and some of them aren't going to talk to you.

Alex Hochul: 16:20

And Vincent Bevins is very good on. You know that dynamic according to which people are parachuted in and the way that you know the voice of the revolution or the voice of the mass protest is ventriloquized always by those who happen to speak English, or you know kind of local NGO people who get sounded out by the media. That itself is reflective of a deeper problem that these protests were never able to really speak for themselves in terms of make a, in terms of having kind of organizational form that was able, that would be able to decide on a politics and proposals and slogans, but also just in terms of their explicit decision and self-consciousness as being in some ways just anti-political right that the idea of crystallizing or summarizing your politics and slogans in precise demands, in organizations and in a vision of what you would want to achieve, that itself was rejected by the protests and put out of hand as like. Well, you know, that's the old way of doing politics We'll get sucked into the system. So we're going to do, I don't know nothing, just be anti. And I think what is it like Paul Paul King's North's book? Like A Hundred No's and One yes, or the squares and so on? Which is that? Which is this sort of anti-political resistance sort of guise where they refuse to speak in their own name. And so, you know, I think Bevins is very good in critiquing that dynamic, something that he knows closely, kind of being a journalist, a reporter, you know, um, but you know, I think, by the time that we're having this conversation and I don't just mean now, I mean maybe, like even if we were having this conversation, um, you know, in 2017, we would already be conscious of the fact that those things were crap, right, right, um.

Alex Hochul: 18:37

So the whole second phase of the millennial left, from 2015 onwards, was already, you know, had a consciousness of itself as overcoming the deficiencies of that earlier phase of the phase that followed from the global financial crisis, through occupied and the and all the sort of occupations and so on. So it's interesting to kind of put those things, you know, face to face with each other and to see, like, okay, but did the second phase of the millennial left, did the populist moment, did the kind of turn towards electoral politics, correct the failures of the previous phase, or did it overcorrect, or did it maybe undercorrect, or did it repeat the problems? Um, and I think that's um, I think that's that's key, because they both that's properly examining them like within the same historical moment, right, it's not just examining them in relation to, again, like well, you know what happened in 1917, how does that relate to that? And it's like no, specifically resolving the problems of post-politics, right, of the ways that society has been depoliticized and contestations been removed. How did they and how did the millennial left as a whole seek to resolve that problem?

Alex Hochul: 19:58

And I think what you can say, kind of looking, you know, kind of zooming out, is that the um protest movements compounded that problem by, in their anti-politics, merely rejecting the establishment and the attempt to resolve that through a turn towards electoral politics in some ways marked a kind of a return to institutionality. But it was an overcorrection, I think. And I'm interested whether you kind of agree with that or not, because, like for me, it's like okay, screw politics, they don't represent us, right? No nos representan. Que se vayan todos. All those sort of slogans, which were actually a lot of them inspired by Argentina in 2001 and their debt default and all that followed from that, and so you know those slogans then kind of, or not those slogans, but that kind of way of acting, that form of activism gets explicitly, kind of unconsciously, rejected in favor of no. Actually we should engage in politics and we can win, and we can go, and we can win now and we can win executive power.

C. Derick Varn: 21:27

Well, I mean the overcorrection to me and this was something that I was worried about as early as 2016, was that we had seen In fact, I wrote about this in 2012, that what I saw in Occupy when I was going around the world luckily, I had a pretty sweet professorial job that would let me do that and I was able to stop by and occupy Yolido, occupy Taipei, and then and the winter because I had a long Asian winter break, as opposed to like in the States, where you do summer breaks as long I had to go back to the States, and so I just took buses from Oakland to DC, to New York, and saw the Occupy encampments there. And what immediately struck me, as a person who had been involved in the ultra-globalization movement way back from zine days in the 90s and who'd rejected it, is that what I was seeing in Occupy was a repeat of that, but that was probably going to play out when people realized that this wasn't a viable politics. That what Graeber was telling you and what Zizek was telling you in different ways. Zizek was telling you to think through it. Graeber was telling you to live as if you were already free, which, of course, has two problems. One. You can only do that if you have the means to already be free. So you need to either be a student or unemployed or very, very rich, which I think we actually do see in some of those movements, and how weird they got over time.

C. Derick Varn: 22:52

But the other thing that was kind of clear to me is that that style of politics was like a passing of the torch from a kind of informal nascent well maybe we should talk about Marx again to Marxist groups coming back into existence, some of which had existed as part of the anti-war movement, some of which had legacies going back to the 60s and 70s, but most of which have been primarily dormant or non-existent from the 80s to the middle of the aughts. They were just kind of dead. The exception in America was the British Trotskyist movement. The American Trotskyist movement mostly died in the 1980s and that was because they were willing to get on these.

C. Derick Varn: 23:37

You know the thousand no's and the one yes about alter globalization, and that was where a lot of that growth came from, as by Bernie Sanders, in that there was a limit on how much Trump could actually change the Republican Party. He did change it substantively. It's not that there was nothing, but there was pretty hard limits, and you saw the Republican Party change Trump as well, and that beyond Trump. If you look at right-wing politics today, it is unclear what institutions or what groups or what ideologies or whatever will eventually replace him once he dies, which will probably be in the foreseeable future, just given his age. So you know.

Alex Hochul: 24:36

So what's at root there, I think, in all those cases, is a misunderstanding or an underestimation of the depth of the crisis of politics and the ways that that has specific organizational manifestations. And you know, when you talk about organization, people often just think about, like you know, organize better or whatever it might be Right, like do more activism, and that's not at all what I'm talking about here. The void of politics, the kind of absence of actual organizations, means that even to describe it as like the social democratic left is incorrect, because social democracy relied on a whole, you know, pillars of institutions built up through society, uh, from trade unions, local party branches, uh, sometimes sporting clubs, whatever, um to to something where today that none of that exists, right, and it's all. One of the reasons that the media becomes so important is that media fills the void where organizations, face-to-face organizations, used to be, and I don't mean media necessarily like CNN, but also social media. You know, which was the big thing that we got excited about as the millennial left? We thought that, like Facebook groups and Facebook events, calling people out on the streets would kind of resolve that problem. Calling people out on the streets would kind of resolve that problem. So I think like to kind of rewind a bit.

Alex Hochul: 26:03

In the first phase of the millennial left of the street protests. There is the crisis of politics. Insofar as there was a conception of a crisis of politics, it was resolved through in purely kind of idealistic terms like a turn towards utopianism, like just demand great things right, recognize us as being outside the system and opposed to the system, and a return to maybe talking about capitalism, which was probably the one kind of encouraging thing about that moment in the late 2000s, early 2010s. But it didn't reckon with the kind of organizational question. And there's actually a continuity For all that. There's an overcorrection in terms of you know, your Sanders, your Bernie types trying to correct for the Occupy problem. There's also continuity in terms of not really reckoning with that void of politics and so they're forced into using what little strength the moment offers you.

Alex Hochul: 27:13

And what does the moment offer you? Well, it offers you the possibility of having a charismatic leader who can connect directly with an unorganized mass of people connected through the Internet very often and to build up a profile and to put all be able to act as a means of conveyance, putting all your hopes into them Right, all the hopes put on Bernie, all the hopes put on on Jeremy Corbyn. And you know I like Bernie Sanders as a politician, I mean, you know, can get into all the limitations of it, but you know, I find him at least engaging in some way, whereas Jeremy Corbyn is a bit of a wet blanket, I think you know. So I find it not very credible, but you know, and Jean-Luc Mélenchon, definitely more credible a good, you know, good speaker can communicate ideas well, forcefully, etc.

Alex Hochul: 28:02

But nevertheless all these guys end up as receptacles for all these huge hopes and expectations which they're unable to carry because they're just kind of individual, individual politicians, um, and going up against the entirety of the state or whatever, and that's something which kind of gets forgotten, brushed aside. But again, you know, for all that, there's a big contrast between occupying the streets versus contesting elections. There's a continuity there in terms of not reckoning with the deepness of the crisis of politics, you know, and one is completely anti-political and not having specific goals and the other one is very narrowly focused on on winning, winning executive power yeah, well, I mean, I think that they both actually in some ways represent some of the problems with populism as such, uh, beyond its inherent class collaborationism, beyond any of that it also tends to.

C. Derick Varn: 29:02

I think Benjamin Studebaker and this is a book I think you could have added to this, even though it's much deeper- Right, yeah, I think so.

Alex Hochul: 29:09

I don't think, had I read-.

C. Derick Varn: 29:11

I don't think it was out yet either. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, but that Studebaker points out that there is and I guess Studebaker's book is actually larger than the left. He basically sees all these, uh, manifestations of idea of-systemic on the part of the system that you're looking at, and they're not anti-systemic to other parts of the system, and these systems are not nearly as uniformly and universally homogeneous as they seem. So you can seem like you're fighting. You know you're taking the position of anti-politics, but you're actually, in fact, supporting a faction of already existing politics in a way that can undermine you, and I think the Bernie movement is an example.

C. Derick Varn: 30:07

One thing that I was worried about as early as 2017 is that the Democratic Party as such would realize how to use the Bernie movement to make it appear as if there was more ideological debate and movement within the party than there probably actually was, and I think to me, that's undeniably what happened.

C. Derick Varn: 30:35

And I think this is also true for labor, because Corbynism was a very small part of labor even when Corbyn was the head of the party. And another trend that we've seen and I want to ask your take on this is even after these people lose power, like Corbyn. I think Sanders is interesting because he has paid for his failure, but he's paid for his failure mostly because he's still in government and Corbyn's still in government, at least for now, knock on wood but he's been pretty much made irrelevant. But someone like Giannis Varoufakis, who took a historic, took a heroic stance against Cerezo. But, if we are honest, these people lost, and they lost usually badly, not you know. And yet I remember I was watching something that the DSA was putting on and they were acting like Dilma Rousseff and everyone to come up and speak and I was like why the fuck do you guys only talk to the losers?

C. Derick Varn: 31:39

yeah, like well, there aren't many winners, but yeah, I take your point what well, let me like lula, for example, is we've talked about the, the, the uh, the, the bizarreness of lulaism, and it's both authentic and authentic aspects but that Lula is an undeniably brilliant, you know, street level politician.

C. Derick Varn: 32:00

There's no way around that and as such, like I get why people could be excited about him, although I also find it interesting that when Lula was actually in power the first time, the left kind of didn't care about him. It was actually more liberals who cared about him and then later on, he becomes uh, through people like michael brooks, he becomes more of a key figure for some of these, uh, millennial leftists. Um, but I think you're right. I mean, maybe it is that we just don't have a whole lot of winners in the first place, like you know, and at least yannis took a heroic stand and loss as opposed to the rest of his party who just went down with the ship but I mean, the honest far effect was to, it would complicit in that to an extent as well by continuing to have too many illusions.

Alex Hochul: 32:49

You know, maybe not not as many illusions as cyprus has, who, of course, like, can stand, uh, we can hold them up very obviously as a, as a trader, and I think they know, like we can use that language pretty pretty forthrightly. But you know, varifacus, um as well, was, was diluted as to what was, um, what was necessary, I think. But anyway, you know, without getting into that whole that, because that's a whole other discussion, I think, um yes and yeah no, I think you're right and I mean, you know, the, the personalization of politics which is of, a, which is part of, or it's a problem which, uh, like, is a subset of the general problem of populism, which is what you're referring to, right, that the personalization of politics is something that's necessary, uh, in, I say necessary, I'm not recommending this right, obviously, like, but it's a necessary consequence of the void of politics. And what happens is that once the, you know, once the hype machine dies down and the and the politician is defeated, um, they be, it becomes very lonely. You know, kind of Corbyn looks like a pathetic figure and you have to have people pretending that like Corbyn is, you know, but it's still an honest man who did the right thing. But, yes, he did lose, you know.

Alex Hochul: 34:09

And it's like this pathetic scene where we're where, like you, have some left just kind of holding up this, this, this effectively like this corpse of a, of a politician into whom, like, so many hopes were invested. So there's a kind of a like, there's a speculative element to it which you can't help but feel is somehow appropriate to an age of, of like, heightened financial financialization, financial speculation, that you kind of. It's a gamble, right, and I think Jaeger and Anton Jaeger and Arthur Borriello are completely correct in talking about the left populist gamble right, and maybe speculation is also another term that we should use there, because it's like, look, suddenly this opportunity opens up because you have the delegitimation of these old parties or the political system, and it opens up this opportunity which is handed to you on a plate right, the Bernie Sanders thing and especially the Jeremy Corbyn thing were handed to kind of leftists on a plate, less so in Greece, where there was a party actually built, and in France also to a certain extent, but in any case, I mean, without getting lost in all the specific cases. These are kind of moments that emerge which, okay, happens in politics, which is kind of just opens up suddenly and there's a kind of opportunistic attempt to kind of, you know, seize executive power. But it's kind of a gamble, you know, it's a wager that's done that like, maybe if we just throw everything behind this, this one candidate, bernie Sanders, wins and wins the nomination and then quite possibly becomes president, and some people were like why the hell are you talking about this? There's too much to do. It's so presumptuous to be having that conversation In fact. No, on the contrary, in fact, if that conversation had been had more widely, I think more serious questions would have been asked about the extent to which getting behind Bernie was the right thing to do.

Alex Hochul: 36:30

Or, if it was the right thing to do, what are the terms that you're setting and what does success look like that you're setting and what does success look like right and, I think, importantly, what might have been success for a campaign behind Bernie Sanders which had, you know, working class support, albeit, of course, it's still the US, so it means that, you know, 50% of the population is kind of not involved. But you know, nevertheless, a condition of success would have been the creation of a new political party, for example, right, but the creation of opportunities for the future. Not winning now because this is the moment, right. And so that's something which, if that had happened, then there might have been more pressure on Sanders to use his huge support base, email lists, donor base, all the rest of it to fund that into a new party.

Alex Hochul: 37:22

Now, whether he would have done that or not is another question, but you know you can. If you set that terms of what you know, of that as being kind of what you're looking towards. You know, if he doesn't win the presidency, or even if he does, I think that changes what your approach is politically and I think that discussion isn't had. And so that's where the kind of, I think, where the speculative aspect of it becomes very clear. You know, you're kind of throwing money at something, hoping that it wins, and then, if it doesn't, well, you're, you're, you're, you're out of luck, and you know you've lost some money and that's it, like there's no continued, like there's no means of giving continuity to that politics, which is what we're seeing, which is why there's so much despondency now.

C. Derick Varn: 38:08

Well, one thing I think you get into in these discussions that I thought was interesting, and I want to kind of pull out a little more is this idea of the way that these gambles often end up without even taking victory.

C. Derick Varn: 38:25

This is not like the social democratic problem of you took victory but you didn't take total victory, so now you're having the managed capital or the, the, the, the Hilferding problem. This is not that, that no, you tried to build your institution parasitically within and both against and subordinated to simultaneously, an already existing political establishment, in the case of the United States and in the case of Britain actually too. One of the things I think is interesting about the Anglophone versus the non-Anglophone stuff and as a non-English speaker who also speaks was well, we have to take the legacy institutions and split them for our own, you know, yeah, but at the very moment that they said this, they also put themselves into a defensive capacity in an anti-fascist popular front against right wing leaders, fascist popular front against right-wing leaders. You know already existing Tory leadership in Britain and Trump and Trumpism in the United States and they did that to themselves Like no one needed to.

Alex Hochul: 39:45

You didn't need to do anti-fascism. It's not like it's given by the. By the moment we can, no one, you know you have to construct the argument that Trump is a fascist. I don't think he is and it's not a fascist movement, even if he were personally fascistically inclined. I think that still doesn't matter because that's just something that's in your head and so they said that. But there's a necessary implication to calling someone a fascist, which is to say that you follow popular front politics and you need to get into, into alliance with you know kind of centrist liberals against them, and that's something that you know the kind of left set up for itself without, without being asked to. There's no need to do that. No, I mean, and indeed it's. This is what I've talked about with, with, with rupture for all that.

Alex Hochul: 40:34

The left says it's against neoliberalism. It wants to end neoliberalism as kind of the Chilean kind of radical positioning, or at least radical, radical rhetoric about being anti-neoliberal. There's a kind of ultimate discomfort with the sort of change that might be necessary and that politics might be unpredictable and that there won't be guaranteed results. But when push came to shove. The left of these new, the new millennial left, et cetera, always opted for the comfort of neoliberalism and its continuity rather than the unknown possibilities beyond right. So it was very clear with, uh, the uk, with labor and the question of brexit, where they kind of the corbin fell in with the and ceded to pressure from kind of middle class, mainstream liberalism, um of the uk to not broach brexit because that might, you know, might, strengthen the right, it'll strengthen the far right or something like that, which was a misreading, first of all, of what the implications and consequences of Brexit were likely to be but, more importantly, showed a lack of ambition and a lack of self-confidence in trying to create a new sort of politics to perhaps seek to begin to resolve the crisis of politics, the EU being a really sophisticated mechanism for clamping down on the possibility of politics by locking things into an economic constitution which is unchangeable, right. So like their unwillingness to broach that sort of rupture, I think was very telling, and the same thing happened ultimately in Greece as well. In other cases maybe there was a less dramatic confrontation with what the establishment or you know, yeah, with what the main establishment force would be. So I mean in the European space it was always about the European Union, whether the left wanted it to be or not.

Alex Hochul: 42:58

In the US it's a little bit different, but there you could say well, it's the Democratic Party which is which occupies that role in this drama. And there as well, as you're hinting at, there was kind of no real willingness to broach break with the Democrats because whatever Trump, fascism, et cetera, et cetera. And so you know, I think there is a difference, as you hint at, between the kind of Anglophone countries and the others. But I think that's given by the nature of the political systems. Whereas we're in the UK it's a first past, the post system. In the US it's a one party state, except there's two of them, and you're dealing with that as a very specific sort of problem.

Alex Hochul: 43:41

It makes more difficult the creation of an independent political party which can genuinely contest elections in a competitive manner, which isn't the case in the multi-party parliamentary systems in continental Europe. But that's even more the reason why something like Podemos, which had some wind behind its sails, created a different party. A different party created a kind of independent party of the left which, for whatever faults it might have had, was a kind of original proposal which sought to dethrone and remove Pessoa, the main kind of central left neoliberalized party, um, only to then find itself in coalition with them, supporting that government, and then ultimately, um ended up cannibalized by it. Um, and so like what did it? What ends up doing is kind of re um. I mean what they ended up doing is like re not energizing, but kind of giving a new life to the old politics which it was meant to defeat.

Alex Hochul: 44:44

And this kind of has happened across the board, right, I mean, the situation in Greece is completely, it's beyond tragic. The in Spain, you know, podemos is nothing. It's kind to end up reinvigorating PSOE. The Labour Party has, when it should have been kind of dying. Has now, well, will romp into government now with a huge majority, only to basically ensure Tory continuity, albeit with new faces, tory continuity, albeit under, you know, with new faces and with the Democratic Party.

Alex Hochul: 45:20

Well, I think that's reinvigorated a lot of like left engagement with and support for the Democratic Party, rather than creating an understanding that no progress would be possible, you know, within it. So you know that's the real kind of tragedy of it, that we're kind of back to, I don't know, in some ways back to where we were in the in the in the 1990s, kind of despondent um, looking to kind of sub-political or sub-cultural avenues to keep ourselves interested and occupied, um, with little expectation of of genuine political change possible, uh, and you know, kind of grumbling about the, whatever the center left options are, but more or less accepting of it. And you know the left will vote for labor in the UK and people will vote for the Democrats in the US and that's where we are.

C. Derick Varn: 46:11

I mean it's interesting the crisis of the Democratic Party is going to be, given that what we've also seen in regards to how, uh, the most recent debate performance may be one of the few debates in history since the nixon kennedy debate, that might actually matter which, yeah, which is fascinating yeah, which is actually kind of fascinating and hilarious because it was actually an exercise in not mattering that weirdly made it matter.

Alex Hochul: 46:37

Right.

C. Derick Varn: 46:40

But I do wonder about this when we talk about the way we move forward, because it still seems to me that the predominant impulse is tailing something. Now people are changing what they want to tail. I mean there's MAGA communism. Clearly, they posit the existence of MAGA somehow beyond the cult of personality around Donald Trump. I don't know. You know what latent social forces is in a meme, blm and Me Too, which also were latent images around specific things that somehow took on power and presented as movements of people. But they were hashtags first and then, when they were institutionalized, it was a mess and no one agreed on anything and they all ended up supporting different elements of the status quo, which is kind of the repeating moral, I mean presumably they were latently instituted, you know, I mean they were only going in one direction.

Alex Hochul: 47:38

If they weren't there already. Uh, it was a way to reinvigorate existing institutions around a new purpose anti-racism, anti-sexism etc.

C. Derick Varn: 47:47

Exactly, I mean blm's a little bit more complicated because it does emerge initially out of riots, but again it was institutionalized very quickly. I I mean like, and literally the first round it was about, you know, diversifying the FBI. I literally went and saw BLM speakers talk about this from Ivy League campuses. While there was still not a formal BLM organization came about corporate diversification, dei, the kind of HR protective legalism which also, interestingly and fascinatingly, is very white person focused too, almost exclusively, and that also died very, very quickly because it became very clear that there was, like there's, a weird mixture of demands that were too easy and demands that, ad hoc and of themselves, are impossible by themselves.

C. Derick Varn: 48:47

Like you, can't just reform the police by defunding or even abolition by itself, without dealing with the larger social context of which all these things developed in. And there was no real attempt at all to deal with the larger social context and not just adding into the fact that this happened during COVID, where people didn't have a lot to do, that it also made hash of a lot of the COVID messaging, because we forget that at the time a lot of the left were still insisting on absolute COVID bans, even in the open air, you know, and stuff like that, where transmission is actually not very likely, and oddly enough, these very riots proved that they weren't very likely. So it was. It was a thing of infinite contradiction and I think you know today. I mean, one of the things about all this is this was all thrown again. I remember this being all thrown again to support the Biden administration. And you know, one of the interesting things about the Biden-Trump debate that I found fascinating is neither man can admit that basically Biden continued implementing Trump's policies and the thing that got better is from the Biden's perspective is they didn't have people who were anti-vax, that they were trying to appease while also pushing a vaccine program, so it just got clearer to administrate, although also clearly, the united states handled it particularly poorly. We like we're down. They were like peru and states like had you know developing world levels of death rates with total social distrust. So in what way? This is part of why I think there's a move to bury discussions of that. Yeah, because it was also used as a highly censorious empowerment of the tech industry to get around effectively bourgeois legal constraints on speech, and that's all backfired horribly for the, for the left and liberals here. Those movements didn't go away, they just set up alternative, even more foothold. You know, media for themselves until the Elon Musk thing happened, and so now you have even more disconnected discourses.

C. Derick Varn: 51:08

And the other thing is, there became topics from 2016 forward that it became very hard to talk about. So, for example, I was one of the few people who was like you know, I don't think that the Hunter Biden tapes are like they're going to be a key to a national conspiracy, but they seem absolutely more substantive than like the Steele dossier, and yet we're pretending like they're not. Now are they of ultimate political significance in the United States? No, they're not, but it is weird what we could and could not talk about.

C. Derick Varn: 51:42

Another thing that was left only to right wing media was talking about the financial irregularities around various BLM organizations, which which came up and the left just kind of pretended that it didn't happen. The left just kind of pretended that it didn't happen. You know, like it, it didn't deny it, it just didn't talk about it at all. It was, it was bizarre, um, and I and my response was like, okay, if you want to be anti-systemic, you have to talk about the problems of politics in the present, the problems of the NGO complex, and talk about your response to them. You can't just cede that to the right because it's inconvenient for the democratic party. And yeah, you know, I feel like this is true for labor. I mean, one of the things about about labor is, given how long the tories have been unpopular, the fact that they are this now running in on their land side to basically have a continuity of Tori rule. I agree with you, that's most likely.

Alex Hochul: 52:36

The outcome is kind of amazing to me that it took them that long to do. Yeah, you know, yeah, well, I mean, and being handed, you know I mean part of it. You end up looking at Star and those close to him and asking you know, you could kind of do what you want here. You know you're gonna be, you're gonna be handed a huge majority, um, so you could have some ambition to do something, whatever it might be. It might not be what the left wants to do, um, you know you don't need to have the politics of jeremy corbyn, um, but nevertheless, you know you it's, it's.

Alex Hochul: 53:16

But you know this is part of a much broader problem and crisis of politics that the elite doesn't want to rule either. Right, the elite doesn't want to rule, I mean, doesn't want to seek to implement its vision anymore in any particular way. It wants to occupy. Those who are politicians want to occupy seats of power but don't have a program. Those who are politicians want to occupy seats of power but don't have a program, and part of that is the kind of the end of class struggle which has led to an elite which doesn't really have the ambition of genuinely ruling.

Alex Hochul: 53:46

I'm trying to remember a reference here which I can't, which now escapes me, but something along the lines of we're still all slaves, but the masters don't even want to be masters, right, which is like, which is kind of the situation that we're still all slaves, but the masters don't even want to be masters, right. Which is like, which is kind of the the situation that we're in. So even you know, an establishment politician like, like keir starmer, doesn't want to drive through a vision of politics despite, you know, being a situation where he would be able to enact a certain amount of change, right?

C. Derick Varn: 54:17

even around the margins.

C. Derick Varn: 54:18

Another example, I mean even you know, and I don't mean in like a left-wing direction, or he would save the nh, whatever it might be, I don't you know um like, yeah, I mean this is similar to the united states where biden did try some continuity things, some things that are wanted, but immediately the moment that got internally politically difficult, he did not lead the party, he let it scrabble and did very little.

C. Derick Varn: 54:46

And frankly, given the age of a lot of these people involved, I think we're going to see a lot of that. And what is concerning to me, I mean one thing that I think Catrone was right. Right, we haven't talked much about katron, we'll talk about you critique him as well. I mean, I have my critique, katron, it's kind of epic at this point. But um, uh, that one of the ironies of what happened with the populist movement is, at least in the angl world, they literally ran to the people who corbin, sanders, etc. As kind of the grand old men that it put in charge and then asked to replicate in some ways a movement and coalition that had failed not once but multiple times in the 80s and 90s like how many times in the rabel coalition just wash up on the shores of history. And unfortunately, millennials didn't know anything about this.

Alex Hochul: 56:03

Like, interestingly, they knew a lot about 1968, right, because that's a key mythical moment for a lot of leftists, but knowing about 1984, 1988 or 1978 or any of that, that's something they don't know, yeah, which is something I mean I do mention this in the in the review essay that there is a generate and I'm not the first one to note this obviously that there is a within the left, uh, to the extent that you can trace a continuity, that there's a bit of a hole there where gen x is um, so you've got the boomers, and you know this happens.

Alex Hochul: 56:35

I kind of left meetings where there's a couple of old fellas and they tend to be boomers, and then you get a bunch of younger people, millennials, or at least this was the case, you know, maybe now Zoomers and there's like no Gen Xers there, and that was partly, partly reflection of the fact that Gen X was a smaller generation, but also the fact that there was no historical continuity, because I was the generation of the end of history, that was the generation that felt the final defeat of politics and dropped out entirely, and so there was a problem of transmission of knowledge and experience to the millennial left, which I think is definitely worth kind of considering a bit.

Alex Hochul: 57:11

But you know, I mean, in any case, you're right that they kind of reached the millennial left, ended up, at least certainly in the anglophone world, reaching for reaching for, like the old losers of the of the new left, um, in a situation which is much more politically degenerated than then in terms of the infrastructure of politics available to uh, an oppositional movement, uh, and so that makes it kind of yeah um, bernie sand Sanders had a much larger labor movement in Vermont to build off of than any national liberal politician, including himself, could have had in 2016.

C. Derick Varn: 57:46

And it is also interesting to me. I mean, one of the things that your article doesn't talk about but I am sort of fascinated about is ability of the at least anglophone left I'm hesitant to generalize this to the world. You can tell me how it goes in brazil of the left to lie to itself about recent history and like just outright lie to itself about recent history. An example, uh, is the amount of we are living in a, in a rather not uh in a renaissance of labor organization that started happening between 2019 and 2022, which, if you actually look at the numbers, is a historical nadir of organization in the United States. There was a slight, a very slight uptick between 2008 and 2012 after the uh, the uaw. Yeah, we're like, uh, we're demolished, right, but but there has been no real uptick since then.

C. Derick Varn: 58:51

Um, there was also, like you know, the red state rebellion and teachers, but again, people aren't following up on what's happening in american teachers associate, which is in free fall like we. We are literally losing huge amounts of staff every year and not able to replace them. So that's not true everywhere, but it's true most places, um and and so, like I have always felt, like I have kind of felt like the left was gaslighting me about these conditions that it said was there, that I'm like, well, I am doing these things. I am a labor organizer.

Alex Hochul: 59:23

I mean, has there not, since the, since the tightening of labor market, relative in relative terms, since the pandemic, has that not led to a small uptick or be within the context of a very significant and long-term decline of uh labor organizing? There is an uptick of union, of union membership, I should say, because kind of.

C. Derick Varn: 59:49

So what that has led to is, uh is, there has been an uptick of numbers, but but it's at a smaller density than before and that's so there is some uptick, but it is not even keeping up with prior union density. So what seems to be happening is you're having pockets of union expansion in certain areas and in decreases. So one of the reasons why there was a decrease and I think this is kind of make everybody uncomfortable is that police unions went from the most unionized sector of society to the second most unionized sector of society. So it's and so, and you've seen increase in like service sector unions, but an increase in a service sector union in the United States that's like an increase of 1.2% to 1.5% union density. But that also looks like a lot of applications to the NCLB for unions, because they're very small shops and they're each individually getting unionized and they're each individually getting unionized. So that can look like 600 new union applications, but it may only be 6,000 people in a population of 320 million.

Alex Hochul: 1:01:06

Yeah, it's a small. I mean, any kind of upward direction is encouraging, but yeah, I mean it is small. It's something which hasn't happened in Brazil, because there hasn't been that movement at all. Um, and you know, you're, you've got a generalized tendency not just of lack of union organization but of, uh, lack of informality in the workplace, right, people becoming self-entrepreneurs and all the rest of it. Um, you know, basically precarious, completely, you know precarious workers at different levels. You know some maybeious workers and at different levels, you know some maybe kind of lower middle class levels and and a lot, um, below the working class, um, formally speaking. So, um, yeah, no, that that hasn't, that hasn't happened here.

Alex Hochul: 1:01:49

Um, what has happened here, which I guess is a, is a general, uh, phenomenon, is the repeat of a kind of popular front politics which Lula led, lula constructed rather skillfully and kind of impressively insofar as he managed to get the types who would he would, maybe, or certainly he or those to the left of him would rail against into a coalition with him. So the old kind of neoliberal right enemy, the devil of the 1990s, you know, becomes part of his government or supports him in government as a defense of democracy against Bolsonaro and for all that, that was necessary in a kind of short term basis to defeat Bolsonaro, who you, you know, maintained is much more of a threat to to democracy than than um trump was. You know trump didn't try to launch a coup, wouldn't have been able to. Um bolsonaro did and you know conditions have been different, perhaps would have been able to kind of sway enough of the military. But I think the military, ultimately, you know there are enough um important generals there who didn't want to rule directly because you know it's important to I think this is an aside but we don't live in an age of military dictatorship.

Alex Hochul: 1:03:07

To the extent that there are military dictatorships, they're either kind of extremely kind of on the margins of of of world history and kind of the legacies of whatever you know like the North Korea or whatever kind of legacies of previous historical moments, or extremely short lived, or or only the most backward societies in the world, I mean kind of the poorest countries in Africa and who constantly have kind of one military coup after another. But you know that's kind of very much on the margins of world affairs. We don't live in an age of military dictatorship because we don't live in an age of mass politics. We don't live in an age of the threat of communism or of actual socialist politics, and so the elite doesn't need military dictatorship.

Alex Hochul: 1:03:51

It can do kind of. It can just do the thing of de-democratization which is happening everywhere, which the liberal center is entirely complicit in, which is just kind of slowly rolling back democracy and, you know, instituting at the most a whole former Soviet space. They're all kind of still present themselves as democracy, even if the democracy is, even if they're in practice not at all. So I think that's worth considering and worth bringing in here to discuss in terms of what the left sees its job as doing in terms of building popular front politics against fascism. As doing in terms of building popular front politics against fascism is that, you know, if you're not going to have military dictatorship, it's not even it's pointless to talk about fascism. I mean, what is fascism without military, without dictatorship? Right, like you know, not all dictatorships it's the ugly, but all fascism is absolutely dictatorship right so it's not going to be dictatorship.

Alex Hochul: 1:04:56

What the fuck are you talking about? You know it's. It's not even. It's not even the at the level of um, horrible, um, you know, cold war era murderous dictatorships.

C. Derick Varn: 1:05:04

It's not even that, let alone interwar fascism well, even in today I was thinking about today because people were picking up about we just got rid of chevron deference, which means that the judiciary can now interfere with the administrative interpretations of ambiguous laws and statutes and case law. And they're like well, that strips it away from Congress. I'm like, yeah, but it wasn't really in Congress and that doctrine was actually designed by the Reagan administration to give neoliberal registrations more power. But I think that's something people don't seem to know. But undoing it is just moving the arbitration of rules from the people doing it but who are also not democratically elected. They're appointed by the executive, just like the judiciary is for the most part. So, like you know, there's some state level judiciaries are elected, but in general they're not elected. So I'm just like so you're moving it from one non-democratic part of the government to another. You're just mad because one is more liberal and one is more conservative, but they're both not responsive to, uh, to general politics.

C. Derick Varn: 1:06:16

This is a smithian game. It is not really about democracy at all. Um, I remember another liberal friend of mine who I'm gonna have back on the show eventually, but he was like well, you know, uh, politicians need professionals for policy. And I was was like, and how in the fuck are we supposed to believe that you're a democratic? Then, if you think that policy has to be decided by professionals, that means that you think that there's expertise to transcend democratic input, in which case you do not believe that you should actually go with what the majority of the population says for technocratic reasons. How is that actually democracy?

C. Derick Varn: 1:06:54

Again, you know, and I I think these, these are what you call the crisis, what you're calling a crisis of politics, and I think these are very real contradictions in today's politics. They are not just fixed by picking whatever figurehead you want to throw at the head of the executive branch, and it is a figurehead, and I think we know that from like. I mean, looking at what I've seen with a lot of these key governmental figures, it seems like the state apparatus is very much keeping up with things day to day because they don't seem capable of doing it. They're not that interested in it anymore either, and you know people used to critique Trump about that, but it's pretty clear that's been happening under biden as well. So it's this is a long, duray problem.

C. Derick Varn: 1:07:38

Another example of that in america and we can talk about the world as an american podcast. We tend to think that we are the only people that matter and that sucks for everybody else. Um, but another interesting problem is like okay, so you have the Supreme Court today. Grant, you know, unitary executive theory privilege to the executive, including criminal, not just civil, cases, and it's no longer qualified. It is now absolute immunity. But my issue has been we've effectively had absolute immunity for the executive, at least since the bush administration, even though it has not been, and it does matter that we're moving from de facto to de jure, but de facto. The moment that barack obama killed someone without trial that was a us citizen, from a drone strike, you were already in that world.

C. Derick Varn: 1:08:29

Like so you know the? It's just the anti-democratic tendencies are becoming explicit and being used in a partisan manner, um, as opposed to the just general anti-democratic tendencies of politics, which I think reflect larger accumulation problems. Like it's not just for me in government, at least don't want to rule. When have you had bourgeois people doing bourgeois things? Like it seems like they're all living off of fucking trust funds and investments and and and and fiscalized returns. At this point they're not actually producing shit, except for some people working on the edge of communication technology. That's been the only real innovative sector for like now probably a generation actually. So, and even that's deceptive because people will come out like, oh, we live in this time of massive technological train and I'm like, compared to what? Compared to the 30s, to the 60s? No, no, no, not at all.

C. Derick Varn: 1:09:27

Yeah that's one of the big lies.

Alex Hochul: 1:09:29

That's one of the biggest lies of today, right Blinded by all the novelties of ICT and particularly everything that comes through your smartphone, that we live in a high tech era or that we live in, perhaps better, that we live in an age of unprecedented technological innovation, which is actually very much on the contrary, we live in, actually in an age of relatively low innovation and slow technical progress, bar maybe some certain areas. From my understanding, I'm not a, you know, I don't have like a science background, but you know medical technologies are advancing quite rapidly, but, you know, on a broad scale, if we consider it to the kind of 19th and early 20th centuries, with all the innovations and advances in uh, transportation and in chemists, chemicals and all the rest of it, it's like now we're kind of living, we live in fairly, um, in fairly retarded times, um, and so, yeah, I mean I, there was something I wanted to, maybe because you were mentioning about, you know, post-democracy, effectively, right. So you know, post-democracy being the term that Colin Crouch used to describe the anti-democratic tendencies within existing systems, but which still present themselves as formally democratic, but which still present themselves as formally democratic. So you still have elections, you still have liberal rights, you have the rule of law, but in which democracy is hollowed out, withered. So, both in terms of, like, the substantial questions of whether you know how many members there are of political parties, political parties becoming increasingly cartel parties as well as you know, the formal withdrawal of rights, gerrymandering of districts, etc. Etc. To make politics less competitive.

Alex Hochul: 1:11:18

The period of, like the 90s and 2000s was a period of consensual post-democracy, right, and now we've entered an era of conflictual or dissensual post-democracy where those same anti-democratic tendencies are there, albeit rather than it being done under the guise of elite consensus. You have increasingly a split within the elites, or at least the emergence of a counter-elite, orabe, counter elite, which are the kind of right wing populists In the US. This has been a longer term thing because the Republicans have long had a kind of, you know, right wing which was much more forceful than in continental Europe. But anyway, the point being is that now you have a kind of conflictual post-democracy in which both sides, in their own different ways, seek to kind of in some ways wither or limit democracy Now, and not just democracy but the kind of liberalism as well right Like this is actually existing post-liberalism.

Alex Hochul: 1:12:26

So if we look at what one of the, you know, proposals of the Rassemblement National in France, who you know did well in the first round of the parliamentary elections they had there last week and are going to. You know the second round is going to be this Sunday. I don't know when this is going to come out, so, but anyway, sunday the 7th. You know, some of the proposals concern, you know, citizenship and the withdrawal of of citizenship to, um, those born in france to foreign parents. Right, and that is obviously to be is lamentable and to be opposed and it's reactionary. But, um, you know, it's a like, it's a process which is done, kind of you'll have the like liberal center doing its own things.

Alex Hochul: 1:13:12

Macron's use of of, you know, kind of like executive Excuse me, I've forgotten the term that's used for it but basically, not having to pass things through the parliament, you can just, you know, by ruling by decree, effectively Right through parliament, you can just, you know, by ruling by decree, effectively right, and so it depends on what flavor you prefer.

Alex Hochul: 1:13:33

And politics looks like it has returned and to a certain extent, in a little ways it has, by the extent to which that there is political conflict and contestation going on, even if it's largely driven by, you know, elite and professional class blocs, but they kind of, to a certain extent conspire to kind of unroll or kind of roll back liberal democracy in each their own way. So I think that's one of the kind of perplexing things about our times and you described it as Schmidian before, and I think that's one of the kind of perplexing things about our times and you described it as Schmidian before, and I think that's absolutely right. So I think we should be the left, I think, also gets sucked into this and it's very Schmidian itself because it thinks the kind of angry opposition to whatever it may be that's there is ipso facto political, and I think that's problematic and something that has to be sort of unpicked and discussed. But maybe that's a whole other discussion.

C. Derick Varn: 1:14:42

I mean it's a long discussion I mean to get back to. I've been thinking a lot about the communitarian Michael Sandel a lot, and his like distinction between early republicanism and the administrative state which emerges in the middle half of the 20th century, which is really another way of describing what Crouch would call post-democracy, which is trying to arbitrate between very opposed factions of the population, of which there's no clear way to get a consensus social base into just technocratically running things. But what happens when, as is implied in the introduction to the same book, now, 40 years later, uh this book on on, uh, on the problems of moxie, um, what do you do when those technocrats are, are, are no longer competent? And it seems the implication is you can only rule by constant and persistent crisis, which, and of course that puts you into a Smitty and mode almost immediately Right, like everyone has their preferred emergency, which they're, which, and of course that puts you into a Smitty and mode almost immediately Right, like um.

Alex Hochul: 1:15:52

Everyone has their preferred emergency, which they're, which they use to kind of circumvent the impasses of politics.

C. Derick Varn: 1:15:59

Right, I mean right now. Everyone's arguing. I mean everyone in the United States thinks democracy is about the end. They're just in completely disagreement about what democracy is and who's about to kill it.

Alex Hochul: 1:16:07

Exactly yeah.

C. Derick Varn: 1:16:08

And I'm like it's been dead if it ever existed this entire time. So you know, like, like you know, this is the hour of minerva shitting itself at dusk. I mean it's like way over already, but nonetheless I was thinking about this today too. And another thing you mentioned building a, building a, a party apparatus, or at least even the processes to a party apparatus, like rebuilding unions, rebuilding the social home. How impossible people try it. I mean they do. It's not like this is the first thing that's occurred to like me or you or people who are not Banga and and whoever else on the online life. It's not like it hasn't occurred to people, it's they have no idea how to do it anymore. I don't either Like at first I, like a lot of the millennial left, thought we could start replicating mass politics easily through mass communication, except now that it's two-way and more participatory, it would actually bleed out into the real world. What it actually seems to have done is the opposite. It's to pull the real world into it, which is kind of disheartening and terrifying ultimately.

Alex Hochul: 1:17:18

But nonetheless, I mean, that illusion at least is gone, because I think the moment at which social media presented some image of new forms of sociability and new forms of politics is now impossible. I mean, you can't even post politics stuff or it gets no traction on facebook, for example. So this idea that, like, politics is something that gets discussed on social media and unfortunately only on social media and not in the real world, um, even that now is, I think, is is something that's that's kind of falling away pretty quickly, right. It's only what on x that that kind of falling away pretty quickly, right. It's only what on X that we kind of politics is discussed I mean discussed isn't even the right word for it.

C. Derick Varn: 1:17:55

Politics is yelled at in hyperbolic form, so people will follow you and spread your message, but yes, it at least is still happening.

Alex Hochul: 1:18:00

You get hyperpolitics on X and you get no politics anywhere else, right?

C. Derick Varn: 1:18:04

Right, or you get the weirdnesses of TikTok and instagram code speak, where you have uh z people who speak totally in this word can't, and you realize they're speaking in it to bypass how, since how censorious the tech censorship is that was led, I want to remind people, by liberals, during the trump administration, you know uh to, to suppress, you know, the alt-right or whatever. And while, yes, the alt-right is gone, I don't think it's the lack of internet that killed them. I think it's the fact that they subsumed themselves to the Trump administration and then had to deal with the aftermath of that, just like a lot of these social Democrats are going to have to do. Well, social Democrats and populists, whatever you want to fucking call them, are going to have to do. Uh, what social democrats and populists whatever you want to fucking call them, um, are going to have to do? Because they really were part of the, of the, of the way to make Biden appeal like a vital opposition to Trump and um, and it's hard for me.

C. Derick Varn: 1:19:05

I guess the biggest thing for me is like, it's hard for me to even make this argument now, because they're like, oh, we need to fight against democracy. I'm like, but I mean fight for a fight against democracy like fight for democracy, I'm like well, but all these things have happened under your watch, like all the consolidations of Trump movements actually have happened mostly under the Biden administration, not under the Trump administration, which is is, and that's despite the fact that the Republicans can't govern that well. They're at constant civil war themselves. The states are no longer, the various Republican states no longer really share, and I like they're much less coherent in their ideologies, from like Utah to Georgia to Texas, than the Democrats are, and even then there's pretty significant differences between the West Coast and East Coast Democrats. It seems like this is an illusion of something that is hard to explain, except that people don't know how to do these politics except for defending I think Matt Chrisman is somehow right For a lot of people, negative politics, negative partisanship, is is all they have left, and what they don't look at is that actually still defends the status quo by and large, you know, I guess, is that we can go into the Bevins book. What do you think? I think Bevins as an analysis of the misunderstanding of these movements is often correct, particularly on over-focusing on the NGO and and hyper college educated parts of it.

C. Derick Varn: 1:20:33

Also, listening to the initial activists versus the people came in later, I mean in Tahrir square. I actually thought he still was listening to the activists too much because when I was like talking to people when I lived in Egypt um three years later, I got a lot more out of the Brotherhood and people adjacent to the Brotherhood than I did anyone who was part of some you know Egyptian Trotskyist sect or Egyptian anarchist movement off of the University of Cairo or whatever Like it was. The soft Salafism was very much the rule of the day of a lot of those individuals, of a lot of those individuals and furthermore, also not dealing with the crisis of politics that happened before Al-Sisi reassumed control, like it wasn't, like the Brotherhood was particularly coherent in ruling Egypt. So these things were all kind of bracketed out of the discussion.

C. Derick Varn: 1:21:25

And I think you know his takeaway is we need like a return to a Leninist party and I think you and I both go like yeah, but none of the conditions that made that possible exist right now and you have no idea other than just saying verticalism, a lot of how to make that happen. Like 80% good, 20% bad, but the 20% bad I was just very frustrated with because I was just like. This is still some kind of weird political volunteerism where we just like if we just have a horizontal organization we can get past this. I'm like there are plenty of Leninist sects right now. It's not like we lack them, they're not successful.

Alex Hochul: 1:22:05

And it always, I think, ends up being like, you know, or the examples of something positive, even if it's, you know, not a full throated advocacy or endorsement of it. It's always like, oh, what about the Naxalites? And you know, it's like you have to go, you have to do the kind of revolutionary tourism that has been a feature of the Western left since the 1960s of kind of going, oh well, what about these guys? Yeah, but these guys have a mass organization and there's a, you know, a mass political party and it's like some weird, like legacy Stalinism or legacy Maoism. That kind of persists for some reasons, but it's not to me which would be replicable in, you know, in Western Europe or North America, in the kind of most advanced states.

Alex Hochul: 1:22:55

And I think that, ultimately, is where I disagree kind of with Vincent I'm probably with you on the kind of 80-20 thing is that there's always a kind of or there's a, which I put in the essay and maybe it doesn't come across maybe so much in the book, albeit it's maybe a bit more tacit. It's a kind of no real expectation of the possibility for political change in the advanced countries, and so it's kind of a. There's a kind of a tacit third worldism there, which I just disagree with, which I just disagree with. So you know, yes, the regimes in you know the quote, unquote third world of, you know a kind of even a progressive government is elected in those places, let alone something more radical, it's very easy to kind of shut for the system, to kind of shut them down.

C. Derick Varn: 1:24:08

Um, absent a kind of regional kind of conflagration, or you know kind of all of latin america suddenly, suddenly swings radically to the left, or something you know we think about the states that are often held up like this, as like these romp socialist states, like, uh, dprk or uh, even cuba and I tend to be pretty defensive of cuba, actually, but but I'm always like, yeah, but the reason why they're like that isn't even because of their own doing. They're literally shut out of the global economic system and thus have to maintain through any means possible. And, frankly, all of them, including the DPRK, have liberalized, including the DPRK have liberalized. Dprk started liberalizing when Kip Jong-un just only in the places where it could, which is just places that aren't subject to the Western sanctions, so that's Russia and China.

C. Derick Varn: 1:24:57

So, like it's, it's not even what people present it as, but even then, they're not the actors that are shutting them out. They're not taking the brave, historically isolated role out of, you know, principle, they're being forced to take it. They're not taking the brave, historically isolated role out of principle, they're being forced to take it, and in some cases that's led to brilliant innovation, I think in the case of Cuba and in some cases it's led to some very weird, hard to understand politics that can be painted as worse or better than it is, and that's a DPRK, but in all these cases it still seems like they're not the actor on the international stage. People are acting on them.

Alex Hochul: 1:25:33

And at any rate, they're not a model. I think Cuba, at least until a decade or two ago, did okay for what it was, which is like a small island in the Caribbean, neighboring effectively the United States. And if you're asked like well, would you rather be Cuba or Guatemala? Say well, cuba, because you know Cuba, like, has some semblance of dignity for its citizens, albeit still kind of, you know, authoritarian and not a huge degree of freedom. But Guatemala does not offer a huge degree of freedom either and a lot more, you know, poverty and inequality and lack of dignity to its people. So you go well on balance. Balance, that's better, but that's not a model you don't want. You know, if you're britain, do you want to be cuba? No, you know, that's not a, that's like a ridiculous way to to approach your politics. Um, so you know anyway, maybe, don't, you know, if you look at alabama.

C. Derick Varn: 1:26:27

Sometimes I'm like alabama might be better, but by being right like, and maybe britain want to be cuba in 10 more years if things continue the way they're going well indeed, yeah uh, but it, um, it is.

C. Derick Varn: 1:26:39

It is interesting to think about. I mean, the revolutionary tourism thing is always fascinating to me because it's not even like the naxalites are winning in india. So I'm always just like I'm like yes, there's a communist party in charge of karula, it's not, the naxalites are winning in India. So I'm always just like. I'm like yes, there's a communist party in charge of Karula, it's not the Naxalites, by the way. But um, uh, you know, it's.

C. Derick Varn: 1:26:55

It's also not doing anything about the larger development of the political right in India, which means it's very weird to cite that as your existing model when it's not even winning in its own larger state, much less the world. So, it's, you know. And people like oh, it's easy to critique that you're not there. And I'm like well, that's not my point, though, like I am not there. So why on earth do I think I can transfer that model here? And I think it's weird to argue that these states could somehow just I don't know overthrow the core, because what is more likely to happen is the elite decadence of the core just causes it to a collapse in and of its own endogenous problems, and it's even more wrong now in the 21st century, when conditions are radically different.

Alex Hochul: 1:27:50

I think this is something that we have to deal with. I mean, I think I finished the essay was saying something like about the 20th century is over, but I don't think we've all. We haven't taken it seriously enough, right? I haven't even fully teased out all the consequences of the kind of logical consequences of what that really means, the consequences of you know the kind of logical consequences of what that really means, right, that everything that we know about politics is to a certain extent premised on a 20th century configuration, whether we're taking the century as a whole or the post-war era and the post-war era itself. Very much is over. You know so the kind of neat competition between central left and central right that's over.

Alex Hochul: 1:28:28

Um, economic growth, you know, maybe, the us notwithstanding and the us is doing well to a certain extent also because it it's kind of cannibalizing europe a little bit um, but you know both, in many advanced states we're dealing with very low growth, right. Um, aging populations, um the the the idea of like managing, of a left-wing party dealing with the problems of having to manage capitalism right, as many social democratic parties dealt with and that was like one of the key questions for the left for the past, you know, or over the post-war period. Even that is a question which has to be be completely reframed right. So the the problem of like, oh, how do you maintain profit, how do you sustain profitability while still trying to seek to implement a kind of reformist program like that, is that isn't even the right question, probably anymore, because there there was, there was economic growth which, uh, could be a means of legitimation, or at least, to, you know, to the extent that there was a surplus that could be shared out. Now that isn't the case anymore.

Alex Hochul: 1:29:35

So we're dealing with a world which looks I don't know if it's right to say that looks more like the 19th century, because that's probably wrong as well, but it certainly isn't the 20th century. So to a certain extent we have to be serious in dealing with our questions, not trying to resolve or replay the 20th century and saying, ok, but if we have these kind of you know, vertical parties in the third world which might take power, then we can restart from there, you know, like, let's restart from, let's restart from 1968 or whatever it might be, let's restart from 1968 or whatever it might be.

C. Derick Varn: 1:30:12

Well, I mean, it does feel like picking some of these places in the world is this idea of like, oh, we can go back to the prior conditions because we're going to places that are, you know, less down the historical timeline if you want to take the teleological view of it, or in a different phase of development if you want to take a non-teleological one, and trying to restart the game over from there. Except that that actually butchers the logic of why this was the way it was in the initial instant instantiation. You needed, for example, the whole innovation of leninism was partially because, like, they had to explain how this revolution happened in a place that it wasn't supposed to happen, without another revolution happening for it to join up to like exactly like and and and.

C. Derick Varn: 1:30:52

In a way, 1992 solves the question. So it's you know, and I agree with you, there's a whole lot of like the 20th century is over and we either want to pretend it didn't happen or we want to say the 20th century is over. Let's read to the 20th century from the beginning like yeah, time doesn't work that way, people yeah, yeah, indeed.

Alex Hochul: 1:31:13

Or like, let's go back to 1945, which is, of course, the particularly the british obsession, um, you know, redoing the spirit of the spirit of 1945. I think there's even a ken loach film called that, isn't there something like that? So anyway, you know, like that's kind of the this kind of nostalgia. But you know, at the same time, same time, there's a kind of irony that there's a across the political spectrum apart it's. You know, come on, it's 2024. How can you still be prejudiced in that way? Whatever right. So it's all about just being up to date with whatever it's the new mores that has decided must be applied across society and that everybody must be up to speed with. Taking those people aside, you have what motivates the populisms of the left and the right is a nostalgia and a desire to return basically to 1963. You know, give or take some years, one way or the other, the left prefers to emphasize different aspects to that which the right does, but the kind of, ultimately the object of their desires, ends up being kind of the same and it has a strong appeal, right. If you look at the populist rights advances in Europe, it's a lot based on a nostalgia, which often is racially coded, but it's also a kind of desire for a more stable society where you could have a family, you could have a stable job, a more stable society where you could have a family, you could have a stable job, you could have a realistic prospect of advancement in life, et cetera, et cetera. Now they think, okay, well, if you stop immigration, then that will, you know, that will resolve that. Or, you know, if you get rid of all the wokes, then that will, you know, improve the situation. We can return to that. Those are obviously kind of premised on kind of impossibilities. Or, you know, improve the situation, we can return to that. Those are obviously kind of premised on kind of impossibilities. Or, you know, it's kind of mis-selling.

Alex Hochul: 1:33:15

But I think, nevertheless there's this kind of nostalgia. So it's, you know, it's not just kind of the left which is thinking that you can repeat the, or you know, the left, specifically kind of left intellectuals who think you can repeat the 20th century and then their proposals, but there is a widespread you know this is the way that the loss of historic imaginary actually applies or manifests itself is in this kind of across the board nostalgia, um, for, you know, returning to the 1950s or the 1960s, um, and that has, that has a, you know, I think that has, um, a popular kind of purchase, and that's why you know. So I don't know what the answer to that is because you would, you wouldn't want to, um, you know so, illusions and you'd'd want to disabuse people of the idea that one can return to 1963. But, at the same time, the desire that's expressed in that is something that has to be spoken to.

C. Derick Varn: 1:34:26

Well, I think we have to I mean to use the horrible Derridaian phrase, hauntology but I think we do have to speak to the fact that this nostalgia, even though it's largely imaginary at this point, people don't like. People are increasingly removed even from the memory of the 70s, much less anything before 1960. But, but there's something very real there, right, we can't just ignore that as like oh it's just, you know, they denied history to us. Well, what does that mean Like? Why does that have so much purchase? Why does that beefo phrase about the cancellation of the future have so much purchase? Not just for us on the left. Like, let's be quite realistic here, whether it's like the neoconservative right or like weirdos in France like G Goulamé Fay, they also are responding to that right. Like the cancellation of the future says something for them too. That's what archaeo-futurism and all those weirder esoteric European right thoughts is actually about.

C. Derick Varn: 1:35:24

And we live in a time right now where, because of the infinite remixing of social media, these things are running back into each other and created like hybrid ideologies which don't really have mass social movements behind them. Because, but then, to be fair to them, what does like? You know, and I remember thinking we saw this in the aughts too. I remember like there's all these kinds of weird hybrid political like you anarcho-monarchism and the National Socialist Libertarian Green Party and you know things that are easy to make fun of. Now I think we're seeing that again because we're in a similar moment, and I guess my last question for you is why does it feel like I am in 1990 to 2006 again, and yet also not Because none of the optimism of that time period and none of the stability of that time period are available for us either, right.

Alex Hochul: 1:36:18

No, and that's a really good question. It's right that the mainstream optimism albeit, you know, I think it's important to bear in mind that the moment of post-historical euphoria amongst the establishment and popularly, to a certain extent as well, was pretty short-lived, and certainly by 9-11 in the United States it was over. And as many people, including Slavoj Zizek, have pointed out, you know that the imaginaries of the time were dominated by fantasies of catastrophe, right, right, all the kind of films that Hollywood churned out were all these kind of catastrophes. And we continue to kind of hinge our imaginations on kind of imagining that this moment of catastrophe will happen, and we feared but desired at the same time, and we hope that it will somehow resolve our problems for us or resolve the sort of intractability of the age. But anyway, you know, there was nevertheless, if not some optimism, at least a kind of channeling of hopes and desires into the idea that, well, you know, there's economic growth and buy new stuff and cheer yourself up with, you know, home improvement and whatever it might be right I don't mean the TV show, although you know, maybe that too You're like, you know, so that the withdrawal of that, but also, so it's not just the withdrawal of that kind of optimism that existed from, you know, whatever, 1990 to 2006, um, but also the increase in, in conflict, that social life feels increasingly conflictual at a kind of everyday level, of kind of war of all against all, which gets, I think, or at least into certain extent, um, politics functions as a means to seek to resolve those antagonism or solve those frustrations by channeling all this anger into politics, into kind of Schmittian politics For those who want to do it.

Alex Hochul: 1:38:18

For other people, you know, you withdraw into other areas, you might withdraw into, seek to withdraw into religion or to your hobbies or whatever else it might be, but unfortunately you can't really find peace there either, because those things are, you know, I think Benjamin Studebaker's book actually, which you mentioned earlier, is quite good on depicting this situation. But you know, for those who might be interested in politics or who you know follow maybe what's going on at certain moments in the electoral calendar. So if you're in the US from, you know, june, from June 2024 until November, you'll be interested in politics somewhat and for the rest of the time you won't be way that the kind of, you know, end of history of the long 1990s didn't have, and that's what's that's kind of what's unique about our times?

C. Derick Varn: 1:39:20

uh, the fact that jurist not the fascist, actually what anyway? Yeah, like uh, no, I mean, I think, to let you finish what I do think it's interesting that there's all this focus on fascism. You know, today, uh, and it was worse before, and I don't know that it's going to come back in the same way if we see a second trump presidency either. I, I think that's kind of exhausted that'll be interesting.

C. Derick Varn: 1:39:47

Yeah, I mean I, I don't know like, but I'm not seeing it gearing up at the current moment the way it was gearing up in 2015. I can say that, um, but you know, and in some ways, a lot of what's happening is people just recognizing long-term trends. Like we're calling fascism is actually did is, yeah, it's a de-democratization of a lot of the of the state. Um, it's populism that has various collective imaginaries floating around as myths to glom onto it's and I, you know I don't even say these things is necessarily good or bad. I'm I'm not a, a sorelian or a gentalian or one of these people who believes that myth can overcome material production, but I don't know of a politics that doesn't have some kind of mythic understanding of the past and that includes Marxism, fortunately or unfortunately, but at the current moment, I think your call that we have to come to grips with the 20th century is over also means we have to understand in a non-mythic way what the 20th century fucking was, because I don't think we do. I know I don't and I'm not getting good answers to my questions a lot of the time, other than let's go back to the 19th century, or, as implied in your critique of Chris Cotone, it's go back to the 19th century, or, and I mean, uh, as implied in your critique of chris crouton, it's not just he wants to go back to the bolsheviks, that he wants to go back to, like the 17th century bourgeois revolutions, like you know. And he and almost weirdly and simultaneously declaring that's impossible today. So he's that's one of the interesting tensions, and crouton platypus thought that that people tend to demonize, but I think it has to be so legitimate tension that they want the early bourgeois values back.

C. Derick Varn: 1:41:40

But they say we're in a period of regression where that's impossible. But then I'm like, well, how the fuck do you make it possible again? And I don't think it would be through cosplaying, um, the, the bourgeois revolutions of the 19th and uh, of the of the 17th, of the 18th, 19th and early 20th century. I just don't think that would be the case. Um, but who knows, I don't, you know. But I was arguing with someone today who was like, well, we need to have a national resurgence. And I'm like, well, but but when Marx was talking about national agencies, they were talking about creating bourgeois nation states. They're created now Like very, I mean, except for maybe the mega, actually the poles of influence which are not bourgeois nation states America, china, india, to some degree Russia because there's never been one nation. The rest of the world has pretty much had its national moment. Now for good and ill.

Alex Hochul: 1:42:33

Like that's done, I don't know why I was talking about it, though in many cases in decomposition, and certainly in Europe, it's the case, and I mean my friend and colleague in the podcast, phil Cunliffe, would certainly argue that you know, the need, that kind of the moment imposes a need to reconstruct the nation, to rebuild national politics. Um, and I'm I'm sympathetic to to that line of thought, even if it's not necessarily um something I can kind of claim credit for or like it's my position that I've elaborated, you know, um I, I would say, when I was analyzing your piece, that was where the difference between us really came out.

C. Derick Varn: 1:43:14

I'm like I think that's a thing of the past, but we do have to, even if I say that we have to come up with something to replace it, and we haven't. So, either way, that does have to be addressed. Have to be addressed, um, and clearly, like this weird 90s end of history, we're just gonna go do tinker around the edges of municipalism doesn't seem to be a way around it either, although I could very easily see a lot of these social democrats and quotation marks doing that, because that seems like a way to build up an electoral base. That's more serious, uh, than bernie. But again, you could get caught up in the larger finagling movements, way larger than any of us, as studebaker points out. Um, uh, so you have that critique.

C. Derick Varn: 1:44:00

I didn't really have a critique of of boriello and jaeger, uh, other than I just sort of agreed that those politics seem to have taken the gamble and not risked anything. Um, and uh, I wanted to talk a little bit. Like, your critique of katron seems to be that it is too past oriented. But what did you make of katron's book? You actually cite it. Uh, it's interesting that you added it later. You cite it both approvingly at points, but also the least of any of the books yeah, no, I didn't, I didn't add it later, I you wrote it with it in mind.

Alex Hochul: 1:44:33

Well, I had, before even starting working on the review essay, I had Anton and Arthur's book and Vincent Bevan's book in mind, and then I added the Cutrone one, but it's not like it was an afterthought in terms of the actual writing of it. I found it very useful in the critiques it makes, indeed of the other books as well at certain points, and so I do cite it approvingly at various points. Is your question like what's my problem?

C. Derick Varn: 1:45:05

What's your critique of Catriona? My critique of Catriona is when we're talking negatively about the left, I often agree with him, but when we're talking about what we should do, about that I almost agree, not at all. So like it's uh, and to get into what why that is is larger than this piece or larger than my discussion here. But I was interested in your response because in some ways I think off bumga bunga are seen as sympathetic to that milieu of the american left, even though off bong about like none of you guys are americans, I think, but you know, um, so uh, um, you know, and uh, I often think we often squish off bunga together too much too, because I think there's differences between you and philip and um your other co-hosts that are subtle, um, sometimes not so subtle, but um, yeah, obviously become, maybe comes out more because because we're old friends and it's right and I've argued with people or to seek, um, you know, narcissism of small differences and seek kind of distinctions when it's more questions of emphasis or approach rather than, uh, anything kind of.

Alex Hochul: 1:46:09

But in any case, I mean, you know, I think the question with Cutrone I probably have already said kind of what I wanted to say about that, but it's the, I think, one, as I say in the piece, he kind of underplays these organizational questions which we discussed about the crisis of politics, because he is kind of dealing with it or trying to insist on a revolutionary horizon, but not analyzing the way the politics has kind of fallen apart.

Alex Hochul: 1:46:43

Um, as a general, as a like, as bourgeois, politics has fallen apart, right, which is, which is, which is um, important and affects us, affects us all, um, but also the uh, yeah, I, I mean I'm gonna just repeat myself because I don't think I have anything okay at here, we won't, we won't go, you know it's the sense of, of a political indifferentism, of um of a kind of well you know, to a certain extent there's politics which imposes itself and, yes, it might be bourgeois or class conciliationist or whatever, but we have to create the conditions for politics today, which is not something that previous left had to deal with.

C. Derick Varn: 1:47:28

Not since the bourgeois revolutions actually.

Alex Hochul: 1:47:30

Well, indeed, and that wasn't the left, I mean because that would have been an anachronism. So whether we want to organize ourselves and conceive of ourselves as the left is a whole other question, and I've never been wedded to left, so I don't really care for that either. I probably use leftism as a term of kind of disapprobation more than approval. So anyway, but the point being is that we have to. Katrona is right in terms of we should judge politics on the basis of whether it opens up future opportunities, but then I think he should be. You know, we have to take that kind of more seriously and go okay, well, we have to create the conditions for politics today. And how do we do that? And the millennial left failed in its key, pivotal moments where there were possibilities to do that in various different ways, in different contexts, and it shied away from it. It shied away from it.

C. Derick Varn: 1:48:28

Right, yeah, and I, you know, in some ways it just follows a long tradition of people who shy away from me. Like, historically speaking, if we're completely fair, we talk about you know well, there's more losers than winners. That's just always true. Like you know, most revolutions fail, it's it is even even when the revolution succeed. They, even when revolutions succeed, they often fail four or five, ten times before they do.

C. Derick Varn: 1:48:58

And I do think we have to think about this in terms of a different kind of politics and I think we have to deal with the fact that. I mean, one of the questions that isn't in your piece but has come up as part of the response to this was the revival of PMC discourse, which is an old discourse that goes back to the new left, that itself really goes back to divisions in response to World War II. I mean it goes back to like James Burnham and Robert Michel and people like that. But that was an attempt to answer this on class grounds, except it's a very broad answer. It's actually not a very fine-toothed class lens. There is, I think, there is, some truth to parts of it, to parts of that thesis. I also think like there's a lot of ways that it can be abused. But that was also clear response to the failure of the millennial left was to try to come up with a class theory for why it wasn't working. Um, and I think that the problem is that we need that class theory, but it is not in and of itself explanatory of the larger problems, of why bourgeois politics itself seems so deracinated, because, no matter how much you want it to be, the middle managers are not actually in charge of everything. And if they are, it's not because they took that power, it's because someone abrogated it. And where are they Like? And that's a big question that you kind of have to answer to make a lot of these discourse patterns make sense. And again, that's beyond the scope of your original essay.

C. Derick Varn: 1:50:44

Again, that's beyond the scope of your original essay, but it's implied because that's when that you know, that discourse and that class analysis emerged pretty much at the end of the anti-Trump period as a way to seemingly explain why the Bernie movement went off the rails. You know, and I'm not sure that it ultimately goes deep enough in understanding these larger political problems, the problems of you know. I mean, one of the things that I would say, even to Chris Catron, is like I would like you to go materially deeper in understanding regression. Why materially not just ideologically, not just off of unfaithfulness to bourgeois whites why, materially has this happened? And I don't get a lot of answers for that, at least not from marxist, like they're not, that weirdly they don't seem interested in like that level of analysis to go and be like, okay, well, why does the bourgeoisie seem non-functional after neoliberalism? I mean theoretically, if we're honest, neoliberalism probably should have ended in 2007 and nothing's really replaced it, but it also isn't functioning the way it used to function at all. So you know what's going on.

C. Derick Varn: 1:51:41

Why is no one in charge? Why is there? You know, as I always say, why are there no adults in the room? There really isn't right now. Why, like, why can no one imagine, you know, uh, replacing joe biden, an 82 year old man who is clearly having mental health problems now, undeniably, I think, without creating a political crisis In a massive party where you think one dude who is not the dictator, dictator of the party shouldn't be that hard to deal with, and yet there is no answer to that, you know, I mean, I think, the United States, where this is particularly farcical, but people who think that the other parts of the world don't operate this way.

C. Derick Varn: 1:52:21

I kind of think they're wrong. It's like, no, the hegemon is where this is the most obvious. But if you look at these other states, you still see it Like a lot of these, even like these autocratic states. You still see it Like, um, a lot of these, even like these, uh, autocratic states. These strong people are having hard times keeping their shit together A lot of the time. They're not all. They're not all GM, putin, people.

Alex Hochul: 1:52:40

Well, um, so it doesn't, and even and even there Putin isn't who the liberals wish Putin was Right.

C. Derick Varn: 1:52:52

Right who the liberals wish Putin was right, right, exactly. I mean, in some ways, the liberals want a more coherent enemy than they have. And you know, all this stuff is kind of I keep on thinking about you know who, all the I think about the pessimism of Mike Davis, who pointed out that we were all going away from Mike. Collective leadership, even in China, and then also all these leaders are very old, worldwide and it's just like what happens when they die. I mean, you know, I'm not wishing them to die, I don't want people to understand me, but they are mortals and they're like between 60 and 80. Now, for most of these people, what's going to happen? 60 and 80? Now, for most of these people, what's going to happen?

C. Derick Varn: 1:53:33

It's not clear that they've cultivated cadres or anything to replace them. You know, in some cases, in the case of, like Russia and China, it's just not clear. I don't know, I don't read that, I'm not in there, I don't read relevant languages, it's not, it's opaque to me. In other cases, like in the United States or in the UK or in Europe, it's clear there is none Like that's not an arguable, like we can understand what's going on. They don't exist right now.

C. Derick Varn: 1:53:58

So you know, I think the post-millennial left I can't, for lack of a better word is going to have to deal with that, and if the millennial left wants to have any relevance in the future whatsoever, I think we do have to understand our own failures, because we're no longer of the age cohort that's going to lead this stuff. Anyway, like you know, I don't want anyone resurrecting me and making me bernie sanders in 20 fucking years, like you know. Not that they would, you know, but like that shouldn't be the goal either. Like so it's. It's where we are. Thank you so much. People want to find your work and anything you're excited to plug. Go ahead and do so.

Alex Hochul: 1:54:44

Yeah, so the podcast. If you don't listen to it, it's BungaCast. You can find us at BungaCast, everywhere on Patreon and everywhere else. I have a sub stack which I should be writing far more on at alexhochillysubstackcom and then on Twitter at alex__1789. I should one day commit Twitter suicide and get off of there, but for the moment I'm still on there, so you can.

C. Derick Varn: 1:55:11

I did it and I had me there I had relative peace for the six months that I did it. Then I then I started having people telling me I had to book them through twitter and I got back on and now I'm like this is a mixed bag. I now see the id of the political landscape, the hyper politics as you guys call it, you know the political id brain, which is terrifying, quite honestly. But also it's a good reminder that most people don't live in the hyper political world, because when you mention what's going on Twitter to people outside Twitter, they look at you like you're nuts and they're kind of right to do that. So it's, it's interesting.

Alex Hochul: 1:55:51

But you can find me at Nuthouse if you wish, or be smart and don't even come on there.

C. Derick Varn: 1:55:57

No, I would tell people to listen to your podcast or read you, as opposed to find your tweets. I mean, I would say that for myself.

Alex Hochul: 1:56:04

I would definitely say that. Yeah, bungacast, and if you haven't read our book the End of History, I think it's still pretty relevant, so you maybe want to check that out.

C. Derick Varn: 1:56:15

Yeah.