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
Fragments of Unity: Navigating the Evolving Landscape of Leftist Politics with Alex Strekal
The episode explores the fragmentation of the left in America following the Bernie Sanders phenomenon. It examines the dissatisfaction with the Democratic Party, the struggle of third parties like the Green Party, and the rise of alternative political ideologies among disillusioned leftists.
• Reflection on Bernie Sanders' impact and legacy
• Analysis of the fragmentation within leftist movements post-Bernie
• Critique of the Green Party's recent efforts and historical failures
• Examination of disillusionment with the Democratic Party
• Exploration of the role of cultural leftism in political identity
• Discussion of potential paths forward amid political cynicism
• Assessment of the future of leftist politics in America
We refer to the following Substack articles:
https://alexstrekal.substack.com/p/the-specter-of-alternative-politics
https://alexstrekal.substack.com/p/the-specter-of-alternative-politics-78b
https://alexstrekal.substack.com/p/the-specter-of-alternative-politics-78b
Musis by Bitterlake, Used with Permission, all rights to Bitterlake
Crew:
Host: C. Derick Varn
Intro and Outro Music by Bitter Lake.
Intro Video Design: Jason Myles
Art Design: Corn and C. Derick Varn
Links and Social Media:
twitter: @varnvlog
blue sky: @varnvlog.bsky.social
You can find the additional streams on Youtube
Current Patreon at the Sponsor Tier: Jordan Sheldon, Mark J. Matthews, Lindsay Kimbrough, RedWolf
Hello, welcome to our blog, and I am with Alex Sprakel today, blogger. Well, excuse me, sub where the anarchists ended up, where the Marxists ended up and why everything feels so shit right now. And we're doing it just so people know the context, even though this will be coming out probably in January, february of 2025. We're doing it the night of the election and we're not going to talk much about the election because I have nothing good to say about it whatsoever. But it is sort of a backdrop to how we found ourselves, with our options being such shit, where we're hoping at the last minute to prop up the green party again for the time that it's likely to not hit 5%.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it is relevant, of course, to the election, but it's it's the back history that we're talking about more, that led us where we are essentially.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so we were going to talk more about this in our first episode on the specter of alternative politics to what you think went on with the Bernie movement around some of these groups. We talked about an episode in our first episode which people should look up Between Bernie one in 2016 and Bernie two in 2020, and then the great fragmenting of the Bernie diaspora. So I'm just going to prompt you with that. Okay, how does Bernie play such a key role in both consolidating and dispersing these movements?
Speaker 2:Well, that's certainly a good question.
Speaker 2:I mean, I remember when he first got popular and, as I previously stated, no-transcript and he definitely had more momentum the first time around, in my perception, he obviously got kneecapped both times in one way or another, and I especially have observed yeah, there were certain ways in which people who were on board with Bernie then, as you call it, the diaspora right, certain people's, brains broke and they went in various directions since he obviously didn't win and that includes the whole Jimmy Dore camp as well, of sort of crossover populist thing in which, coming from Bernie, supporters who didn't know what to do after he lost and have a lot of legitimate critiques of the Democrats actually but there's this camp that I see that I observe that their bitterness from Bernie led them to almost tail the right, or, if not tail the right, almost be such cynics that, like their whole politics is nothing but being anti-Democrat in a way, and they don't really have an answer. Well, to.
Speaker 1:To be fair, to door his anti-democratic stance and by that I mean anti-democratic party stance is not new. Um that he was a bernie. He was a bernie campaigner in 2026 2016, but that was about as much as he wanted to mess with the Democrats. But his talking points definitely changed after 2021.
Speaker 2:Yes, I get what you're saying doing plausible deniability on.
Speaker 1:You know COVID conspiracies, getting a lot more right wing guests on a show, yeah, um, stuff like that. We've definitely seen that.
Speaker 2:Maybe bringing him up wasn't the best example of my point in a way, but I also see this coming from a lot of the green camp in a way, where it's like people who are, for pretty legit reasons, pretty cynical about the Democrats, but their online posting, from what I see, is literally just yeah, they're like Jill Stein supporters who just kind of agitate their desperation with the Democrats and don't have an answer or obsessively talk about the foreign policy especially, and it almost seems like they just stew in this nihilistic bitterness towards the Democrats but don't really have an answer other than to just fall back on the Greens or something Right.
Speaker 1:But then when you ask him if they really think a solution, they'll tell you that all they're aiming to do is break the two party diopoly by getting the Greens to five percent so they can get federal funding, to which I always ask then what's the point then? Like, if you know it's not going to, you know, I guess if you want to punish harris, it's a way to, I see, giving a whole lot of ways out. Um of the current scenario, because it still is primary. Like if we look at the jill stein, I mean like, look, in 2020 the greens were running a, a co-presidential candidate with the Socialist Party of the United States, howie Hawkins.
Speaker 1:Today they're running Jill Stein, and that feels like a repeat, deliberately, of a prior failed strategy. Now the vice presidential candidate has a better relationship with the Muslim community, etc. Etc. Etc. And about a little under 50% of the Muslim voters that have been polled say they're going to vote for the Greens, but that still doesn't get them the 5%. That's right, they might hit it, but we haven't seen a third-party candidate hit percent since ross perot.
Speaker 1:Um, so, and I. I question what they're gonna do with it, because I don't know that the greens have very much state level game in a lot of the country. So again, this feels like a presidential stunt dodge, in a way similar to my critique of the bernie movement, where the bernie movement was like we're going to use this electoral power to empower the workers movement, but we need the workers movement to win. That's right. This feels this feels like we need to run a a hail mary pass dissent from the Democrats campaign with the greens that literally nobody was considering a year ago. I mean, like when people were going through their third party options around Biden, the greens weren't coming up.
Speaker 1:You were getting RFK, you were getting Cornell West, you were getting the, the people's party, around Jimmy door. None of that ended up coalescing at all, so we ended up back in the spot that we were before Bernie. That's what I'm actually fascinated with, because if we think about Jill Stein's presidential ones like Because if we think about Jill Stein's presidential ones, she is 74, so she's not particularly long doesn't really undo that she ran for the presidency in 2012, 2016, and 2024. And she was blamed for almost costing Obama the election in 2012. And she was blamed for costing Hillary Clinton the election in 2016,. Which was kind of a joke, I mean, because obviously Stein's popularity is actually dependent on the negative viewpoints of the main Democratic candidate.
Speaker 2:Very true, so you know, I guess from what I see it's just the Jill Stein thing and the Green Party in general. It just amounts to a protest vote that's supposed to be symbolic or whatever, or at least send a statement, but it doesn't really do anything at the end of it. But it doesn't really do anything, um, at the end of it. That's kind of how I feel about the third parties that do, libertarians and the greens. At this point it's just like um, I'm not into the whole angle of obviously like finger wagging at the third parties for spoiling elections or whatever. I think that just takes the status quo for granted too much in a way. But but I I do think that it is just a just by the sheer numbers it's an untenable thing and it ends up just being a symbolic vote, channeling yourself into a false alternative that will never have national power at any real level right, I mean I could go into the history of the greens.
Speaker 1:You know howie hawkins and john reason brink, uh his relationship and founding it, pito comejo's relationship and uh really helping hawkins and and uh risen bring do that. It's tied to nadir, the weird uh right populist, left, populist, uh unity ticket that happened under nadir when the reform party and the green party, through their, through their support behind nader one year um believe it was 96, yeah, um. So you know which also I just want to point out didn't give them over five percent, despite the fact that the reform party, uh no, it wasn't 90, it wasn't 96, it was, uh 2004. So it was after the pat buchanan reform party, but before, uh, it seemed to just fade out as an independent institution. Is now that, I'm remembering, correct? So so you know, I I find this interesting, but I also find it interesting that we're still dealing with baby boomer relics in all these parties. But it also feels like this is the same protest vote you would have cast in 2012.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you're right, nothing's changed in that regard.
Speaker 1:We're dealing with the same candidate. We're dealing with the same candidate. We're dealing with the same platform for the most part. I'm sure there's been some additions to the platform, but not many. Um, and I'm not here to belittle anyone for wanting the protest vote. I I couldn't make myself vote for either major party candidate either but it seems to be that it really isn't a solution. It seems to be like a way to punish the democrats, fine, and that that is a political strategy, um, but with no viable way to build up a movement, yeah, to replace the democrats. And to me it's not that different from the same delusions you saw with, like the ackerman plan, except that was trying to do the same thing within the democratic party yeah, um, is it?
Speaker 2:I don't know um. And there's also the opposite dynamic, as we've much discussed, of the people who, like in the past, were very cynical of the Democrats Bernie for a former people who probably millennials, especially who joined the left during the Bernie wave, who, like, initially make a lot of like cynical statements towards liberals and you would think that they're posturing very hard left and then, once this election came, got very soft and started like buying into the vibes rhetoric and just making very reaching justifications for supporting Harris's campaign all of a sudden. And I found that to be weird in and of itself too.
Speaker 1:All of a sudden and I found that to be weird in and of itself too, because they're trying to claim that they were the main reason that Harris got on the ticket and Biden got unseated, which is frankly delusional. Biden got unseated because there's a defection amongst the donor class, not because of anything 60K people in the dsa may have thought right yeah, I get what you're saying.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you thought that. Yeah, they thought that they had some grander effect than they really did, as if they're, like the democratic party, specifically responding to them, and it really isn't mostly um, but I mean.
Speaker 1:So you have the door phenomenon, which, which I think, which I have we have to give door some credit that he was right, that the Dems were cynically using the squad and Bernie to stir up momentum. And there was a. I don't know if it was intentional, I think it was initially, but there was a. It seems to be that Bernie was so afraid of getting, of getting put in history, uh, as the same kind of person as Jill Stein that he was willing to kiss the ring early and often.
Speaker 2:Well, that's the other confusing thing, in which, of course, jimmy doors Dore's commentary is relevant to, because he's always calling it out but yeah, just how much Bernie has kissed the ring and but also how much as a follower of him. And that's where, like, I feel so different from a lot of standard leftists, I guess, who, like they, have a prehistory of following the Democratic Party and voting for Democrats in a way that I do not. So I think they have this attachment where they're more likely to just if Bernie says, vote for Hillary Clinton, they'll vote for Hillary Clinton Because they still follow him as well. That's the pragmatic political wisdom, right, and he's someone they trust. So it turns into this weird thing where people who would posture themselves as hard left end up being just liberals quote unquote at the end of the day, because of Bernie kissing the ring and like being this sort of thing people hinge on to like fall back on, I guess. Like well, if that's what the official position is, I'm going to have to fall in line. I mean.
Speaker 1:To me it became really obvious when you looked at not just something like like door, because door has his fans and, like I said, door even. I think both you and I would even say as much as we are annoyed with some of the stunts. Doors pulled his main points about the squad and the Democrats. They're not wrong as held um. It's just that what he wants to replace them with is I actually have no fucking idea some kind of populist vibe.
Speaker 2:Well, the other thing, the other thing, that's a little bothersome about door is just like he's just not politically astute enough to like know who the fuck he's talking about. Part of the time, and part of the controversy around him is it's a bit like a Joe Rogan type of scenario, where it's not necessarily that he endorses reactionaries or something, but he brings them on and he has no idea who the fuck he's talking to and he just softballs them because he doesn't even fucking know what's going on. And it's because of this vague populist mishmash that he's seeking with whoever is considered an outsider. Um, basically, and it turns into the. In a way, it mirrors the libertarian uh fusionism which was its own version of left right populism. At the end of the day anyway, um, he ends up almost sounding like well, that's what I was gonna ask you about like like.
Speaker 2:Is this a repeat of libertarian strategy?
Speaker 1:I mean, when we look at someone like jackson hinkle right, who was a bernie bro way back in the day, now he's like some kind of socially conservative, communist or anti-imperialist I use both those in quotes but Hinkle was created by the Bernie movement and he seems to have this idea that you can build up a left-wing populism and a right-wing populism together, largely off of foreign policy. But it's hard to tell if it's organic at all. But the first thing I learned about Hinkle even though he has millions of followers on Twitter, which who knows if they're organic or not is that he was kind of a person not running on a red-brown strategy but running on something like joint populist anti-imperialism, which you and I recognize from the libertarian campaign and the aughts.
Speaker 2:Yes, and there is some overlap. The anti-war liberals.
Speaker 1:Some of the same people are involved even Like the motivations are different.
Speaker 2:But, like I've observed a while back that yeah, there's I mean it kind of relates to what we talked about in the last video there's an overlap between the paleo conservative and libertarian camps and left-wing anti-imperialism. But the right wing it's not that they're anti-imperialist really, but it ends up overlapping because because of the anti-war sort of sentiments that go along with it, um, I mean so. So there is like a natural reason for that at some level, but it ends up getting vagued up, I guess. Um, but yeah, and that goes back to it's just that the motivations are different, like it's more isolationist when it's coming from the paleo libertarian type of people right.
Speaker 1:I mean I will say that isolationism is also something that, like almost no one actually believes in, including what's kind of a loaded. It is kind of a loaded old term yeah, um, but I I actually I think you're right and that we've seen a ton of this stuff move towards the post-left and, in many ways, the post-left.
Speaker 1:A lot of them over time just become right-wing populists, whatever that means whatever that means yeah, right, um, because that's a floating signifier too, right, like, what the issues are, who, what they're reading on to like the Make America Great Again movement, et cetera, seems to be opportunistic in a way that flatters them.
Speaker 1:But we can't be too mad at them, in a way, because we have to acknowledge that a lot of people did that with the progressive wing of the Democratic Party to a lot of our know, not great success. I mean, um, if we think about the number of people who, in 2019, who were telling me by two, by by 2028, we'd see president, uh, acacia cortez, I I've just like, stare at them brankly now, you know, like, and it was in. Even at the time, I thought it was transparently ridiculous that these people were like, not really like, they couldn't see in the past and they also couldn't see into the future, and thus they don't know how this rhymes with the past. I mean, the one thing we can say about this current moment is that the libertarians kind of went away. Like we mentioned in the last one, they either became nationalists or they became liberals for the most part.
Speaker 2:Well, um, I agree with you, but I would want to clarify. I mean, it's like the party is still there, the movement's still there, but yes, there was a subsection of them that effectively got subsumed into trumpism and a subsection of them actually kind of get subsumed into the liberal Democrats. Actually, that's less known or talked about, but there's this camp of people who they originally called themselves neoliberals actually, but then they rebranded as new liberals, for example. But it's mostly coming from socially liberal libertarians who disagree with the paleotypes, who ended up moving into the Democratic Party. They might favor minor regulations on capitalism or something, but otherwise they're pretty big yimby development types.
Speaker 1:Right, there's people in New York who are entering the DSA en masse, yeah. So yeah, you know like there's people in New York who are entering the DSA en masse, oh yeah.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, I think that's, but I do think the movement's still there. But, yes, it's never going to like get much more than a marginal effect. And the Libertarian Party does still run what I call. Yeah, they're the milquetoast, socially liberal, fiscal conservative type of libertarian. But it's obviously the party's been around for 50 years or something and it kind of has a weird astroturfed history too and it mostly has ended up serving as an organ of the Republicans anyway, Well, I mean, yeah, it's always been kind of astroturfed.
Speaker 1:What I find fascinating is, even though it's actually had more state-level representatives than a lot of these other third parties, that it's also not usually gotten more than 2% of the vote. That's right, which I find fascinating, I mean. So, you know, we've talked about this in our last thing about the spectrum of alternative politics, but we have to ask ourselves like a question so, for example, the Muslim population in the united states is about two percent of the population. Uh, jill stein is likely to win about half of that. Where's the other four percent going to come from? A bunch of disaffected leftists. I guarantee you there are less disaffected far leftists in america than there are muslims, probably. So you're not, yeah, yeah, so so now it that is enough that the Democrats can gear up to blame, like defections of black men and and all this other stuff, and the left and Jill Stein, for if Heller loses.
Speaker 1:But to me, we have to ask ourselves why did we allow ourselves to be fooled that the Democrats were ever going to allow a Corbyn-like situation to happen with Bernie Sanders in the Democratic Party? And we also have to remind ourselves that Corbyn lost twice. So and now and now the left in the uk seems to be non-existent. It's just gone. So I mean, there are workers movements in the uk, but the left, the formalized left, seems to just have been liquidated. So when we look at where we're where, where we're heading in, it also seems like the like that there was kind of a deal with the devil that the DSA made with the Democrats by wedding us to them again and then not opposing our breaking when, when Trump lost, Well yeah, this is sort of a pattern I've observed with a lot of the millennial leftists who followed Bernie.
Speaker 2:They come into it almost as like quasi-tankies or something in their rhetoric, very radical posture, and then at the end of the day they start. These very same people who posture almost as if they're tankies or something end up being just kind of like the most liberal version of, so the most conventional liberal version of socialism possible. In their arguments they turn into liberal pragmatists.
Speaker 1:What do you mean by tanky Cause? That is an abuse term.
Speaker 2:Well, it is a very abused term and I've commented on that before. But you know people who posture as like you know they're, they're, they have Soviet insignia everywhere and they're very keen on Russia and China or whatever.
Speaker 1:It reminds me of the CPUSA from the late 70s into the aughts. So that's the Communist Party of the United States, which is a historical common-turn-aligned party. But I want to be clear about that. It's also full of feds. Go ahead.
Speaker 2:Of course, but you know that's something that I've talked about a bit. Tanky has become a very abused term, especially in the last five years, and I actually noticed it's gotten to a point where, like liberals have picked up the term tanky and like they're calling anarchist tankies, even like they think anyone who's like a foreign policy critic is a tankie at this point, Like it has no meaning, Right? Some of these discourses I'm seeing it's like a tankie used to be something pretty damn specific and now it's like anyone.
Speaker 1:Well, let's talk about what it is like. Tankie is someone who supported Khrushchev crushing the Prague Spring, khrushchev crushing the Prague Spring. Right, if you want to get super specific with it, I mean that is the origins, yes, and then sometimes it means Marxist-Leninist, but again you're not using it. Even that specifically because the people we're talking about have the foreign policy stances of Marxist-Leninist and they'll even sound almost like third-worldist in some of their rhetoric, but their actual politics is wedded to the Democratic Party.
Speaker 2:That's kind of what I'm talking about in a way, yes, but their posture might make them sound like third-worldists. Basically, they have a very that kind of bent a lot, but then at the end of the day, yeah, they're still wedded to liberal, pragmatist thought with the democratic party right I mean it's.
Speaker 1:It's the kind of people I think of who, uh and a lot of them are in the dsa who got mad when p when palestinians were protesting jamal bowman, but then made the exact same arguments that the palestinians were making against jamal bowman, but then made the exact same arguments that the palestinians were making against jamal bowman, against biden and harris, even though they also want us to stay working within the democratic party, sure so? It's just you know, and that's a common position.
Speaker 2:So but just I would just go like the way I would generally use the term. Tanky is like yeah, someone who like cosplays it up a lot with so iconography, has pictures of Mao everywhere and most likely engages perhaps even some of the fourth positionism crap or whatever or multipolarity type of stuff.
Speaker 1:That's how.
Speaker 2:I would generally use the term.
Speaker 1:I mean, the multip-polarity stuff is confusing and it makes me mad because I get called all kinds of names by people who are clearly projecting what they want onto the history of the term.
Speaker 2:And I've been accused of being a tankie by anarchists who don't know what the fuck they're talking about before.
Speaker 1:Right, it's a term of abuse, which is why I asked you to clarify it. I actually don't use the term. I don't use it at all Because it's been ruined by overuse. It's unclear.
Speaker 2:It got to a point where you could literally call a paleo-conservative a tanky in the way people are using it. That's where it got weird for me. I made some observations about that, the breakdown of the term. I noticed this in Vausch's community, especially because he started throwing the word tanky or his audience started picked up on the term. And then you read his comment section and it's like oh Jesus, this is totally inapplicable. It's just a liberal smear term against a foreign policy critic at this point.
Speaker 1:So it's like, okay, whatever tanky means but I mean, I do think there to get beyond the use of the term tanky. I just wanted to be be clear about that. Um, uh, there is a tendency on the american left for people to take radical positions on foreign policy and milquetoast positions on domestic policy. There's a long history of that, um, and one of the reasons why I think they do that, to be quite frank, is they have no effect on foreign policy, so there's no cost to making those calls. None, um, you know, uh, now I think palestine complicates that because there is, there has been a cost to that.
Speaker 1:Um, there has been, you know, people who got used to institutions allowing you to do massive protests and write annoying letters to the editor that normally break company policy actually got cracked down on and lost their jobs over Palestine. Okay, that really happened, okay, something. But I would also say a lot of the people who throw that around. I mean, I am specifically thinking of, like the non-Matt Chrisman part of Chapo Trap House, where they take very radical lines on foreign policy and very milquetoes lines as for a leftist on domestic policy, leftist on domestic policy and ignore the fact that they're also often supporting people who do not share their foreign policy agenda at all.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean honestly, I felt I felt that way somewhat about jacobin's output in general. Um, maybe not so much in terms of the foreign policy being radical, but in terms of like, okay, you're just kind of advocating corporate liberalism from the 50s and 60s and returning to that.
Speaker 1:Right. Socialism for them is New Deal. Hordism, but with the workers slightly more in charge this time.
Speaker 2:Yes, Well, simultaneously very strongly arguing against anything that's anarchist-y, and while I might agree with some of those critiques, it almost felt to me like, okay, you're also positioning yourself as the de facto what's the term I'm looking for? Yeah, as the de facto people who would be the managers, as a de facto managerial elite, while saying that you don't trust the workers themselves. There's that aspect of it as well that rubs people wrong, I think, and kind of echoes Leninism in a way, of that whole conundrum of I'm brain farting on the terminology um, but you know what I'm talking about. Um where managerial elite, socialism, if you will.
Speaker 1:I mean, I think that's true of a lot of the analytical Marxists to be to be frank, that they uh view this as a as a issue of specific developments and policies and not of, say, empowering workers. Um, I would actually say they're even more guilty of that than Lennon was. We can talk about the Vanguard party stuff but like, like Lennon did have Soviets and they did sort of matter.
Speaker 2:It mattered less and less if things went on, but they actually these people are talking like, yeah, there's going to be no Soviets at all. And it's us, the managerial elite, who is going to create socialism?
Speaker 1:I mean, but this is one of the things I wanted to ask you about the Bernie diaspora, because the the same people are the people who broke out and resurrected the 1960s and early 70s pmc category from from being fading to obscurity, um, as a, as a kind of theodicy for why they failed in 2020.
Speaker 2:So, oh, it was all the, the fake workers, you know, the pmc yeah, and that that gets very arbitrary, because it's like I think there's an element of truth to the pmc thing, but, as I pretty much agree with your position that, like it's not really a class, but you can consider it like a subcategory within the workers and maybe, maybe, and I would emphasize, it's even relevant, um, yeah, just to consider it in terms of, um, liberocracy, I guess it's like okay, yeah, you're onto something, but the way they talk about it it's conflated with someone's political beliefs or not, or whether they're politically liberal, right?
Speaker 1:Political liberalism is seen as a PMC ideology as well as what else would they link to it?
Speaker 2:And they overemphasize it, its effect as a class, it's like. It's like, yeah, Well, I mean the thing is what they mean by.
Speaker 1:It is also a floating signifier. Sometimes they mean elites, and sometimes they mean anyone with a college degree, and then that's where it's like. It's like okay.
Speaker 2:are college students or even professors, or even doctors and lawyers, like elites in a political sense? That's very important? Like I don't think so.
Speaker 1:Right, I mean doctor, so that's a kind of weird conglomeration of things. And normally, what if you really push people about what their image of that is? It isn't managers or professionals, it's academics, yes, and like media people. But like, yeah, because I'm like, well, okay, there, there is a lot there If we want to talk about the weird role of academics. But are you seriously trying to convince me that high school teachers and adjunct professors have the same social power as lawyers and and tenure-track professors and they have the same social power as ivy league graduates? And also, don't you realize you're talking about 40 of the population and your idea of who the working class is is only 16 of the population yes, that's a concern that comes up for me in dealing with certain interpretations of marxism.
Speaker 2:Actually, it's like well, how strictly do you interpret the working class and how egalitarian is your philosophy really if the working class is five percent of the population or something um?
Speaker 1:right. I mean because? Because usually when they say working class, most people mean wage earners. Yeah, then they move it to productive wage earners and then they'll try to say that service sector people, even when they produce a physical commodity, such as coffee, which you consume on the spot, but it is a physical commodity and is traded on the stock market, so it's a physical commodity and it is traded on the stock market, so it's a commodity. Um, somehow aren't productive workers, even though they are producing capital surplus? Just not. I just don't understand, because they'll, they'll act like baristas are the same thing as, like, tech workers, are government workers or something.
Speaker 2:It's bizarre, it is um, and I think some weird cultural bias has to come into that Right. Who don't you like?
Speaker 1:Well, it becomes clear that a lot of people want to brame certain groups for their failure to reach out to a larger audience in 2020. But they don't want to be like. We don't like these cultural people, because it would be clearly seen as reactionary. Also, it is, and so you come up with this. Well, the PMC like it? Well, who the fuck do you mean by the PMC? And it becomes this floating signifier that controls everything and nothing. And I also point out that the only people who use the term would qualify as being in the class they're critiquing.
Speaker 2:Yes, I've talked about that as well and yeah, so it almost comes off as like is this just the competitive logic of professionals themselves?
Speaker 1:Right, it's like oh so I mean, I think we see that when you realize that a lot of what they want is their 1950s Fordism back, the same as the other DSA types, which it makes sense that they would become more and more conservative over time, then because like that's what I saw with Catherine Liu and, following her a little more, she did seem to become almost socially conservative to a certain extent over time.
Speaker 2:From what I saw, I could be off the mark there, but I've seen that with certain people from Jacobin too, where it's saw I could be off the mark there, but I've seen that with certain people from Jacobin too, or it's like maybe it was part of their pitch of trying to pander, to write populism or something, but it's just like I don't know, like I just don't buy this. Yes, you could appeal to, I understand the cultural, cultural Bursa is a problem, but at the same time, like I have this nagging idea that like it's a terrible idea to like try to appeal to working class people but let them have like any fringe right wing idea they want, but as long as they support like some single issue thing like universal healthcare, they're part of some political alliance with you. It's like I just think that's insane. You have to actually bring them your way or you're not really doing anything.
Speaker 1:No, I mean, if you allow them to move, you you're tailing them. Yes, and also, looking at what most working class Americans actually believe, it is true that blue collar people more and more vote for conservatives, and that's been true since the 1970s, uh, but that's also true for many of the identitarian groups that people were saying we're always going to stay loyal to the democrats. Um, which, if you in the long array of things, for example, black men supporting the democrats at rates above 90 percent is actually something that was established only in obama's first term, and since it was a one-off thing. Uh, now, black women have been a loyal democratic party, uh, bastion, since the 70s. Black men in the North have been Democratic Party supporters at about 60 to 70 percent since the New Deal. However, that's not dealing with the fact that in the South, where a lot of Black men are, felon laws prevent about 40% of them from voting.
Speaker 2:Um, there's that, that's a factor. Um, and I have observed actually even in Cleveland here, like a lot of the younger black men in particular, I know either they're Trump supporters or they're, like, not necessarily Trump supporters, but certainly strongly socially conservative.
Speaker 2:Actually they're not archetypal liberals. Maybe their parents were more likely to be. And I've met those type of folks where, like, it makes sense because of the civil rights era that that was sort of the incentive to support the Democrats. But I think there's I've met a whole, a whole cross section of young black men who, like, especially, they felt that Obama did them wrong actually, and then they've defected from the Democrats since then actually, and some of them get tempted into being Trump supporters actually, and it may surprise white liberals to hear just how popular he is among some Black people, actually Black males. Just in my anecdotal experience, Well, the stats, the stats.
Speaker 2:Most people don't bear that out yeah.
Speaker 1:I mean they both do and don't they do. They do Like you're still dealing with. Most young black men are still probably going to vote for Harris today, OK, but, but A significant number of them aren't, aren't? Most young black men are still probably going to vote for Harris today, Okay, but, but a significant number of them aren't, aren't? It's a growing right, but I also think that that's being used by the Democrats to to to hide the fact that they've been pivoting to chase college educated white female voters and blue collar women solely on abortion, and so and we'll know a lot by the time this comes out this part of the conversation will have been clarified by history. But, like I mean, it just seems to me that people resurrecting PMC theory and ignoring what John and Barbara Ehrenreich had to say about it because John and Barbara Ehrenreich actually talked about Barbara Ehrenreich had to say about it, Because John and Barbara Ehrenreich actually talked about Barbara Ehrenreich before she died, was talking about the PMC as a class that was dividing amongst itself between part of it that was being proletarianized and part of it that wasn't.
Speaker 1:And Christian Parenti actually developed that even more by pointing out that a lot of the profession the reason why we had to talk about professionals, as professionals used to largely be petite bourgeois. If you were a doctor, you own your own practice. That's not true now. The great majority of them are wage are wage earners. They work for institutions, are wage earners, they work for institutions, they're high paid wage earners and they have certain relationships to the government, which means that they're protected from certain kinds of problems. But they're still like. Again, I don't know who they they're talking about when they talk about PMC. If we're trying to come up with one relationship to either the working class or, um to the mode of production, what we actually end up is like a group of people that seem to be categorized together because of the way that liberalism, particularly progressive liberalism, is seen as an ideology of the educated class today, which is not, has not historically been true until the last 10 years no-transcript and the teens. It became a statistical reality.
Speaker 2:But not before then. What do you think changed or caused that to be actualized? Or?
Speaker 1:caused that to be actualized. I think the amount of academic, adjacent activist terminology adopted into the party after Obama, particularly after 2012, and occupy as a way to keep the progressives in the coalition probably prompted a lot of that. Okay, and that also there is a huge donor class tied into the endowment apparatus of major universities. Um, and that also, on top of all that, uh, there are very few incentives for conservatives to remain in universities at all, and that's been true since the teens. That there have been ideological, not purges, that's not true, but like ideological, basically, you know, self-deportation movements, for lack of a better metaphor where, like, conservatives have just been made to feel unwelcome on campus so they leave, and I think that has pernicious effects that people don't think about, because it makes it seem like that being an educated person is to be a kind of namby-pamby liberal In a way. That has always been something that Republicans have been trying to sell the public, because I heard that stereotype when I was a kid, but it wasn't true. It was a false stereotype. It's true now.
Speaker 1:If you go to matt like conservatives will often get bas and in fact, interestingly, a ba or a bs is less of a predictor of being a liberal than it used to be. It's now you got to get a master's degree but basically nobody who gets a master's degree is not liberal or left wing and a lot I mean a lot of it's even alienating to the far left like I. I would have a hard time, but basically nobody who gets a master's degree is not liberal or left wing and a lot I mean a lot of it's even alienating to the far left Like I would have a hard time sitting through. You know the ideological indoctrination of some of those courses at this point in my life myself.
Speaker 2:Yeah Well, I mean just speaking from personal experience. I attended college firstly for music. I technically didn't finish it because all of the English and math classes were staved off and then I dropped out. I did good in the music classes but a few years later I actually went into a philosophy 101 class and while I don't necessarily I'm not like some sort of you know, reactionary anti-feminist or anything but like on the first day of class the guy talks about feminism. Well, actually he starts out talking about Socrates and then he jumps to feminism and we're talking about liberal feminist theory on day one of Philosophy 101 class. And I just found that strange. It's like why are you bringing these politically loaded topics into it on day one when we're like we were just talking about the Greeks? So I found that just to be an anecdotal example of how I could see how the culture environment at colleges almost automatically is going to push certain people in certain directions, because that's the topic of the environment.
Speaker 1:Right. I mean I was actually recently dealing with an agricultural school, a major research institution, but it largely serves an agricultural population and it largely does agricultural-based majors.
Speaker 1:In Utah that was requiring all of its students to do like progressive racial analysis and comp 101 yeah, it just seemed arbitrarily forced yeah it's a shoehorned in is how right and and even the, even the very, um, the very left wing or liberal, uh, graduate students felt uncomfortable because they're like, you're having me talk about this race stuff and there's literally no one in any in this circuit who has any real experience with it at all, and and it's, and actually a lot of what we get back is reactionary pablum that's prompted by what you're asking, instead of like trying to build up some trust and show it to you another way, so maybe it backfires.
Speaker 2:maybe the intent of it is yeah to you know educate people, quote unquote and make them more socially liberal, but it ends up having the adverse effect. People feel alienated, they think you're shoehorning the topic in um in a way that doesn't make sense and some you know of some of the rhetoric pushes people away and then the right becomes more reactionary and just doubles down, right I?
Speaker 1:mean I have approached that in my own educational stuff in an entirely different way, where I try to limit things to facts and I think the facts normally speak for themselves, but not that you can ever deal with facts purely without some theoretical framework. But I mean, like, um, I've gotten, I've gotten conservative people, without getting them to abandon their conservatism, to come to understand left and liberal points by not framing them as politically charged points and not using that language, right? Um, and a lot of these things have social codes where you kind of have to use the language right and then they're automatically alienates.
Speaker 2:But yeah, it is kind of like it does become lingo, doesn't it um?
Speaker 1:right. I mean, I'll give you an example of it just around here. Even amongst my, my, my democratic voting latin friends in the neighborhood, you'll notice that I always say latin and not latino or latina or latinx, because I'm deliberately just translating the, a gendered word, into spanish, to its de-gendered word in english. Um, but latinx alienates a lot of working class Latin people in my neighborhood. It does. I'm not saying that there is no organic movement for Latin. There was a movement in Argentina, but it was very urban. It's much more complicated than it's just a white invention. But a lot of people in the latin community here do perceive it as an educated white imposition on their own cultural identity.
Speaker 1:I can believe right, um you know. Whether or not that's objectively true is a separate question, um, but to me, whenever I've said latin, no one has gotten mad yeah, right I mean they shouldn't?
Speaker 2:I mean? It's the most neutral way to go about it right.
Speaker 1:Well, I mean what you hear about people getting mad about it, but my, my, my, my trans friends appreciate that I'm not gendering it and my latin friends appreciate that I'm not trying to use a word that they feel is alienating. However, in academia, I am sure someone would actually say something about me making that choice there's always going to be that person well, there's a whole department.
Speaker 1:It's called the retin comp department. Their entire mode of being is if we change language, it will change material reality, and that's what they do. I mean, I don't want to generalize that to everyone in retin composition, but it is the majority ideological apparatus than that so they were done on cracklin, yeah, sort of um I, I really want to want to talk about this.
Speaker 1:So, um, in the sense that you and I both feel like anarchism has gone in a really weird direction, yeah, I did want to talk about bony. Yes, it has I mean you watch which I've never been able to make myself do.
Speaker 2:Well, to be clear, like he pops up virally on my feed and I occasionally check in, but, yes, I hate watching him though.
Speaker 1:I refuse to hate watching anyone unless I can shoot at them. No, I mean in all seriousness. But, he's relevant to that.
Speaker 2:He's relevant to that, but yes, Well, I mean, I've seen anarchism.
Speaker 1:So there's been one movement of anarchists who want to go back to like anarchism of the early 20th century, late 19th century, who want to get back their tradition that was seemingly lost around, like the CNT and in Spain and all that.
Speaker 2:The way I categorize it in my head is there's historical anarchism, which was approximately, you know, prudon up to what you're talking about, like the Spanish revolution era, and then after that, like the, the window of classical. That's what I call classical or historical anarchism. That window closes with World War I and World War II especially, and then after that you sort of get a revived anarchism within the new left. And then in the 90s you get the post-left thing. That's kind of how I split it up in my head. Right, the problem that I have with that is Graeberism. In the 90s you get the post-left thing.
Speaker 1:That's kind of how I split it up in my head right. Well, the problem that I have with that is graberism and then chomsky, because they don't really belong to either movement. Chomsky is historically, you know, comes out of historically syndicalist politics, but like he does, but he like gives it up very quickly, in my perception right it very quickly goes to to um lesser evilism and then uh graberism. Was just, it tried to have social anarchism and lifestyle anarchism are uh come together?
Speaker 2:in a way that made no goddamn sense. I can see, I mean I'm less, I'm less of a follower of graber, but I, you know, I I do know that. Think about occupy, how and I know he had different paths.
Speaker 2:He had a lot to do with occupy, um, apparently. Yeah, I'd like certain. That's the thing, though, like I, I come across certain things of his and I'm like, well, that's pretty good critique of the way things are. Then I follow him further and I'm like, okay, I don't know enough about the anthropology to comment on that aspect of him.
Speaker 1:I think his anthropology is selective. I know that you're critical of it. Go ahead.
Speaker 1:From a distance it almost comes off like the tendencies I would criticize among the primitivists in which they're just very obsessed with almost a romantic picture of tribal societies or something right, except it's also tied into um endorsement of what would be state monetary program, because it was also kind of a quasi mmt year, okay, and I don't understand how you square that circle, like how you're like talking about mmt and like state level monetary politics but also saying that like the occupation is the revolution and that's what we should be doing is building these occupations as alternative forms of life everywhere, which to me it's just like. It's like taking some of the worst elements of book tonight uh, municipal, you know, anarchism and some of the worst elements of lifestyle anarchism and temporary autonomous zones and smashing them together. But Graeber also was admittedly himself not very knowledgeable about pre-1960s, 1970s anarchism Interesting, I mean he said that in a couple of interviews.
Speaker 2:I feel like I'm more knowledgeable about it than I am about 60s and after anarchism in some ways.
Speaker 1:Well, I mean because yeah, 60s and after anarchism doesn't really have, particularly in North America outside of Bookchin, it doesn't have a lineage tied into historical anarchism at all tied into historical anarchism at all?
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I think that's part of how the ANCAP thing became possible, precisely because, you know, maybe a part of it is just America's culture and how hyper-capitalistic it could be too. But it just seems like in my mind yeah, anarchism is more of a European and Latin American thing. If you want to be serious about it, american anarchism, like the classical individualist anarchists, is more of a European and Latin American thing if you want to be serious about it. American anarchism, like the classical individualist anarchists, even in the 19th century they had weird muddled ideas. Some of them were socialists of a sort, but they also often were very anti-communist in their rhetoric or they ended up getting into Max Stirner and becoming weird type of individualists.
Speaker 1:Yeah well, individualist anarchism has also just always been slightly more popular in the United States, for reasons that are obvious. Socialist tradition in america tends to come either out of the populist movement of the of the late 19th century or the utopian socialist movements like the orionites and the fourierites in the early 19th century.
Speaker 1:So like there was all kinds of communes like quasi-anarchist, quasi-communist communes in the united states, from blythesdale farm all you Farm, all the way to the Oneida Collective. There's a huge tradition of that in America, but it also tends to be. What's interesting about those is they tend to be quietistic, in that you set up your utopian community and you just disengage from society. You don't try to like In my mind.
Speaker 2:I associate that with the 60s and the hippies, because there was a lot of revived ideas along those lines of yeah, let's go have an agrarian commune in some quietest manner, separate from society In so much that there were ever that many people who took the hippie notion politically, because our link of the new left with hippies is kind of just a historical accident of timing.
Speaker 1:They weren't the same people. For the most part they both opposed the Vietnam War, yeah, but that was it. That was really the only overlap, and that the new left was prominent from like 66 to 72. And the hippies exist from 66. Like. Also, we have to remember the hippies were a very short lived movement, yeah, like. Like the hippie moments, like 68 to I probably like 72, 73.
Speaker 2:Yeah, 72 or 73.
Speaker 1:Right and there's some overlap with the new left and the yippies and people like that, but there's not a lot of it.
Speaker 2:Well, a lot of it was on the anti-war thing, I think.
Speaker 1:And then these people going in the communes and stuff. Yeah, I mean that that was, but you were as likely to go into a commune off of some weird yoga retreat as you were for political reasons, I mean.
Speaker 2:That's the other thing um, but I would just say, as far as far as, like I don't know, like yeah, like in my mind, like yeah, there's traditional anarchism and some people do try to maintain that position of like something along the lines of syndicalism or anarcho-communism as it was, like 100 plus years ago, um, undeveloped, which in a way it's more pure than the newer anarchism um, but it's also like it's cut off from his historical tradition, because we have to admit that it's basically revivalist.
Speaker 1:Why?
Speaker 2:I was going to say there is another end of it, where it's like, okay, it's like, is this backwards looking? Yeah, I do have that thought. Where it's like is this actually conservative and backwards looking because you're trying to revive a historical, you're obsessed with people from the 19th century and like your whole, and you're trying to revive ideas from the 19th century that might be whole, and you're trying to revive ideas from the 19th century that might be partially outmoded and trying to apply them to today. That's a thought that occurs to me with classical anarchism, um, especially with regard to, uh, prudone, in some ways, um, especially the more abstract, I don't I?
Speaker 1:yeah I don't understand, like I admit that the Perdonis tradition has to be admitted as part of classical anarchism, but it's so different than the Bakuninist or the Malatestian or the Durante.
Speaker 2:It's kind of a vague start because of the fact that his involvement in politics was un-anarchistic.
Speaker 1:Right, anarchistic right, and and the other fact is like it's the form of classical anarchism, that's that is recuperable to to markets.
Speaker 1:It is, it's true, um, although theoretically cynicalism is too. I mean, that's the thing. Like you could be, like you could think that markets, if everything was a workers co-op, would still be okay. I guess that's, yeah, but all these things to me seems. I mean, I remember the birth of do you remember the? The bash garson cara article? Um, in descent magazine from like 2008. It was a critique mostly of naomi klein, uh, about anarcho-liberalism, about the, the liberals who would use anarchist rhetoric and anarchist morality but would always vote for the democratic party and didn't really have a systemic view of the world and they were keynesians and shit interesting their economics were keynesian and because I mean that could be said in more recent years.
Speaker 2:That happened under the Biden administration, during the height of the pandemic and the BLM protests, in which all of a sudden the liberal establishment, to some degree and to some effectiveness, actually co-opted anarchist rhetoric, and some anarchists went along with it.
Speaker 1:Well, I mean the using abolish the police to talk about, when trying to abolish the police without abolishing that's a big one dumb idea, but then, uh, safe defying it by making it defund the police, which I was like. That's not what abolish means and then defund the police.
Speaker 1:She became like, let's make them more like social workers, right um, and I mean we saw a lot of that in the late 18 slash, early biden administration, I think about. Another one was abolish ice, where the anarchist and the marxist using it meant one thing and the liberals who picked it up meant put immigration authority back in the alcohol to buy tobacco firearms. That's all they meant. Um, uh, and I. There was this tendency, but what if I? Interesting, what I was going to bring up to you is it's post, bernie. It's hard for me to tell the difference between the Boshkar-Sankara social democrats, who critique the Dems but are also in them, and the anarcho-liberals like Bosh.
Speaker 2:I can't see the difference, Like I can't see the difference, and I mean it's relevant to bring up Chomsky because I also, when I was first getting into anarchism, like 15 plus years ago, you know, at first I was an ANCAP and ended up moving leftward.
Speaker 2:I pretty much became some sort of ANCOM somewhere along the line in my critiques of critiques of markets.
Speaker 2:But in other case you would encounter people I would call Chomskyans and it was the Chomskyan style of anarchists and it was kind of a weird scene that I never was part of, because it felt like a lot of them, yeah, they kind of associated with syndicalism, but it was also like they all adopted a liberal, pragmatist position at the end of the day. And it did push this question of like, well, Chomsky and some of the more individualist anarchists actually had valid criticisms of the Chomskyans of like as fake anarchists, because it was like, well, you guys just function as social Democrats basically. On the other hand, you observe these people who they might even frame themselves as Marxists or something, but it ends up being the Michael Harrington version of being a Marxist, which becomes something much like being a Chomsky, and so, yeah, it does. It does blur at the end of the day, doesn't it? When the anarchists follow the Chomsky path, like what's the difference between that and Richard Wolff or someone like that, really?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, to me they all converged. I mean, there's this weird way and this is going to make a lot of different factions of my audience uncomfortable but there's this weird way in which some of the Marxist-Leninist, some of the analytic Marxist and some of the Marxist-Leninist, some of the analytic Marxist and some of the more liberal-leaning anarchist although they hate each other rhetorically, took the same fucking stance towards the Democratic Party in 2020. Which was to hold your nose so that you could build a movement off of it and vote for them.
Speaker 2:That's true, you know you know, but also the cpusa stance for like ever, but yeah but also in terms of policy. It's like, okay, everyone ends up, you know, kind of, just, kind of okay, we want to raise the minimum wage and have the green new deal and um raise taxes on the rich or whatever. You know the cliche suspects in the discourse you would suspect. Right Both anarchists and Marxists are pretty much advocating the same shit when it comes to that.
Speaker 1:Right. Well, this is my whole thing. Like I engage in the. I'm not an anarchist, but I engage in a lot of the anarchist tradition. One because I think some of the critiques actually are sound. And two because when I see what people actually do, these, these different groups are playing similar roles in society, whether they realize that or not, despite their ideological differences.
Speaker 1:In the way that they actually interact with the democratic party, which is sort of like a lesser evil, radical backstop, and I think we and we have to be honest, I think we saw this a lot with both social democrats and and anarchist and blm in particular, and against the anti-trump stuff, because it was like everybody was like, oh, we need to. You know, it can happen here we can do. I mean, I remember, like I think about um, uh, robert evans and that former crack anarchist group, um, and they do a lot of good work and and reporting, but they were basically part of a popular front to get biden elected um, and they and I haven't seen a lot of people admitting that that led us to where we are today. Now there are a lot more marxist leninists to do that. But I find that kind of funny too because, believe it or not, historically they're at a step with their own tradition, because they're the tradition that invented the popular front in the first place.
Speaker 1:You know, like Marxist-Leninist are the people who advocated us to like get in bed with FDR way back in the day. They weren't the first people who do it, that was the populist who were the first people who did it. But that and that was, and they did it with a more reactionary Democratic Party than the than the FDR one, but it's not. There's a long history there. I find it interesting today, though, because if we look at where the left is today, what left I mean? There's still plenty of people who culturally identify as left wing, who may. There's plenty of people on left orgs, but like this idea that there's a mass movement for a left candidate, that's not on the table.
Speaker 2:Well, the way I've come to think of it is yeah, the left. The left doesn't exist as a political force. It mostly exists as an online discourse, unfortunately, but it doesn't particularly exist as a political force that has an effect in the world. But, yeah, you could say so. You know, the death of the left discourse makes sense to me in some regards. I think some people go in weird directions with it, but I get it. It's like it's not a political force that has a real effect. It's mostly people talking to each other, a lot of them academics or just weirdos on the internet like me.
Speaker 1:Well, I mean it. Just it seems to me that there is something about Biden in 2020 that made a lot of these groups like for a while, try to. I think the first two years of the Biden administration was me listening to every Marxist and a whole lot of anarchists tell me that maybe we were getting something out of our deal with Biden that I did not see us getting. Wake-up call for some people and then for a whole lot of people, it took. It took israel, palestine, going the way that you would expect it to go if you know biden's history and whatnot. Yeah, but uh, nevertheless, that seemed to finally wake people up, even though none of that should have been surprising.
Speaker 2:But I've seen some really weird shit happen after biden and some people who came at least came out of anarchism. Because you see these people, I've seen people take neoconservative foreign policy stances who are like from the left libertarian camp that I used to hang around and that like fries my brain to see. But I've seen it and it's because I don't. It's hard to explain how or why that is, but I think part of it is that people got so scared by the paleo-libertarians and by Trumpism that they grasped at whatever the pragmatic option alternative would seem to be. But they got scared by communism too. They got scared by Marxism and communism too.
Speaker 1:So the next option in their vision is they see some 19-year-old Marxist, leninist on Twitter and they freak out yeah, or what people might call.
Speaker 2:They use what people call tankies in the worst sense as their example of a Marxist, and so they're scared of the left too, and then they shrink back into a liberal pragmatist position because there's no radical alternative that seems sane to them. Essentially, that's what I've seen happen with, surprisingly, quite a few people from the left libertarian camp. Some of them are, like not really libertarians anymore too. I've seen that where it's like people are, people are post libertarians. But instead of like me, like drifting for the backward, or instead of becoming a Trumper like some people did, their answer is to become like a centrist pragmatist of some sort.
Speaker 1:Well, I mean, there's a long tradition of that Both, both with anarchists and Maoist, ironically.
Speaker 1:But like I mean, in a way, alex, can we blame people if they bought the Chomsky rhetoric for so long, no matter what, to stop the Republicans from coming to power? Then it's a lot easier to do in the stomach if you convince yourself that what the Democrats are doing is actually good. That seems to me to be a lot of what's going on there. It's just like we're watching people, uh, who've told themselves well, we have to support the lesser of two evils, and it's just a lot easier to do if you start believing more. Maybe the lesser evil just isn't evil at all. Like you know, it's a sunk cost fallacy, um, which is, you know, tromsky has never been guilty of, and even some of these people that we've talked about earlier, the social Democrats are not always guilty of. But there's been a lot of tailing on Trump on right-wing issues. There's a lot of ignoring that, for example, on racial grievance issues that, well, you know, there's basically the get rid of the settlers conundrum, which I'm like.
Speaker 1:I'm all about decolonization, but I don't know how you remove 98 of the population it's true um uh, there's a practical issue there is, you know, and uh, I don't think it's going to go the way you think if you drop to either. Yeah, um, but there's also this other group that was very much in vogue until relatively recently. That was like um, all this identitarian stuff is just to divide the working class, you hear a lot what we've seen is a lot of those people have just become more and more conservative, outright, it's true, you know.
Speaker 1:So it's. It's. It's a hard road to rock, I like there's a lot of ways in which our actions in regards to the Democratic Party seem to have put people into blinders. And you and I are in an interesting position because I think you are probably less hostile to the Democratic Party than me, but we're both sort of like. What is all this about? Like, at this point.
Speaker 2:I mean, I don't know that I'm less hostile, but like, maybe my motivations are slightly different or something I don't know. But I don't have a back history of ever supporting them so I'm not. I'm not I think that's part of how I differentiate myself from a lot of people on the left is that I don't have this back history of being disappointed by the democrats because I never trusted them I, I have all I have one back history of it and that was in 2008, and that's it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, like like, and that's that's relates to the bernie thing for me too, because, like I was, I must admit you know, I was tempted when bernie first got popular. I'm like I almost became a social democrat myself because it was. I understand the logic. It's like well, you know, if we can't, if we can't, um, you know, create the, enact the radical ideas we actually want, well, I guess social democracy is the best of all possible worlds, let's go for it. But I ended up backing off from that because I saw, pretty quickly I got, I didn't forget what I already knew about the operation of political power, put it that way. Um, but it's tempting to get lulled into that. Um, I was just like well, I guess social democracy is the best of all possible worlds, because what else has been tried that actually functions?
Speaker 1:well, I mean, arguably a lot of marxists say the same thing about what they do, so it's true and that's often wielded against anarchists.
Speaker 2:I guess I'm like well, we have the one, you know, the system that works, or whatever, and you guys just have utopian fantasies, or whatever yeah, although I would like to point out that a lot of them are a fan of the system that's no longer with us.
Speaker 1:So, you know, the only society that lasted less long was Athenian direct democracy. But I really think we have to really parse where we're at with a lot of this stuff, because it seems to me that I don't know where this I I let. Let me let this be our last thought for this, for this episode, and I'm going to have you back on later. But where do you think these people are going to go if harris r trump wins? Because I don't know. I, like a lot of people are telling me we're going to see the Trump era pushback that you saw in 2016. I just I'm not saying that's impossible, but I don't currently see it. And I also think, if somehow Harris wins, what does the left learn from all this? Maybe nothing Like. I mean A lot of. What does the left learn from all this? Maybe nothing Like.
Speaker 2:I mean a lot. A lot of the discourse shows that the left already has learned nothing, I guess, and I fear it will be a repeat of the Obama era. Basically, if she wins, if you catch my drift, I mean, I see people forgetting what the foreign policy critique of 15, 20 years ago was all over the place. Well, I mean including people whose style is anarchist, which is weird to me.
Speaker 1:I mean, you and I are living in a time where we're seeing a Cheney Harris yeah, like unity Tour, which is Well, this is what I mean it already was happening that the neoconservatives were joining with the Democrats.
Speaker 2:but now it's come full circle. Once you have Dick Cheney joining with the Democrats, it's like whew. But the problem is the way that liberals talk about it. It's like they think it's a good thing. They're like well, trump is so bad that he scared Dick Cheney into joining us. They don't see the other side of it, which is like you guys became more like Dick Cheney, right which, to be fair, they always kind of were but like yeah, but it became more like full circle to me, I guess.
Speaker 2:But they used to be ashamed of it, yeah.
Speaker 2:And now it's now it's now it's for a full circle and out in the open and it's like well, I guess the new conservative establishment and the Democrats have joined at the hip. But if you were someone who keenly paid attention to politics 20 years ago, you should be alarmed by this. And I'm seeing people who are not alarmed by it. They're like taking it as a good. You know, that's the spin of it, of the pro-Democrat establishment or whatever it's like. Oh, trump, is that bad that Dick Cheney joined us? They don't get it at all.
Speaker 1:And Trump is so bad that Richard Spencer became a Biden endorser. I mean like, um, I mean so you know, I just I find this all sort of ridiculous, to be quite Frank.
Speaker 2:It's disconcerting, but, yeah, in my mind, the choice right now is between a narcissist who, just, um, takes over the entire political discourse for the purpose of the purposes of their own personal grievances, and a democratic party that has, like, fully absorbed both reaganism and neoconservatism. So it's like okay, um, we just need to recognize that and be honest about it as like a square one.
Speaker 1:I guess what I would ask you as a kind of final question about this is where do you see these people going now that there is like if, if the green party doesn't reach 5% which I don't see them in a month being able to catch up all the ground of nadir in 2000, and that's the biggest vote the green party ever had, and that was only like 2.7 percent or something like that you're talking what exists of the ostensible left opposition, if you will right.
Speaker 1:Where do? Where do they go? Where did the left and the democratic party go? Do they go? Where do the left and the Democratic Party go? Do they just admit to themselves they're not left-wing anymore? I think some of them might. One of the things I have been wondering is if we just won't admit that a whole lot of people have left-wing cultural issues. But in the late 90s, early aughts, they actually have given up on any other progressive left vision. So they're just're just like yeah, we can go gay marriage, but you know, and gender autonomy or whatever, but that's it like there was a lot of that.
Speaker 1:I mean, we're not even talking about blm anymore. Basically, if you didn't make your your uh, your in your track position or your NGO between 2019 and 2021, even that ship has sailed. So where are these people going to go? Where do you think?
Speaker 2:I mean, it's an interesting question I'm not sure I have an answer for I do think yeah, as you hint at, some people might come to admit that well, I guess I'm not on the left anymore, or whatever, or here's why I'm leaving the left. I think a lot of people will choose to charge on and it'll continue to be an online discourse. But what place, what they have to put their energy? And I have no fucking idea.
Speaker 1:Um, well to me, a lot of them actually, frankly, do a lot of things like, if I'm completely honest, I think a lot of them, uh, are only culturally left-wing at this point anyway, I mean, I I get, I get what you're saying and I run into that with people a lot, it feels like, with people who, like I kind of gel with politically.
Speaker 2:But I get the sense that, um, cultural, being culturally left-wing, takes precedence over everything. And it's kind of weird because, like, I've actually pushed back against economic reductionism before, but I do see the other side of the coin where there is kind of a cultural reductionism that's in vogue or maybe not even but just like taking over people's minds I am not a.
Speaker 1:I am not a class reductionist, in that I don't think social class is the only thing that matters to politics, but I am a class, I am a crass premises and that I think social class explains the most things about where people are.
Speaker 2:Not all of it, because there's divisions within the social class and you think it has more, you think it has the most explanatory power.
Speaker 1:Right, I would actually put in this order class, gender and then race.
Speaker 2:Actually, that makes sense to me, because gender is more broad than race actually right.
Speaker 1:I mean with with the exception of some key groups and, uh, foreign policy. Um, is your anti-imperialism positive or negative? And by that I mean I don't mean like is it bad? That's not what I mean. With negative, I mean is your anti-imperialism just against US empire, in which case you're an ally, but that's not a substance of politics, one way or another. That doesn't tell you anything about what you do to stop it from happening again and um, and to build up people beyond that. So, like, if you're like, like I'm not gonna like, if you're a single issue, voter on genocide, more power to you, I'm not gonna tell you anything. Like, do that, but that's not the same thing as having a coherent political vision for how you get out of imperialism or whatever I mean.
Speaker 1:so it's like necessary but not sufficient.
Speaker 2:And I guess in relation to your question though. So there is. There is this like abundance, if you want to call it that, of people who are, like, very invested in foreign policy, especially with regard to israel, um, but yeah, I don't know what place they have to go, though, because obviously, like, they're all anti-heros, or at least, um, you know, they're cynical.
Speaker 1:Maybe some of them are holding their nose and voting for her, but I mean we know that a whole lot of people are going to hold their nose and vote for her because, frankly, the majority of Democrats are not happy. I mean, poll after poll indicates the majority of Democrats are not happy about the Harris and Biden supporting of the Israel-Palestine question, but they also don't consider it an important enough issue domestically to be the thing they vote on. It's true, or they think that maybe Harris is going to live up to her rhetoric where she says I believe we're working towards a ceasefire, as Biden has said for a year, despite the fact that everything we found leaked out of that administration indicates that that is a complete and total lie and they don't intend it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, at this point it seems like the rationalization for voting for Harris is the way I've seen some people describe it even and it kind of makes sense in some ways to me, but I still think that it's flawed or that there's problems with it. But they seem to think that it's like voting for Harris will stop Trump from monopolizing American politics and by monopolizing American politics I mean like his presence, just it does seem to derail American politics into just being about him and his personal grievances, issues or anything but because of what his posture is in relation to the political system at this point, which is as someone who disrupts the whole fucking system so that we can't even operate to get anywhere. So it almost seems as if it's like, even among some people who are the would-be left opposition, they're going to vote for Harris just to not have to worry about Trump having the bully pulpit.
Speaker 1:Essentially, but that ends up with. I mean radicals, who are basically arguing for the status quo over and, over and over again.
Speaker 2:That's true, though that is true, and then it does become a rationalization for the status quo. And so I guess, but that's the sentiment I see a lot People are haunted by Trump just monopolizing the political discourse about himself.
Speaker 1:I think but what's fascinating to me about this is we were told we were never going to normalize Trump policies, and we normalized a shit ton of them.
Speaker 2:Yes, we did. Yeah, we did, but no one seems to want to admit that.
Speaker 1:Like the immigrant, like, yes, trump has moved well to the right of his prior immigration stance because the Democrats gave him his immigration stance. So now he wants an auto defay of all the immigrants, because where else are? You going to go after that.
Speaker 2:That's right.
Speaker 1:Like you know and I've actually pointed out that like, like I don't even know that the state has the like what he is asking for would require, like a new deal level of employment, but turn, instead of getting people to work for building infrastructure, it's it's getting people to be deporters, like that's what it would require.
Speaker 2:And they're also effective. They've definitely crossed into advocating for like you're talking about removing legal immigrants. Now you can't say this is just about illegal immigration, You're talking about mass deportation of legal immigrants, partly with a vague economic argument, but ultimately as a kind of nationalist and racist type thing.
Speaker 1:I don't know. We don't have the capacity. We're down capacity of people now for what we need for the number of people in society, given that we're also seeing the rest of the baby boomers are leaving the market and these are not the baby boomers who have good pensions, these are the baby boomers who are have good pensions, these are the baby boomers who have 401ks and having like, who's going to like we have doctor shortages Now. We have teacher shortages Now we have we have major manufacturing sector shortages now, despite automation. Like I'm not arguing that you know, know we should make that up on the back of, you know, the american working class. But I'm like who's gonna do that work, true, um, and then you add the other. The other thing from the trump administration is the tariffs, which were already normalized in the body, but I'm like like that's going to lead to inflation. There's like I don't know how that doesn't.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and while not to sound like a free market economist, but I do think it's still true that, as a general rule, yeah, high tariff policy has adverse consequences and it will just lead to inflation. Essentially, I think that's true. I don't think you have to be a libertarian capitalist to believe that.
Speaker 1:No, or even a person who believes in the supply theory of inflation. I'm not a person who believes that money supply is the sole determiner of inflation.
Speaker 2:I don't believe that. No, but it will come back to bite us and effectively raise domestic prices to have high tariff policy.
Speaker 1:Because, yeah, because we don't have an internal, we have a mass. We do produce a ton of stuff here people I know people don't realize that, but we do but our inputs for that stuff come from other countries. Yep, even when we're producing our own steel, we're're offering, sending it to other countries to be finished and making a finished product out of it here. So, like, you're just adding and you're adding tariff cost on all ends when you do that, and if you want to have a mass, um, social fix, for that you need to to bring up whole industries very quickly with mass amounts of workers. Now there are 10% of the male working class, blue-collar workers who are unemployed, but most of them are not employable. If you actually look at why they're unemployed, it's like Some of it's hopelessness, but some of it is stuff like disability. Uh, well, some of it's hopelessness, but some of it is stuff like, um, disability, okay, um, uh, no one at home to take care of kids.
Speaker 2:If they have kids, there's practical reasons they can't there's practical reasons as well as ideological ones.
Speaker 1:I mean, there are people who probably also just gave up, but I don't. I don't see that as being able to make up the difference, and you'd have to deal with their social problems too. And we have no. No one democrat or republican has put anything down to deal with the social problems or the health problems or the doctor pro. I mean like what? I just don't see it anywhere. It it's like we live in a country that is, that policy is pretty much based on negative partisan vibes and that's it, yeah.
Speaker 2:It does feel that way.
Speaker 1:And, like you know, yeah, trump's gonna. Trump has this radical agenda in Project 2025. I don't know if you think he's really going to do it. I don't. The only part of it I think he actually does is replace a whole lot of the app the state apparatus, uh, professionals with loyalists.
Speaker 2:Um but what's weird about it is like there's this whole that's totally legal. There's this there's this anti-deep state posture, but by the sound of it, to me it's like he just wants to recreate the deep state in his own image anyway.
Speaker 1:So right, well, because what else would you do? Like, like, if you don't want to destroy the government and I don't think trump really wants to destroy the government you can't destroy all the administrative, all the administrative stuff. You can say you're going to do it like reagan, you know, like every republican hasn't, but which also said he was going to do it like Reagan. You know like every Republican has, bush also said he was going to get rid of the education department.
Speaker 2:I mean, it's not a new thing.
Speaker 1:That's very true, it's not a new thing and they don't mean it either, like, um, which is not to say they could never deliver on it. I mean like, but I like to point out that these people tend to deliver the stuff to their groups when their groups are actually when the group that they're delivering the stuff to is actually on decline, like, for example, evangelicals in america finally getting their abortion stuff federalized the way dobbs federalized. It is also weirdly tied to a time period where evangelicals are not going to be a cultural force in the future. In the same way, even though you got a lot of like younger Zoomer and millennial men becoming religious, they're not becoming evangelical questions Interesting, like they're probably becoming Orthodox or Catholic Christians, you know, or stuff like that. So it's just it's hard for me to see where this goes, but I do think we have to deal with the fact that a lot of people got broken by Bernie. Yes, they doubled down on trying to make excuses for the.
Speaker 1:Biden administration for at least two years.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think there's a saving face, rationalization logic to some of this Right and I do think, yeah, politics seems to have reduced largely to negative partisanship and even when you, even when you're someone who has like critiques of the Democrats or whatever, I don't know it's some sort of defensive logic comes in where you have to rationalize it somehow so people end up contradicting themselves. But yeah, it's hard to know where. I'm just very cynical, it's hard to know where I'm just very cynical. It's hard to know where this goes and I'm the unpopular guy who's not voting this time around, although, and many other times around. But I feel that paralysis that's largely why I don't vote is. I just feel that paralysis of like. Well, the systemic issues aren't addressed, no matter who I vote for.
Speaker 1:Yep, I am. I'm not going to say I didn't vote, because I vote on local issues and I always put something down for national issues so that they don't invalidate my ballot. But uh, um, I I will.
Speaker 1:I will gladly admit, and I'm not gonna say what I voted for, because I don't endorse people, but uh, but I proudly threw my vote away without hesitation, um and uh, on the national level ballot, and then I voted strategically and my conscience, on the local level ballot, which means I did not vote party ticket on anything, which which to me seems responsible. But I couldn't make myself vote for any of the two candidates that were have a chance of winning. I just couldn't do it. I I'm in a state that's gonna, that trump is gonna carry. So you know, you can be pissed off with me if you want, but it doesn't fucking matter. It's been weird watching democrats start to shame people, even voting their conscience in deep blue states. That's been bizarre. Um, because it used to be, that was an acceptive like thing, even amongst progressive democrats and that's even becoming taboo and I'm like is that just there? Is that just that they know how close and insecure they are?
Speaker 2:I don't know, at this point I see people, you know, posting Michael Jackson we are the world style local all-star thing saying vote, and that's what we're left with as far as liberal signaling, I guess and this is coming from people who were Bernie supporters before too. So it's like okay, so you just have inspirational messaging at this point.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so. So so you've gone from from from Bernie to Lin-Manuel Miranda.
Speaker 1:I mean, you know, hamilton vision, great, lovely, pretty much I mean you know, Hamilton vision, great, lovely, pretty much, I mean, you know, and you have people like Ben Burgess saying that they protest voted. So I mean the world has gotten a lot weirder. What do you mean by Ben Burgess? All right, and on that note, oh, he, he said he wrote in. He, he announced to the public that he wrote in Rashida Tlaib's name. Oh, he said he wrote in. He announced to the public that he wrote in Rashida Tlaib's name. Oh, okay, so yeah, well, on that note, I think we'll end. I'll have you back on to talk about some other issues in the future. Thank you for coming on, alex. No problem, people can find your work at your sub stack, which will be linked. I appreciate it. Have a good one, you too. Bye-bye.
