Varn Vlog
Abandon all hope ye who subscribe here. Varn Vlog is the pod of C. Derick Varn. We combine the conversation on philosophy, political economy, art, history, culture, anthropology, and geopolitics from a left-wing and culturally informed perspective. We approach the world from a historical lens with an eye for hard truths and structural analysis.
Varn Vlog
The Paradox of American Politics: Navigating The Current Malaise with Benjamin Studebaker
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Benjamin Studebaker joins us to dissect the paradox of American politics, where the stakes are monumental, yet policy differences between parties have narrowed. We explore how this shift aligns with recent UK elections and the transition from detailed policy debates to a focus on signaling and messaging. The episode uncovers how figures like Kamala Harris position themselves as change candidates despite their ties to past administrations, and why the Democrats are steering clear of traditional rhetoric around demographics and democracy threats. Our discussion highlights the GOP's internal tensions, contrasting Project 2025's explicit policy strategy with Trump's broad, unifying rhetoric.
The episode ventures into the complexities of foreign policy, particularly within the Democratic Party, and the challenges voters face in navigating a vibes-driven political landscape. We address ethical and spiritual gaps, especially regarding the U.S.-Israel relationship and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and explore the Democratic shift towards a "politics of joy." Through an examination of past election strategies, we contemplate the broader landscape of political engagement and the emotional and ideological shifts driven by recent political and economic challenges.
In our conversation, we also tackle economic realities and labor union dynamics. We scrutinize the transformation of industries and the struggles faced by leftist movements in adapting to modern economic conditions. The episode touches on the historical context of labor unions in the U.S. and their potential as a vehicle for socialism, questioning the sustainability of current strategies amidst shifting global capital dynamics. By reflecting on societal struggles for meaning in a rapidly changing world, we ponder the role of intellectual engagement in fostering both personal and societal well-being. Join us for an episode rich in insights and reflections on the intricate dance of politics, policy, and power.
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Host: C. Derick Varn
Intro and Outro Music by Bitter Lake.
Intro Video Design: Jason Myles
Art Design: Corn and C. Derick Varn
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US Election Cycle and Policy Shifts
C. Derick VarnHello and welcome to Wernbog , and I'm here with Benjamin Studebaker and political doomer , but you and the hosts of American Prestige may be the two most upbeat people in American political commentary , which tells me something about the benefit of giving up false hope . But so I wanted to ask you a little bit what do you make of this election cycle where tons is at stake and nothing is at stake ? People are highly polarized , but policies have actually moved closer and closer together , even compared to historical 70s through aughts norms . What do you make of that ?
Benjamin StudebakerYeah , it's a lot like the UK election that happened a little bit earlier , right , where you had the actual economic policies of the two parties coming together to the point where they were almost totally indistinguishable . And so the argument became about aren't you just tired of the conservatives , aren't you just tired of Rishi Sunak and that whole shtick that they do ? And it became very much about signaling and messaging , and the platforms , the manifestos , that usually play such an important role in British politics , were diminished by that experience . And now in the United States it's happening to a much greater degree , where we are really taking a very flimsy attitude to policy . And it's just a question of what feels good . We've got these Laclauian floating signifiers all over the place .
Benjamin StudebakerYou know , first it was weird , right . Well , what do you mean by weird ? Fill it in with whatever you want as a criticism of the Republicans , and then joy , which is how you're supposed to feel , right . And then freedom . At the DNC , they had freedom plastered all over the place . At the DNC , they had freedom plastered all over the place .
Benjamin StudebakerAnd then you can fill it in with some kind of positive freedom , reproductive freedom , freedom from , say , racism or from slavery , right . But you also could , could treat it as freedom from having to think about policy , freedom from having to be concerned about Trump or about democracy and they talked about this being scared when you wake up in the morning about what's happened in the world because Trump is president and you have no idea what may have happened . And now you won't have to worry about that . You're free to experience joy and hang out with your family and friends and not think about politics . I think that's a major part of all of this , and it just comes back to do you trust the Democrats in some kind of blasé way to take care of things without them having to tell you precisely what it is that they'll do ?
C. Derick VarnYeah , it feels like a return to the idea of generic good management politics , which in some ways , is astounding as um a political message right now . Uh , and part of that is because , somehow and I wanted to ask you how you think they did this You're , you're the person who probably does the most conventional political analysis in my , in my wheelhouse Most of us like feel gross that we have to touch punditry , but I've been really thinking about how did they , in a very brief period of time and I actually do think from a from vapid political messaging , this is impressive in a sincere sense that they took this campaign that they've been running pretty much since 2016 of demographics is destiny and we have the brown people , which is no longer clear and I've been critiquing as like that's obviously been a bad play for a long time , because the idea that , as material conditions got better for non-whites in the United States , or at least didn't get worse comparatively to whites , that everyone would stay on the Democratic side when the Democrats also weren't doing anything for anybody . They weren't really establishing patronage networks outside of occasionally giving circa to some very particular kinds of identitarian activism , but reluctantly , honestly , despite the fact that they like the rhetoric out of it . It seems that that and the oh , democracy is going to be destroyed has been softened dramatically and not entirely gone away . I mean , you don't hear that stuff out of the Harris campaign's mouth . It does still come up in there and downstream from them .
C. Derick VarnI don't know if it's because they realize that that's unpopular and people hitting downstream don't necessarily hit the , the main of the regime ticket , or if it's . You know , activists have such ingrained habits that , no matter even if the campaigns and stuff that they are a part of have signaled hey , stop that shit , they can't because of what they've been doing for a decade . I'm not sure which one of those it is , but it does seem like something dramatic changed in signaling . But it's just signaling and it's incredibly thin . I mean , even compared to the Obama campaign , which at least they knew some things that he wanted to do . I was thinking and I'm like I really don't have any idea what Kamala Harris's policy stances are , except that she's not going to be soft on the border . That's like you know .
C. Derick VarnAnd for people who may wonder why she's pushing on that , not only is that one of the general weaknesses of the Democrats period , that they have no viable vision for immigration reform , positive or negative or anything . It was also a particular weakness of Harris in the early Biden campaign , because Biden saddled her with representing him on it , and they seemed to be at first loosening Trump policies and then reinstating them really , really quickly and in fact , doubling down on some of them beyond what the Trump administration initially did , as if they thought that they were going to get credit for that , because if everything's vibes , what you actually do doesn't matter anyway . So like it's a very strange situation . So how do you think they did that ? How did Kamala Harris , a key figure in the last regime , somehow managed to at least sell her base that she was a change candidate and sell people at the DSA who probably shouldn't be her base that she was a change candidate Not saying everyone in the DSA believes it , but like the DSA's national organization released some statements that were embarrassing .
Benjamin StudebakerYeah , part of what is going on here is that in the Trump administration there was much better reporting at the time on internal divisions within the administration , in part because people were concerned that bad things might happen . So they wanted to know how are decisions actually made in the Trump administration ? And a lot of these books came out with hyperventilating titles about danger . But if you read them what you would find is that there were divisions in the Trump administration that effectively kept the president in check . He had to deal with the kind of Jared Kushner , ivanka Trump part of the administration which is kind of moderate Democrat . He had to deal with the Rince Priebus establishment Republican part and then you did have the Steve Bannon out there kind of alt-righty part , but that part was just one out of three parts . It was rarely the dominant part and in practice most of the administration's decisions ended up going through Kushner because Kushner's family . So that reporting that helped people , I think , if they paid attention , to feel like , hey , it's going to be all right , we're going to make it . That reporting during the Trump administration mostly dried up during the Biden administration . There was a little bit of it . You occasionally saw some pieces on Politico or the Hill about the internal dynamics . But people I've observed , even relatively well read , attentive people , don't know the dynamics as well . Attentive people don't know the dynamics as well .
Benjamin StudebakerWhat you can figure out if you look around is that Biden has a kind of brain trust around him , a set of advisors that come back from his Senate days , from his time as VP , close friends of his , who share his vision , his attitude to the world , his tight-knit group . And this group of people they don't like Harris . They viewed Harris as somebody they added to the ticket for demographic and electoral reasons , not someone that they really wanted involved in decision-making . They discovered from a relatively early point that whenever Harris gets media attention it would tend to do damage to the campaign . That people like the idea of Harris as an identitarian signifier . But if they actually listen to her talk it's bad for her favorability numbers and bad for Biden's . So they exiled her to the border issue .
Benjamin StudebakerThey kept her out of a lot of the interior meetings and you'll find , if you look around , that there was deep animosity between Harris's staff and the Biden staff and the brain trust staff . Because the Harris staff they thought this is our opportunity to be part of an administration we're working for the vice president , and then their vice president was one of the least influential vice presidents in any administration in recent history , so it was very , very frustrating for them . They thought we're close to power , we're staffers for the vice president , but in practice she had almost no influence within the administration . That now makes it easier to frame her as someone who had always been an outsider in the administration , even though she was inside it and has contributed to this rapid turn .
Benjamin StudebakerBut another thing that I think is a major factor is the Democratic Party still had enough cohesion to coalesce around an alternative to Biden . They were able to get together and not just say we want Biden out , but that we agree on who should replace him , which was a surprise to me . I thought that there would be more disagreement about that and that it would be harder to replace Biden because many people in the party would go well , we can't pick Harris . Harris is not someone who will be able to withstand extended media attention . We know from all of this data that we have that she doesn't do well under the bright lights . But they figured out that they can run a competitive campaign as long as she talks as little as possible and if they run a kind of LaClauian , obama style vibes campaign around her , they can have a campaign where she actually does very little of the talking and , as you've noticed , but this CNN interview as soon as she does appear and talk at all , it's not good .
C. Derick VarnYeah , well , that's something I've been pointing out to people is that the messaging around the campaign has been astoundingly disciplined , but she is not a good speaker . She is not an Obama figure and yet the base seems to really really want her to be an Obama figure . Because this strategy of silence only works if the base is willing to project their ideas upon you . Now , it's not like this is unique to the liberal left . We've seen like Trump's demagogic coalition only works because everybody listens to the fact that he says something for everybody in a speech .
C. Derick VarnAnd you could be a war hawk or a paleo conservative , uh , reactionary peacenik , and you would like a trump speech like it's . You know that is one of his raw I , you know , like to refer to it as lizard brain , intelligent , like ways that he operates the . The Democrats are remarkably bad at that , but it seems like their base wants them to be good at it , so that we're kind of emperor's no clothing . This , I mean like what do you think is driving people to project that upon the Harris campaign ? Because , you're right , most of it's actually just silence .
Benjamin StudebakerYeah , it's a disciplined messaging effort around Harris . Lots and lots of party elites , party insiders , are doing this messaging for her At the convention . I think that the speeches of the former presidents Obama and Clinton were very much doing this kind of work , trying to set up a particular kind of discursive thing around her . Gavin Newsom made a joke in an interview recently where he said he's been told to say that it was a bottom-up process , the process of replacing Harris . They're being very tight about their messaging and this has been impressive to me as someone who views these parties as increasingly not connected to people , not very cogent . This is why we , as millennials , thought that maybe we could potentially capture these parties , because they do have a weak social base . They're not very tied to people . The patronage system is very weak relative to what it used to be . So I thought there might be an issue with cohesion , but that there really hasn't been an issue with cohesion . The Democrats as a , as a party , have been very cohesive . So even though they have this nominee , who's kind of weak , they've been able to nonetheless create discipline messaging around her .
Benjamin StudebakerThe person that she makes me think of is Dan Quayle . The person that she makes me think of is Dan Quayle . You know I'm imagining what if Bush in 1992 had saw that his numbers weren't very good against Clinton and saw that there was this third party challenger in Perot who was getting very high numbers and went I'm not the strongest nominee to go into this cycle and the Republicans coalesced around Quayle . Quayle was someone who was very inarticulate , viewed by many people as kind of a stupid guy , a liability for Bush , but he'd been picked for electoral reasons . Bush was this Ivy League East Coast elite guy and Quayle was this guy from Indiana who sounded like a middle American . I see , see , this is almost like a what if for me , of what if you had just made Quayle the nominee in 92 in an attempt to save Reaganism from Bill Clinton . And I like the comparison too , because Dan Quayle is a white guy . So when you make the comparison to Dan Quayle , as opposed to , say , someone like Lori Lightfoot , people can't use identitarian arguments to dismiss the critique .
C. Derick VarnYeah , that's a good point . Well , I mean , they could say that you're being offensive by comparing her to Dan Quayle , but that's about the most you could say .
Benjamin StudebakerAnd it's a Republican . You're admitting and acknowledging there that you think that there are Republicans too who are just as stupid and just as silly . Right , and of course we do that . One of the first things they do when we start to seriously criticize the Harris campaign is accuse us of being Republicans .
C. Derick VarnSo this can be preempted with a comparison that invokes a Republican as a negative figure so one thing I have to ask , though , is um , simultaneously , it seems like I I watch the rnc speeches . Uh , because I'm a masochist and everyone told me I should .
Fear-Based Politics
C. Derick VarnI normally avoid the convictions because , in some ways , usually you can predict how the parties are going to present themselves to themselves , although the tension between the activist base of the Republican Party and their messaging moderation , which I think is something liberals have just ignored , just flat out ignored . Coherent grab bag of conservative uh , absolute wants , and , as you and I both have actually commented , it's weird that the liberals don't even attempt an incoherent grab bag of of stuff . But then , in some ways , the problems with it become clear , because trump pivoting away from project 2025 people , you know he probably rejects parts of it anyway , but people have tried to be like , oh , he's secretly a 2025-er and I'm like , no , the problem is actually now you've made policy statements that are directly contradictory , whereas Trump is dependent on vibes that can hold these contradictions together . 2025 , the internal tensions of that will become immediately obvious . Beyond , you know , there's the easy stuff , which is actually not as radical as people posit it's a breach of soft norms which is like , not , you know , not going through the party and going downstream and putting loyalists in lesser parts of the administrative apparatus . But people miss it . Like , all administrations tend to put loyalists in the upper part , except maybe in the military , because until recently that was considered too necessary to play politics with . That's not true anymore , but it was true . So that's a change , but people make it sound like it's some kind of revolutionary change . I mean no , any president could have done this . If they want to . It's in their rights to do . It's just norms that they don't .
C. Derick VarnHowever , the other stuff in that document are all over the place . You got pro-labor and rabid anti-labor legislation Both are in there . You have economic promises that seem both like standard Republican . We really believe in MMT , but we're going to pretend like we believe in hard money and then we're going to return to gold , which no one would let the US do , by the way . I just don't think anyone would allow it .
C. Derick VarnSo I had know , I had joked that , like if they actually did that , we would be like there'd be a civil war , but it wouldn't be the liberals versus conservatives , it would be probably the business and the military versus the regime , like it would be a very quick scenario , which indicates to me , since they've made it public that they don't actually intend , intend that that that's for activists to get them to , to get various coalitions in . The problem with it is it makes it all explicit and the and you can start seeing , not only does it freak out the general public and liberals can use it , but also like it actually makes different factors of conservatives uncomfortable because it makes it makes policy realities of tensions between them in an attempt to also bring them all in . And that , whereas Trump's we can see Trump's attitude in the RNC's well , in the platform , which is like , basically remove all specific policy references whatsoever , like and be about vaguely patriotic vibes and a little bit of anti-immigrant rhetoric and that's it . That's really all we're putting in there and backpedal on , you know , the promises to evangelicals soften your abortion stances to something like what is in the median voter norm , as in the median voter norm , and liberals by and large have been arguing with the Project 2025 version of this . Only a few people have acknowledged the other half of this at all , and yet that's also faded away too .
C. Derick VarnOne of the things I noticed in the last couple weeks is is , despite all this focus on project 2025 , since the harris campaign has come up . We're now on their weird politics of joy shit , which everyone's just telling me is practically effective and I'm like it'll work for a while . It might even work till November . I doubt it , though . I think there's too many real things breaking down for vibes to work forever . But maybe I'm wrong . I've been wrong before . But what do you make of where the GOP is right now ? Because it also seems In some ways , trump was the most disciplined I'd ever seen him , like just before and just after the assassination attempt , and that's all gone to pot since JD Vance came on and Biden was gone . It's like Trump didn't have a backup plan for if they had to run against Harris . What do you think is going on there ?
Benjamin StudebakerYeah , you know , if we think back to 2020 , in that election we were in the white paper Warren era , where you showed you were a serious presidential campaign by having these detailed policy white papers . And back then I found myself often going you realize , these are just campaign documents right . To actually enact this policy , much of it would require the help of Congress and therefore there would be a negotiation . It's a political process to get policy . Much of it would require the help of Congress and therefore there would be a negotiation . It's a political process to get policy right . But people were going oh no , they're going to do exactly whatever they put in the policy white paper . Therefore , the details of the policy white paper were treated as enormously important and people were on these wonk blogs fighting over little policy details . Right now we're completely over that . We're totally over the policy wonk stuff . And now we've moved into a stage where if you say anything about policy , it's actually a liability . And that's because the attitude has moved from the kind of hopey attitude of the 10s , where there was some kind of hope that somebody was going to do something dramatic about the post-2008 malaise , to this combination of , on the one hand , fear-based stuff and , on the other hand , a kind of post-despair ironism .
Benjamin StudebakerI think there are a lot of people who were not able to stay in the despair of the result of the 2020 election , the result of the Biden administration . They're not able to tarry with the despair . They found it too upsetting . I think a lot of us on the left you know , we , our ethos is very much tied to politics and when we experience political defeat , we don't necessarily have an ethos Many of us that can withstand not having a politics or going through a period where we don't have a politics or going through a period where we don't have
Foreign Policy and Political Engagement
Benjamin Studebakera politics . And one of the consequences of this is a sort of headlong rush into some kind of political pose or LARP or something to paper over this gap . And I think it often takes the form of this kind of ironist semi-detached . You know , on the one hand , being politically invested in Harris , on the other hand , just declaiming it and going . Well , of course , I know it's a silly vibes campaign .
Benjamin StudebakerA lot of people on the kind of soft left .
Benjamin StudebakerA lot of what they are saying and doing now is they'll criticize Harris for not being serious and running this vibes-based campaign with no policy and they'll laugh and joke about it because they're in the know . But if you get serious about criticizing it and suggest that it might be a reason to not bother voting or to not vote for the Democrat , they become very upset . And the sense I'm getting is that a lot of these people feel they're in on the bit . They're identifying with the Democrats who are engaging in marketing , messaging , right , and they're thinking about themselves as marketers , as people , almost as if they work for the Democrats , right , or they're working to prevent Trump from being elected because they're afraid of him . So they're thinking like like they work for the party . A lot of ordinary Democratic voters are thinking as if they work for the party and kind of identifying with the party as a way of papering over this lack of a politics and the kind of ethical mess that that would leave them in a kind of ethical spiritual gap .
C. Derick VarnWell , I think the ethical spiritual gap becomes the most clear when we , on one hand , you and I are cynical about the way in which Palestine can be leveraged against any one factor in the Democratic Party or the Republican Party . It is a step down in political agency from even opposing a US war because it's you're hoping and it and I know people are surprised that I say this given the sheer I mean it is kind of amazing the scale of of arms shipments we'd set to Israel . Um , but they're hoping that stopping those arms shipments would automatically end the war and while it would probably end it faster , this entire time I've been unconvinced that Israel would necessarily stop just because we quit sending them as much munitions . Maybe I'm wrong , maybe there's some realist patterns there that I'm not seeing , but given Netanyahu's general tendency over the past decade and the number of people commenting on Israeli politics who clearly don't know that much about it other than the occupation is bad which , yeah , it definitely is , I'm not denying that but that Netanyahu have been pivoting to lessen US dependence before the war and like they had made . You know , israel is one of the trading partners for Russia that were not fully . They were basically exempted for some of the sanctions , not the ones on weapons and computer stuff , but the other trade . Russia was pretty much tacitly allowed to go on because of the deep integration that's been made there under the Netanyahu administration , and also China .
C. Derick VarnPeople have been wondering why China , while it has been willing to intervene in the peace process , has basically not done that much beyond that . And it's like well , but Israel is a major technology trade partner for China . It's not just the U S that , and it's like well , but Israel is a major technology trade partner for China . It's not just the US that they're trading with . So the idea that they're totally dependent on just our patronage to me seems actually itself a little bit of cope . But it does seem like this will be a liability for Harris and some key states . But it also was amazing to me that until literally , we were recording this at the very end of August 2024 , so people have a timestamp because this is actually very particular until an interview where she's like , well , what's happening to Palestine is bad , but we're not going to change a single one of our you know arms trade policies at all . Basically , a lot of the soft left was like , well , harris is probably going to be better on Israel than Biden . She'll at least go back to Obama-level norms and I'm like you're just projecting that on her .
C. Derick VarnWalsh , not like a strong Zionist . But why would a governor of minnesota , of a upper midwestern state , from a um , you know , a a middle class professional background , have strong ? Um , I mean , this is one of these things that I'm always like you're asking governors if they have strong foreign policy stances , which it's actually kind of weird that uninvolved governors who are not in major trading states like New York and California would have strong policy stances , except for things explicitly about the interest of their state . And Minnesota is not a military state . So I don't really see why he would have a strong opinion one way or the other . I mean he might morally don't really see why he would have a strong opinion one way or the other . I mean he might morally , but that's kind of a different question .
C. Derick VarnSo you have a progressive cipher from , you know , from a state that wouldn't have said a lot about Zionism one way or the other , and you have the Harris campaign and it does seem to me like this is a horror , horror of the horror of the situation is leading people to explicitly false hope , but that does seem to be a real liability for a for a sliver of the electorate .
C. Derick VarnMeanwhile , while us general opinion seems to be slightly in palestinian favor for the first time in like ever , um , it's not hard enough for it to really matter in voting and there's evidence and evidence and evidence of this that , like , the average voter like thinks what's going on in Israel is bad , but they're not sure we can actually do anything about it anyway .
C. Derick VarnSo , which I think is an interesting stance and foreign policy doesn't directly affect their lives . It's like 10 or 15 down on a lot of people's major concerns right now , even compared to , you know , foreign policy over Russia , ukraine , because there's more fears , particularly on the right , of the resurgence of the possibility of nuclear war , whereas , like , no one's really thinking that , even though Israel has like 29 nukes that they'll throw it on Gaza because you know the blowback alone from that would be unbearable . But also it just wouldn't make logistic sense , like it's too close to where you live . So , um , what do you , what do you make about that ? And the democrats inability to deal with it . And then also it's been a divider on the right too , which is surprising . So what do you make of that too , I'm gonna shut up for a while .
Benjamin StudebakerYeah , you know there's a , a bigider on the right too , which is surprising . So what do you make of that too ? I'm going to shut up for a while . Yeah , you know there's a big chunk of us who are reluctant to vote for a Democrat , not because of Palestine , but because of things like Medicare for all and tuition-free college and infrastructure and all of those things Nobody really talks about anymore . But that's a big reason why many young people already are out on the Democrats and we're out on the Democrats before the Israeli-Palestinian conflict got going . Many of those issues I think are more important to young people on the left than Israel-Palestine is . Based on the surveying that we have , it ranks very low on most Americans' issues lists , unless you are someone who is in a university setting and you don't have a lot of concrete issues in your day-to-day life that are affecting you , and then you're a little bit freer to care about foreign policy issues .
Benjamin StudebakerHistorically , even when we've had boots on the ground in countries and there have been soldiers deployed to countries , it's difficult to build a political movement around opposing a war . We saw that with Vietnam . We also saw that with Iraq . The left in both of those cases organized very heavily in opposition to those wars . But in terms of the actual political effectiveness we didn't really see a whole lot of that . You know , left-wing candidates who opposed Vietnam or who opposed Iraq were never really successful in building power . Even kind of soft left , you know , democrats , progressive Democrats , who oppose those wars , were not really able to get into positions of power by running on those issues . And those were wars that were considered high priority issues by many , many people . So I don't really see much effectiveness there .
Benjamin StudebakerOne thing I have noticed also is that we've got a lot of people who , because they are feeling frustrated about their inability to change anything domestically within the United States , have libidinally invested in the possibility of other states changing things , a kind of return to a 70s third worldism or 70s Maoism that is focused around other states as having latent capacities , whether they're states in Africa , the BRICS , the Palestinians , the Russians . And one thing that often this overlooks is that there are major divisions among these states . For instance , the term BRICS includes both India and China . These are two states that almost came to blows within the last calendar year over their northern border . They don't like each other and there's a significant contingent of people in India not just a significant contingent I'd say it's much bigger than any contingent that would favor an alliance with China , who think that a new Cold War between the US and China would cause a lot of investment in manufacturing to relocate to India and who think that India is in the best possible position to benefit from that . Huge chunk of the Indian elite thinks this way . So when people use terms like BRICS and just throw all of the other countries that aren't straightforwardly already allies of the United States together as if they are a cohesive thing , it's just not very realistic .
Benjamin StudebakerPeople have a hard time thinking about small states . A state like Israel they either treat as if it's always already just an appendage of the United States or as if it's this completely sovereign thing that makes its own decisions in a vacuum , as if it were a great power . People have a very hard time understanding the kind of very compromised , very limited state agency that these small states have . They either erase it completely in their account or they big it up and treat it like these are citizens in some kind of international republic that have rights that can't possibly be besmirched . Small states are always operating in these very difficult in-between spaces and this is why it is significant that the states of Europe are not actual US states . It is significant that Canada and Australia are not actually US statesahu booted than that the United States would cut off arms shipments to Israel , because if the United States abandons the state right , then they lose an allied state in that region .
Benjamin StudebakerBut if the United States betrays in some way the government to get a government that's more pliable , that would be more in keeping with the way the United States tends to behave with its allies . You know we saw this many times in Europe during the Cold War . You would get some kind of you know maybe left-wing movement going in one of these states and the United States would subtly intervene and back factions within these states that would police out . You know particularly Greece . You know the colonel's regime in Greece , a kind of coup that the United States okayed because of concern about resurgent Greek communists . This kind of thing is much more common .
Benjamin StudebakerThe Americans didn't go oh , we'll just wait for a socialist to win the elections in Greece and then cut them out of NATO and stop sending them weapons .
Benjamin StudebakerNo , they made subtle interventions in Greek politics to get a government that they wanted and it was concern about that that ultimately often limited socialists who did win office .
Benjamin StudebakerThey were concerned that they might get cooed out if they did something that provoked in some way the United States , that they had to maintain the alliance or the participation in NATO or what have you , lest something very terrible happened to them right , personally , you know that they might be in personal danger . So they had a certain scope for autonomy . But up against the possibility of a subtle US intervention and the fact that nobody really talks about that , that nobody really talks about , is the United States going to tolerate Netanyahu or is it going to do something to try to force him to go ? They immediately go to the United States . We'll cut off arms . That , to me , says that they're just not really serious about thinking about how international politics works , and if you really care about trying to end a war , you would get serious about that kind of thing , and I think for these people it's really a psychological exercise . They're not really focused on what would actually be required to end the conflict .
C. Derick VarnConversely , what do you think is going on in splitting the right over Israel ? I mean , there's obvious stuff like yes , there's some hard rightists who are basically anti-Semites who are abandoning Trump , but that's such a small . I mean like explicit anti-Semites are still a relatively small , uh uh , part of the population explicit , uh , implicit ones maybe , maybe not , but explicit ones are rare . Um , so you know , yeah , you can make a big deal out of , like candace owens and richard spencer , you know , I mean , but richard spencer has actually basically been a democrat , racist democrat , for like four years . People who missed out , he was a Biden supporter .
Benjamin StudebakerIt's not that hard to be a racist Democrat , because both parties are so thoroughgoingly racist at this stage .
C. Derick VarnYeah , I mean also it's kind of a kind of a return to historical norm , kind of a return to historical norm , um , so yeah , but yeah , I mean it is . It is true that both parties are pretty thorough going and have allowed for things that have some pretty big backlashes , like um , I think I don't think this was a big contributor
US Foreign Policy and Power Dynamics
C. Derick Varnto it . But the advent of BIPOC as a way to separate out Asian and Latin people from people of color as being more privileged whether it's true or not strategically is a strange move , because you know , united Colors of Benetton world is going to be the majority of the US population by like 2050 . However , that's only if you got everybody in that coalition . If you're just looking at indigenous and Black people as the vanguard of the most oppressed , you drop back down to like less than 20% of the population . And if we look at the polling opinions on black men , you don't actually even have most black families on board with that either . So it's a very strange move , but we saw that .
C. Derick VarnBut on the right there does seem to be like even some neocons have been like well , maybe this Netanyahu shit's gone too far . Even some neocons have been like well , maybe this netanyahu . Shit's gone too far , which leads me to believe that they're actually paying attention to what you're talking about , uh , and the traditional us way of intervening in politics , which is we're going to support your internal enemies to get rid of you . So someone , someone who's more reasonable , navigates this conflict . It's just hard to do during wartime . That's not an easy thing to pull off during wartime . Normally , if you want to do underhanded espionage shit , you do it before war . But so here we are . What do you think about that ?
Benjamin StudebakerIt wouldn't surprise me if it was subsequently revealed that the United States has for a long time been trying to organize opposition forces to Netanyahu . Every presidential administration that has interacted with Netanyahu has detested him , including Bill Clinton in the 90s . Every US administration that interacts with Netanyahu doesn't like him and would prefer that he go , so I don't think that that has at any point been a question . I think every administration has wanted to find a way to get rid of Netanyahu , but they'd like to do it democratically , in a way that doesn't make them appear to be involved . They'd like it to appear to happen through an election , but because of the way the Israeli parliamentary system works , it's quite difficult to push out Likud in any kind of long-term way . It's very challenging , but I do think that that is still a goal of the administration . No-transcript .
C. Derick VarnOh , that's a good question actually . Thank you so much . Oh , I was talking about , like the , the , a lot of the weirder tensions and , oh , the right , yes , the right .
Benjamin StudebakerYeah , so I think you're you're right to point out that you know there's been this upsurge of explicit antisemitism . There's also been an upsurge of explicit Islamophobia and there's been just more racism in general in both parties , both the old kind of racism with you know Vance talking about in his book . You know Vance tries to draw a distinction between the Scots Irish , you know , and migrants and German migrants . And people on the right are doing this kind of very old fashioned , internecine white ethnic group racism . Now that is very sad to see back in our politics on any level . At the same time , the left is through , you know , the woke identity politics , trying to split racial and ethnic groups against each other through language like BIPOC . So we're seeing at this point both old and new racism , you know , very , very explicit , very dominant in the politics . I do think that is a factor . But I think , more fundamentally , with regard to Israel-Palestine , what's going on in the right is that there's a friendliness to the Saudi regime .
Benjamin StudebakerThe Kushner-Ivanka faction within the Trump administration prided itself on constructing friendly relations between Gulf states and Israel .
Benjamin StudebakerThe goal of Kushner was , and it's very nearly been achieved , to normalize relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel .
Benjamin StudebakerSo a lot of the Republican foreign policy is driven by Saudi interests and Saudi thinking , and we see this with regard to the harsher attitude toward Iran , which comes from Saudi influence on the way they think about the region and also the way that Saudi Arabia thinks about Israel , which is that why shouldn't Israel just be treated as a normal state and become friendly to all of the states around it ?
Benjamin StudebakerBoth of those positions come from Saudi Arabia and from the Saudi elite , and the Saudi elite has an enormous amount of influence over foreign policy within the Republican Party at this stage . It's also that the one conflict that Trump really escalated while he was in office was the conflict in Yemen , because he gave the Saudis all the weapons that they wanted so that they could intervene in Yemen , because the Saudis were concerned about Iranian influence there . So I would say that you know that's a big part of what's going on . Yes , there's also some you know , residual Rand Paul , ron Paul isolationism going on in the Republican Party , but I'd say , with respect to the Middle East , it's the Saudis . A lot of these Republicans are very much persuaded by the perspective of the Saudi princes that they hang out with .
C. Derick VarnYeah , I think that needs to be . Well , this goes back to something that we both I think separately have acknowledged that a lot of the left assumes that US hegemony is way more competent and powerful and omnipresent than it actually is , that there aren't elite actors playing people off each other within small states , that even the large states have limits to their competition . Like when people tell me , though , oh , the us wants to go to war with china , and I'm like not directly , they don't . There might be one or two generals , I think we could , could stand a nuclear war with china , but almost nobody . You know , when you read , when you read policy pages , they like tension there , but they don't want it to actually bleed over the . The idea of a Cold War may be a minimal to a lot of people in the US policy establishment , because they also operate under the function that maybe if we had a Cold War back , we'd have US unity internally . That ship seems to have sailed , in my personal opinion . That ship seems to have sailed in my personal opinion , but it also seems like this is a fundamental misrecognition of US power from the same people who are always telling you that the US is declining which it is , but I don't know if people aren't looking around , but so is everywhere . People aren't looking around , but so is everywhere With the even .
C. Derick VarnEven China , relative to itself , has has experienced a significant decline in the past five years . Like , not relevant , not relative to any other similar , similar , you know , middle income , great power , not , not , not even similar to the United States . They probably still have more internal real commodity absorption power than we do . I can debate with other leftists who seriously follow economics about how much they have , because I don't see them ever getting above . I think they're mature economy and they have a business cycle now . I think they're a mature economy and they have a business cycle now and it's going to be hard to deal with , you know , getting beyond , say , 5% GDP growth , which for us would be amazing but for their historical norm would be quite low and they haven't been hitting that either in the past two years . Low and they haven't been hitting that either in the past two years .
C. Derick VarnSo , um , I bring that up because it seems like there's just fundamental like weirdly , even from people who view themselves as anti-imperialist and american skeptics , really provincial view of america , that kind of like thinks that we're both declining but somehow all-power powerful and maybe more all powerful than we were . We're at our high point in the in the 70s to the 90s . That's our geopolitical high point . I don't know that that's our , that's not our economic high point of the 50s , but like it still seems very strange A worldview I wanted to think , like what do you make of that ? Like it , no-transcript armed powers Just what do you make of that ? Why are people doing that ? Why are they unable to like ? I mean , it's a lot to ask of people I know to parse , you know politics in places they don't really understand . But it is sort of dangerous to like confidently assert that we know what's going on in some of these places because we don't .
Benjamin StudebakerYeah , especially people who don't speak or read the languages you know . For them to say that they know what's going on is kind of amazing .
US Foreign Policy and Global Capital
Benjamin StudebakerAll of these states at this point , with very few exceptions , are in the WTO . They are subject to the global system of capital flows . That incentive structure , the flows , the relationships among the states in the world system overdetermines to a large degree what many of these states can do . And then internally many of these states have all sorts of internal internecine problems that make it very hard for them to act in a cohesive way .
Benjamin StudebakerChina has all kinds of issues with its local governments and its property sector . There's all kinds of stuff that goes on in all these different states and it's very difficult even for someone who studies politics full time to grasp all the intricacies of all of it . So it's always stunning to me when people who don't study it full time act like they know everything about what's going on all over the place . But one thing I would remind people is that the standard of living in China for the ordinary , average Chinese person you would have to have a real argument here about whether that living standard is as high as the standard of living for the median Soviet citizen in the 80s , there would be a real question about that . So , while China has caught up enormously relative to the position that it was in 30 , 40 , 50 years ago , I think people should bear in mind you know , the most optimistic kind of description you could give for the median standard of living in China would be roughly equal to that late 80s Soviet standard of living .
C. Derick VarnAnd very uneven . I mean , people have talked about the rise of the Chinese middle class , which is real , which is why I do think there is some internal commodity consumption power available , yes , but it also tells you how ahistorically people are approaching US economics because it's like , well , but we were like that too in the 19th century , even with more highly unstable world system that was prone to not just recession but depression all the time . And I know it's a lot to ask people to have a droid understanding of the history of even their own country 100 years ago or 150 years ago , but it would really help in them making what are like basically facile claims . The other thing that I think is interesting I'm going to ask you a little bit about what you see about this is you know , when people throw bricks around , we see the kind of opposite tendency on the right , where people think , oh well , if we just I want to say people where there's a few pundits Tucker , carlson and co who think if we could , just , you know , normalize relations with Russia , the innate tensions between the Russian Eurasian project and the Chinese project will come out and that Russia would swing back into the US sphere of influence if we respected their sovereignty , and I hate to say like I don't agree with their norms for that , but I actually think that's true , like there is some truth to that even Putin's kind of directly singled it , and that both the state itself and certain elements on the left , for completely different reasons , want us to believe that Russia and Chinese interests are exactly the same and that geopolitically for Russia it's important that they maintain that as well .
C. Derick VarnInterestingly , but it seems obvious in the breach . If you look at stuff internal to China , if you've talked to anyone who like speaks and read Chinese , like censorship , for example , of pro-Ukrainian positions in China . While they're a minority they weren't censored the way , say , people might not know this , but like criticism of the Iraq war 20 years ago they were censored in China and solidarity stuff around anti-war was suppressed then . So that indicates to me that the Chinese . So that indicates to me that the .
C. Derick VarnChinese either . Think that this is too complicated for them to be . Think what this hits on is there's a bunch of different groups who have opposed politics both domestically and internationally , that have reasons to posit unity that is not actually there . What is causing that in your mind ?
Benjamin StudebakerYeah , yeah , I think , especially with respect to Eastern Europe , the ideal outcome for a state in Eastern Europe was to get into the EU and NATO . The states that succeeded in doing that after the collapse of the Soviet Union achieved a much higher standard of living than the states that were left in the Russian sphere of influence . The problem is that when Putin has said that he would like to be friendly with the West , this has always come alongside things like access to the European market , and the trouble with that is that Russia has a very large population . The usual strategy in terms of the EU expansion is to let a few small states in at once , take in a quick influx of workers from those Eastern European states into Western Europe and then to use those states as investment zones . Right , and if you do a few states at a time , it's very generative in terms of the European Union's growth to have these influxes of labor and then these influxes of places where you can successfully invest . And it's been done in Poland , it's been done in Hungary , it's been done in a number of these countries at this stage . But it can't be done all at once . It has to be done over time . A few states at once , and that's part of why there's this interest in the United States and the possibility of breaking Russia up into smaller states that could gradually be absorbed into the bloc Unfortunately for the people who entertain that kind of fantasy into the bloc . Unfortunately for the people who entertain that kind of fantasy , russia is not a state that is easy to balkanize in that kind of way , to anything like the degree that , say , the Soviet Union itself could be balkanized . But I think a lot of it is .
Benjamin StudebakerIn terms of why people are drawn to these narratives . It's in part because it's very difficult for people to stay with foreign policy and to grasp all of the intricacies and all of the differences . Many of the elites who disagree with each other have reasons to conceal to various degrees the degree to which they disagree . They make it hard to figure out what's going on the media , the journalists , are not very good at covering a lot of this stuff , so it's hard to stay abreast of it and hard to differentiate who really knows what they're talking about versus who doesn't .
Benjamin StudebakerAnd then also , you know what's really motivating people to want to believe this is that the situation in the United States and in the European Union appears so totally hopeless that they're looking for someone somewhere to have some kind of latent agency vis-a-vis global capital that could yet be tapped or could yet be actualized . The thing that people really don't want to wrestle with is this idea that at this point the system of capital mobility is extremely total and it's very , very difficult to meaningfully resist it from any position within the world system . But part of the reason they're drawn to it is because they don't know enough about these contexts , so they can imagine that maybe these states are more effective sites of resistance precisely because they don't know what their role is in the system . They don't understand the internal politics , and that leaves them free to make the kinds of assumptions that they would like to be true , whereas in our own case it's been rubbed in repeatedly in recent years that we are not in a state that is an easy state to operate within .
C. Derick VarnRight , I mean it also means that you see the goal of , for example , socialism . You'll see people talk about like , oh China executes its rogue millionaires and our billionaires , and I'm just like well , it has rogue billionaires and are billionaires , and I'm just like well , it has rogue billionaires which it shouldn't .
C. Derick VarnUm , but also like it's not like the west didn't used to do that like , and it's also an enormous amount of economic inequality oh yeah , until and I think it was until g's reforms in the countryside , uh , the you know the the red new deal , which I think people should read what it was , because it's like giving China almost a U ? S level slightly better than the U ? S but not as generous as , say , canada of a welfare system that they didn't have as a communist country , which in and of itself is a weird thing to talk about , cause the Soviet union sure as hell did . And so I think when people talk about that , I'm like , well , there's a reason Rajeev is popular , and one of the reasons Rajeev is popular is that he did absorb a lot of easy economic reforms Educating rural girls , which Dung quit doing are , putting in some kind of Medicare-like policy for rural hospital access , stuff like that . You know that's what Xi has done with a lot of his internal reforms in the past decade , decade . I would also say that the more you learn about Xi , you also see that he is really pushing back on the idea of generating internal stimulus by paying workers directly , because he thinks that'll make them lazy . So there's no like ubi style programs , um re , removing market elements from the medicare system outside of the not a medicare system , medical system , I'm sorry , uh , outside of , uh , you know , intervention and things like pandemics , which of course they will , because you know , even capital states do that , except for the united states wouldn't , but anyway , um , it seems to be that you just see people like , well , this is socialism now , but then you're like , well , but that's like , that's the socialism of like less than the bernie sanders program of 2018 , which is also not socialism historically . That's nordic , uh , nordic mixed economy that you're asking for kind of not even all of that , not like Bernie Sanders was asking . That like sectoral unions have a seat at the table in a formal governmental sense , or anything like that that you sometimes see in Nordic countries , and I find that fascinating . Or anything like that that you sometimes see in Nordic countries , and I find that fascinating in that it is exactly what you're talking about this projection on states .
C. Derick VarnJust , people don't understand and it's a lot to understand . I mean like , for example , I don't claim to be a Chinese . I've studied China for 20 years , but I'm not a Chinese expert because I don't read Mandarin . You can't be unless you read Mandarin . I know plenty of Russians . I ask them stuff all the time and I feel like I'm grasping an elephant blinded , you know , use that old Buddhist metaphor because I know that I don't understand all of Putin's support base and I also know that the reporting that I get on it here is bad .
C. Derick VarnBut then I've seen people construct very strange narratives in the lack of information , in the lack of information . So it seems to me one of the themes , that is one , capital mobility is a big problem . Two , we have an information glut , but the meaningfulness of that information is almost impossible for anyone to parse , so we can kind of use it however we want to . Three , a lot of the answers that say even like the realistic left , nationalist offer , uh , seem to be based off of this idea that production technology has not fundamentally changed in um since the 1950s . Because one of the things that I've learned from reading the works of Phil Nill you know the kind of ultra leftist but good guy , and his empirical work on this is quite good the capital concentration now and automation from capital concentration means that like we don't need several you know factory workhouses of the world and the world scale , and that even if you get them , they're so automated that they don't lead to the kind of mass employment or mass division of wealth of U ? S Fordism when developing countries try to implement it , because they're implementing modern , efficient technologies , which they should .
C. Derick VarnBut that means capital organic capital composition , to use very technical Marxist terms is higher and more concentrated and it's not going to bleed out to general society in the same way that it did in the early 20th century , because we've already , frankly , innovated away the need for that much direct labor , which is not , you know , me saying we don't still operate under labor theory of value or something like that . That's not my point . My point is you need less workers to do the same amount of work and and you can produce a ton on the world market , relatively small , and thus you have high concentrations of both capital in area but also capital and individuals . So you can , like these developing countries can , have mega rich , but it's not really expanding out to the general population the way it did in the early 20th century in Europe and the United States and Canada and Japan , and so those traditional methods don't work .
C. Derick VarnAnd at the same time , I think we're seeing a doubling down on that vision as the primary vision , both left and right really , it's not just the left who are offering this false vision To the majority of the world , as if we can go back to the 1950s , you know , in JD Vance Trump world . That's what they want to do . They just don't , you know , they don't , they want to . They want the bosses to have a lot more power , but they still basically want that post-war social collaboration as a vision . But so does most of the left . They just want it to be nicer to queer people and multicultural . So it's , and even some of the quote far left . When you scrap what they want , that's what they want , cause they're like well , that's the Chinese model or whatever , like um , how do we handle that ? Because to me that's just delusional .
Benjamin StudebakerLike yeah , one of the things we're caught between now is is this world where production was the thing that generated growth and if you were the industrial state then you would be rich , right ? That world is gone now .
Economic Realities and Left Politics
Benjamin StudebakerBecause of the degree to which factories have been automated , production has become very cheap too . It's also very easy to pick up and move factories . Now , relative to what it used to be , they're increasingly like Lego kits . They're designed by industrial engineers to be easy to throw up and then take back apart again , so you can , within a calendar year , pick up a factory that's in one place and build it somewhere else . It's incredible the efficiency of these Lego kit factories in terms of mobility . They've worked very hard to make them more mobile so that they're less beholden to domestic workers . But yes , I think that one of the things that has happened is that there's a chunk of people who have a kind of I call it a physiocratic mindset , but with respect to production . So , you know , the physiocrats thought that real wealth came from agriculture , and anyone who is making tools you know who is making physical objects that you couldn't eat was engaged in a kind of flimsy activity that wasn't real economic activity . That real economic activity had to be directly related to producing food , because food is what keeps us alive . And a lot of these guys you know made arguments in France that France shouldn't industrialize , because as long as France controls the food supply , states like Britain will be dependent upon France . Right , and I see many of the same kinds of arguments now , but with respect to industry or manufacturing or production people imagining that being a producer state gives you all this power and leverage . Actually , what it does is it means that you have to continuously export a lot of stuff , and if you're dependent on the export market , it means that your wage growth tends to be limited . Your purchasing power growth tends to be limited . The most successful instance of states that grew on this model , germany and Japan , have this problem of limited purchasing power , difficulty pushing that purchasing power up manufacturing industries that are structurally embedded and entrenched and extremely difficult to dislodge , that have enormous political influence . You see this especially in Japan , with the electronics and the car industries blocking any attempt to raise the wages or living standards of Japanese workers . So some people imagine oh , you can have every state produce . It's like saying every state should go back to farming or something it's very much out of touch with where we are . At the same time , we also have not reached a point where we don't need labor . We haven't reached a point where we have a fully automated economy , where people don't need to work at all .
Benjamin StudebakerAnd one of the things the new left did in the 50s and 60s was to anticipate the arrival of that world , but many , many , many , many , many years before it actually arrived . So they adopted a kind of a post-scarcity politics at a time where the material conditions were not yet ready for that . They did it on the basis of their own life experience , which was that between the 20s and the 60s there had been this enormous growth and they thought there would be at least that much growth again , maybe even more , maybe it would be exponential , right , and then between the 60s and the 2000s , growth was not nearly anything like that fast . The 70s were this horrible decade that destroyed all of these images of the future that the post-war generation had , and so , relative to what people believed would be the case in the 50s and 60s , we're living in a dystopia where we have had a lack of growth and our society and our institutions and structures have changed much less than they anticipated Stuff that they thought of as transitory has become permanent and people have even essentialized and naturalized it as if it won't go anywhere ever Right .
Benjamin StudebakerAnd one of the features of this is an obsession with production . It's one of the features of their not having been the growth that was anticipated during that period . It's one of the features of there not having been the growth that was anticipated during that period . But at the same time we also have not had the kind of growth still even now that people in the 50s and 60s anticipated .
Benjamin StudebakerSo we're not ready to do a straightforwardly new left project . It is not yet the case , and it may never be the case , that the kind of new class of professionals , of college educated people , will completely put the old working class out to pasture and make it a non-factor in the way that the new left imagined that it would Right . And yet at the same time , if you try to retreat back into a post-war productivism , you're going to be way out of step with where things are . We're in this frustrating interregnum between two kinds of left politics . That would make a certain amount of sense , and I think we've been in this interregnum probably for 50 or 60 years , but it's something that we don't talk about very much .
C. Derick VarnWell , as a person who is writing a book of essays , one of which is on this exact problem . Why does the millennial left look like a weird , bizarro , less ambitious form of the already not particularly ambitious new left , and I have come to the conclusion that there are both social cycles involved in that . Like Marxism overstatingating its hand , non-marxist uh activists leading a movement , marxist re-entering , seeming to be the more militant end of the movement , uh , but being also dependent on the dominant political parties at hand , and thus , really , uh , while they say they're responding to material conditions of production , they actually follow , pretty clearly , election psychologics . Um , and you see this now too . I mean , I was thinking about how , um , the period of like 61 to 1975 , we basically condensed , uh , as a speed run from 2012 to 2018 , like , and um , I think it has a lot to do with what you're talking about , a misunderstanding about the changing nature of the economy . So the longer this goes on , the more you have .
C. Derick VarnWell , let's just get our smokestack socialism back , or you have , and we haven't talked about this but like , basically degrowth delusions that are just two steps up from primitivism , which is like we can all go back to 80 , being an agricultural economy without somehow having mass human die-off , which , uh sorry peeps , uh , if you were to do that , it would be be Massie Madoff and most of the people dying would be in the developing world . So it doesn't even help you and your whole bizarro justice view of the universe and I know that sounds particularly bleak , but it is a misrealization , like I feel . This way , the whole growth degrowth socialism debate seems to be based off of a fundamental misrecognition of the situation at hand from both parties .
Benjamin StudebakerNobody wants to acknowledge the possibility of middle capitalism . Middle capitalism is really unpleasant because if you're in middle capitalism you don't get to see the end .
C. Derick VarnBecause if you're in middle capitalism , you don't get to see the end . Well , yeah , the whole idea that we've been talking about late capitalism because a crisis was going to solve it for us or force the solution one way or the other . If that was true , maintaining that after 1980 is a hard position to do , and so what you've seen on the left , you were talking about two different left policies , one which is this kind of 70s middle elite . People forget when the term PMC was coined by Aaron Reich and her husband and initially used you see this in the work of alvin guldner uh , um , they thought that the divisions in that group of people were going to lead to a revolutionary class coming out of that group , that basically , the tensions between uh , what we would now say , using like peter tershen language elite , overproduction and the decline of the working class would lead to the quote PMC being able to hook up with the parts of the remaining working class and basically run a political program that being revived in the last 10 years I mean , you know , for decades the only person I heard using that kind of language was Adolph Reed , and he has a different definition than the Ehrenreich one too , which is confusing . None of the people have the same definition for what PMC is .
C. Derick VarnSo there's a response to that which is basically let's have our 50s back , and which is basically let's have our 50s back . And not only do I think this is a fundamentally conservative almost I'm not going to say reaction , it's small c conservative , but it's still conservative and reactive , if not reactionary , response , and I think we see it go . I think we see certain Twitter movements . Where it does go outright reactionary is because it is kind of completely based off returning to an economic model that no one knows how to return to and people are pretending like we can go back to the 50 version of it , as if the technology itself has . That is , to me , a volunteerism that is just foolish , for lack of a better term .
Benjamin StudebakerPeople aren't able to tarry with it . The technology has changed enough that you can't do the 50s shit right enough to move you into a late capitalist , post-growth kind of world where people can all be immediately emancipated from labor totally and without any kind of serious negative consequences . And the trouble is that it requires a certain dialectical playfulness to grasp that technology is still a thing . There's still growth , but not enough growth to do the things that we'd like to do . Too much growth to make the stuff we used to do viable , not enough growth to make the new stuff viable . Yet Stuck in this middle period . It's very frustrating . So people start engaging in all kinds of cope because they don't want to actually spend their whole life in that kind of space . To actually spend their whole life in that kind of space . It's very depressing this idea that you'd just be in capitalism and that there'd be very little you could do to actually bring it to an end while you're on Earth .
C. Derick VarnBut it's funny because almost every smart leftist I know would say even if we won , it was going to take us two or three generations to begin to move away from this Right .
Benjamin StudebakerWhat you could do is you could organize to have a power base so that , as the technology develops , you're in a position to try to direct that and to create a situation where you will be able ultimately to prevail . But this kind of patience is not something that people on the left are known for .
C. Derick VarnNo . Well , this leads to another interesting question that I want to pick your brain about a little bit , because I don't think I've heard you talk about it on your business distillation on a podcast . But it does seem like part of your project and my project is somewhat similar in that it runs up to this is to break people of the illusions of press projects . But it also seems like , frankly , as things continue to develop , that's a harder and harder preposition to do , because the incentives the psychological incentives alone , not not just the material ones make that harder to do . The material ones are from people who think everything's about vulgar commodity production isn't obvious to people . But , for example , if you are a left media figure , there is a real lack of incentive actually for you to be particularly honest about all this stuff .
Challenges of Leftist Political Strategy
C. Derick VarnAnd and the reason why is it would be demoralizing to your audience , right like , um , people really do not like a politics . It's like , well , you can do something , but it's going to be slow and there's no quick electoral stuff . In fact , uh , you're going to have to forego to even be an electoral political actor , believe it or not . You're going to have to forego participating in national elections in anything other than a defensive manner for maybe a generation or two . That is not a sexy sell to be like . You don't have any way to .
C. Derick VarnYou know , I hear this on the DSA that in this sounds smart and in some ways it is , but they won't look at why they lack the conditions to do it . So we like we need to hold electives accountable and I'm like , but you're not a big enough social force to do that without money . And my , my , my , my brothers in labor , you don't have money Like , yes , you have money relative to maybe other people . A lot of you guys are middle class or upper middle class . Some of these weird sectarian leftist things actually have a bunch of millionaires in them . But on the scale of what you need to hold multiple electoral officials accountable , you need Berkshire Hathaway money . You don't need , you need Mercer family money and you need multiples of that . The DSA is broke because one of the first things the DSA tried to do was was engage in electoral campaigning and all they could give their candidates was like $7,000 , which if you think that's going to breed loyalty in a political candidate , you don't know the cost of running for I don't know city council of fucking Salt Lake City , not even a major metropole . I can tell you there were millions of dollars spent just for our city council election here two years ago . I don't know why you would think that you could do that .
C. Derick VarnI'll give you another example . Krasama Salant basically used the resources of one Trotskyist sect to stay as a city councilperson for years . It was 5,000 people basically , where the entire sectarian activity was more or less just to keep her in office , where she hadn't achieved anything after her first two years , because she was adjusted for and was able to be bracketed out strategically after her initial reforms . And I don't know why people just don't look at that . So if that , if , if an entire sectarian , national sectarian organization has to do that for one city council seat , even the dsa with its paper members of a hundred thousand but currently I think it's real members or something like from the internal report , something like they've lost basically 40,000 members in the past three years . So we are now at the point where there's more people who've been in the DSA that had left than people who are in the DSA , which is not a great thing , because when we're also talking about them , oh , they're like at 50 000 less 40 000 people . Well , they've lost more than that because they're constantly recruiting from college students , so like it's just that that's where they can stop , but nonetheless , um , I think we've seen them get particularly incoherent between the two tensions that you see . There's the dsa right I'm gonna put that in quotation marks for people who know that I don't think they're right-wingers in the proper sense , but who think that we need to operate within labor bureaucracy as basically a labor bureaucracy advocacy group within the Democratic Party . And then there's the DSA left , which thinks that we should operate basically as an international advocacy group , slightly outside of the Democratic Party and eventually one day build a party out of that , but mostly on questions of international geopolitics , reframed as something , something , something Lenin or Stalin , depending on your particular flavor of candy , that me , that you like .
C. Derick VarnIt's a very hard position to be in To go into a little bit more of people not realizing things . You and I have both lived through this weird gaslighting period where even Democrats were telling us labor was ascendant and while I do think in abstract , outside of former institutions , labor militancy has been increasing , as has the um popularity of labor unions , but ironically , as I've said , that's because no one's in them and they're not growing , um , and they don't even have like the larger ones , don't have particular incentives to grow , because they hold enough building property that they don't need the money . Um , what do you ? How do you deal with that and why do you think it happened ? Why were people gaslighting themselves about labor , um , for the past six years ? Was it ? Is it ? Is it a response to bernie ? Is it ? Is there something else going on ? Is this hopelessness ? What do you think's going on there ?
Benjamin StudebakerYeah , statistically there hasn't been a growth , especially if you're looking in terms of percentage of the workforce .
Labor Unions and Leftist Strategies
Benjamin StudebakerAnd with regard to labor unions , the good fight was fought in the 70s , where the labor unions tried to fight to control the Democratic Party . They tried to do this at a time when there were a bunch of factories that employed large numbers of people that were hard to pick up and move . They tried to do this at a time before the WTO and there was just GATT , and when many , many states were still excluded from the system of global trade and , despite all of those structural advantages , they still got their butts kicked . So we're dealing with a rump labor movement that is never going to be as strong as that labor movement from the 70s was , you know , let alone strong enough to actually prevail against the capitalist state . So , yeah , I agree with you that I think that people who are thinking in terms of the unions are very pie in the sky . Part of the reason this is occurring is that for people who see that the Democratic Party is not immediately responsive to them , they go okay , we need to build up some kind of power , dual power , or power in society , or something with which to hold the Democratic Party accountable , and so they start looking for existing institutions and structures because they want something that could happen quickly . So they're not willing to build new structures out of nothing . They want something that's already there , and the thing that's most obviously still in existence is the labor unions . Right , there are the labor unions and there are the universities and what else the churches . They're not interested in those . Right , there are very few other kinds of social structures at this point that are non-state structures , that are not straightforwardly appendage to one of the parties , that are not NGO in that kind of NGO universe . Very few civil society structures . So people who are really , really desperate for something that could be immediate , that could pay off within the next decade , will go to the unions because they're there and they won't think very much about the actual history of the labor movement and why it is that the unions became what they are . Or they'll dress it up and say , well , they could have won in the 70s if they'd just been more militant , that they defeated themselves in the 70s by not being militant enough , and this becomes a way of papering over , in much the same way that , you know , bolsheviks will paper over the 20s in the Soviet Union and they'll say , oh you know , if they just had listened to Lenin , or if they just had resisted Stalinization , if they just listened to Trotsky , right , these kinds of well . If only this one idea that failed , if it had prevailed , then this institution or structure would have been much more dynamic or powerful or capable .
Benjamin StudebakerBut I think it again ignores the structural situation that was faced by people in these contexts In the 70s . There were these enormous inducements for these labor unions to , a , become tied to the state and then B , over the course of the 50s and 60s there had been many , many rounds of gap and opening up of trade with Germany , with Japan , moving of factories to Germany and Japan , such that even by the 70s the old labor movement was not capable of exerting the same force that it had exerted 30 years ago , even though it had grown , even though as a percentage of the workforce it was bigger in the 70s than it had been in the 40s . We haven't even achieved that in terms of growth as a percentage of the workforce . But even if we were to get the labor unions , if I could snap my fingers and make them the size of the workforce that they were in the 70s . That would not in and of itself give us any real significant ability to change anything , which would shock and horrify people who imagine that a few percentage points difference would be the start of something . But I don't even think that doubling the share of workers in labor unions would be meaningfully effective in the States . I mean it would improve marginally the conditions for people in certain places . I certainly encourage people if you're working at Starbucks , form a union if you can and improve the situation if you can . Right .
Benjamin StudebakerBut to think of this as a vehicle for socialism is a different question from whether it can improve conditions immediately for the workers right Now .
Benjamin StudebakerI do think that improving conditions for the workers can have downstream benefits for the socialist project insofar as they protect people's time , protect people's energy , free them up to do other things , to have higher aspirations , to think about other things .
Benjamin StudebakerAll of that is good and that's why I supported a lot of the Bernie policies that people on parts of the hard left said oh , this is just placating the workers .
Benjamin StudebakerNo , if you take away people's concern about not being able to pay for health care , you are freeing up their time and energy in a way that is generative and does allow them to do other things and to aspire to more . I do think it matters . Things like housing , health care , access to education , access to energy these things do help people , I think , and I do think that they're meaningful . Insofar as we can get the state or get social organizations to provide this stuff , I do think it matters . But that's not to say that this is going to allow you to straightforwardly take power within the American state within , say , the next 10 years or within the timescale that many of these people think is necessary to say , prevent the worst effects of climate change . If you're operating on that kind of timescale , which many people in this , in this camp , are operating on , you're not going to get there by organizing with labor unions .
C. Derick VarnYeah , sorry , matt Huber , I love Matt .
Benjamin StudebakerI love Matt results in an identification on the part of college educated people with bureaucratic elites , which I think is entirely destructive to what we're doing . And at least Matt is trying to leverage what's left of the workers and treating them as real participants in politics . I think that's really valuable , but I don't think it can have the kind of effects that I'm sure he would like it to have .
C. Derick VarnWell , that's my point is like that's my . My point is like I agree with him . But I remember him and Lee coming on my show talking about a kind of muscular from their perspective I would actually say from my perspective kind of anemic social democracy as a means to socialism . And I was just , I was like I wish that was true . I mean , I really do . I wish it was true .
Leftist Politics and State Dynamics
C. Derick VarnI agree with what you're critiquing , like this idea that a bunch of college educated people on on on the fact of an ecological crisis are going to like somehow do both third world development and return half the planet to agriculture . And then also what Kohei Sato's actual politics is and they came out of their book is way more milquetoast than I thought it was going to be I was like , oh , that's it . You like what green co-ops and stuff ? Ok , I guess .
Benjamin StudebakerYeah , their critique of that stuff is really insightful and , I think , powerful and helpful , but I don't think they have an alternative worked out that will fly .
C. Derick VarnYeah , I mean to be fair to them . I don't either .
Benjamin StudebakerYeah , it's really difficult . It's a huge challenge .
C. Derick VarnI'm big on workers autonomy , but I'm also I also realize that , like , if you think you can go back to the industrial worker as the primary locus and subject of history , it's 15 percent of the population and largely ununionized and easily , as your book illustrates , capital flight is huge . Organic composition of capital is huge . Illustrates capital flight is huge . Organic composition of capital is huge . And for those of you who don't know what I mean , like there is a tendency for for like factories to go to what we might call the internal periphery , like Alabama , as opposed to New York , because labor costs are lower . But there's a limit to that too , because if they need , like organic capital composition , you really can't get that in Alabama . You're going to need to be either in New York or in a developing world metropole like I don't know , guatemala city or something , where there's just tons of people and lots of resources , even though there's also massive abject poverty . And that is need is just not dealt with . Some of that need has been mediated in white collar positions because now , like we have the technology , we don't really need offices and the only reason we're trying to maintain them as basically a dying , uh , commercial real estate sector that's probably going to blow up in the next two years ? Um , but it is . It is a real problem .
C. Derick VarnI think the other thing that we see is like the other tendency and you and I haven't talked about it , but maybe we should is what we might call the apocalyptic crisis tendency , and this is actually more of an ultra left thing , but where conditions are just going to get bad enough that people have to have revolution and that that will be the basis of , you know , proletarian power . Get that . We must accelerate the contradictions , and by that we mean actually not get reforms at all from the state in rebounds to labor , basically actually encouraging a miseration , and I think that's a disaster . But it's been a common , if minority , politics in the left since the late 1960s . Like it's one of these ideas that emerges from the stalling that that happened , that you and I've been talking about . That undergird all this . Because I think one of the things you and I agree on , I guess , like most of the rest of the left , is like this current crisis is just a manifestation of a long stalling crisis that started probably in the mid sixties , and that it doesn't seem like that to us because that's beyond the scope of almost everyone who's alive lifetime , unless you're a very old baby boomer at this point . But if you look at why even cultural production I was talking to someone about , like everyone always says idiocracy is is I did all the specialness .
C. Derick VarnSo this is something on my mind right now is predictive of the future and I'm like no , it's actually commenting on like reagan's america and like the end of the 90s and the early and the and the very early , even maybe before the war on terror bush administration . And it seems prescient to us because we have forgotten that basically all the context , even in our own lifetimes , has been very stagnant . There's been very little actual significant change in the way politics runs , even though there has been a ton of very quick change in the way economics has run , change in the way economics is run and um . So when something is commenting about something from the 1990s and we don't recognize that , we assume that it's pressing in about the future and not that like no , the future's fucking stalled , like it's just like nothing has happened significantly in terms of policy or our political ideology probably since the 1980s and even when you see new ideologies come up and there's tons right now I mean you and I are both on X , which is like a breeding ground for delusional ideologies .
C. Derick VarnI think it's primary function at this point , and both left and right . Basically , it's no longer just annoying liberals anymore . It seems to me that the fundamental question of that being stuck in the interregnum period bothers people . It also seems to me that this idea that climate crisis and economic crisis can be both fast and slow simultaneously , like because when everyone's like , oh , the American empire is falling , I'm like dude , yeah , but empires fall , like historically speaking , like I don't know , the British empire started falling in 1850 . Like it didn't fully fall for another hundred years and even then I mean like arguably it didn't fully fall until fucking Brexit .
Benjamin StudebakerThey should never have agreed to pay down that Napoleonic War debt . The poison pill was there after they decided they would pay down the debt from the Napoleonic Wars . That was the beginning of the end . Even before they peaked , they were already beginning to decline because they agreed to pay down that Napoleonic War debt .
C. Derick VarnYeah , it's funny because I actually I mean , we're joking , but I actually kind of think that's true .
Benjamin StudebakerIt is . They were already screwed by 1850 because they'd wasted the last 30 years paying down Napoleonic war debt . We're already screwed .
C. Derick VarnRight , and so when you tell people and that , balance .
Benjamin StudebakerThe books mentality is still ruining them now . It's been ruining them for 200 years .
C. Derick VarnWell , yeah , britain's personal friend but ideological frenemy , colin Drum Drum , has actually pointed out , the British have had a particularly obsession with balancing the books , like actually going back probably a thousand years . That has , by and large , not worked out for them . So it's , it's , uh , you know , with the , although it may have prompted a grand imperial scheme , you , you know , to try to balance the books and all of their weird internal scheming . But for the people who effectively made , like fiat currency , the basis of the modern world through their empire , they've never actually particularly done it .
Benjamin StudebakerYeah , they've never understood their own currency . It's incredible . It's one of the huge holes this nation of shopkeepers that has never understood money .
C. Derick VarnYeah , it's kind of like the nation of artists that is Germany that has never understood the limits to production , but nonetheless , now that we're slagging our European friends , it is interesting , though . One thing I wanted to talk to you about that is related to this is you and I are also of the school of most anti-elite politics ends up being a counter-elite politics . Because up being a counter elite politics because people do not understand the nature of the state , and by that I mean they think the state is unitary Like and part of me blames French theory for this as a side note because , yeah , all to say , um , honestly , going all the way back to fucking the cart , there's this in Descartes , there's this in the Philosophes , there's this like assumption of unitary sovereignty in French , thinking that you know , going back to the attempt at absolutism in the early modern period that I think like it's all over French thought even today , and so it and Americans seem to like their French thought . For reasons that I never completely understood , team France replaced team Germany in America after world war one , and that never really changed , although it is interesting going back and reading 19th century stuff where we were like the Germans , the Germans are going to get us out of all of our problems , but anyway , that stopped in World War I .
C. Derick VarnBut there is this view of the state as unitary and of a unitary class interest and while I do believe the state ultimately does serve capitalism as a product of the bourgeoisie , that it's actually very much not unified because neither is the bourgeoisie , that sectors of capital are at odds with each other constantly and Marxists do kind of talk about that but also administrative bureaucracies are at odds with each other constantly , and I've actually said like I don't I can't always predict which administrative bureaucracies are going to side with which party . They actually move around quite a bit , but that right now it does seem like Most of the administrative bureaucracies are afraid of the GOP , even though I think the Biden administration has shown they weren't afraid of GOP policies . That wasn't the problem , because the Biden administration maintained , I don't know , probably 80% of the Trump regime's innovations Just like the Trump regime wasn't as disruptive as people like to pretend it was .
Complexities of State Structures and Dynamics
C. Derick VarnSo why are people misrecognizing this about the state and what are the implications there ?
Benjamin StudebakerYeah , I think that one of the things that's going on right is that socialism was really a way of thinking that developed in response to rapid growth and rapid change in class composition response to rapid growth and rapid change in class composition and so it happened during a time where there really was a sense in which there was a kind of bourgeoisie that was united against a proletariat . You know , material conditions looked kind of that way , right To the point where you could have in , say , the second empire in France . You know this Bonapartist regime where you have Napoleon III balancing between the bourgeoisie on the one hand and the proletariat on the other hand . One of the things that happens if you weaken the proletariat which is what has occurred and you disable it as a political force , is that there's no longer a need for these elites to stay united against the proletariat . Right , and when the right talks about anti-communism as an ideology , right , they're talking about this disciplining effect that worrying about the communists or worrying about the proletariat had on elites . Right , and they're complaining about the fact that , since we're no longer disciplined by the communists or by the workers , right now we're infighting with each other in ways that are increasingly dysfunctional and making it hard for us to run the state and run society in a way that is competitive and effective and reasonable , and we're getting ever further into these rabbit holes of internecine disputes that are confusing , that make it difficult for us to see what's going on or to take a point of view which examines something like the common good . You see this a lot in the right , this idea that the notion of the common good has fallen away , and this in part comes out of this increasing tendency toward internecine conflict . It also comes out of the way in which the proletariat was ultimately disciplined . Was through all of these mediating structures . Right , we got all of these different parts of the state going .
Benjamin StudebakerAnd in the case of the United States , as de Tocqueville talks about at great length , the thing that distinguishes the United States from France is the degree to which it has all these different mediating structures . So when a problem kicks off , it's very unclear who or what or which part of the state is ultimately responsible for the problem , whereas in France it's the king , it's the absolutist monarch . That's the one who's obviously responsible . So when there's a problem , you rebel against the center because there's one center . It's very obvious where it is this in the United States has always been more difficult , and one of the functions of representative democracy is to break the sovereignty apart into little parts , pit the different parts against each other .
Benjamin StudebakerRight , and at the international level , the fact that we don't have a world state , it pits all of the different national bourgeoisies , all the different state elites against each other in various ways . So they're pitted against each other both externally right , there's competition among states and among the elites that rule the different states right and then internally , within the different states , there are different sectors , different factions within the elite that often have conflicting economic interests . A really obvious example of this would be the conflict that led to the American Civil War right , which is a conflict between planters who need the British to import the cotton , and a conflict between Northern industrialists who need tariffs on British goods so that their industries can get off the ground . And if you tariff British goods so that your industries can get off the ground , the British retaliate with tariffs on agricultural exports . And they do this deliberately to pit those two sectors within the United States against each other very effectively , to the point where a civil war begins . And then the British debate whether they should militarily intervene to make the civil war go the way that they want it to go and ultimately they don't , because they become concerned that their own political elites would not tolerate their state intervening on behalf of slave owners Right . But in terms of geostrategy , what was in the British state's raw geostrategic interest ? Of course , break up the United States . By leveraging the sectoral tension between the industrialists and the planters , they very nearly pulled it off . The only reason that they didn't ? They couldn't persuade their own internal elites to send troops to help the Confederates and they couldn't do that because of internal debates within Britain about the status of slavery within the British Empire , right , and in terms of their dealings with the Ottomans .
Benjamin StudebakerSo all of this stuff , you know it's very complicated and it's not so simple , but people have a very difficult time staying on top of it because it requires , you know , really following not just you know , the stuff that the elites say to the public , but the stuff that they say to each other , and often this happens in meetings you don't easily have access to . Sometimes it's classified documents that you can't read . Sometimes it has to be sussed out and you have to have a little bit of a mind for how these people think you have to have rubbed shoulders with them a little bit . It's very difficult for the ordinary person . The media , most of the stuff that people read that they have easy access to , is not meant to help elites figure out what to do . It's stuff that is meant to propagandize in various ways ordinary citizens into going along with this or that .
Benjamin StudebakerThe real conversations about what to do happen in other kinds of spaces . And if you're not a party to those spaces , if you're not able to get into them , you know , because you maybe don't have a PhD or you don't go to the kinds of events where these people talk , or you don't time or you don't live near where these meetings take place . If you don't have access to all of that stuff , then you have to have very good theory to be able to read in these intentions , into the behavior and activity that you see . It's a very challenging thing to do and I don't blame people for having a hard time . It's objectively very confusing the way the state is run .
C. Derick VarnI think that's a very key import , and this is a human tendency to want non-overdetermined . I don't mean that in the Alta-Sarian sense , I mean it literally , in the logical sense . There's too many determining factors as causes for you to point to any one of them as the primary cause , right , and so you will come up with abstractions like class conflict . Like that's an abstraction , actually , we know that . Like , yes , class conflict is the primary driver of history , blah , blah , blah . I more or less believe that that in and of itself actually doesn't tell you that much , though right , because which classes are conflicting at any given time is not necessarily obvious . The composition of classes isn't actually as obvious as people think it is , and a lot of people will exist in multiple class functions , particularly in the West , during the course of a year , like , for example , myself , because I have a 401k , even though I don't think about it .
C. Derick VarnI'm not actively investing , but I have one . I am an owner of capital , that's a fact . I'm not a property owner , I rent , so that's different . But when you think about this , I'm , but I'm also . I'm not a worker in the productivist sense , but I'm a wage earner . I'm dependent on the wage fund directly , even if I get from that rate front , uh , unproductively , meaning that I'm paid out of taxes , um . But if the wage fund drops , it's not like if you were . And , by the way , workers are different here , depending . No-transcript . If you work at a state level , you're dependent on the wage fund . If you were at the federal level , you actually aren't . There is a time yeah , I'm not one of these people that's like oh , the feds can just keep money forever . They can't . There are limits , but those limits are not them running out of a base currency because they fucking decided what it is , so it . So there's different levels of dependency . Even talking about it , not even terms of historical terms , is hard .
C. Derick VarnBut I think about the civil war a lot . I'm a Southerner . I grew up in the fairly deep South , um , I went to a fairly progressive school for the deep South as well , which is interesting in and of itself , but wouldn't be progressive by other standards , um . But I will say that , like I've always said , I mean , when people were talking about the civil war , I'm like , for the south , it was about slavery . You're absolutely correct , it was an economic proposition about about slavery . It absolutely was . Therefore , the war for the South is about slavery .
C. Derick VarnBut if you for a moment believe that the North was primarily concerned about liberating the slaves , you do not understand 19th century economic infrastructure . Because they were perfectly willing to let slavery stay by and large until the middle of the war , and one of the reasons for that is they thought that they could basically let it die , naturally by limiting it . But they realized that that was just not going to happen . It was going to you're going to have external that as the , as the US empire grew , that you were going to have debates over who got to benefit from that . And international trade was very much tied into it . Like you said , Like the British were very much in the interest of agrarian capital in the Southeast . It was good for them . And people also don't realize . But , historically speaking , until until after the civil war , uh , the Southeast was the biggest place outside of Canada that had a bunch of Royalists in it , like , and they were still kind of hiding semi-Royalist sympathy for economic reasons until the middle of the 19th century .
C. Derick VarnSo it's , you know , but that's not a fun and easy narrative , it's not a moral narrative to be like . Oh yeah , you're right , the confederacy was an utterly regenerate slave state and , like you know , marx and engels talked about it needed to be opposed or there'd be a new hybrid form of of world economy that takes the worst of the old world with the worst of the new . Um , and they , you know , marx was really afraid of that . Uh , hence all this advocacy of the new . And they , you know , marx was really afraid of that . Hence all this advocacy in the U ? S in civil war . And for people who don't know , marx published a ton in the U ? S , in German and in English during that time period , also wrote a letter to Lincoln that we don't know that Lincoln read , but we do know that it was sent and that Lincoln received it , et cetera , et cetera , et cetera . But you know there is a heroic narrative there , but it's not a heroic narrative about , say , the union's interest , because that's that's basically bullshit .
C. Derick VarnAnd similarly , when we talk about like World War II everyone likes World War II we always like to talk about World War II because it's a . It's a war that accidentally we're on the good side of history , but our being there is more or less a function of Japan . It's not a function of our own politics or moral worth . And weirdly , I do want to ask you about this . It's neo-reactionaries . The one form of the alt-right that managed , survived the great alt-right liquidation of the last decade is neo-reactionaries because they have money , just to be frank . The others , like random white nationalists , don't tend to have money and everyone kind of realizes they're a threat to their economic viability . But neo-reactionaryism if you're a certain kind of silicon valley tech head , it's somewhat appealing and you can throw money at it .
C. Derick VarnBut weirdly , like I think I've read a lot I've read way too much Kervis Yarvin in my life . Actually I don't know why I've subjected myself to this , but having read a lot of Kervis Yarvin , the only thing I actually found appealing about his Minch's Moldbug stuff that he was honest about that shit about like the raw real politics of a lot of seeming progressive stuff that even far leftists were like we don't want to really go there because it kind of makes history a lot less of a heroic narrative than we would like . So I find that interesting , but I also think
Populism, Labor Unions, and State Dynamics
C. Derick Varnit's . I also think when it comes to populist politics , we always talk about populism .
C. Derick VarnA lot of the enemies of populism who are claiming to defend democracy are , of course , full of shit . I want to state that outright first . But one thing they are kind of right about because of the nature of the state that we're talking about . They are kind of right about because of the nature of the state that we're talking about populist often end up not promoting a worker's agenda because the workers aren't powerful enough to do that . They end up basically as pawns and counter elite game between weaker forms of elites in the current system . Um , and whether that be elites abroad or like you know , my favorite is like we're going to save the American industrial sector , but pick which one you want to save . And there is an incentive even on the left to ignore this .
C. Derick VarnI'll give you an example of that and I want your take on it the Battle of the Two Shons in the labor union world Sean O'Brien and Sean Fain . Sean O'Brien , for reasons that are complicated and involve some of the internal fucked up politics of being in the Teamsters Union , seems to have thought that maybe being more independent of the Democratic Party would be useful for them . But also , when you look at the sector that they work in , the Republican Party's policies are a little bit more forgiving towards I don't know mass truck transit , whereas the UAW is in the US Auto Union and is really dependent on the Democrats basically to maintain the protection law against Chinese EVs . And so you have Sean Fain , despite taking progressive stances on even stuff that normally unions don't take particular progressive stance on , like Palestine . They usually can't stay out of that , but it is within their purview to do not , because it's about maintaining trade and international law , so they can actually do something about it . There's a bunch of ways in which what Sean Finn wants to do there is totally legal , although it's going to get backlash .
C. Derick VarnBut it leads to , like Sean embarrassingly kissing the ring of Biden way prematurely and in a way , people are very confused by this . They'll call the Teamsters red-brown , which is ridiculous , because almost all unions , including UAW , will work with Republicans at a local level . They have to . Or if you're like a MAGA communist or something like that , something particularly silly .
C. Derick VarnOr if you're like a MAGA communist or something like that , something particularly silly you'll pretend that like this means the GOP is pro worker , which are you looking at what's happening with labor laws in the southern states right now ? Like even the few protections that , because it's not like the South ever had strong labor laws or any integrated unions , but the little bit of protections that they have have been changed legally at , like the Alabama and Mississippi state level in the last year . So you have to keep up with that , but then you have to go . Is it actually in the interest of the broad working class for us to hold off any engagement with Chinese EVs for a small , very small actually , sector of the US economy ? Because I don't know if anyone's noticed , but the car industry has been dying for 30 years here .
Benjamin StudebakerYeah Well , and this is the thing about the UAW there is no obvious economic reason why cars should be made in the United States at this point . This was the debate after 2008 , when Obama was deciding whether to save the automobile industry . He very easily could have decided not to . Many people within the elite in the United States said we don't need them , it's time for them to go . They've had their run Bye , bye . The Democratic Party need them . It's time for them to go . They've had their run Bye , bye .
Benjamin StudebakerThe Democratic Party saved them and in saving them it has made them totally sycophantic to it . They're completely dependent on it . It was made clear to them that the Republicans were ready to let those factories go post 2008 . So they're in a very weak position . They exist precisely as long as the Democrats keep them around .
Benjamin StudebakerAnd this is why , you know , if the Democrats say you've got to get to this percentage , you know EV these companies will broadly go along with it , even though they're , you know , because they are receiving so much protection , the actual quality of the automobiles that come out of the big three , you know , is not very high , and I mean some of this , I'm sure , is a little bit of Studebaker resentment at the big three . There is , of course , a little bit of you know , a feeling that you know , because the way that they out-competed Studebaker is that we overpaid our workers relative to them and they took advantage of that Very often . The Studebaker plant , the labor negotiations at the Studebaker plant , set the terms that they would be negotiating at the big three . Yeah , so there's some resentment there . But also I do think it's important to bear in mind it is not at all impossible , because it has happened I mean , it did happen in the 60s with Studebaker for these American car companies to be allowed to die and they very nearly were allowed to die and they might well be allowed to die in the future .
Benjamin StudebakerSo the union is very weak politically for that reason . It knows it lives on borrowed time . The Teamsters are in a totally different position because logistics is a booming sector and a sector that is still a sector where human labor is essential , very difficult to get rid of . It's a sector that is , if anything , becoming more important as warehouses are proliferating all over the country . So that's a sector that has a little bit more power and therefore more potential autonomy . So I think , in their different ways , the behavior of both of the Shons makes sense , given the parts of the economy they're operating in and the fact that the UAW is in decline and it's trying to manage that decline , whereas the Teamsters Union is . Maybe ascendant would be too strong a word , but has plenty of reason to think that it will be a player going forward .
C. Derick VarnRight and thus has a reason to play both sides as kingmaker in the national level , even if that befuddles the left about why they would do that . And I don't think people are like , oh , you're saying that that means that the Teamsters are independent , and I'm like , no , they're not , but they have more compared to everyone else . I mean it's similar right .
Benjamin StudebakerAnd this is the trouble , right . People can't keep both sides of this in your head . Ok , the Teamsters have more power than other unions , but that doesn't mean they have the power to take over the state by going on strike , right ?
C. Derick VarnYou know , and unfortunately , I mean there was a sort of like if you've read the work of Kim Moody , you know the great Kim Moody , gene McAlevey , wars and union organizing has been under understood , Although one of the things I've said about McAlevey is this is not her fault , theory tells you . But if you read it superficially you can be like , well , all the , all the left activists should go into union bureaucracy and like uniserves and stuff like that . Uh , to service and aid the integration of the unions and with the state , which in the united states context actually means . Oh so make them a pinnage of a Democratic Party , which we tried already in the past .
Benjamin StudebakerI mean , I do feel like In structurally more favorable circumstances . The conditions have gotten so much worse for that strategy . Now it's so much worse , and yet people want to repeat it .
C. Derick VarnYeah , and I will say all of McAlevey's examples of success are in the time period that we're talking about , ignoring the end of it Right . Conversely , kim Moody was very focused on the logistics unions and maybe radicalizing the logistics unions , but that runs flat directly into conflict with the McAlevey strategy . And both don't deal with the fact that the largest union sectors in the United States are the teachers unions and the police unions , which also , by the way , is why the police unions are never going to get kicked out of the AFL-CIO , because they're a disproportionately large part of it , even though a lot of police unions aren't even in it .
Benjamin StudebakerAnd this goes back to what you said about the public sector not drawing on the wage pool that everybody else draws on . That's why the defined benefit pensions can last longer and the unions can last longer in those zones . But , of course , as the state is subjected to continuous rounds of austerity driven by capital mobility , conditions get worse for those sectors too . It's just delayed .
C. Derick VarnAnd we see this in public systems completely falling apart education and healthcare . And I will say this , and I want to ask you your opinions about this I think the left's way of talking about the education crisis and the healthcare crises have been largely to not or to be irresponsible , or to just say Medicare for all will fix it , and I don't know .
Challenges of Educational System Reform
C. Derick VarnFree college fixes so little of the education problem in the United States . I'm not against free college . I think in most cases it actually ends up being regressive , but it doesn't have to be . If you studied implementations , you could learn how to do it relatively progressively . The problem that you have if you look at the examples in Asia and Europe , is that elite colleges tend to be free because they're patronized by the state and there's a limited number of seats , so they remain elite , which means that the competition for them in a capitalist society still favors the rich , which means you have this . You actually do end up in a regressive situation where the rich are getting shit for free . I saw this in korea , like the rich are getting uni for free and the middle class is paying out the nose for it , and often for-profit , low endowment universities , um , so that's a definitely suboptimal thing that I don't see people looking at enough . But the other thing is like why do we need everyone to have 24 fucking years of education ?
C. Derick VarnI'm a believer in education . I'm a believer that working class people can like read books and shit , and it makes me mad when I hear people like talk about how that is impossible . I come from the working class and I can fucking read . In fact , reading was cheaper than a lot of other forms of entertainment . But I do find it increasingly frustrating that I don't think the left you know Freddie DeBoer aside and I don't always agree with him , but at least he's talking about it I don't think the left treats American public education honestly at all . It doesn't really talk about why it's falling apart and usually you'll get oh well , if you just empower the teachers union more and I'm like California , new York , have plenty of empowered teachers unions and it's not actually even helping the teachers that much and it definitely isn't changing conditions for the students . I'm a union rep in a teachers union so I definitely have interest of those growing . But let's be honest here that that's not the only social condition you need to change to fix this . I think the unionized schools they do do better , right , because your teachers are happier , they stay longer , you have more accumulated knowledge , you're not constantly grinding through people who leave the profession as soon as they learn it , because it's going to take three to five years to even begin to be competent at it . But so you do see , you know , on margin , small gains . But the larger problems of American education aren't fixed that way and they also aren't fixed by money , because what we have actually created in the past 20 years in the education system is a rent-seeking apparatus the world has not ever seen before .
C. Derick VarnIncluding on tech . I went to a super expensive tech conference paid for by my district . It was basically an ad for a bunch of bullshit AIs that barely worked and they paid $600 a person for people to go and I'm just like that's a grift if I've ever seen one and getting the left to like . Really go into that and talk about that . I think because it doesn't , because it's not as noble about like , like . Maybe all the incentives of teachers or you know this , that or the other um are that there are . There are different incentives and different needs .
C. Derick VarnDuring COVID , I was one of the few people that was like you need to teach . You need to treat high schools differently than elementary schools . And yet , on both sides of the political divide , I couldn't get people to realize that they would talk about high school policies based off of elementary school research and vice versa , and I'm like that doesn't make any sense . Like we're dealing with different , like we know that COVID affects yes , it affects children some . Yes , it may have long . You know , I'm going to even give some of the long COVID people some due , like , yes , we don't understand all that it does to children , but here's what we can say for sure it's not fatal in most cases with younger people , actually different from most other diseases that we've run into . But as far as bodies are concerned , these kids are adults at 16 . So you're dealing and the structure of the school is dramatically different . Like they're , you're moving around constantly . There's more vectors of infection than you would have in an elementary school .
C. Derick VarnWhy can't we treat these separately ? Other nations did , by the way , like other nations , like would keep the elementary schools open and close secondary schools and stuff like that . We didn't do any of that , or we did it piecemeal here and there when we , when we were forced to , and and getting people to talk about the needing different strategies at different age groups was really hard , partly because they didn't want to point out that like that would lead to differences in labor treatment between teachers , like , and insurers , like , and they didn't want to deal with that . All right , and I think that's really hard to look at . Or another example it's just kind of different .
C. Derick VarnBut I can't get people to talk about the fact that Joe Biden cutare payments after the pandemic to the point that we've actually seen large numbers of doctors at exit the the market and we were already at lower capacity because of our structuring that like a , like a you know , uh , at need service sector like , which was a you know , which means you have no capacity for academics . You have , you barely have the capacity for the fucking flu season , um , and yet getting leftists to talk about that , even when they were opposing joe biden , to just be like he was cutting medicare payments they didn't even know . I just like , like it it was . It was like amazing to me that the people who are advocating for medicare for all don't know that the government is cutting medicare payouts at the very time that they're talking about . Well , they weren't talking about it this much anyway , but when it would have been logical to talk about it , you would think if we were going to hit for Medicare for all during the pandemic would have been the moment we did so .
C. Derick VarnAnd amazingly , large functions of the soft left were like , nah , this is not the right time . What of the soft left were like , nah , this is not the right time , what it was kind of . That's been maddening to me and getting the left to honestly talk about what's happening in these institutions that are that , frankly , a lot of the leaders of these institutions are major democratic stakeholders , you know , and so it's like you guys aren't going after those elites either , like and it's not like they're really in your interest . I don't know why you think university presidents really would be happy with like a a liberal regime or even a progressive liberal regime .
C. Derick VarnAnd what I think was interesting the only one of the one of the major positive developments out of the student protests around Palatine , which I don't think people look at , was an accident and what I mean that is was exposing how much of even the public , major universities are basically just investment wings , that like there's almost no relationship anymore to the mission of the university as an educational institution for any of that that you know . You listen to adam twos like tell you that like , yeah , the universities are making money from their hospitals and their endowments and that they're major landlords in almost every major city in america , like , and that their income stream based on undergraduate education is like minimal . That was an accident of some of the some of the ways that they were exposing the protests and I actually was talking to somebody . I was like yo , people think that you have a bunch of , like , hyper Zionist supporters in the university endowment system and the answer to that is probably not . I mean , there's probably some , obviously there are some , but you're talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars in places where there are billions . What they're mad about is that you're opening the books at all and making it clear that the mission has fundamentally changed due to the structural nature of these endowments and what is interesting outside of Adam Tooze and outside of specifically around Palestine , people miss the implications of that and what that says about higher education .
C. Derick VarnThey've also not paid attention to . The only people who paid attention to what I'm talking about in secondary and primary education are the libertarians who've been noticing how much run is going on , that like we've seen the cost of educating pupils double , with no significant increase in pay for teachers and staffing is 93% of the cost of all education , so where's the money going ? Like weirdly , I have gotten the left asking that either . Like so it just seems like there's . For people talk about materialism all the time . They don't do a lot of actual research in the material economies .
Benjamin StudebakerYeah , so what do you make of that ?
C. Derick VarnWhy is there an unwillingness to go there ? Yeah , so what do you ?
Benjamin Studebakermake of that ? Why is there an unwillingness to go there ? Yeah , I have a lot I could say about education and health care , I think . With regard to education , yeah , the universities , the expansion of the universities was originally a postwar , retrofuturist project to prepare us for the end of labor , right . And then , when that didn't come off , all of a sudden the university became a job prep institution , which was never what it was originally envisioned , as . The university was never meant to be a job prep institution . It was an elite training academy .
Benjamin StudebakerSo the idea that you would just go to a university as part of getting ready to be a worker was never part of the vision for what a university was supposed to be . If you got into the university system , you were in a different class , you had gone somewhere , somewhere different , and so the image of expanding the university system was to lift everybody out of being a worker ultimately , and that was the original vision for it . Everybody out of being a worker , ultimately , and that was the original vision for it . And then , after the 70s , this regressed into trying to give you an advantage in the labor market , trying to give you a leg up on other people who don't go to school , and this led to a degradation , gradually over time , of the universities , where now you have to go to the university to compete for a job , even for a job that there's no obvious reason why you would need to go to university to get . And it's become a way of disciplining the workers in a double sense One , your parents are worried about whether they can afford tuition for you , so they have to work longer and harder and they have to keep their heads down so that they make sure there's enough money . Or , alternatively , you are going to borrow a bunch of money to go to school and then that debt is going to control you in your early career and limit what you can do . So the university system , which was originally meant to liberate everybody from being a worker in the 50s and 60s , when they conceived of this expansion , has now become a way to discipline workers , both at the early stages of their career , through the student debt , and then at the later stages of the career , through the need to put your kids through college . And that's the sick , sick thing that has happened to the university system , which was originally meant to play this grand emancipatory role and has now been turned into a tool of enslavement and servitude . It's incredibly sad and very sick .
Benjamin StudebakerThe other thing I would say about education with regard to the public school system , the left because it doesn't want to think about the family or the household in a rigorous way as a material institution which is involved in , you know , bildung , in creating new subjects , tries to put all of the emphasis on the schools and on the school system . And it does this even as the conditions for ordinary workers , for their ability to raise their children , have been continuously undermined . So you used to have a situation where one person , doesn't matter the sex , could be at home and could play a continuing role in the school system , could go to school board meetings , could be an aide who participates in the classroom . Even Parents used to be involved in the schools , really involved in them , in a way that they can't be now because they both have to work . And when the kids come home if they come home , oftentimes they're in daycare , they're at the Boys and Girls Club , they're at the YMCA , they're somewhere else after school because there's no one around , there's no one who's able to be around because of the imperative that both parents work . So you're not having the parents , you know , reading to the kids in the evening . You're not having the parents involved in looking at the homework and discussing with the kid what happened at school . If anything , when the kid does talk to the parents , it's you know . The kid gets a sense that the kid has to just tell the parents , it's fine , don't worry , because the parents are too stressed out to be able to actually help or actually make a constructive intervention
Impact of Healthcare Sector in US
Benjamin Studebaker.
Benjamin StudebakerWhat we're getting at this point is an entire generation that has normalized the idea that , from a very early age , kids just have to be in daycare so that a professional can do the work of actually raising them . And this is impossible . It's not possible , no matter how well run a daycare is , for someone running a daycare to take care of your kid in the way that you would be able to take care of them if you were fully engaged . And one of the things that's gone horribly wrong and it's a misogynist thing that has happened in our society is that we've devalued the work of raising children because it's something that was previously not done for money and something that was previously done primarily by women . We've treated this as work that doesn't really need to happen or which can just happen under the rug , sweep it away .
Benjamin StudebakerWe don't treat it as a social issue , a social question how that labor is to be done or how we are to arrange the conditions under which it can take place , and instead this whole discussion is sublimated into endless debates about reforming the schools and constant blaming of the teachers for things that are wrong . Because we have not adequately provided for functional households . Our economy no longer provides for that , so we are getting entire generations that are not capable then of going to a university and participating in it in the way that they would have been able to at a similar age , and that's further driving down the quality of university education , further making the university into a stupid job coupon factory . It's incredibly tragic and , with regard to health care , the health care sector is our problem as a state , the United States . Its problem is that it has a bloated health care sector that's too large , that sucks up too much resources that could go to investment , could go to other sectors , could allow other things to pop off .
C. Derick VarnIt literally sucks up from everybody too . All classes get built by it . Everybody to get classes get get built by it .
Benjamin StudebakerYeah , and and you know the whole notion that the millennials are going to inherit a bunch of money . No , first the health care sector will suck all of that money away from our aging parents before we inherit it . That's what it's designed to do . It's designed to vacuum up that money so that people can't build generational wealth through even any professions that pay good money . Ultimately , they'll get it all from you before the end , and that is the function of the health care sector is to get it all from you and keep you weak . But the thing that I think people don't think about enough is that , ultimately , if Medicare for all were to have succeeded , it would have succeeded because it would have been an overcoming of an entrenched sectoral interest . It would have been- .
C. Derick VarnWe would have eliminated a ton of jobs .
Benjamin StudebakerYes , yes .
Benjamin StudebakerAnd those people would have needed to be re-skilled and reallocated , and it would have been an enormous undertaking I think a necessary one to create dynamism within the American state . If you were actually trying to prevent the United States from declining as a state , you would have to break the healthcare sector and free up those people , that investment , that possibility to distribute it elsewhere . It plays the same role in our economy that heavy industry played in the Soviet economy or that the construction sector and the local governments play in China today . It's the Achilles heel of the US economy and this is why I thought there was really a point to arguing for that and agitating for it . And when people act like it's just an issue like anything else , this is incredibly short-sighted and small in terms of the thinking . Healthcare is the biggest issue that we have , because that sector every year sucks up trillions of dollars , multiple trillions of dollars , and wastes them every year , just burns them up and wastes them every year With more and more .
C. Derick VarnI mean one , you know . Advocates of socialist medicine have actually pointed out that , and they're not wrong about this that we spend more money than socialized . You know , from a government perspective . We're not even dealing with the obscene amounts of private debt . It doesn't work like a market . People Like markets . I've been in countries that actually have healthcare markets where they post prices and there's no insurance . They exist Egypt was one of them . Like there was insurance , but it was all reimbursement insurance . There's no like prepaying system , hiding the price for you . I hate to tell people , but that's actually preferable to what we have Like . Like .
Benjamin StudebakerAnything , anything that any other OECD system is eight to 12% of GDP , not 17 . We have at least 5% of US GDP . Us GDP is huge . At least 5% of US GDP wasted every year on that sector . At least five , maybe more .
C. Derick VarnAnd right now we're in a crisis to the extent that we don't even have the healthcare professionals to do it , like we now have rate times that people talk about for , like the bad parts of the NHS or Canada or , I don't know , the Soviet Union , despite being terribly underfunded systems right , those are terribly underfunded systems .
Benjamin StudebakerWith those wait times we have an overfunded system and comparable wait times . In many cases it's completely nuts .
C. Derick VarnRight and it's because everything's going to these periphery bureaucrats who are managing the money , people who serve the bureaucrats and like , look , I realized for a lot of people and this is something that left doesn't talk about that is a associate's degree , middle-class job , particularly for women and particularly in areas that used to be industrialized that have gone away . Gabe Winnand's work on this , at least as an objective description of the situation , is actually pretty accurate . I don't know that I agree with his political conclusions from it , but he's right . There's a reason why the industrial Midwest is full of fucking hospitals and that in some ways it's been a works program to maintain anything in those areas . And the right attacks it dishonestly but some of the attacks aren't wrong that it's a major government rent-seeking sector .
C. Derick VarnAnd the other thing I want to point out I mentioned two things that were the major sources of the university's income . The other one is this because the universities are tied into this too , which means the primary liberal institutions are invested to never allow the two things that the social democratic left wanted as their major reforms which is free college , which again can be regressive anyway . It doesn't have to be that . We can go back and forth on that , but but to me doesn't still doesn't deal with the problems of healthcare . But you're never going to fucking get it if the university administrators are your primary donor base , uh , and to the medical sector , right , and then you add silicon valley's weird , uh , political allegiances , which shifts all the time , honestly , in ways that I think are underexplored , um , because sometimes they're dependent on state largesse .
C. Derick VarnActually , I mean , we could do a whole episode just talking about , like why has silicon valley's policies gone reactionary ? Well , they have now achieved monopoly capture to the point they don't need state intervention , like they did for the past 40 years , to achieve that monopoly power . You know , none of those people came up through an organic market , competition , market and so much that any of those things have ever existed . Those people in particular didn't do it , um and so . But now they have . They have enough organic capital from being allowed to set up monopolies this way that they don't need to state in the same way anymore . They basically have used the state and can throw it aside , and so you're gonna see silicon valley politics get weirder because its needs are going to shift more , I think .
Benjamin StudebakerAnd the state made a point to try to intimidate a lot of them , especially the social media guys , after 2016, . When they called them in and Lindsey Graham said you think you don't think you have a monopoly ? These guys very clearly trying to intimidate and bully them into changing the way the social media algorithms work , and I think that had a lot to do with Zuckerberg putting out that letter recently . There is , I think , a felt need on the part of these guys to to hit back in some way or to to do something toward office state , which they view now , instead of as a source of investment , as something that might encroach upon them in the trust busting sense , as you mentioned yeah .
C. Derick VarnSo you and I uh continue to play our role of dr dooms . You're all cheery about it , um and uh , you and and uh danny besner , who are the most cheerful black people . I know um besner when someone's like who's the most black-pilled , and I was like Des Besner , and he's also not going to recognize it because he's a happy person . So I do think maybe one thing I want to ask you about and this is more speculation but what psychological role does this investment in delusional politics play for a lot of people ? Because and I mean , you're not a psychologist , I'm not either , but I do I have been trying to model the mind incentives for this kind of engagement , which seems particularly intense but also particularly devoid of reality . It goes back to that initial statement I said in the beginning they would live in a time period where policy differences are actually probably the thinnest they've ever been , but we're more polarized than ever Over what exactly . No one seems to really know , other than you know , people disliking immigrants , but even the Democrats don't seem to like immigrants that much these days . So what role is this playing for you according to you ? Because you know , you and I have talked about , like the paper , bonapartism that exists right now , and by that I mean like people really invest in the executive and they believe on almost , like we have a bonapartist politics and yet and in some ways we do , because the legislature just can't fucking function anymore blah , blah , blah , blah , blah . But in other ways we really don't , because we've also seen real limits to the executive be shown to everybody and then just ignore it .
C. Derick VarnAnd so what psychological role is this playing ? Because I have to start imagining that that's got to be
Navigating Meaning in a Changing World
C. Derick Varnpart of why this is continuing . Is it just too bleak to look at , you know ? Is it too bleak to do the stuff that you would actually need to do to have real hope ? Is that what it is Like ? What's going on ? That's my last question .
Benjamin StudebakerYeah , yeah , I think that there is . There is , this is . It's really a shame that this is the case , but a lot of people aren't able to come up with a purpose to life . People need a purpose in life . They need something to care about . Right , reproducing the world that you came into and sharing it with the next generation and preparing that next generation for entry into your own world , the world that you grew up in , which is still the same world , because the pace of change is very slow . Right , you have a very , very slow rate of change .
Benjamin StudebakerThen reproducing what was obviously meaningful because it was the world that you grew up in is , I think , straightforward to many people . Some of the abstractions that come out of that faith in the religion , commitment to one's family these are things that make sense in a very slow change environment . When you have a very rapid changing environment , people try to be on the side of history . In some sense . They try to see where things are going and to be on the side of where things are going , to have what they've done in their life retroactively justified by the direction of history and of politics , and I think there are a lot of people who want to believe that they can live like that and that they can get value out of that . But I think one of the things that this idea of middle capitalism forces us to confront is a possibility both , that we won't live in a low change context where everything is obviously meaningful , nor will we live in a high change context where we can ride waves or feel part of a change . Rather , we're in this middle period where things have changed enough that we no longer recognize our world that we grew up in right , but not so much that there have been major changes that we can identify with or feel that we were part of or that we helped to bring about . We can't identify with the changes , nor can we identify with a continuing set of traditions or status quo . So this puts us in an environment where , when we get blackpilled , there is this question of meaning and there is this temptation , I think , to embrace what I call the negative despair .
Benjamin StudebakerSo the negative despair is to start taking it out on yourself or the people around you , to blame yourself or the people around you for the fact that you neither have an obviously intrinsically meaningful world nor are you going somewhere that you identify with or feel good about right and to say it's my fault , or to say it's your fault , or to say it's the fault of this or that group of people out there . You know , based on religion , ethnicity , race , being an immigrant , whatever it might be , or you know being bigoted , you know those people , the bigots out there , they're the ones who are in the way . Whichever group you blame , I think that that's the kind of negative despair , the despair that tries to blame somebody for the fact that we are in this period . And it's nobody's fault that we're in this period , it's nobody's fault and our task is to find a way to engage in some kind of meaningful activity in a period that is not going to make what we do , what we're encouraged to do by capitalism , obviously meaningful to us . This is that question of how do you find meaning , how do you find values in a world where traditional values have been in various ways undermined and yet also there are no obvious new values that come to us straightforwardly from history . We can't just take the winning side and go . Well , obviously this is where the world is going . It's not that simple , and that makes it really difficult , and I think for a lot of people it's too difficult .
Benjamin StudebakerAnd so there is this move toward a kind of either hatred of the other or self-hatred that can end in various kinds of suicidality , and I think we saw that a lot with Gen Xers in the 90s . There was a strong tendency towards suicidality , and in the case of the millennial generation it's more hatred of the other right , it's hatred of the bigot , hatred of the right , hatred of the left , blaming it on somebody , blaming it on some group of people , and we're seeing it very strongly now in some of the right hatred of the left blaming it on somebody , blaming it on some group of people . And we're seeing it very strongly now in some of the Zoomer internationalist or nationalist , rather , politics which is about taking the side of different nation states and putting different flags in your profile and deciding the Ukrainians are good and the Russians are bad , or the Russians are good and the Ukrainians are bad , or the Muslims are good and the Jews are bad , or the Jews are good and the Muslims are bad . And this kind of black and white civilizational Sam Huntington thinking is really not left-wing thinking at all at all . And yet , because people are not able to find values , they're not able to find things that give them a reason to feel that it matters that they get up in the morning and it matters that they go to bat for the people around them in their life .
Benjamin StudebakerThis is where people are heading , and I think we really have to despair about this in the positive way , and that is the cheerfulness . The cheerfulness is to say what we're doing matters . You matter , I matter , the people around us , we all matter , you matter , I matter , the people around us , we all matter . Just because the world is frustrating with its level of change , that doesn't mean that condition . You know we don't . We don't have to to be so all or nothing about it . You know it's okay to live in in a confusing time and to care about the people around you .
C. Derick VarnYeah , we're not all utilitarians at least I'm not , and I think this isn't . I think that's an important point , because I often get told that I am hopeless and I'm like no , I actually believe in people like a lot , um , um . I don't really believe in systems that much , and you and a lot of people seem to be fundamentally confused about the difference between those things . It's why , like , when I talk to people , I'm like I have no interest in trailing white ring talking points . But I do think if you're not willing to talk to like poor ass people and where I live in like Utah , go out to rural Utah , which has different conditions in Wyoming , which has different conditions in the South . But if you can't talk to those people , you don't really have a viable politics in a federated nation . You just don't . But that doesn't mean you tail the bullshit that other people are feeding them either . There's limits to that . But also , people aren't going to believe when leftists pick up right-wing talking points . No one really believes them . They don't believe themselves .
Benjamin StudebakerIt's painful , the lack of sincerity that people end up adopting , and some of it's market-driven , because it gets you clicks In the case of professionals who are doing it for a living , but for a lot of people it's to avoid blaming themselves or blaming somebody else . All they can do is adopt a political pose of some kind , and I really wish that those people could get out of politics or find a way out of that kind of negative despair , because it's such a painful space to be in . It's so hard to feel that way , to feel in some way responsible or to feel hatred for somebody else because of the conditions that we're all bound back in .
C. Derick VarnYeah , I think that's a really valid point . One thing that does occur to me about Zoomers people were asking me about the left and right distinction between Zoomer women and Zoomer men , which seems to be slightly I think this is overstated , but slightly more than people that there's a more , that political divisions are more gendered than they have been in the past , and I think amongst the very political , which is not the majority of the population , this is true . But one thing I will say is , by and large , traditionally the most likely group to kill themselves are men period in discussion particularly in their late adolescence and then again in their late , in their early to late middle age . Like , just statistically , dudes are way more likely to kill themselves than women . Um , the greatest increase in suicidal ideation , uh , that we see right now is not in men . Their suicidal ideation has kind of been static for I don't know 50 years . I mean it's gone up , but it's , you know , it went up a long time ago . It's in women . And your discussion about negative despair and where this goes , I do think has a direct role here , and I know people will be like , oh , that's too psychological , it's not based in the class and I'm like , well , maybe it is based in the class , because there's a lot of class problems that no one's fixing and people are just trying to figure out how to do it Now .
C. Derick VarnOn the left , I think one of the biggest manifestations of this is third worldism . It's not that the first world is not exploiting the shit . Actually , that's not what it's doing it's extracting the shit out of the third world . Absolutely , completely true . But the idea that there's a proletarian subject that's about to dominate and liberate us all from that area about to dominate and liberate us all from that area . You can't study international politics or productivity rates or the politics in these developing world countries and believe that at all Like it is . In no way can you actually believe that the only place where you can kind of sort of convince yourself that is true is China , like , which has already had a revolution . So maybe , maybe , if you're really trying to be enough . Like , which has already had a revolution . So , um , uh , maybe , maybe if you're really trying to be enough . Um , but it does seem to me that part of that's despair , because when I like , ask people , like okay , so you're saying that like the , the empire bought off the workers , but like the height of American military power is the nineties . The height of American economic power is the 90s . The height of American economic power is the 50s
Intellectual Engagement and Capitalism's Influence
C. Derick Varn. So how does that work exactly ?
C. Derick VarnIt seems like you're describing Fordism and neoliberalism as if they happened at the same time , and even then if you look at labor productivity . So I'm not going to get into why . It's not because the developing world is full of stupid people and they don't have the technology . It's not that at all . It's labor arbitrage , it's international rules , regimes . It's the concentration of capital we talked about earlier , right , but you can't look at the productivity rates and go like , oh well , we're just exploiting them more . No , we're extracting from them , but we're not exploiting them more . But some ways a lot of those countries would love for us to exploit them more . I know that sounds strange , but that would get them organic capital composition and ways out of the lower income traps of development .
C. Derick VarnAnd yet the fact that every time that people convince themselves we're about to have a social democratic revolution and then it doesn't happen , we see massive increases in third worldism . And we've seen this three times in the last hundred years . Right , and in the first time I think it was justifiable . There were revolutions , national liberation revolutions happening all over the goddamn planet . That's not true now . It's not even true that the left forces are on the same side , like Brazil and Venezuela , have remarkably different interests , for example just to look at a contemporary example in America , in America . So the only way I can explain that is this negative despair that you're talking about , that people are projecting this somewhere , because trying to find hope in yourself and in your own activity and in your life , that would compound and join with other people's hope and rebuild , that requires discipline and patience and things that modern life mediates against and that it's painful , it literally hurts .
Benjamin StudebakerIt really hurts and people like you and me we have some level of protection from it . We've been able to read . We've been able to spend a lot of time on a lot of kinds of books that have no obvious instrumental use . I've talked to academics who sincerely believe that they have to only read books that they're going to cite because they have to compete for these academic jobs , and they're so worried that they won't be able to . They don't have time to read something just because it might be compelling or it might help them in some way to think about something or to feel about something .
Benjamin StudebakerYou and I have both had time to read a lot of stuff which is not obviously useful , and when you have time to read stuff that's not obviously useful , it really opens up all of this meaning that's all around us . There's so much meaning all around us all the time , but when you're stuck in labor and you don't have the time to be able to do those things , and when you do have time , you're increasingly in this digitized space where the political economy of the digital is very much about screaming and screeching and agitating people to get them to click on stuff or to get them to obsess over things or hate , watch stuff or make fun of this or that . It's a very unhealthy environment and very much capitalism has driven this . It has driven people who create content , who write , who talk , to make stuff that is outrage inducing , to make stuff that creates stress and anxiety , because that's the stuff that sells and unless you happen to have some level of protection from that , it's very , very difficult , if you're creating content , to avoid it . In both of our cases , we've been able to make stuff that isn't really huge and we don't feel a material pressure to get as big as possible as fast as possible .
Benjamin StudebakerIn both of our cases , we've been able to spend big chunks of time relative to other people , reading stuff that just doesn't .
Benjamin StudebakerNobody has a reason to read . That is a market driven reason , an instrumental reason , a reason to do with reproducing live , and it's so difficult for people to get access to those conditions . And the thing that I always remember when I think about this stuff and what to do is you know , people have so much latent potential that's crushed out of them by all of this and if there's anything that we can do , anything we can do at all to unlock any of that , any of it , even just a bit of it , it really matters . It really matters to give people a little bit more time , a little bit more energy , a little bit more slack in their life to be able to go hey , I'd like to read some book about this , that or the other , and to be able to do that and to have the energy to do it , without all this , you know , grind , sad and hustle and all that , all this awful , awful stuff that people are forced to do .
C. Derick VarnIt really is .
Benjamin StudebakerIt's really sad If you can stand outside it , which only a few of us are in position to do . It confronts you as this enormous mass of sadness .
C. Derick VarnIt's interesting , like how you get that freedom ? Because for me it's . I have a relatively intense , but I have summers off so I can read , like you know , 50 books in the summer and I can write . Most people don't have that . And when people ask me why do I say a teacher , I'm like well , I'm not an academic and I'm not trying to compete . No , when I was , when I was an academic , everything I read felt like it had to be exactly what you're saying , like , like I had to be competitive in the market and read a bunch of shit that was mostly useless and like , but it was useful for me to stay on top of my field because I had an interview when I , when I went back to teaching primary secondary education , I didn't worry about that . I still read for my job . But like uh , it's a different set of concerns um and uh , because I have a day job . I don't like this . I have a relatively successful podcast , but I don't , in fact , frankly , if I get a whole lot more successful .
C. Derick VarnIt's a tax liability , like um . So you know , I I have an incentive to be honest , um , and to not care about seo and um and stuff like that . Uh , but if I wanted to do this for my living , I would have to cartel to what people believe , and that would change me too . It does something to the people who do this .
Benjamin StudebakerI've seen it yeah , you'd have to become Vowsh .
C. Derick VarnRight , yeah . And and people who think , oh , that's just cynical , I'm like no , eventually you believe it . If you pretend to believe something for long enough , you will start to believe it , and that's .
Benjamin StudebakerThis is Plato's point about mimesis . He's got a point about it .
C. Derick VarnRight . Oh yeah , I need to explain mimesis to my peeps sometimes . But thank you , benjamin . I find this conversation eminently rewarding and I've done a lot of postmortems on the last 10 years of the left . I find that my conversations with you are at least rooted in material conditions and less in vibes , so I appreciate that . I'm sure that people will have things that we have upset them with Good Comment on it . If you want , it's going to help my algorithm anyway , even if you hate my guts . If you really want to hurt me , guys , you don't say anything , but I think people should check out your work . Where are you publishing these days , ben ?
Benjamin StudebakerWell , so if you go to my website , benjaminstudebakercom , I always announce new stuff there . My next book , legitimacy in Liberal Democracies , will be out in November . Ooh , yeah , that'll be with Edinburgh University Press . I'm looking forward to it and I'm really looking forward to sharing the cover . We got this really , really beautiful cover for it . I'm really excited when they put it on the website I can share it around .
C. Derick VarnYeah very close to getting that cover up yeah , well , when it comes out , I'd love to have you back on , because legitimacy and that's a question it's like and interestingly , it's like you and michael sandell asking it very few as much as people talk about saving democracy all the time , I'm not hearing many people talk about why the democratization has been largely legitimized across the board , just in different ways , and maybe your book will be an answer to that . Um , I like some of the pieces you've written for sublation . Actually , your pieces are probably the only pieces I've read from Sublation , to be quite frank . So I should read my old friends more , but I don't .
Benjamin StudebakerI very much appreciate it . By the way , the video made about the uh beyond bonapartism piece yeah , I know that you are often a very effective critic of people's work , so I went oh , varnes made an hour-long video about what I wrote . Oh , does he tear it to shreds ?
C. Derick Varnbut you were very nice about it yeah , I , uh , I actually , when I read that I was like this is the most transient piece of criticism on the state I've read in a long time . I mean , I have my . My critique was basically there's not enough economics in it , but it's also a speech at a like . You can't cover everything in one piece . So so yeah , but I enjoy your work and people should check it out and hopefully people will also start building meaning and and I guess you know I'm a really harsh critic of David Graeber but the like probably more than most leftists actually , I might eventually on the books that I'm going to maybe write , you know there are two that are in the works right now , one on Christopher Lash and one on essays on the millennial left , right now mostly about Portico . For some weird fucking reason I have thought about writing a Contra Graber book , just titling it that . But the community meaning stuff in him is actually one of the few things in him that I think is actually somewhat good .
C. Derick VarnNot that that's the end-all , be-all of politics it obviously isn't , and I think the problem is that he stops there . But you can't really do politics without it . Negative partisanship as your primary means of partisanship will destroy you and I don't think that's enough . I don't think
Navigating Political Reforms and Engagement
C. Derick Varnit's being .
C. Derick VarnPeople tell me I'm sometimes too soft on elites and I'm not focusing on hating them enough and I'm like I don't know how hating them enough actually gets anything done against them . I just don't . I don't see the evidence for that . The trends are larger than that . People's individual hate is not enough to do it . But they can't do the stuff that I need them to do , like you said , unless they feel like they have meaning in their life and that they have some relative stability and anything that we can do in reforms that would enable that dealing with healthcare , dealing with crime . I know that's a big no-no on the left . We're not talking about that today , but that would be really important for any future politics and in a way we're in a position where to be political , even electorally , we have to kind of give it up for a little while , because if we continue running that rat race we're doomed . That's my take , yeah .
Benjamin StudebakerYeah , I'm really looking forward to that stuff . A lot of that sounds really fun . I hope it comes out . I love to read .
C. Derick VarnWell , one of the books is actually under contract , so I have to finish it .
Benjamin StudebakerGood , good , I'm so glad to hear that's going to happen . I really I have such a great time coming on and talking to you . It's really a blast .
C. Derick VarnYeah , thank you so much , ben , and we'll definitely see you when that book comes out and if you have any other writings . I find your , I find X to be a hellscape and I always have . I engage in it because you kind of have to in the media , yeah , but I actually find yours refreshingly honest , so , like people should check out your ex , all right , thank you so much Thank you Bye .
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